Stuttgart, Germany, is a car town. The car company Daimler, which owns Mercedez-Benz, has its headquarters here. The first practical car—which debuted at the World’s Fair in 1889, almost two decades before the Model T went into production—was invented less than a two hour’s drive from here.

It’s also one of the most polluted cities in Germany, which is why an environmental rights group, Deutsche Umwelthilfe, took legal action to force Stuttgart and other cities to meet European Union air quality standards. In some cases, the group argued, the only way to meet those standards would be to ban diesel vehicles from city centers altogether.

While governments fought back, this week a German court found that the proposed bans on diesel cars were legal. Soon the streets of one of the auto industry’s most important cities could be relatively free of cars.

Germany’s love for the automobile began with a road trip from nearby Mannheim to the town of Pforzheim, less than 30 miles from Stuttgart. In 1885, Karl Benz had invented his first Motorwagen, a three-wheeled vehicle with a gas-powered engine of his own design. One of the first times he managed to get it started, he drove it straight into his laboratory wall.

By 1888, he had a working prototype, which had successfully driven down a road. The now-patented Motorwagen had no gears and could not go up hills, but it worked. One morning, Benz’s wife Bertha decided to take the car on its first extended road trip. With her two sons, she pushed the car out of the garage, until it was far enough from the house that they could get it started without waking her husband.

Bertha Benz had a destination in mind—her parents’ house in Pforzheim, about 65 miles from her home. Following roads meant for wagons, she and her sons started the drive—the first recorded road trip in a car.

There were challenges. A pipe clogged; Benz cleaned it with her hat pin. A wire shorted; she insulated it with her garter. They needed more fuel; she convinced a pharmacist to sell her an unusually large amount of the gas the car used. When the brakes started wearing out, she had them shod with leather at a cobbler. When she reached a hill, she had the boys push (along with local help).

By the end of the day, the Benzes had reached Pforzheim, where Bertha telegraphed her husband that they were safe. After a few days' visit, they drove back home to Mannheim.

Ten years ago, Germany created an official Bertha Benz Memorial Route, marking her historic road trip. Part of Bertha Benz's motivation was to sell potential customers on the advantage of automobiles; although it took another decade or so, people eventually bought into this transportation revolution.

“Observe when you walk abroad...and then your work will show the more naturally.” Recipe books don’t typically start this way. But for Hannah Woolley, cooking and science weren’t all that different.

When Woolley published The Ladies Directory: Choice Experiments and Curiosities of Preserving in 1661, she became the first woman in England to release a household manual. Women of all classes craved these insights, and the little book of recipes, remedies, and etiquette quickly became a huge hit. Woolley went on to publish four more books, and became the Martha Stewart of 17th-century England, making a living by selling her advice to the masses.

In addition to cakes, roasted meat, and jellies, a number of recipes in Woolley’s books particularly encouraged women to create food that mimicked animals or natural phenomena. In one recipe for “Hedgehog Pudding,” for instance, Woolley advised cooks to use almond slivers and raisins to craft a hedgehog’s spines and eyes, respectively, in the sweet treat.

These recipes, which Woolley dubbed “New Experiments,” coincided with experimental science taking off across England. They also connected women’s work in the kitchen with the more formal experiments taking place in the Royal Society. This association of physicians, natural philosophers (a 17th-century term for “scientist”), and experimenters—all male, all upper-class—was founded in 1660. In order to fulfill its mission of “Improv[ing] Natural Knowledge,” the Royal Society spent its time looking through microscopes and conducting experiments examining the nature of air, colors, and perception.

Women’s scientific thoughts, and the experiments they headed in their kitchens, were of little interest to the men of the Royal Society. When writer and natural philosopher Margaret Cavendish visited the Royal Society in 1667, for example, men dismissed her as silly, despite her interest in observing “several fine experiments...of colours, loadstones, microscopes, and of liquors among others,” as Samuel Pepys, a member of Parliament, wrote in his diary. Cavendish’s “dress [was] so antick, and her deportment so ordinary, that I do not like her at all,” he continued, “Nor did I hear her say anything that was worth hearing, but that she was full of admiration.”

But in 17th-century English kitchens, women like Cavendish and Woolley observed and recreated the natural world in inventive ways. Upper- and lower-class ladies alike crafted elaborate dishes comprised of sugar-paste, marzipan, or jelly to look and act like animals, plants, or natural phenomena. These dishes, often unveiled as centerpieces at banquets or presents for friends and family, displayed not only a lady’s culinary skill, but also how she studied nature. The more closely a woman understood nature, the more lifelike her edible kitchen creations would be.

Some of these recipes were ubiquitous, such as the one for snow cream, which appears in many 17th-century handwritten recipe books. Elizabeth Godfrey’s recipe draws on the reader’s observation of snow in nature to know when the cream is ready: “when you see it look light like snow take it off with a skimmer,” she notes. In order to get the texture of snow cream right, a woman would have had to carefully observe what snow both looked and felt like. In order to replicate nature on the table successfully, a woman had to have more than culinary chops: She also needed to have a dedication to studying the natural world.

Woolley’s recipes show that she had a particularly attentive eye. In The Queen-Like Closet, her most popular book, Woolley gave detailed instructions to craft a centerpiece called “A Rock in Sweet-Meats.” It was less a sweetmeat than it was a dazzling, wine-dispensing imitation seashore, complete with cookie rocks, sugar-paste snails and oysters, candies of all colors and, to top it off, a marzipan peacock with real feathers drinking from jelly “water.” How were women in the middle of England to know what such a seascape looked like, though? In the recipe, Woolley encouraged women to draw on their studies, replicating the variety “you know Nature doth afford” in food.

To bring these natural wonders to life, women scrappily distilled their own syrups and essences of fruits, flowers, or medicinal herbs, creating chemical reactions in household laboratories to transform natural products. Those who couldn’t afford the specialty molds necessary to hold their sugar-paste fruits, birds, animals, and plants creations made their own. This meant expertly carving the shape of these natural objects, in reverse, into wood or plaster.

More gruesome recreation methods, ones reminiscent of dissection and butchery, also brought nature to the dinner table. For instance, Robert May’s 1660 recipe book, The Accomplisht Cook, includes directions for theatrical banquet courses that featured live birds in a pie and a sugar-paste deer speared by an arrow in its side. When diners pulled out the arrow, wine would flow out of the deer “as blood running out of a wound.”

At first glance, the stag gave diners the pleasure of knowing what lay inside a deer. But it also revealed a woman’s keen ability to dissect nature. Wendy Wall, a professor of English who studies manuscript recipes, writes in Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama that butchering animals and healing bodies gave women an intimate knowledge of anatomy. By doing so, a woman “had her finger on the pulse of life and death.”

The practice of replicating natural life (and death) directly echoed emerging scientific discoveries of 17th-century England, which often required looking into or looking closely at objects. The microscope, invented around 1590, had recently captured the English imagination, and everyone wanted to see what nature looked like up close. In 1665, Robert Hooke published Micrographia, or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses, the first book to illustrate insects, plants, and other small natural objects through a microscope. In Micrographia, Hooke showed that scientific knowledge comes through observing something closely and reproducing it through art. He also established the act of close observation as essential to science: Good scientists observed the world around them and replicated their findings to share with others.

While Hooke gained notoriety for publishing images of nature observed through a microscope, women observed it, too, in the ways available to them. In doing so, they also asked questions about the composition of the world: What is a snail or a strawberry made of if someone can create one from sugar paste? How does natural phenomena happen if sugar paste and food dye can be made to look natural, or if whipped cream can imitate snow?

Cavendish, one of the first people to insist on women’s role in scientific investigation, wrote in her 1667 scientific treatise, Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, that women “would prove good experimental philosophers, and inform the world how to make artificial snow, by their creams, or possets beaten into froth and ice...and many other the like figures, which resemble beasts, birds, vegetables, [and] minerals.”

She illustrated that women’s work was a central, if silent, part of the beginning of modern science. Women experimenting in their kitchens have been asking the same questions and doing the same work as their male counterparts, even as they were excluded from masculine spheres of professional science. Cavendish, Woolley, and countless other women employed similar methods and asking the same questions as their male counterparts in the Royal Society—the only difference being that women’s household science was ephemeral and edible.

By the turn of the 18th century, the practice of creating elaborate recreations of nature for the table had become a pastime for the nobility, whose large servant staff could do the painstaking work. But whether it was recreating a fruit or a rock, testing out recipe variations, or creating their own tools, the scores of women penning these recipes bear silent and revolutionary witness to the storied tradition of kitchen experimentation.

In April 1986 the nuclear accident at Chernobyl devastated a large swathe of land in the north of Ukraine. The workers’ city of Pripyat was evacuated, to become one of the world’s most notorious ghost towns—while dozens of villages in the vicinity of the nuclear power plant were similarly deserted as radiation polluted earth, air, and water alike. At the very heart of the Exclusion Zone however, the plant itself would remain a hub of activity.

Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) was still producing energy for 14 years after the accident at Reactor 4. In the wake of the disaster, amid the rubble and radiation, it was safer to allow the remaining fuel rods to burn out in their own time, rather than trying to remove them. Reactor 2 wasn’t shut down until after a fire in 1991; Reactor 1 followed in 1996. Reactor 3 was in use until December 2000, and since then Chernobyl has produced no energy at all—until now.

The Ukrainian-German project Solar Chernobyl is preparing to launch a solar farm right next to the Chernobyl reactors. Due to go online early in 2018, the one-megawatt installation features 3,800 photovoltaic panels and will be capable of powering as many as 2,000 homes. A further 99 megawatts are planned for a future development, and the project, which has so far cost a million euros ($1.25 million) to build, is expected to pay itself off within seven years.

Ukraine currently has 12 active nuclear power plants, but it is no stranger to solar energy. It has beenreported that Solar Chernobyl is the country’s first solar farm, but this is in fact the fourth such installation built on Ukrainian territory.

