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There are many routes to Misery. From the north, you can take the Rue du Jeu de Paume; from the east, the Rue de Licourt; and from the south, the Rue de Billy, a meandering asphalt track that winds past bare fields, under an open sky. Any of these will lead to this French village of around 140 residents, 90 miles north of Paris.

Misery is one of more than 150 places with a desperately sad name, chronicled by the Australian artist Damien Rudd on his Instagram account, Sad Topographies. In British Columbia, Canada, the remote Sorrow Islands look out over miles and miles of empty ocean; Terrible Mountain can be found in Vermont; in Las Vegas, a wrong turn off Hearts Desire Avenue will leave you on Broken Heart Street, a lonely stretch of road 177 feet long. Each one has been lovingly screenshot from Google Maps and put on display—the world’s most joyless places, laid out in a feast of wretchedness, despair, and general disappointment.

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It all started, Rudd says, when he learned about the Australian expedition of the explorers Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills, in which the men attempted to lead a party of 19 approximately 2,000 miles across Australia in 1861. Along the way, they sought to reach a place called Mount Hopeless, a 420-foot elevation in South Australia, but ran out of food and water and died in the Outback. The peak had been named some 20 years earlier by the English explorer Edward Eyre, Rudd says. On a similar cross-Australian journey in 1840, “he got to this hill, and he looked out, and there were these salt water plains. Basically, the expedition had to end, and it had only just begun,” Rudd says. In his expedition journal, Eyre wrote of that day: “Cheerless and hopeless indeed was the prospect before us … This closed all my dreams as to the expedition.”

This was Rudd’s first sad toponym. Inspired, he began searching for other examples of locations with desperate names on Google Maps. He started in Australia, where the places often carried the same ghosts of failed colonial exploration, and then looked farther afield, screenshotting them on his phone as he went, until he had “a small collection of places.” These initial sites eventually became the starting seeds for an Instagram account that today has well over 85,000 followers.

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To find each spot, Rudd painstakingly searches sad terms on Google Maps—a fertile semantic field of woebegone words. After a while, people began to send him the places they’d found themselves, the best of which later found their way onto the account. As time’s gone on, Rudd says, he’s been able to deviate a little from the form, with the implicit message that any place posted on the account is very sad: A post from the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration as president, for instance, simply features the entirety of America.

Now, after a few years of operation, Rudd might post one new place a month. Each has a similar format—a close crop on a Google Map, with its familiar flat shades of blue, gray, and green. (Occasionally, Rudd will edit away any topographical detritus—nearby places and other needless information—that might distract from the sadness of the chosen site.) Some of these places, Rudd says, have haunting backstories like that of Mount Hopeless. With others, it’s harder to say whether something horrible happened, or the person given naming privileges simply had a very dark sense of humor.

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Either way, certain patterns emerge. There’s a whole archipelago of ill-fated watery spots: Agony Island; the Island of Tears; Mistake Island; Misery Island; Lonely Island; Despair Island; Broken Island; Useless Islands; Solitude Island. On their own, each place seems poignant. But as a group, there’s a kind of baroque comedy to them. Is it supposed to be funny? “It is,” Rudd says. “What makes it funny is the combination of these two conflicting ideas—about landscape and maps as being something kind of very serious and austere, and then landscape itself as being something romantic and beautiful. And then you have these very sad names: Depression Island, that sort of thing. That combination is where the humor comes in.”

He wonders too if there may have been an element of self-awareness behind some of these early explorers’ choices of name. “They surely must have been aware of how bleakly funny that is,” he says, “to name a mountain for how disappointing it is.”

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Sad Topographies’ popularity—it has since inspired twobooks—perhaps speaks to these places’ universal appeal. In the comments on the Road to Misery in Maine, someone stakes out a claim to “the little cottage at the end,” while another person wonders whether Grief Island, in Alaska, will let newcomers move in. “People align themselves with these places,” Rudd says. The tiny atoll of Agony Island, in the middle of the Pacific, doesn’t have any permanent residents—but it’s not so hard to imagine why, from time to time, it might seem appropriate to relocate. The project’s tagline says it all: “Somewhere to go, when you’re feeling low.”

Masha Ivashintsova was born in Russia, in 1942. At 18 she started taking photographs, and became involved the underground arts movement in St. Petersburg, then known as Leningrad. She shot prolifically on the streets of the city, with either her Leica IIIc or Rolleiflex. But she never showed her work to anyone—some of it she didn't even develop. When she died, in 2000, she left 30,000 photographs—in the form of negatives and undeveloped film—in a box, where they remained, untouched, for 17 years.

Late last year, while working on a renovation, Ivashintsova’s daughter Asya Ivashintsova-Melkumyan and her husband discovered the box in their attic. Slowly they began to explore this archive, and saw what Ivashintsova had seen, created, and then hidden.

One photo from 1979 shows residents shoveling snow on the bitterly cold banks of the Neva River. Another captures a playground beside an abandoned building, with a jungle gym shaped like a rocket ship, quiet and unused. In a busy street scene, a man looks into the lens, mid-conversation, a cigarette hovering, a fur hat perched on his head.

There are also family snapshots and the occasional self-portrait. Ivashintsova also shot portraits of the notable artists with whom she was romantically involved, and felt eclipsed by: photographer Boris Smelov, poet Viktor Krivulin, and linguist (and father to her daughter) Melvar Melkumyan. “She sincerely believed that she paled next to them and consequently never showed her photography works, her diaries and poetry to anyone during her life,” Ivashintsova-Melkumyan writes.

Unlike these men, Ivashintsova was not recognized for her work. She held various jobs, and was unemployed by 1981. According to her daughter, without a job, Ivashintsova had two options: prison or institutionalization. For the next decade, Ivashintsova moved between psychiatric hospitals.

Ivashintsova-Melkumyan has now created a website and Instagram feed devoted to her mother's work, and is planning an exhibition of these revealing, unusual images for this summer in Vienna. “During her lifetime whatever she did was never taken very seriously, neither by her family nor by the men she loved,” she said, in a recent interview with My Modern Met. There is a sense of validation that her mother’s work can finally be appreciated. And there are many more of the 30,000 images that still need to be developed, printed, and scanned. Atlas Obscura has a selection of Ivashintsova’s photographs.

In 1896, New York City’s American Museum of Natural History hired Franz Boas, a notable anthropologist and curator, to spruce up its growing-but-inadequate collection of ethnographic materials. At the time, the institution boasted numerous Native American artifacts, but had a limited collection of similar objects from around the world. Boas, now considered the founder of American anthropology, jumped at the opportunity to curate specific and well-defined collections that effectively captured the complicated global history of human development.

Boas was uniquely qualified to achieve this goal. Having already served in similar roles at Chicago’s Field Museum and Berlin’s Royal Museum for Ethnology, he understood the cardinal rule of late-19th century curation: What you couldn’t get in the field, you traded for. It’s not surprising, then, that when he set out to assemble materials from Indigenous Australians in April 1899, he reached out to Roger Etheridge, curator at the Australian Museum in Sydney, looking to strike a deal.

That month, he wrote to the museum requesting carefully curated artifacts from a single but non-specified group of Aboriginal people. His opening move in these negotiations would have fit right in a century later amid a front-porch trading card swap: he offered Etheridge his dupes. “Our museum is very strong in collections from the Pacific coast of America and from arctic America,” Boas wrote, “and it would be possible to arrange a good typical collection from either or both regions for purposes of exchange.”

Etheridge initially rejected the offer. While his institution owned several of the weapons and tools Boas desired, he could not relinquish them “for the want of duplicates.” Still, Etheridge hoped the museums could come to different terms. “If your Museum is desirous of Marsupial skins,” he responded in May, “a fairly good set, either mounted or in skin, could be sent in exchange for the works of the American Aborigines.”

From a 21st-century vantage, it’s hard to fathom prominent museums swapping stone axes and kangaroo skins as if they were Pokémon; however, according to Catherine Nichols, a lecturer in cultural anthropology and museum studies at Loyola University Chicago, this exchange between Boas and Etheridge perfectly encapsulates the common practice in their era of swapping duplicates—items Nichols defines as “a kind-of-thing” of which a museum already owned enough representative examples “to serve scientific and educational purposes.” Museums usually considered a “kind of thing” a specific item from a distinct region, species, or people—a Zuni vase for instance, or a Zande spear-head. If a museum owned enough examples of one of these vases or spears, it labeled excess artifacts as duplicates.“Almost all museums exchanged duplicates in the late-19th and early-20th centuries,” Nichols says. “Every exchange was different to a point, but people were often trying to fill gaps in their collections. So, if an institution didn’t have specific material, and it knew a different museum did, it would write and ask about duplicates.”

According to Nichols—who unearthed many of the exchanges detailed in this article amid her extensive research on the subject—19th-century museums saw nothing unethical in this behavior. Most ethnographic items were originally procured either through bartering directly with indigenous peoples or through funded excavations. Curators like Boas and Etheridge believed the transparent nature of these methods cleared them of any ethical grey area, even when exchanging culturally sensitive items.

Indeed, examples of these exchanges abound in the records kept by most major museums. Curators from across the world often reached out to one another with wish lists, alongside inventories of surplus items available for one-off trades. Some even established decades-long trading relationships, thereby creating a global network that saw the exchange of countless artifacts, ranging from contemporary animal specimens to the skulls of ancient Romans.

According to Nichols, this network effectively established duplicates as a world-wide currency among anthropologists, zoologists, and archaeologists. Its existence caused museums of the era to expand purchase and expedition efforts to include the procuration of excess artifacts they could swap for items on lists often referred to as “desiderata.” For example, says Nichols, “if a museum was going to send an expedition to the Philippines, it would collect more than it ultimately needed, because it knew that if it collected multiple examples of something, it could trade them.”

