When most people think of a recorder, it conjures up an image of those cheap plastic flutes that many people were forced to try to play in elementary school, as an introduction to the world of music. However, recorders were once something more—cherished instruments that helped define the sound of the Renaissance. Similarly, when people think of King Henry VIII, they (quite rightfully) tend to focus on his long and violent series of marriages. But he was also a musician and composer, and one of his favorite instruments was the recorder.

The recorder as an instrument dates back to the Middle Ages, when it evolved from earlier flute-like instruments, and it was distinguished mainly by the inclusion of a thumb hole. Traditional recorders were often carved from a single piece of wood or ivory, and were much more refined musical instruments than the more commonly known plastic cheapies we have today. They were widely popular in the Western musical tradition throughout the Renaissance and Baroque periods, when a number of courtly symphonies were produced. Of course Henry VIII, who considered himself, well, a Renaissance man, composed a number of pieces involving the wind instrument.

Henry VIII indulged in a number of pursuits, including sports and gambling, as well as intellectual activities such as writing and supporting the theater. But as an artist, perhaps the Tudor monarch’s most fascinating output was as a musician. He is known not only to have played the lute, lyre, and harp, among other instruments, but also to sing. While his undoubtedly lovely voice (would you want to be the one to tell him otherwise?) is not recorded for posterity, he could read and write musical notation, and a number of his compositions have survived.

The British Library holds a manuscript dating back to 1518 known as Henry VIII’s Songbook, which contains more than a hundred musical compositions from the era, 33 of which are credited to the king himself. Many of them are multi-instrumental arrangements with lyrics, including what is arguably his most famous song, “Pastime With Good Company.” His musical career is so storied that there is a persistent myth that he was the original author of the famous English folk song “Greensleeves,” although this is almost certainly not true.

Among the surviving musical works of Henry VIII are at least two songs written specifically to be played on the recorder. “If Love Now Reigned” and the other, untitled work are typical of the instrumental recorder music of the age. They sound as though they would fit in perfectly at a Renaissance fair, or the nearest fantasy novel tavern.

To support his musical obsession, the king amassed an impressive collection of instruments, which were held at Westminster Abbey and kept by fellow composer Philip van Wilder, who had been named Keeper of the Instruments. In the massive 1547 inventory of Henry VIII’s possessions after his death, among the lavish palaces, ships, and riches, is a long list of musical instruments, including bagpipes, flutes, lutes, organs, and more. Notably, the collection lists some 49 recorders made of different types of ivory and a variety of woods, including boxwood, and walnut. Many of the recorders are grouped together by material, and probably produced a wide ranges of sounds and tones. There are also singular instruments listed, such as a great bass recorder, which was likely larger than the rest. He may have had even more than the ones listed in the inventory. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website claims that the musical monarch owned 76 recorders by the time he died.

We might not think much of the humble recorder in the modern age, but once, it was truly the instrument of kings. Listening to Henry VIII’s recorder compositions today, the instrument’s sweet, chirpy tones provide a glimpse at the famously harsh figure's often overlooked softer side.

Today's pop-culture landscape is rotten with stories about melodramatic, brooding vampires and their supernatural love affairs. But back in the 1960s and '70s, those narratives belonged almost exclusively to the soap opera Dark Shadows. Near the end of its run, the series had become such an institution that it spawned a pair of Dark Shadows feature films (not to be confused with the 2012 Johnny Depp reboot), and to promote them, the producers staged what might have been the first ever nationwide spooky beauty pageants.

“The common perception is that it’s a campy soap opera from the '60s with a vampire, but if you stick with it long enough, the show is an everything bagel,” says Wallace McBride, editor of the Collinsport Historical Society, an in-depth fan blog devoted to all things Dark Shadows. “It’s got science fiction, it’s got horror, it’s got romance, time travel, parallel universes, werewolves, zombies, witches. Anything genre, you can find in 1,200 episodes of Dark Shadows.”

The first feature film spin-off, House of Dark Shadows, was released in September 1970, the year before the show finally went off the air after 1,225 episodes. The film focused on the series lead, vampire Barnabas Collins, and his search for a cure to his vampirism—so that he could marry a mortal, naturally. Though the property appeared to be expanding to the big screen, the TV show was actually on its last legs. “The show was just getting over the hill in terms of ratings,” says McBride.

To promote the film, the production company decided to try something a bit different. MGM and the film’s director and overall Dark Shadows mastermind, Dan Curtis, thought they would get the fans involved by putting on a nationwide beauty contest. They called it the Miss American Vampire Contest, and the winner would win a week’s guest spot on the Dark Shadows TV series, and a trip to New York, where the show was filmed.

Ads were placed in newspapers across the country, targeting girls, 18 to 25, who thought they had the right “vampire looks.” One newspaper story about the promotion, dredged up by the blog Dark Shadows in the Press, said that contestants would be judged by their interpretation of the vampire aesthetic, as well as “charm, poise, stage presence, and videogenic qualities for television.” One TV ad for the competition read, “It’s a contest you can sink your teeth into.”

Leading up to the release of House of Dark Shadows, regional beauty contests were held in a number of cities, from Dallas to Philadelphia to Miami. These prelims produced a handful of finalists, who traveled to Los Angeles to compete for the title on September 10, 1970. One of the judges for the New Jersey regional competition recalls her experience in the book The Dark Shadows Companion: 25th Anniversary Collection, saying, “It was fun for the first five minutes. After that it got terribly depressing. Some of the girls came in bikinis. Some of them came dressed as witches or vampires or dead bodies. One girl stood in front of me and just stared.”

The final competition winner was actress and activist Sacheen Littlefeather, who gained greater fame a few years later when she represented Marlon Brando at the 1973 Academy Awards to decline his Oscar for The Godfather in an act of protest over the treatment and portrayal of Native Americans. Similarly, Littlefeather did not reap the benefits of her award. According to McBride, it’s unclear whether she declined the trip to New York to appear on the show, or whether the producers decided not to hold up their end of the deal. Either way, Littlefeather remained in Los Angeles. The prize passed to Christine Domaniecki, the winner of the New Jersey regional, where she had been crowned by none other than Barnabas Collins himself, actor Jonathan Frid.

Despite the confusion over the winner, the Miss American Vampire Contest, while bizarre for its time, must have been seen as a success, because it wasn’t the last supernatural beauty contest that the Dark Shadows franchise got up to. Following the release of House of Dark Shadows and the final episode of the show's original run, in April 1971, there would be one last hurrah for the residents of the show's fictional Collinsport. A second film, Night of Dark Shadows, came out in August that year, and focused on another member of the Collins clan, the franchise antagonist Angelique, a vengeful witch. This time, the producers wanted to crown Miss Ghost America.

The rules were much the same as before, with "ghost" in place of "vampire," through regional competitions leading to a final pageant event. However, since Dark Shadows was off the air, the prize was an opportunity to appear on The Dating Game (more on that later). Enthusiasm for the pageant declined accordingly. “The wind had kind of gone out of the sails at that point,” says McBride.

The pageant finals went ahead, and were shown on a local Los Angeles horror program called Fright Night, on September 25. The winner was 18-year-old Kate Sarchet, who, in addition to appearing on The Dating Game, also received a $250 savings bond. McBride was eventually able to unearth an account of Sarchet’s appearance on the game show, posted to Facebook by the winning date, comedian Will Durst. In his dispiriting post, he wrote, “Miss Ghost America totally ignored me on the date and hooked up with the golf pro at the hotel we got a free round of golf at. Which left the chaperone and me to drink in the hotel bar. Drank so much. Missed the ride back to LA the following morning. And had to get back on my own.” In modern parlance, she ghosted on him.

