In 1866, the Italian naturalist Odoardo Beccari discovered a curious-looking plant while venturing through the tropics of Malaysia. It looked like a bulbous lantern, with three pointy antenna-like rods and a ribbed, white stem. Intrigued, Beccari later drew the Thismia neptunis in his notebook, preserving its likeness for years. Little did he know his 1878 depiction would be the only record of the plant—until now.

After over 150 years, researchers from the Crop Research Institute and Palacký University in the Czech Republic rediscovered Thismia neptunis in Matang Massif, Borneo. The plant was just as Beccari described, with a few additional details. The plant’s bulb-like flower is 9 centimeters across (3.5 inches) with reddish stripes and a tiny circular opening at the top.

Thismia neptunis is part of the mycoheterotrophic plant species, which means it lacks chlorophyll and can’t photosynthesize. Rather, it extracts nutrients and fluids from underground fungi to survive. Other than those few facts, there’s more to uncover about the Strangers Things shadow monster-esque plant.

It’s an auspicious finding because the plant only blooms for a few weeks, and sometimes, it doesn’t bloom at all. Of the 76 species within the plant’s genus, colloquially called fairy lanterns, 30 have been discovered since 2011—even though scientists have known about the plant's existence since 1844. That's because it grows relatively low to the ground, so it’s easy to miss. With global destruction of the rainforests, the researchers speculate there are a few other plants within the genus that might be extinct already.

According to Beccari's notes, he found two more plants like Thismia neptunis. The researchers hope their recent luck will lead them to additional discoveries.

If you were to go looking for photos of paradise, chances are good you would come across pictures of the Seychelles islands. Sitting on a white sand beach, watching the sun ascend over turquoise water, it’s easy to imagine people landing in the Seychelles in the 16th century, and quickly deciding to never leave.

The Seychelles (officially the Republic of Seychelles) is a rocky archipelago in the Indian Ocean, northeast of Madagascar. The beauty of the islands is so heavenly it’s almost cliché. All the standards are here. Clear water. White sand. Warm wind. But the true pride of the Seychelles is an endangered ancient palm tree called the coco de mer.

A strange case of island gigantism, coco de mer trees thrived during periods in which other giant species around the globe died off. Sixty-five million years ago mass extinction wiped out dinosaurs and countless other species, but not the coco de mer. Today, the Seychelles islands of Praslin and Curieuse are home to the only two remaining wild populations of these rare palms.

The trees themselves can hit 100 feet tall, but it’s not their height that sets them apart, it’s what they produce. The inedible fruit of the coco de mer look like giant green coconuts weighing 75 pounds. Inside these massive husks grows a seed weighing more than 35 pounds—the largest in the plant kingdom.

At more than a foot and a half in diameter, size is only part of the allure of these unique seeds. In addition to weighing as much as a toddler, coco de mer seeds look like voluptuous human behinds. Split into two symmetrical sections with bulbous cheeks on either side, their image graces everything in the Seychelles, from t-shirts to government trucks. Nicknamed the love nut, in local Creole they’re coco fesse, the bum nut.

On the Island of Praslin is the Vallée de Mai Nature Reserve, home to the largest concentration of coco de mer trees in the world. The park feels like a Triassic playground. Standing under huge coco de mer with fanning leaves 30 feet long and 15 feet wide, it’s easy to imagine dinosaurs hiding in the shadows. Above the canopy the sun blazes, but in the forest it’s cool and damp.

Numerous species here exist nowhere else in the world. The Seychelles Black Parrot, the Bronze Gecko, the White Slug. Each of them relies on the coco de mer in one way or another. The parrots nest in the hollow trunks of dead coco de mer, the geckos and slugs eat its pollen.

“Coco de mer is a keystone species,” says Vallée de Mai Site Manager Marc Jean-Baptiste. “Without coco de mer, this forest would collapse.”

Five other endemic species of palm call the Vallée de Mai home, but none of them capture the hearts of locals and tourists like the coco de mer.

A slow growing species, coco de mer coconuts take seven years to reach maturity. Once they fall they need another two years for the husk to rot away and the seed to sprout. Coco de mer trees might need 40 years to reach adulthood, though some trees may begin reproducing as early as 11. By comparison, a traditional coconut seed takes six years to reproduce. A banana plant takes two.

According to Jean-Baptiste, the coco de mer’s size makes it a natural predator. “Young coco de mer trees do not need too much light to grow,” he says.

When the massive leaves of adult trees block the sun, he explains, it doesn’t bother the young coco de mer, but it might keep neighboring plants from growing and competing for resources. Adult trees are also very efficient at collecting rainwater. The leaves funnel most of the rain that lands on them to their trunks, leaving little for less aggressive plants below. And when the giant leaves fall off, the sheer size of coco de mer seeds means the trees they sprout are strong enough to push their way through, while smaller neighboring plants may not be.

But while the coco de mer has proved robust enough to survive centuries of evolutionary hazards, the dangers it faces are increasing.

The kernel inside coco de mer seeds is considered an aphrodisiac in parts of Asia, fetching upwards of $100 per kilo. Poachers take coco de mer seeds from the forest before they can sprout, in order to sell the kernel on the black market. Poaching poses a long-term risk to coco de mer populations, but looming effects of climate change could prove even more alarming.

“My biggest fears for the coco de mer are poachers, fire, and disease,” Jean-Baptiste says.

Dr. Frauke Fleischer-Dogley is CEO of the The Seychelles Island Foundation, the public trust that manages the Vallée de Mai. She says rising temperatures have meant longer dry seasons in the Seychelles, and longer dry periods increase risks of fire. “Warmer temperatures around the globe can also lead to the spread of diseases that have difficulty in cooler weather,” she says.

Some 40 percent of Praslin has already been affected by fires. If fires get worse, or if a combination of fire and disease were to hit both Praslin and Curieuse, what remains of native coco de mer forests could be decimated.

For now though the trees remain, growing slow in their island paradise as they have for thousands of years.

Sometime between the years 1000 and 1600, a group of people set sail from the shores of the South Island of New Zealand, heading east into the great unknown. For days and days, across a journey of 500 miles of stormy ocean, they did not pass a single speck of land. Finally, on the horizon, someone must have seen some distant islands. Today, they are known as the Chatham Islands, and are part of New Zealand. Then, the travelers named them Rēkohu, or “Misty Sun.”

These rocky outcrops on the edge of the world would become their home—a faraway and inhospitable land. On this archipelago of two large islands and a freckling of smaller ones, agriculture was near-impossible. It was chilly, rained 200 days of the year, and had relentless winds so powerful that the island’s gnarled trees grew back on themselves, their branches reaching almost to the ground. East of the islands was a near interminable expanse of ocean, with 5,000 miles separating them from the next landmass: South America.

After their arrival, this community of people, who would come to be known as the Moriori, would adapt almost every aspect of their lives to these inhospitable conditions, including their diets, their clothing, their transport, their social structures, and their military practices. For hundreds of years, they lived a pacifist, hunter-gatherer existence—until, in 1835, members of two Māori tribes from mainland New Zealand arrived on the island, killed between a sixth and a fifth of the Moriori, and enslaved the rest.

Exactly how these early settlers came to the Chatham Islands, and what they were looking for, remains a mystery, along with many aspects of how they lived their lives. According to Moriori folklore, quoted by the New Zealand historian James Belich in Making Peoples, “Their atua [god] told them there was land to the east, and they went and peopled it.” The Moriori were descended from the same seafaring people who used double-hulled canoes to discover, and populate, hundreds of islands across thousands of miles of the world’s oceans, from New Zealand to Hawaii to the Easter Islands.

Some of these, like Fiji or Vanuatu, are tropical paradises; others, like New Zealand, are huge land masses—islands so big it would take weeks to walk across them. The Chathams are neither. Chatham Island, the larger of the two main islands, is about 30 miles wide, with about a fifth of its land mass taken up by a central lagoon. Formed by volcanic activity, the islands are fringed by dizzying basalt cliffs, and made up of wildly different topology across a relatively small space. Hill and valleys are thatched with rivers and streams, beneath a green thicket of ferns and nikau palms. Pitt Island, to the south, is around a tenth of the size. The islands, which reach highs of about 65 degrees Fahrenheit in January, are both too cold and too inclement to grow traditional Polynesian vegetables, like sweet potato, taro, or yam. The Chatham Islands have no native land mammals, but a large population of leggy shorebirds and forest fowl, including warbling tui and the melodious bellbird.

To survive, Moriori had to look to the sea. Within a couple of centuries of their arrival, they had developed a functional way of life that remained largely unchanged until the arrival of Europeans in 1791. Instead of developing traditional agriculture, they learned to manipulate the islands’ wild plants, the late historian Michael King wrote in the 1989 book Moriori: A People Rediscovered, “especially kopi—for its berry kernels—and fern root, which they grew in clearings and around the edge of the kopi groves, where the richer soil gave it a pleasantly nutty taste.” Of the hundreds of types of plants on the Chatham Islands, perhaps 30 were edible, King wrote—and none of them especially tasty.

Most of day-to-day existence on the Chathams, therefore, was spent gathering food from the sea that the Moriori needed to survive. In the calmest months of the year, from October through to April, King describes how women and children were tasked with assiduously pulling certain types of shellfish from the rock. Around the same time of year, when the sea was at its least perilous, men used nets woven out of flax to catch cod, grouper, moki, and tarakihi. Year-round, the Moriori hunted seals, which provided them with blubber, meat, and skins, which they used to make waterproof cloaks, with the fur facing inwards. Crayfish, seaweed, and a few coastal and forest fowl rounded off this largely seaborne diet.

There was enough to eat on these remote islands, but life was hard—and often short. Average life expectancy, according to King, maxed out at about 32, with around a third of the population dying in infancy. What killed them was not predators, warfare, or starvation, but damage to their teeth from a lifetime of gritty shellfish. This, in turn, often led to bacterial infections, which were worsened by the respiratory problems common to a damp, cool climate.

The Moriori had come to the islands on double-hulled canoes, but the harsh environs demanded their transformation, too. These were adapted into vessels better suited for fishing in the rough seas around the archipelago. Called korari, or wash-through rafts, they had a floor and sides made of bound reeds, and used inflated kelp to remain afloat amid harsh winds and choppy seas. Some were as much as 50 feet in length, and used to go out to offshore rocks to kill seals or albatross.

