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Complete This 2,000-Piece Puzzle to Win Free Cheese

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One of New Zealand's best-known local cheesemakers, Mainland Cheese, is enticing dairy enthusiasts with free cheese these days. The catch? A test of one's patience: You'll need to successfully complete a 2,000-piece puzzle.

Earlier this week, the creative agency Colenso BBDO unveiled a head-scratcher of a promotional campaign for the cheesemaker entitled "the Mainland 2,000 Piece Voucher." It invited cheese-lovers to get their hands on free cheese, as soon as they complete a complicated puzzle depicting a cheese. In their words, the puzzle takes“almost as long to make as our cheese does.” Anyone who finishes a puzzle can redeem it for free cheese.

Since late 2017, hopefuls have been applying for the vouchers, which the company gave out on Facebook. So far, the fastest puzzle builder has completed the puzzle in 45 hours.

The idea is to give cheese lovers a sense of how labor-intensive the cheese-making and aging process is, while also playing on the brand's slogan: "Good things take time." This isn't the first time Mainland has offered cheesy rewards for their customers' time. In 2015, the company offered a voucher to those who offered up the cheesiest one-liner. (The winning line: "What do u [sic] call cheese that's not yours? Nacho cheese.") While time-intensive, the puzzle is—dare we say—a very gouda idea.


The Art of Chinese Propaganda Posters

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Propaganda posters can leave a lasting impact. For Shaomin Li, the Chinese artist, economist, and dissident, they are particularly meaningful. He grew up during the Cultural Revolution, surrounded by the posters that he now collects. As a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army, Li also had to create them. Now, some of his collection is on display in a new exhibition at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia.

“For my generation, our education was pretty much Mao’s revolutionary class struggle ideology, which was propagated by the posters,” says Li, in an email interview. “It has left such a strong indelible imprint on us that many of us may still subconsciously follow Mao’s tactic in our lives. For example, many contemporary business leaders in China attribute their business success to Mao’s thought.”

Li grew up during the Cultural Revolution, a 10-year period of destruction and upheaval in China. It was launched by Mao Zhedong in 1966 as a way to reassert his rule and galvanize the Communist revolution, with a devastating impact. The death toll is usually estimated at one million, although one study suggested it could be as high as eight million. It also encouraged the eradication of the “Four Olds”—old “things, ideas, customs, and habits,” through which classical literature, art, and architecture were damaged or destroyed.

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“Whenever I think about that era, the scene in my mind is a red ocean of posters, with high-volume speakers blasting fighting slogans and songs praising Mao,” recalls Li. “It was surrealistic. The masses were totally mobilized by Mao to destroy everything that was not revolutionary. Remaining calm and normal was dangerous and was viewed as crazy and abnormal.”

“Shaomin Li’s collection really traces how the Communist Party penetrated all aspects of life in China during this period, and he brings unique insights because of his life story,” said Lloyd DeWitt, the Chrysler Museum’s chief curator, in a statement.

In 1975, Li joined the People’s Liberation Army as an artist-in-residence. “I loved drawing and painting when I was very young,” Li says. “Later on, I became a propaganda poster artist not by my own choice—in that era, every artist must do propaganda work, because Mao told us that art is merely a tool for the revolution.”

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The content of the posters were strictly regulated: he could only draw approved imagery, which was set out in model books. “I focused on portraits,” he recalls. “Under Mao, the main task of art is to depict and glorify him and other revolutionary heroes.”

Li was eventually demoted from this position for a “bourgeois tendency,” and was serving as a soldier when Mao died in 1976. Then aged 19, Li was called upon to paint Mao’s funeral portrait. Although this was perceived as an honor, it was also fraught. Li later wrote, “One small mistake might send me away—yet not back to guard post duty, but to be guarded in detention for desecrating Mao’s god-like image.” Despite these risks, Li’s painting was well-received; there was even a photo taken of him next the portrait, a rare occurrence in China at the time.

This photograph is also part of the exhibition, alongside a much later sketch of Li’s: a drawing of the prison cell in which he was held captive for five months in 2001. He had been arrested on a trip to China for promoting democracy in Hong Kong—or “endangering state security,” according to the charges. After his eventual release, Li left Hong Kong for the U.S, where he's now a professor at Old Dominion University.

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For Li, there is a timeliness to this exhibition. “We thought that the Chinese Communist Party had learned a lesson from the mistakes of launching the Cultural Revolution, and would totally repudiate it. But we were wrong,” he says. “Some of the practices of the Cultural Revolution, such as mobilizing the masses to worship the top leader, suppressing and drowning any dissenting voices by the red ocean of posters and slogans, are having a comeback. So by showing what happened during the Cultural Revolution, we can better understand what is happening there today.”

DeWitt also sees a broader context. “We would like visitors to be aware of how a dictatorship happens,” he says. “It destroys the past and plays on fear and emotion, as well as identity.”

AO has a selection of images from The Art of Revolution—which includes posters from after the Cultural Revolution—and which runs from March 2 through to June 24, 2018.

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The Hidden History of Bathing in Soup Broth

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The old German font was hard to decipher, so I sent the newspaper article to a professor who spends half his life immersed in the gothic script. “This is from 1848,” I wrote. “Does it really say what I think it says?”

I was researching the 19th-century European vogue for eating horsemeat, a movement spread across the continent by “hippophagic societies” whose members believed that broken-down workhorses should be fed to the growing proletariat. I was used to accounts of scientists and do-gooders tucking into “Pegasus filet” and fine wines, but this was something else. “It is what you think it is,” the professor wrote back. “They’re bathing children in horse broth.”

According to “the informed opinion of an experienced physician,” the brief news item from Berlin recounted, horse bouillon bathing had proved itself in medical applications, especially in pediatrics. It wouldn’t be just the wealthy who could indulge, the article went on, implying that baths of broth would be affordable for the lower classes, too.

In 1848, German enthusiasm for horsemeat was still new, but the dark red flesh already had a reputation as a health food. The chemist Justus von Liebig claimed that horse contained more creatine for muscle building than beef or mutton, and the new horse-butchering establishments were well-regulated and clean. But even if horsemeat was cheap, why bathe in a tub filled with bouillon?

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It turns out that Europeans have a long history of steeping themselves in meat soup, although I found that references were scattered and scant. Vats of horse broth played a role in pagan Indo-European rites across Europe and Asia in which the equine was sacrificed, dismembered, and boiled. This may have inspired the first mention I found of a broth bath, dating from the late 12th century. Gerald of Wales, clerk and chaplain to King Henry II of England, was dispatched to Ireland to report on the locals. Gerald portrayed them as godless brutes in an account now viewed as unreliable, anti-Irish propaganda. He described the new king of an Ulster tribe bathing in broth made from a sacrificed white mare with which he had just had intercourse. The king sipped on the broth as he soaked. Several modern scholars have pointed out the similarities between this (probably) imaginary rite and the ancient Indian Vedic horse sacrifice known as the Ashvamedha. Although in that case, the queen symbolically sleeps with the horse, and no one bathes in the broth.

Less luridly, broth bathing appears to share a tandem history with “hydrotherapy,” the therapeutic immersion of the body in warm mineral water. Classical writers such as Pliny the Elder believed that different natural springs had distinct mineral properties that cured diverse ailments. While therapeutic bathing fell into disrepute after Roman baths became associated with sexual licence, the rediscovery of classical texts in the Renaissance led to renewed interest. The Swiss doctor Theophrastus von Hohenheim (or “Paracelsus”) prescribed bathing in spring water to remove mercury from the body. Physicians believed that skin was permeable, so if mercury could seep out, then surely the hearty properties of spring water or bouillon could seep in.

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In 1782, the wonderfully named Dr. Rhodomonte Dominiceti opened a bath house in Panton Square near Haymarket in London, where customers could experience not only “artificial baths” in his own recipe mineral water, but also wallow in “veal or other broths” for the princely sum of three to five guineas. Just four years later, the Scottish anatomist William Cruickshank was claiming that Paracelsus himself had kept men alive for several days by sitting them in broth or milk baths. (Cruickshank thought they absorbed the nutrients via their rectums. They did not.)

While broth bathing does not seem to have been on the menu at the grand spa resorts of the 19th century, it remained a folk and medical custom across a wide geographic region. In 1856, a traveling Englishwoman staying with an aristocrat in the Italian town of Macerata was informed by her local maid that babies were often soaked in a brodo lugo: a light broth of lean veal with all the fat skimmed off. She recommended it for the English lady’s complexion, because “it softens and yet nourishes the skin.” A German medical text from the same year records typhus patients in Russia taking bouillon baths as part of their recuperation. A later German medical handbook, meanwhile, contains recipes for a sheep-foot broth bath and dissolved Thierleim, a brownish, gluey jelly made from boiled hoofs, bone, skin, and tendons. The handbook does not specify which ailments they were meant to treat.