Today, Dark Shadows is still beloved by a healthy fanbase of devoted Collins family aficionados, and while the odd beauty pageants have not enjoyed the same level of immortality, they may have contributed to the show's enduring appeal. According to McBride, they may have helped the show, which was more beloved in its native New York than anywhere else, achieve such a widespread following. “What the pageants did is, they offered the cast a chance to sort of branch out and make it a national phenomenon.”

Michael Fry is an art teacher living in Mamaroneck, New York. He is also a trenchant observer of pop culture and, unequivocally, a dad.

Evidence of all these things can currently be found in his front yard, which he has filled with a "dead trend cemetery"—mock gravestones representing fads that have perished over the past year.

Fry started this Halloween tradition in 2015, inspired by a spin through Disney World's Haunted Mansion ride, which also features droll headstones. "I wanted mine to be funny, but current and relevant," he says. "I also wanted to change them every year so it would always be fresh."

His students help put together his topical hit list, as do his two daughters. A youthful influence shines through in this year's crop, which includes "dabbing," "homemade slime," and "the old Taylor Swift." These sit easily alongside the more crotchety picks, such as "Payless Shoes" and "accountability" (subtitle: "looking at you Millennials"). Death is the great equalizer, after all.

Over the past few days, Fry's graveyard has drawn national attention, appearing everywhere from Mashable to Good Morning America. It's also a local hit: "My neighbors look forward to it," Fry says. "Every October they start asking what died this year."

Although the paint is barely dry on these graves, Fry is already looking ahead. When asked what he hopes to be able to mourn in 2018, he has an immediate answer. "Fidget spinners," he says. "Of course, global warming would be nice too." Stay tuned.

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 an area southwest of Cairo, not far from Giza, a team of archaeologists from Egypt and the Czech Republic have uncovered a temple that they believe belonged to Ramses II.

The temple dates back 3,200 years. Evidence of its existence was first uncovered in 2012. Now, the archaeologists have unearthed its mud-brick foundations as well as relief fragments that depict Ramses II.

The structure was about 105 feet by 167 feet, and the evidence uncovered indicates that columns lined the main court. In the back, a staircase or ramp led to a sanctuary and three smaller rooms. Some of the bricks were painted blue.

It was dedicated to the worship of a sun god, a tradition that goes back more than 1,000 years before the construction of the temple. It also shows the extent of Ramses’ influence, the Associated Press reports.

Last year, some 124,000 people voted to name a new British research vessel Boaty McBoatface, but the decision was overturned. The ship was named instead for the popular British broadcaster Sir David Attenborough. Trainy McTrainface, however, will today officially receive its name in a naming ceremony in Gothenburg, Sweden, reports The Local.

Earlier this year, the Swedish transport company MTR Express held a public vote to name their new Stockholm-Gothenburg express trains. Trainy McTrainface was the runaway winner. At the time, amid fears that Trainy might meet a similar fate to Boaty, marketing chief Per Nasfi promised this would not be the case. "I can guarantee with my life that the train will be called Trainy McTrainface," Nasfi told The Local.

Ceremonies will be held in Gothenburg and Stockholm to name the new fleet of trains, all of which have crowdsourced names: Ingvar, after a local television host; Estelle, after Princess Estelle of Sweden; and Glenn, a reference to a popular joke that everyone in Gothenburg is called Glenn (in the 1980s, four of the players in local football team IFK Göteborg shared the name). Trainy McTrainface's ceremony will take place at Gothenburg's local station, after which the name will be emblazoned on its red exterior.

Nasfi speculated that some of Trainy McTrainface's popularity was revenge for the scuppering of Boaty McBoatface. In a statement, the train company MTR Express said they thought this new train, with its highly democratic new name, would "be received with joy by many, not only in Sweden."

Just down the road from North Carolina’s cosmopolitan state capital, there is a field. In that field, there is an enormous mound of dung. And buried under that dung, more than a hundred miles from the nearest beach, are the colossal bones of a whale.

For years, Raleigh has served as a burial ground for these massive mammals. From the behemoth 54-foot sperm whale inhumed in sand on the State Fairgrounds back in the 1920s to the right whale buried in manure five miles from downtown this summer, Raleigh has become the unlikely—if only temporary—resting place of dozens of marine mammals over the last century, although the exact number is unknown.

But apart from thoroughly confusing future archaeologists, what possible reason could there be for burying these whales? Ben Hess of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences explains that it mostly has to do with grease.

Hess is the museum’s Mammalogy Collections Manager. As such, he is charged with processing the mammals that get sent to the museum so they can be used for biological research. In come dead rats and rabbits, out go clean skins or bones that get added to the museum collection, where researchers from all over the world can study them. Hess has prepared all kinds of mammals—wolves, bats, bears. You name a furry, warm-blooded creature of the southeastern United States and Hess has probably held its heart in his hands or cleaned its body in his box of corpse-munching dermestid beetles, also known as “skin beetles.” It’s all part of the job.

But every now and then, Hess is tasked with preparing a specimen that won’t fit in his box of beetles, or even the double-wide doors of the museum. On those occasions, when a whale washes up on the North Carolina shore that the museum wants for the collection, it’s Hess and the rest of the Mammalogy team that must turn it from a fetid leviathan of fat and bone into a clean specimen. To do so, they just need a mountain of horse dung and a spot of land near the museum’s downtown Raleigh location.

Walking past the mound of manure, you’d never know what was hiding beneath it. The pile sits in a small field surrounded by a chain-link fence, which Hess says keeps the coyotes away. A few flies busy themselves in the excrement and you can hear cars whizzing by on the highway. Poking out here and there is a bit of white, betraying the location of a piece of skull the size of a pickup truck bed.

“[The skeleton] just had a little connective tissue, and unfortunately because of how porous the bone is, if you tried to pry it off you’re really going to break the bone apart,” Hess tells me, sitting in his laboratory, stuffing a black rat with cotton. Instead, the team uses the organisms naturally living in horse manure to scrub the bones clean of the remaining tissue and grease.

“People often say ‘oh, it’s the worms and stuff’ but nope, that’s not what happens,” explains the museum’s Mammalogy Research Curator Lisa Gatens. “It’s composted. It’s anaerobic decomposition, so it’s the bacteria in the manure that cleans it.” That bacteria eats off the skin, muscle, and, of particular importance, the grease percolated deep inside the porous bone.

“[Horse manure] does a fantastic job of de-greasing bones,” says Hess. “There’s really very little that can compare to how good that does.” That manure is sourced for free from a North Carolina State University horse farm just down the road. “They have an ample supply of poop and we have an ample supply of need,” quips Hess. After being buried in the feces, the bones emerge, sometimes years later, thoroughly clean. Then, all it takes is a quick soap scrub and the bones can be deposited in the collection or articulated into a giant skeleton to go on display in the museum.

This history of burying whales in Raleigh goes back to at least 1928 when then-Museum Director H. H. Brimley sent a team down to the coastal town of Topsail, North Carolina, to carve up a beached sperm whale. The monumental task, somehow accomplished in waist-deep water using only axes and spades, raised more than a few eyebrows among residents, as described in an article from the museum’s archive.

“An unsigned letter given to the press expressed strong resentment of ‘the parking of a uzed [sic] whale’. Residents, the letter further explained, ‘would suffer if the intent of beaching the Jonah at Topsail is carried out. It's poor policy to throw your trash in your neighbor’s backyard.’”

Eventually, the whale bones were hauled up to Raleigh’s State Fairgrounds, where “Trouble,” who was named for the hassle his decaying body caused, underwent a 10-month cleansing soak in wet sand before being brought to the museum. But the fairgrounds quickly proved to be a poor site for cleaning whale skeletons due to the annual gathering of thousands of people every fall. So after Trouble the operation moved to a different spot just outside the city beltline.