The Okhotnykovo and Perovo Solar Parks, in Crimea, were both commissioned in 2011—generating 82 and 100 megawatts respectively. A third was brought online in 2012, the 42-megawatt Starokozache Solar Park near Odessa in south Ukraine. Following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, however, Ukraine lost its two largest solar farms. With Russian natural gas supplies now similarly cut off, the new installation at Chernobyl, though far smaller than the nuclear site’s original output of four 1,000-megawatt reactors, is nevertheless a welcome step in the direction of energy independence.

For Chernobyl NPP itself, the project spells another welcome development: financial investment.

Dealing with the irradiated remains of Reactor 4 poses the greatest ongoing cost for the plant. In October 2017 the New Safe Confinement, a colossal radiation containment dome, was installed over it, at a cost of €1.5 billion ($1.8 billion). Built by a French consortium, the structure is hermetically sealed and fitted with remote controlled cranes with which to dismantle the reactor inside. A new radioactive waste storage facility has also been created nearby, where up to 75,000 cubic meters of hazardous materials can be safely stowed underground. While Reactor 4 is gaining a lot of international attention and investment, however, Ukraine is largely alone in decommissioning Chernobyl Reactors 1, 2 and 3.

Inside Reactor 2, scientists and other staff dressed in white protective suits walk swiftly through archaic, 1970s Modernist interiors. The so-called Golden Corridor, leading to the reactor’s control room and upwards from there to the core, is decorated in ribbed metal panels and Art Deco tiling. It looks like a power plant designed by Wes Anderson, and staffed by the cast of A Clockwork Orange… and it is bitterly cold in winter.

As temperatures outside drop to around -12 C (10 F), the unheated interior of Reactor 2 is close to freezing point. Protective garments are provided and visitors shiver as they strip to their underwear, walking half-naked to the next room to don starchy cotton suits, gloves, slippers and masks. Later, in the Golden Corridor, a worker passes the group. Over the same white pajamas he wears a thick blue jacket stenciled with the power plant’s initials in Cyrillic: “ЧАЕС.” Envious gazes follow him down the corridor.

“It’s too cold here,” says Anton Povar, a station guide who deals with official delegations and the occasional tour group. A regular stream of engineers, inspectors, and journalists visit the reactors, and the experience is also sometimes offered to tourists for a surplus fee. None of that money seems to go back into making it comfortable though, either for workers or for visitors. “We don’t have enough radiators,” says Povar. “We don’t even have enough winter coats for everyone.”

After conducting a tour of the Reactor 2 control room, Anton leads the way up a pitch black stairwell to the reactor chamber. In the absence of light bulbs, half a dozen mobile phone screens illuminate the steps.

The decision to lease land at Chernobyl NPP to solar energy companies brings valuable new revenue to an alarmingly underfunded decommissioning project.

The original plan for the Chernobyl site was to build a block of 12 nuclear reactors, located 80 miles north of the Ukrainian capital. At the time of the accident in 1986, Reactors 1 through 4 were already online while 5 and 6 stood semi-completed. The ground had already been prepared for Reactors 7 and 8; and today the power plant still controls the land designated for the full 12-reactor block. Combined with Chernobyl’s still-intact electrical transformer substations, capable of handling and redirecting huge power outputs, the creation of a natural energy plant at the site makes a lot of sense.

Even as that lease money trickles in, though, other sources of income at the plant are dwindling. “In 2016 the power plant had 6,000 visitors,” says Anton. “Last year that number went down to 4,500.”

While Chernobyl’s ghost towns are attracting more visitors each year, the plant seems unable to capitalize on these numbers. These days, Anton Povar finds much of his time is spent leading foreign journalists down the Golden Corridor.

“For me, the journalists are the worst,” he sighs. “They all want to find something sensational to write about, but we are just a decommissioned power plant… there’s nothing sensational for them here.”

Despite being only a few inches high, almost every part of the Venus of Willendorf is larger than life. This 30,000-year-old Stone Age statuette has an expansive tummy, an elaborately detailed crotch, and areolae so large they make her pendulous breasts resemble acorns. Despite wearing what looks like a knitted hat—likely a complicated braided hairstyle—she is entirely naked, and commonly thought of as an early symbol of fertility.

Recently, as The Art Newspaper reported, self-professed "artivist" Laura Ghianda posted an image of the work, which lives in Vienna's Naturhistorisches Museum, on Facebook. Shortly afterwards, the social media giant flagged the image as inappropriate content and took it off the site—prompting outrage from art fans and museum curators alike. On Facebook, the museum's director general Christian Koeberl posted: "There has never been a complaint by visitors concerning the nakedness of the figurine. There is no reason […] to cover the Venus of Willendorf and hide her nudity, neither in the museum nor on social media.”

This is not the first time the site has faced opprobrium for its art censorship. Earlier this month, a case from 2011 finally made its way into Parisian courts, with French teacher Frédéric Durand-Baïssas attempting to sue the site for censoring his photograph of Gustave Courbet’s 1866 painting L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World), a close-up depiction of a woman's genitals.

Facebook's censorship policy ostensibly stakes out its position on naked artworks: "We also allow photographs of paintings, sculptures, and other art that depicts nude figures." It's hard to see how the Venus of Willendorf didn't fall under that umbrella—though, standards be damned, perhaps some works of art are simply too nude for Facebook, after all.

Just below the end of Wall Street, at the tip of Lower Manhattan where the island meets the furthest estuaries of the green-grey Atlantic, there are no bananas. I’m around a hundred years too late: In the early 20th century, so many boats bearing bushels of bananas arrived at this spot that the Old Slip piers became known as the Banana Docks, as ships laden with bananas came in to land.

In the shops nearby, admittedly, there are a few—lurid yellow Cavendishes occasionally making an appearance behind the glass sheet windows of Starbucks, or for a buck apiece on the street corner from a local vendor. Unfortunately, the Cavendish will not do. I am here for the Gros Michel—the OG banana that was the standard across the United States from 1870, when it sold for $2 a bunch in Jersey City, until the late 1950s, when the ruinous fungus Panama disease all but wiped it out.

I am on a quest across New York City for the Gros Michel, the Big Mike, the banana that launched a thousand pratfalls. Online, people speak of it in revered digital tones: “I am absolutely dying to try one,” one banana forum user writes, promising to pay “an arm and a leg” for them. Another claims they are so delicious that regular Cavendish bananas are disgusting by comparison. Today, the banana is virtually gone from the consumer market in the United States—finding it will be at best a challenge, and perhaps impossible.

It wasn’t always the case: The Gros Michel was once everywhere. When America fell in love with the banana, this is the fruit that captured its heart. The alchemist who first produced the banana split used a Gros Michel; the chemist who produced artificial banana flavor allegedly had it in mind as well. When Eddie Cantor sings “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” it is Big Mike he’s singing about. In New York, for enough money, you can get nearly anything: dice made of camel bones; a purple latex executioner’s hood; half a cow, sliced lengthways. But can you get a Gros Michel banana?

My first port of call is the internet. I’m by no means the first person to search for this, and strangers online have a few ideas about where I should be looking. A Reddit user thinks she’s seen them for sale in Chinatown. It seems sensible enough: If you can get pomelo and dragon fruit, lychees and longans, perhaps you can get a rare banana as well.

When Panama disease crept across the world in the first half of the 20th century, only a few places in a few countries were spared the blight that blackened bananas from the inside out. The few countries that still produce the Gros Michel today mostly do so under another name: Thihmwe in Myanmar, Johnson in Cuba, Pisang Ambon in Malaysia. In Hawai’i, it is commercially grown as Bluefields. The world’s largest banana firms don’t sell it—Chiquita, Dole and Del Monte have their hands full with Cavendishes—so any fruit with a recognizable blue and yellow sticker is automatically out. (This is helpful as, from pictures and YouTube video taste tests, the Gros Michel looks near indistinguishable from the Cavendish.)

It’s possible that some Gros Michels under another name have slipped into a shipment of fruit from Thailand or Indonesia, therefore—and that’s what I’m banking on. Down on Forsyth Street, in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge, Chinese-speaking vendors sell frilly green cabbage for a dollar a pound. It is just days after Chinese New Year, and supplies of fruit and vegetables seem lower than usual, though pouting red strawberries are selling like hotcakes. Barely a banana to speak of—just a fan of green phalanges, unceremoniously dumped in a cardboard box. I look closer at their stickers. They’re Del Monte. Back to the drawing board.

Back in Brooklyn, specialist fruit stores, markets and street vendors are all selling glossy Cavendishes, custard and green and as flawless as an emoji. (A fruit seller, speaking to the New York Times, described the less ripe version as the Millennial banana; older generations apparently prefer them golden-yellow and flecked with brown, like in the extremely suggestive Chiquita banana commercial.) The Cavendish, in fact, is just about the only banana commercially sold in the city, and the country, with the average American eating over 100 a year.

As the Gros Michel went down, banana producers scrabbled for a variety that they could replace it with—one that, like the Gros Michel, shipped easily, grew readily, and could handle the odd bump and bruise in the packing process. In 1961, producers plumped for the Cavendish. Descended from a plant grown in a Devonshire hothouse 180 years ago, it takes its name from the family name of its Duke and Duchess. It was a compromise, says Dan Koeppel, author of Banana, The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World. The Cavendish is not as hardy as the Gros Michel, leading to changes in how the bananas were boxed and bagged. It is also not quite as delicious, he says. “Chiquita and Dole definitely worried that consumers would reject the Cavendish because it didn’t taste as good.”

Eight years after Cavendishes started being grown commercially, they became the standard in American stores. But this revolution in the banana industry seems to have made little impact on consumers. Today, a slight change of recipe for a commercial foodstuff provokes petitions, public outcry, and much media coverage—but there was barely a peep from banana-munchers whose Gros Michels were entirely replaced by Cavendishes in the early 1960s.

To Koeppel’s mind, and palate, it’s simply because they don’t taste that different. He likens them to vanilla ice-cream. The Cavendish might be a five-gallon tub from the back of the supermarket freezer; the Gros Michel only one step up from that. Neither one, he says, is exactly Haagen-Dazs. “The Gros Michel is a better tasting banana. I don’t think there’s any question about that. But it’s not a million miles ahead of Cavendish,” he says. “There are many, many varieties that are astonishingly good, where you would notice a difference immediately.” None of these more delicious bananas fit the bill from a shipping perspective, however—and so we are stuck with the McDonald’s hamburger of the banana world.