But the greatest shifts in lifestyle weren’t in diet or transportation. Being so remote, with a population of just 2,000 people, required an overhaul in the political structure of society, and how disputes were resolved. Moriori coexisted in tribal settlements of up to 100 people, scattered across the two bigger islands. In 1873, the magazine Catholic World published an extended interview with Koche, a Moriori man who had found work with an American vessel. They had lived “in peace and plenty for centuries,” he said, “enjoyed a democracy and conducted their simple affairs by a council of notable men.” In similar Polynesian societies, however, bloody tribal warfare was common—in mainland New Zealand, cannibalism remained a feature of many of clashes between Māori iwi, or tribes. But the Moriori adopted pacifism, known as Nunuku’s law.

Alexander Shand, in an early journal article on the Moriori, describes how Moriori ancestor Nunuku-whenua had “proclaimed a law which was honoured and kept until the Māori invasion... ‘Ko ro patu tangata, me tapu to-ake’ (Manslaying must cease henceforth forever).” According to Moriori custom, if physical conflict were truly necessary, men could hit at one another with tupurau, poles the width of a man’s thumb and a couple of feet in length. But the moment blood was shed or skin broken, they were obliged to stop. Nunuku offered a warning for those who disobeyed his law, King writes: “May your bowels rot the day you disobey!”

Elsewhere in the Pacific islands, men proved their strength and masculinity through warfare and enduring the pain of tattoos across their entire bodies. Moriori seem to have abandoned tattooing, however, and instead, King writes, substituted other activities as ways to prove their worth. “One was the demonstration of bravery on birding expeditions, particularly when landing on sheer or even concave rock faces; another was the manufacture of a hafted adze [a type of ax]; and a third was the capacity to dive in rough seas for crayfish and come up with one in each hand and a third in the mouth.” These factors influenced who was made ieriki, or chief, rather than the standard heredity on other Polynesian islands.

Shand lived among Moriori on the Chathams in the late 19th century for some years, and described their lifestyle in detail in the Journal of the Pacific Society. Rather than fighting, he wrote, Moriori tribes would “organize expeditions” to one another’s patches and, on arrival, “recite incantations for the success of their party, just as if in actual warfare.” (These “incantations” may have resembled the Māori haka, made famous internationally by the All Blacks.) Generally, however, they lived peaceably—marrying as teenagers, having large families, and living in unfortified, A-shaped houses, lined with bark for warmth. In times of plenty, they ate three meals a day; when supplies were scarce, only one.

Through an intricate system of rules and rituals, Moriori developed a way of life that ensured their long term survival while preserving the natural world. Hunting expeditions were cooperative, rather than competitive, and particular species of animal banned from consumption during some months of the year, to give them time and space to stabilize their populations. Nunuku’s law may also have been a way of protecting themselves from one another—with such a small population, they simply couldn’t afford to lose members of society over quibbles that became violent.

Perhaps Moriori would have continued these peaceful mores into the present day. In November 1791, however, a navigational mishap sent a British Navy ship, HMS Chatham, careening further south than intended—and into the path of the Chatham Islands, which would soon be named after the vessel. When they saw the ship, Moriori came down to the shore to greet these new arrivals. According to the ship’s log, “as soon as they saw us land now advanced hastily, and by their threats and gestures plainly indicated their Hostile intentions.” The British had encountered indigenous people before, and did not seek a fight—the Moriori, on the other hand, had been separated from other people for centuries, lacking either a word for people who were not like themselves, or a word for their own culture.

Returning to the ship, the British decided to “engage their friendship,” returning with an offer of helmets, beads, and red cloth. They hoped to be given food and water; Moriori did not oblige. Amid a to-and-fro of miscommunication, a skirmish ensued, and a Moriori man, Tamakaroro, was shot, and his body left on the beach.

When the British left, the Moriori decided that they were the guilty party in this fight, and had dishonored Nunuku’s law. Tamakaroro’s body on the beach was left on the beach, and the British gone—the “Sun People,” perhaps named for the paleness of their skin, were not in fact the cannibals Moriori believed them to be. On their return, they decided, they would be greeted with a sign of peace.

Within 50 years, foreign ships had become a common sight on the Chathams. Though few official records were kept, British and Australian ships alike flocked to the islands to slaughter animals by the thousands. Moriori had killed only male seals, and mostly the older ones, but European sealers were indiscriminate, leaving the carcasses of the animals they had skinned to rot on the islands. These fetid carcasses drove away the rest of the seals: By the 1830s, King writes, almost all of them had gone from the island, depriving the Moriori of a key food, fuel, and winter clothing source.

Despite these affronts, the Moriori maintained their pacifism. By 1835, a relatively peaceful and content community of around 1,600 people—some from mainland New Zealand, some from Europe—lived alongside Moriori. Aspects of Moriori life had been altered irremediably, with pigs replacing seals and introduced cats and dogs decimating populations of native birds, but things were not so different to how they had always been. They had continued to obey Nunuku’s law, even in the face of pathogen- and weapon-bearing visitors, and had been mostly left alone. The religious practices, language, and family structures developed over centuries seemed safe.

But in 1835, members of the Māori tribes Ngāti Tama and Ngāti Mutunga, living in what is now Wellington, New Zealand, decided to migrate to the Chatham Islands. Around 500 men, women, and children arrived on the shore, determined to take the land they found there through a practice called “walking the land,” where they moved across the island and settled wherever they liked. Moriori who disagreed or attempted to retain their districts were summarily slaughtered.

King describes how about 1,000 Moriori gathered to discuss what they should do. This invasion was different to previous arrivals, who had come, taken resources, and then left again. Some younger men argued that Nunuku’s law was designed to protect them from one another, and did not apply to those who were not Moriori. They needed to fight back, they said, or risk certain death. Older chiefs disagreed. Nunuku’s law was a moral imperative. Disobeying it would compromise their mana, a complicated and multifaceted term comprising integrity, prestige, and strength. The Moriori resolved not to fight. The Māori, King writes, seem to have decided at roughly the same time that a pre-emptive strike was necessary.

Shortly afterwards, hundreds of Moriori were slain by Māori. They did not fight back. “They commenced to kill us like sheep,” one survivor said later, “wherever we were found.” At least 220 men and women were killed, and many more children.

Recordings of a council of Moriori elders from 1862 lists all adult Moriori alive on that day in 1835. One cross meant they had died or been killed; two crosses meant they had been cooked and eaten, a Māori custom common to land disputes on the mainland. Those who had not been killed were enslaved, separated from their families, and prohibited from marrying. Many died of illness, overwork, or kongenge, meaning dispiritedness or despair. The historian André Brett argues that what took place was not mass killing, but systematic genocide: “Māori viewed Moriori as a different and inferior people and killed individuals on the basis of their membership of the Moriori group.” In fact, they were genetically indistinct from one another.

Within 30 years, there were only around 100 Moriori people left. An already broken people suffered injustice after injustice—30 years of slavery; the awarding of 97.3 percent of the Chatham Islands to Ngāti Mutunga Māori in an 1870 Native Land Court decision; and the systematic portrayal of Moriori as a “lazy, stupid people,” genetically distinct from Māori and Polynesians, in a 1916 copy of School Journals, a series of educational magazines used across New Zealand elementary schools. In 1933, the last “full-blooded” Moriori, known as Tommy Solomon, died, causing many to claim that the Moriori were gone for good. Despite it all, a few hundred Moriori descendants continued to eke out an existence for themselves in New Zealand, albeit far from the Chatham Islands, in a country that often failed to acknowledge their presence or what had happened to them.

Since the 1980s, however, these historical atrocities are beginning to be recognized for what they were, mostly due to the continued efforts of the 900 or so Moriori still living in New Zealand. In 1994, a New Zealand tribal tribunal awarded Moriori a share of the Chatham Islands’ rich fishing resources; in 1997, construction began on the first Moriori marae, or meeting house, on the Chatham Islands in over 160 years. This was completed in 2005.

In 2011, New Zealand’s Education Minister, Anne Tolley, travelled to the islands to present Moriori with a new series of School Journals that told their story accurately. The article, headlined Moriori: A Story of Survival, dispels a century of accrued slander about the Moriori—another step in the reparations process for a people who, from their first arrival on the Chathams, have survived and thrived no matter the odds.

When the Princeton University geologists Akshay Mehra and Adam Maloof, Mehra's advisor, wanted to learn more about Cloudina—a fossilized organism that lived 545 million years ago—they decided to pulverize it.

As part of their work for a recent study, published in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers had collected samples from rocky outcroppings in Namibia and the Canadian Rockies that were once reefs. The haul was varied—the scientists had hacked off pieces of different colors and textures. Back in the lab, “we cut them down, sawed them into blocks, stuck the blocks on a metal plate using some epoxy, and then we just started grinding away,” Mehra says.

Spinning at 3,000 rpm, GIRI (short for the Princeton Grinding Imaging and Reconstruction Instrument) cuts the material into slices just a few microns thick—that’s about one-third as thick as a single strand of hair. A dribble of water-based coolant soothes the friction and flushes the ground material away. As it whirs, the machine captures a high-resolution image, “a recording of what exactly is in the rock, including color and texture information,” Mehra says. The researchers can rotate the image and get a close-up look at how the different structures relate to each other. (Watch a video of a sample from Namibia, above, which shows only the fossil tubes, and no surrounding stone.) When GIRI has chewed its way through the rock, there’s nothing left but finely ground dust.

It might seem startling to knowingly make smithereens out of millions of years of history. This strategy certainly isn’t the only way to look in: Scientists often turn to X-rays and electron microscopy to peer inside fossils, even ones still embedded in rocks. The technologies can also be helpful in allowing scientists to manipulate scale, zooming in for a closer look. “For those studying early mammals, where bones are fragile and the all-important teeth are often smaller than cous cous grains,” The Guardian noted in 2016, “micro-CT scans can enlarge your world of study so that the finest cracks in tooth enamel become veritable canyons.” Institutions can scan and share these findings, contributing to vast digital repositories.