Like any collectors’ market, the museum exchange network required successful participants to strike a careful balance between trustworthiness, aggressiveness, and collegiality. Few did this better than Enrico Giglioli, director of the Royal Zoological Museum in Florence between 1874 and 1909. Giglioli, who also served as vice president of the Italian Anthropological Society, traded with nearly every major museum in the western world. According to Nichols, records of his exchanges with other curators now provide anthropologists great insight into the back-and-forth nature of large scale exchanges.

“Giglioli was super persistent in terms of trying to assemble the kind of collection he wanted,” she says. “He would keep coming back until he got exactly what he wanted, and he would use whatever means he could.” Though Giglioli conducted trades that ran the scientific gamut, by the late-19th century, he was largely fixated on a single passion project—a comparative analysis exhibit, which demonstrated the centuries-long evolution of tools used by indigenous peoples in isolated parts of the world. When negotiating with museums for unrelated swaps of animal or plant specimens, he often serviced this project by requesting rare items like stone axes, bone needles, and ice chisels.

In 1889, for example, Giglioli sent the Smithsonian Institute a desiderata list that included nearly 50 items from the indigenous peoples of Alaska, California, and the Midwestern plains of the United States. Expecting the museum to offer only duplicates, he prioritized obtaining modern examples of axes, flint knives, and arrowheads—though, as he added in an attached letter, “any of the ancient types of Indian stone implements [would also] be most welcome.”

In return, Giglioli initially offered ethnological material from Oceania, a geographical region that includes Melanesia, Micronesia, Polynesia, and Australasia. When this failed to procure what he wanted—specifically rare weapons from the Dakota and Apache tribes—he upped the ante a few years later with a comprehensive set of Andaman artifacts collected by a prominent anthropologist named Edward Horace Man.

Man, then famous for his monograph on the indigenous inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, collected (or arguably took) so many artifacts during expeditions to the region in the 1880s, he seems to have flooded the British museum market. By 1887, for instance, he had sent 753 Andaman artifacts to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History alone. “We already have far too much Andaman and Nicobar things,” an Oxford representative later lamented to one of his peers. “There was in Pitt Rivers one whole gallery full of scarcely anything else. They quite swamped the rest. Now, I hope to reduce their effect by distributing them, but even then there are too many.”

The Smithsonian apparently did not know or did not care about the abundance of Andaman artifacts available on the international market. Giglioli’s offer—which included belts, baskets, canoes, sleeping mats, bows, and just about everything else collected on the island—proved too much to resist for Otis Mason, a Smithsonian curator. “I take pleasure in saying that this our best offer,” he wrote to his colleague, George Brown Goode. “No one has made a more desirable offer of exchange. I should therefore move to give this the very first place and accept the offer at once.”

According to Brian Gill, a former curator at the Auckland Museum in New Zealand and author of The Unburnt Egg: More Stories of a Museum Curator, Giglioli was not alone in his mastery of the exchange economy. He believes the records of Thomas Cheeseman, who served as curator of his museum between 1874 and 1923, are equally impressive, and, in many ways, better illustrate the unique opportunities created by the international trade market. “Auckland Museum had very small budgets during the period and had very limited ability to buy objects from dealers,” he says. “Exchange offered a way around this cash problem and enabled the acquisition of many objects that could be exhibited for the delight and education of the public.”

During Cheeseman’s prolific reign as curator, Gill says, he greatly expanded international holdings in his museum (now known as the Auckland War Memorial Museum), largely through swaps with men like Giglioli. His success, he says, speaks greatly to the two main movers in the exchange economy: scarcity and desirability. Because Cheeseman operated from an isolated region rich in unusual flora and fauna, he easily elicited valuable return on items like kiwi skeletons, stuffed kakapos, and other native specimens. He also had access to Maori ethnographic items, some of which he traded for artifacts as wide-ranging as an Egyptian mummy, ancient Italian crania, and prehistoric axes.

The exchange process mastered by Cheeseman, Giglioli, and countless other curators eventually ran its course. According to Nichols, while natural history museums still occasionally exchange non-man-made items, anthropological trades largely “fizzled out” by the 1960s. As staff turned over at major museums, subsequent generations took a new mindset into the field and beyond. “In the early days,” she says, “there was not a lot of need for fine levels of variation. Now, our techniques and our way of approaching things have become more advanced. Anthropologists have a greater appreciation for the variance of objects that was overlooked when items were designated as duplicates.”

More importantly, she says, ethical concerns have greatly complicated the idea of ownership. Many of the items in modern museums were crafted by tribes with extant descendant populations. To trade such artifacts would not only call into question an institution’s claim to specific items but also the very notion that museums primarily exist to keep, preserve, and display precious material.

Indeed, 1990’s Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act obligates any American museum that receives federal funding to honor requests from native tribes to reclaim culturally important materials. There was a time, Nichols says, when museums feared that this and similar legislation would leave their institutions with empty shelves. This is not the case now, she contends, at least in part thanks to the complicated legacy of curatorial exchanges. Because items have been “coming in and out of museums from the very beginning,” she says, most institutions now recognize that their ownership of culturally sensitive material has always proven tentative and that those making repatriation requests often stand on higher ethical ground.

“Many museums are not only compliant with NAGPRA,” she says, “but they welcome repatriation requests and believe that a lot of good ultimately comes out of these conversations.”

Consider the humble potato. Linguistically, it’s often used to denigrate. Unimportant things are “small potatoes,” and we all try not to be “couch potatoes.” Nearly alone among vegetables, its nutritional value is questioned, making mashed potatoes and french fries something of a guilty pleasure.

But to artist and professor Jeffrey Allen Price, potatoes transcend their homely image. In fact, he might be the potato’s number one hype man. Price is the proud owner of 5,000 pieces of potato ephemera, from toys to books to snacks. He collects on behalf of his Think Potato Institute, which encompasses potato art, potato music, and potato events. Until June 15, 100 of his collectibles will be on display at Stony Brook University’s Charles B. Wang Center.

At the exhibition—titled Potasia: Potatosism in the East—the potato is king. Nineteen artists from Asia contributed artwork, which was curated by Price and the Wang Center’s director of cultural programs, Jinyoung Jin. Each and every work incorporates potatoes, whether in paint, video, or actual embellished potatoes.

Potasia is the sixth potato-themed art show that Price has curated. In honor of the tuber, he’s thrown events, amassed his collection, and even composed music (you can check out his band Potatotron on Soundcloud). While potatoes are often derided for their goofy name and lumpy appearance, they remain “humble, earthy, versatile, and healthy,” Price says. Potatoes spread from Peru across the planet to feed millions, providing nourishing and familiar meals in nearly every country. This, Price says, makes them a near-universal symbol, albeit one of many meanings. Humor, family, poverty, humility, and hope are all tied up in the concept of potato. “It is a very approachable vegetable,” Price says.

Price coined the term “potatoism” to describe the act of examining how potatoes intersect with and influence culture. But Price, who graduated from Stony Brook in 2003 with a master’s in studio art, points out that potatoes have long been represented in art. He was particularly influenced by Vincent Van Gogh’s 1885 work "The Potato Eaters," a painting of a peasant family sharing a hard-earned meal of potatoes. Van Gogh drew many people harvesting or peeling potatoes, which symbolized the hardscrabble lives of Dutch peasants. As for why goofy, lumpy potatoes deserve so much attention, Price quotes the conceptual artist Joseph Beuys: “Even the act of peeling a potato can be an artistic act if it is consciously done.”

The Wang Center has hosted food-themed shows before, most notably its 2014 show on how mangos became a propaganda symbol in China under Mao. Jin curated that show as well, and she approached Price at one of his potato lectures to pitch a collaboration. Price then asked his potato-art contacts and former students to contribute art.

Jin suggested a focus on Asian art, she says, because the Center already had socialist Korean prints that extol the planting of potatoes. The spud in Asia, she says, contains multitudes of meanings.

“It's nutritious, but poisonous as well,” Jin says of the potato’s status as a member of the nightshade family. “In North Korea and other socialist countries, it was a symbol of poverty and sorrow." Decades ago, potatoes were considered a poor substitute for the staple of white rice, and potatoes still dominate North Korean food.

Jin points to the art of Seongmin Ahn, whose work is included in the show. Ahn depicted delicate red and gold peonies, which represent prosperity, covering decaying potatoes. The contrast, says Jin, speaks to the fragility of dreams and cruelty of reality. Russian artist Anna Prikazchikova painted a kerosene bottle entangled by a potato plant covered in beetles. Invasive Colorado beetles scourged Soviet potato fields, which the government claimed was an American plot. As a child, Prikazchikova picked off the beetles and drowned them in kerosene: a gruesome chore that she depicts as almost hauntingly beautiful. Another artist, Okada Noriko, used her eerie cloth-and-yarn sculpture Awakening to comment on the poisonous nature of potato sprouts, underlining that potatoes must be kept from growing to stay good as food.

Potato art is on the rise. In his research for the show, Price says he found practitioners across the globe, including luminaries like Yayoi Kusama and Subodh Gupta. But the potato’s influence in Asia isn’t just cultural or culinary. It’s also economic. “The three leading producers of potatoes in the world now are China, Russia, and India,” Price says. On a macro level, potatoes aren’t so humble after all.

But the potato art at the Wang Center is more micro, and concerned with individual relationships with potatoes. “Though potatoes are a symbol of a global, connected world, artists use them to tell personal stories,” Jin says. Part of potatoism is the communal experience of sharing potatoes, so the Center is offering lectures and art projects as well. Along with viewing the art, potato-lovers can create prints with potato stamps and crocheted potato amigurimi, a type of stuffed doll popular in Japan. Price has also set up a recording booth for people to tell their potato stories, which he plans to feature in his upcoming Potato Podcast.