A Chinese friend, hearing of my search for the banana in Chinatown, suggests that I look in New York’s Thai grocery stores instead, along bustling Woodside Avenue, in Queens. Koeppel suspects I won’t find them there. (I don’t.) In countries where people eat many different kinds of bananas, like Thailand, he says, no one hankers for the Gros Michel. “Thailand, I guess, has 40 or 50 fairly common backyard banana varieties,” he says. Many are simply more delicious, like the diminutive “lady finger” Nu Meu Puying banana, or candy-sweet red varieties with a peel the color of lungs.

If banana giants like Dole and Del Monte were to offer a greater selection of bananas to customers, Koeppel says, they’d have to change the way they think about the fruit. At the moment, “it’s an industrial product. It’s all about scale and markets.” More delicious bananas are also more expensive to ship—requiring a cognitive shift in how consumers think about them. In short, we’d have to start thinking of bananas as fruit worth spending more than a few cents on. At the moment, only the Cavendish can promise that.

But how much longer the singular Cavendish will remain in our stores remains to be seen. For some time, it has teetered on the precipice of disaster, after a new incarnation of Panama disease began to wipe out crops in Asia in the late 1980s. In the years since, the fungus has destroyed African crops, Filipino plantations, bananas in China, Pakistan, Indonesia. This month alone, it struck a third commercial banana farm in Queensland, Australia. Cavendish bananas don’t have seeds inside—they’re clones of one another, no matter their provenance. But, like the Gros Michel before them, their monoculture makes them vulnerable to attack. Anything that will wipe out one plant will kill them all. The Cavendish’s days are numbered—unless they can be modified to fight off the plant cancer that has already felled so many.

There are a few options on the table. In Australia, scientists are attempting to “switch on” the gene that makes the Cavendish able to resist this particular blight. In Japan, they have engineered a new form of the Gros Michel, with a lettuce-like skin that fruit fans can simply bite into. (If this one were to become the norm, shipping practices would have to change dramatically, likely driving up prices.) But these, and other biotech options, again prioritize the monoculture that led us to this problem in the first place. Banana barons seem to have learned little from the demise of the Gros Michel, and are now finding themselves bitten by precisely the same bug. No one knows exactly when the Cavendish will come crashing down—Koeppel is reluctant to make any predictions—but it seems an inevitability.

The day I speak to Koeppel, a FedEx box arrives on my desk from Miami. Inside are 26 bananas, each around four inches in length, of varying shades of chartreuse and canary yellow. Having given up on finding the Gros Michel in the wild, I’ve ordered it in from the Miami Fruit Company in South Florida, a tropical fruit grower with so many different bananas they’ll ship you an entire sampler of different varieties. I spend the next week waiting for them to ripen so I can hand them out to Atlas Obscura staff members and their banana-loving family members. “It’s not a taste revelation,” Koeppel has warned me on the phone. Visually, there’s no obvious difference—the inside of the skin is a little silkier, the stem, to my mind, slightly more delicate. Across a room, I’d definitely mistake them for a Cavendish.

Biting into the banana of yesteryear, I expect a more intensely tropical flavor and the vivid sweetness of artificial isoamyl acetate banana flavor. Instead, the fruit is tangy and complex. Everyone who eats one over the following week agrees: This is a superior banana, with a creamier texture and a more delicious flavor. I could eat three in one go, easily. But these bananas have not come cheap. Each costs about $2 a pop, which would get me at least a half-dozen at my local bodega.

One thing is for certain: The model of banana growing is likely to change. Small plantations like this one, where lots of different varieties are grown side by side, is one possibility, though one that would put an end to “Big Banana.” Moving from monoculture to multiculture is a more environmentally sound outcome, but one that may push bananas into a higher cost bracket. Whether consumers believe that to be a reasonable price is hard to say. If that is the eventual outcome of the Cavendish being scuppered, however, the specially grown Gros Michels on my desk may not be a vestige of the past, but the bananas of the future.

In the spring of 1865, Cathay Williams, like many other freed slaves, found herself without a job.

During the American Civil War, Williams had worked as a cook and washer for the anti-slavery Union side, making hundreds of meals for General Philip Sheridan’s tired troops on the battlefields and scrubbing their dirty dishes.

Her experience behind enemy lines possibly informed her undercover aspirations, and provided solid intel for her years incognito as the only documented female Buffalo Soldier, the first African-American peacetime army regiment after the Civil War (and an inspiration for Bob Marley’s song of the same name).

According to some historians, Williams was a trailblazer who deserves praise equal to many great black pioneers. However, others argue there isn’t enough evidence to show she’s worthy of this distinction. There is scant documentation of black women from the era who may have achieved greater feats, making it impossible to assess Williams’ true place in history.

Born to a freeman in 1844, Williams grew up in Independence, Missouri, but she was far from independent. Her mother was a slave, and according to arbitrary codes, she inherited that status, becoming a house slave for William Johnson, a rich farmer. Age 17 marked one of many turning points for Williams and for the divided country. Johnson died in Jefferson City during the onset of the Civil War, but his death did not release her from bondage.

Around 1861, the 13th Army Corps Union soldiers in Jefferson City took Williams, other slaves, and freed persons to Little Rock, Arkansas, under Colonel William P. Benton’s command. “I did not want to go,” she said in an interview with the St. Louis Daily Times in 1876. Colonel Benton told her she’d cook for the Union soldiers, but there was one slight issue. She “had always been a house girl and did not know how to cook.” She learned quickly.

After the war’s end, she returned west to Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, but little is known about what she did, until one recorded moment. On November 15, 1866, Cathay Williams—under the inscrutable, male alias William Cathey—enlisted in the 39th United States Infantry Company A under Captain Charles E. Clarke in St. Louis, Missouri. This infantry, along with six others, became the Buffalo Soldiers.

Women weren’t allowed to serve in the army, but plenty did anyway. Under the guise of Franklin Flint Thompson, Sarah Emma Edmonds served in the Michigan’s 2nd Infantry. Jennie Hodgers, known as Albert Cashier, fought in over 40 skirmishes for the 95th Illinois Infantry. Frances Clayton, Mary Galloway, and the Confederate spy Loreta Janeta Velazquez are a few Civil War examples on a long, known list of women from Joan of Arc to Hua Mulan.

These women’s reasons for enlisting varied. Sarah Emma Edmonds wanted to serve her country and assert her independence. In 1865, she once wrote in her memoir, “I could only thank God that I was free and could go forward and work, and I was not obliged to stay at home and weep.” Others, like Florena Budwin, wanted to fight alongside their husbands, and many from working class or poor backgrounds needed an income.

The latter was one of two reasons Williams enlisted. The military was (and still) provided freed black men job security, money, and a way out of poverty when prospects were little to none. It was even harder for black women. “I wanted to make my own living and not be dependent on relations or friends,” Williams said. A steady paycheck assured her the independence she wanted, but her cousin was another reason she joined. Her cousin’s name is unknown, but he and his friend knew Williams’s secret. “They never ‘blowed’ on me,” she told the St. Louis Daily Times.

How they kept it for so long and from 75 other privates remains conjecture. Buffalo Soldier historian Frank Schubert says “this illuminates an incompetence in the medical staff. If the guy [doctor] had done his job, she wouldn’t have been in the army.” During the Civil War, there was such high demand for soldiers that some infantries took anyone that looked somewhat healthy and down to fight. With so many soldiers on the battleground, women could take cover in plain sight because no one was looking. U.S. National Archivist DeAnne Blanton adds, “because black people were invisible as far as individuals and being paid close attention to, we know [of] hardly any black women who passed as men in the army.”

Despite Williams’s army knowledge, guarding the expanding Western frontier from Native Americans, cattle thieves, and outlaws was extremely intense. She got sick quite often. Starting in February 1867, she was hospitalized for an unknown illness and on April 10 for an itch, which by 1800s medical standards“was usually scabies, eczema, lice...”

When she was healthy, she marched through Kansas and New Mexico from fort to fort. “I carried my musket and did guard and other duties while in the army,” she said in the St. Louis Daily Times interview. There are no historical records to confirm she fought enemies or fought in combat, but she did her job, until she couldn’t do it anymore.

In January 1868, after eight months off sick leave, her health declined. She was admitted to four hospitals on five different occasions, and no one ever figured she was a woman. Even if she abstained from undressing, there are no records of her treatment. For many historians this leaves more questions than answers. In the 1992 article “Black Woman Soldier 1866-1868,” Blanton wrote that it “raises questions about the quality of medical care, even by mid-19th century standards, available to the soldiers of the U.S. Army, or at least to the African-American soldiers.”

Eventually, a post surgeon discovered William Cathey was really Cathay Williams. From January 1868 up to that point, Williams was already fed up with the army. “Finally I got tired and wanted to get off. I played sick, complained of pains in my side, and rheumatism in my knees.” In her discharge disability certificate, the surgeon claimed William was “continually on sick report without benefit. He is unable to do military duty.... This condition dates prior to enlistment.”

So, on October 14, 1868, William Cathey was discharged from the 38th infantry at Fort Bayard, New Mexico, having been dubbed “feeble” and found out as a woman. Some discovered women were similarly discharged without trial. Others faced long prison or mental institution sentences. For Williams, the biggest backlash was from her fellow privates. “The men all wanted to get rid of me after they found out I was a woman,” she said. “Some of them acted real bad to me.”

Williams went back to cooking and washing in Pueblo, Colorado. There she got married, but the marriage didn’t last. “He stole my watch and chain, a hundred dollars in money and my team of horses and wagon,” Williams said of her husband. She applied for a disability pension on the grounds of deafness, rheumatism, and nerve damage in 1891, but her claim was rejected the following year. Though a pension medical examination found that all her toes on both feet were amputated, from what circumstances and when is still unknown. The Pension Bureau ruled no disability existed, and denied her claim.

After that, there’s not much recorded about her life. Historians are lucky enough to have a few documents, and estimate she died in Trinidad, Colorado, between 1892 and 1900.