But, Mehra says, these approaches don’t always work for any given fossil. X-rays evaluate different densities, he says—that’s why some shapes on a scan glow white, while others appear black. In the case of a fossil like Cloudina, which is chemically almost identical to the rock surrounding it, an X-ray wouldn’t tell them much. “If we stuck this rock in an X-ray machine, it would just be a big blob,” Mehra says.

Is sacrificing the original material worth it? “As ever, it all depends on knowing precisely what your research questions are and whether this technique will answer them and contribute to knowledge,” says Ruth Siddall, a geologist at University College London.

Other experts stress that minimally invasive techniques, such as those offered by other types of imaging technologies, should be ruled out first. “With CT scanning, a lot more can be done with fossil vertebrates, nowadays,” says James Kirkland, the state paleontologist with the Utah Geological Survey. When a strategy like GIRI does emerge as the best option, Kirkland adds, researchers should exercise extra caution about archiving data. Since the original will vanish, there’s no fail-safe. Though the Princeton team preserves the rock residue on a fine mesh filter—in case they want to study chemical properties later on—the data record is the most direct link to the original.

"Dinosaur bones, lunar samples—there are certain specimens that people are less likely to give us,” Maloof said in a statement. In contrast to these more precious ones, workaday samples are less likely to raise hackles. “Cloudina, there are zillions of them,” he added. “We could never grind them all."

What they do grind, though, offers a peek deep inside a rock, and way back in time.

Written in a tight Arabic scrawl, the Korean words—Okryu-gwan—are easy to miss on the sign, and Kim Jong-un’s visage does not stare down at diners. Most visitors to this unassuming corner of Dubai’s Business Village would likely mistake this restaurant for any other hole-in-the-wall East Asian establishment, rather than an outpost of the North Korean government. Inside Pyongyang’s state-run restaurant, guests are greeted by tableaus of snow-frosted mountains, cascading waterfalls backdropping the karaoke stage, and aged red upholstery that would fit comfortably in any discount banquet hall.

Waitresses stand by, appareled in identical ultramarine-blue dresses, laying out menus for customers while a portrait of a tiger stares from the wall. The menu is emblazoned with images of kimchi, bibimbap, and soondae, a type of blood sausage. “Do you do karaoke here?” I ask one of the waitresses after she takes my order of cold noodles. Within minutes, a trio of North Korean women appear on stage, holding guitars and, later, accordions. They begin a choreographed dance to Mandarin pop songs, a performance involving multiple wardrobe changes. The delivery looks rehearsed, but also showcases a strange, tamed exuberance. Although they’re holding instruments, no one appears to play anything as music blares from speakers and the television flashes lyrics for the audience.

Suffering under the weight of staggering international sanctions, the Hermit Kingdom is rarely visited by travelers. Nor is it touted as a gastronomic paradise. Since 2004, however, North Korea's government-run restaurant chain has achieved a surprisingly global reach, with branches opening up in Beijing, Phnom Penh, and Kathmandu, not to mention the Middle East. Each branch is staffed by carefully-vetted North Korean women, selected for their beauty, family background, and most importantly, loyalty to the state. The overseas restaurants are required to remit a percentage of the revenues back to sanctions-hit Pyongyang. As the nation grows more internationally isolated, the cash generated by branches of Okryu-gwan (meaning “Jade Stream Pavilion”) helps buoy a weakened economy.

The first Okryu-gwan sprouted up in Pyongyang in the 1960s, under the rule of North Korean president Kim Il Sung, who oversaw a period of intense industrial growth. Amidst this newfound prosperity, the restaurant appealed to North Koreans eager to sit in a modern establishment and consume traditional food such as Pyongyang’s famous naengmyeon (cold noodles). The restaurant did not accept cash, relying instead on coupons rationed out by the socialist party. North Koreans lined up in long queues for hours, adding their names to a waiting list for the chance to enter.

By contrast, in Dubai, there are no coupons. The restaurant, which opened in 2010, attracts a range of international customers, but Chinese tourists are the most popular. For Pyongyang, the appeal of setting up a shop in Dubai, a city built on a get-rich-quick character, was fairly obvious. Rumors abound that the branch is another cover for North Korea’s intelligence-gathering and money-laundering projects.

Amid Pyongyang’s growing international isolation over its nuclear program, however, the country has recently faced renewed criticism for using state-owned businesses, including the Okryu-gwan restaurant chain, to skirt sanctions and channel foreign sources of cash. North Korea’s attraction to the UAE’s lucre is hardly unique, as the oil-rich Gulf country has long relied on legions of migrant workers from Africa and Asia to meet its labor needs. The North Koreans' departure from the cosmopolitan milieu might be imminent, though.

In 2015, Marzuki Darusman, the former special rapporteur on human rights in North Korea, told the United Nations General Assembly that as many as 50,000 North Koreans were working outside the country, providing up to $2.3 billion to the regime. He explained that most workers brought home only $120 to $150 a month, with their salaries largely confiscated by the state. Sometimes they worked shifts of 20 hours a day, receiving little time for food or breaks. Darusman praised another Gulf state, Qatar, for expelling almost half of its North Korean laborers that spring, noting that the world’s businesses, including in cities like Dubai, were increasingly “complicit in an unacceptable system of forced labor.”

In October 2017, as North Korea intensified its nuclear tests, the UAE cut diplomatic ties to Pyongyang and stopped issuing new work permits to North Korean businesses and citizens. Two months later, North Korea was hit with a fresh round of sanctions, including a new requirement that any UN member state hosting a North Korean migrant worker would be required to eject them by December 2019. Last year, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson also threatened harsh punishments for countries allowing the North Korean government to profit from overseas labor: “Any country that hosts North Korean guest workers… is aiding and abetting a dangerous regime,” he said.

The 25-year-old North Korean waitress taking my order has been in Dubai for the past three years and expects to stay for one more. “I’m going back for vacation,” she says, referring to her upcoming return to Pyongyang. There is no mention of the changes to come, or any of the political convulsions that may have disturbed her carefully-organized work placement in Dubai. It’s still unclear if the Dubai outpost of the Okryu-gwan restaurant will remain in operation, or how exactly North Korean migrant workers will fare across the Gulf. In addition to Qatar and the UAE, Kuwait has also stopped issuing new visas and work permits to North Korean laborers, and it appears the majority of North Koreans there will pack their bags before next December, leaving behind jobs in the construction, mining, and hospitality business.

Curious about the number of North Koreans impacted in Dubai alone, I asked her about how many North Koreans worked at the restaurant. She chose to ignore the request, and soon came back with green bean pancakes, which were crispy and mealy, and a beef and rice box set that also contained a wing of roasted chicken, along with a battered shrimp pancake. Pyongyang’s famous cold noodles, firm and salty, arrived next: The buckwheat and sweet potato dish was served in a chilled broth of boiled eggs, meat, vegetables, vinegar, and radish.

Okryu-gwan offers a rare window into the difference between North Korean and South Korean cuisine. Not only is food from the North less salty and spicy than its southern counterpart, but corn is also favored over rice because of its affordability. The restaurant strives to give visitors a taste of North Korea’s most common dishes. In North Korea, the average diet includes kimchi and maize porridge, as well as injo gogi bap, a popular vegetarian rice dish containing kimchi and soybean paste.

North Korea's modern food culture is as much a byproduct of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s as it is of a street-stall culture. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was a factor in devastating North Korea’s food production, distribution, and imports, precipitating a famine that killed up to three million civilians. Today, North Koreans are fed by a mix of a state-controlled food distribution system and illegal street stalls, but it’s not enough—approximately 4.4 million people still face a food crisis.

While the restaurant staff performed on stage, I wondered if Dubai was the closest approximation to a plum posting for a North Korean worker. With a capitalistic cityscape that has achieved an eerie level of order and cleanliness, Dubai sits at the opposite pole from North Korea’s tightly-planned socialist economy and rigidly-controlled food distribution system. Despite heavy surveillance during their period of labor, North Koreans in the Gulf city get glimpses of an alternative world, though it’s difficult to guess whether the experience shakes their ideological commitment or merely reinforces it.

In 1989, Mauro Morandi set sail from Gallipoli, in Apulia, southern Italy, with the goal of reaching Polynesia. “I had enough of society,” the now 79-year-old Morandi says. “I was dreaming of a desert island in the Pacific where to start life anew.”

A few days after leaving, he landed on Budelli, less than a square mile in Italy’s Maddalena archipelago, in the Strait of Bonifacio between Sardinia and Corsica.“There were a lot of tourists, so I thought I could make some money taking them around the islands,” he says. “I owed some money to the bank.”

At the time, Budelli was owned by a property firm that employed a caretaker and his wife to watch over it. Morandi met the couple and started to wonder if he could take over for them. “He told me his wife did not like the lifestyle,” Morandi says. “Some find it too crowded in the summer and too lonely during winter, but I do not mind.”

A few weeks later, he had the job. He has been living and working on Budelli as its sole official guardian ever since. But now his cherished autonomy may be coming to an end. “It’s been two years that I don’t leave Budelli, as I am not sure they would let me go back,” he says, concern in his voice.

Before the dispute started, Morandi used to break his isolation twice a year to visit his daughters in central Italy. Because he was legally employed by the owner, he was assured of his return to his solar-fueled hut. In 2011, however, the island was put up for sale. That’s when his trouble started. Two years later it was purchased, only to be later taken over by the government and made part of a national park. “I now live in a state of uncertainty,” he says. “The island is owned by La Maddalena National Park and they could kick me out anytime.” Morandi has returned to the fold of Italy’s Kafkaesque bureaucracy—part of the reason he left on his sailboat in the first place.

He had none of these concerns in his first, idyllic winter on the island, in 1989. “At the time I hated people,” he says. “During winter I could finally enjoy the beauty of this island by myself.” Sometimes, during the cold season, sunlight shines in a way the reminds him of some his favorite paintings by German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich.

But winters can also be cruel, with punishing winds wreaking havoc on the few short shrubs that grow among the rocks. To Morandi, this harsh side of nature is part of its beauty. “My best memory here is a storm in 1991,” he recalls. On that occasion winds reached a speed of 104 knots—an intensity that hadn’t been seen in 200 years.

“The wind was so strong and made a howling sound that I have never heard before,” he says. Waves reached 18 feet and were breaking far beyond the beach. “I realized that humans are nothing against nature,” he says, with a taut voice. “Even with all of our technology, we are nothing but small ants.”