“I hope to interview potato people from around the world,” he says, adding that potato-industry insiders, potato artists, and people with good potato recipes are all welcome.

In the end, our search for the most marvelous everyday invention came down to paper and the sewer. One is everywhere, from notebooks to contracts, libraries to banks. The other is less visible but also ubiquitous, far beneath city streets. Save for manhole covers, the asphalt doesn't carry many hints about the busy world below.

After four rounds of voting, the sewer clinched the competition. It took down roundabouts in the first round (in a surprisingly close vote), then defeated string and can openers, before finally cruising past its last challenger.

A few readers told us why they cast their votes the way they did. Brian Perera noted that while it's possible to bump paper-only transactions to the cloud, there's, um, no way to outsource waste. At least not yet.

Modern civilization often talks of "going paperless," but no such movement (pun intended) has arisen for going sewerless. Case closed.

— Brian Perera (@thermoware) March 31, 2018

Hard to argue with that. Ammie E. Harrison, a librarian, chimed in on Twitter to say that, despite multiple literature degrees, a background in information science, and an abiding love of the written word, "I will vote sewer every time."

Here's the final bracket:

It's easy to imagine why a sewer might not get its due: When the system is functioning the way it's designed to, you don't even know it's there. It hides its labor, its scale, and any number of unpleasant smells by design, and gives us the "freedom to forget that the waste goes somewhere," writes Nicola Twilley in New York Times Magazine.

But when something goes wrong? Heavy rains might cause overflows, pushing waste into lakes or rivers. Small-scale problems might turn your office bathroom noxious. Fatbergs—congealed globs of fat, wet wipes, and more—can obstruct old pipes: Hoary, goopy reminders of what the sewer does for us every day. Flush, woosh, gone.

That's the drawback of being an everyday invention that's engineered to be invisible. People may take you for granted. Calvin Hendrick, the chief engineer of the Baltimore Sewerage Commission, was already worried about this in 1909. The installation of the system was wrapping up, and he wondered whether the system was too mundane and hidden to generate the fanfare and wonder it deserved. “The public would be amazed,” he remarked, “if they could realize what has been accomplished … I only wish that the people of Baltimore could see it.”

Modern sewage systems and their forebears have been making cities healthier and less foul for centuries. From the Roman Forum's Cloaca Maxima ("Greatest Sewer") to the giant iron balls that clear sludge in Paris's 19th-century system, sewers are subterranean wonders—underground, and too often overlooked.

Avery Island, a dome of salt fringed by marshes where Tabasco sauce has been made for the past 150 years, has been an outpost of stubborn consistency near the Louisiana coast. But the state is losing land to the seas at such a gallop that even its seemingly impregnable landmarks are now threatened.

The home of Tabasco, the now ubiquitous but uniquely branded condiment controlled by the same family since Edmund McIlhenny first stumbled across a pepper plant growing by a chicken coop on Avery Island, is under threat. An unimaginable plight just a few years ago, the advancing tides are menacing its perimeter.

“It does worry us, and we are working hard to minimize the land loss,” said Tony Simmons, the seventh consecutive McIlhenny family member to lead the company. “We want to protect the marsh because the marsh protects us.”

Simmons allows a silent pause as he mulls a situation where Tabasco is forced off the island. “We don’t think it will come to that, but we are working to do everything we can to make sure it won’t happen to us,” he said. “I mean, we could make Tabasco somewhere else. But this is more than a business: This is our home.”

A geologic oddity, Avery Island rises to 163 feet above sea level, making it a towering giant amid the supine flatness of Louisiana’s coast. The 2,200-acre island—more accurately a hill of buried salt surrounded by bayou and marsh a couple of miles inland from Vermilion Bay, an inlet of the Gulf of Mexico—has long provided a sturdy home to Tabasco but now faces the danger of being marooned.

The Avery Island marshes are retreating by around 30 feet a year as salt water seeps in, ushered in by canals dug by the oil and gas industry and the level of the land itself, which is gradually sinking by around a third of an inch a year. The salty brine kills off vegetation, loosens soils, and accelerates erosion.

Fierce storms clatter into what’s left of the marsh, which is also being slowly drowned by a warming ocean that’s rising faster than almost anywhere else in the world. A further sea level increase of two feet, almost certain given the warming that’s already occurred, will leave only the lofty core of Avery Island dry, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“The marsh stands between us and Vermilion Bay, and we don’t want to be right on the bay,” Simmons said. “We have to be very aggressive about dealing with the land loss. We almost can’t work fast enough.”

The threat posed to Tabasco is replicated along much of Louisiana’s coast, where a football field of land is lost every 100 minutes. Around 2,000 square miles of land, roughly the size of Delaware, has vanished from the state since the 1930s due to a cocktail of maladies and self-inflicted wounds, stemming from the overdevelopment of the Mississippi River and an unquestioning embrace of extractive drilling, topped off by the wrenching global consequences of climate change.

The U.S. has already been stripped of half of its wetlands since Europeans arrived and Louisiana, which accounts for a bulk of these losses, is on course to lose all of its wetland within two more centuries, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

A master plan set out by the state government last year forecast a further 2,250 square miles of Louisiana could be lost over the next 50 years, forcing 27,000 buildings to be flood-proofed, elevated, or bought out.

The plan sets out billions of dollars in work building protective seawalls, restoring marshland and increasing the amount of nourishing sediment carried to wetlands by the Mississippi, which hasn’t been left to meander naturally since New Orleans was established 300 years ago. Thousands of people still face being relocated, but while state authorities have acknowledged this fate they have yet to grapple with the vast cost and emotional whiplash it will entail.

“You go to Plaquemines parish and people will say they are already flood-proofed because they can pull their boat up to their door,” said Rudy Simoneaux, an engineer at the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority. “It asks a lot of a shrimper or a crabber to relocate inland to Baton Rouge. They depend on the water. People are prepared to just rebuild and rebuild.”

The western half of Louisiana, where Avery Island sits, is particularly vulnerable as it is starved of the wetland-creating sediment dispersed by the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers. There “aren’t many options” for the region under the master plan, Simoneaux conceded.

“The area doesn’t have the materials to build wetlands—it has been torn to pieces by canals and pipelines and it has no natural barriers, so hurricanes come pounding in unobstructed,” said Oliver Houck, an expert in land loss at Tulane University.

“It is a ripped-up rug. It would take decades to put it back together, even without sea level rise. Avery Island is going to become an actual island, there won’t be much left. The state has decided to put all its eggs into restoring the eastern part of the state. I hate to use the words ‘written off’, but those coastal communities are on their own.”

Unlike nearby residents who have resorted to rudimentary house elevations to stay above the foaming surf, the McIlhenny company has financial muscle to swing at its relentless foe. After Hurricane Rita turned much of the Tabasco production area into a pond in 2005, the company erected a 17-foot earth levee, complete with pump system, to wrap the red brick factory in a protective hug.

It has thrown itself into the task of wetland restoration by planting hardy cord grasses, refilling canals, and erecting weirs that halt the advance of salt water. Wildlife, such as black bears, alligators, and snowy egrets, have a protected area to roam on the island.

Climate change has cast a shadow over several everyday staples, menacing the production of chocolate, the harvesting of hops for beer, the growing of coffee beans. Tabasco has no plans to join this list, with the company insisting the production of its peppers isn’t at risk and that its ancestral home can be safeguarded.

“We worry about anything that impacts our land,” said Simmons, a craggy, genial man who wears pressed trousers and slathers Tabasco sauce on virtually any food bar his morning cereal. Paintings of peppers are displayed alongside the wooden ducks that sprout from his shooting trophies. “That’s why we are working so hard on this.”

Pepper plants used to blanket the slopes of Avery Island until the 1960s, when the property switched to seed cultivation and shifted the bulk-growing and mashing of peppers to various South American countries. The pulped peppers return to Avery Island and are aged for three years in stacked oak barrels towering in a pungent, cobwebbed warehouse before salt and vinegar is added in huge vats.

Today, this company that was born shortly after the death of slavery pushes 750,000 bottles of product off its rattling production line each day, levered into cardboard boxes by mechanical arms and sent to more than 185 countries—the Japanese are particularly voracious consumers, dousing pizzas and spaghetti.

Throngs of tourists visit a museum and shop that plays off this heritage. Many of them come straight from the other attraction two hours’ drive to the east, New Orleans, which itself faces an existential crisis despite its huge investment in protective levees after Hurricane Katrina crunched into the city in 2005.

The problem is apparent from the air, with much of the wetland that would buffer New Orleans from another Katrina in a state of decay, rotting and curling up like chewed cloth, dotted by boats and trucks that were swept away by the huge storm and never salvaged.

“We’ve had 300 years of bad decisions,” said David Muth, director of Gulf restoration at the National Wildlife Federation. The lower reaches of the Mississippi have long been aggressively channeled via levees and other barriers, with this process accelerating in the 1930s after a major flood prompted Congress to authorize further intervention. Distributaries were severed and wetlands were drained or cut apart for farming, cypress logging, and oil and gas drilling.

The result has been the choking off of sediment carried by the river to the marshes, causing the delta peat, grass, and shrubs to dissolve away to open water in places.

Meanwhile, New Orleans drained swamps for housing developments that now sit below sea level behind levees.

“This area has been neglected for so long,” said Happy Johnson, head of a community sustainability group in the Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood, worst damaged by the hurricane. He is concerned about lack of consultation locally.

“There is very little trust in the government because there isn’t consistent engagement with communities of color. New Orleans is 60 percent black. How can you restore the wetlands and not have black and brown people involved? You can’t save a place with half the people.”

There are signs of hope, at least environmentally. Recent diversions of sediment have provided a jolt of growth to patches of the delta, a restoration that would be further bolstered by the master plan’s projects.