Right whales, pilot whales, and even a few rare True’s beaked whales were all processed at this second spot. Like Trouble, each whale was carved up on the beach (a task undertaken in recent times by North Carolina’s Marine Mammal Stranding Network) to separate as much flesh from the skeleton as possible. Then the whale bones were trucked up to the new location to be buried in purifying baths of sand, and later, horse manure.

Today that land is the site of the Wake Med Soccer Park, where the North Carolina FC professional soccer team plays its games. A spokesman for the soccer club was “surprised” to learn of the land’s prior use. And you can’t blame him. Sitting in the stadium above the perfectly manicured grass, it’s hard to imagine the land was once used to process the bones of beached marine mammals.

Around the year 2000, the operation moved a final time to the latest site. One of the first whales buried here was a critically endangered 50-foot northern right whale named Stumpy. She and her unborn calf were covered in manure for a year and a half after they washed up dead on the North Carolina shore. Her bones, broken from ship strikes, were later used to inform new policy on boat speeds in right whale habitat, clearly demonstrating the value of preparing these specimens for the collection.

Mary Kay Clark was the museum’s Curator of Mammals before Gatens. In an email she writes, “[I]t would never occur to Raleigh residents that the remains of some of our most interesting NC coastal residents are nearby.”

But that’s the thing about a place’s past. The earth has a long and dynamic history and even the most unassuming of locations can be hiding incredible secrets. Indeed, when ocean levels were higher at various times in North Carolina’s geologic history, the skeletons of marine animals likely washed up near Raleigh. So in a sense, these whales aren’t anything new—they’re the continuation of the long legacy of a landscape whose history is waiting just under the surface to be explored.

It’s not every day that a cookie takes a solo space flight. Certainly none of Tunnock’s teacakes—which are shortbread cookies under domes of chocolate covered marshmallow, and a favorite tea-time treat in Scotland—have done so. But what generations of Scots have overlooked is that these classic cookies come wrapped in a spacesuit-like silver-red foil. As the Glasgow Science Centre museum was to prove, Tunnock’s teacakes come pre-dressed for a trip to the stratosphere.

On October 13, 2017, GSC scientists attached a Tunnock’s teacake to a weather balloon and sent it hurtling far above the earth. Weather balloons typically gather meteorological data—they are the cheapest and easiest way for non-astronauts to reach the edge of space. But as weather balloon kits can cost less than a thousand dollars, the barrier to non-human space travel is surprisingly low. Past balloon-elevated oddities include a hamburger, a Hello Kitty doll, and an armchair.

Appropriately, the launch site was the village of Houston, 16 miles from Glasgow. Two cameras documented the journey of “Terry” the teacake, who spun at a vertigo-inducing rate as he ascended.

Terry Teacake boldly going where no teacake has gone before! #teacakeinspacehttps://t.co/ljhLy7kUI9#GlasgowScience🚀 pic.twitter.com/gE5dJAR1EG

— GlasgowScienceCentre (@gsc1) October 13, 2017

After an hour and 29 minutes of upward ascent, Terry reached an altitude of 21 miles. Terry had reached the stratosphere, but not space, which according to NASA begins at 62 miles above the earth. The cameras fixed on Terry showed spectacular vistas of the curving horizon below and the darkness of space beyond. Not a bad view for anyone, much less a marshmallow cookie.

Eventually Terry's balloon popped, and Terry began a 40-minute descent from the stratosphere, slowed by the balloon rig’s parachute. Though the weather balloon rig crash-landed into a tree in Galloway Forest Park, Terry survived intact.

Terry's space adventures peaked at 37,007 metres. He took 40 minutes to descend & landed in a tree in @gallowayforest& no, we didnt eat him pic.twitter.com/AD5FjQBvFu

— GlasgowScienceCentre (@gsc1) October 13, 2017

While sending a cookie to space might seem frivolous, GSC's chief executive explained that Terry’s journey was meant to be inspirational. "We engage people with space science every day,” said Dr. Stephen Breslin to the BBC, “and we thought what better way to spark people's imaginations and interest in STEM than for us to launch something into space ourselves.”

While Terry’s space adventures came to an end, Breslin has promised that more Scottish treats will get “the science treatment.” But it’s hard to imagine what could beat sending a teacake into the stratosphere.

In 1900, with space in the 46-square-mile peninsula of San Francisco quickly becoming a premium, the city's Board of Supervisors voted to reclaim some room from the dead. First, they ceased further burials within city limits. Then, in 1914, on the back of a developer publicly valuing cemetery land at $7 million, the city began the arduous and ramshackle process of evicting the deceased.

Over the next 40 years, nearly 150,000 bodies were exhumed and relocated a few miles south to the city of Colma; currently, dead residents outnumber the living there roughly 1300-to-1. But the relocation process wasn't as fastidious as you’d expect. Records were transferred incorrectly, family plots were split apart, body parts were transposed and mixed with others, often in mass graves.

On May 9, 2016, as construction crews were renovating a home in the city’s posh Richmond district, they struck something with their shovels. Under the garage floor was a tiny coffin made of lead and bronze, its most prominent feature a pair of glass windows that allowed workers to peer inside. They saw the preserved remains of a three-year-old girl. She was dressed in white, with ankle-high shoes, and grasped purple flowers that’d also been woven into her hair. A rosary and eucalyptus seeds had been carefully set atop her chest. There were no markers indicating who she was or when she died.

A city medical examiner cracked the coffin to find more information, but in doing so, broke the airtight seal that had long kept the body from decomposing. Time became an issue. A burial had to take place soon, but who would pay?

The city felt it was the burden of the homeowner, Ericka Karner, who was quoted prices between $7,000 and $22,000 for the burial, which she understandably balked at. “I understand if a tree is on your property, that’s your responsibility. But this is different,” Karner told the San Francisco Chronicle at the time. “The city decided to move all these bodies 100 years ago, and they should stand behind their decision.”

After nearly two weeks, Karner got in touch with Elissa Davey, founder of the nonprofit Garden of Innocence, which works to name unidentified dead children. Along with the Odd Fellows, they fronted the cost of the new cherry wood coffin lined with a violet interior, and for the girl’s second burial.

On June 4, 2016, more than 100 people took the trip down to Greenlawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Colma for a short service to the mystery girl. She was buried under a heart-shaped granite headstone that read:

Miranda Eve
The child loved around the world
“If no one grieves, no one will remember.”

That name was meant to be temporary, given to the dead girl by Karner's own two young daughters, to be replaced when Miranda’s identity was finally discovered. See, before her second burial, researchers extracted DNA from the corpse, first to make sure that there was no foul play, then for clues.

The samples suggested Miranda had been weaned from breast milk a year before her death, putting her age between two and three-and-a-half years old when she died. They also hinted at a diet change that took place a few months before death, which suggested she died from a longer illness, not trauma. An analysis of her hair concluded she died of marasmus, or severe malnutrition, likely due to an infection.

Researchers also used the physical properties of the coffin and burial location in an effort to determine her identity. They superimposed an old map of the Odd Fellows cemetery atop a contemporary map to pinpoint where Miranda’s plot would have been; they traced the unique, dual-windowed casket to the only undertaker in the city making them at the time. Volunteers searched through 29,982 burial records, and were left with only a pair of possibilities. One had a distant, 82-year-old relative living in nearby Napa, who agreed to have his DNA withdrawn for testing alongside Miranda’s.

After months of waiting, the results of the DNA test were announced in April of 2017. It was an official match.

“WE FOUND MIRANDA!!!” announced the Garden of Innocence website. “Miranda Eve is Edith Howard Cook. Born November 28, 1873 and died October 13, 1876.”

