It’s almost Halloween, which means it’s time again for Chapman University’s Survey of American Fears, a report that attempts to catalog America’s greatest fears of the year. And once again, the results are a collection of relatable subjects of dread.
For this, their fourth annual survey of fears, the researchers surveyed 1,207 random U.S. adults back in May, to find out what scared them the most these days. The top ten fears of 2017, featured in the chart below, include corrupt politicians in the number one spot, with other modern concerns including global warming, the possibility of a North Korean attack, and rising medical costs also earning a large number of “Afraid” and “Very Afraid” responses.
This year's responses are not incredibly different from 2016’s, which also placed corrupt government officials in the top spot. But it isn’t all things you might be afraid to discuss with your family at Thanksgiving. A number of more ephemeral threats also made the 2017 list further down, with clowns, blood, zombies, and ghosts taking 76th, 77th, 78th, and 79th, respectively. Perhaps most frighteningly, “Whites no longer being the majority in the U.S.” came in as the 69th most popular fear this year.
We’ll have to wait until 2018 for the next fear survey, but until then the top 10 existential threats we have now should keep us more than occupied.
There's an awful lot we don't know about dolphin and porpoise sex. It mostly takes place underwater (though some versions involve a leap), and at seemingly random intervals. Different species also do it different ways—belly to belly, or perhaps a curious T-formation. But scientists do know that they do it frequently—all year round, regardless of whether the female is fertile, and sometimes multiple times in an hour. But there's a darker side to cetacean copulation. Because it can be hard for males to find females who are fertile at that moment, sometimes multiple males will aggressively attempt to mate with a single female at the same time. New research, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests that female dolphins have an anatomical ability to choose which of these males, if any, ultimately fertilizes her eggs.
For the past seven years, Dara Orbach, a marine mammologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, has been studying cetacean sex. To better understand the mechanics of sex in bottlenose and common dolphins, and harbor porpoises, she and her team studied the sex organs of animals that had very recently died to model sexual activity. The scientists inflated the penises with pressurized saline, and then slipped them inside silicone molds of vaginas. They also made CT scans of the experiments to determine how the anatomical parts fit together in different positions. While the common dolphin's vagina seems relatively straightforward, Orbach found that the porpoise and bottlenose dolphin have extensive vaginal folds and complex spirals that can easily obstruct penetration.
These folds, Orbach told Newsweek, may allow females to control whether a male can successfully inseminate her—if, for example, he seems like a poor paternal pick. With a slight twist of her body, a penis tip could be obstructed from reaching her cervix, and make it far less likely that his sperm could make it to her eggs. "She might be able to control paternity through something as subtle as a small body shift," Orbach said. This becomes especially relevant in the context of the form of dolphin sex described above, where multiple males may attempt to fertilize a female in quick succession over a period of weeks. These hidden folds may be a secret way for females to wrest control of procreation.
Even with this new information, there's a lot to be learned about how dolphins and porpoises have sex. If dolphins are somehow aware that particular positions may make conception less likely, there might be other reasons they still do them, Orbach told Science. If not for procreation, she wonders, what leads them to have so much sex? "Is it play? Is it working out hierarchies? Is it establishing dominance? Is it learning?"
To enter the Glass Flowers exhibit at the Harvard Museum of Natural History is to be immediately overwhelmed by perfection. The walls are lined with thousands of flawless plant examples, all rendered exquisitely in glass. The models, created by father-and-son team Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka beginning in 1886, were meant to help botanists study plant anatomy; as such, the room is full of bright stems, pert petals, and luscious fruits.
Currently, though, visitors have the chance to be tempted by a slightly different exhibit. In the mid-1930s, after his father's death, Rudolf Blaschka began work on a series of diseased fruits, including about half a peck of sickly apples. After about 15 years in storage, these perfectly imperfect specimens—blackened, spotted, spore-ridden and spongey-looking—are back by popular demand, displayed in special cases in the middle of the exhibit space. "When they aren't up, people look for them," says collections manager Jennifer Brown. "They ask, 'Where are the rotten apples?'"
As Donald Pfister, a professor of systemic botany at Harvard, explains, the models were originally meant as "an educational venture" in the then-burgeoning field of plant pathology. "It's very modern to think about sustainability," he says, "but back then, people were, too. They were always asking: What are the diseases and pests that might limit crop production?" In the absence of today's tools—DNA analysis; color photography—the glass facsimiles "could answer the question, 'What's that blotchy thing?'"
A survey of the blotchy things on view makes it clear that there are a lot of ways for an apple to go bad. Several of the glass fruits suffer from "apple scab," an infection by the fungus Venturia inaequalis that yellows leaves and covers the fruit in small brown spots. Others have "water core," from too much sun, or "apple scald," which develops in storage. (The glass apples are coming off of about 15 years in storage themselves, and required some cleanup, as seen in this video.)
Many have brown rot, which means they've been "mummified" by another fungus, Monilinia fructigena, and turned into spore-producing machines. Because brown rot manifests in a variety of ways, Blaschka made a corresponding variety of apples, some covered in tumescences, others black and shriveled. He also made a blown-up patch of Aspergillus, another common infectious mold, which looks like a nightmarish, blob-ridden forest.
Blaschka lavished the same care on these diseased specimens as he did on his other, heartier models. Each crusty patch of apple skin is lovingly textured, every yellowed leaf perfectly shaped. "They're the last body of work Rudolph worked on," Brown says. He died just three years after he shipped them, in May of 1939, at the age of 82.
Most of the apples are about that age now. Unlike their creator—and the rest of us—they may well last forever, in a state of perpetual, beautiful decay.
For many people, the idea of Cambodian architecture begins and ends with the lotus-inspired sandstone towers of Angkor Wat—the medieval temple complex that is considered the largest religious monument in the world. Mid-century modernism, on the other hand? Perhaps not so much.
However, in the 15 years that followed Cambodia’s independence from France in 1953, the capital of Phnom Penh transformed into one of the foremost outposts of modernism—largely thanks to the vision of a single man, architect Vann Molyvann. On September 28, 2017, Molyvann passed away from natural causes in Siem Reap, the gateway to the ruins of Angkor Wat, which had inspired much of his work. But rapid construction and changes in the capital city now mean that Molyvann’s legacy—which already survived coups, purges, and wars, barely—is under threat.
“Before the term ‘green architecture’ was thought in anyone’s mind, he was already designing buildings really creatively to integrate natural light and airflow,” Canadian filmmaker Christopher Rompre, who directed The Man Who Built Cambodia, a 2014 documentary on Molyvann’s life, said in a recent interview with Cambodian magazine Voa Cambodia.
Rompre, who has been based in the Southeast Asian nation for several years, turned his attention to the architect’s work after spotting some “really interesting, unique buildings” that were slowly being enveloped by Phnom Penh’s construction boom. These encounters sparked his curiosity into the work of a lesser-known giant of modernism, a man whose career and vision were deeply entwined with the turbulent history of his country.
“I was trying to understand the origins of the Cambodian people,” Molyvann, then 87, said in the film. “Cambodians have a very spiritual understanding of the world.” After earning his degree from Paris’s École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, where he studied with famed French-Swiss architect Le Corbusier, he returned to his newly independent country during a cultural renaissance that is considered by many to be modern Cambodia’s “Golden Age.” Then-ruler Prince Norodom was eager to let go of the country’s colonial identity and project a modern face to the world. His plans included remaking the appearance of what had been a sleepy provincial capital. He picked 30-year-old Molyvann to do it.
Molyvann served for 13 years as State Architect—1957 to 1970—during which time he worked on nearly 100 projects, including signature creations such as the National Olympic Stadium, the National Theatre, Chaktomuk Conference Hall‚ and the Institute for Foreign Languages. His works represent a unique combination of modernism and elements the architecture typical of the Khmer Empire, which ruled the country from the eighth to 15th centuries. The style has became known as “New Khmer.”
“This was not inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, not a European clone, but an authentic style that arose independently in Cambodia,” wrote urban planner Helen Grant Ross, coauthor with Darryl Leon Collins of Building Cambodia: “New Khmer Architecture” 1953–1970, in a recent interview with reporter Ron Gluckman.