The branching wetlands, with white pelicans soaring overhead, remain an ecological wonder, persisting despite the scars of pipelines and the ongoing plight of its native communities, such as Isle de Jean Charles, that will be among the first climate change refugees in the U.S.

In 1993, the superstar author of Jurassic Park and Sphere, Michael Crichton (or very possibly one of his assistants), sent me a signed photo and a handwritten note in response to a letter I had sent him. The black-and-white photo showed him standing in the shadow of a dinosaur, and it instantly became my most prized possession.

Another Atlas Obscura staffer wrote a letter to her teen crush, actor Robert Sean Leonard, who replied with a signed headshot of his own and a letter that explained how he was actually friends with all the other melancholy heartthrobs from Dead Poets Society. Have you had a similar exchange?

Today many people just tweet at their idols, but some still attempt a more meaningful interaction with a beloved writer, actor, scientist, musician, athlete, or other breed of luminary. And many fans still receive personalized emails, photos, handwritten letters, gifts, and other amazing artifacts from that correspondence. Now we want to hear about what you’ve received from your heroes, childhood or otherwise!

If you’ve ever gotten a beloved item or letter from one of your heroes, please tell us about it via the form below, and we will feature the best submissions in an upcoming article. We also want to see your special gifts, so please send pics or anything else to eric@atlasobscura.com. Please make your submissions by Friday, April 6.

Walking in the woods, as winter gives way to spring, you might notice a strange phenomenon. The snow doesn’t just melt away uniformly. Across patches of ground and around tree trunks, almost perfect circles melt in the snow, polka-dotting the forest.

These “thaw circles” can be found in deciduous forests where snow accumulates. The sides of the circles are surprisingly even, straight, and vertical. They often look like someone used a cookie cutter to remove a stout cylinder of snow.

The secret of thaw circle formation is heat: As the sun warms the forest, the dark trunks of the tree absorb more heat than white, reflective snow. That heat radiates outwards from the trunks, melting away the snow in a ring around the tree. Sometimes the small-scale topography of a patch of land can also create uneven melting, forming circles without trees at their center.

Last year around this time, a team of biologists was in the woods in southern Quebec, Canada, when the thaw circles caught their attention. “We were immediately struck by circles of bare ground extending about one tank’s width out from the edges of most medium-sized to large trees,” they wrote in a report published in the journal Ecology. They noticed, too, that a few tiny plants—spring beauty, trout lily, and red trillium—had started to grow in these open patches of land.

There are a series of reasons, including the availability of water and nutrients, that plants might cluster near tree trunks. But the scientists wondered if, in this case, the early thaw around the trunk might be a factor. Plants on the forest floor have just a short period of time to peek above ground and soak up sunlight before trees fluff out their leaves and shade the vegetation below. For plants adapted to grow before the forest’s upper canopy darkens the ground, these open patches of land, it seemed, could provide a head-start on the growing season, and a reason to cluster around tree trunks.

This season, says Mark Velland, the lead author of the Ecology report, he and his colleagues are testing that hypothesis, by seeing if early snow melt helps plants grow and so encourages them to cluster around trees. Last summer, they planted bulbs of a spring ephemeral, known as Dutchman’s breeches, in the forest, and this spring they will observe their development while changing the variable of where the snow melt occurs. At their control sites, they will monitor plants growing in thaw circles, close to the tree trunks, and at snow-covered sites further away. At other sites, they will manipulate the conditions—they will fill thaw circles near tree trunks with snow and clear the ground elsewhere to create early thaw sites further from trees.

If the plants grow best in the natural thaw circles and the places where the scientists move snow away, that will support the idea that thaw circles are at least one reason these early spring flowers tend to cluster near trees. After all, doesn't it seem appealing to live someplace where you get to experience spring and stretch out your limbs just a little bit earlier?

On their way back from the South Pole in 1912, Robert Falcon Scott and his team discovered the delicate lines of plant leaves pressed into the hard rock of Antarctica. They were “beautifully traced” fossils, Scott wrote. Despite the explorers’ fatigue and dwindling supplies, they collected samples, evidence that the icy expanse around them had once been far greener. When their bodies were discovered months later, so were the fossilized leaves of Glossopteris indica, a prehistoric tree that no longer exists, along with the preserved wood of a conifer.

The samples are some of the earliest bits of evidence that the frozen continent was once lush and covered in tall, thriving forests. They date back to the Permian period, more than 250 million years ago, when the planet was warmer than it is today. Though the land that would become Antarctica was part of the supercontinent Gondwana, it was still located at same extreme latitudes , where long stretches of light are followed by months of darkness. In those conditions a forest grew and, before it disappeared, left behind some of the best-preserved evidence of prehistoric plant life. By searching for the remains of Antarctica’s forests, scientists today are trying to discover what the world looked like all those years ago, just before one of Earth’s most dramatic extinctions wiped out most of the species living on the planet.

Because Glossopteris leaf fossils had also been found in South America, Africa, India, and Australia, they provided key evidence that the continents had once been connected as Gondwana—an idea that was a new theory at the time. Today, when researchers go fossil-hunting in Antarctica, Glossopteris leaves are among the most common finds.

“If you spend three or four hours at one site and you continually pull out materials, it’s usually the same type of plant,” says Rudolph Serbet, the collection manager in paleobotany at the University of Kansas. At most of the sites that Serbet and his colleagues visit, as part of a National Science Foundation research grant led by university professor Edith L. Taylor, they have just a few hours to sample and collect, during what will likely be their only visit to that particular site. “The chance of going back there ever again is pretty slim,” Serbet says. Only when they start to find something novel among the common—parts of plants that no one has ever seen before—do they return for more extensive work.

Sometimes the researchers find fields of prehistoric stumps, fossilized by minerals deposited inside, with their internal structures preserved. “One day, I climbed over this sandstone ridge, and there’s a big black tree stump,” says Erik Gulbranson, an assistant professor at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who has participated in collection expeditions. “I look to my right, and there’s another tree stump, preserved as they would have stood.” Then he saw another stump, which looked to have been rotten at its center, and a few more.

The trees in these Antarctic forests grew as tall as 100 feet and their stumps can be three feet in diameter. Scientists now think that evergreens would have mixed with deciduous, and the ground would have been covered with a lower canopy of ferns and shrubby plants. In some ways, it would have looked like temperate forests the world over, but with a touch of the uncanny. “When you look around, you wouldn’t recognize any of the plants that were growing in this forest,” says Serbet. “Virtually all of these are extinct now.”

The Permian is not the only period when Antarctica was covered in green. A mere 53 million years ago, that area of the world grew palm trees, and scientists have also discovered the mummified remains of mosses and other plants from just 14 million years ago. But the forgotten forest of 250 million years ago stands out, in part, because of the way it disappeared.

No one knows exactly what caused the mass extinction that ended the Permian, but it’s linked to a dramatic increase in carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere. The plants that lived in Antarctica had adapted to hard conditions—months in the dark, without the energy of the sun—but they were still vulnerable to change in the Earth’s climate. Understanding these ancient plants’ responses could help us understand how today’s plants will react to a replay of that atmospheric shift.

Even with the knowledge that the planet has been through major makeovers in the distant past, it takes a leap of imagination to picture the polar landscape—white, sere, inhospitable—as a forest. The image should feel like a shock. A forest at the South Pole would have a transformative effect on temperatures and weather across the globe, but imagine the condition of the rest of the world in which this is possible: different species, sea levels, rainfall, seasons—with or without us. We're starting to see the polar march of plant species in both hemispheres even now, evidence that the forested past of Antarctica could be a window into its future.

Say you’re trying to go incognito. If it’s nighttime, you might try to blend into the inky background by wrapping yourself in dark clothes or a blanket. Maybe you’d be less visible to the naked eye, but you wouldn’t fool an infrared camera—that device picks up heat and longer wavelengths of light that human eyes can’t perceive. To devise camouflage that’s better able to evade these detectors, scientists are looking to cephalopods, masters of undersea disguise.

In addition to being clever engineers, octopuses, squids, and their cephalopod brethren are expert hiders. Researchers often turn to them for clues about how humans—and the technology we build—can perfect the art of vanishing from view. Last fall, backed by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, a robotics team from the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University took a cue from the way that octopuses and cuttlefish can quickly flex their papillae—the little bumps freckling their skin—to blend into a bumpy or spiky background. Now, a team of scientists at University of California, Irvine, has used cephalopod skin as a model for synthetic materials that can dodge infrared cameras.

Many cephalopods are able to change color in a flash by expanding or contracting clusters of cells on their skin. These include chromatophores, which contain pigments (black, brown, orange, red, or yellow). When the cells contract, pigment is less spread-out; that helps an animal blend into a light background. When they expand, the pigment is more visible. In a new paper in the journalScience, the UC Irvine researchers describe a way to engineer a manmade version that functions the same way.

The researchers devised a wrinkled, wavy membrane whose shape changes when an electric current courses through it. When the shape changes—similar to the expanding or contracting cells on a cephalopod's skin—so too do the wavelengths of light that are reflected.

The scientists made a prototype in the shape of a squid. When they tinkered with its temperature and reflectance, the mimic successfully hid from the infrared camera. “Our artificial platforms translate many of the key natural capabilities of cephalopods from the visible to the infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum,” the researchers wrote.

This kind of technology has applications above the waves. Camouflage is a military advantage—and, someday, it may be used by average civilians dodging the surveillance systems that are proliferating on dry land and in the skies above.

Atlas Obscura is delighted to announce that we've been nominated for a Webby Award. This year is the 22nd year of the annual prizes, presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences—and we're on the shortlist for the internet's best travel website.

There are two prizes to be won in each category: one chosen by the Academy, and the other by the public through online voting. If you love to travel with us, have had your journeys—real and imagined—enriched by our places and stories, or simply want to show your support for Atlas Obscura, you have about two weeks to cast your vote here. (You can see a complete list of nominees in the Travel section here.) Polls are open now through Thursday, April 19.