It took nearly a century after her death until historians learned of her tale. Upon discovery, a mythos around Williams emerged. Soon, artists such as William Jennings drew imagined renderings of her with unrealistically sleek, relaxed hair dressed in a slim blue Zouave uniform. Jennings painted her “to highlight and honor the triumphs, trials and tribulations of women in the military.” There are insufficient descriptions, photos, or paintings of her, so the drawings are mere conjecture, and this guesswork fuels various narratives about her.

In the 2002 book Cathay Williams: From Slave to Female Buffalo Soldier, historian Phillip Thomas Tucker attempted to document Williams’s life and largely speculated she was an unforgotten hero who “can be viewed as a pioneer for the thousands of American women serving in today’s United States’ armed forces.” In a book review, author Sarah Eppler Janda wrote that “Tucker fails to demonstrate what was so noteworthy about this one woman who pretended to be sick in order to avoid service that she herself willingly entered.” Others have further claimed she saved her fellow privates from outlaws and was awarded for her bravery.

Frank Schubert believes these historians are projecting Williams’s story to fit a certain worldview based on little information and turning an average soldier into a larger-than-life model, especially compared to black figures like Bessie Coleman, Mary Hamilton, Ida B. Wells, and other Buffalo Soldiers. He adds that the lack of inclusion and representation in black history portrayals shouldn’t deflect focus from lesser-known figures that have sacrificed far more for the black community.

“She’s extraordinary in a way because she took this great risk of joining the army, but it doesn’t make her a hero,” he says. For Blanton, it’s important to look at changing perspectives as historians. She says, “we all define hero the way we define hero, but we have to look at the context of her time. What would be common for a woman today, to do that then, was extraordinary.” In the face of racism, sexism, and more, her simple act was significant for her time.

Williams wasn’t intending to be a hero or highlight a cause when she joined the army. As a former slave with no education, she simply wanted “to make her way through the world,” as Blanton points out. There were probably more black women like her, whose words were never written down.

In 2016, on a hot June day, the Richard Allen Cultural Center and Museum in Leavenworth, Kansas, unveiled a bronze bust of a Buffalo Soldier. It’s a new addition to the Center’s several monuments of Buffalo Soldiers. This statue is different, though. It’s carved in the presumed likeness of Cathay Williams or William Cathey. Either is fine.

Cancer is often considered a disease of modernity, fueled by our longevity, and dietary and lifestyle choices. But recent studies have shown that the it has plagued us for a very long time. To learn more about the prevalence of breast cancer in the past, a team of oncologists led by Raffaella Bianucci of the University of Warwick, studied breast iconography throughout art history to look for evidence of the disease.

Their work, published this month in the journal The Lancet Oncology, has led to the identification of the earliest known pictorial depictions of breast cancer.

Signs of the disease were found in the oil panel transposition of Michelangelo’s statue The Night, painted by Michele di Rodolfo del Ghirlandaio (also known as Michele Tosini), a Florence-based exponent of Italian mannerism, in the 16th century. The left breast of the female subject appears smaller then the right one, and shows signs of nipple retraction. According to the authors, this is suggestive that she had the disease.

The team found further signs in another Renaissance painting, The Allegory of Fortitude, by fellow Florentine Maso da San Friano (1531–1571). In this case, the female figure appears to have a tumor that broke through the skin, with evidence of swollen tissue around the nipple. "These features are consistent with those of an ulcerated, necrotising breast cancer and associated lymphoedema,” the researchers write.

The fact that both paintings date to the 16th century may not be coincidental. As Bianucci and her colleagues explain in their paper, the Renaissance was marked by important innovations in medical practice—including breast tumor surgery. French surgeon Barthélémy Cabrol (1529–1603), who served at the court of King Henry IV and taught at the University of Montpellier, was one of the first practitioners of mastectomy, the surgical removal of breasts.

However, radical mastectomy, or the complete removal of a breast, was rare, for a variety of reasons, including the lack of general anesthesia and aseptic techniques—and the fact that breast were considered a symbol of femininity and many male surgeons found the practice inhumane.

The authors posit that the depiction of breast cancer in these early and late Renaissance paintings was intentional, which may prove that the disease was relatively common at the time.

Retro Flip Down Clock

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There's just something special about mechanical flip down clocks, with their satisfying plastic “clack” at the passing of each minute. Compared to the highly calibrated digital timepieces built into our phones and watches these days, flip down clocks feel practically steampunk. They provide a not-so-subtle reminder of time passing, plus the opportunity to admire a clean, simple machine at work.

If you've ever longed to stop looking at your phone quite so much and start living life one click at a time, look no further.

Naky Gaglo begins his tours of Lisbon in Praça do Comércio, a grand plaza that once served as the commercial business district of Lisbon. Today, most tourists focus on the lemon-colored buildings and the triumphal arch, built to honor Lisbon’s survival and reconstruction after an earthquake in 1755. But Gaglo brings his tour to the plaza for a different reason. Slave ships once moored here along the Tagus River. Gaglo starts in Praça do Comércio because he wants his group to begin to imagine how the architecturally stunning district acted as a brutal epicenter for human trafficking.

“[This is] the other side of Portugal that isn’t well-known—the African side of it,” Gaglo says. “In Europe, slavery is not taught the way it should be. I'm just trying to uncover what the secrets are and educate people about an important part of the history.”

Portugal was responsible for shipping 4.9 million people from Western Africa to Brazil, by far the largest amount of human cargo transported during the Atlantic slave trade. And yet, while traversing the cobblestone streets of Lisbon, or sipping the barrel-aged red wine in Porto, there is little hint of the country’s role in participating in one of the bloodiest man-made atrocities in human history. It’s a missed opportunity to explore one of Europe’s most breathtaking countries by taking an honest look at how culture, history, and racism still shape this gem on the Iberian Peninsula, as well as to highlight the rich cultural diversity of the country today.

That’s why Gaglo decided to do something about it. Originally from Togo, he runs the African Lisbon Tour, a five-hour English-language walking tour through the capital city’s center that unravels the complexities of Portugal’s colonial past with intelligence and finesse, drawing clear, insightful relationships between past and present.

“We don't have very much about slavery here,” Gaglo says. “There are almost no monuments or museums. Sometimes you have exhibitions, but there's really nothing that is relevant.”

Considering that Lisbon has a substantial African community, he finds it incomprehensible that there hasn’t been a larger initiative to educate foreigners or even locals about Portugal’s part in the slave trade. While official statistics of African inhabitants aren’t known, because the Portuguese Census doesn’t ask questions about ethnicity, the cultural makeup of the city conveys an atmosphere of richness and diversity.

“We have [people] from Mozambique, Angola, and Cape Verde,” says Gaglo. “It’s a shock to tourists, but it’s a positive shock. The culture is very vibrant here.”

The tour adds a somber dissonance to Lisbon’s aesthetic charm. As Naky guides the group, 15th-century neighborhoods built from intricate mosaic tiles become fraternal meeting grounds for Africans seeking refuge. The neighborhood of Mocambo, for example, now referred to as Madragoa, served as a place of both extreme duress and sacred assembly. In Mocambo, slave owners’ were often negligent of their human chattel who, after dying, were left to rot on the streets, causing significant sanitation and public health concerns. As a result, in 1515 King Manuel I ordered that a massive burial site, known as Poço dos Negros, be built and filled with quicklime—a site now replaced with shops and markets.

Mocambo was also a significant meeting ground for slaves to practice their traditional West African beliefs. It’s where they buried bolsas de mandinga (mandinga bags), sacred talismans worn by men meant to ward off evil spirits, and took part in traditional religious ceremonies in accordance with what many Afro-Brazilians now practice as Candomblé.

Naky also takes the group to Rua do Comércio, which once sheltered a bustling slave market at Terreiro do Pelourinho Velho, where human lives were bartered. The tour then stops in the nearby neighborhood of São Bento. Now home to many bustling shops, São Bento became a prominent Cape Verdean neighborhood in the 1960s. It’s here where Naky and his group take a mid-tour break at an African restaurant that provides a delicious assortment of West African food and drink, such as spicy pork, tuna, or tofu with cachupa, a Cape Verdean dish of corn, beans, and cassava. It’s an ideal moment for both tour guide and tourist to discuss what they’ve learned and reflect on how it might challenge preconceived notions of Portugal’s past.

Afterward, the tour passes the Memorial as Vitimas do Massacre Judaico de 1506 in Rossio Square, a monument that remembers the victims of the anti-Semitic campaign that resulted in the execution of an estimated 2,000 to 4,000 people, who were accused of being Jewish. It was a critical event that is seen as one of the factors leading up to the Portuguese Inquisition, which formally began in 1536. It’s an interesting place to take the tour, because this location was also where slaves gathered for different forms of spiritual assistance and brotherhood during the 15th century, and demonstrates that the viciousness of ethnic and religious persecution affected many communities during Portugal’s colonial era.

The tour ultimately concludes near a statue at the Praça Dom Luis, named after the Portuguese king who reigned during the bloody Scramble for Africa.*

By using this history as an anchor in his tour, Naky contextualizes the integration of modern-day African communities. He shines a light on African businesses, music, art, and especially food.

“Even after the tour, they're really amazed by the history,” Gaglo says of his participants. “They really like the fact that it’s not a European tour; it's an African tour. They like having something different. This is my biggest motivation for doing it.”

Because the tour is done entirely by foot, Naky is able to guide tourists through parts of Lisbon that would not normally be discovered, and his extensive research into the subject makes it well worth the physical exercise. His tour, and the conversation it has helped to stimulate, may also be making a difference. Toward the end of 2017, Lisbon residents voted to finally erect a memorial to commemorate the millions of Africans that fell victim to the slave trade, sparking a heated debate about the true nature of Portugal’s role in slavery and the need for public accountability. No doubt, if and when completed, it will provide an invaluable opportunity for education, as well as an excellent addition to Naky’s tour.

*Update: This post has been updated to reflect recent changes in the tour itinerary.

On the first Saturday of February, Peruvians raise a glass to their country’s most well-known cocktail: the Pisco Sour. Since 2003, this simple twist on the classic Whiskey Sour has had its own national holiday. But while the drink evokes a sense of pride in Peru, the Pisco Sour is largely considered the invention of an unlikely figure: a Mormon man from Salt Lake City named Victor V. Morris.