As Molyvann himself explains in the film, he wanted to draw from the past to create something entirely new: “Why did I study Le Corbusier? Because he used to built his ‘unites des habitation’ on stilts. Houses on stilts had been existing since prehistoric times in Cambodia. So I only adapted his vocabulary to Khmer architecture.”
Much like Frank Lloyd Wright or Le Corbursier himself, Molyvann’s design process started with an attentive analysis of setting: cardinal position, prevailing winds, and the local rocks, earth, mud, and grass. “The most important is to find what the site suggests,” he says in the film, “what it provokes in the imagination.”
Phnom Penh’s National Olympic Stadium—an ellipitcal, 70,000-seat arena and associated sports complex designed in the early 1960s—is widely considered his signature creation. Moly, as his friends called him, was inspired by the way in which Khmer architects combined earth and water at Angkor Wat. Some 17 million cubic feet of earth were dug out from the site to shape the stadium’s grounds, while an elaborate system of inner canals allowed water to flow from its roof to pools, or barays, at the base—recalling the ancient temples, preventing floods, and keeping crowds cool at the same time. He intended the stadium to be an example of sustainable and accessible architecture that welcomes all for exercise, socializing, or relaxing in the cooled breezes.
The structure was supposed to host the 1963 Southeast Asian Peninsular Games but the competition was never held because of growing political turmoil. In the late 1960s, the kingdom of then-ruler Prince Sihanouk was challenged both by the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), informally known as “Khmer Rouge,” and by his own generals. In 1970, while he was on a state visit to Moscow, the prince was overthrown in a coup led by General Lon Noland. Molyvann, a long-time collaborator and friend of Sihanouk, fled with his wife and kids to Switzerland in the hopes that he could soon return.
But the situation worsened. Civil war broke out between United States–backed Noland and the Viet Cong–supported Khmer Rouge, which eventually seized power in 1975. The new state’s calendar was set to “year zero,” with authoritarian rule and mass executions to follow. For 15 years, Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot set in motion his plan to “cleanse society from modern elements,” which included the forced displacement of people from cities to the country and the systematic killings of artists and intellectuals. An estimated 1.5 million lost their lives at the hands of his regime.
Pol Pot’s dedication to wiping out modernity and urbanism also took aim at Molyvann’s efforts. All of the materials documenting his works were destroyed, and his buildings were abandoned or converted to military use. The stadium he had so carefully designed as a public resource was used as a site for mass executions.
Molyvann only returned home after the Paris Peace Accords of 1991 ended the Cambodian-Vietnamese War. He found many of his buildings transfigured or deeply neglected. In 1994, during reconstruction efforts, a fire burned down his Preah Suramarit National Theatre, which had just been reestablished as a home for the artists who survived the Khmer Rouge years. It's charred remains were demolished in 2008.
His creations that weathered those years are now facing an entirely new challenge—Cambodia’s turn back toward urbanism, and the construction craze it has created. Over the past 10 years, the nation’s GDP has doubled, and Phnom Pehn’s population grown nearly four percent a year. New residential blocks are sprouting like mushrooms. The White Building—a residential estate that Molyvann designed with Khmer architectural principles, such as exterior air vents and a partially raised floor to create a shaded social area in the basement—is now being replaced by a Japanese-designed, 21-story mixed-used building. The Council of Ministers building, with a pyramidal shape that recalls Angkor Wat, was replaced in 2008 by a Chinese-designed and -funded building that looks, well, like a contemporary Chinese government office.
The National Stadium remains intact as a place where locals can exercise, conduct business, and socialize day or night, but it had been sold to a Taiwanese developer. The Angkor-inspired drainage system was altered, so now the site frequently floods. This symbol of the New Khmer style also now sits among high-rises and construction cranes.
The problem of recognition and preservation of Molyvann’s creations centers around the fact that they are old enough to be in need of restoration—but not old enough to be considered cultural heritage in a country with such a recognized and significant ancient lineage. As Ross and Collins explain, even French colonial buildings get more international recognition as world heritage than the New Khmer places do. Further, the current government, which came to power in 1979 after defeating the Khmer Rouge, is keen to wipe out any legacy of pre-1979 history.
"The government doesn't want to leave anything from before 1979, because it wasn't their achievement. History is completely manipulated," Molyvann said in a 2010 interview with the Los Angeles Times. Wiping out, by action or neglect, architecture to reshape the country’s identity is a recurrent historical theme—and one that's not particular to Cambodia.
The father of New Khmer Architecture spent his final years trying to impart his vision to younger generations. “They [young people] should all get together and create New Khmer architecture,” he said with emotion, in one of the last scenes of the film. “No more Vann Molyvann, but a movement of the young.”
The Vann Molyvann Project, started in 2009 by Canadian architect Bill Greaves, is now working to prevent history from interfering with New Khmer architecture yet again. The project calls for Cambodian and international architects to catalog Molyvann’s legacy in paper and digital archives, and through physical models of his buildings. The team also organizes walking tours and records oral histories from people who still inhabit or use the structures.
“We took care of so many things at the Project” says Seng Chanraksmey, a recent architecture graduate from Phnom Penh’s Norton University, who took part in the Vann Molyvann Project in 2015. “I applied because I wanted to know more about his impressive design concept. We were surveying Molyvann’s buildings, making models, interviewing local people for our oral history records.”
Seng is just making her first steps as a professional architect in the booming—and mostly foreign-funded—Phnom Penh construction sector. When asked what is it about New Khmer that inspires her, she goes back to the wellspring of the style. “There are too many things that inspire me about it, but it is especially the will to combine Khmer and Western style to keep the Cambodian identity alive," she says. "And the massage Vann Molyvann left to younger generations: Learn from the past, but do not copy.”
The outlook seemed bleak for the Burmese star tortoise. Extinction appeared virtually certain for the creature as recently as 2004. In the decade before, it had become a star attraction in the southern China black market for exotic pets. Local Myanmar families, if they found one, could earn a finder's fee large enough to feed a family for a year—if they managed to avoid the seven years of jail time. But times are changing for this little reptile, which is somewhere in size between a large hamburger and a small football. An aggressive captive-breeding effort has seen populations explode to 14,000 leaf-guzzling specimens, each with a distinctive star pattern on its shell, according to a recent paper in the journal Herpetological Review.
These tortoises are native only to Myanmar's central dry zone: in 2003, a survey team took nearly 1,000 hours to find a single tortoise, making it ecologically extinct in the wild. Together with a global conservation network called the Turtle Survival Alliance, the Wildlife Conservation Society joined forces with the Myanmar government to try to save the species. A captive breeding program was set up at three local wildlife sanctuaries. Steven Platt, study author and herpetologist with the program, said, in a statement, "This is the modern day equivalent of saving the bison from extinction." Similar programs have also been used in the United States to save condors or wolves.
The team started the colonies with around 175 tortoises, mostly confiscated from exotic animal traffickers. They were supported by a battalion of herpetologists, molecular scientists, and veterinarians from the Bronx Zoo. Now, 750 animals have been released from the breeding centers into wild areas of the sanctuaries. These initial animals are on their own and political and social challenges rage in the background. Until they have been resolved, and the risk of poaching reduced, the other 13,000 or so tortoises will remain in captivity.
In the meantime, the tortoises are aggressively guarded. Theft remains a constant threat, with at least 200 stolen from the program so far. To prevent break-ins, the tortoises are now guarded round-the-clock by staff members, and kept in 10-foot concrete enclosures with concertina wire looped over the top.
Nonetheless, the project has been a triumph, surprising even its strongest supporters, who call it a "model chelonian conservation success story."
"If you had told me more than 10 years ago when the project started that we would have more than 10,000 Burmese Star tortoises, and that we would have returned nearly a thousand to the wild, I wouldn't have believed it," said Andrew Wilde, from the Turtle Survival Alliance, in a statement. "It is success stories like this that make all the hard work worth it."