But technology did penetrate Morandi’s isolation over the years. Three years ago, a private company installed a wireless router nearby to provide a internet access to tourists visiting the park. “I did not even know what an iPad was,” he says, “but now I have accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.”

Morandi’s primary creative outlet used to be crafting design objects out of juniper logs that washed on the beach. It has since been replaced by photography to fuel his social feeds. “I used to be more egoistic,” he admits. “But now I want to share this beauty with everyone around the world.” His social media output now reaches hundreds of thousands of people all over the world.

On a typical winter day, Morandi wakes up around 7:30 in the morning, makes some coffee, and begins the workday in and around his hut, from cutting up logs for heating to cleaning and cooking. After lunch, he wanders his personal paradise, taking photos of sandy beaches, rocky inlets, and the ever-changing Mediterranean sky. “I used to read a lot, mainly Mitteleuropean thinkers like Kant and Schopenhauer,” he says. “But now I mostly take photos and then go back to edit them.”

Friends on a nearby island come by every ten days to bring him groceries and supplies, but less frequently in the winter. “Friends come all the time during summer,” he says, at that moment 25 days from his last supply drop. “In winter, not so much. So tonight I am going to eat wild nettles sauteed with some butter.”

During fall, winter, and spring, he can forage for the wild herbs typical of the macchia, or the shrubland biome characteristic of the Mediterranean: wild beets, asparagus, garlic, rosemary, leeks. “Spring is when everything blossoms,” he says. “Starting from the end of February you get a strong scent of wild rosemary.” During the summer, the strong sunshine and stiff wind dries out everything apart from few evergreen shrubs such as rock roses and the occasional wild white lily. “Lillies have such as strong smell,” he says. “In the summer the evening breeze takes the scent right into my hut.”

Myrtle, from which local herbal digestive Mirto is made, are another sight. “Myrtle berries are usually harvested in fall, but this year it did not rain for 10 months straight, so there were very few berries.”

Morandi has seen, year on year, changes in his corner of the world. Last summer was an abnormally hot one, he says. “Temperatures reached 116 degrees in inland Sardinia and around 109 here in Budelli.” He has noticed fewer fish in the shallow waters around the island. “I spoke to some fishermen and they told me it’s because coastal water gets too hot so fish go deeper to look for cooler temperatures.”

Winds are changing, too. Usually, his part of the archipelago is swept by westerly winds, but now the breeze is coming from the other direction. “Easterly winds erode the beach,” he says. “You can already see the impact.” The storms have grown longer and stronger, too.

So during high season, when tourists visit the island by boat, Budelli’s caretaker spends his days talking to visitors about conservation. “In the summer my life changes completely,” he says. “I am busy lecturing and giving tours of the island from dawn to sunset.” Lectures take place in a separate small hut equipped with wooden benches and samples of rocks and corals. Sometimes, a friend translates his words into English. “Children are more receptive than adults,” he notes. “They like to hear this sort of Robinson Crusoe guy talking about nature.”

“I teach kids that nature is not something to be used,” Morandi says. “It’s something we need to to protect.” He is mainly referring to one of Budelli’s most famous and infamous features, its pink beach, one reason that some consider it one of the most beautiful islands in the world.

Famously featured in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1976 film Red Desert, the pink beach, or spiaggia rosa, owes its color to a distinctive blend of crystals, fossils, and corals such as Miriapora truncata and Miniacina miniacea.

When Sardinia and its surrounding archipelagos became an emerging tourist destination during the 1980s, masses of tourists flowed to Budelli to see its famous spiaggia rosa, and many took handfuls of the sand home with them. By 1994, this practice was taking a toll. The beach turned whitish, and soon tourists were no longer allowed to set foot on it. Part of Morandi’s job became to enforce the ban. “In the past three or four years the pink started to come back,” he says. But now he is worried that he won’t be there to see the beach return completely to its former glory.

After Budelli was put up for auction in 2011 following the bankruptcy of the property firm that owned it, it was eventually sold to Michael Harte, a banker from New Zealand, who allegedly wanted to convert it into biological preserve with an eco-resort. The plan did not go over well with local authorities. The dispute went on for years, during which time Morandi did not hide his support for Harte. “I know perfectly well that things run by the government do not work,” he explains, “while this guy, Michael Harte, had already done eco-reserves in New Zealand.”

In 2016, Harte withdrew his proposal and the island officially became Italian property. Morandi thinks that his open support for Harte put him in a bad light with authorities. “I was sure they would have tried to kick me out,” he says. Indeed, about a year ago, he received a notice of eviction due to some irregularities with the way his hut was built prior to his arrival on the island. “But I know how long these kind of legal matters take,” he says. “I am not going anywhere.”

Currently, the national park has nominated a new president, who may change his view over the caretaker’s right to stay. In the meantime, the man who has spent most of his adult life living there, and some of his followers, have started petitions to support his right to live there. One was titled, “I would like that Mauro Morandi, former caretaker of Budelli, could stop living in terror.”

He doesn’t really find “terror” an apt description of his current situation. “I am not afraid,” he says. “I am used to living in uncertainty.” The first owner of the island apparently had stopped paying him after five years, so he has faced the prospect of leaving—for financial reasons, in that case—before. But this time is different, in part because the freedom he had once so coveted there is now twisted in on itself. “I could always leave and come back before,” he says. “Now, I depend on people to come here.”

A few years ago, Google Street View expanded the boundaries implied by its its name and began adding entirely street-free places: remote outposts that most people will never get to visit. By clicking around, you can now explore a South Pole penguin rookery, the shooting set for Diagon Alley, or Stonehenge. At times, the "floating eye" aspect of these endeavors can be somewhat dissonant. (Remember when they added many acres of Canada's Quttinirpaaq National Park and never acknowledged the guy who actually had to carry the giant backpack?) But if you want to see a place where it really works, grab your little yellow avatar guy and stick him on Tern Island.

Back in the summer of 2013, Google enlisted employees from NOAA and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to help them bring five of the islands in Hawaii's Papahanaumokuākea Marine National Monument to Street View. One of these was Tern Island, a 26-acre atoll almost entirely taken up by a naval airstrip that was built in 1942 and abandoned four years afterward, following a tidal wave. Later, the Coast Guard used it as a navigation station.

Before, after, and (presumably) during these military tenures, the island was frequented by many other creatures: green turtles, monk seals, and birds, birds, birds. Airstrip construction entailed a massive reshaping of the island, leaving it eerily flat and rectangular, but the birds don't seem to care about that. On Street View, they're lined up in scores-deep regiments, as if putting on a show of force.

It works. About half of the map's path is limited to a straight line that follows the airstrip, reinforcing the impression that you actually are on some kind of crazy street. (The rest lets you explore the shoreline.) But where most view-able places would have buildings, bus stops, or fire hydrants, there are only birds—on the sand, in the bushes, in the air, and floating just offshore. It's their world, we can only click on it.

There's a lot to think about before you dive the sunken ruins of a prison, especially during winter. But the Finnish urban explorers Tanja Palmunen and Kimmo Parhiala thrive on such logistics. Known together as Abandoned Nordic, for the past two and a half years they've been traveling across Northern Europe to find and photograph abandoned manor houses, car lots, casinos, churches, and, in this case, an underwater prison, often in the dead of winter.

At Estonia’s Rummu Prison, situated in the middle of a submerged quarry, depth is less of an issue than temperature. “The Rummu lake is a shallow lake, and the average dive depth is around 6 to 10 meters. This means that we can stay down longer without worrying about decompression sickness,” says Parhiala. The greater risk is from diving during the icy winter months. “Northern European winter drops the water temperature to around 3 to 4 degrees Celsius. In these temperatures, we use a drysuit. Still, after a while, our bodies can’t cope with the cold water and we start to feel cold, really cold.”

Another factor is visibility, and at Rummu, there’s a lot to see. The prison—originally known as Murru—was established in the late 1930s, although the first prison cell wasn't constructed until 1949. Of course, it wasn't meant to be in the middle of a lake: the location was at a limestone quarry, where inmates were forced to work. Following the collapse of the USSR, the entire sire was abandoned. Groundwater, which was previously pumped into a nearby town and used in local farms, soon flooded the quarry, creating a partially submerged island of crumbling brick walls.

For their dive, the visibility was good, but Palmunen and Parhiala found the water to be what you might expect from an Estonian winter. “The cold shivered my lips when we began our descent toward the underwater parts of the main building,” recalls Parhiala. Diving into submerged buildings in a shallow lake was particularly tricky for the photographer. “You have to adjust the camera settings and keep your focus on your buoyancy, so you don’t touch the bottom and screw up the visibility, and also that you don’t ascend to the surface.”

Above the water, the walls from the main building are visible. But underneath is a vastly different view. “Next to the main buildings, a diver can visit other buildings, which are completely immersed,” says Parhiala. “These large buildings with many rooms are covered in green moss and debris. In addition, a diver can visit the old underwater walls with lamps still intact. It is an odd sensation to imagine the inmates figuring out if they could climb over the walls. Now, we can just hover over them without any resistance.”

During their dive, the Abandoned Nordic team moved slowly through the prison, pausing for photographs and to consider the site’s history. “Bars in the windows reminded us about the history of the place. Like many other abandoned buildings in Estonia, this one was made out of cheap gray bricks which were laying around everywhere on the bottom. Inside this weird underwater building, we watched our exhale bubbles hit the ceiling and enjoyed a break from the sensation of ordinary gravity.”

AO has a selection of images from Abandoned Nordic’s dive; you can see more of their work on their Instagram.

Some wonders are riotous, introduced with fanfare and endlessly discussed. Others are quietly brilliant, but no less ingenious and impactful.

Take the bread clip. It’s hardly ostentatious—it's flimsy, disposable, and fills a pretty specific niche. But, as my colleague Eric Grundhauser wrote last spring, it solved a tricky problem in a brilliantly simple way. According to company lore, Floyd Paxton, the founder of Kwik Lok, which manufactures the little plastic tabs, whittled a prototype from a credit card to cinch a bag of partly nibbled airline nuts. More than half a century later, the company has produced billions of them. Momentous utility, little attention.

We want to know about your favorite overlooked inventions. They may be big or small, ubiquitous or esoteric—anything from, say, envelopes to screws. What they should have in common is a clever solution to an everyday problem.