Broth baths came to America, too. An early settler in 1850s Texas named Mary Ann Maverick recorded in her diary that when her newborn daughter didn’t fatten up, “Mrs. Salsmon, an experienced German nurse” recommended boiling beef bones for four hours before cooling them to “one hundred” and settling the baby in the broth. The baby should then be removed and wrapped in a blanket without being dried, and set to sleep. Maverick did so, and, within days, the little girl was putting on weight.

As the medical establishment increasingly relied on better science, however, doctors turned skeptical. In Dr. Hermann Eichhorst’s 1887 Handbook of Special Pathology and Therapy for Practical Doctors and Students, meat-broth baths are described as “without benefit.”

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Not that everyone listened. The notion of a nourishing bath is still irresistible. Magical thinkers of the 21st century bathe in milk, caviar, olive oil, wine, and even coffee at wellness spas, and one Japanese firm makes miso-soup bath sachets for the ultimate comfort experience. For those who enjoy the unmistakable cognitive dissonance of realizing that any bath, whether you’re tipping in Epsom salts to season or not, is a sort of human soup, a hotel in the Philippines offers the chance to bathe among floating coconut leaves with a fire going under the pot, like old comic-book images of clueless cannibal victims.

Definitively calculating how popular or widespread broth bathing was throughout history would be a major research project that has, alas, not yet been conducted. But I can say that it was an established-enough practice to appear in medical textbooks and spa menus. There may have also been long folk traditions that the written record barely reveals.

I did stumble on one last, modern story. A linguist friend told me that on a research trip in rural Armenia, she met an Assyrian woman who followed local practice and bathed her baby boy in beef broth “to strengthen his bones.” The baby thrived.

Try the Chips of the Future, Today

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Chirps Cricket Protein Chips

From $19.99, Amazon

The United Nations predicted it, cutlery designers are banking on it, and 10 out of 10 Caras certainly agree: In 50 years, we're all gonna be eating bugs.

If you want some practice—or are just looking for a unique snack to offer your friends—you might want to spring for some Chirps Cricket Protein Chips.

Chirps are a good gateway food. Rather than forcing you to go full bug right away, they're made out of about 10% cricket flour (the rest is corn, beans, and chia seeds). They also look and feel like your standard salsa vehicle, although they've got a bit more heft to them, as well as a slightly nutty taste. Thanks to the protein, I find they also fill me up faster than regular chips.

The three-pack contains one bag of each flavor—Sea Salt, Cheddar, and BBQ—and you can get larger quantities, too. Why not stock up? You never know when the future might arrive.

The Poignant Gulag Art by Stalin's Doomed Meteorologist

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An Arctic fox, a hen, wild berries, a reindeer, a single candle glowing in the darkness, glaciers floating at sea, and an aurora borealis. These are some of the subjects of delicate, precise illustrations created by a man imprisoned in a Soviet gulag during the 1930s. The man’s drawings and letters, teeming with melancholy, survive today thanks to his daughter who conserved and published them. His story, as told in Olivier Rolin’s new biography, Stalin’s Meteorologist: One Man’s Untold Story of Love, Life, and Death, is one of tragedy, but also of resilience—the kind that allows a sensitivity and love for the wonders and mysteries of nature to survive the most oppressive, cruel circumstances.

Alexey Feodosievich Wangenheim was born in 1881 in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in the town of Krapivno, a name that translates to “the place where nettles grow.” His father, Feodosy Petrovich Wangenheim, was a minor nobleman, a so-called barin. Nurturing his own passion for agronomy—the science of soil and crops—Feodosy encouraged his children to indulge their curiosities and interests in science. Though he studied math and agriculture, Alexey developed an unshakeable fondness for clouds and, in 1929, became the first director of the USSR’s Hydrometeorological Centre.

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During his time as head of the Soviet Union’s meteorology department, Alexey worked to establish registries for water, wind, and sunshine, and, in 1930, he created the Weather Bureau in conjunction with the first comprehensive USSR weather forecast broadcasted over radio. These were no easy tasks, as the USSR was a huge territory comprised of vastly different terrains and climates. The primary purpose of Alexey’s work was to better prepare farmers for meteorological events that might affect their crops. The meteorologist, however, could not solve all of the logistical and organizational flaws of Stalin’s model for socialized agriculture. Between 1932 and 1933, a devastating famine in Ukraine killed three million people.

On a snowy January 8, 1934, Alexey’s wife, Varvara, waited for him outside a theatre, but Alexey never arrived. In the midst of great anxiety about treachery and betrayal of the Communist Party, Stalin began arresting and interrogating members of his government. Alexey was taken to Lubyanka, the secret police headquarters, and, after coercion, he eventually signed a confession stating that he knowingly and intentionally disseminated false weather forecasts to sabotage socialist agriculture. To be clear, Alexey was, in fact, innocent of these alleged crimes and was a mere scapegoat for widespread famine and death. He was sentenced to 10 years working at one of the first forced labor camps, a 15th-century monastery turned gulag, situated on the frigid, isolated Solovetsky Islands, an archipelago in the White Sea near the Arctic Circle.

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Though Alexey never again saw his wife or three-year-old daughter, Eleonora, he wrote them countless letters detailing life at the camp, his state of mind, and his physical ailments. His letters to his family, along with mosaics of Stalin that he created with scraps of stone, reveal that Alexey’s belief in both his own innocence and the good of the Party remained, on most days, steadfast and unwavering. Most poignant, however, are the illustrations and flower pressings that he sent home to Eleonora. Like his own father, Alexey cared deeply about his child’s education, and his whimsical images functioned as tools for learning about plants, climate, natural phenomena, riddles, arithmetic, and geometry.

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There is a quietness, a stillness about all of his illustrations. Alexey’s three iterations of the aurora borealis, with various shades of subdued blues, greens, and grays, show the celestial body swaying and “undulating as if in the wind,” as he put it in a letter from March 22, 1936. Other drawings of sparse rooms and solitary animals, objects, and plants evoke the unimaginable reclusion of the gulag. Indeed, in one letter to his wife and daughter Alexey wrote, “How galling it is to think that others are carrying on, while I have become this utterly useless person who gives lectures to prisoners, and who will be consigned to oblivion on this island hemmed in by ice and darkness.”

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And yet, despite the horrors of life as a prisoner, Alexey’s earnest appreciation for Earth’s creatures and phenomena remained intact. He seems to have found joy in the volumes within the gulag’s library, planting trees on the grounds, and giving academic lectures to the other prisoners—some even called him “professor.” Perhaps his misguided, problematic faith in Stalin and his regime contributed to any sense of contentment or peace he felt, but it appears that Alexey’s careful art-making practice afforded him a great deal of comfort and a sense of purpose in the face of incomprehensible chaos. He wrote, along with a drawing of a cat’s head, in a letter from September 20, 1935, “It may seem strange, but this playful little gray creature comforts me.”

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Alexey was executed in late 1937, and the truth regarding his sudden disappearance was only fully uncovered 60 years later by the Memorial Research Centre, a historical and civil rights organization that seeks to bring to light the buried crimes of Soviet Russia. He wrote in his last letter to his daughter, “I shall not be able to send you my drawings for a while, but I hope you’ll send me yours.” Alexey also explained that the varakusha“is a bird with a blue back and a browny-orange breast that’s a little like a sort of thrush,” and he inquired about her music lessons.

Eleonora would become a paleontologist with an expertise in vertebrates. Like her father, she was captivated by the phantasmagoria that is the natural world. She eventually published Alexey’s many letters and drawings, which, in turn, inspired Olivier Rolin’s recently released biography. The book includes Alexey’s letters, drawings, and story of heartbreaking entrapment in the cold, unyielding fist of totalitarianism.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault Awaits Its Millionth Crop Deposit

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Deep inside a mountain on the Norwegian island of Svalbard, seeds from more than 900,000 crops slumber in permafrost. Each deposit is nestled in its own sealed, heatproof packet. These specks of black, brown, and taupe are protected from everything: come climate change, geopolitical disaster, nuclear war—heck, even hell or high water (literally—the facility is 426 feet above sea level). Located on the Arctic circle, Svalbard is remote and inaccessible, with no roads connecting the settlements where just 2,600 people have made their homes. It is here, buried in the virgin alpine rock, that more than 430,000,000 seeds in total serve as an agricultural insurance policy against the end of the world.

Today, on the vault's 10th anniversary, a new arrival of more than 70,000 crops will tip the total number of deposits over 1,000,000. "Hitting the million mark is really significant," Hannes Dempewolf, senior scientist of the Crop Trust, an international organization dedicated to conserving crop diversity, told the BBC. "Only a few years back I don't think we would have thought that we would get there."