Some animal hybrids are common, like mules. Others are unusual, like zonkeys (that's a zebra-donkey), or untameable, like wolfdogs, or not-entirely-healthy, like ligers. And some animals that were thought to be hybrids aren’t hybrids at all. Take the leopard, the offspring of a lion and a "pard." We know now that leopards are, in fact, their own thing: the offspring of a mommy leopard and a daddy leopard. But for a long time, leopards were believed to be the sterile, degenerate spawn of a lioness and a male pard. The pard was a terrifying semi-mythological big cat with a lust for blood. But where did this puzzling creature emerge from?
One of the earliest known references to the pard comes from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (the chapter is entitled "Lions; How They Are Produced"),which dates to around 77 A.D. There, he describes how the lascivious male pard seeks out seductive female lionesses on the banks of Africa’s rivers, where species mingle and mix, and hideous hybrids are born. “Hence arose the saying,” writes Pliny, “that ‘Africa is always producing something new’.” Later, the male lion, recognizing the “peculiar odor of the pard” on his lady lioness love, will “avenge himself with the greatest fury.” But by then it is too late, and the lioness is already pregnant with a leopard. It’s been suggested that Pliny may have believed that pards were male panthers, which are themselves, in Asia and Africa, black leopards.
The authors and illustrators of medieval books of beasts embraced pards with gusto. These books are veritable menageries of pards—scowling, snarling, and generally making a nuisance of themselves. The authors struggle to draw these beasts, which they knew only from complicated, even contradictory, descriptions. What they usually have in common, however, is spots: In Isidore of Seville’s seventh-century Etymologies, pards are described as having a “mottled coat,” speckled with white like a giraffe’s. Swift and “headlong for blood,” they kill their prey with a single leap.
Six centuries later, in the 13th-century Bestiary, pards acquire a bloodthirsty, even demonic, reputation. “The mystic pard signifies either the devil, full of a diversity of vices, or the sinner, spotted with crimes and a variety of wrongdoings,” reads the caption beneath its snarling face. The Antichrist, it adds, is known to be a pard. In Revelations, the Antichrist is described as a beast “like unto a leopard,” with a bear’s feet, a lion’s mouth, and a dragon’s power. All of a sudden, the pard had become something far more than a simple panther straying from its taxonomic lane.
Pards appear in poetry, too. In As You Like It, Shakespeare says a soldier, “full of strange oaths,” is “bearded like the pard.” (This particular pard presumably inherited a mane from its leonine cousins.) Two centuries later, in 1819, Keats describes Bacchus, god of winemaking, fertility, and generally having a good time, as being “charioted” by “his pards.” To the American writer Joseph Holt Ingraham, in 1845, they were “velvet-footed” as they crept upon their prey.
What pards represent, however, is a long-standing general confusion as to how big cats—jaguar, cheetah, lion, leopard, panther (to say nothing of tigers, lynxes, or New World big cats, such as jaguars or mountain lions)—are related to one another, in the West at least. These far-off beasts were barely more imaginable than the Antichrist himself. In the 14th-century Byzantine poem, An Entertaining Tale of Quadrupeds—a dialogue between various animals—the terms "pards," "cat-pards," and "leopards" are all thrown around with relative abandon. The leopard is told he is a “beast that’s born in sin and brought up out of wedlock,” whose lioness mother has washed the scent of her pard lover from him. If the lion smells it, the writer suggests, he will kill her and never mate with a lioness again.
The poem gives still more clues about the natural history of the mysterious pard. They are apparently resistant to fleas (their pelts, therefore, make excellent bedspreads), they have comically short tails, and they live in quarries. These last two nuggets, Nick Nicholas, the Tale’s translator, observes, suggest a possible confusion with a lynx. Either way, the text is sufficiently ambiguous for one illustrator to draw a pard as a scraggly lion, and the next as a tamed cheetah wearing a collar.
After centuries of confusion, by the 1750s, biologists knew definitely that leopards are not a hybrid species. They appear in the 1758 edition of System Naturae, one of the first attempts to catalogue all animals, as creatures in their own right. "Pard" was still in their initial scientific name, Felis pardus, and appears twice in the one they go by now, Panthera pardus pardus.
Today more glamorous mythological beasts—think unicorn, sphinx, or dragon—dominate the fantasy limelight, and pards have virtually faded from memory. Where they appear in modern texts, it’s often in passages ripe with literary allusion. In Vladimir Nabokov’s 1969 novel Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, handmaids pounce “like pards”—killing, presumably, with a single leap. But beyond that, they mostly remain caged in their medieval bestiaries, where their anxious, feline faces seem to say: “I really hope no one realizes I’m not actually real … ”
Looked at one way, Renaissance painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s "The Vegetable Gardener" (1587-1590) looks like a black bowl overflowing with root vegetables, greens, and one huge onion.
But flipped, the painting become something else entirely. The onion has become a plump cheek, while the huge parsnip is a bulbous nose. The bowl is now a hat, perched on what is now obviously a smiling face.
Many of Arcimboldo’s peers in the 16th century were painting portraits or still lifes, but Arcimboldo had the bright idea of combining the two, creating an instantly recognizable style that inspired 20th century Surrealists.
Nothing about Arcimboldo’s early career as a stained glass and fresco designer suggested that he’d develop this distinctive style. It wasn’t until he landed a cushy post as court portraitist to Emperor Maximilian II of the Holy Roman Empire in 1562 that he started painting, along with typical portraits of court members, his series of composite faces. Often set against pitch-black backgrounds, each composite face is made of animals, objects, or, most famously, food.
His royal patrons had a taste for the odd and unusual. Emperor Maximilian II and his son Rudolf II were reportedly delighted by Arcimboldo’s style. They kept him busy with commissions, including paintings and drawings that documented the imperial family’s collection of artistic works and natural curiosities. These Wunderkammers—compilations of oddities owned by the royal and rich—were the predecessors to museums, and they often focused on novel objects (taxidermied animals, preserved plants, cultural artifacts) brought back by European explorers. Organizing and displaying wild and wonderful objects not only fed the Renaissance appetite for the esoteric, but also exerted power over and made sense of a changing world.
Undoubtedly influenced by the imperial collections, many of Arcimboldo's food faces featured ingredients from the Americas. His 1563 series of paintings depicts the four seasons as male figures, from young Spring to geriatric Winter, using seasonal produce. Along with Spring’s literally rosy cheeks and and Winter’s lemons, newer additions to Europe’s gardens appear. Summer’s ear is an an ear of corn, while Autumn’s head is a white pumpkin. Both were relatively recent arrivals from the Americas.
Arcimboldo’s whimsical faces sometimes had real-world models, the most famous example being his 1590 painting of Rudolf as Vertumnus, the Roman god of the four seasons. Arcimboldo painted figures made of books, wine-making supplies, and, most eerily, meat. In a style similar to "The Vegetable Gardener," "The Cook" (1570) is a reversible painting. When displayed on one end, it’s a haphazard pile of roasted piglet and chicken. Flipped, it’s a grotesque face, with a small bird as a deformed-looking nose and a pig’s tail as a curl of hair. The silver serving platter becomes a broad hat, decorated with greens and a slice of lemon. At one recent exhibition of Arcimboldo’s work, mirrors installed beneath the painting showed visitors the flipped version.
Though Arcimboldo was renowned during his life, his fame didn’t last long after his death in 1593. But his work gained prominence in the early 20th century, as his flair for the surreal and allegorical inspired a generation of artists, including Man Ray and Salvador Dalí.
Like the plants he portrayed, a long dormancy didn’t mean Arcimboldo’s whimsical style of painting was dead. It just wasn’t yet back in season.
When archaeologists originally analyzed the burial clothes found at Viking graves in Sweden, they were working during World War II and looking at the garments through the lens of a Nordic-focused ideology. They missed a fascinating detail. As textile archaeologist Annika Larsson discovered when she reexamined the silks, which had been in storage for decades, the burial clothes had woven bands of silk patterned with Kufic characters referring to Allah and Ali, one of the most important figures in Islam.
Larsson was studying the clothes from graves at Birka and Gamla Uppsala in order to recreate the patterns for a new museum exhibit, but she was puzzled by the designs. “I couldn't quite make sense of them and then I remembered where I had seen similar designs—in Spain, on Moorish textiles,” she told the BBC. The designs, she found, were Kufic characters, an ancient form of Arabic script, and may have been an attempt to embroider a prayer onto the burial garments, made in the 9th to 10th century A.D.