Over the next few weeks we’ll pit these inventions head-to-head in a bracket challenge we're calling Mundane Madness. We'll winnow our pool of contenders to a single winner: one mundane invention to rule them all.

Make a nomination by filling out the form below. (And, while you’re at it, tell us why you’re such a fan.) You might see your pick in a future round.

Don't forget to come back when the matchups begin on Tuesday, March 13.

Before NME became the New Musical Express in 1952, it was Musical Express. But before that, it had another, more unexpected name: Accordion Times. The bastion of the British popular music press, which this week shutters its print edition after 66 years, has its origins not in the rise of rock-and-roll, but in a 20-year mania for accordion music.

Amateur musicians had spent the 1920s learning the ukulele, but the dawn of the 1930s brought with it a new enthusiasm for the thumping oom-pah-pah of the squeezebox. "Britons are quickly becoming 'accordion minded.'" the Times of London reported in 1936. "Four years ago, the accordion was seldom, if ever, heard by the next-door neighbor. Now it has come into its own, and when the wireless is switched off is a favorite instrument of the family circle in many homes." Quickly, it became Britain's most popular amateur instrument, helped along by accordion rockstars like Harry Bidgood, who founded Don Porto and His Novelty Accordions in 1932, Primo Scala and His Accordion Band in 1934, and Rossini's Accordions in 1935. (The multiple aliases allowed him to record simultaneously for different labels.)

When 4,000 spectators showed up to London's Caxton Hall to watch the 1936 National Amateur Accordion Championships, Accordion Times was there to chronicle it. Established in 1935, the magazine catered to both the amateur enthusiast and professional accordionist. Accordion bands, which usually included a xylophone as well, stormed the country's dance halls. In a sense, it wasn't so far removed from the raffishness of the scene the NME would one day cover—accordion bands were fast, loose, and designed for dancing. But the boom proved short-lived. "By the end of the Second World War," writes Pat Long in The History of the NME, "life was getting tough for the publishers and staff of Accordion Times."

In early October 1946, Accordion Times rose from the ashes—but under a new guise. Now Musical Express, incorporating According Times (NME could so easily have been MEAT), a 1949 list of periodicals describes this new incarnation as, "A British musical (tabloid?) newspaper, covering all and any aspects of the British musical entertainment world." The accordion coverage was gradually phased out: First reduced to a single column, it was then excised altogether, and the Accordion Times dropped from the name. By the end of the decade, Long writes, Musical Express had become Britain's largest weekly music paper—leaving the country's accordion fans, whoever they were, forced to look elsewhere for their windjammer coverage.

Nematostella vectensis, a species of sea anemone, possesses tentacles that look like ethereal tendrils of tulle. However delicate, the creatures are not to be trifled with.

Mature members of the species use the tentacles to sting prospective food, usually shrimp and small fish. Juveniles can pack a wallop, too, but venomous behaviors change pretty remarkably over the course of the organism’s life, as researchers at Hebrew University's Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences describe in a new paper in the peer-reviewed, open-access journal eLife Sciences.

"Until now, venom research focused mainly on toxins produced by adult animals,” said Yehu Moran, an experimental biologist at Hebrew University and one of the study’s lead authors, in a statement. “However, by studying sea anemones from birth to death, we discovered that animals have a much wider toxin arsenal than previously thought.”

To see how the venom changed over time, researchers genetically modified N. vectensis specimens in the lab, adding fluorescent markers to identify toxin-producing cells. The scientists concluded that the anemones produce various types of venom, which “evolves to best meet threats from predators and to cope with changing aquatic environments," Moran said.

Like many organisms, the anemones, which spend their lives in shallow salt marshes and lagoons along the coastal United States and southeast England, are born vulnerable. As larvae, these creatures are susceptible to being gobbled up by fish and shrimp. But they’ve got defenses: The researchers found that the larvae produce a potent venom that nudges predators to spit them out when they go in for a nibble. When the scientists lumped the swimming anemone larvae in with some nauplii brine shrimp—individuals in their first larval stage—N. vectensis decimated the crustaceans. Three of the eight were paralyzed or dead within 10 minutes. A lone survivor hung in there for an hour and a half.

The young anemones aren’t the only creatures who excrete something noxious to deter predators: When bombardier beetles find themselves in the dark depths of a toad’s stomach, for example, they expel hundreds of caustic sprays each second. More often than not, toads end up regurgitating the insects, which can withstand the predator’s acids and go on their merry way when they’re back on the outside. But the researchers found that, unlike some other creatures with unappetizing expulsions, the anemones produce a different type of venom when they grow and become predators in their own right.

“This evolutionary plasticity might be one of the factors that made sea anemones such a successful group that inhabits all the world’s oceans for the last 600 million years,” the scientists write. However it's wielded, venom can be a sharp tool for survival.

When the captain came home to the waters of Venice, he returned to a republic on the rise. Independent and ruled by the doge, this city-state of islands dominated Europe’s trade with the Levantine peninsula and throughout the Byzantine Empire. Its ships sailed off to the Crusades and came home laden with art and other riches. Venice was only beginning to imagine the place it could hold in the world.

This was sometime in the 12th or 13th century, and the captain was returning from the east: Constantinople, perhaps, or Tyre in Lebanon. He had a gift for the doge. On his ship were three granite columns, it is said, each two stories tall—marvels of conquest, a new glory for Venice.

The captain sailed into the main harbor and, anchored in front of the doge’s palace, ordered the columns moved ashore. But the weather turned, and one of them slipped from the sailors’ control. It sank and was never seen again.

Hundreds of years later, two of those great columns stand in the Piazza San Marco, the central and most visited square in Venice. Sometimes called the Columns of Justice, they flank the piazza’s entrance from the harbor. Topped with statues representing San Todaro and San Marco, the city’s patron saints, the columns are solid and real, each an enduring symbol of Venetian might and wealth. The third, lost column is a legend that has been repeated for hundreds of years, and has worked its way into histories and guidebooks—with no proof of that it had ever been there.

But another Venetian captain believes the third column could be real. For the past three years, Roberto Padoan—Capitan Pipa, he likes to be called, for his Popeye-esque pipe habit—has been planning a new search for the long-lost treasure, a quest he has named the Aurora Project. He has assembled a crew of archaeologists, geophysicists, artists, filmmakers, and engineers, and soon they are going to look deep under the most famous place in Venice for a pillar of granite that may or may not exist.

“Of course mediocre people will tell you that it’s just a legend without even trying to find it,” Padoan says. “But we don’t have any written evidence of the other two columns, either. Yet they have been standing there for centuries.”

Padoan was 10 years old when he discovered his hero, legendary French documentarian Jacques Cousteau. Every Wednesday he stayed up late to watch Cousteau on television, he told a crowd gathered at Ateneo Veneto, one of Venice’s most prominent cultural institutions, in January. That night, the bearded Padoan wore his usual outfit—a navy turtleneck and a basque hat. “I am a man of the sea,” he says proudly. “Even when everyone is wearing a tie, I would wear my turtleneck because that’s who I am.”

Just like his childhood hero, Padoan spent most of his life in the ocean, working as a superyacht captain in the Mediterranean and an underwater surveyor in Venice’s murky lagoon. “I know the Mediterranean sea well above the water,” he says. “But I know Venice mostly underwater.”

It was during these hour-long dives in the muddy waters of La Serenissima, where it can be impossible to see an inch ahead, that he grew impatient with the lagoon’s condition. “I wanted to find a way to make water clearer,” he says. In 2001, he patented a technology, which he calls ACLA or Acqua Chiara Laguna Azzurra, which he says can filter particles and microorganisms from a section of water about 11 feet wide—without chemicals. He tried it under the Bridge of Freedom, which connects Venice to the mainland, and says that he found visibility greatly improved. Two other local underwater conservation projects, at Dona Bridge and San Pietro di Castello, a basilica that stands on underwater stilts, have also used the technology.

Since then, Padoan has tinkered with other underwater inventions, as he likes to call them, including a waterproof resin that can be applied to strengthen the wooden piles under most of Venice’s buildings. But it was not until three years ago that he started to wonder if his visibility technology could be used for another purpose.

“They say the third column of Venice is a legend, but legends are half true,” the captain says. “So I started to wonder what’s real and what’s not about this.”

Padoan, who was born and raised in the center of Venice, feels a strong sense of belonging there, and for him the lost column symbolizes the city’s beauty and strength. He’s not bothered by the lack of any textual evidence. “Ever since I was a kid I wanted to do something like Cousteau,” he says. “He trusted his intuition to look for what’s hidden. I want to do the same for Venice.”

From the beginning of its rise, Venice was built on imports. The city’s original patron saint was San Todaro, until the 820s, when two Venetian merchants brought the relics of San Marco home with them from Alexandria—after which it had two patron saints, one imported. (In some versions of the story, the merchants stole the saint’s bones. In others, they rescue the relics from the threat of plunder by enemies of Christianity.)

As Venice’s wealth increased, the church that still houses the relics, and the piazza in front of it, grew in splendor. “There’s nothing comparable in Venice,” says art historian Robert Nelson, co-editor of the book San Marco, Byzantium, and the Myths of Venice. The piazza, he notes, is a “very large public space in a city where the space is at an extreme premium.”

Venice, from the sea, does not look impressive. Built on a collection of small, low-lying islands spread across a mudflat at the northernmost point of the Mediterranean, the city was, however, ideally located to move goods from the sea to Germany and Central Europe. It had little going for it besides its location, and no Roman or Etruscan past to build on. “Everything had to be brought in,” says Nelson. “Venice had nothing, yet it tried to compete with the other empires of the Mediterranean. It needed history in order to make itself great. It invented traditions all over the place.”

Decorated with the lifted riches of other places, the Piazza San Marco is representative of this rise. The facade of the church of San Marco is a collection of Byzantine art. At one point, Venetian ships were under orders from the government to bring marble columns back from their voyages. The Columns of Justice greeted foreign dignitaries and framed their first view of the city. Their foundations are made of Croatian stone, their capitals of Genoan marble. “Everything is a collage,” says Nicola Barrato, an independent researcher and artist who has been working with Padoan on the Aurora Project.