Armed with a name, archivists dug through Edith’s history and discovered a trove of information about the family. Edith was the first daughter, and second child, of Horatio Nelson Cook and Edith Scooffy Cook, a prominent San Francisco family who came west during the Gold Rush. Horatio had a hide-tanning business which lasted until 1980, when it merged with a similar business in nearby San Leandro; he was also the city’s Consul to Greece. Their next daughter, Ethel, was a city socialite talked about in the tabloid rags; a Russian nobleman once called her“the most beautiful woman in America.”

With the mystery of the little girl in the coffin finally solved, on a sunny Saturday in June 2017, another hundred or so people went to Colma for one last ceremony. This time, the headstone included Edith's real name, her birth and death dates, a computer-aided image of what she may have looked like, and a message to those random passersby who happen to find themselves at this odd grave.

“GOOGLE HER!” it reads.

You might think that when you are cooing and using baby talk that you are just making up uniquely random sounds. But according to a new study, in some ways, just about every mom speaks the same baby talk.

A recent report out of the Princeton University Baby Lab (a real institution) has found that women from a wide range of different languages all use a similar timbre when speaking to infants in a cutesy way. Researchers tested 12 English-speaking mothers, taking samples of them speaking both to children and then to adults, and were able to train a computer to differentiate distinct voices for each with little more than a second of sound data. Then they sampled the voices of 12 more moms who spoke nine different languages, and found that across all the subjects, the change in timbre was about the same.

According to the Baby Lab's Elise Piazza in a press release, the takeaway is that mothers (and probably fathers as well—the researchers just stuck with mothers for now to limit the test results) may have “a universal form of communication that mothers implicitly use to engage their babies,” which may help language learning.

There is still more research to be done, but the next time you find yourself spewing some cutesy nonsense at an infant, take heart in the fact that it’s not silly. It’s natural.

A couple of years ago, Carol Page was taking the elevator up to her apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts when a new, intriguing leaflet caught her eye. A couple of her neighbors, it seemed, had found themselves needing to rehome a cat. Page had recently lost a cat of her own, and this one—a sweet black furball named Molly—was just her type. She went back to her apartment and made a few calls.

Within a day, Molly was prowling happily around Page's apartment. Within a week, Page says, it was as though she'd never lived anywhere else. "Everyone told [the cat's former owners], 'You can't do better than to give a cat to Carol Page,'" Page reminisced recently, smiling, sitting in a deep armchair. Nearby, Molly yowled: a reporter had rudely displaced her from her own dedicated seat.

Page is clearly an ideal cat companion. She's got an almost feline mix of playfulness and calm, and at 68 years old, she's happy to provide a consistent lap. But whether or not Molly knows it, her human's cat credentials actually extend much further. Back in the early 1980s—before anyone had ever made a Lolcat image, binge-watched Maru videos, or hashtagged #catsofinstagram—Page created PURRRRR! The Newsletter for Cat Lovers, an eight-page, cat-themed booklet that she produced six times per year, all from her Boston-area apartment. In its near-decade-long heyday, PURRRRR! could be found in thousands of homes all over the world. Today, though, it's been mostly effaced by the cat-themed media that followed—hough PURRRRR! has left its footprints all over it.

Page is the kind of person who, if asked, can easily divide her life into cat-based eras. When she started PURRRRR!, at age 32, she was living with three of them: Benny the Bargain, O'Brienette, and a white behemoth named Amazing Grace, who she trotted out for press pictures. (At the time, her own name was Carol Frakes—she changed it to Page later on, after she had become something of a media mogul, and grown tired of people mishearing it.) "I appreciate dogs," she says, "but I am a cat person, and that will never change."

By the early 1980s, the rest of the United States was catching up: cats had successfully slunk onto Broadway and the cover of Time, and a cat merchandise craze was in full swing, spurred by the offbeat drawings of cartoonist B. Kliban. The accompanying backlash—one popular book was called 101 Uses for a Dead Cat—just added more fuel to the feline fire. Even compared to the present moment, Page says, "cats were huge."

Page found herself uniquely positioned to take advantage. Grace, Benny and O'Brienette were all great muses, and she had just completed a newsletter-making course at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. Plus, her freelance writing career was off to a rocky start, which provided her with crucial motivation. "I was getting a lot of rejections," she says. "So I said, 'Screw this! I'm going to be my own editor.'"

She solicited contributions via an ad in Writer's Digest, and brought in an artist friend, Richard Titus, to design the logo: a chubby cat with a cheerful smirk. Titus also spiced up each issue with a number of interstitial drawings and cartoons, and Page attributes some of the publication's charm to him. But everything else was hers, from the color scheme—brown and peach—to the title, with its distinctive tail of extra R's. "I thought, 'Purr—that's a great name,'" she remembers. "But I wanted to achieve some onomatopoeia."

By April of 1982, the debut issue was ready to ship. Like her subject matter, Page has an eye for empty niches, and in a first-page editorial, she claimed PURRRRR!'s. "While many cat lovers enjoy an occasional cat show, pages and pages of cat show listings aren't of interest to them," she wrote. "Neither are breeder advertisements or feature articles on the special breeding problems of the Rex or Himalayan." In other words, while other cat publications might lean, well, fancy, this one was proudly populist: as she wrote, "PURRRRR! is for cat lovers, not just breeders."

That first issue set the tone for the rest of the run. Useful articles, like "Catproofing Your Home," are snuggled alongside feline-human-interest pieces, like a profile of a pet-focused dating service. There's a humor column, a vet advice corner, and a recipe of the month (for "Tuna Treat": dry cat food, minced parsley, and the leftover juice from a tuna can). All fit into a neat eight pages, and are written with a kind of clubhouse knowingness: If you're a cat person, you'll keep reading and nodding. If you're not, feel free to trot along with a tennis ball in your mouth.

PURRRRR! took off quickly enough that it was immediately a full-time job for Page. "I did everything myself," she says, from soliciting contributions to putting stamps on the envelopes. Some of this work came from managing readers: one testy cancellation, typed directly onto a subscription renewal notice, explains that "reading time is precious … and caring about cats makes that reading time even more valuable."

Most of it, though, was straight hustling. The milk crate is full of back-and-forths with more storied publications and personages—NPR; Dear Abby; Playboy—in which she makes the case for PURRRRR! coverage. "I really believe that the appetite of the cat-loving public for cat-related news is insatiable," she once wrote to the Washington Post.

Although some bigwigs didn't take the bait—Cosmopolitan, she says, really gave her the runaround—plenty did, including the NPR radio program All Things Considered and NBC television's The Today Show, which each brought Page on for a segment. She also got coverage from many local publications, which clearly enjoyed the opportunity to write headlines like "Newsletter Kitty-Corners the Market" and "Catering to Cats Catnip for Carol."

Her biggest break, she says, came from the New York Times Book Review, which published an author's query in which she requested interesting cat names for a recurring feature. "I got 440 new subscribers," she says. Even better, she got a bunch of great names: Conway Kitty; Cat-A-Tonic; Wisteria, "because he's just hanging around." Remembering these still makes her grin. "I had a guy in Iceland who named his cat Tenzing Norgay," she says, after Edmund Hillary's guide during the first-ever summit of Everest.

Paging through the archives of PURRRRR! reveals a remarkably consistent sensibility. Features came and went—book reviews; historical roundups; a tongue-in-cheek column called "Ms. Meowser," for which Page impersonated a cat advice columnist—but the focus and tone remained. At its peak in the mid-1980s, the newsletter boasted about 3500 subscribers from all over the world. Still, the operation never budged from her apartment. "Once every other month, I'd go downstairs and dump all the PURRRRR!s in the mailbox," says Page, "I'm sure the mailman was like 'Oh, shit.'"

Even the best job in the world gets tough if you do it for too long. Around 1989, Page says, she burned out. She sold the newsletter at a small profit, and continued working as the editor; eventually, she quit that, too. In February of 1991, Page got a letter from the new owner. "PURRRR! is going to fold," it read. "Sorry to report the demise of your brainchild."