There’s a growing pile of evidence documenting the relationship between Viking culture and the Islamic world. Some Viking swords show evidence of metal-smithing techniques from the Arabian peninsula, and as The Guardian reports, archaeologists have found more than 100,000 Islamic silver coins and a woman’s ring with “for Allah” inscribed in it, as well as a hoard that mingled religious objects from Christianity, Islam, and Thor worship. The people buried in some Viking graves also had Persian origins, according to DNA analysis.
Larsson’s own work has examined the use of silk garments in Viking burials. In the Quran, silk garments are associated with the inhabitants of paradise. “In particular I think the idea in Islam of eternal life and paradise really appealed to [the Vikings],” Larsson told The Local. “We have written sources that attest to that, and it could be that the Vikings took this idea from the Islamic world."
In the past, garments like these were thought of as plunder. But, in Larsson’s view, these newly discovered silk bands show that these clothes weren’t plundered; they’re typical Viking-age clothing that shows the influence of another part of the world on these wide-ranging travelers.
Scientists have long thought that mountain lions are majestic loners—only spending time with their fellow big cats when raising young or breeding, and otherwise roaming around their vast ranges by themselves. So researchers were surprised when cameras trained on animal carcasses spotted cats sharing meals. It turns out that the solitary pumas are actually somewhat social.
A team from the University of California, Davis, the conservation group Panthera, and the American Museum of Natural History used data from mountain lions wearing GPS collars and motion-activated cameras in Wyoming to learn more about cat interactions. They found that every single mountain lion they tracked ended up feeding from a carcass at the same time as another cat, and some were repeat dining partners.
They also discovered that the cougars had a hierarchy, with male cats ruling over a territory, and other cats forming a network within that region. Dominant male cats also got the best deal—when other cats tolerated their presence, they were able to feast on carcasses they didn't have to hunt down themselves. This, the researchers write in their report, suggests "males might be cheating in a cooperative system" based on reciprocating tolerance.
And when it comes to cougars, social doesn't mean friendly. In videos, included with the report in Science Advances, the cats come off as confrontational at times.
While it's nice that these cats apparently get to hang out with others on occasion, the fact that they're social could change how they're protected. If a male cat is killed by a trophy hunter, the social network could be affected and hurt other mountain lions. And if mountain lions socialize, then biologists may need to reconsider what they think they know about how other solitary cats, like snow leopards, interact. The world's big cats could have a hidden life.
Quttinirpaaq National Park in Nunavut, Canada, is about 500 miles south of the North Pole. If you want to go there, you have to get to Nunavut's capital, fly to the small island town of Resolute, and then book a four-hour charter flight to the park on a utility aircraft.
Once you get there, it's just you and whatever you've packed. There are no facilities or human communities. According to the CBC, only about 50 people visit each year. The rest is glaciers, rocks, and lemmings.
If that sounds like your thing, but you don't want to make the journey, you're in luck: Quttinirpaaq National Park is now on Google Street View.
Parks Canada has been collaborating with Google Streetview since 2013, and has brought a bunch of other Canadian spots to the site, including the Fortress of Louisbourg (an 18th-century French fortress) and Pingo Canadian Landmark (home to a bunch of pingos).
Quttinirpaaq National Park is now the northernmost place on the platform. To get it online, the park's manager Emma Upton and a colleague hiked in the park for five days with a 360-degree recording backpack. (The colleague, who wears the backpack in most of the photos and videos, is never named; in certain sections of the Streetview, he seems to be doggedly following his boss, who remains perpetually a few hundred meters ahead.)
The park is 14,585 square miles, and most people who venture out there spend over a week hiking. But Upton told the CBC that they tried to get a good cross-section of what's on offer, including its "phenomenal geology" and the possibility of "getting intimate with a massive glacial ice cap."
You can explore the landscape yourself here. As Upton points out, you won't get to hear the glaciers settle, smell the cold air, or feel the vast openness of the wild, but you also won't have to carry the backpack.
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.
Every 90 minutes or so, a crowd gathers on a wooden boardwalk as steam pours out of a crack in the ground. Soon enough, a spout of water, up to 184 feet high, erupts from the ground for about 90 seconds. And 90 minutes later, it happens all over again. Old Faithful is one of the most famous sights in Yellowstone National Park, but for all its popularity, we don't know exactly how the predictable geyser works. Something is heating that water and forcing it out at regular intervals, but the exact mechanics have remained a mystery. Thanks to a new study, we now have a clearer picture of what things look like underground.
Scientists dangled a camera down Old Faithful's gullet back in the 1990s, capturing video of boiling water and the silica sinter rock formations closest to the surface. Otherwise, technology has thus far limited what we can find out about the hydrothermal feature without being seriously scalded by water that's 204 degrees Fahrenheit. Recently a team of scientists from the University of Utah decided to try a new tool, a series of small seismic wave sensors, to see if it could help them better understand Old Faithful. The results were promising—not only could they see the difference between a lava flow and glacial gravel, they could also see a massive reservoir just west of the geyser. That reservoir, which sits roughly underneath the Old Faithful Inn, is a likely source of the geyser's fluid. It's the first clear look at the system, and it's changing how scientists think Old Faithful works.
"Some studies suggest that there might be a cavity that's underneath or slightly on the side of the Old Faithful conduit, but that's not really being proven," says Fan-Chi Lin, a geologist on the University of Utah team. It's been thought that if that cavity exists, then it might be trapping the steam and water bubbles, letting pressure build until an eruption. But if the cavity is actually a giant reservoir of fluid farther away—about 100 meters to the southwest according to Lin and his colleagues—then the eruptions must happen in a different way.
To map out the subsurface around Old Faithful, the University of Utah team braved the cold once the tourists cleared out for the season and set up an array of 133 sensors. Their goal was to measure the vibrations in the ground generated by the geyser's eruptions and see how quickly they traveled through the surrounding rock. The sensors sat around Old Faithful for two weeks, collecting four terabytes of data describing ground vibrations—though a few were chewed on by animals, probably curious coyotes.
Sin-Mei Wu, a co-author of the study, then used a computer program to identify vibrations at each sensor that were definitely caused by the eruptions. Based on the time of the eruption, picked up by sensors closest to the vent, Wu looked at the time the vibration arrived at sensors further out. Geologists can infer properties of the materials underground based on how long it takes for a vibration to pass through them.
"We can see there's an area of waves that's slowed down significantly," says Lin. "That's likely because the water actually resists wave propagation, that slows down the waves." Just how slow the vibration's waves travel can also help them estimate the volume of water underground. Lin and Wu say it's about 300,000 cubic meters of water. In comparison, Old Faithful only spurts out about 30 cubic meters during each eruption.
"Maybe because this is a huge reservoir, it produces a constant hydrothermal fluid feeding to the system and producing this eruption every 90 minutes or so," says Lin. And the team has only scratched the surface. They still don't know enough about the deeper structures that are part of the nearby Yellowstone supervolcano, and are hoping to image the underlying magma chamber. "That will eventually produce a better idea of what the volcanic hazard is in the area."
Lin notes that this study really only tells us about Old Faithful. We have no idea if it operates like other geysers because we haven't been able to image them either. "We're planning to put this kind of array at other hydrothermal systems," he says. Norris Geyser Basin, also in Yellowstone, has been growing hotter and hotter, so this technology could help the National Park Service determine if the underground structure is changing and whether or not to block off the area in case a hydrothermal explosion is imminent.
The information could also help the Park Service protect structures, including the Old Faithful Inn, finished in 1904. "They tried to dig down to reinforce the base of the structure and at a very shallow depth, they reached very hot hydrothermal fluid," says Lin. "There's some concern whether there's actually active hydrothermal activity right beneath some of the buildings there."
The team plans to brave the snow and the coyotes again this November to put out another array near a place called Geyser Hill. The small sensors are a powerful tool for unlocking the geologic mysteries of some of nature's greatest shows.