Atlas Obscura last won a Webby Award in 2011, which sits proudly in our trophy cabinet. We're thrilled to be nominated for another.

The Dode Dieren Met Een Verhaal or Dead Animal Tales exhibit started with a literal collision. In 1995, Kees Moeliker, the curator of Natural History Museum Rotterdam in the Netherlands, was sitting at his desk when he heard a noise. A duck had crashed into the museum’s glass facade. It wasn’t the first time he’d witnessed an animal’s untimely demise against the building, but this time, the duck’s lifeless body was then assaulted by another male duck.

It was the first time an act of homosexual necrophilia was witnessed in the species and Moeliker published a paper about the incident, which won an Ig Nobel prize in 2013. The story spread, and occasionally visitors to the museum would ask to see the duck, which had been immortalized with the help of taxidermy. Though Moeliker would bring the duck out upon request, it was another incident, infamous in the Netherlands, that really launched the exhibit.

An annual event known as Domino Day, which started in 1998, televised the attempts of a Dutch team to break the world record for the number of dominos set up and toppled. The event garnered a lot of local attention each year and even boasted hosts like Lionel Richie and Shania Twain. At the 2005 event, a sparrow (a mus in Dutch) got into the exhibition hall and, after it knocked over 23,000 dominos, an expert was brought in to deal with the bird. Attempts to capture it failed and it was eventually shot. The incident caused a tremendous outcry in the Netherlands, and the shooter was fined €200. After Moeliker appealed to the Ministry of Justice and Security, the body of the so-called dominomus joined the duck at the museum.

The bird generated a lot of interest and was featured in an exhibit about sparrows at the museum. “We have half a million dead animals and plants at the museum,” says Moeliker “and most get a half of a second of attention from the visitors.” The ill-fated duck and dominomus, however, got a lot more. So, Moeliker had his insight for the Dead Animal Tales exhibit, which opened in 2013.

“What the exhibit is really about is the collision, sometimes literally, between humans and animals,” says Moeliker. It is the first thing you encounter when you enter the museum. The exhibit now includes around 25 animals, though only around 10 are on display at any time. Criteria for inclusion are loose and based around the fatal animal incidents that Moeliker and his successor, Bram Langeveld, think have garnered enough public interest. Inclusion in the exhibition also requires that the museum have a body in good enough condition to display.

“Sometimes, people turn up with a dead animal in a plastic bag,” says Langeveld. Other times, Moeliker and Langeveld had to do a bit more work to acquire new pieces. To obtain a weasel that had been electrocuted by a transformer at the Large Hadron Collider in November 2016, the pair had to drive to CERN and pick up the body, which had been held by a Dutch researcher working for the institute.

Other donations have arrived under a shroud of secrecy, such as the Parliament Mouse. In 2012, the Dutch Parliament building was plagued with a rodent problem. The museum requested one of the mice but was told “the House of Representatives does not make vermin, dead animals and other waste available to third parties, not even to collections.” However, someone in the parliament disagreed and anonymously mailed the body of one rodent to the museum. It is now on display, complete with the envelope in which it arrived.

Most of the animals come from the Netherlands, but two objects have arrived from abroad: the CERN Weasel and the Breakfast Bat from Germany, which came tumbling out of a box of cereal in Stuttgart in 2012. (A German government investigation determined that the bat entered the cereal box when it was on a shelf in the purchasing family’s home.) “We’d love to have more animals from abroad, but the transportation of animal remains can be difficult,” says Moeliker.

Although the sensational stories behind the animals may be what drives the interest in the exhibit, they bring up larger moral questions about the impact of human lifestyles on animals. When Langeveld gives tours of the museum to high school students, he shows the McFlurry Hedgehog as a sad example of why we should properly dispose of our trash. The hedgehog was found dead with its head stuck in the top of a McDonald’s McFlurry container. These containers would get stuck around the animals’ necks and, unable to remove them, they would starve to death.

This year, the museum acquired the remains of two new animals for the exhibit. The first were the legs of a dead heron that was found by police after the bird was roasted and eaten by a homeless man. Moeliker called the police after hearing the story, and they fished the legs out of the trash and donated them.

The other new addition was a kingfisher that died perfectly preserved in ice during a recent cold spell, and whose photo went viral. The museum is trying to display the bird still in the block of ice, as it arrived.

“Soufflés fall and so do dancers, and both survive: The main thing is to forget it,” wrote the late Tanaquil “Tanny” Le Clercq, a New York City Ballet principal dancer, in The Ballet Cook Book. In this passage from her obscure work, Le Clercq detailed a mortifying spill she took during a performance at Washington D.C.’s Constitution Hall. “Time heals all wounds: this happens to be true," she continued.

As a resilient and sharp-witted ballerina-turned-writer, Le Clercq knew a thing or two about brushing yourself off and pressing on. Discovered by legendary choreographer George Balanchine (whom she later married), Le Clercq began performing professionally while she was still still a student. She joined the Russian émigré’s troupe, now known as New York City Ballet, taking on roles in Afternoon of a Faun, La Valse, and other beloved ballets still performed today.

At one notable March of Dimes charity show, Balanchine played an ominous character, “Polio,” while his pupil played his unfortunate victim. This performance would be a footnote in the ballerina’s biography if it wasn’t for what was to come: At the peak of her career, while touring in Copenhagen, Denmark, Le Clercq abruptly contracted polio. At the age of 27, she could no longer dance, and the disease caused her to use a wheelchair until her death in 2000, from pneumonia.

After rigorous rehabilitation and settling into her new way of being in the world, Le Clerq set out on an ambitious project, the aforementioned Ballet Cook Book. Though she didn’t have formal culinary training, Le Clercq relished her time in the kitchen. In letters to friends, she shared memories of her latest meals and planned menus for her and Balanchine’s elaborate gatherings. With encouragement from Balanchine, she wrote the 424-page book over the course of several years. Released in 1967, the book features chapters by America’s first prima ballerina and Balanchine’s third wife Maria Tallchief, British choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton, confidante and choreographer Jerome Robbins, Russian superstar Rudolf Nureyev, and over 50 other luminaries.

In the book’s dozens of chapters, Le Clercq offers engaging stories through a wry lens about dancers' palates and quirks. For instance, Balanchine preferred bagged sauerkraut to canned contemporaries. “The cans aren’t fatal, he just prefers the other,” the writer playfully adds. Meanwhile, Jacques d’Amboise, Tanny’s frequent partner, swore by his “Real S.O.S. Stuffing.” It consisted of three layers of breading with sausage, oysters, and more sausage. In his “Shrimp Sneden,” Robbins confessed that he ate the shells and all.

Its pages also reveal the colorful ways dancers approach performance. It details how a post-show ritual for Cuban idol Alicia Alonso included a relaxing cocktail and, two hours later, a steak. Suzanne Farrell, a dancer a generation below Tanny, traveled with a papier-mâché cat with one ear missing as a good luck charm. The contemporary dancer Melissa Hayden once elbowed herself in the solar plexus so hard that she passed out during a dramatic moment in The Duel at London’s Convent Garden, an anecdote that precedes her recipe for stuffed cabbage. The writer describes it as “a knockout of a recipe worthy of a headline.”

Despite The Ballet Cook Book’s triumph in sketching humanity within these larger-than-life characters, ballet is still often perceived as high-brow, boring, and enigmatic by many. The long-standing belief that dancers have unhealthy eating habits doesn’t help, either. But Le Clercq’s book helps demystify these assumptions while simultaneously offering a window into the eclectic lives of dance’s most beloved figures.

Though Le Clercq and Balanchine’s marriage fizzled out only a few years after the book’s release, and it eventually went out of print, its stories have lived on through the writer’s friends, former colleagues, and curious ballet fans. But in recent years, The Ballet Cook Book itself has undergone a resurgence, largely due to the efforts of educator, writer, and food scholar Meryl Rosofsky. She researched the book as a 2016 fellow of The Center for Ballet and the Arts, and led talks and lecture demonstrations on it throughout New York City.

Rosofsky first got wind of The Ballet Cook Book before hosting a dinner for ballet historian Jennifer Homans, who was writing a biography of Balanchine at the time. “I had recently learned from [New York City Ballet principal dancer] Jared Angle that Balanchine loved to cook,” Rosofsky says over email. “This gave me the idea to research his favorite dishes or recipes to make for this dinner.” That evening, the women noshed on Balanchine’s blini with caviar, a flounder with Georgian coriander sauce, kasha with mushrooms, and Gogl-Mogl, a dish that Rosofsky describes as a “Russian custard Balanchine recalled fondly from his childhood.”

Her research into Balanchine’s recipes led her to learning of Le Clercq’s The Ballet Cook Book, too. “To have [discovered] a compendium like this, so witty and varied, was a light-bulb moment,” Rosofsky says. She realized that this "was a very important document—not any old cookbook off the shelf.”

The scholar also happened upon the 2012-2013 The Ballet Cook Book dinner series, led by arts and culture writer Ryan Wenzel and baking enthusiast Susan LaRosa. The six-part series took place in LaRosa’s Brooklyn home, with each event centering on one dancer’s chapter from The Ballet Cook Book. The meals were largely executed by former New York City Ballet soloist Antonio Carmena, a dancer who knew his way around a stage and a kitchen alike. “I always was going to the kitchen and would talk to my mother while she was cooking,” says Carmena, whose love for cooking began in his native Spain. “I would learn by watching her.”