Page had already moved on to other things. Her next few decades were full of ventures and adventures: since the newsletter's demise, she has traveled to dozens of countries, taught journalism at Emerson College in Boston, covering the psychology beat for the National Enquirer, and run a PR firm. ("Everything I used there, I learned from PURRRRR!" she says.) Now that she's retired, she enjoys traveling, collects hats, and hanging out with her boyfriend, "Guatemalan John," with whom even Molly is happy to share a chair. Her remaining cat curation energy goes into a number of Pinterest boards, including "Interesting Markings," "Cats On Glass Tables," and "Bellies I'd Like To Smooch."

The enduring appeal of cats does not surprise her. "People have come to understand that although cats can be assholes, most are not," she says. "They're soft, they're warm, you can leave them for a while if they're fed and cleaned." Media trends may come and go, but cat fans will always find a way to read about cats.

If you would like to peruse PURRRRR! on your own, we have digitized the first issue here.

Humans wouldn't be where we are today if not for our brains. Relative to our bodies, our noggins are exceptionally large. Scientists say we evolved our big heads to manage our complex social structures, an idea called the social brain hypothesis. Researchers have since looked at the social brain hypothesis to explain other large primate brains, along with social bird brains. And now a new study, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, suggests that whale and dolphin brains evolved in much the same way.

A team of researchers from the United States and the United Kingdom compiled data from studies describing the body and brain sizes, social structures, and cultural behaviors of whales and dolphins. They included behaviors such as group hunting, social play, and complex vocalizations. Controlling for body size, the team found that brain size predicted how socially complex a species is, how rich their diet is, and the size of their social groups. Larger-brained species were also found across a wider range of latitudes, which probably means they're "more ecologically flexible," write the scientists in the report. They also note that a lot of the whale brain is devoted to auditory processing, which shows just how important social behavior and communication has been in their evolution.

Humans have managed to spread to just about every nook and cranny on Earth thanks to our brains, but don't expect whales or dolphins to take over any time soon. "The apparent co-evolution of brains, social structure, and behavioral richness of marine mammals provides a unique and striking parallel to the large brains and hyper-sociality of humans and other primates on land," said study coauthor Susanne Shultz in a statement. "Unfortunately, they won't ever mimic our great metropolises and technologies because they didn't evolve opposable thumbs."

The ancient settlement of Soğmatar, which thrived 5,000 years ago, back to the Bronze age, might seem like a world detached from our own. By legend, this is the place where Moses came after killing an Egyptian overseer and had to flee the palace where he grew up. The people here had built their city around a large hill, and they worshipped a moon god, called Sin.

But, as a new discovery shows, in some ways, the people of Soğmatar had lives not so different from our own. Their children played with rattles and the Bronze Age equivalent of toy cars—tiny toy chariots with four wheels, the Hurriyet Daily News reports.

Since May, an archaeological team has been excavating dozens of the 120 tombs found during a surface survey in 2012. In one child’s tomb, they found a toy horse carriage, scaled down to a child’s size, along with a rattle decorated with birds. Those toys were meant for the children of high-ranking people, according to Harran University’s Yusuf Albayrak, who is leading the project.

Today, the miniatures we make for kids might be cars, trucks, and planes, but one principle of human nature has remained the same for thousands of years: Kids love pushing tiny vehicles around.

Auckland Central Library, in New Zealand's largest city, has a long history of providing for the city's homeless population. After a local charity told administrators that the library served as a kind of "lounge" for people with no fixed address, they welcomed them into the space, asked what the library could do better, and organized regular screenings in the boutique cinema in the basement. But when books started going missing, and then reappeared in unusual, hidden places within the library, often with proper bookmarks in them, librarians were puzzled and didn't make a connection.

"It was really odd and we couldn't quite figure it out," Auckland Libraries manager Rachael Rivera told The Guardian. "We thought someone was playing with us, or it was bored kids." It was only in one of their regular meetings with the library's homeless patrons that the solution revealed itself. Unable to get library cards without an address, or fearing damage to books that they checked out, many people had been tucking their books beneath couches or under shelves so that they could return to them without losing their place.

"That community really values the services we offer and treats the books with a great deal of respect," Rivera told the British newspaper. "A lot of the guys that come in are extremely well-read and have some quite eccentric and highbrow literary tastes. People are homeless for so many different reasons, and being intelligent and interested in literature doesn't preclude that." The library has since established a special bookshelf behind the front desk to store books for this group of about 50 homeless readers.

New Zealand has some of the highest rates of homelessness among developed nations, with almost one percent of the population, or about 40,000 people, regularly "sleeping rough." It's a particular problem in Auckland, where housing prices have soared in the past few years. The library, which is off the main shopping strip, often has a group of people sheltering under its awning or using the benches by its front door.

Every morning, pie bakers find themselves elbow-deep in several requisite ingredients, including flour, butter, eggs, and vanilla extract. While a dash of vanilla extract is a hallmark ingredient for sweets, American bakers in the early 19th century reached into the cupboard for something else altogether: rosewater.

Food trends are as old as food itself, and evolve from generation to generation. While rosewater is considered an exotic ingredient nowadays, it didn’t use to be. Up until the 1840s, nearly every pie, cake, and cookie recipe called for a dash of rosewater—an addition that gave desserts a subtle floral aroma and a slightly earthy taste.

America had a taste for rosewater because England had a taste for rosewater, and England had a taste for rosewater because of The Crusades. “All the Crusaders marched off to the Middle East to defeat the infidels. What they did was they picked up an awful lot of Middle Eastern foodways,” says Sandy Oliver, a colonial food historian. The Crusaders became particularly fond of desserts that used rosewater and orange blossom water. When they returned home, they made rosewater by steeping fragrant roses in water. Then the English brought rosewater with them when they sailed to America.

By the 18th century, Oliver says, the taste of America was “rosewater, cream, and sherry.” The floral water appeared everywhere in cookbooks, such as American Cookery by Amelia Simmons, published in 1796. In it, an apple pie recipe calls for “rose-water and sugar to your taste," as do recipes for various puddings, custards, tarts, syllabub (a kind of frothy drink), cakes, and gingerbread. Modern Domestic Cooking, published in 1829, includes tips for making superior rosewater. Home cooks used their own rosewater in “French flummery,” macaroons, drop biscuits, and every kind of cake. Even William Henry Harrison’s favorite pound cake featured rosewater.

In the mid-1800s, however, American palates abruptly shifted from favoring floral-flavored desserts to those with lemon and vanilla extract. To most Americans, vanilla’s appeal stemmed from its novelty. The only issue? “Until the 1840s, vanilla was incredibly expensive: wanted by all, but only the elite could afford it,” writes food historian Sarah Lohman in Eight Flavors. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, returned from a visit to France with a taste for vanilla ice cream, and ordered vanilla pods for 24 shillings a bean in 1791. For comparison, the average agricultural worker made about 3 shillings a day. As Lohman notes, “Europeans were far more likely to chow down on more common flavors such as violet, orange, or rye bread ice cream than vanilla.”

But in 1841, Edmond Albius, a 12-year-old slave from Réunion (then known as Île Bourbon, where the term “bourbon vanilla” comes from) developed the technique of quickly hand-pollinating the vanilla orchid using a stick and a careful flick of his thumb. Prior to Albius’ discovery, people relied on insects to pollinate vanilla, and then on a much more time-consuming method of hand-pollination that botanist Charles Morren developed. Since not much vanilla could be produced at a time, vanilla stayed a rarity. Albius’ discovery, a result of his passion for botany, caused vanilla to evolve from a luxury ingredient into something the average middle-class household could afford practically overnight.