Over the past months, a strange story has been unfolding: Diplomats working in Cuba reported that they had been experiencing severe hearing loss and mild head trauma. According to the U.S. government, those symptoms were caused by a sonic attack, perpetrated by unknown parties, in which some sort of device was used to sicken the U.S. personnel.
This is, to say the least, a very strange and unusual story. What in the world is going on? Here's what we know.
The Timeline
The State Department first heard about the attacks in late 2016; they started within days of the presidential election. The initial reports included what the Associated Presscalled“unexplained losses of hearing.” Among the first people affected were U.S. intelligence agents. In March 2017, Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department heard reports of similar symptoms—“headaches, nosebleeds, dizziness, ringing in the ears,” The Star reports.
The AP reports that the U.S. government started an investigation into these strange incidents and concluded that the embassy workers’ hearing loss could have been caused by “an advanced device that operated outside the range of audible sound and had been deployed either inside or outside their residences.” Investigators also found, according to The Guardian, that the attacks were concentrated in three clusters, at the homes of U.S. diplomats and at hotels they frequented.
Americans working for the embassy in Cuba had started to come home for treatment or chose to leave their postings. In May, the U.S. State Department responded by asking two accredited diplomats at the Embassy of Cuba in the U.S. to leave the country.
In August, the story of the “sonic incidents,” as the State Department was calling them, became public. At the time, a spokesperson stressed that there was still no definitive answer about what was causing these symptoms. In the same month, another round of incidents was reported. By late September the State Department was considering closing the embassy, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson met with the Cuban ambassador. Soon after, the U.S. removed most of its employees from Havana and suspended visas for Cubans. Early in October, the U.S. had 15 more Cuban diplomats leave America.
The Sounds and Symptoms
In total, there have been 22 confirmed cases of people being hurt by these sonic attacks. As reporting on the incidents increased, so did the list of symptoms the diplomats had experienced, which included “mild traumatic brain injury and permanent hearing loss, but also loss of balance, severe headaches, cognitive disruption and brain swelling,” according to ABCNews.
Although the original reports said the device operated outside the range of audible sound, by mid-September the AP was reporting that victims had heard sounds, including a “loud ringing or a high-pitch chirping similar to crickets or cicadas,” a “grinding noise,” or “a ringing in their ears.” The AP also found that “some of the incidents were confined to specific rooms or even parts of rooms with laser-like specificity,” adding to the puzzle of what was responsible. The Associated Press obtained a recording of what the victims were hearing; you can listen to it here. (It is very annoying.) The sound is not dangerous to listen to on your computer, but the victims said they heard it a much higher volume.
To date, no actual device linked to these attacks has been found.
The Science
What type of “advanced device” could cause these sorts of symptoms? To cause hearing loss, a sound needs to assault the ear’s delicate mechanism until it’s overstimulated and stops working. If the sounds were inaudible, they would be either in low-frequency or high-frequency sound bands. A high-frequency sound can be directed in a tight beam, which would stack up with some reports that the sound was incredibly localized—just stepping a few feet away could mean escape. But high-frequency sounds cannot travel far, and a device that generated enough to cause damage would likely be pretty large.
The Alternate Theories
In the earliest public reports, the State Department floated the possibility that a third country (possibly Russia) was behind the attacks. Since then, the list of potentially responsible parties has grown to include Iran or rogue Cuban military officials.
There have also been many theories floated about what else might be causing these symptoms. Wiredset out a case that the same symptoms could be caused by chemicals that caused hearing loss and that had somehow been weaponized to use against the diplomatic community. The New York Times suggested that a bacterial or viral infection could also have been the cause.
It could also be the case that the reported attacks are a case of mass hysteria. Because the symptoms reported are somewhat vague, several scientists have told reporters, they may actually be the result of anxiety and psychological pressures, rather than any mysterious device.
Houses drawn by kids are fun, for sure: spiky triangular roofs, puffy clouds billowing out of massive chimneys, windows askew, with a giant smiling sun looking down. But they also reflect what a child thinks of as a home and how they see the world they're inheriting. So let's take them seriously for a moment. What would these fantastical designs look like translated into professional-looking architectural renderings?
Below is a selection of drawings that British children—aged between four and 12—came up with when asked to draw the “home of the future.” And under each one is a 3-D model of the home created by British retailer made.com. It turns out that imagination—homes with rocket roofs, solar-powered pyramids, and precariously perched tree houses—might actually be up to the tall task of adapting to the challenges the future might bring. They also suggest just how tangible some of those challenges are—even to kids. Atlas Obscura has a selection, including both the drawings and the renderings that bring them to life.
To 10-year old Ameen, from Crawley, homes built on land are so 2017. Floating on clouds is the way to go.
Five-year-old Charlie also thinks little of staying put. His home of the future comes with four legs and two arms so it can go move around freely. That conical tilted roof? A rocket, just in case you need to take off for Mars.
Hamza, eight, also from Crawley, goes for a classic tree house, but it is reachable only by floating stepping stones that connect to a rope ladder.
Seven-year-old Ellis from Harlow dreams of a super-safe home, featuring titanium bricks, bulletproof windows, a steel roof, and an oak annex. That's all probably wise, since his vision of the future includes metal clouds.
Finally, there's 10-year-old Antoni's design, that solar-powered pyramid. The Worthing resident also provided a bird's-eye view: solar panels on top, a hover car entrance just beneath it, and windows all around. It looks built to withstand whatever the future might bring, while also recalling an enduring design from the past.
In 2017, in an era of satellites, big data, and digital maps that appear instantly on your phone, the world can feel very known. New Views, a new atlas by Alastair Bonnett, a professor of social geography at Newcastle University, is full of information about this planet: its forests and undersea cables; its air traffic, ants, migrants, and happiness; its gas prices, guns, and asteroid strikes. This collection of 50 unique world maps—“beautiful, enthralling and thrilling,” Bonnett writes—aims to make us look again at the world we think we know and consider it anew.
In this impressive collection of knowledge, however, there are dark spots. Three of the book’s views of the world reveal the less connected and known parts of the world—the uncharted parts of the ocean, the places where gas and electricity are less easily available, and the regions that are cut off from cities. Even in this crowded, quantified world, there are still places that are hard to see.
For instance, in the “Remoteness from Cities” map, the dark spots show the few places in the world where it can still take days to reach the nearest city (any one of 8,158 cities that have 50,000 or more people). Most of the dark spots are places where very few, if any, people live—deserts, ice-covered land, and deep forests. In some places, though, most notably the Himalayas and Tibetan plateau and parts of Indonesia, there are significant populations that live apart from the urban world.
The map showing “Energy Flux,” seen at the top of this page, represents gas and oil pipelines with yellow lines and electricity transmission with white lines. As Bonnett reports, the world has spent approximately $100 trillion in the past century to create energy infrastructure and, by looking at this map, it’s possible to see “where the money has gone.”
The pipelines create veins that flow through six continents, bringing oil and gas thousands of miles from their sources. White electricity lines are like floodlights in Europe and the United States. Some of the dark regions on this map represent, again, places where relatively few people live, but other dark spots are very populated places that don’t have the same access to electrical power. This map also shows the limits of electricity transmission: While gas can travel over whole continents, electricity can only go so far before it’s lost.
The ocean presents yet another story. This map, “Unknown Oceans,” represents the work of one of the largest efforts ever to collect information about the water-covered parts of our world, the Census of Marine Life, which had thousands of scientists on hundreds of expeditions searching the ocean for creatures known and unknown. There are about 250,000 marine creatures known to science; it is estimated that at least another 750,000 are out there, waiting to be described.
But look at that map. All of those dark splotches are places outside our known world. If there are places on land that have less access to electricity or are far from cities, huge parts of the ocean are a massive, mysterious frontier. As much as we know, there’s still a lot more to find out.
In 1837, newspapers across the country were plastered with ads for a promising new product called Dr. Miles’ Compound Extract of Tomato. It was promoted by Archibald Miles, a Cleveland-based merchant who claimed that his pills had been scientifically tested and painstakingly developed over years to treat everything from indigestion to syphilis. Shortly thereafter, a Dr. Guy R. Phelps (an actual, Yale-trained physician) began doing brisk business selling his own Compound Tomato Pills and promising similar medical results. Miles was livid. An anonymous tirade (likely penned by or at the behest of Miles) was published in a New York paper denouncing Phelps’ pills and claiming they were nothing but a “baseless imitation.” The tomato pill war had begun.