Attracted to the fine balance of technique and creative expression that both practices demanded, Carmena enrolled in a course at the French Culinary Institute to quell his restlessness while recovering from a dance injury. Carmena was especially attracted to the unexpectedness of the cookbook’s recipes, such as Diana Adams’s Southern fried chicken in buttermilk spoonbread. Adams, as Wenzel points out, “was known for appearing in modernist Balanchine masterpieces that were stark, sleek, and simple.” What’s more, “the cookbook shows a side of these dancers that you don’t normally hear about,” Wenzel says. “It humanizes these monumental figures.”

The dancers’ stories struck Wenzel and Carmena the most, though. Within its pages lie tales of the late French dancer Violette Verdy, who grew up and trained by candlelight in Nazi-occupied France. The artist continued to cook her maman’s recipes while touring in the United States, traveling with cloves of garlic in her suitcase. To this day, Harlem native Arthur Mitchell eats his mother’s peas ‘n’ rice recipe every New Year’s Eve. And one anecdote recalls how Allegra Kent once brought back Wil Wright’s Ice Cream on a plane (via cabin freezer) from her native California for her family.

As Carmena describes, many of the recipes are not for novice cooks. Nor are they for the faint of heart: Loads of butter, bouillon, and heavy cream make hefty appearances in the cookbook’s dishes. Other recipes involve old-fashioned techniques, too. For example, Balanchine’s kulichi, a traditional Orthodox Easter bread, requires 45 to 60 minutes of dedicated kneading. Others are quite potent. As Le Clercq cheekily wrote in the recipe for her “Great-Great Grandmother Blackwell’s Eggnog”: “The spoon stands upright as it is supposed to, but which causes you to fall down as you are not supposed to.”

Tucked in between decadent dishes like Kent’s ice cream cake and Verdy’s quiche lorraine, one also finds foods, gadgets, and cooking techniques still in vogue today. Balanchine included several different pickled mushroom recipes, for one thing. And former New York City Ballet principal Edward Villella’s Italian mother, who was a health nut, used a pressure cooker to prepare organic vegetables from a specialty store that they schlepped miles to from their Long Island City home.

At first glance, The Ballet Cook Book’s recipes may not seem resonant with a new generation enmeshed in the clean eating movement. Yet Le Clercq’s piquant prose is what pulls readers in, regardless of their age or culinary preference. “She was quite ahead of her time,” says Rosofsky. “You kind of feel like [they’re] sharing tips and techniques with you over coffee. It’s disarmingly personal and intimate.” In one story, for instance, Le Clercq describes how she adopted a Chemex in hopes of finally brewing the perfect cup of coffee. The secret—or so she and Balanchine hoped—was a 10.5-sized anklet sock secured by hairpins as the filter.

What’s also extraordinary about Le Clercq’s book is how it offered an intimate window into the lives of golden era dancers from the ‘30s-‘60s, who weren’t nearly as accessible to the public as today’s media-savvy performers. “Ballerinas at that time were a little bit more on a pedestal than they are today … if you read, for instance, [Alexandra] Danilova’s memoir, she talks about her idea of a ballerina and how you have this responsibility to your audience to be a little bit above and removed, and to always be glamorous,” says Holly Brubach, the author of Choura: The Memoirs of Alexandra Danilova, and who is writing a forthcoming biography about her friend Le Clercq. “Tanny was a harbinger of a new kind of relationship between a ballerina and her audience.”

Le Clercq’s relatability has attracted all kinds of readers, dancers and non-dancers alike. So much so that despite only being available in secondary markets, demand for the book is high. (Six years ago, both Rosofsky and Wenzel purchased copies for around $75 each, and used editions today sell for upwards of $600.) Luckily, Rosofsky is working toward bringing the storied book back into print. Eventually, she has plans to pen a new ballet cookbook featuring the stories and recipes of dancers of today, too. “I think that The Ballet Cook Book deserves attention and embrace for all it represents,” Rosofsky says. “It is still a remarkable living book today. It’s not just a time capsule.”

Unicycling is a sport. Contrary to popular perception, it's not just for circus performers, eccentric panhandlers, and that odd kid you knew in elementary school. Competitive unicycling takes a number of forms, from one-wheeled basketball to off-road trail bombing. But maybe the largest cohort of sport unicyclists is the extreme (I promise that is the first and last time that word will be used in this article) athletic urban riders who hop, spin, and flip like Tony Hawk with a seat.

Called "flatland" or "street" riding, the sport even has a whole glossary of moves and tricks from the International Unicycling Federation (IUF) that sound like they wouldn’t be out of place on an X-Games broadcast ("crankflip," "wheel-walk," "catch-foot"). And just like with skateboarding and BMX, some tricks are so difficult that they are almost legendary. But what is the most difficult trick on one wheel, and what does it take to master?

“I still think it’s true to this day that a fresh unicyclist can rise to the top in just a few years with a lot of dedicated practice, and carving your own niche in a sport with an international scene is a really amazing feeling,” says Eli Brill, a young professional unicycler who has been pushing the limits of what is physically possible for over a decade. “I got into unicycling 10 years ago, when I was 12. At the time a lot of my friends were into skateboarding and riding bikes or scooters, and we liked doing tricks on anything we could find.”

For most, just getting on a unicycle seems like an almost impossible trick, but, as Brill says, with enough practice, just about anyone can ride, and probably even learn a few tricks. “When riders first dive into the world of street and flatland unicycling, it is often recommended that the first tricks they learn should be 180 twists, 180 unispins, and crankflips,” he says. A 180 twist sees the rider hop up with their unicycle and turn to face the opposite direction. A 180 unispin is similar, but you actually jump off the unicycle while it turns, and land back on the pedals. And then a crankflip requires the rider to hop off of unicycle and spin the wheel around before landing back on the pedals. Sounds easy enough right?

While such moves might seem advanced to us, they're the basics that more difficult tricks are built on. “A hickflip, for example, is when a rider performs a 180 unispin and a crankflip at the same time. A 180 flip is when a rider performs a 180 twist and crankflip at the same time. A smallspin is a 180 twist and a 180 unispin at the same time. Riders can work up to 360 twists, 360 unispins, doubleflips, and higher—and then all of those tricks can be performed simultaneously again,” says Brill.

Brill says that he’s mastered every move at the IUF’s highest level, but there are a number of tricks that still elude even the most masterful riders. There are three in particular that he says are likely contenders for most difficult unicycle trick. One is adding an additional rotation to the ever-rotating unispin, so that the the rider jumps off the pedals and spins the cycle like a top before landing back on the pedals. The current record stands at 1260° of spin (3.5 full rotations), first done by Brill himself in 2012. “It has always been a huge deal in urban unicycling when someone manages to tack on another 180 to the current biggest unispin,” he says. “It’s fun because whenever somebody lands a bigger spin, it feels like it is impossible to go any higher—until someone eventually manages to make it happen. As of right now, three riders have landed 1260s, and it’s about time for somebody to step up and try to land the 1440.”

Then there’s the seatwhip, in which the rider jumps off the unicycle and flip the whole thing—seat-over-wheel—before landing on the pedals and riding away. This trick wasn’t even accomplished until 2010 when, according to Brill, an American rider named Max Schulze pulled it off, and named it the “maxwhip.” Since 2010, a number of riders have managed it, all the while adding various spins and flourishes that keep ratcheting up the difficulty. “Honestly, I'd be ecstatic if I could master any variation of the seatwhip. But the one that would make me the most happy would be my one-handed whip,” says Brill. “It's different from the other variations in that it starts and ends with me sitting on the seat—as opposed to riding two-handed with the seat in front of my body—which I think makes it look really stylish.”

Lastly, Brill mentions the full-body frontflip, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like, but with a unicycle between your legs. “This trick is truly legendary both for the boldness required to even attempt it, as well as for its sheer difficulty,” says Brill. “I think it will be interesting to see how the community handles this trick moving forward—I know that in a lot of extreme [author’s note: I lied.] sports the ‘first backflip ever’ is a huge milestone. That is something that has yet to be landed on a unicycle.”

Brill and his urban unicycling comrades continue to try to top themselves, but for now, he remains the undisputed master of at least one of the apex tricks. “Unfortunately, as far as I am aware, at the moment I am the only active rider who can land a 1260,” he says. “So I think, as of right now, the chasm between the first 1260 and the first 1440 is destined to continue growing wider and wider.”

However, as he says, with enough practice and determination, just about anyone can become a skilled unicyclist, so it’s possible that all new legendary tricks, or yet crazier versions of the existing ones, are right around the corner. No matter how long it takes to invent new master-level techniques or break the records, the next unicycle master probably won’t be found in the circus.

On Thursday, March 26, 1916, you could get a beer in a South Australian bar after dinner. You could get a second, a third, or even a fourth, and sit, nursing your beverage. At 11 p.m. or perhaps half past, the bar would close, and you’d bumble tipsily home. But the next day, South Australians voted in a referendum to force pubs to close each day at six—closing time for the late-night tipple.

By the end of the next year, New Zealand and almost every region in Australia had followed suit. “Six o’clock closing” was intended as a temporary restriction, partly to improve public morality and partly as a wartime austerity measure. Instead, this “interim” legislation lasted for 50 years, through both World Wars, New Zealand’s independence from Britain, multiple governments, and even the invention of Vegemite. Attempts to curtail it were met with pearl-clutching gasps—despite the policy actually encouraging a culture of heavy drinking.

It’s likely no one anticipated how long the regulations would endure when they were first introduced. In November 1917, New Zealand’s Wairarapa Age described the forthcoming law with evident irritation as “farcical;” the following month, the Auckland Star called it “certainly the most drastic and far-reaching of the war regulations here.” It had only been in place three days, but “the tendency of the worker is already apparent,” the paper reported. “This tends to create a great rush hour between five and six.” This rush was the “six o’clock swill.”