“If you had the capacity to buy flour, sugar, make cakes, you probably could acquire vanilla,” Oliver says. As a consequence, rosewater became passé. By 1896, culinary aficionado Fannie Farmer, whose Boston Cooking-School Cookbook was a household standard for many middle class women, implemented vanilla in recipes for cakes, cookies, chocolate, croquettes, and an omelet soufflé. Farmer suggested rose extract for wafers and frosting, but only if they were colored pink. Eventually, rose scents stopped reminding Americans of pie and became solely associated with soaps, perfumes, and toiletries.

Vanilla’s allure as a new, luxury-turned-affordable ingredient can help explain its rise. It became the all-American ingredient—and a white one too. As it gained popularity, the French press claimed Albius was white, and French botanist Jean Michel Claude Richard said he taught Albius his vanilla-pollinating technique.

Vanilla’s longevity is harder to explain, though. Why hasn’t a new trend usurped it? It may just be that vanilla tasted better. The combination of vanilla, sugar, and cream alighted our tastebuds in a way rosewater never did. We liked our pies better with vanilla, whether as a flavoring in the crust or in vanilla ice cream. Maybe we were waiting for a rosewater replacement all along. Then again, maybe rosewater had to go away for white Americans to “discover” the ingredient all over again. New generations love a good trend, especially if it seems foreign—despite the fact that many people, including Middle Eastern-Americans, have been cooking with it for centuries. But rosewater is as American as apple pie—even if it makes the pie taste a little like perfume.

We're launching a food section! Gastro Obscura will cover the world’s most wondrous food and drink. Sign up for our weekly email to get an early look.

Since October 8, firefighters in Northern California have been battling wildfires that numbered in the dozens at their peak and have killed at least 41 people. The flames have scorched tens of thousands of acres and leveled entire neighborhoods.

While some of the most advanced firefighting tools are being deployed in the battle—from drones that can map fires to massive Boeing 747s dropping retardant—most firefighters are wielding a century-old tool named for a hero of one of America’s most destructive wildfires.

The Pulaski is part axe, part hoe, and has been used by wildland firefighters since the 1910s. While a house fire can be doused with water, the only way to stop a wildfire is to take away its fuel. To do that, firefighters dig a “firebreak” to clear all vegetation down to the dirt so a blaze has nothing left to burn.

Bob Beckley is known as “the axe guy” at the U.S. Forest Service’s Technology and Development Center in Missoula, Montana. “Despite all the modern technology we have to fight fires, it still takes boots on the ground to stop it,” he says. “Planes and helicopters can drop water on a fire but that will only slow it down.”

In the early 20th century, when the U.S. Forest Service was created, wildland firefighters used shovels, rakes and whatever other tools they could grab to literally “beat out” the flames, according to research forester James B. Davis. Some forest rangers used a modified mining axe to dig firebreaks, but it took a man by the name of Edward Pulaski to perfect the tool that would eventually bear his name.

Pulaski was born in Ohio in 1868 and moved to the Idaho Territory looking to make a new life on the frontier when he was just 16 years old. Over the next two decades, Pulaski worked as a miner, a prospector, a cattleman, sawmill engineer, blacksmith, carpenter, and even a plumber. In 1908, he signed up to be a ranger with the Forest Service. According to author Timothy Egan, Pulaski quickly became one of the best rangers in the Bitterroot Mountains, which sprawl across the border of northern Idaho and southwest Montana.

“He knew how to calm a horse when lightning struck, and could craft a tool from a plank of rough cedar, and could pitch a lean-to in less time than it took other rangers to finish a sentence,” Egan wrote in his book The Big Burn.

Two years after he was hired by the federal government, Pulaski secured his legend as one of the best rangers the Forest Service ever had when he saved the lives of more than three dozen firefighters during the largest wildfire in American history. The Great Fire of 1910 scorched 3 million acres in Washington, Idaho and Montana in just two days, killing more than 80 people and incinerating entire towns. At the time, Pulaski was assigned to the forest around Wallace, Idaho and was leading a crew of about 45 firefighters. On the evening of August 20, hurricane-force winds fanned the flames into an inferno and Pulaski and his men were trapped. Through a blizzard of ash and embers, Pulaski led the crew into an old mine shaft and then positioned himself at the entrance to protect the men from the flames. Using his hat as a water bucket, Pulaski tried to smother the burning timbers at the entrance.

As the fire grew more intense outside, it started to draw oxygen out of the mine shaft. One man began to suffocate and decided to try to make a run for it, but Pulaski, knowing the man would surely die if he went into the flames, drew his .44 revolver. “The next man who tries to leave the tunnel,” Pulaski said, “I will shoot.” As the man retreated, Pulaski turned back to the inferno. Pulaski was soon overcome with exhaustion and he fell into the flames, burning his hands, face, and eyes. In a last-ditch effort to save himself, Pulaski tumbled backwards and poured water over his head before he fell unconscious.

A few hours later, after the fire had burned past the mine entrance, some of the firefighters began to emerge from the depths of the earth. As they approached Pulaski’s lifeless body, one of them said, “the boss is dead.”

“Like hell he is,” Pulaski muttered.

Despite having burns all over his body, Pulaski led the surviving men back to Wallace, which by then had been completely destroyed. Pulaski was blind in one eye after the fire and spent more than a month in the hospital. Amazingly, by the summer of 1911, Pulaski was back at work for the Forest Service. In the years after the fire, Pulaski spent much of his time trying to make the perfect tool to fight fires like the one he and his men had survived. Taking the idea of a modified mining axe, Pulaski created a tool that had a hoe on one side of the head and an axe on the other. With a few adjustments, Pulaski had crafted something that was tough enough to cut through the thickest underbrush while light enough that a man could carry it deep into the woods.

By 1913, firefighters across the Northern Rockies were using the tool dubbed the Pulaski. In 1936, six years after Pulaski died, the U.S. Forest Service decided that all of its wildland firefighters would use the Pulaski axe.

Ed Pulaski’s own Pulaski axe, which bears the initials “EP” on the side of the head, is still on display today at the Wallace District Mining Museum.

More than a century after it was created, the Pulaski axe is used by firefighters around the world. Beckley says that while the Forest Service has made some changes to the tool over the years, including changing the shape of the hoe end to increase cutting efficiency, it remains mostly unchanged since Pulaski first perfected the design in the 1910s.

“For firefighters on the ground," says Beckley, "the Pulaski axe is still the most important tool out there.”

It might not have been the best food on Earth, but it had a legitimate claim to being the finest fare in the sky. On board a zeppelin, one of the German-owned rigid airships that traversed the Atlantic in the early 2oth century, travelers ate like kings—or, at the very least, lesser nobility. From 1928 to 1937, when the Hindenburg disaster saw the once-bright future of lighter-than-air travel go up in smoke, passengers experienced food to rival modern luxury cruise ships. These rigid airships were enormous structures, the size of buildings, hanging more than 1,000 feet in the air and cruising at speeds exceeding 80 miles an hour.

Airships went farther and faster than anyone ever had before, but journeys were still rather time-consuming. A trip from Brazil to Europe, for instance, took three days, and there was little to do except look out the window, read, socialize, eat, and drink. These last two, as one might expect, were taken quite seriously. Meals were regular and lavish, and drinking so excessive that prairie oysters, a hangover cure made with hot sauce and a whole raw egg, were listed below the cocktails on the bar menu.

Food aboard the Graf Zeppelin, and its sister ship, the Hindenburg, was based on the dining one might find at a traditional, high-end European hotel. The chef on the final Hindenburg trip, Xaver Maier, for instance, had come to it from the Ritz, in Paris. Because of that, the food was not always to American tastes, says Dan Grossman, airship historian and author of Zeppelin Hindenburg: An Illustrated History. “The most important thing to remember about food on the Hindenburg was that it was German food—very, very German food. There were some complaints from primarily American passengers,” he says, “that it was a lot too heavy and specific for their tastes.” Menus were strong on meat. Vegetables, where they appeared, were usually lathered in butter or a rich cream sauce. “The food was not really tailored to the needs of their customers.”