Ads for various vegetable pills claiming miraculous results were nothing new to American newspaper readers. But in the late 1830s, tomato pills took over the market. This was especially surprising as Americans at the time had not considered tomatoes for their epicurean qualities, much less for their medicinal properties.
Botanically speaking, tomatoes are a fruit. Yet tomatoes are culinarily treated as a vegetable. In fact, pound for pound, they are the second most popular vegetable in the U.S. today, after potatoes. But 200 years ago, tomatoes were sooner found in a flowerpot than on a dinner plate.
“People had very different ideas about the right color of food, and red wasn’t one of them,” says Andrew F. Smith, food historian and author of The Tomato in America: Early History, Culture and Cookery. The daring red tomato was likely first introduced to North America by Spanish colonists in the 17th century. By the 19th century, some intrepid gardeners grew ornamental tomatoes because they thought they looked interesting. But few thought to actually eat them.
That attitude began to shift in 1834, when Dr. John Cook Bennett, a physician and amateur botanist, made a provocative announcement in the press: Tomatoes had medicinal properties. While there’s no evidence that Bennett conducted scientific research himself, he was a great promoter of other people’s work (though he often neglected to credit them), and he’d visited European hospitals and colleges where doctors recommended tomatoes to patients. He claimed that eating tomatoes prevented cholera and treated diarrhea, headaches, and dyspepsia.
Other vegetables had been similarly lauded with medical promise before. Sarsaparilla, mustard, dandelion, and rhubarb had all been deemed as curatives at one time or another. But Bennett insisted that tomatoes were a true wonder fruit, and he urged Americans to eat them often and in great quantities. He predicted that soon some pioneering person would figure out how to extract these miraculous properties from the plant and put them to medical use. By 1838, both Archibald Miles and Guy R. Phelps had claimed to have done just that.
Tomato pills proved to be big business. Miles had a network of agents and retailers that stretched from the Gulf Coast to the Canadian border. And he did not take kindly to upstart competitors. That year, a Miles-approved editorial in the New York Journal of Commerce claimed that Phelps was a “quack” and a “charlatan.”
Phelps countered by publishing a letter stating that Miles had “about as much claim to the title of doctor as my horse, and no more.” Phelps further insisted that Miles had essentially stolen his tomato pill formula. Endorsements ensued claiming that Miles’ pills were the “original” and that all other tomato pills were frauds. Miles eventually published an article arguing that the low price of Phelps’ pills was evidence that no tomatoes were even used to make them. Phelps called Miles “unjust and unmanly.” And on and on it went, playing out in the press for two years much to the delight of readers and newspaper editors, who seemed happy to publish credulous articles about tomatoes’ healing powers in exchange for tomato pill ad revenue.
Through all the claims and counterclaims, one truth did emerge: Neither Miles’ nor Phelps’ pills actually contained tomatoes. “Tomato pills were a joke,” says Andrew F. Smith. Of the tomato pills that were analyzed, none included a trace of the plant. It seems that the men’s main concern was less the health of their clients and more the health of their bank accounts.
But the tomato pills were effective in a couple unlikely ways. “There was a huge placebo effect," Smith says. “Psychology plays such an important part if you think taking pills will help you with a specific ailment.”
The tomato pills were also mostly innocuous (they were essentially laxatives), which is more than can be said for other treatments at the time. Indigestion and other common ailments were often attributed to impure blood, and Miles and Phelps promised their pill could purify patients’ blood. But, in fact, most of these afflictions were likely caused by ingesting a potent slurry of polluted water and eating a diet high in salt, fat, and starch, and low in fruits and vegetables. At the very least, the tomato pill craze gave physicians something harmless to offer patients instead of mercury pills.
The battle over tomato pills ended abruptly in late 1839. It’s not clear exactly what transpired, but Phelps and Miles either came to an agreement or simply realized that it wasn’t in their financial interests to continue the war. Though tomato pills continued to be sold, Phelps ended his national advertising campaign in the spring and Miles in the summer. Miles went on to own a healthy tract of real estate in Ohio, though he continued to self-describe as a physician. Phelps founded a successful life insurance company in Connecticut and sold his tomato pills through the early 1850s.
With fewer ads circulating and some physicians publicly denouncing tomato pills, the buzz abated and sales dwindled. And yet, tomato pills had piqued Americans’ interest in the scarlet fruit. Even as the tomato pill craze fizzled, Americans continued to gobble up tomatoes at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Tomatoes were served as main courses and side dishes, and with eggs, meat, and fish. There were savory tomato pies and sweet tomato tarts. Tomatoes were made into soups, jams, jellies, and ketchup. One journalist wrote in 1842 that he liked his tomatoes “fried in butter, and in lard, broiled and basted with butter, stewed with and without bread, with cream and butter.” A writer for the London Observerdescribed the many tomato-centric meals he consumed while staying at a Wisconsin hotel in 1841: “At breakfast we had five or six plates of the scarlet fruit pompously paraded and eagerly devoured … At dinner, tomatoes encore, in pies and patties, mashed in side dishes, and dried in the sun like figs; at tea, tomato conserves, and preserved in maple sugar … ”
Cookbooks, magazines, and seed catalogues all picked up on the trend, praising tomatoes’ delicious, healthful, and fashionable qualities. “Within 10 years, tomatoes went from relatively little consumption to the queen of the vegetable market,” says Smith. By the early 1850s, millions of bushels of tomatoes were grown in New England alone. Tomato pills may have been a sham, but America’s love of tomatoes was the real deal.
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Nixon’s unprecedented presidential trip to China in 1972 steadied a rocky diplomatic relationship. In the two decades since China's Communist Revolution, the countries' Cold War relationship had ranged from muted hostility to narrowly avoiding war, and Nixon's trip was part of a carefully choreographed detente. But for Americans following along at home, what the president ate was just as interesting as the speeches. Each night, Nixon toasted Chinese officials with glasses of powerful baijiu liquor, sat down to lavish banquets, and ate dishes that few Americans had ever sampled.
Before Nixon’s visit, American Chinese food leaned heavily towards the “American” part of its name. To appeal to Americans, many Chinese chefs slathered dishes with gravy and served fortune cookies (a San Franciscan invention) and egg rolls (likely a New York invention).
But the constant media coverage of Nixon's week-long trip led many Americans to emulate his culinary adventures. According to Gallup polling at the time, more Americans heard or read about Nixon’s visit than any other event in Gallup’s history. The banquets were televised and attended by luminaries such as Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters. (Cronkite famously shot an olive airborne with his chopsticks.) On Nixon’s first night in China, the menu featured shark’s fin soup, steamed chicken with coconut, and almond junket (a type of pudding). In less than 24 hours, a Chinese restaurant in Manhattan recreated each dish, serving it to curious diners for months after Nixon’s return.
Following diplomatic protocol, Nixon hosted one of the banquets. But a lack of space on the American planes kept him from bringing his own cooking staff. So the Americans brought champagne and California oranges for dessert, and a Chinese staff cooked an almost entirely duck menu for the American-hosted dinner. This was the president’s second night feasting on duck, which Nixon later called his favorite meal from the visit.
The publicity led to a Chinese restaurant boom. In a New York Times article describing the phenomenon, the paper listed “the more exotic Chinese cuisines” that Americans could now try, including moo shu pork, sweet-and-sour fish, and, of course, Peking duck. One Chinese-American restaurateur said that when her restaurant first opened, she “couldn’t give away a Peking duck.” Nixon, she added, was “the greatest salesman for Peking duck. Now many people want it.”
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Like many traveler-oriented spaces, the international terminal at Oslo Airport features a number of conveniences aimed at making travelers comfortable: restaurants, wifi, a limited supply of lounge chairs.
Soon, though, it will also offer some less soothing amenities: a series of paintings by the psych-horror master Edvard Munch.