Barrato joined Padoan’s team because he was intrigued by the lost column’s myth, and he has been trying to understand how the legend fits into Venice’s history. “The whole story is covered by a veil of uncertainty,” he says. The columns might have come to Venice as early as 1122, though many experts now put their arrival at 1268. By 1487, the date of the earliest written reference Barrato has found to the third column, the story was already ensconced in Venetian lore, and historians were debating where the columns had originally come from. While one of the existing columns is made from Turkish stone and the other of red Egyptian stone, the similar craftsmanship suggests they came from the same place, with Constantinople as a leading contender.

“There is no real historical nor scientific proof or evidence for the existence of the third column,” Barrato says. “But seeing the two gives legitimacy to the dream of the third.” The third gives the story an archetypal quality: a captain returns from the East with a monumental trinity.

All over the Mediterranean, stories accrue around antiquities. But Venice, unanchored in the classical world, has a penchant for reshaping its own mythos. “Reading the present into the past or the past into the present is a well-established practice in Venice, especially for artifacts in prominent locations,” Nelson, the art historian, writes. The Venice of today—sinking into the mud, threatened by rising seas, overrun by tourists—can seem like a simulacrum of what it once was. A lost column is reminder of the city’s mystery and power, from the beginning of its rise to prominence. “Speaking about a fundamental quest, searching for something that is invisible and unknown—it is a strategy or a way to face the future,” say Barrato.

Or, as Capitan Pipa says, “The column is much more than an object. It’s a symbol of the beauty and strength of Venice.”

To begin the search for the lost column, Padoan and his team must first navigate a labyrinthine bureaucracy to allow them to essentially take over part of one of the most touristed sites in the world. The plan is to examine parts of the foundations of the piazza and waters just beyond, using both tomographic analysis, which will scan the ground down to a depth of around 35 feet, and Padoan’s water-clearing technology. Barrato and his colleagues on the communications side of the project are planning a pavillion that will create a private space for the geophysicists, engineers, and archaeologists to do their work, as well as communicate the story of the lost column to the public.

To some extent, discovering the column itself is not critical to the success of the larger project. “If we do end up finding something that’s good, but even if we don’t find anything, that works as well,” says Marco Bortoletto, one of the archaeologists on the team. Previous excavations have examined the world under the piazza, Bortoletto says, but some of the most interesting areas have gone unexplored. Using the geophysical technology, they’ll be able to see further into the history of this iconic place.

Padoan believes that a trove of archaeological treasures currently lie in the muddy waters under and around the piazza, and is hoping to livestream the exploration in real time. “Imagine what must be down there,” he says. "The column is just the tip of the iceberg."

This story was inspired by Atlas Obscura's 2017 trip to Venice. Travel with us to discover more untold stories about the world's most fascinating places.

Fruits and vegetables can be beautiful. Ask any artist who's painted a still life. But for Japanese chef Takehiro Kishimoto, produce is his canvas and a knife is his paintbrush.

On his extremely popular Instagram account, Kishimoto carves everything from radishes to avocados. Some he turns into elegant flowers such as carrot peonies or chestnut roses. On occasion, he sketches a vegetal anime character. Other times, he etches geometric pattens into cross-sections of avocados and broccoli stalks.

Kishimoto, who is from the city of Kobe in southern Japan, started carving a little more than three years ago, and began posting his work on Instagram in mid-2016. At first, he says, he carved simple shapes, but eventually graduated to more difficult designs. He uses a sharp, thin knife, and the time each fruit or vegetable takes varies. For broccoli, it's about an hour. Softer avocados takes two hours, while apples take three.

Many of Kishimoto's designs are inspired by traditional Japanese patterns. Typically, such patterns are woven into cloth or embroidered, and can convey meanings and connotations. One, called bishamon tortoise, consists of upside-down Y shapes. Kishimoto carved that into an avocado. Another variation on bishamon, called kumikikkou, he carved into a papaya. Both are based on the patterns of a tortoise shell. They symbolize longevity and were used on warriors' clothes. Another, maze-like design he has etched into broccoli and cauliflower is called sayagata. Sayagata has roots in ancient Buddhist art, and it originally came to Japan on Chinese fabrics hundreds of years ago. Why did Kishimoto choose these traditional patterns? The answer is simple: He thinks they're cool.

Kishimoto refers to produce carving as "Thai" carving, because the masters of fruit carving are from Thailand. It's an old tradition that originated from chefs cooking for the royal family. But Japan also has a history of food-carving. Mukimono, as it's called, is hundreds of years old. By combining historical patterns and mukimono, Kishimoto has created something unique. News outlets have gushed over his work, and he says he's been surprised by the attention.

And what happens to Kishimoto's creations when he's done? "I carve and eat it," he says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This story originally ran on October 8, 2017.

Fruits and vegetables can be beautiful. Ask any artist who's painted a still life. But for Japanese chef Takehiro Kishimoto, produce is his canvas and a knife is his paintbrush.

On his extremely popular Instagram account, Kishimoto carves everything from radishes to avocados. Some he turns into elegant flowers such as carrot peonies or chestnut roses. On occasion, he sketches popular anime characters into eggplants and apples. Other times, he etches geometric pattens into cross-sections of avocados and broccoli stalks.

Kishimoto, who is from the city of Kobe in southern Japan, started carving a little more than three years ago, and began posting his work on Instagram in mid-2016. At first, he says, he carved simple shapes, but eventually graduated to more difficult designs. He uses a sharp, thin knife, and the time each fruit or vegetable takes varies. For broccoli, it's about an hour. Softer avocados takes two hours, while apples take three.

Many of Kishimoto's designs are inspired by traditional Japanese patterns. Typically, such patterns are woven into cloth or embroidered, and can convey meanings and connotations. One, called bishamon tortoise, consists of upside-down Y shapes. Kishimoto carved that into an avocado. Another variation on bishamon, called kumikikkou, he carved into a papaya. Both are based on the patterns of a tortoise shell. They symbolize longevity and were used on warriors' clothes. Another, maze-like design he has etched into broccoli and cauliflower is called sayagata. Sayagata has roots in ancient Buddhist art, and it originally came to Japan on Chinese fabrics hundreds of years ago. Why did Kishimoto choose these traditional patterns? The answer is simple: He thinks they're cool.

Kishimoto refers to produce carving as "Thai" carving, because the masters of fruit carving are from Thailand. It's an old tradition that originated from chefs cooking for the royal family. But Japan also has a history of food-carving. Mukimono, as it's called, is hundreds of years old. By combining historical patterns and mukimono, Kishimoto has created something unique. News outlets have gushed over his work, and he says he's been surprised by the attention.

And what happens to Kishimoto's creations when he's done? "I carve and eat it," he says.

'Living Stone' Succulents

$13.99, Amazon

What looks like a rock, but is really a plant? Succulents are the current celebrity of the windowsill gardening world, and one of the stand-out varieties is the lithop. This bulbous genus of succulent is known for its resemblance to a colorful stone, earning it a number of fun nicknames, including “pebble plant.”

On the outside, the plants look like colorful rocks you might find in their native South Africa, or maybe even a weird little brain, but on the inside they are as satisfyingly squishy as any succulent. Despite looking like a precious gem, lithops can also produce a flower from between their rounded halves.

Whatever you call them, a small cluster of lithops is sure to make you the envy of your friends and other indoor gardening enthusiasts.

Stand at just the right vista on the shore of Lake Merritt in Oakland, California, and you'll see what appears to be a big island filled with dead trees, dense shrubs, and majestic birds—depending on the day, maybe double-crested cormorants, grebes, or black-crowned night herons. But walk a handful of paces and the mass will separate, revealing a five-piece archipelago where thousands of waterfowl make a home on their way across the lake or the world.

Although the archipelago is tantalizingly near both the shore and the lake’s boating area, the general public is not allowed within 50 yards, which gives the islands a mysterious appeal. The handful of parks workers and volunteers who have been lucky enough to walk its grounds describe the experience as a rare gift.

“It’s a visceral feeling—I could compare it to my first time traveling overseas, getting off the plane and realizing it’s the same sky, but you look around and everything is totally different,” says James Robinson, who grew up in Oakland and directs the nonprofit Lake Merritt Institute. “It’s a sensory overload, an experience of learning of how to be in the moment.”

The islands, the first of which was sculpted nearly 100 years ago from leftover construction dirt, reflect the political and ecological history of not just the lake, which is the nation’s oldest wildlife refuge, but also the city around it. They are a sanctuary within a sanctuary, hidden just out of view of the street, waiting to be discovered. “When you come inside the park, you see a ton of very cool-looking birds,” says Robinson. “You think, how is all this nature here in Oakland?”

Sitting nearly at the geographical center of the San Francisco Bay tidal estuary ecosystem, Lake Merritt is not actually a lake, but a lagoon, degraded for over two centuries by urban development. The Bay estuary, with its mix of salt and freshwater, is so perfectly-located and unusually biodiverse that it is considered both hemispherically and internationally significant by conservation groups; dozens of species of birds have, for centuries, stopped there to rest on long journeys down the Pacific Flyway, a migratory route that stretches from Alaska to Patagonia. And within this already unusual ecosystem, the lagoon is unique, its calmer inland environment and smoother waters providing a serene counterpart to rough coastal shores.

Throughout the early 1800s, as Oakland’s original city center grew a few miles away, on stolen Ohlone land, the lagoon became a sewage dump, an olfactory legacy that planners are still dealing with. The slow march toward cleanup began in 1869, when Samuel Merritt, a wealthy former doctor and Oakland’s 13th mayor, convinced the city council to install a dam, hoping regulated water levels would help hide the stench. A lake was born.

Unfortunately for Merritt’s substantial waterfront real estate investments, so was an ideal hunting ground. The lake exploded into an aviary wonderland of actual sitting ducks. Constant gunshot noise and the threat of stray bullets drove Merritt, on behalf of his wealthy neighbors, to barge his way through California’s bureaucracy and demand the lake become a nature preserve. In 1870, it was enshrined as North America’s first wildlife refuge, birthed more of capitalism than conservation.

Merritt died in 1890, but another mayor, John Davie, took up the birds’ cause upon his election in 1915. Nearly four decades as a refuge had made the lake a popular local attraction—more of a people sanctuary than a wildlife sanctuary—and Davie wanted to give the birds back some of their space. Construction of a 20,000-square-foot Duck Island finished on May 9, 1923; the mayor’s opponents, who considered dedicating an island to birds frivolous, called it Davie’s Folly.