The curious path that led Morris from Utah to the Peruvian Andes began not in spirits but in flowers. Born into a large and well-respected Welsh Mormon family, Morris co-ran a floral shop with two of his brothers. But tragedy struck in 1900, when Morris’s older brother, Burton, got into a fight while on a date and was killed by two bullets through his heart. Worse, the assailant was acquitted in a high-profile case after pleading self-defense. An outraged Morris told a reporter that the legislature “should immediately repeal the law making murder an offense in Utah and thus save the State the expense of going to trial.”

After Burton’s death, Morris managed the flower shop for a few more years before selling the business to take a clerical position with a local railroad company. He may have stayed in this position and never left the United States if not for the business venture of a well-known Salt Lake City resident named A.W. McCune. A powerful figure, McCune had transformed the capital’s streetcar system from wagons to electric cars and run for both Mayor and Senate. He owned the Salt Lake Herald and half the Utah Power Company, and shortly after the turn of the century, McCune embarked on a massive Peruvian mining endeavor funded by Gilded Age robber barons including J.P. Morgan, Henry Clay Frick, and the Hearsts.

In the late 1800s, a scouting expedition led by McCune discovered old mines first excavated by Spanish colonists in the town of Cerro de Pasco. Until its liberation in 1820, the town had been a great source of riches for the Spanish. According to one local legend, the rocks around Cerro de Pasco’s campfires “wept silver.” McCune signed a mining agreement with the Peruvian government, and by 1902, McCune had broken ground. The project transformed Peru’s economy and kickstarted its mining industry. This gritty, turn of the century mining town would be the setting for the creation and popularization of Peru’s signature cocktail.

Back in Salt Lake City, residents took note of McCune’s endeavors. The city was no stranger to the mining business, which was a vital source of its growth. Many residents joined McCune’s business venture, and, in 1902, Victor V. Morris travelled to the dusty, high-altitude city of Cerro de Pasco as one of the early arrivals from Utah to join the project. There, he worked on another of McCune’s extraordinary endeavors: the construction of the world’s highest elevation railroad tracks. The railway would lead from Cerro de Pasco to La Oroya, a city with access to a port where precious metals could be shipped abroad.

Industry transformed the dusty Andes village. By the early 1900s, Cerro de Pasco was Peru’s second largest city after Lima. Americans and other expats walked the bustling, newly drawn streets, and they both expected the latest amenities and had the mining wealth to pay for it. Soon, upscale saloons dotted the city center. These bars introduced Morris to Pisco, the yellow-colored brandy produced across Peru and Chile.

Given Mormonism’s reputation for prohibiting alcohol, the prospect of Morris enjoying the local brandy may sound like him succumbing to a boomtown’s illicit pleasures. But at the time, Salt Lake City was full of breweries, wineries, and distilleries owned and operated by members of the Mormon Church. Latter Day Saints apostle and church leader Brigham Young owned the city’s first saloon and a winery, and it wasn’t until 1921 that LDS president Heber J. Grant made teetotaling Church law—a development that aligned with the growing temperance movement across the United States. The death of Morris’s own brother was fueled by anger over poorly made mint juleps. So Morris was no stranger to saloons in Salt Lake City or Cerro de Pasco.

Peruvian oral historian Dr. José Antonio Salazar Mejia notes that this may have been where Morris discovered a traditional Peruvian drink that would serve as a prototype for the Pisco Sour. In 2012, a Peruvian Creole cookbook from 1903 was discovered with a similar recipe to the Pisco Sour, lending some evidence to this possibility.

According to Morris himself, though, it was something else that led to the Pisco Sour: a massive, all-day party. The completion of the railway was a cause of much cheer, and, in July 1904, a major celebration took place. Newspaper reports note that nearly 5,000 people attended. Women held Peruvian and American flags made of silk with gold and silver threads, and local celebrities and dignitaries joined the festivities. Morris, who oversaw the event, allegedly explained later—in a testimony to his family—that he turned to Pisco when the grand celebration ran out of whiskey for the sours being consumed.

Despite Morris’s claim, the exact year of the Pisco Sour’s birth is still contested, partly because it did not achieve widespread popularity until Morris retired to Lima with his Peruvian wife and three children, where he opened a saloon and christened it Morris’ Bar.

Located on Calle de Boza in what is now Jirón de la Unión, just a block from Plaza San Martín, Morris’ Bar quickly became a major hub of intellectual, political, and celebrity activity. By then, Morris had lost part of his leg in an accident, but it didn’t affect his demeanor. Morris was known as an affable and generous host and developed a dedicated following. Famed Peruvian writers Abraham Valdelomar, José María Eguren, and Pablo Abril de Vivero regularly scribbled their names into the guest book. As did anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber and adventurer Richard Halliburton.

Pisco Sours were the signature drink. Famed American aviator and soldier of fortune Dean Ivan Lamb noted the strength of the drink in his memoir The Incurable Filibuster, writing: “In Morris’ Bar I ordered a pisco sour. It tasted like a pleasant soft drink and I ordered another, to which the bartender objected, informing me that one was usually sufficient. After an argument he made another—from that time events were not very clear … ”

By the 1920s, some of Morris’s bartenders had taken the Pisco Sour recipe to other Lima bars. This both spread the drink and changed it, adding to the difficulty in identifying who exactly “invented” the Pisco Sour. If anything, it was more of a collaborative effort. Notably, Mario Bruiget, a one-time employee of Morris' Bar, brought the drink to the Grand Hotel Maury, where it’s believed he added egg white and bitters. Today, this is the style most commonly served in Peru. The Grand Hotel Maury, which is still in operation, claims to be the original site of the modern Pisco Sour.

Victor V. Morris passed away in 1929, and his bar shut down that same year. As a testament to Morris’s contribution to modern Peruvian culture and the country he called home for more than half his life, a bust stands of him now in Parque de Amistad, in Lima’s Surco district.

After Morris’s passing, the drink only grew in popularity. By the 1930s, it had reached San Francisco, and the drink was a popular oddity in New York City by the 1960s. In Lima, the drink became the signature cocktail of high-end hotel bars—Orson Welles and Ernest Hemingway enjoyed the drink when in Peru. Apopular legend from the Gran Hotel Bolivar describes a barefoot Ava Gardner dancing around the hotel bar after one too many Pisco Sours before being carried to her room by John Wayne himself.

Today, the drink is not just for the elite, but a Peruvian staple. And while the drink may have been popularized by an American, one thing is for sure: The Pisco Sour is fully Peruvian now.

When someone commits a crime, it’s safe to assume that person wants to get rid of the evidence; they may wear gloves, or conceal their identity. But criminals get caught, often on the most incidental oversights—some as small and seemingly innocent as a knot in a string.

And, it turns out, knots are exactly one of those common oversights-turned-evidence, thanks to the small but significant field of knot forensics, in which specialists examine knots to unveil forensic clues. This is what Glenn Dickey, knots expert, has done to help prosecute criminals; as one of few knot experts in the world who contributes to forensics work, Dickey uses his advanced knowledge of knot tying to establish tricky details: whether the knot-tier was left- or right handed, skilled or novice at knot tying, and in some cases, whether the crime was premeditated.

Dickey, based in Ohio, is part of the North American chapter of the International Guild of Knot Tyers (IGKT), a group united over its love of knots. Normally, knot enthusiasts spend time preserving knowledge of historic and decorative knots, not solving murders; for example, Dickey honed some of his knot skills while rigging a 15th-century style ship and recreating an ancient English chariot. Occasionally, though, police, detectives or prosecuting parties find themselves in a bit of a bind, you could say, when it comes to crime scenes that include rope—at which point they often contact the IGKT, looking for someone to help.

According to Dickey, it’s often the prosecution in a trial rather than police who look for forensic help, and requests can come from various parts of the country. Dickey’s knot forensic work was especially handy for a case in Michigan in the early 2000s, where the suspects of a woman’s murder were whittled down to two men by the time Dickey was called upon to help: a mechanic and a butcher. The murderer had used cord to bind his victim, whom he then deposited into a body of water. Unfortunately for the killer, Dickey spotted a specific knot that many people wouldn’t know of outside of the butcher trade, and he was also able to identify the handedness of the criminal, which matched the butcher. Afterward the police interrogated the correct suspect, who confessed and was found guilty.

Knot forensics work hinges not only on expertise, but also basic human nature. Most people, Dickey says, are not thinking clearly when they are committing crimes, even if they’re premeditated. This, as Dickey recalls learning from the writings of knot forensics expert and IGKT co-founder Geoffrey Budworth, means that when under stress, criminals will use the knots they’re most familiar with and not think about the evidence they leave behind. Knots can be made left or right handed based on the twist of the knot, or which direction the rope is drawn through specific loops—even the rope used can be twisted primarily to the left or the right. While certain knots can be formed left or right handed intentionally, it’s rare for a non-expert to notice this difference, especially in the heat of the moment. If someone is committing a crime, and they are right-handed, “the knot will almost certainly be formed right handed,” Dickey says.

For Dickey, his own process often begins after the investigators send him photographs to study the knots found at the scene. Here, Dickey puts to use a specialized sub-skill: as a former writer and editor of the IGKT newsletter, he learned to study images of knots that were sent in by curious knot enthusiasts, in order to recreate, identify or describe them. For knot forensics, he uses the images as a sort of blueprint, and is even able to access specific kinds of rope or cord to match the type used in the crime. Once he has the rope or cord in hand, he will study the crime-scene photographs, recreate the knots at home, and analyze his findings.

The photos he uses, as you might imagine, are graphic. “I don’t do this lightly. I have nightmares over this,” Dickey says. Much of his work, he adds, includes learning the mindset of a murderer, and knowing that something he loves—knot tying and ropes—was used for nefarious purposes. If light-hearted decorative knots are his labor of love, knot forensics is his labor of duty. “I know if it were a member of my family and someone had the knowledge, I’d want them to help me. For evil to triumph, all that has to happen is for good men to do nothing,” Dickey says.