Some of these seeds are cultural touchstones—the black-eyed pea, say, or barley used to brew Irish beer. Others, like the Estonian onion potato, are so unusual that even Google wrinkles its nose in confusion. There are two deposits each year, and many more seeds are yet to come—the first of three chambers is now almost full of packets of seeds, the BBC reports, but there is potentially room for millions more.

Seeds vaults like Svalbard are often referred to as "Doomsday banks," an attempt to shelter the world's agricultural food supply from some far-off disaster. In fact, they're already being put into practice. Almost exactly a year ago, the Syrian crisis prompted an emergency withdrawal of around 90,000 seeds. Many have since been replaced—but it highlights the importance the facility is likely to have in times of growing unrest. And so, after the vault was flooded last year, the Crop Trust fitted new, waterproof walls to safeguard the vault even further. The cargo may be precious now, but in years to come, it may prove priceless.

An Incredible Collection of Marian Anderson's Life Is Getting Digitized

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In 1977, Marian Anderson started sending boxes of materials documenting her life to the University of Pennsylvania. Her career was already full of legendary accomplishments: She was the first African-American singer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera; she sang at the inaugurations of Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy; she had received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 1963, her performance at the March on Washington became an iconic moment in American history.

Anderson's choice of UPenn made sense. She was born in Philadelphia in 1897 and grew up there. Additionally, her nephew, the conductor James DePriest, had two degrees from the university. In the next 16 years, until her death in 1993, she sent her life's work to the archive—525 boxes in all, containing 34 scrapbooks, 146 notebooks and diaries, 1,200 programs from her performances, and 277 hours of recordings.

The UPenn library has already digitized more than 4,400 photographs in the collection; now, with the help of a grant, the library will digitize additional portions of the collection and make them available online.

This material covers both the public and private parts of Anderson’s life. In her diaries, she wrote of her experiences touring Europe and the United States at a time when the movements of black people were restricted. The programs and scrapbooks document her work: One potential project, the Daily Pennsylvanian reports, would be to map the locations of her performances.

To the greatest possible extent, the newly digitized materials will be available online. Anderson gave the university control over most of the collection, but the rights to some of the recordings are still owned by commercial entities.

Besides recordings of her own performances, Anderson's donation to UPenn included her personal musical library—more than 2,000 songs in manuscript and another 2,000 printed scores. She gave these materials to the school so that the people in the place she grew up would be able to learn about her life and what she loved. Now the wider world will, too.

From Turtles to Whales, Marine Animals Have the Same Moves

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If the ocean were a dancefloor, it would be full of improbable pairs. Black-footed albatrosses top out around 6 pounds, while short-finned pilot whales weigh about 6,600. It would take 20 little penguins on top of each other to reach the height of a hammerhead shark standing on its tail, and a polar bear would probably rather eat a California sea lion than waltz with it.

According to a new study, though, these animal duos each have some moves in common. In a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an international team of researchers used tracking device data to better understand the motion in the ocean, comparing the daily movement patterns of thousands of animals across 50 different species. They found that even though some sea creatures are much bigger than others, many of them share the same basic choreography, something that is much less true for animals on land.

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Whether animals fly, scuttle, or swim, their movements are powered by internal factors, like body size and metabolism, and constrained by external ones, like temperature, or how tightly packed the trees are in a forest. The details of how they move—how fast they go, say, or the angles at which they turn—are determined by how these factors intersect. As this new paper points out, scientists have wanted to figure out the rules determining this balance since at least 350 B.C., when Aristotle wrote of the need for "an investigation into the common ground of any sort of animal movement whatsoever."

Contemporary researchers have a new tool at their disposal: remote tracking devices, which, when attached to animals, let far-off scientists keep tabs on their movements. Over the past few decades, researchers have used trackers to study everything from where ducks go in winter to how baboons make decisions. This particular study piggybacked on data collected from previous studies about elephant seal foraging, shark population decline, and how often leatherback sea turtles snack on jellyfish, to name just a few. "We realized that if we all share our data and work together in a concerted manner, we can learn a lot more about these animals," coauthor Daniel Costa told Eurekalert.

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The researchers used tracking data from 2,600 animals belonging to 50 different species, which collectively checked in from 2.8 million locations around the world. Some of the information dates back to 1985, while other sets were collected as recently as 2015. With all this information at hand, the researchers were able to "ask questions that transcend patterns of individual species," one of the study's co-authors, Prof. Michael Berumen, told Eurekalert. Albatross and shark speeds could be compared with one another. Whale wendings and turtle turns were studied side by side.

The results surprised the researchers. On land, previous studies have found that intrinsic physical stats, like body size and metabolism, determine how animals move. In the oceans, though, external factors proved more important. For the species studied, "movement patterns show a remarkable convergence, being strongly conserved across species and independent of body length and mass," even though some of the animals being studied were as much as 10 billion times larger than others, the paper says. (The main exception was the group of true seals—including crabeater seals, elephant seals, and Weddell seals—whose length affected their speed.)

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Other factors—including different species' breeding and foraging strategies, or even whether they paddled, swam, or flew—also didn't seem to make much of a difference in movement patterns. Instead, the second-biggest influence was where the animals were hanging out. (The biggest was species identification; Macaroni penguins move like Macaroni penguins, after all.) Animals that spend most of their time along the coast—from beluga whales to green turtles—tend to move in more complex ways, turning more often and retracing their steps.

In the open ocean, things are simpler: animals who prefer it there, like black-footed albatrosses and whale sharks, will pick a spot in the distance and shoot for it. "It makes sense, because the coast is … much more complicated," said Costa. "Regardless of what species it is, the movement patterns match the oceanographic features of the environment." The water itself also likely plays a part: its buoyancy and three-dimensionality help to make an even playing field for animals of all different sizes and shapes.

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This playing field is changing fast, though: Arctic ice is melting, coasts are rearranging, and sea levels are rising as oxygen levels dwindle. As these shifts accumulate and accelerate, researchers hope that understanding animals' movements will help us predict what they might do in turn. If shoreline-hugging animals are used to navigating more complexly, they might be able to adapt en masse to their habitats' shifting shapes. Meanwhile, those who instead go full speed ahead in the open ocean might be less flexible.

Now that these patterns are being pinned down, researchers can also loop in the many creatures that weren't included in this survey. "Many of these species are endangered and we have no tracking data," said Costa, "but we can extrapolate from other species to understand how they are likely to interact with fisheries, shipping, or other human activities." If we want to smoothly insert ourselves into this oceanic choreography, it helps to know the dance steps.


Why Europe's First Celebrity Chef Named His Dishes After the Rich and Famous

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Without Georges Auguste Escoffier, there could be no Gordon Ramsay. No Nigella Lawson, no Alain Ducasse, not even—perish the thought—Guy Fieri. Escoffier has some claim to being not just the first celebrity chef, but the first person even to invent the concept, through a unique career that spanned decades, countries, and seven cookbooks. In the late 19th century, Escoffier set a precedent in which the chef came out of the kitchen and into first the dining room, and then the limelight. The hundreds of dishes he named after the Belle Epoque’s superstars were just one small part of how this culinary luminary helped transform modern cheffery.

Escoffier came up with thousands of new recipes, many of which he served at London’s Savoy Hotel and the Paris Ritz. Some were genuine leaps of ingenuity, others a twist on a classic French dish. Many carry someone else’s name. In early dishes, these are often historical greats: Oeufs Rossini, for the composer; Consommé Zola, for the writer; Omelette Agnès Sorel, for the mistress of Charles VII. Later on, however, Escoffier made a habit of giving dishes the handles of people who, in their day, were virtual household names: An entire choir of opera singers’ names are to be found in Escoffier’s cookery books. The most famous examples are likely Melba toast and Peach Melba, for the Australian opera singer Nellie Melba, though there are hundreds of others. But why did he do it?

Before Escoffier, being a chef to even the most glittering names of the Western world was dirty, low-status work, says Luke Barr, author of the forthcoming biography Ritz and Escoffier: The Hotelier, The Chef, and the Rise of the Leisure Class. “Chefs were working-class guys,” he says. They’d start working in the kitchen as teenagers and spend years in hot, grimy conditions behind the scenes, usually well-lubricated by furtive swigs of something strong. But Escoffier had another vision for his kitchen, of which cleanliness, serenity, and sobriety were all key. The kitchen was to be a spotless oasis of calm, and Escoffier its wholly presentable figurehead, clad in dazzling whites. For the first time in the history of Western dining, the chef would go out and greet guests, Barr says. This was previously unheard of. “They were servants. They were not someone whose name you knew, or someone you talked to—until this period, when that started to happen.”