Lake Merritt was already on its way to becoming the city’s “crown jewel,” and soon the island itself was a point of civic pride, with every improvement toward a resplendent sanctuary covered by the Oakland Tribune. Locals in 1924 celebrated the first batch of “native-son” ducks born on its shores, a brood that went on to star in a serialized radio play set on Duck Island that aired every Monday at 2 p.m. throughout the 1920s. “The Lake Merritt Ducks” was so popular that every episode got a full-column recap in the paper and, occasionally, fan art. Socialites even took inspiration from the island ducks for Mardi Gras costumes.

Meanwhile, the real birds were learning that the island and surrounding shores were safe places for stopovers free of land-based predators. Beginning in the 1930s, researchers from the U.S. Biological Survey banded ducks for tracking and study, an endorsement of the lake’s unique status: There were few other places that so reliably had so many birds so easily accessible.

“If you go to the lake today and you’re unaccustomed to it, you’ll be overwhelmed by how many birds there are, but in the 1940s and ’50s they were counting 4,000 a day that they didn’t get the day before,” says Hilary Powers, a birder who leads walking tours of the lake for the Golden Gate Audubon Society. “Tens of thousands over the course of the season.”

It was during this era in the mid-20th century that the birds got their most significant champion, although this time, he was motivated by conservation. In 1948, Paul Covel, a former zookeeper from Massachusetts, joined the Parks Department as the city naturalist.

“He was a self-taught ornithologist of the first degree, so in love with the variety of birds and so in love with the lake,” says Stephanie Benavidez, an Oakland native whom Covel hired to work at the refuge nearly five decades ago. “He saw his role as protecting the legacy of the sanctuary and carrying it into the future.”

All of Oakland’s natural environs were under Covel’s purview, but his avocation was the refuge. Between 1953 and 1954, he oversaw the construction of four more islands, this time from landscaping dirt, to join the original one. The first was also rejuvenated. Covel hoped to diversify the bird population, so plants—including Himalayan blackberry bushes, star acacias, eucalyptus trees, and bottlebrush—varied slightly island-to-island to allow birds to pick the arrangement that suited them best.

Wigeons, pintails, scaups, and goldeneyes began to nest alongside the mallards and canvasbacks. Some years, according to Benavidez, nearly 150 different species appeared over the course of a season. Covel and his staff revelled in explaining them all to visitors. “He knew the importance of making people feel responsible for helping to protect the beauty of what was going on around them,” says Benavidez.

But the variety did not last. Two decades later, as Covel prepared to retire, the bird population had declined to match an uptick in Oakland’s human population. Marshes nearby had turned to landfills for new housing stock, and a once-robust park staff dwindled to a handful. New birds continued to arrive, but their populations never matched the sheer volume of the mid-century flocks.

Benavidez took over as lead naturalist from her mentor in 1975, the same year that a raccoon infestation in the nearby Audubon Canyon Ranch nature preserve forced egrets there to relocate. They chose the islands, white egrets gracing tree branches and snowy ones burrowing into the bushes, pale feathers set off by the verdant green of the underbrush. They were soon joined by black-crowned night herons, and the islands “became a vivid rookery of bird life,” remembers Benavidez.

Meanwhile, the islands attracted birders by the thousands, from across the country and the world, who would stake out vantages for spotting a Barrow’s goldeneye or a bufflehead duck from much closer than they were accustomed to at home, or even in other sanctuaries. “The ease of seeing things here is unique,” says Powers. “The birds are just right there. They’ll give you the stink eye from [a few] feet away.”

The egret/heron regime destroyed much of the islands’ landscaping. It turned out the eucalyptus trees Covel had planted were no match for guano, or for the brackish mixture roots sucked up when rainwater muddled the lake’s natural saline content. By the early 2000s the trees had gone bare and died, leaving the herons and egrets without foliage for roosting. They moved out.

“It’s been a slow drama over the years,” says Powers, one that continued in 2003, when construction on the Bay and Carquinez Bridges evicted scores of double-crested cormorants from nooks underneath the roadways. Being seabirds that bask in direct heat, they started appearing on the islands’ tree branches, which were conveniently left shorn for maximum sun exposure by the previous occupants.

Since then, the permanent residents have predominantly been cormorants, although naturalists are trying to bring back the herons using decoys and recorded bird calls. Throughout all this, the islands themselves have proven robust, requiring only occasional maintenance and never additional dirt. In 2006, the city spent $1 million to shore up the edges, replace invasive plant species, install a new irrigation system, and add some living trees to attract foliage-loving bird species.

The biggest problem remains human beings. San Francisco’s decade-long housing crisis has continuously pushed new residents into Oakland, and those people every year push more and more trash into the lake, which can clog the irrigation system and hurt birds. Dissatisfied with being relegated to the shore, some visitors have begun flying drones across the islands to get closer to birds that are already unusually close. “People new to the city sometimes don’t seem to understand how to interact with the wildlife,” says Robinson.

While Oakland voters consistently prioritize the lake in funding measures, nothing can reverse the years of decline of surrounding habitats or increased stress of urbanization. Paul Covel warned of this on the occasion of the refuge’s centennial in 1970, reminding readers of Tribune that his work hadn’t truly “saved” the lake. “If we are to preserve Lake Merritt and the waterfowl refuge without gradual erosion of their natural values, we shall need your help,” he said.

Benavidez, who is now 65 and has been with the Parks Department for 48 years, takes after her mentor: She doesn’t think it’s too late. “The lake and the animals have adapted best they can to the sprawl and the Disneyfication, and this is what Paul was trying to get the staff to understand—it’s our job to get people to become responsible,” she says. “Once they’re responsible and fall in love, they will preserve and protect.”

If the producer Simon Cowell were cast away on a desert island, he told the BBC in 2006, choosing a luxury item to while away the days with would be an easy task. “A mirror,” he told the English broadcaster Sue Lawley, who wondered aloud if he were joking. “It’s true,” he replied. “Because I’d miss me.” “Are you going to let us broadcast that?” she asked. “I don’t care,” said Cowell. “What, I’m on my own, no one else is around, I might as well have something, I’ll have a mirror.”

For 76 years, these kinds of extraordinary exchanges have taken place on a British radio show called Desert Island Discs, where famous, illustrious, or just plain interesting people are tasked with imagining themselves as island “castaways.” Every Sunday morning, over the course of an hour-long interview, these guests choose eight records to share with the public, as a kind of soundtrack to their lives. At the end at the program, they must choose just one piece of music—these days, often a pop song; when the show started, usually a longer piece of a classical music—to take to an unspecified desert island, along with a work of literature and a luxury item of their choosing. They are also given the Complete Works of Shakespeare and the Bible (or an equivalent religious text) as freebies.

The show plays each week on the BBC’s Radio 4, a primarily spoken-word channel that bookends drama, comedy, science, and history with snippets of news. For many Brits, it is part of the aural tapestry of being in the kitchen at home: the gurgle of an electric kettle, drizzle outside the window, and the quiet hum of Radio 4. Each week, around 3 million people will listen to Desert Island Discs, which has been hosted by the Scottish broadcaster Kirsty Young since 2006. Some do actively tune in, but many will simply wander into the kitchen at some point during the program and decide to keep on listening—depending on the guest.

The program was created in 1942 by its first presenter, Roy Plomley, whose interviews often dwelled on the specifics of life on the island, and whether his guests, like Margaret Thatcher in 1978, were any good at camping. For the entirety of its run, the show has opened to the strains of a sing-song orchestral valse, By the Sleepy Lagoon, by the composer Eric Coates, who himself appeared on the program in 1951. Herring gulls shriek over the top of the music, to give a desert island “feel.” When it was pointed out in the 1960s that they were native to the northern hemisphere, and would not have been found on a tropical island, they were briefly replaced with more authentic sooty terns. Listeners complained, and the gulls returned for good.

More than 3,000 people have appeared on the program in these nearly eight decades. Among the ‘D’s alone are Davids Attenborough (three times!), Walliams, Mitchell, and Beckham; Dames Judi Dench and Zaha Hadid; Dukes and Duchesses of Devonshire and Westminster. In the show’s back catalog are musicians, actors, authors, and doctors; politicians, pundits, designers, and tycoons. Some guests have mass appeal, like the actors Tom Hanks or George Clooney. Others have simply lived extraordinary lives, like the Wales-born vascular surgeon, David Nott. He described making life or death decisions in Aleppo and nearly broke down in tears as he told Young about returning home to his wife, after being in Syria.

Appearing on the show has become a point of pride. Speaking at the Cheltenham Literary Festival in 2012, the producer Leanne Buckle told the audience that celebrities often wrote in to the program, asking to appear on it. “I wrote a really kind letter saying we were pleased they liked the program,” she said of one anonymous letter-writer.“The person wrote back to say really I ought to reconsider my decision because they were very interesting. I wrote back again politely declining. Then their daughter wrote and said, ‘If my father has a heart attack it will be your fault!’”

But there are still a few hold-outs. At the same festival, Young described Elizabeth II as her dream guest. “There is quite a long list. It’s never going to happen, but Her Majesty would be wonderful.” The playwright Sir Alan Bennett, who last appeared on the program in 1967, is high up on the list, she said, as was Rolling Stone Mick Jagger.

For its audience, part of the pleasure of the show lies in choosing your own imaginary songs. Would you opt for your all-time favorites, or the ones that had really summed up your life, no matter how questionable? (An even greater pleasure, perhaps, is knowing that you probably won’t ever have to appear on the show, and reveal your musical tastes to the world.) Speaking on the show in 2006, the restaurant critic A. A. Gill said he’d been planning his list since he was a child, while the actor Patrick Stewart claimed to have carried round a list of his top eight song choices, on the off-chance he was asked to appear.