Even if the killer is not a person skilled with rope or cordage of any kind, Dickey can tell quite a bit about them by the knots they made. In a recently closed case in Maryland, Dickey was able to study images of the murderer’s makeshift campsite, which was full of simple, poorly formed knots and wrapped rope, and match these knots against those the suspect made during the crime. The now-convicted murderer also used crudely made decorative knots—made purely for his own aesthetic enjoyment—in the cordage he used to commit the crime. These knots not only matched the low-skill knots that the murderer used on his campsite, but the significant amount of time he spent arranging them in the rope indicated premeditated intent.

Knot forensics work needn’t just be used for the most morbid of crimes, however. “We had another [IGKT] member in Florida who was called in on a string of burglaries, where the perpetrator used rope to tie things up,” Dickey explained, “the perpetrator had used the same unique knot at each crime scene.” Dickey says that the knots most people make are of only a few simple types—half-hitches, overhand knots, and granny knots among them. A 2011 analysis of 100 knot forensics cases by knot forensics consultant Robert Chisnall agrees with this sentiment—only about 3-6 percent of knots in forensic cases were what Chisnall calls “sophisticated.”

While Dickey is glad to put his knot skills to good use, he seems happiest when talking about old ships and knot-tying lore, rather than murder and crime-solving. It’s a heavy job. For the rest of us, Dickey has a word of advice, almost a plea: “First of all, don't kill anyone. It’s not a good idea.” And if you are out there committing any crimes, stay clear of the rope, he warns—“it leaves too much evidence behind.”

When drought ravaged California in the first half of the 2010s, it caused a treepocalypse. Weakened by lack of water, parched oaks, firs, and pines succumbed by the hundreds of millions to pests, fungi, and disease. The state government's Tree Mortality Viewer still shows the carnage, with red dead zones stretching across the state like a trail of blood.

As their brethren shriveled up around them, though, a stand of trees in northern Mendocino County stayed lush and green. How did they do it? Just the way the survival handbooks tell you to: via a secret store of water, deep underground.

In a new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers detail the results of a four-year study during which they measured the water stored in the bedrock at the Eel River Critical Zone Observatory. The observatory is part of a worldwide network established to learn more about Earth's "critical zone"—the thin layer of the Earth's surface, from the bedrock on up, that influences and is influenced by human life.

The amount of water they found was "beyond our wildest imagination," says the study's lead author, Daniella Rempe. The rocks at the site were able to hold onto nearly 30 percent of the year's accumulated rainfall, more than the soil itself. They also may contribute to a kind of rationing system, parceling water out to the trees above them all year long.

As Rempe explains, hydrologists have long known how to measure surface water, which stays near the top of the soil, and groundwater, which sinks beneath the bedrock layer and feeds into streams. But water also stays in the bedrock, in the form of droplets that hang from crevices, or thin films that layer on the rock's surface. Quantifying these drips and drabs is more complicated. "With soil, you can look at individual particles, or poke instruments in directly," Rempe says. "In rocks, you can't really do that."

For this study, the scientists drilled nine wells in the forest's bedrock, and used neutron probes to measure the hydrogen present in the wells. They then deduced how much water gathered each year, and how long it stuck around.

The results, Rempe says, were "pretty tremendous:" each well ended up receiving between 4 to 21 inches of water per year, meaning the rock stores up to 27 percent of the annual rainfall. The bedrock appears to have a maximum capacity, sloshing anything extra into the groundwater store instead. As Rempe puts it, "The cup gets full, and then the size of the cup dictates how much water is available over the summer," ensuring a steady, rationed supply.

And while the soil dried out relatively quickly after rain stopped falling, the rock was able to hold onto the water for much longer. This may explain why the trees were able to survive the drought: "Because the cup gets full even in a drought year, that place might be particularly resilient to mortality that relates to water stress," says Rempe.

Many mysteries remain. For one thing, it's unclear exactly how the trees pull the water out of the rock's tiny openings. (Like most trees, they likely get some help from symbiotic fungi, whose thinner hyphae, or branching filaments, can wind their way in there.) Researchers also aren't sure why trees in other places—the Sierra Nevada, for example—succumbed to the drought in such large numbers, even though they also sit on water-storing bedrock. Scientists are looking into this, as well as some basic questions about the storage system itself, Rempe says: "Where exactly is the water, and why is it stored where it is?"

Some lessons we can take away immediately, though: Be prepared. Don't guzzle all your water at once. And, of course, it never hurts to hide your supplies deep underground.

Deep down in the ocean, there lives a type of sponge that can grow close to 10 feet tall. This sponge, Monorhaphis chuni, belongs to the class of glass sponges, which have skeletons made of silicon. In some species of sponges, these skeletons grow as a fine, criss-crossing lattice. But M. chuni grows a single spicule that anchors it to the sea floor. Its softer body grows around this strong silicone spine; the sponges look like giant, underwater reeds or large marine feathers, tethered to the ground.

For many years, scientists imagined that the deep ocean was empty of life. But after a telegraph cable was pulled from the ocean floor covered in marine creatures in 1860, scientific expeditions sailed around the world dredging the depths to find out what lived there. The Challenger expedition, which spent three years circumnavigating the globe, first discovered glass sponges in the 1870s; M. chuni was discovered during the Valdivia expedition, which lasted from 1898 to 1899 and looked even deeper in the ocean for life. Off the coast of East Africa, dredging to a depth of more than 5,000 feet, the expedition brought up one of its prize discoveries—an M. chuni spicule more than nine feet long. No other animal makes silicon structures as large as the spicules of M. Chuni.

Dating the spicules can be difficult. Sponges like these have lived in the oceans for millions of years; M. chuni are thought to have first evolved more than 650 million years ago, and individual sponges can live for millennia. Their spicules are made of hundreds of concentric layers of silicon, gathered around an axial core. A cross-section can look a lot like concentric tree rings, but these layers don’t correspond to an exact time period in the same way that tree rings do. The make-up of those layers does have a close relationship with the temperature of the surrounding seawater, though, and by matching up those patterns, a team of scientists estimated the lifespan of one giant spicule, found in the East China Sea, to be 11,000 years old, plus or minus 3,000 years. (They published their results in a 2012 Chemical Geography paper.)

The longevity of these sponges make them a promising candidate for understanding the history of the deep sea and the planet’s climate going back thousands of years into the past. In the past 20 years, climate scientists have been researching the possible uses of sponges as proxies for long-term changes in the climate: The carbon values in shallow-water calcified sponges, for instance, have been shown to be a good indicator of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. The deep past of the deep sea, though, has remained more mysterious.

In the 2012 paper, the team of researchers, based in China and Germany, proposed the possibility that M. chuni spicules could be a “paleoclimate archive,” which captured data about the climate of the distant past. Recently, in a paper published Geophysical Research Letters, a team led by the same scientists showed how the ratios of silicon and germanium in sponge spicules could document the changes of silica in the ocean during the last deglacial period.

The silicon available at different depths of the ocean depends in part on the lives and production of tiny algae, diatoms, which live closer to the ocean’s surface and suck up carbon dioxide as they photosynthesize. Silicon is a crucial nutrient in diatom life, and when they die, diatoms carry both carbon and silicon deeper down into the ocean. By looking at the changes in silicon and germanium ratios in the sponge spicules, it’s possible to better understand the long-term history of diatom production and its contribution to the global carbon cycle. These striking silicon spines, a wonder in their own right, hold secrets to the past that we're just beginning to discover.

No eyes, eight claws, a body shape somewhere between an overstuffed couch and Jabba the Hutt. Microscopic tardigrades may be far from many common conceptions of "cute," but there's a surprising amount to love about "moss piglets" or "water bears," as they're sometimes charmingly called. When the going gets tough, tardigrades hunker down, suspend their metabolisms, and spend up to five years off-duty: an inspiration to anyone who's ever needed an afternoon nap. They're incredibly hardy, but spend all their lives waddling around and sucking on moss. And if tardigrades are the post-apocalyptic future of Earth, well—there are worse creatures we could leave to care for the planet. And now, thanks to the efforts of scientists' work in Japan, we've got a whole new species of them to appreciate.

We may never know how long Macrobiotus shonaicus had been minding its own business on a clump of moss in a concrete parking lot in Tsuruoka-City, Japan. Members of a research team led by Daniel Stec from Jagiellonian University in Poland took a sample of the moss, and found 10 specimens of the brand new tardigrade—the 168th known species in Japan. The research was published yesterday in the open access journal PLoS One.

To the untrained eye, one tardigrade looks much like another. M. shonaicus, however, has a few key points of difference—an extra bulge on its internal "legs" and an atypical solid surface to its eggs. Like two other recently discovered tardigrade species, the eggs have flexible filaments on top. That commonality, scientists say in the paper, may suggest a common ancestor for these three species as well as two other similar members of the group.

Rudimentary color theory is one of the first things we learn as children, albeit while slopping paint together. But calling the blend of red and yellow "orange" doesn't raise many eyebrows, in elementary school and otherwise. After all, even oranges are colored orange.

The color orange got its own name fairly recently, though. In fact, it was only after the fruit arrived in Europe that Western languages began referring to the shade as "orange." It's worth noting that colors are often named how they are because of social constructs. For example, in ancient China and Japan, a fixed term for blue didn't exist: Instead, the term was qing, which could refer to either green or blue.

Before orange (the fruit, that is) stormed Europe, yellow-red was called simply that: yellow-red, or even just red. While both red and yellow are terms derived from Proto-Indo-European words, the roots of the word "orange" come from the Sanskrit term for the orange tree: nāraṅga. Traders traveled with the nāraṅga across the Middle East, and it became the Arabic naaranj. When Islamic rule spread to southern Italy and Spain in the Middle Ages, the orange tree made it to Europe.

While the word stayed close to its original roots in several tongues—naranja in Spanish and arancia in Italian—it lost that first "n" in both French and English. A handful of other words did, too: Before a linguistic shift called metanalysis, where the "n" sounds shifted to the indefinite article, anapron once read as a napron and an uncle as a nuncle. By the 1300s, the word "orange" and its variants had spread across Europe, and denoted the name for the brightly-colored fruit.