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Escoffier wasn’t just a culinary genius, however—he was a tremendous charmer whose guests quickly warmed to him. Nathaniel Newnham-Davis’s 1914 Gourmet’s Guide to London dedicates some paragraphs to describing his “commanding personality”—how this smallish man, mustachioed like a walrus, had “the face of an artist, or a statesman.” (“Had [he] been a man of the pen and not a man of the spoon,” he wrote, “[he] would have been a poet.”) Even his slight quietness, Newnham-Davis wrote, belied the Maître-Chef’s knowledge, authority, and “capacity for command.” And he was as flirtatious as he was charismatic, says Barr. “He loved to talk to women, especially.”

Just a few decades earlier, neither chefs nor female guests would have been in the high-end dining rooms of Europe’s capitals. Restaurants had previously been the domain only of the men who could afford to eat there. Chefs and other staff were swept out of sight, and women safely ensconced in the home. At a push, men might meet their mistresses or high-end sex workers in private rooms, but by and large most high-end restaurants were virtual boys’ clubs. All that changed in the late 19th century, as women began to have more and more independence and, in turn, to venture into restaurants. A third social change was also taking place: the professionalization of acting and opera. This transformed female actors and singers from “fallen women” into stars, worthy of respect—and of places in Europe’s most salubrious dining establishments.

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Many of the female celebrities who inspired Escoffier’s dishes, therefore, were pioneers in their own right. They came to restaurants in the grandest hotels of London, Paris and the French Riviera both for recreation and to be seen by others in their wider social circle. There, decked out in the latest fashions, guests would peer past one another, surreptitiously taking note of which notable figures were to be found under the gilded ceilings. At his hotels in Paris and London, the Swiss hotelier César Ritz, Barr says, made a point of choosing lighting that would illuminate diners as flatteringly as any portrait in a gallery. “And they were celebrities, they were opera stars, they were courtesans, whatever,” says Barr. “More and more, Escoffier would name his dishes for these women.”

The reasons for this are many and various, and unpicking them requires a little background knowledge on how Escoffier ran his restaurants. As in many high-end hotels today, Escoffier kept complex dossiers of notes on his customers. He would meet with diners, chat to them about their likes and dislikes, and plan menus accordingly to prevent repeats. “And that eventually led to the mythology of Escoffier: That he would give you the perfect dinner, exactly what you wanted,” says Barr. “A perfectly balanced menu. And one of the reasons he was able to do that was because he was keeping close records of what people did and didn’t like.” A dish specially designed according to someone’s tastes, therefore, might well end up bearing their name.

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There was a certain amount of self-fashioning to this, too. “It was a symbiosis between the fame of the clientele and the growing fame of the chef,” says Barr. A little-remembered dessert, Poires Mary Garden, combines syruped pears with softened cherries, raspberry sauce, and whipped cream. Today, Mary Garden has faded from public memory, but at the time, she was one of the best-known opera singers in the world. Having her name on his menu spelled out the ilk of Escoffier’s clientele and, in a way, allowed him to attach himself to these leading lights. “He stole a little bit of the cachet and the glamor of his celebrity guests by naming a dish after them,” Barr says.

For the French opera singer Emma Calvé, it was a dessert of vanilla ice-cream and cherries stewed in Kirsch. For Italo-French Adelina Patti, a stuffed chicken dish with artichokes and rice. French singer Jeanne Granier is memorialized in an egg concoction involving asparagus and truffles, and the actress Sarah Bernhardt in a strawberry dessert, a chocolate-gilded macaroon, and a veal broth. Having a dish named after you by a chef as great as Escoffier was an honor, and guests were usually quite flattered. Nellie Melba, in her likely ghost-written memoirs, makes the distinction between this and between the irritating vogue of celebrity names being exploited to sell bootlaces and cigarettes. He had come up with the dish especially for her, and asked if he might name it accordingly. “I said that he might with the greatest pleasure, and thought no more of it.”

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In her autobiography, Melba dates the dish around 1904, and claims to have eaten it at the Savoy. As Escoffier was dismissed from the Savoy in 1898, it is likely she misremembered some of the details. Either way, by the time the decade was out, the dish was everywhere: from Rules, in London, to New York’s Ansonia hotel, one of the grandest in Manhattan. If you didn’t like that version, Hotel Knickerbocker, down the road, had their own, as did the St. Regis Hotel. It appeared in Chicago and Washington D.C., and on the menu of Belfast’s Ulster Club. It was everywhere. Many chefs palmed it off as their own creation, Melba wrote, describing irascible fights between herself and upstart pretenders: “I think we should give credit where credit is due. And it certainly is due to Escoffier.” Neither Melba nor Escoffier saw a cent from these imitations, though the dish’s runaway success can hardly have knocked back either of their rising stars. In fact, Newnham-Davis described how the invention of Peach Melba “added a new glory to a great singer.”

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A dish honoring a celebrity guest didn’t just benefit the chef or his muse, however. Ordinary members of the public extracted a certain joy from eating like the glitterati. Like anyone who has ordered a martini and fancied themselves James Bond, so diners at the Savoy or the Ritz might have ordered Edward VII Lamb Chops and tasted a few mouthfuls of royal treatment. “You’re participating in the glamor at one step removed,” says Barr, “but you can still enjoy it.” Today, many of these recipes are forgotten, but each retains a little stardust—a written record of a time when the world’s most famous chef was naming dishes for the world’s most famous people.

Found: A 700-Year-Old Ring Adorned with St. Nicholas

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The ancient Egyptians, the classical Greeks, the people of Middle Earth—they all saw rings as powerful symbols for human institutions such as marriage, religion, and political power. During the Middle Ages, it was not uncommon for wearers to don multiple rings, each signaling a different aspect of identity, from social class to political affiliation.

Last week, Dekel Ben-Shitrit, a 26-year-old gardener who was minding a private lot near HaZore'a kibbutz in northern Israel, found a 700-year-old bronze ring bearing an engraved image of St. Nicholas, the saint believed to be the inspiration for Santa Claus.

"I rubbed it slightly and I saw it was carved with a human image inside a frame," Ben-Shitrit told CBN News.

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Shortly after the discovery, Ben-Shitrit, who happens to have been born on Christmas Day, shared a photo of the ring on social media, where it was noticed by heritage authorities. According to Yana Tchekhanovets, a expert on the Byzantine period at the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), the artifact dates to a period between the 12th and 15th centuries.

As explained in a video produced by the IAA, during the medieval period, travelers carried icons to protect them while on the road, and St. Nicholas is the patron saint of travelers (along with pawnbrokers, children, thieves, and more). As the ring was found in Lower Galilee, near ancient Roman roads that brought people from around Europe to the Holy Land, Tchekhanovets believes that it was probably lost by pilgrim passing through.

“Christian pilgrims to the Land of Israel from all over the Byzantine Empire would carry his icon to protect them from harm,” she told CBN.

Immortalizing Human Scents as Memory Perfumes

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There’s a line in George du Maurier’s novelPeter Ibbetson that perfectly encapsulates the relationship between odor and memory. Near the beginning of the story, the titular protagonist describes his childhood in France and scrupulously details the aromas of Paris. “For scents, like musical sounds, are rare sublimaters of the essence of memory (this is a prodigious fine phrase—I hope it means something)….”

To French mother-and-son duo Katia Apalategui and Florian Rabeau, it definitely means something. Rabeau refers to the quote frequently. And the pair spent a decade figuring out how to preserve the particular smell of a beloved person.

In 2007, Apalategui’s father died of cancer. After he was gone, her mother held onto his belongings and clothes. One particular relic was hard for Apalategui’s mother to throw away: her husband’s pillowcase.

It smelled of a Christian Dior fragrance called Fahrenheit and the tiny dog that lay beside him in his bed at home. Whenever Apalategui’s mother held the pillowcase, the odors immediately brought her back to precious memories of her husband that photos simply could not capture.

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Swiss zoologist Claus Wedekind studies odor in both humans and animals. He says odor—particularly human odor—is a powerful memory-triggering agent.

Human odors are, however, “unique,” says Wedekind, “and there is not one perfect odor,” exclusive to every human being. This makes replicating a person’s scent quite tricky, because each person’s smell contains many individual components. If someone or a research team were to replicate a scent, guesses Wedekind, “they would extract and reproduce the exact components and put them into the right concentration, and I would be extremely surprised if a company would be able to do this.” Smell-O-Vision or Perfume, the book about a serial killer who is intent on capturing human scent via lethal means, might come to mind as replication methods. There are other, safer ways to make it happen.