Every day, workers rushed to the nearest bar at 5 p.m. Instead of lingering over their beers, as they had once done, they spent an hour crushed up against the bar, spiralling swiftly into crapulence. After 60 minutes of fast-paced, empty-stomach drinking, the ringing of a six o’clock bell announced a “supping-up” time of 15 minutes. Instead of remaining at the pub, people would head home, pickled as newts, and drink beer from “riggers” that they kept in their houses.

One onlooker, then “a small barefoot boy passing on his bike,” remembers looking through the windows of pubs in Rotorua, New Zealand, at about 5:45 p.m. “It was like a glimpse into Hades,” he says. “A great chaotic crush within, a huge babble of sound through open windows, a heaving roiling of male bodies. A glimpse of lawless chaos.”

Other regulations contributed to this atmosphere of all-male debauchery. Until 1961, in an ostensible attempt to reduce prostitution and venereal disease among servicemen, women were restricted from public drinking in many New Zealand bars. Some felt that they would not have enjoyed the crush: In a 1965 episode of the New Zealand current affairs program Compass, men were interviewed about the presence of women in bars. They said they liked women being in lounge bars, where people could sit down. But as one put it: “As far as the public bars go, I think they should be left to the men.”

If six o’clock closing sought to limit alcohol consumption in Australia and New Zealand, it failed dramatically. In the first three years after its introduction in New Zealand, annual beer consumption per capita rose by over 40 percent. Over the 47 years that followed, it ballooned by around 300 percent. There was another, more deadly consequence: New Zealanders were legally allowed to drive home drunk, without breath-testing procedures or blood alcohol laws. In 1960, with a national population of barely 2.4 million, 374 New Zealanders lost their lives in road accidents. (In the same year, the United Kingdom experienced 1,647 road deaths, across a population of 52 million people.)

But though the laws did not achieve their stated aims, two powerful lobbies continued to protect them: morality-based groups and trade unions.

Australian temperance groups had been advocating for early closing since 1900, but the wartime effort, and a related interest in displays of patriotic austerity, gave them a new angle: protecting young soldiers from the devastations of drink. The most zealous temperance groups seemed to believe that the First World War had been divine intervention meant to tackle moral decline. In January 1915, the Australian Christian World suggested that “the Almighty” had permitted the war “in order that the conscience of the community might wake up to the state of affairs and that Australia might realise the necessity for cleaning up the moral hearthstone.” Within two years, the measure had been introduced. That it made pubs thoroughly unpleasant was considered a positive outcome: People, they reasoned, would be less inclined to go to them, and drinking reduced.

Another effective temperance tactic focused on the preservation of the family unit. In 1916, the Sydney Morning Herald published a poem, entitled Six O’Clock, which read:

Tis after six and he's not in!
The children hear her voice grow sad,
And wonder if they should begin
Their tea or — wait for dad!

'Tis pay-day; but despair's not yet!
She'll keep the good meal warm awhile;
But seven strikes, her eyes grow wet.
And all have ceased to smile.

The children settled safe in bed,
She sits alone, with fear to start,
And ev'ry hour, with tones of lead,
Seems striking at her heart.

Then on her knees, distraught in mind
She prays, while words and sobs e'er mix,
"Oh, God, grant laws of any kind
That send men home at six.”

According to the Temperance Alliance, based out of New South Wales, drinking wasn’t necessarily the problem: It was “night drinking” that was the scourge of “happy homes.” As a response, drinkers seem to have simply started earlier. When a whisky shortage hit New Zealand in April 1939, the Northern Advocate reported that: “To their horror and dismay, the many men in the city who are accustomed to stroll into a hotel and enjoy a morning whisky found that they were unable to buy one.”

It might seem perverse that bar owners and trade unions alike would support pubs having to close early. But limited hours seem to have been financially advantageous for both. People were drinking just as much, but over fewer hours, which meant reduced costs. And bars were no longer required to provide a pleasant atmosphere, either: The six o’clock swill was necessarily horrible, so investing in a high-quality drinking experience didn’t make sense. Owners destroyed billiards rooms; threw out tables and chairs in favor of long bars that facilitated quick ordering; and introduced tiled walls for easy cleaning. For workers and trade unions, the legislation was also a boon. Bar and hotel employees were paid a salary, rather than by the hour. As long as pubs shut at six, workers behind the bar earned the same remuneration for fewer hours.

In 1949, New Zealand offered a referendum on the trading laws, which gave voters two options: keeping the current system; or closing at ten p.m. Campaigns from lobby groups such as the New Zealand Alliance focused on the effect on home life: One 1949 poster claimed that six o’clock closing “means fewer bad debts … more money for family comforts … happier home life.” In the end, people voted against changing the law, attributed by some to misinformation about whether a later closing would mean a period of the day when pubs were forced to close.

That doesn’t mean that drinkers preferred the swill. In February 1947, for example, the Bay of Plenty Times called the swill a “five to six pig trough rush,” and described how “returned servicemen hanker nostalgically for the ease and comfort of drinking conditions in certain countries overseas … where the open hours are longer and patrons sit down to it cafe style.” After 1937, advocates of a return to the old system pointed jealousy to Tasmania, which had reintroduced 10 p.m. closing. There, they said, bars and hotels had become more pleasant, with a “village inn atmosphere” and fewer convictions for drunkenness or illicit liquor sales.

"The smell of liquor, the smell of human bodies, the warm smell of wine, and on one early occasion even a worse smell, as a man, rather than give up his place at the counter, urinated against the bar.”

Gradually, however, public support for six o’clock closing dried up. In 1947, New South Wales followed Tasmania’s example; Victoria and South Australia did the same in 1966 and 1967. Finally, across the ditch of the Tasman Sea, bar closing times were extended to 10 p.m. in New Zealand on October 9, 1967, after a referendum returned a three-to-one majority. Temperance groups had accepted that the law encouraged drunkenness, and all but the New Zealand Alliance backed the legislative change.

In 1962, Caddie Edmonds published an embellished autobiography, Caddie: A Sydney Barmaid, in which she describes the six o’clock swill: “It was a revolting sight and one it took a long time for me to take for granted. The smell of liquor, the smell of human bodies, the warm smell of wine, and on one early occasion even a worse smell, as a man, rather than give up his place at the counter, urinated against the bar.” The end of early closing supposedly signaled the end of this degeneracy.

But 50 years of enforced binge drinking took its toll. Today, Australia and New Zealand have a well-documented culture of alcohol abuse, and remain among the most well-lubricated countries in the western world. In the end, the regulations did exactly the opposite of what they had intended, with consequences that stretched well beyond last call.

If you want to get from the edge of the city in Berkeley, California all the way up to Tilden Park, you have a couple of options. You can drive there, slowly, switching back every hundred yards or so as the steep roads demand. Or you can do it the old-fashioned way, and take the stairs.

A series of 10-foot-wide paths and stairways—Covert Path to Whitaker Path, and all the way up to Patty Kates—leads from the UC Berkeley Rose Garden all the way up to the park, with just a few detours on paved streets along the way. It's one of dozens of such routes that exist around the city, an efficient and exciting alternative to regular old roads.

The stairways may feel furtive, but this hidden network is actually an entrenched part of the city's infrastructure. "The paths were drawn out on the original city maps," says Colleen Neff, who, since she moved to Berkeley 17 years ago, has walked all 136 pathways. During an early rush of development in the early 1900s, many of the city's new neighborhoods were built way up in the hills, with the houses perched practically on top of each other.

"The streets wind along, and they sort of switch back to get down," she explains. "The pathways were put in as shortcuts, so that people who lived up in the hills could come down and get the streetcar." From there, they then could go into the center of town, or catch the ferry to San Francisco—a city with plenty of secret stairs of its own.

Neff is the president of the Berkeley Path Wanderer's Association, a group of volunteers that first arose two decades ago, after a tragedy pointed out another vital service provided by the paths. At that time, Neff says, "there was nobody really stewarding the pathways." After dozens died in a hillside fire in 1991, she says, "people in Berkeley saw that these really could have been used as escape routes for people to get down from the hills." The city surveyed the existing paths, and added signage. A few years later, the Association was born.

Now—with what Neff calls "light supervision" from the city—the group maintains the network of staircases and pathways. They fundraise for needed materials, throw work parties, and coordinate with various city agencies to get the most out of the infrastructure. They also publish a map of the city, "Berkeley and Its Pathways," that serves as a complete guide to the city's various byways. (The most recent edition is new as of 2018, and excerpts from it appear in this article.)

Because the city did not build all the paths they had originally planned to, the Association also works to add one new path every year. This, Neff says, can be a struggle—although people love the paths, not everyone necessarily wants one to suddenly sidle past their house or yard. "There is always a lawyer who lives adjacent to the path," says Neff. "We have one right now that's fighting one of the pathways."

Although the city originally laid out plans for over 150 paths, they did not end up making all of them. So the Association is working to finish the job, bringing one planned but unbuilt path to fruition every year. For this reason, "the path always gets built," she says. "I always talk about it like the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, and then people do get to acceptance."

(Plus, after the path is there, Neff says, "it's never what people think it's going to be. They always think there is going to be maurauding bands of teenagers. But if you had teenagers, you would know they do not need to climb this kind of a hill to sit up and drink a can of beer.")

Instead, the paths continue to attract the demographic they were built for: people trying to get into the city from the outskirts. (Although the city's streetcars are no longer in commission, a lot of the transportation infrastructure is the same, and the paths now tend to emerge at bus stops.)

But the stairways have, somewhat ironically, become a haven for those who are trying to get away from it all. Once you step off a road and onto a pathway, what started as a shortcut becomes a destination in itself. "You're not on a street smelling the cars and hearing the traffic," says Neff. "You're on an adventure."