The libations were also very German. On the Hindenburg’s maiden flight, the bar is said to have run out of gin. This is because, says Grossman, “Germans don’t drink a lot of gin. Brits and Americans drink tons of gin, but the very fact that they did [run out] shows that they weren’t really thinking about accommodating the expectations of their passengers.” An inventive guest, Pauline Charteris, who was married to the author Leslie Charteris (creator of "The Saint"), is said to have taken kirsch (a cherry brandy), dry vermouth, and grenadine to produce an alternative “Kirsch Martini.” Later that night, she entertained guests by singing a contemporary jazz song, with the lyrics “Mamma don't want no gin, because it makes her sin.”

Zeppelins flew so much lower than modern planes do that they did not have the same cold, dry, pressurized cabin air that dulls taste and smell today. Airship food would therefore have been much more flavorful than what we eat aloft today—even if the menu didn't include fattened duckling with champagne cabbage. No expense was spared. In The Great Dirigibles: Their Triumphs and Disasters, John Toland describes the Hindenburg’s larder: “turkeys, live lobsters, gallons of ice-cream, crates of all kinds of fruits, cases of American whiskey, and hundreds of bottles of German beer.” The Graf Zeppelin allowed for 7.5 pounds of "victuals" per passenger, per day, whether fresh or in specially prepared cans, with labels hand-affixed by the chef’s sister.

The emphasis on German cuisine was no accident. While there was a hope that these commercial zeppelin flights would one day be profitable, they were primarily a way to demonstrate a kind of German cultural strength, says historian and writer Richard Foss, author of Food in the Air and Space: The Surprising History of Food and Drink in the Skies. “It was an instrument of national prestige. It showed a Germany that had been so completely trampled in the war [World War I] now had the fastest and most luxurious method of transport. They could serve caviar with every meal, they could do whatever they wanted to, because they didn’t really have to make money.” Joseph Goebbels, who ran the Ministry of Propaganda, invested in the company for its ability to represent Germany on the world stage.

The day’s eating began sometime around 8 a.m. Tables were laid with vases of fresh flowers and blue-and-white china. Despite the weight considerations always associated with air travel, the plates and teapots were inlaid with real gold, and were very heavy. Upon arrival on the ship, passengers were given a single white napkin, in a personalized envelope. They were to keep this and reuse it for the rest of the journey to keep weight down—though it's hard to see how much of a difference this made on the 236-ton, china-laden Hindenburg.

The Hindenburg’s dining room was furnished with lightweight, state-of-the-art aluminum Bauhaus furniture. Measuring 46 feet in length, the space could accommodate all guests on board simultaneously, at either separate tables or one long one. “They did everything they could do to make it feel like a land-based restaurant,” says Foss. On the final Hindenburg voyage, guests were served the following traditional German breakfast:

Coffee, Tea Milk, Cocoa
Bread, Butter, Honey, Preserves
Eggs, boiled or in cup
Frankfort Sausage
Ham, Salami
Cheese
Fruit

At the time, cocoa was believed to be a health food of sorts that aided in digestion and strengthened the constitution. Every morning, bread rolls were baked fresh in the all-electric, all-aluminum kitchen, which had been designed both to limit weight and minimize the risk of a catastrophic kitchen fire. It was, after all, basically inside a building full of flammable hydrogen.

Guests spent a considerable amount of time in the bar, the only place on board where they could smoke. There, they had access to as many as 15 different kinds of wine and sparkling wine, as well as a selection of mixed drinks, divided into “Sours,” “Flips,” “Fizzes,” “Cobblers,” and “Cocktails.” In addition to the most common cocktail orders, the bar offered a few specialties: LZ 129, made with gin and orange juice, and Maybach 12, the formula for which is now lost. “We don’t really have recipes [for their cocktails or meals]—in fact, things were really nonstandard,” says Grossman. “It was very much run on an apprenticeship basis. People knew their jobs because they’d been doing them for a really long time.”

Also set up in the bar was the world’s first aluminum alloy piano. Weighing just 356 lbs, it was made of duralumin, an alloy of aluminum, copper, and other metals, with hollow tubing for its legs, back bracing, and lyre. The outside was covered in light-colored pigskin leather. It had been taken out of the airship before the 1937 travel season, so it avoided the fate of the rest of the Hindenburg disaster, though it was accidentally destroyed several years later, during World War II.

By the time of the Hindenburg disaster, nearly 3,000 people had ridden on the luxury airship, then the global standard for speed, luxury, and fine dining. Today, it’s near-impossible to eat food of any kind on any sort of dirigible. Until recently, the Hendricks blimp, which is currently out of action, served three gin-based cocktails in the air—but it’s a far cry from the golden age of dirigible dining.

We're launching a food section! Gastro Obscura will cover the world’s most wondrous food and drink. Sign up for our weekly email to get an early look.

A chain rattles and the wind blows. A skeleton's bones clatter and a woman shrieks. A wolf growls and a ghost whispers in the darkness.

Halloween, amirite?

The Halloween sound effects album is a staple of the holiday, almost as inextricably linked to it as trick-or-treating. Each year people buy Halloween sound effects albums with a reliable seasonal fervor usually surpassed only by the sales of Christmas music.

But where do all these spooky sounds come from? Who is out there torturing screaming victims and creating ominous soundscapes? Polite English musicians, for one.

“Halloween sounds are timeless, I think. An old Disney Halloween album is still as popular as ever, and although the market has been saturated in recent years, the sounds themselves do not go out of fashion as far as I can tell,” says Leigh Haggerwood, a professional media composer and musician who has created six Halloween albums himself, as well as a number of others under contract for third parties. “The most popular album I’ve produced to date is Halloween Horror–Scary Sounds and Music. It sold over 50,000 copies in one week back in 2009 and was higher than Thriller in the iTunes chart at one point," he says.

The history of modern sound effects can be traced back to the live radio plays of the 1920s. Live sound-effect creators would stand in the studio breaking light bulbs, clapping wooden boards together, and shaking panes of sheet metal to recreate the sounds of, say, breaking windows, slamming doors, and growling thunder. A 1931 annual produced by the BBC defined sound effects broadly as “everything that comes out of a loud-speaker, except what is usually classed as 'Music' or 'Speech.'” Within that wide definition, the art of sound-effect creation and the foley arts (for movies) began to evolve. That same year, America got its first full-time sound effects department, at CBS, which is credited as having been a driving force in the development of the industry as a whole.

Jumping ahead to the late 1950s, vinyl records allowed people to bring albums of sound effects home. Novelty records by the likes of Spike Jones, featuring funny monster songs and spooky stories set to eerie effects, became popular. However, possibly the first record with a track of just spooky sounds seems to be a record released by Disney in 1964 called Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House. The album features effects that are now Halloween staples: moaning ghosts, barking dogs, clattering chains, and screaming victims, interspersed with short, often comedic, vocal segments that established them. “Disney’s Haunted House album, which was rereleased in 1995, seems to have become a staple in the U.S.A. in particular," Haggerwood says.

Over the next decade, the cottage industry of Halloween sound-effect albums exploded, as the number of albums being produced increased. Today, a quick Amazon search for “Halloween sounds” pulls up more than 65,000 offerings. “Due to the availability of cheap recording devices, and the easy access to selling in online stores such as iTunes, there has been a huge influx in copycat albums over the past five years,” says Haggerwood. “When I first released Halloween Horror in 2008 it was one of only a handful of horror albums on sale.”

So what does the creation of a Halloween sounds album even look like in the 21st century? Surprisingly, not that different than it would have in the 1920s.