Influenced by Apalategui’s mother and her beloved pillowcase, Apalategui and Rabeau decided to create such a company in 2015. It’s not the first time someone has tried to synthesize human-related scents. In 2006, French brand Etat Libre d’Orange released Sécrétions Magnifiques, an ode to sensual pleasure that embodied the smells of saliva, sperm, sweat, and blood. Another company in 2009 claimed to offer fragrances based on DNA. Apalategui and Rabeau, however, wanted their approach to be different, and use keepsakes like the pillowcase to evoke past experiences.

“We felt the need to keep these olfactory memories,” says Rabeau. Along with chemist Geraldine Savary from the University of Havre, he and Apalategui spent eight years developing a technique to reproduce human scent. The process remains a closely guarded secret, but in a 2015 interview, Savary gave a few clues: “we take the person’s clothing and extract the odour—which represents about a hundred molecules—and we reconstruct it in the form of a perfume in four days.”

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Apalategui had finally found a way to keep her father’s memory, and pillowcase scent, alive in a fragrance. By the time she and Rabeau figured out this technique, however, it was too late to extract the pillowcase scent into a perfume. They decided to allow other people suffering from loss or dealing with an absent family member to send in their clothing to them, so they could create a customized perfume from that material without destroying it. Customers then could spray the perfume at home to help remember their loved ones and help them with the grieving process.

“Human scent is like an olfactory cocktail,” says Rabeau, and “what you eat, where you come from, if you smoke, what products you put on your skin” are all part of our scent identity. In addition to sight, sound, or touch, Rabeau claims smell and the memories associated with it can create a rounder picture of the person or event someone is remembering—like an olfactory photograph.

At first, people were intrigued by their idea. When Marketplace profiled the scent project in 2015, they asked Parisians what smell they would choose to bottle. One woman said “the baby smell. When you have another baby in your hand and that reminds you the smell of your own children. So maybe this odor—the odor of your children when they were babies.”

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The bottling of human aroma perplexed some, though. Society encourages people to remove or mask their natural odor by showering and applying lotions and perfumes. “Nobody wants to smell bad,” Rabeau says, “everyone wants to be associated with a perfume” or a scent that portrays a crafted persona.

Nevertheless, interest in synthesized human scents grew. However, customers increasingly asked Rabeau and Apalategui to bottle their lived experiences, and the duo realized they could market themselves beyond human scents. Rabeau cites an example of a customer who wanted to remember his childhood home. The home had a musty, oak fragrance and the customer wanted to reminisce on his early years with his parents and grandparents. He wanted to access something in his past. So, using the customer’s material from his home, Rabeau and Apalategui extracted the components and reconstructed the customized scent, and the perfume seemingly transported the customer to that specific moment. Rabeau also experimented with materializing his childhood rose garden by taking the exact flowers and manufacturing the odor into a concentration.

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Thus, they shifted their focus to capturing such moments. In addition to memories, Rabeau and Apalategui extract scents from rare spices or new food products to make them accessible to more people. They even worked with a dating site to create a pop-up store in London, and materialized the smells of six men. Then, interested women sniffed the perfume, and based on smell, chose which man to meet.

For Rabeau, he does “not seek to materialize good or bad scents but simply odors that will anchor a moment in space-time.”

“When you walk down the street, all of sudden you can smell something, and then you will think of a deep memory,” he says. “Smells are linked to our deep emotions.”

What a Chart of Urine Tells Us About the History of Color Printing

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In the early 16th century, books did not include images unless there was a very good reason. “To print images in books at the time required planning, time, and extra money,” says Caroline Duroselle-Melish, a curator at the Folger Shakespeare Library. “They were not simply decorative. An image was a real investment.”

The full-page, color spread (above) in Ulrich Pinder’s medical text, Epiphanie medicorum, printed in 1506 in Nuremberg, Germany, must have seemed crucial to his project. On the left-hand page is a wheel of flasks, each colored a different shade of yellow, pink, black, brown, or greenish blue. Opposite, the same flasks are arranged in rows, with more detail about the colors and what each shade might mean. All the flasks were meant to represent samples of human urine.

At the time, urinalysis had already been practiced for hundreds of years and was on the verge of becoming so popular that people started self-diagnosing their ailments based on the color of their pee. This revolution in home medicine depended in part on printing technology that created access to information once restricted to the medical professionals of the time.

But printing technology was not yet good enough that images could be counted on to reliably convey what they were meant to. “This is a case where you really should read and not only look at the image,” says Duroselle-Melish, who curated the Folger’s new exhibition, Beyond Words: Book Illustration in the Age of Shakespeare, which features Pinder's book alongside more than 80 other illustrated books and prints from the 15th to 18th centuries.

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As far back as 100 B.C., Sanskrit medical texts from South Asia described 20 different types of urine and the ailments they might indicate. In ancient Greece, Hippocrates hypothesized that urine represents a filtrate of the four humors, the balance of which determines a person’s health. He believed it came from the blood and was filtered through the kidneys. As an article in Kidney International notes, this was “a fairly accurate description.”

Although not all of the early work using urine as a diagnostic tool holds up, ancient physicians knew that sweet-tasting urine (a sign of diabetes) or cloudy urine (indicating dehydration, infection, or a host of other things) were causes for concern. By the Roman era, the physician Galen improved on Hippocrates’s analysis, correctly postulating that urine was a filtrate of the blood.

Most diagnoses were made by inspecting urine visually. But physicians also tasted samples, and one influential seventh-century scientist developed a test that used heat to precipitate proteins from urine to provide more information. Urinalysis, according to the Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, can be considered "the first laboratory test documented in the history of medicine."

During the Middle Ages, the popularity of urinalysis increased, and it became a primary tool for health assessment. One 12th-century physician invented a special glass vessel used to collect and examine urine samples. Every respectable physician had one, and they became a symbol of the profession.

Soon experts started publishing urine charts as teaching tools. When books were printed in Latin, the secrets of urine stayed within the medical profession, but starting around the time Pinder’s book was published these charts began to be translated out of Latin, which gave more people access to them. Soon, healers with no medical training were offering to diagnose ailments based on pee color alone. By the 17th century, these “pisse prophets” had become so ubiquitous that one writer, Thomas Brian, published a takedown of the whole profession.

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While visual urinalysis is a legitimate diagnostic tool, it was a problem how much the medical profession had come to rely on it. Pisse prophets aside, some physicians were offering diagnoses based on urine samples alone, without ever seeing the patients who provided them. But learning to read urine based on printed charts could be dangerous. As Duroselle-Melish says, printing technology wasn’t up to the task.

“Most of these images were printed in black and white,” she says. “For a lot of these illustrations, color was added after, by hand.”

Look more closely at the chart above: The colors don’t even match from one page to another. Color might have been added to an illustration by a printer, or it might have been commissioned by the owner of a book after purchase. There was no standardization, and while some book publishers created detailed coloring instructions, the artisans who did the work didn't always conform to those specifications.

In this case, the unreliable coloring “makes the identification of the color and the diagnosis difficult,” says Duroselle-Melish. It certainly seemed impressive to have a book with a color illustration, but in this case it was still, in part, just for show. Any physician who wanted to master urinalysis would have to read the Latin, too.

Edmonton Embraces the Cold by Turning Park Paths Into Frozen Skating Trails

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Nearly every morning during the winter months, a truck winds its way past snowbanks in Edmonton, Alberta. It looks like the salt-spewing variety, but it's actually the exact opposite. It has a tank full of water, and its goal is to make the paths more slippery.

To gear up for the season, the vehicle dumps between 60 and 80 truckfuls of water—enough to flood park trails and turn them into winding skating paths speckled with colorful light installations come nightfall. The result is ice up to 12 inches thick—and something akin to a giant, winding backyard ice rink for the entire city.

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The skating trails are one way that Edmonton is facing facts: It’s cold. A few years ago, officials decided that, if locals were going to be shivering, they might as well make the best of it.

Cities in finger-numbing climes have a few options: They can accept that residents will hunker down inside, or encourage them to get outdoors despite it all. Winnipeg lures folks to artful (or wacky) warming huts; Montreal installed an interactive playground of light and sound. Edmonton has gone all in, too. A few years back, they piloted a WinterCity Strategy, including guides with tips on tobogganing, snowshoeing, and cross-country skiing, as well as how to safely keep cycling in subzero temperatures. “We can create more fun experiences that don’t force you to hide behind your four heated walls all winter,” the architect Matt Gibbs told Metro in 2015.

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Gibbs dreamed up a version of the frozen trails concept as part of his master’s thesis in landscape architecture at the University of British Columbia. His idea, which he christened the “Freezeway,” involved even more frozen paths—enough glassy arteries that Edmontonians could strap on some blades and skate to work. That wasn’t quite feasible, but the city adapted the project, named it the “IceWay,” and has paved two frozen paths through parks. There’s a three-loop trail around Victoria Park, a one-and-a-quarter mile path through Rundle Park. The project is growing: Angie Blades, a project coordinator for the City of Edmonton, estimates that the Rundle Park route, which the city piloted last year, is 80 percent longer this season.