The name for the color came later, though. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term "orange" started to be used in English to describe cloth and clothing in the 16th century. This also coincided with Portuguese sailors bringing a sweeter, tastier orange from China to Europe. "China apple" is still a synonym for orange in a number of languages, including Dutch and Ukrainian. But in Europe and beyond, "orange" became both the name for the color and the fruit. Even in China, the orange's likely birthplace, the characters for the fruit and the color are the same.

Why did oranges receive the honor of naming such a standard color, as opposed to, say, pumpkins or carrots? It probably has to do with timing. Pumpkins spread from the Americas to the rest of the world after the voyages of Christopher Columbus, and carrots didn't become orange until the 16th century. Before that, they were yellow, white, purple, and red, but rarely orange. It was only after the fruit became synonymous with the color that the carrot became orange, when 16th-century Dutch farmers bred them that way (one myth says this was to honor William I, Prince of Orange, but that's likely not true). For some people, the most orange object they could think of may have simply been the fruit.

With its place on the color wheel, orange commands a special respect, despite the fact that there are plenty of other colors named after foods (think apricot-colored scarves and raspberry-tinted berets). It's all the more interesting, given that oranges' exteriors are often naturally green. The bright color we associate with the fruit occurs only if temperatures drop while the orange is on the tree.

And while oranges can be perfectly ripe, commercially grown oranges are often exposed to ethylene gas to destroy the green chlorophyll in the peel. But it would be even more confusing if oranges were called "greens."

If a dark space beneath the earth contains something wondrous, be it a collection of Paleolithic paintings, a stunning display of stalactites, or simply a bunch of neatly stacked human bones, people will want to take a look. Opening such a space to the public often requires installing artificial lighting in previously unlit spaces. Unfortunately, a newly incandescent or fluorescent glow can awaken a little green menace.

The native residents of deep, dark places—which include pale and eyeless species of arachnids, insects, crustaceans, fish, and amphibians adapted to a life without light—survive on a limited supply of food brought in from the surface or produced by specialized bacteria and archaea. Introducing a new source of energy—light—can cause big changes to these environments by creating conditions friendly to photosynthetic organisms that couldn’t previously survive there. When these find their way in via air, water, animals, or humans, it’s easy for them to set up shop on illuminated surfaces.

The group of light-dependent newcomers are known as lamp flora (from the German lampenflora). Young lamp flora typically consists of microscopic algae and cyanobacteria, which collectively form a greenish slime on surfaces illuminated by fake sunlight. With time, mosses and ferns can join the subterranean party. A flowering plant or two may even put in an appearance.

The arrival of lamp flora in newly lit underground environments can threaten the livelihoods of the original darkness-dwellers. The latter are adept at dealing with food scarcity, and often slow down growth and reproduction in turn. Lamp flora, on the other hand, can grow rapidly in the presence of light. Organisms that like to munch on lamp flora may show up, establishing a new ecosystem. The darkness-adapted community isn’t able to keep up, and can eventually go extinct.

In addition to disrupting the local ecosystem, lamp flora tends to spoil the very environment that lights were installed to illuminate. No one wants a prehistoric hand painting or nifty cave crystal to sprout green fuzz, but it’s more than a matter of aesthetics. As lamp flora grows, it leaks organic acids. Although the acids aren’t particularly strong, they can put caves (and their cool formations) at risk because these spaces are often made of limestone and other carbonate-rich rocks susceptible to dissolving. If lamp flora becomes encased in a cave’s carbonate minerals, the organisms can leave their pigments behind as a permanent green stain.

The most straightforward way to get rid of lamp flora is to remove the artificial lighting. This isn’t always a popular solution, since it would likely mean closing a cave to visitors. Another option is to brush or scrape off the green gunk, but this can spread it to other lit areas and potentially damage the surface being cleaned.

Chemicals can also be used to combat lamp flora. The famous Lascaux Cave in southwestern France was permanently closed in 1963 due in part to la maladie verte—a green biofilm that grew on the hundreds of Paleolithic wall paintings after lighting was installed. To deal with this issue, workers sprayed the cave walls with a potent combination of antibiotics and formaldehyde. (A simple solution of household bleach is another way to destroy unwanted slime.) The high-octane treatment managed to fend off the green stuff, but the cave has nevertheless remained off-limits to tourists in order to minimize further damage to the artwork. A replica, known as Lascaux II, has been constructed for the public to visit.

Even when chemicals are effective, though, they can damage the surfaces on which lamp flora grows and kill off native microbes hanging out nearby. Chemical treatments might not be permanent, either: Lamp flora can hide out inside small holes in the rock, ready to grow back.

Perhaps the most promising way to control lamp flora while still allowing visitors to access underground spaces is to reduce light without eliminating it entirely. According to Slovenian researchers, this can be accomplished by some combination of switching off the lights after visiting hours, dimming lights whenever they’re on, placing lamps far from important features, and using LEDs that emit light only at wavelengths that lamp flora can’t easily use. A big advantage of the light-based approach is that it doesn’t cause any collateral damage—and it’s shown some positive results. In a section of Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave, swapping in growth-inhibiting LEDs, which emit only yellow light of a single wavelength, eliminated the existing lamp flora within a year. Even so, these lights might not be a permanent solution, since cyanobacteria can adapt to changing light conditions by upping their production of different pigments to absorb whichever wavelengths are available.

For all the work being done to get rid of it, the appearance of lamp flora isn’t always bad news for an subterranean space. The Kungsträdgården subway station in Stockholm is home to a cherished section of underground greenery. When the station was carved out of billion-year-old granite, some sections of the rock were intentionally left exposed. On one wall, the presence of artificial light led to the growth of a vibrant ecosystem consisting of lamp flora, tiny springtails and copepods that munch on lamp flora, and a small cave spider that hunts the flora-eaters. This particular spider is not known to be found anywhere else in Sweden, and may have journeyed in on the equipment used to construct the station back in the 1970s. Considering its unique contributions to Kungsträdgården station, there’s at least one place where lamp flora has earned its time in the spotlight.

Pablo Picasso is known for the prodigiousness of his artistic output, but his most monumental work was never realized. In the early 1960s, he had been introduced to betograve, a concrete sculpting method, by Norwegian artist Carl Nesjar, who became Picasso’s fabricator for the next 20 years. The two realized many imposing statues, some of which are found in the courtyards of American institutions of higher learning, from Princeton to New York University. But their most ambitious collaboration, a 100-foot concrete monument that would have dominated the campus of the University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa, was never made. The State Board of Regents approved it on April 9, 1973, a day after Picasso’s death, but did not agree to fund its estimated $10 million budget.

Now, 45 years later, researchers at USF have found an audio reel describing the artists' plan, along with a copy of a composite photograph and sketches. "When I found the reel, I had a feeling it was going to be a major piece to the puzzle," said Kamila Oles, an art historian and archaeologist at USF, in a release. "When I realized it was Carl Nesjar speaking, my jaw nearly hit the floor."

Bust of a Woman was to measure 102 feet in height, which would have made it his largest single work and among the world’s tallest concrete sculptures, and would come with an art center designed by modernist architect Paul Rudolph, who lived and worked in Florida at the time.

Oles is now working to combine Nesjar's description with other materials into a virtual version of the sculpture and its surroundings. "We are the next artisans who will bring to life the biggest project of the world's most renowned artist by means of new technologies," she added. "It is an extraordinary pleasure to realize Picasso's desire. I believe he would be very enthusiastic about our virtual reality methods."

In January, Saturday Night Live aired a sketch spoofing The Bachelor, one of many they’ve done throughout the reality juggernaut’s time on air.

Bachelor contestants adhere to a long-established archetype in the public consciousness: the vapid gold-digger who needs a man to make her life complete. Most of the cast members depicting the contestants adopted a certain speaking style: monotonous, with elongated ending syllables and a lot of vocal fry, in line with the voice associated with “ditzy” girls today. But host Jessica Chastain's interpretation was slightly different: her voice had a higher pitch and a little more musicality—more AMC than ABC. Though it sounded old-fashioned, it was clearly recognizable as part of a library of voices women have pulled from over the years to play silly, sappy, or simpering women.

A version of this voice has existed since sound met film and, in a way, since a little before that. Actresses of early film played mostly damsels in distress or wide-eyed young women, and by the time talkies took over, women were still portrayed as less headstrong, more head-in-the-clouds. “The 1920s had a serious case of the cutes,” notes Max Alvarez, a New York-based film historian. “There is a prevalence of childlike women in the popular culture [at the time] ... Girlish figures, girlish fashion, girlish behavior.” Along with these girlish figures came a girlish voice—high-pitched, a bit breathy, and a little bit unsure, evident in Clara Bow’s pouty purr, and even Betty Boop’s singsong.

Shortly after the advent of sound in cinema, the scrappy, spunky flappers of the ‘20s were relegated to supporting characters—“the gangster’s moll, the cocktail waitress,” says Alvarez. Musicals of the era, says Alvarez, were bastions of these kinds of wise-cracking wacky sidekicks. “Anything with a backstage Broadway setting, you’re gonna find these women.” The speaking voices filling these film’s chorus lines were still childlike as in the decade prior, but started to show signs of the modern-day “sexy baby voice”: a little bit breathy, a little bit nasal, and with fewer harsh consonant sounds.

Leading ladies like Katharine Hepburn and Lauren Bacall portrayed feisty women through deeper voices as America entered the Rosie the Riveter era. It wasn’t until the 1950s, when women were less vital in the workforce, that softer voices took center stage again. And boy, did they ever. “We think of blondes as being dumb because we tend to think of Jean Harlow and Marilyn,” says Alvarez. Though Marilyn was famously influenced by ‘30s screen siren Jean Harlow, her bubblier, breathier speaking style—most notably, her immortal rendition of “Happy Birthday”—still have a stranglehold on the voices used to denote “sexy, but not very smart.”

Actresses like Ann Margret and Jayne Mansfield propagated it well into the ‘60s. The higher pitch that had been the standard for “silly” hung back as the sexual revolution took hold, though it could still be heard in performances like Goldie Hawn on Laugh-In. Things hadn’t improved much by the 1970s. “The women’s movement has no impact on Hollywood because the films are all about male angst,” says Alvarez. TV wasn’t much better—though stars like Farrah Fawcett kicked ass on Charlie’s Angels, they mostly still spoke in disarmingly high, soft voices.