Reading tea leaves is no easy task. That's true whether or not you believe that predictions of love and loss are contained in patterns of leftover leaves from a cuppa. Tasseography, or tea-leaf reading, has been practiced for centuries. Keen-eyed fortune tellers, it's said, can derive a wealth of meaning from different shapes formed by tea leaves at the bottom of a cup. But what about the amateur fortune-teller, who can't tell a skull from a set of stairs?

Enter the fortune-telling tea cup, which first emerged in the early 20th century. Thanks to its paint-by-numbers approach to tasseography, anybody could tell a fortune. Soon, a number of porcelain-makers in the U.S. and England were making their own versions. From the outside, some fortune-telling cups looked like elegant, normal cups. But on the inside, they contained arcane symbols. Wherever tea leaves landed indicated a fortune-telling clue.

The cups were part of a craze for all things occult that lasted well into the 20th century. With new discoveries and technological wonders discovered daily, the mystical didn't seem that crazy. Having one's fortune told became a party game, and even an industry. In the 1920s, fortune-telling cafes sprang up in urban centers, and many offered tea leaf readings. So it's not a surprise that porcelain-makers got in on the trend. Fortune-telling cups were sold in small magazines and even books: One 1907 juggling tome sold a cup "marked with the signs of the Zodiac, all arranged in a certain mystic order." Interested readers could also buy a crystal ball and "mesmeric discs."

Fortune-telling cups came in various designs. According to The Mystic Tea Room, an online museum of fortune-telling cups, there are four typical patterns. Astrological signs, numbers, playing cards, or meaningful symbols, called "omens," are usually printed on cup interiors. Other cups occasionally have designs on the exterior or even the saucers. One common design came with a couplet written along the edge: "Many Curious Things I See, When Telling Fortunes In Your Tea." Cups were often sold individually, with instructions on their use for fortune-telling amateurs. These days, manufacturers are few and far between, and many older models are sold online as antiques.

One such pamphlet, published in 1924, laid out the rules for discerning a fortune from a "Cup of Knowledge," which had a playing card design. After drinking the tea, the cup was to be turned three times, then flipped upside-down on a saucer. After most of the tea had trickled away, the leaves sticking to the cup could be read. Leaves closer to the rim indicated that predicted events would happen soon, while leaves atop each card could denote anything from "a dance" (the nine of clubs ) to "happiness and prosperity" (a Joker, oddly). But particular sets of cards together had their own meanings too. Readers were cautioned to watch out for the "evil intentions" denoted by two Jacks.

Not everyone who owned a cup was a believer. Many explanations of leaf-reading start out with a disclaimer that it's all in fun. The number of cups in antique stores and on eBay are proof that our highly-caffeinated elders found them very fun indeed.

Want to feel like an old-timey astronaut? You can trawl auction houses for lunar artifacts mistakenly put up for sale. You can travel to a Dairy Queen in Franklin, Pennsylvania, and pose outside of a model of the Apollo command module. Or—and this is much simpler—you can watch a GIF of a moon buggy rough-riding over some craters, as above.

This spacey experience was put together by Chaz Hutton, a comedian from Australia. Earlier this month, inspired by Jared Kinsler's similar curation project, Hutton went through all of the photos in the Project Apollo Archive and made some of them move.

The archive contains 14,227 images, taken over the course of the 10 manned Apollo missions. Starting with Apollo 8, astronauts brought electric Hasselblad EL cameras with them to space. As Gary Kitmacher explained on the NASA History Program website, these cameras "largely automated the picture-taking process." Astronauts only had to point and shoot, and the Hasselblads took care of everything else, from tensioning the shutter to re-winding the film.

Likely for this reason, "a lot of [the images] are shot in sequence—the same scene set out over 20 or 30 photographs," Hutton explains. "Even when you're scrolling through, you almost get an animated effect. And so I was like, 'Hang on a second—a lot of these can be turned into GIFs.'" (He collected his in two Medium posts, which you can see here and here. NASA also has their own GIPHY page, which features more examples, both historic and contemporary.)

On their own, photographs can be like magic, dropping the viewer into a time or place they could otherwise only imagine. But people who want to feel still more present in these scenes have found a number of ways to shrink this distance even further. Artists carefully colorize black-and-white images, removing the barrier to empathy that can come with monochromatics. Or archivists place photos in their geographic context, so that viewers familiar with a particular spot can see exactly what that place once looked like.

As a comedian, Hutton originally intended to bridge this gap through humor: "My first thought was, what if I went through the archive and found all the shit photos?" he says. (Therearemany.) But the choppy motion of the GIFs provided another immediate entry point. "You get a sense of the height, and where everything is in relation to each other," he says.

For example, there's a pair of GIFs that comes from the Apollo 9 mission. They show the lunar module (nicknamed Spider) flying separately from the command module (nicknamed Gumdrop), with two astronauts aboard. They were testing Spider to make sure it could properly detach from Gumdrop, fly far away—say, to the moon—come back up, and then reattach.

In the first GIF, Spider is leaving Gumdrop, careening off into space. Its "United States" license plate flashes defiantly as the Earth spins in the background. In the second, it's returning, emerging from the whirl of clouds and heading straight back to Gumdrop. You can almost imagine the photographers sighing with relief.

Another high point is the panoramic shots. On most missions, a moonwalking photographer took a moment to spin around in a circle and take photos of the local environs: craters, equipment, and fellow astronauts. "It's almost like you're in Google Street View," says Hutton.

And then there are those GIFs that—depending on your particular constitution—might make you glad you're not actually there. One of Hutton's favorites shows a spacewalk from Apollo 17, during which Ron Evans retrieved some instrument film from a service module outside the main spacecraft. The walk took place halfway between the Earth and the Moon. "To me, that's like going for a swim in the middle of the Pacific," says Hutton.

Viewed one by one, these images show a trained professional, capably going about his job. The GIF shows the same thing, but the camera bobs and sways. Watching it, you feel one bad grab away from the infinite abyss of space. It's a good thing to empathize with, from the safety of your computer.

Stockier than Homo sapiens, with heavy-set pelvises and barrel-shaped chests, Neanderthals had distinctively shaped skulls that gave them a unique profile. Previous research has suggested that these unique characteristics—sloping cheekbones, protruding faces and noses that might reasonably be described as bulbous—point to a bite so powerful it could be used for gripping, like a third hand. But a new study, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests an alternative theory: Neanderthals' facial structure helped them to breathe deeply in cold climates, allowing cold, dry air to move around their nasal passages.

Australian scientists used three-dimensional digital reconstructions of Neanderthals, modern humans, and a third hominid species, Homo heidelbergensis. By running computer simulations to explore the biomechanics of their bites, and how heat flowed through their nasal passages, the team learned that, in fact, Neanderthals seem to have had a bite no stronger than our own, and possibly even weaker. “A surprising result of our simulations was that modern humans can bite hard—and we do it using weaker jaw muscles. Turns out we modern humans are very efficient biters,” Stephen Wroe, lead author of the study, told The Guardian.

But when it came to taking in cold, dry air, and warming and moistening it, Neanderthals had a considerable advantage. The study found that Neanderthal nasal passages were just under 30 percent larger than that of modern humans, perhaps helping them to survive in harsh, frigid conditions.

On top of that, they seem to have had larger nostrils, which allowed them to propel air through those passages more quickly than we can—a possible boon for an active lifestyle, heavy on huffing and puffing. “The calorific demands of Neanderthals were huge compared with ours," co-author Chris Stringer told The Guardian. "They were moving around a lot, they probably had less efficient clothing and therefore they are having to burn a lot more of their body fat to keep warm."

While some new research suggests that Neanderthals might have displayed behaviors previously believed to be uniquely human, other papers, such as this one, indicate that they had certain physical traits that were all their own.

Georgia Grainger had only been working at Charleston Library in Dundee, Scotland, for six weeks when she was met with a mystery. One of the library's customers, an older woman, approached her with a question and an open book. "Why does page 7 in all the books I take out have the 7 underlined in pen?" she asked. "It seems odd." The customer opened the book to the relevant page and showed Grainger—sure enough, the 7 had been scored through with a pen. Another book, which the reader planned to take home that day, had exactly the same markings on the same page. This hyperlocal mystery (Charleston has a population of just 4,323 people) has captivated many thousands more around the world, after Grainger tweeted about what she'd discovered.

Immediately after learning about the marked 7s, Grainger says, her mind started to race through the wildest of possibilities. "I've got a bit of an overactive imagination, so I started coming up with all sorts of theories," she says. "Spy rings, secret romances, serial killers, the usual!" She began checking other books for the mysterious markings. Most didn't have it, but many in a similar genre did. These, Grainger says, are "wee old women" books—often romances set in wartime Britain, which are particularly popular with older patrons at the library. "They're quite soft, gentle romances," she says.

The mystery remained unsolved, until her manager returned from an arts-and-crafts session she was hosting for children. In a tweet, Grainger wrote: "I decided to tell her about the serial killer in the library. And that’s how I found out that a lot of our elderly clientele have secret codes to mark which books they’ve read before."

These days, computers will automatically flag up whether a customer has taken out a book in the past, but many of the library's elderly clientele have been doing it since long before electronic systems were in place. They might underline a page number, draw a little star on the last page, or write their first initial somewhere in the book. "Then when they pick it up, they can check!" Grainger says.

The books which tend to be marked in this way, Grainger says, typically have similar plots or characters. "So our patrons can’t quite remember if they’ve read them before," she says, "but they tell me they’re very enjoyable to read all the same." Since learning about the secret codes, she's been checking for other hidden symbols, but, so far, has only come across other number 7s.

Libraries and librarians around the world have since got in on the fun, with the University of Oxford's Bodleian Libraries tweeting: "A brilliant story. Please don't reenact it at [Bodleian Libraries]." While on the one hand, Grainger says she worries that the huge number of people who have enjoyed and shared the thread means "a new spate of readers using secret codes ... in truth, I found it hard to be annoyed about it."