But listeners don’t necessarily tune in for the music choices. Instead, it’s the interviews which often draw people in, to reap moments of incredible personal candor from the guests. Sometimes, these come in the choice of a luxury item—a worrying number of people have asked for a blow-up doll. At other times, such moments arrive simply through beautiful, considered answers. Behind the scenes, Young and her producers will spend hours researching the lives of the people they’ll interview, so that the perfect, searching question, when it comes, is almost never an accident. She’ll prepare sartorially too, she told Radio Times, donning an open-neck shirt for Bill Gates and a sharp suit for Paul Weller. “And we had it on good authority that Morrissey drinks neat vodka, so we made sure we had a bottle,” Young told the magazine. “When my producer said, ‘Would you like some tea or coffee… or vodka?’ Morrissey said, ‘Vodka.’ I had one as well. I wasn’t going to have a cup of tea when Morrissey was having a vodka. I didn’t drink it, he did.”

At the end of the program, having chosen their eight records, guests must select just one song with which to spend eternity on a desert island. Sometimes, this is the hardest part—harder, even, than choosing the original eight, or engaging with Young’s courteous cross-examination. For the actress Judi Dench, it was near-impossible. “I will take…” she began. “Hm. I don’t want any of these. I don’t want to go to the island. I don’t want any of those records with me. What’ll I take?” She paused, startled by the question. “I’ll take… Sinatra. … What a nightmare.”

If the great auks had been able to stay on Geirfuglasker, in the end it would not have saved them. Sheer-sided, surrounded by rough seas, Geirfuglasker—Great Auk Rock, in Icelandic—discouraged visitors. Men had found the fat, goose-sized birds there anyway, but the island was far enough out to provide a measure of safety for a while. But then, in 1830, a volcanic eruption sank the island beneath the water.

The great auks migrated to Eldey, a rough wedge of rock 14 miles closer to Iceland’s Reykjanes peninsula. There was only one spot to land a boat on Eldey, but men made it onto the island, from time to time, to hunt the birds. Once, these birds had been sought for their down or the meat of their large breasts. When they became scarce, collectors competed to get hold of one. In June 1844, a group of Icelandic hunters rowed out to Eldey in search of great auks at the behest of collector and dealer Carl Siemsen. They climbed to the island’s flat top and spotted a single pair.

The birds’ wings had long ago evolved for the water rather than the air. On land, where they came to lay their eggs, the birds could only waddle toward the water, wings tucked close to their bodies, in an attempt to escape. “They uttered no cry of alarm,” one of the hunters later recalled, “and moved with their short steps, about as quickly as a man could walk.”

It was easy to catch the birds and break their necks. They had been caring for an egg, already crushed by the time the hunters found it.

Those great auks were the last of their species, or at least the last two definitively seen alive. After that, occasional reports of great auk sightings surfaced, but soon it became clear that the species, the last flightless bird in the northern hemisphere, had gone extinct.

The remains of those last two birds never made it to Siemsen. The hunters sold the bodies to an apothecary in Reykjavík, who skinned the birds, preserved their internal organs (in whisky, according to legend), and sold them. Today, the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen holds their eyes and organs. But in the chaotic 19th-century trade in great auk specimens, no one kept track of what happened to the coveted skins.

Jessica Thomas, who goes by @Aukward_Jess on Twitter, first heard about the disappearance of the last great auks’ skins when she spent a year at the University of Copenhagen as part of her doctoral work on ancient DNA. She wondered if it might be possible to find them. The skins were so valuable that they almost certainly ended up in a museum somewhere.

Thomas was already gathering DNA from great auk specimens, in search of biological data that could help explain their extinction. But, she thought, perhaps she could use her data to the solve another centuries-old mystery: the fate of the remains of the last two great auks.

Great auks were beautiful birds. Their bellies were white and their backs a slick black. They had large white spots on their heads, overlapping small, intent eyes. Their oversized beaks had parallel grooves running down each side, and their eggs were spotted with drips and drabs like a Jackson Pollock painting.

They lived in the cold waters of the North Atlantic and in summer months congregated on isolated islands in large groups. Off the coast of Newfoundland, before Europeans arrived, the Beothuk people paddled out to a small rock 30 miles to sea to collect their eggs. The birds were powerful symbols for the people of North America’s Atlantic coast: Their beaks have been found in human graves, including one where 200 beaks covered the interred.

European sailors came across the birds on that outcropping, later named Funk Island for the smell of the guano layered there, in the 17th century. On expeditions of exploration or fishing voyages, they went to Funk Island as if it were a commissary. The large birds were easy to catch. Craving a supply of fresh meat while out at sea, sailors herded them onto the boats. The Funk Island auks survived this assault for hundreds of years, but at the end of the 1700s, when settlers started killing them for their down rather than just their meat, Newfoundland’s great auks was doomed.

“On the island, which is just a bald rock, there's a cairn of stones,” says William Montevecchi, who studies the ecology of marine and terrestrial birds at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He spent many years conducting research on Funk Island, now an ecological reserve mostly off-limits to visitors, to protect the gannets, murres, and other seabirds that still live there. Accounts of the last encounters with the island’s great auks describe mounds of dead birds piled up, parboiled and discarded after their down had been harvested for European blankets and pillows. Montevecchi found a lingering sign of that slaughter. Great auk islands tended to be places of bare rock coated with guano, but this one has a meadow on top, grown from, in Montevecchi’s words, “composted great auks.” “It's a mysterious place,” he says, “unique on the planet.”

As great auks dwindled in number, they became more sought after than ever before. By the early 1800s, naturalists had noticed that auks were becoming rare, which set off the scramble among museums and amateur collectors to obtain one. In London, Stevens' Auction Room became famous for its auk auctions, and mounted auks became status symbols. As Errol Fuller writes in his book The Great Auk, “Kings and princes became Auk owners.” Carl Fabergé created a tiny auk statuette, from rock crystal with ruby eyes, that’s still in the Royal Collection in England.

Soon, mounted specimens, about 80 of which exist today, were all that was left. Reports of real-world sightings took on a mythical quality. In 1848, four years after the Eldey auks were killed, a group of Norwegians were rowing between two tiny islands off the country’s northeastern edge when they saw four strange, swimming birds. They shot one, hoping to examine it more closely. It was a large bird, with a white spot beneath its eye and unusually tiny wings. Months later, one of the men saw a drawing of a great auk and had a flash of recognition. But there was no proof he had encountered one. The men had dumped the body on the shore, but when they returned to retrieve it, it was gone.

We drove great auks to extinction before anyone had studied them closely, so there are major holes in our knowledge of them. Scientists are still uncovering new details, almost 175 years after the Eldey birds were killed. Montevecchi, for instance, analyzed bones from Funk Island to learn about the birds' diet (primarily capelin, it turned out). One major question, though, is why they went extinct at all. Over-hunting is an obvious culprit, but scientists have wondered: Could environmental change played a role as well?

By examining their DNA, Thomas, who recently completed her doctorate at Bangor University and the University of Copenhagen, aimed to create a clearer picture of the size and genetic diversity of the world's great auk population before the birds disappeared. But to solve the mystery of the Eldey auks, she’d need to focus on individual birds. In any genetic study, individuals are most easily identified by DNA from a cell’s nucleus. Thomas’s research focused on mitochondrial DNA, which is easier to obtain from older specimens but contains less information. Only if the genetic diversity of the auk population was high would her DNA samples lead her to the last, lost auks.

In his book, Fuller writes that each extant great auk specimen represents “a little tragedy all of its own.” He traces the history of dozens of preserved auks, and was able to identify five specimens that, based on their histories, could be the birds killed on Eldey in 1844. Among those, he suggested that one in Brussels and another Los Angeles could be the most likely candidates.

According to the recollection of a Danish professor, set down years after the birds left Iceland, the skins of the Eldey auks had been brought to the Congress of German Naturalists in 1844. From there, they may have passed through the hands of Israel of Copenhagen, a well-known auk dealer, to a merchant in Hamburg, to an Amsterdam dealer. By 1847, according to Fuller’s research, one of those skins belonged to the Brussels museum. The other made its way to a museum in Los Angeles over many more years. But it was unclear whether the skins Israel of Copenhagen had sold were in fact the Eldey auks.

In her larger study, Thomas had looked at 41 individuals and found little overlap among the sequences. Even in their mitochondrial DNA, the birds had enough genetic diversity that individuals could be distinguished from one another with relative ease. To try to identify the skins, Thomas extracted DNA samples from the esophageal tissue of the two Eldey auks along with a sample from one of their hearts, from among the portions still held by the Natural History Museum of Denmark. The genetic material from the esophagus of the male auk was a perfect match with one other specimen—the Brussels auk that Fuller had identified. But the DNA from the female auk, taken from her heart, did not match any of Fuller’s five suggestions. Only half of the mystery had been solved, and the female auks’ skin was still lost.

But Thomas believes she knows where it could be. The auk in Los Angeles once belonged to George Dawson Rowley, an amateur ornithologist who had traveled to Iceland to document the history of the Eldey auks. Rowley owned two auk specimens, which later became part of a quartet of auks sold by a London dealer. But, Thomas and her colleagues write in a paper published in the journal Genes, the auction house mixed up the four birds. It’s possible that the Los Angeles auk and another—now in a Cincinnati museum—may have been confused for one another. Thomas plans to test the DNA of the Cincinnati auk in the coming months. By this summer, the mystery of the auk skins may be solved.

Even then there will still be open questions about the larger loss. “Understanding more about its extinction, as a recently extinct species, has implications for understanding present-day threats to biodiversity,” says Thomas. We can learn more about why and how species might disappear by studying one that was wiped out in our own time than one that went extinct thousands of years ago.

The glassy-eyed mounted specimens only hint at what was lost when we helped extinguish great auks. They look a little awkward, but in life they would have been striking, the northern hemisphere’s answer to penguins. Though the northern and southern flightless birds have a resemblance, they are not closely related. Penguins and auks are a case of convergent evolution, where two similar niches led two lines of evolution travel different paths to the same result. (Think of the body shapes of dolphins and sharks, or the wings of bats and ravens.) The name “penguin,” though, originally belonged to the great auk, the Pinguinus impennis. In Welsh, pen gwyn means “white head,” and it may be that the white spot on the great auk’s head inspired the name.

“We really could have had flightless birds in the northern hemisphere,” says Montevecchi. People already flock to islands around Newfoundland to see puffins and other seabirds, and to Antarctic waters to see penguins. “You can only imagine what we could do with islands with flightless birds on them,” Montevecchi says. “They capture people’s imagination.”