Oslo's Munch Museum is collaborating with the airport's operator, Avinor, to bring the artworks to this new environment. The ten-year deal will see a rotating series of paintings come through a dedicated display space starting this December, the Local reports.
The first will be "Hode ved Hode," or "Head by Head," a 1905 work that depicts a woman and a man leaning on each other. The Munch Museum describes this work as shot through with "psychological tension," reminding viewers "how difficult it can be to achieve mutual trust, security, and affinity."
So if you're flying to or from Oslo soon, and you were planning on laying your head uncomplicatedly upon your companion's during calm midair stretches, you may want to reconsider. And when you're up there, make sure to keep an eye on the clouds.
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.
Sensible shoes and cocktail attire, living life to the fullest in the home of the dead, the flicker of thousands of tea lights across acres of mid-October gloom. Over the two nights—Friday, October 13, and Saturday, October 14—of Atlas Obscura's Into the Veil 2017, some 3,500 revelers went on a journey filled with contradictions and hints of the transcendent in Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery.
Here, for posterity, are a few exceptional moments from these two extraordinary evenings.
At the intersection of Pine and Central Avenues, guests in velvet and lace downed cider-sherry Jell-O shots, while the taps of a dancer's shoes echoed into the night. Three members of the Brooklyn Bluegrass Collective played to a rapt audience, before "dirty gospel" band the Reverend Vince Anderson and the Love Choir took up a spot in the clearing.
In a honey-gravel voice, Anderson sang about life, death, and his whisky-drinking grandmother. On the slope behind him, the audience gathered like a devout congregation.
Under a tree hung with lanterns, musician Laraaji went both fast—with his hammered dulcimer—and slow—with his voice. The effect was warming but persistent, as audience members sprawled on rugs like moon bathers.
Usually closed to the public, the catacombs were opened for the two special nights. By the entrance, living candelabras dripped milky candle wax, and deeper inside, the New Perplexity Daxophone Quartet made stunning, strange music. Artist and performer Lucien Shapiro began his Fear Collecting Ritual, with a mask, a vessel, and a circle of light. "The ritual shows that all darkness desires light and is symbolic of the continual search for guidance along the path of life," he says. "Participants ... walk out of the darkness one faces through the realization of the light held within, and the journey does not end."
Headliner S U R V I V E lit up a huge natural amphitheater, and sent waves of lush electronica through the headstones and monuments as belly dancers swayed in time.
Among the cemetery's 560,000 graves, guests sipped cocktails, peered at headstones, or simply enjoyed the darkness. Edwardian brides slipped past men in evening dress, ladies in waistcoats and long skirts paused to take in a willow tree lit up with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of glinting tea lights. Green-Wood Cemetery dates back to 1838, and that provided inspiration for many of the outfits on display, even as the silhouette of One World Trade Center's spire peeked out above the trees.
One October morning in 1996, Pat Baker was driving her three youngest kids to school. On the car radio, the zany and irreverent DJ Jimmy Chunga was jabbering about the haunted castle in Provo.
Like everyone in north-central Utah, Baker knew about the castle, which sprung up every October: A spook alley infamous not because it was particularly well-done (though by all accounts it was), or particularly scary (though it was better than average), but because it stood on the grounds of Utah State mental hospital—and because some of the actors who worked there, playing witches and zombies and chainsaw murderers, were patients at the institution.
Baker had been a special kind of shocked to learn about the haunted castle. She directed Allies for Families, a nonprofit that educated parents and teachers about mental health, and provided support for families of the mentally ill. Every day in her work, she had to battle the perception of mentally ill people as unpredictable at best, dangerous at worst. She knew this stigma was precisely why those with a history of mental illness often kept it a secret, lest they make it harder for themselves to find jobs, friends, or housing.
To Baker, the haunted castle only reinforced this negative stigma. But the situation was complicated. Allies for Families contracted with Utah State Hospital, and Baker had a happy working relationship with the hospital administrators. She also knew that the hospital depended on revenue from the castle for its yearly recreation budget. That money wasn’t just an abstract good to Baker—her oldest daughter, Amy, had been an inpatient at the hospital two years earlier.
So Pat Baker had reached an uneasy peace with the haunted castle. That peace wouldn’t last the car ride, however.
From the speakers of her Subaru, Chunga was up to his usual shtick, trying to get groggy listeners to call into his show. This particular morning, the station was giving away tickets to the haunted castle—or, as Baker and her children heard him describe it, a chance to be frightened by “real-life psychos" at the hospital.
As they pulled up in front of the school, Baker’s youngest son turned to her: “Mom, is Amy a real-life psycho?”
That was when Pat Baker decided the haunted castle had to go.
Originally known as the Territorial Insane Asylum, Utah State Hospital was founded in 1885, on an isolated plot separated from Provo proper by swamps and a garbage dump. As the hospital’s website puts it: "The message this reveals about the prevailing attitudes regarding mental illness is unmistakable.”
In 1971, the hospital organized a spook alley for staff and patients, which then became an annual tradition. “Pretty soon the employees here started asking if they could bring their families,” recalls Janina Chilton, a long-time hospital administrator who now runs a museum at the hospital. “It just kept getting bigger.”
After a few years, the hospital decided to turn the event into a haunted house fundraiser. There was already an ominous building on the grounds that lent itself to the cause: the giant, turreted stone Castle Amphitheater, built as a public works project in the 1930s. Every September, patients and staff would spend weeks working to build and spookify several rooms on the amphitheater structure, each with a unique haunted theme. The castle would open up to the public in late October.
“It was a lot of work,” says Leland Slaughter, director of recreational services at the hospital from 1981 until 2009. “We spent a lot of late nights and extra time doing that.”
Former staff members recall how the patients clamored to help build and act in the castle. Slaughter says that the event was not only therapeutic—a chance for patients to exercise creativity and challenge themselves—but a rare bonding opportunity. “You’d have patients and staff right beside each other that were manning the room. So the patients would get to see the staff in a different light.”
They took the scary factor seriously. Over the years, the castle would include brutal torture scenes and savage gorillas; chainsaw murderers and mad scientists’ laboratories; a swamp monster that popped up to scare people as they walked over its giant water tank. To keep the haunts up to date, a fraction of each year’s revenue would be set aside for new lighting, sound equipment, costumes, and props the following season.
Hospital staff assessed which patients were fit to participate. Those with emotional issues, or whose psychosis might be triggered by the overwhelming lights and sounds, wouldn’t be allowed to interact with visitors. “We didn’t want to interrupt or hurt their treatment at the hospital,” says Slaughter.
Over the years, as the patient population at the hospital became less stable, they relied more on volunteers to don the makeup and costumes. By the 1990s, only 10 to 15 patients were helping at the castle, alongside some 90 citizens from local community and church groups. That didn’t diminish the draw. Attendance at the castle grew steadily through the 1980s, and hit 27,000 visitors a year by 1995. The line extended across the hospital grounds. At $5 a ticket, that translated to $100,000 to $125,000 in revenue.
“State money has lots of strings attached, what you can use it for,” says Chilton—but the castle money was different. “This was all in a separate fund, and didn’t have those same parameters,” she says.
“Over time we became more and more dependent on it, and we actually built the recreation program around the funding,” says Dallas Earnshaw, a longtime staff member and current hospital superintendent.
Indeed, Slaughter says, the haunted castle revenue roughly matched the sum that his department received from the state. They used the money to take patients out to bowling alleys, performances, and restaurants. They bought art supplies, as well as gear for camping, skiing, and river rafting.
“A lot of times, if you got the patients in an outdoor environment, or maybe on a raft, ... the patients would open up and talk a little more freely,” Slaughter says. “We were able to do a lot of good for the patients—to show them a sense of normalcy.”
For centuries, there had been a sense of hopelessness surrounding the mentally ill. “The outlook was, ‘They’re gonna be homeless or institutionalized,’” says Baker. Starting in the 1980s, however, she saw that beginning to change—as understanding of mental health expanded, families were no longer willing to simply accept that their mentally ill relatives would be ostracized from society.
“It was a different view of mental illness,” Baker says.
After she heard Jimmy Chunga’s “real-life psychos” comment, Baker got to work convincing others that the haunted castle perpetuated a negative, outdated idea of mental illness. Over the next year, she brought it up at meetings with public officials and fellow advocates. She called reporters on the mental health beat to voice her concerns.