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The trails demand daily upkeep, hence the trucks going about their freeze-friendly business. Starting around 5 a.m., staff sweep and plow the route, removing any dustings of snow that tumbled down overnight, and smoothing any shavings or grooves from the prior day’s skating. They then flood the route four or five times to freshen up the surface. It's ready for skaters by 10 a.m.

The trails melt on their own come spring, says Blades. Until that thaw, residents just need a little push to get moving.

One of the World's Most Irreplaceable Books Was Used as a Cutting Board

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The Exeter Book, inscribed in the 10th century, is a rare treasure. Many scholars consider it one of the building blocks of English literature. But it's suffered damage along the way that goes far beyond the usual wear and tear. For one thing, one of the book's previous owners used it as a cutting board. And an entirely different person used the book as a coaster, which left a literal lasting impression: a ring that soaked through the pages.

To understand how horrifying that is, it helps to know what the Exeter Book contains. Though the Anglo-Saxon period in England lasted for roughly six hundred years, not many Old English (think Beowulf) manuscripts from that era survived. As the longest and oldest of four manuscripts that contain poetry, the Exeter Book is a particularly crucial remnant of a once-rich oral tradition.

The Exeter Book has it all, though: religious odes, tragic elegies, and a surprising number of riddles where the punchlines are jokes about penises. For example: "A curiosity hangs by the thigh of a man, under its master's cloak. It is pierced through in the front; it is stiff and hard and it has a good standing-place. When the man pulls up his own robe above his knee, he means to poke with the head of his hanging thing that familiar hole of matching length which he has often filled before." (The "answer" is a key.)

But it seems that at several points throughout history, the book fell into the hands of someone who didn't appreciate it that much. While the first few pages of the book are missing, the opening pages that are intact have deep knife marks—which suggests that the book may have been used as a cutting board. Several folios of the book are stained with a circular ring that bled through the pages, too.

The most popular theory to date holds that someone set a beer down on the book's unbound pages, staining it irreparably. Alternatively, it could have been a pot of glue.

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It's unclear who the culprits were, especially given that the book has spent most of its existence in the Exeter Cathedral library. According to Anglo-Saxon scholar Patrick W. Conner, Anglo-Saxon writing would have been incomprehensible to most people by the 13th century. The book went unread for centuries, and its large size apparently made it a useful countertop.

The book was practically rediscovered in the 19th century, thanks to increased interest in the Anglo-Saxons. The Exeter Book's most famous fan, J.R.R. Tolkien, used a term from the book to define the fictional world of his legendary creation,The Lord of the Rings. In the poem Christ I, one line reads “Hail Earendel brightest of angels, / over Middle Earth sent to men.” Luckily for LOTR fans, whoever left their cup on the Exeter Book didn't make a habit of it.

The Common Language of Gesture Between Bonobos and Chimps

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Among human beings, some gestures seem universal—an open hand for begging; a shrug of the shoulders for confusion; backing away when someone is a little too close for comfort. Others don't always translate from one culture to the next, like a thumbs up or a shake of the head. When it comes to our primate cousins, gestures get still more complicated: Our friendly smile, to a gorilla, might indicate anything from appeasement to aggression. New research published today in PLOS Biology, suggests that, between chimpanzees and bonobos, many gestures require little translation. The two ape species are distinct, but closely related—they separated a couple of million years ago—though the degree of similarity between the meanings of their gestures is a new discovery.

If a bonobo fell on all fours and then presented its arm in front of you, you'd likely wonder what it wanted you to do. A chimpanzee, the study says, would know the answer: It's short-hand for "climb on my back." A team of researchers from the Universities of York, St Andrews, and Kyoto analyzed 33 bonobo gestures by observing how the primates reacted to one another's hand or body movements—whether a bonobo stroking its mouth communicated that it wanted to be groomed, left alone, or given an object or food. (It's the last one.)

Next, they compared their results to known gesture meanings typical of chimpanzees, and found substantial overlap between the two. A bonobo's "big loud scratch" means "groom me"—82 percent of the time, a chimpanzee's does too. Another example is known to researchers as a "hand fling," and would be instantly recognizable to any child that's ever been shooed. "It's like, 'move away,' or 'stop that,'" says researcher Kirsty Graham of the University of York.

That these meanings are shared across species and social groups is particularly interesting to the scientists. "The most parsimonious explanation for [the shared understanding] is that the gestures are biologically inherited," Graham says, which may include inheriting them from a common ancestor. But there's still more that the researchers hope to learn about how they're acquired—whether they seem to kick in at a common point of development across both species, whether they're ritualized in some way, or whether they learn them from one another socially.

Scientists are also beginning to examine whether humans share or understand these gesture meanings. Because human beings use so many different gestures, observing them is a very complicated way to analyze how many gestures are shared across species—instead, human participants are being tested on their comprehension of bonobo or chimpanzee gestures. In a recent online experiment, 15,000 participants were shown videos of primate gestures and asked to select what they thought they might mean. A correct answer, Graham says, might indicate that we still have elements of this shared understanding. Another related study includes testing the gestures on pre-verbal infants. We may have moved on from "climb on my back," but there's still plenty of room for overlap.


Found: A 5.5-Million-Year-Old Ancestor of the Red-Eared Slider

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We have the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to thank, in part, for the ubiquity of red-eared sliders, freshwater terrapins native to North America. The sewer-dwelling characters made the pond-dwelling chelonians popular as pets around the world. So popular, in fact, that they have become one of the most invasive reptile species around, leading several countries in Europe, Asia, and Central America to take steps to protect their own turtle species against the semi-aquatic invaders.

Now a recently discovered fossil of an ancient relative of red-eared sliders might help scientists learn more about why these creatures are so adaptable. Steven Jasinski, a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, found the fossilized remains of the newly identified Trachemys haugrudi at the Gray Fossil Site, a sinkhole in eastern Tennessee in which dozens of fossils—from a red panda to a mastodon—have been found.

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It is not uncommon to find fossilized turtle shells, but they are usually broken, which makes identification a challenge. But in this case, the remains, dating to the end of the Miocene, 5.5 million years ago, are pleasingly numerous and intact. “It is extremely rare to get more complete fossils,” the paleontologist said in a release, “but Trachemys haugrudi, commonly called Haugrud’s slider turtle [for a manager at the site], provides me with dozens of shells, and several are nearly complete.”

Haugrud's slider grew to as long as 10 inches, smaller than red-eared sliders, which can reach 16 inches from front to back (part of the reason some owners release them into the wild). Jasinski's findings, which were published this month in the journal PeerJ, indicate that there was once greater diversity of Trachemys turtles compared with today, suggesting that some species could not adapt to changing environments—perhaps leaving the more versatile varieties. "While Trachemys turtle species are considered plastic, implying they can adapt to and live in many environments, this adaptive lifestyle may be a relatively newer characteristic of these turtles," Jasinski said. "More fossils are needed to better understand if this aspect of their evolution is a recent addition."

Meet a Man Who Makes Sculptures From Lava

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Some sculptors are content to carve their visions out of simple, static stone, but Ireland-based Danny Osborne prefers to go to the source. He likes his rock living and flowing. “When I got onto the idea of lava, it seemed like a good way of experimenting,” says Osborne, who has traveled the globe, from South America to the Arctic, for artistic inspiration.

His fascination with molten rock began in 1984 when he was working in Chile. Among the active volcanoes along the country’s border with Argentina, Osborne began to appreciate the primordial nature of flowing lava. He had a background in industrial ceramics, with experience in cast materials such as porcelain, bronze, and glass. Lava seemed like a fascinating new challenge.

In the beginning, Osborne (who is most widely known for his rakish Oscar Wilde memorial sculpture in Dublin) tried making pieces out of what might be called “homemade" lava. He took chunks of hardened basalt, brought in bags from the Canary Islands, and melted them down to pour into his molds. But it was an imperfect process. “The main problem is that when it’s coming out of the crucible, it cools quite rapidly, so you’ve only got half of it poured into the mold when it’s beginning to freeze,” he says. “I decided to go find a volcano with a much larger amount of lava.”

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As it turns out, working on an active volcano is somehow even more difficult than it sounds, and not just for the obvious reasons. Hawaii was his first choice, and for years he tried unsuccessfully to get access to an active volcano. “I got everybody on my side. Geologists, ambassadors," he says. "And they weren’t having it. They probably get a lot of requests for weird things."