The unnaturally high pitch used over the years is all a diversion tactic, says Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at UC Berkeley, Robin T. Lakoff. Sounding “masculine” often invites ridicule, so, whether they do it consciously or subconsciously, these hyper-feminine, childlike voices and mannerisms associated with un-serious women could be the result of them over-correcting to stave off criticism. “‘I don’t want you to think I’m hard,’” is what Lakoff says motivates this. “Aiming at the ‘S’ [sound] and hitting it is harder than if you put your tongue a little back.”

It’s also important to note that the actresses cast as wisecracking sidekicks or tawdry sex maniacs were generally savvy and intelligent in real life. “Many of these women … had to be adults at a very young age,” says Alvarez. Many early film stars came from working-class backgrounds, sent to support their households once their parents saw their talent. Mary Pickford was a whip-smart dealmaker in Hollywood, says Alvarez, but was constantly cast as “an annoying, childlike waif.” Marilyn Monroe famously attended the prestigious Actor’s Studio to hone her craft, and Gloria Grahame, typecast as a sex kitten in the ‘40s, was the child of a British stage star who trained her in the traditional style.

The voice we now recognize as “ditzy”—the one that permeated the Bachelor sketch—gets its start in the “Valley Girl” vocal trends of the ‘80s and ‘90s. The Valley Girl voice is more natural, but still balanced with Monroe’s eager-to-please disposition, resulting in the much-derided “upspeak”—the tendency to end sentences on a higher intonation, the way American speakers do with questions—and the guttural buzz made by dropping the voice to the lowest register, called the “vocal fry.”

“I don’t understand why people worry,” says Lakoff of the panic that crops up every decade or so over changing speaking patterns. The voice we associate with dim, dull, and ditzy women has evolved, but it’s all coming from the same place: It’s a way to deflect potential ridicule by asserting—sometimes aggressively—femininity. “A lot of the times it isn’t that women said, ‘Okay, I don’t have to carry this baggage around with me anymore, I’m gonna talk [in a way that’s] natural, but instead they substituted one form of girliness, ladylikeness for another,” says Lakoff. Though Kim Kardashian’s vocal fry is a far cry from Marilyn Monroe’s breathy lilt, the aim is still the same. “What people will not want to hear is it’s still with us,” says Lakoff. “[They] still wanna please and [they] don’t wanna frighten.”

For close to two decades, Wild Bill’s Nostalgia attracted visitors from near and far with its eclectic mix of oddities, art, and freewheeling events. The store's impresario, Bill Ziegler, collected the flotsam and jetsam of pop culture: At Wild Bill's, you could buy old-school posters, bobblehead dolls, old records, old books, lunch boxes, toy cars, dolls, and more. He had a knack for finding one-of-a-kind objects—Pee-wee Herman’s bike, a portrait of P.T. Barnum, a mechanized clown. The artists who had come through, working odd jobs and taking up informal residencies, had their work on display, too. Outside, a fun house was in the works.

Last April, in the weeks after Ziegler died unexpectedly at age 70, Heather Page, his daughter and longtime store manager, was trying to figure out how to keep Wild Bill’s open and its spirit alive. There was a concert celebrating Wild Bill’s life and a general sense of “Let’s keep this place going,” as Joe McCarthy, an artist who had worked with Ziegler for years, put it.

But now the future of the Connecticut nostalgia emporium is murky.

“We’re closed,” Page tells a group of National Guard members who come by the door on a Wednesday afternoon. She doesn’t want to be saying this; she wants to let them in. But it's not up to her anymore.

In November, after a family dispute over control of Ziegler’s estate, a Connecticut probate court appointed an independent administrator to manage its assets, which include the business. Since then, the retail store’s hours have been cut back, and are now down to just Friday to Sunday. Page and the other staff are no longer buying anything new, but just re-inventorying the extensive stock with the aim of creating a new catalog for retail and wholesale. The type of quirky concerts and events that Wild Bill used to host are not part of the vision for the business’ immediate future.

“Today I turned 10 different people away,” says Page. “I have to watch people come up to the store and [I have to] say we’re not open. It breaks my heart.”

Businesses like Wild Bill’s, which are formed around the passion and personality of a unusual individual, can be hard to keep alive over the long term, even when the founder is still alive. And when the visionary passes on, and a family disagrees over how to run their inheritance, the chances of survival become slimmer still.

“We’re all hoping that things are working out and that we can continue,” says Page. But the probate process, which includes paying off the estate’s debts and dividing assets among Ziegler’s three children, will not be complete for some time, so it is hard to say what will become of the place itself.

The assets of Wild Bill’s Nostalgia aren’t quite like those of most businesses, which further complicates the legal process. Out front, for instance, is a giant sculpture of three cars seemingly balanced on circus balls. Originally named I’d Go Where Yugo Stanley Marsh 3 (a reference to Stanley Marsh 3’s iconic Cadillac Ranch, which features 10 cars half-buried in the ground), the sculpture came from the fact that there were somehow three Yugo cars on the property (two of which had been left at the store because that's the sort of thing people did for Wild Bill). After McCarthy proposed his idea for this sculpture, Ziegler paid him for the costs and the time of creating it. When it was complete, they agreed that McCarthy would own half and Ziegler the other half.

If Wild Bill’s were to close, it’s not clear what would happen to pieces of art like this and the other (some similarly gigantic) sculptures made here. “The hardest part would be finding a new home for the Yugos,” McCarthy says. “It’s a big piece that’s going to be expensive to move. But really the same could be said for most of the work on the property.”

In the past, part of what made Wild Bill’s Nostalgia a special place was these sort of improbable, impractical projects, which functioned as round-about investments because they attracted people to the store to spend money. Under the supervision of a fiduciary, there’s little room for that sort of creative marketing.

“The dream that my dad had was to make people happy. And to treat life not as seriously as it needs to be treated, and to have fun, and pique people’s curiosity,” Page says. “I’m devastated by the way things are changing. If this all goes away, it’s a bigger loss than just losing my dad. I’m losing my whole identity, and that’s a lot to take in.”

The earrings are only a couple of inches long, but the masterfully carved salmon look like they’ve leaped from the water to whisper in the wearer’s ear. Their glowing red hues and iridescent opalescence caress the eye. These colors occur naturally in the medium in which Leah Mata, a Northern Chumash artist, works: the shells of the red abalone, or Haliotis rufescens.

Abalone shells and the rich meat inside have sustained Mata’s people throughout their existence. And the Chumash are just one of the coastal Native communities for whom abalone holds a central place in culture and cuisine, and in jewelry, regalia, and ceremonies.

Now, however, a “perfect storm” of overfishing and climate change is driving the abalone perilously close to extinction, pushing the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to cancel the 2018 abalone fishing season.

Although the ban poses potential economic harm to the estimated $24 to $44 million sport-fishing industry, it could spell subsistence and cultural disaster for the tribes. Since California tribes lack treaty rights or other federal or state laws allowing them to pursue their traditional lifestyle, they have little leverage to seek cultural or subsistence exemptions from the ban.

“I’m absolutely heartbroken,” said Clint McKay, a cultural consultant with the Dry Creek Rancheria Band of Pomo Indians in Sonoma County. “We need to maintain the relationship we have with the ocean and the plants and animals within it, or we’ll lose that connection.”

For millennia, the 20 or so coastal California tribes have relied on abalone as an important source of protein, harvesting the shellfish at sustainable levels. Commercial fishing began in the late 1800s and gained intensity over the years. By the 1990s, several species had nearly been wiped out, prompting wildlife officials to halt the practice. Recreational fishing was permitted, but the harvest was strictly limited to allow the invertebrate to recover.

In other states, tribal members typically can engage in subsistence activities outside recreational fishing and hunting regulations, thanks to sovereign territory rights, as with Alaska Natives who hunt seals, whales, and other animals. However, since Congress refused to ratify the treaties negotiated with California tribes in 1851-’52, they lack subsistence rights and are subject to California wildlife and coastal management laws.

A toxic algae bloom in 2011 and an unusual mass of warm water the following year caused a massive depletion of kelp forests, the principal food source for several coastal species, including abalone. And the kelp that survived faced a greater threat: purple urchins. After their primary predator fell victim to a viral disease, the urchins ate everything in sight, including about 90 percent of the kelp, resulting in today’s “urchin barrens.” McKay said that, when he dives, it’s like walking across purple carpets of urchins.

“A big barren used to stretch a mile,” said Cynthia Catton, a marine biologist with the department, who studies kelp and abalone populations. This barren stretches for 100 miles, and the ecosystem may take decades to regain equilibrium.

Poachers also exact a heavy toll. McKay says that state officials say poachers take as much, if not more, abalone than legal fishing each year. State authorities are trying to crack down, but when a single abalone can fetch $100 and up on the black market, stopping poachers is nearly impossible.

Mata says she may have to quit selling her award-winning abalone shell jewelry, which helps support her family. And given the reduced fishing seasons and takes, many tribal members fear that this tie to their heritage is in danger of being broken.

Sonke Mastrup, an environmental program manager with the state wildlife department, says California can help Native artists find a reliable source of shells, using dead abalone on the ocean floor and shorelines. The agency may also be able to supply some tribal communities with small amounts of abalone meat from research labs.

But that’s not enough for Mata and McKay, who worry they could soon lose a vital part of their culture, spiritual beliefs, and history. Abalone shells adorn their regalia, and its meat has long filled the bellies of their ancestors as well as those of their people today.

And even though tribes are represented on the California Coastal Commission and California Department of Fish and Wildlife, many Natives feel their concerns are drowned in the noise of a state with 33 million people. “Western culture has taken our cultural resources for themselves,” Mata says.

All this adds up to a heavy cultural price.

“I look around at our elders, at my dad,” McKay said. “This has been part of his life, his culture, his Native tradition for 82 years. But somebody is going to look at him and say, ‘You can’t have this anymore.’

“If this continues for several years, they’re telling our elders, ‘You won’t eat this food again in your lifetime,’ ” he said. “That’s really scary to think that that may happen.”