Baker knew that change happened slowly—but she still wasn’t happy when the haunted castle opened up again in 1997. “I do remember being frustrated and annoyed,” she says.
That same year, word of the anti-castle effort made its way to Kat Snow, a reporter for Salt Lake City public radio station KUER. Snow says she immediately understood Baker’s concerns. “I was really stunned that nobody seemed to think that it was perhaps a damaging idea,” she recalls.
Snow decided to produce a radio story to take a closer look at the castle—and to find out if the hospital had good reason to subject its patients to such a spectacle. When she interviewed kids waiting in line for the castle, her microphone didn’t keep them from speaking their minds.
“Knowing that mental people are here is scary,” a young girl told her, giggling.
“It’s real crazy people, not fake!” tittered one boy. “Psycho people! Chainsaws!”
Another girl: “There’s no control over them! They could just grab you and it’d be scary.”
Inside the castle, Snow found a cackling mad scientist, and a man chained to a wall who lurched at visitors as they passed by. To her, these scenes evoked those days when the mentally ill were considered dangerous pariahs. “People were chained to the walls in asylums,” she says. “And here it was being kind of used as a scare tactic.”
(Superintendent Earnshaw insists that the castle planners worked to avoid any scenes that evoked mental illness. “I think it was probably her over-interpreting what she was seeing," he says of Snow’s reporting. But Snow doesn’t buy it: “I would have a hard time believing that you could do that scene and not know what you’re doing.”)
Snow interviewed a patient named Robin Judd, who was working as a “vampire-witch-creature” in the castle. Judd described how an adult visitor had snarkily asked her if she’d taken too much Thorazine, a drug used to treat symptoms of mental illness.
“It's not right what the public thinks,” said Judd. “So, the heck with them. If they think they're going to come see a bunch of freaks—well, they're not.”
But over the course of the reporting process, Snow’s opinion of the castle began to soften. When she interviewed recreation director Leland Slaughter, she was struck by the sheer amount of money on the table, and how far that cash went towards helping patients feel like part of society.
Snow, who also covered state politics, recognized that the money would not be easy to replace if the castle was closed. “This was a population of people that have been suffering from budget cuts for a long, long time,” she says. “It’s not like the Utah legislature was quick to jump on funding those kinds of things.”
But the question lingered: Did that sad reality justify keeping the castle open?
“By the end, I was really glad I wasn’t the one making the decision,” Snow says. “Because it was a lot more difficult of a decision than it seemed to me at first.”
Not all mental health advocates initially saw the castle the way Pat Baker did. As of October 1997, both the American Psychiatric Association and the local National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) chapter declined to take a strong position on whether the hospital should shut it down. While they grasped the stigma problem, they also recognized how much money was on the line.
But perspectives were shifting. In April of 1998, a national NAMI representative sent a letter to Utah’s governor, begging him to shut down the “barbaric” castle. The letter read: "I do not know which is more offensive—the fact that this horror show is allowed to continue or that the hospital administrators admitted to knowing that part of the draw each Halloween is the public's fear of mental illness.”
Later that month, Baker walked into a meeting of the state Board of Mental Health, which oversaw Utah State Hospital. The Board had agreed to make a decision on the haunted castle. As the meeting began, Baker was optimistic—and afraid.
“This is it,” she remembers thinking. “And if this doesn’t work, then it’s probably not going to work.”
When it was her turn to speak, Baker played a recording of Kat Snow’s radio story. She wanted the Board to hear how the children in line talked about the castle. "I knew if there was gonna be a tipping point, that was it," she says.
Baker herself was interviewed in the story. The Board listened to the recording of her holding back tears as she talked about her daughter: “When you have a family member who has a serious mental illness, and you love that person, and you watch them struggle, and you watch them succeed, it is hurtful to have that person stereotyped as some kind of a maniac.”
Representatives from the hospital also had a chance to weigh in before the Board voted. Administrators explained that they were actively working to combat the stigma issue. “We took advantage of the notoriety of the castle to educate the public about stigma,” says Earnshaw, who was present at the meeting. Every October, hospital staff and patients would visit local schools to explain to students that the mentally ill were just like them. “It was an opportunity for us to educate the community,” says Earnshaw.
The hospital staff said as much to the Board. And, of course, they reiterated the revenue issue—nobody in the room was confident that state lawmakers would allocate more money to fund the recreation program.
The Board took a vote. It wasn’t unanimous, but they reached a majority decision: It was time for the haunted castle to close.
As far as controversies go, the haunted castle controversy had been intensely civil. Baker continued her relationship with the hospital for many years after the final haunted castle in 1997. "We didn’t have any ill feelings towards her,” says Earnshaw.
Historian Janina Chilton suspects the castle’s days were numbered regardless of the Board’s decision, simply because the event was becoming a larger legal liability. Chilton, Earnshaw, and Slaughter all say that they sympathized with Baker and her concerns about stigma.
For her part, Baker would ally with the hospital to lobby for state funding to replace the castle revenue. In 2000, the legislature moved around money to appropriate an additional $76,000 to the recreation program, and the hospital was able to continue its robust recreation program.
In many ways, it was a happy ending. The stigmatizing castle had been vanquished, and the patients were no worse off.
Yet the end of the castle signified a broader change—something that went beyond one hospital or one haunted house.
Your average Utahan might say it was an explosion of political correctness. In 2006, the Utah Valley Daily Herald published an editorial blaming “politically correct zealots” for the castle’s closure, and imploring Utah State Hospital to bring it back. To this day, Earnshaw gets calls every year asking him to revive the event. (It's a non-starter—stigma aside, all of those elaborate lights and costumes are long gone.)
Hospital staff say it was a loss of trust in the people of Provo. Earnshaw thinks that a handful of insensitive radio DJs didn’t accurately represent the community’s view of the mentally ill, and that advocates like Baker had fixated on that minority. “Most of the public were actually quite offended that people would assume that they would stigmatize the State Hospital because of the castle,” he says.
Pat Baker, on the other hand, believes that it represented a newfound demand for dignity, particularly among people like her, who saw their loved ones being publicly stereotyped. “I had been in Utah for a while and knew about this haunted castle, but it wasn’t until it hit me personally that I was willing to take it on,” she says. “I knew it was the right thing to do."
Alligators can be tricky animals to study. If you want to know what they eat, for instance, you either have to catch them in action, open up a dead one, or pump their stomachs. Considering they spend a lot of their time in the murky waters of marshes and rivers, where they are hard to observe, getting a look at their stomach contents is the more accurate way to track their dining habits. A pair of intrepid biologists did just this, and pumped the stomachs of more than 500 alligators on the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts of Florida and Georgia and found, surprisingly, that some alligators have expanded their menus to include sharks and rays.
Alligators usually feed on crustaceans, such as crabs and shrimp, in addition to wading birds and fish. There are some stories of gators eating sea turtles and small sharks, but there hasn't been a lot of hard evidence. Because alligators lack salt-secreting glands that would allow them to spend much time in salt water, they tend to stick to freshwater habitat, and that's probably why biologists haven't spent much time investigating interactions between alligators and sharks. But James Nifong, a biologist at Kansas State University, and Russell Lowers, a biologist at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, argue that these interactions—a pleasant way to say gators eating sharks—probably happen more often than previously believed.
Their survey of gator stomach samples turned up evidence of meals that included a nurse shark, a lemon shark, a bullhead shark, and an Atlantic ray. The high acidity of alligator stomachs breaks down shark tissue in one to three days, so Nifong and Lowers were lucky to find what they did. GPS tracking units on the alligators also show that coastal gators can hunt in saltier water. "When it rains really hard, they can actually sip fresh water off the surface of the salt water. That can prolong the time they can stay in a saltwater environment," said Nifong in a statement. They have these encounters further inland, too. Juvenile bull sharks live in Everglades estuaries where alligators also hang out. "While no evidence exists," write Nifong and Lowers in their report, "given the overlap in habitats used, large American alligators foraging in these estuaries potentially consume immature bull sharks to some extent."