Eventually he went to Guatemala and discovered Pacaya, a volcano that seemed like the perfect candidate. “You have to be quite lucky when dealing with volcanoes,” he says. “You have to get them at just the right time, because they’re unpredictable. Sometimes they’re doing nothing, or oozing a little bit of lava. Or sometimes it can be too much, too violent.” Osborne secured access to the mountain and made his first fresh lava sculptures by plunging molds directly into the mountain’s flows and letting them fill up. Shortly after he had finished this work in 2010, Pacaya unleashed its natural fury—an eruption that covered the area in ash and resulted in multiple deaths.

Putting the dangers aside, Osborne has continued to cast sculptures out of lava. After his years of unsuccessful petitioning, he was finally able to purchase some acres of land on the side of Hawaii’s Puʻu ʻŌʻō volcano. Now he has his very own lava to work with.

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Osborne’s artistic process is relatively simple. First he creates a negative mold of the shape he wants—a baby bottle and a conquistador’s helmet are just a couple of his designs. He puts the mold on the end of a long pole so that he can drive it right into red hot streams of lava like Queequeg harpooning a whale. The molds themselves range in complexity from single-piece “jelly molds” to multipart forms that have been bolted together. Osborne has used a handful of materials to create molds that can withstand the oozing crucible of a lava flow, including high-tech compounds, bronze, and even wood. “I made a wooden mold of a bible,” he says. “Of course it turned into a ball of flame pretty quickly. But it filled with lava.”

After years of working on and with volcanoes, Osborne hasn't received any injuries worse than random burns and the occasional bit of molten lava in his boot. He credits paying close attention to his surroundings. “Volcanoes have a bad reputation for killing lots of people. And rightly so in some areas," he says. "But there’s dangerous volcanoes and less dangerous volcanoes."

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Osborne has created more than 40 lava sculptures so far, but only around 25 have survived. “Some of them don’t make it down the mountain,” he says, due to the fragility of hardened lava, which is essentially volcanic glass.

Osborne sees lava as a sort of primal material from which everything in the world, including humans, has grown. “It’s a sort of big jump through time,” he says. “That’s why it has such a powerful symbolic value to me. It’s this sort of essential matrix material of everything around these days.”

Osborne has exhibited his works in a number of small shows in Canada and Europe over the years, and he feels as though he’s almost ready to stage a larger show focusing solely on his volcanic work. There certainly seems to be demand for it. “The reaction has always been great. I’ve done far more dangerous stuff for years up in the Arctic," he says (glaciers are every bit as hazardous as volcanoes), "but somehow the work in the lava captures the imagination more.”

Have You Ever Felt Homesick for a Place You've Never Been?

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Last month on our Facebook page, we shared one of our favorite Judith Thurman quotes, about that hard-to-describe-feeling of being homesick for somewhere you’ve never actually been.

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As some Facebook commenters pointed out, there's a German word (of course!) that describes this feeling: fernweh. Literally translated as “farsickness,” the term is closely related with the concept of wanderlust. Just the mere thought of some places can fill us with a sense of fernweh, even when we've never been to them before—or, in the case of fictional places or places that no longer exist, can never reasonably expect to.

The type of place that inspires this unique feeling of longing is different for everyone, and we want to hear yours! For some, it’s the idea of a faraway country they’ve always wanted to visit, while for others it’s Middle-Earth. For me it's the Scottish Highlands, which I've only ever seen on television or in movies. And yet somehow, picturing the rural Highlands always makes me feel like going there would be like going home. It’s probably colder there than I'd realistically enjoy, but the idea of it, the version of the Highlands that exists only in my mind, is comforting all the same.

We want to know what place makes you feel homesick, even though you’ve never been there. Share your responses via the form below, and we’ll publish our favorites in a future post.

How Whale Calls Change Over Time

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When Holly Root-Gutteridge imitates an infant North Atlantic right whale, it sounds like something between a yawn, a squawk, and a boop. "You can tell what kind of call they’re trying to make, but it comes out really funny," she says. Some sound loopy. On one recording, "one of them sounds like a burp—like a baby tried to call and burped in the middle of it."

Humans should be able to relate to a slow slog toward articulateness. Your vocabulary has likely ballooned beyond your repertoire of infant babbles, for one thing, and you’ve got more control over your lips and tongue. By analyzing 986 calls collected from 49 individuals, Root-Gutteridge has concluded that right whales also refine their calls as they age.

As a post-doctoral researcher in biology at Syracuse University, Root-Gutteridge analyzed a trove of recordings made over a 17-year period. To collect the calls, scientists sunk hydrophones into the water, or adhered recording tags to whales’ bodies with suction cups. (These stayed on for between 12 minutes and 48 hours.) Researchers identified whales by comparing photographs of distinctive rough patches on the whales’ skin to images in a catalog maintained by the Right Whale Consortium. They then sorted the individuals into age categories: calf, juvenile, adults aged 15-25, and adults older than 25. Scientists then analyzed the calls, tracking attributes such as duration and chaos—essentially, the amount of grit, growl, and scratch that accidentally leaps out when, for instance, you strain for a note you can’t quite reach.

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"In the same way that I have an individual voice and you have an individual voice, the whales do, too,” Root-Gutteridge says. Those variations tend to emerge in pitch. But broad patterns emerged, too, as Root-Gutteridge describes in a new paper published in Animal Behavior.

At first, the findings didn't strike Root-Gutteridge as being especially surprising: "Babies tend to make baby talk, and have to learn a little bit or physically develop, in some species, to be able to make adult calls," she says. But the picture got a little more complicated. "I was going, huh. This isn't stopping—this is still refining as they age." The calls changed throughout the whales' lives, even after they’d reached maturity.

By the time they're a year or two, whales are forming abbreviated approximations of the calls. "Instead of really long-duration 'oop,' they're briefer,” Root-Gutteridge says. “As they age, the calls get longer and longer." Younger whales’ calls were chaotic, too. Juveniles’, less so—and by the time the whales were 25, they weren’t making much of this type of ruckus at all. As they aged, Root-Gutteridge says, "whales got better at making a purer version of the sound.”

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There’s a lot that researchers still don’t know, and some of that hinges on a murky picture of vocal development. The question is whether a young whale must pass a physical milestone before making a particular sound, or whether another individual just needs to model it. Beluga whales, for instance, have demonstrated vocal learning, in which young individuals are able to reproduce a call when they hear it. It’s not yet clear whether that’s how it works for right whales, too.

It’s also hard to translate the messages the whales may be volleying back and forth. Root-Gutteridge suspects that the characteristically undulating upcalls function as a sort of ping—a "Marco Polo kind of, 'I'm here, where are you?'" Pinning down anything more specific is "a major problem in animal communication, trying to figure out how to record the sounds under natural conditions, and do it often enough to be able to say, 'This was always made when they did this,' or, 'Every time they made this call, they drew another whale to them, which means it's probably meaning something like this.'"

Since researchers weren’t watching the animals while they wore the acoustic tags, they can’t be sure of what the whales were up to. Many cetacean researchers spend hours squinting out into the distance, watching for plumes of water, a shadowy shape, or the gentle rise of a back. If the whales have dived deep—or if the calls happen to be emitted at night—researchers don’t know whether the whales were feeding, swimming, or resting. To better understand the relationship between behaviors and vocalizations, Root-Gutteridge says researchers would need thousands of calls matched with data from visual observations. A stronger data set would also include more male whales, and fill in some ages that are missing.

Meanwhile, other experts suggest that the window to study these whales is slamming shut. There are only a few hundred of this baleen species left in the wild, lumbering through the waters on the East Coast of the U.S. and Canada, and researchers haven’t recorded any new births this year. “When you have high mortality and zero reproduction, it’s catastrophic,” Michael Moore, director of the Marine Mammal Center at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told the Boston Globe. “It couldn’t be any worse.” The whales can die when they’re ensnared in fishing nets or other equipment, and warming waters have been correlated with a steep decline in the plankton that they feed on. Speaking to The Guardian earlier this week, a researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution warned that the species could be extinct by 2040. If researchers are going to hold a microphone to the ocean, better sooner than later.

The Dirty Secret of ‘Secret Family Recipes’

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When Danny Meyer was gearing up to open his barbecue restaurant, Blue Smoke, there was one recipe he knew he had to have on the menu: his grandmother’s secret potato salad recipe.

“I told the chef, ‘My very favorite potato salad in the world was the one my grandmother made,’” Meyer recalls.

That’s a big statement coming from Meyer, a successful restaurateur who has earned Michelin Stars and founded the fast-casual chain Shake Shack. At the time, his grandmother had already passed away, but Meyer remembered that she kept recipes on three by five index cards. After a search, he found the right card and handed it to the restaurant’s chef, who invited Meyer to try it in the Blue Smoke kitchen.