Even with all the changes and technology and increased competition, when creating an eerie soundscape Haggerwood still sticks to the basics. “The main elements are shock factor and creepiness,” he says, “It’s good to find a balance between eerie drones and ambiances that sound weird, and intercut them with fast, loud, and shocking sounds like snarls, bangs, and screams.” Haggerwood picks specific sounds to fit the theme, from cemeteries to torture chambers, he’s working on. “So, for example, a cemetery would utilize the sounds of crickets, owls hooting, and gentle wind as a background, then I would use gravestone sliding sounds, zombie moans and shrieks, and footsteps to bring the scenario to life," he says.

Of course, recording a zombie’s moan isn’t as simple as going out and recording the undead. Haggerwood often needs to create the effects for his soundscapes from scratch, whether it’s the sound of monsters, birds, or menacing footsteps. “[I] spent a lot of time recording myself breathing, laughing, moaning, rattling chains, asking friends to scream, following circling crows, you name it!” Haggerfield’s methods seem about as simple as they were when live radio players were doing the work. “In the past I’ve borrowed chains from my father’s shed. I’ve hired actresses to spend the afternoon crying and screaming in my studio. I’ve walked through forests recording my own footsteps on leaves, captured the sounds of dripping water, growling dogs, creaking doors, and floorboards.”

The sounds on Haggerwood’s albums, while much more hi-def, are essentially the same variety of noises. For instance, in his torture chamber track, dripping rot and creaking wood seem to permeate the space, accented by the occasional scream or sound of sawing wood (or is it bone?). Some sounds have also become more prevalent over time, such as those evoking technological shocks, like the ghostly TV static and deep bass growls of Haggerwood’s Poltergeist tribute (one of the musician’s favorites).

Technology has changed some things, though. Most notably, the depth of sound is much greater now than when Haggerwood began. Making a sound louder when it is closer and more muffled at a distance was once produced by simply changing the distance between the sound and the mic, but today sounds can be layered and distanced to create any effect desired.

In addition to doing more and more sound effects for Halloween apps, Haggerwood is hoping to bring video into his own soundscapes. “In fact my next venture is to create short, scary videos with similar sound designs so that people aren’t left with just an album cover to look at—but that’s obviously a whole new area.” He doesn't sound scared.

This article was originally published on October 28, 2015. It has been edited and updated from the original version.

It’s finally here folks. After decades of anticipation and sci-fi dreaming, from Voltron to Pacific Rim to countless other cartoons and video games, we finally have two giant mech-suit robots fighting each other in real life. What a time we live in. But, well, it looks like we still have some work to do.

After years of breathless promotion and buildup from Megabots Inc. and their Japanese counterpart, Suidobashi, the two companies (that are trying very hard to make giant robot fights a thing) have finally created enough massive battle bots to put on the United States vs. Japan contest they’ve been promising.

In a recently released YouTube video, a series of massive bots face off with one another with massive metal fists, pincer claws, a giant chainsaw, paintball cannons, and even a drone, in a warehouse stadium full of crushed cars and metal barrels. Each of the robots stands around 16 feet tall, and is controlled by two pilots nestled inside like fighter pilots. In many ways, it’s the giant fighting robot future that generations of sci-fi fans have been hoping for.

Unfortunately, it may not have lived up to the anticipation. Moving around many tons of steel is a pretty slow process, so the fights look sort of clumsy. And the actual battles are pretty short. Combine that with commentators working overtime to make the action seem more bombastic than it is (as well as some regrettable staged antics), and the overall effect is rather underwhelming.

But still, anyone who’s been waiting their whole lives to see the dream of battle mechs come to life, your day has come. Technically, at least.

A plume of steam and ash burst suddenly from the North Atlantic Ocean on November 14, 1963, and for the next three-and-a-half years, a series of eruptions produced a new island of basalt and ash about 20 miles from Icelands's southern coast. The new speck of land was dubbed Surtsey Island, after a black fire giant of Norse mythology. Today, it's one of the few places on Earth that has remained relatively pristine and untouched by humans.

Early on, scientists recognized that Surtsey offered a unique opportunity to observe the infancy of a new volcanic island. What would be the first life to arrive, and how would it get there? How would the rock change as the ocean beat against its shores? Iceland's government declared the island off-limits to anyone but just a few researchers granted permission to study the evolution of Surtsey.

Even today, researchers must get government approval before venturing to Surtsey and once they are on the island, must follow strict rules to avoid contaminating it with seeds or chemicals. A drilling expedition earlier this year perfectly illustrates the lengths to which scientists must go. "We went to enormous efforts to protect the island from any sort of contamination at all," says Marie Jackson, a geologist at the University of Utah and one of the leaders of the expedition.

All the equipment was brought to the island in pieces by boat or helicopter—more than 90 helicopter lifts for the drilling setup alone—and then assembled on the island. The researchers went to great lengths to avoid fuel spills, and had to dig out the drilling site by hand. Every meal was prepared in advance, and included an extra two week's supply, in case weather prevented them from leaving the island on schedule. The scientists and technical staff were all trained on how to avoid bringing new plants or animals to Surtsey, which includes checking clothing and other gear for hitchhikers such as seeds. They also had to stick to established paths and couldn't explore other areas of the half-square-mile island. And once they had collected the core samples they came for, says Jackson, "literally everything we did, we took off the island." That included their waste.

Trips to Surtsey also have to be timed to avoid disturbing the animals that have taken up residence. Jackson's expedition was right after nesting season for some of the island's birds had ended in July, and they had to wrap up before seals and their young came to live on Surtsey for the season in September. Visiting scientists must collect data and samples, and then do their analyses elsewhere. Jackson's team took their cores to nearby Heimaey Island to image and analyze rock samples.

All that careful planning has been worth it—Surtsey remains more or less pristine, and still allows scientists to learn about how life establishes itself on a new island, how a new ecological community evolves, and even how life affects geologic processes.

Life came to Surtsey within a year of its birth. A 1964 New York Times article notes that plants, birds, and even a mosquito had already shown up. Spiders were blown to the island, while some other insects arrived by floating across the ocean's surface. Perhaps expectedly, birds were some of the first inhabitants of Surtsey, and a number of species have been spotted since, including some squacco herons typically only seen in Southern Europe.

Recent research has focused on smaller residents. Jackson's expedition was drilling cores from Surtsey's interior to look for signs of microbial life in the young basalt, which could help scientists understand an important geologic process. Basalt is one of the oldest types of rocks on Earth, and its creation "is a process that has been going on in the Earth's crust for billions of years," says Jackson. "But we know very little about the first things that happen in freshly erupted basalt on the seafloor. Surtsey is giving us a window to study this."

Drilling on the seafloor is a complex process, and bringing up samples of rock that aren't contaminated by ocean water—and all the microbes it contains—is near impossible. The eruptions that created Surtsey, on the other hand, brought freshly erupted basalt to a much more accessible place. "Surtsey gives us a very different platform—we can put the drill on real land," says Jackson. This gives them more control over the drilling process, which can include a sterilized system to preserve the microbes. Such microbes are capable of changing the chemical composition of rocks, and even their magnetic properties. "It's a unique opportunity to look at the very, very beginning of these processes," she says.

The cores might also help researchers understand why Surtsey looks the way it does. "Surtsey is very, very young," says Jackson. "It's a fraction of a second in geologic time. But on the surface, it looks very old." Erosion has shaped Surtsey's surface. Lava flows are breaking apart to form boulders, for example. The constant battering of the ocean has shaped the shoreline, too, shrinking the island by about 50 percent. "We're trying to understand what processes are contributing to this accelerated aging."

Surtsey was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2008, which adds another layer of official protection to help keep the island pristine. And for the foreseeable future, the only way to visit will still be as a member of a research team—one that treads very, very lightly.