When Meyer arrived, the sous chefs had a big bowl of potato salad that brought back memories of his grandmother. He tried it, smiled, and told the chefs, “That’s exactly right.” They grinned back at him mischievously. Eventually, Meyer broke and asked, “What’s so funny?” A chef pulled out a jar of Hellman’s mayonnaise and placed it on the table. Meyer looked at it, then realized that the secret recipe his grandmother had hoarded for years was on the jar. It was the official Hellman’s recipe for potato salad.

This actually seems to be a common phenomenon. The television show Friends even features a similar discovery, when one character, Phoebe, realizes that her grandmother’s “famous” chocolate chip cookie recipe came from a bag of Nestle Toll House chocolate chips.

Two months ago, we asked Gastro Obscura readers to send in accounts of their own discoveries. We promised a (loving) investigation of grandparents lying about family recipes. But instead we got a delightful look at the power of imagination, the limitations of originality, and the halo effect of eating a dish or dessert made by family.

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Examples from Readers

In response to our call, 174 readers wrote in with stories of plagiarized family recipes. Hailing from New York to Nicaragua, from Auckland, New Zealand, to Baghpat, India, they prove that this is a global phenomenon. The majority of readers described devastating discoveries: They found supposedly secret recipes in the pages of famous cookbooks, and heard confessions from parents whose legendary dessert recipes came from the side of Karo Syrup bottles.

Fittingly, one of the most extraordinary examples also echoed the cookie plotline from Friends:

Once I was the judge of a chocolate chip cookie recipe contest. We stipulated that all cookies had to be homemade, no mixes or frozen dough. The top three cookies were chosen, photographed, and presented in a local newspaper along with the recipes for them. Calls and letters poured in pointing out that the first place cookie was the Nestle Toll House recipe and the second place recipe was the Toll House recipe doubled.

–Jeff Miller, Fort Collins, Colorado

Several readers joked about family members threatening to take a secret recipe to the grave. To our surprise, we also received a story of a late-in-life confession:

My uncle was known around town as the “fudge man.” Every year, he would make pounds of it for Christmas parties, bake sales, and gifts. It was legendary—people would beg him for the recipe. When he was ill in the hospital, before he passed, his wife begged him for the recipe so she could keep his memory going. He replied, “It’s on the side of the marshmallow fluff container.”

–Jess Heller, Minnesota

Not every story featured a deceptive elder, however. A number of readers found that they’d assumed a secret family recipe where there was only a well-loved cake mix:

My husband's Russian grandmother made the world's best Lemon Cake—according to my husband. Now, I consider myself a pretty good baker. I only use European butter, fresh ingredients, everything from scratch. It's my hobby, my passion. When my husband and I first got together, he talked wistfully of his grandmother's cake. She was 90+ and living on the other side of the country, so on my urging, he would ask her to send him the recipe. She never got around to it. Over the years, I tried dozens of recipes—using fresh Meyer Lemons that we grew ourselves! He would try them and say, “Well, it's delicious, but not what I remember from my childhood."

Finally, we happened to visit the East Coast in the final year of Grandma's long life. We went to visit her at her home. Joe brought up the cake. She whacked her knee and exclaimed in her thick Jersey-and-cigarettes voice: “Oh Joey! That WAS a great cake! I got it off the box of Betty Crockah. Lemon Poke Cake. I'll find it for you."

–Suzy Scuderi, Olympia, Washington

You may be noticing a trend: Most of the stories concerned sweets. While we heard about stolen stuffings and copied casseroles, the vast majority of revelations centered around cookies, cakes, and, in one case, purple jello.

If you swear by your father’s chocolate cake or your grandmother’s famous cookies, you may want to check the recipes on Betty Crocker cake boxes and Hershey’s chocolate chip bags. To be safe, though, you have to investigate uncommon recipes too, as shown by this story about a mulled cider drink called wassail:

I grew up in California, and every Christmas Day for as long as I can remember, my grandmother and then my mother would make wassail in the slow cooker. It simply was not Christmas until the kitchen smelled like wassail, and the simple recipe (apple cider, pineapple juice, honey, sliced citrus, and spices) seemed to differ from any other wassail recipe. So the assumption was always that it had been created by someone far back in the family tree and handed down.

Recently, in a fit of nostalgia, I asked my mom for the recipe, and she dug out a printed recipe card and … It was a mass-produced recipe card from Macy's department store. It turns out the wassail we enjoyed so much was a “freebie” recipe given away in the Macy's kitchenware department during one holiday season back in the ‘70s to help sell Crock-Pots!

It was a bit of a let down to learn it wasn't really some secret family recipe, but I have since introduced my in-laws to it, and they insist I make it every Christmas.

–Stephanie Baldwin, Montréal, Canada

While secret recipe stories tend to have punchlines, many are profound reminders of the link between food and memory:

I was on vacation in San Francisco, and we ended up eating at what could only be referred to as a Chinese spaghetti restaurant. It was inexpensive and very popular.

I ordered my meal, and they served soup as a starter. I took one bite, and it was my father’s vegetable beef soup. I almost got up and checked the kitchen, because he had passed away three months before.

Finally I called my mom, and she said that’s not your dad’s soup; it is Muriel Humphrey’s soup. Muriel was Hubert Humphrey’s wife, who was appointed to his Senate seat after he died. My dad was a lifelong Republican, but clearly he could reach across the fence when it came to an amazing vegetable beef soup recipe.

–Amy Jensen, Minnesota

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Three Theories of Plagiarized Family Recipes

Reviewing reader accounts bolstered one explanation for why secret family recipes turn out to be not-so-secret: Cooks and bakers enjoy passing recipes off as their own. One Gastro Obscura reader recounted how her mother passes off a Neiman Marcus chocolate chip cookie recipe as her own, and, when asked for it, tweaks the recipe so it won’t work as well. Another story involves a mother-in-law confidentially describing her taco sauce recipe: “Put pan on stove, pour Rosarita taco sauce into it, heat until warm, hide the bottle.”

But these stories also reveal that many family recipes are not a lie but a misunderstanding: Often, younger generations assume a recipe is a family secret despite a grandparent making no such claim:

Growing up, my mom would make pancakes with cottage cheese, milk, eggs, butter, and flour (plus a touch of salt and vanilla). She never looked at a recipe card, and for 20 years, my siblings and I had always assumed this was some secret family recipe learned in Lithuania. When I was long since grown and out of the house, I called to ask her for the recipe. With a nostalgic image in my head, I asked if she had learned to make these from her mother when she was growing up in Lithuania or Germany (as us kids had always assumed). My mom laughed and said, "No, I got the recipe from a cottage cheese lid."

–Christopher Aedo, Portland, Oregon

As with any fake news, family legends about supposedly secret recipes seem to germinate because they feel true. And they’re enabled by the surprising uncertainty we often have about our own history. One reader recounted how he thought his family’s Christmas cookie recipe came—like his family—from Germany. He later learned the cookie was Swedish, and that he was actually Irish and English.

A final explanation for this phenomenon is simply that true originality is rare. Multiple cookbook authors have stories of asking people to send in family recipes and receiving dozens of nearly identical versions. “A lot of that has to do with [recipes sharing] very common ingredients,” says Stephanie Pierson, who wrote in to describe her experience asking for brisket recipes.

With so many people cooking and baking and tweaking similar recipes, it’s hard to call anything original. “Recipes have been propagated through newspapers and community cookbooks since the mid-1800s at least,” writes Maryland food blogger K.M. Harris of American food culture. “Some cookbooks even admit that nearly identical recipes were submitted from multiple community sources.”

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What We Learned

When it comes to secret family recipes, people just want to believe. It’s a powerful idea: A supposedly secret ingredient can turn a recipe from a lid of cottage cheese into a link to an ancestral homeland. A supposedly hallowed family recipe can turn Betty Crocker cake mix into the world’s best lemon cake.

Plenty of readers expressed dismay about discovering that a treasured recipe had a common origin. (Variations on the phrase “I died a little” appeared in multiple accounts.) But more frequently, when readers learned the truth, they accepted it and loved the recipe more than ever. The cookies and cakes and potato salads were, after all, still associated with childhood memories and departed loved ones.

After Danny Meyer realized that his grandmother’s recipe came from the side of a mayonnaise jar, he started laughing. “Here I thought I had scored this major coup, tracking down this secret recipe,” he recalls. “I looked up to heaven and gave my grandmother a look and started smiling. I was happy.”

Meyer’s barbecue restaurant opened in 2002, and he’s pretty sure they served his grandmother’s potato salad (which was also Hellman’s potato salad) for the first few months.

“I didn’t care,” he says with a laugh. “It was a good recipe.”

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