The mammals in Geneva’s outskirts are now iconic in the country.

On the drive from the airport into Geneva, Switzerland, you may spot creatures roaming the fields that seem out of place. The hulking figures are too large to be the archetypal cows of the lush Alpine meadows, they're far more agile, and they sport large humps on their backs. They look eerily similar to North American buffalos, and with good reason: They are the very same animals. But how did they find their way to the Swiss Alps?

Years ago, a young man from a Swiss farming family, Laurent Girardet, ventured to Alberta, Canada. He went to participate in an exchange program, work on a farm, and learn English. During his time there, he unexpectedly fell in love with the bison (the term "buffalo" is often used interchangeably, but in Switzerland they are known as bison, as their scientific name is Bison bison). “I always liked big spaces and everything related to bison,” Girardet says.

He also liked the idea of raising animals naturally—that is, on pasturelands rather than in enclosures, and on a grass diet rather than one bolstered by antibiotic supplements. Compared to Switzerland’s domesticated cows, bison were robust and healthy, too. So he resolved to raise them instead. “We decided to walk away from traditional dairy cattle, to turn ourselves to something more natural and extensive,” he adds.

When Girardet first shared his plan to sell his cattle herd and replace it with bison, his fellow farmers thought he had lost his mind. No one had ever tried to raise these animals in Switzerland. What’s more, no regulations existed for bison farming, nor for the imports necessary to sustain them. Girardet’s paperwork for the unusual cargo especially confused authorities. “Getting the Swiss authorities to sign off on importing bison was quite a tough job,” he recalls. “It was the first time someone wanted to import bison for another purpose than putting them in a zoo.”

Still, Girardet pressed on. He travelled to several United States ranches in South Dakota and Wyoming, and to a buffalo stock show in Denver, to choose the bison. Once he bought his initial stock in the early 1990s—several ten-month-old calves—they were in for a long journey. First, the bison travelled to Wisconsin to go through a quarantine. Then came a long flight from Chicago to Zurich. From there, they traveled to Geneva on a truck, and then arrived in the Alps.

Today, Girardet owns a herd of 150 bison, and 35 to 40 of those are butchered every year. Calves are born every spring, he says. Behind the wire fence where he stands, a young, light brown-tinted calf nuzzles on its mother. Girardet—who is tanned and lean, with a mop of salt-and-pepper curls—extolls on how bison are easier to care for than cows. They are sturdy, healthy wild animals that rarely get sick, and don't have to be corralled for winter, either. Bison eat grass in summer and hay in winter, as opposed to cows, who are often fed grain, corn, or soy to fatten them up.

It may not come as a surprise to learn that many meat connoisseurs believe that bison cuts are much tastier, more nutritious, and higher in omega-3s than their beef counterparts. “This is simply because grass is high in omega-3s,” Girardet explains. “As herbivores, grass should be their sole nourishment. Corn, soy, growth hormones, and antibiotics should be out of the picture.”

While bringing bison all the way to Switzerland proved challenging, his efforts weren’t all for naught. Bison meat quickly became popular fare, and its place in the country was cemented when other farmers began buying Girardet’s animals for their own farms. From there, the bison migration through Switzerland continued (and continues to this day). “All bison raised in Switzerland come from our herd,” Girardet says.

Christian Lecomte, who owns the Bison Ranch in Les Prés-d'Orvin, about 100 miles north from Geneva, bought several animals from Girardet shortly after they first set their hooves on Swiss soil. At first, Lecomte set out to diversify his offerings and become more competitive in what he felt was a saturated market: Sure, his cows produced a lot of milk, but so did everyone else’s cows. But given his location in the mountains, and the fact that he had plenty of pasture, he thought breeding bison would work well. Lecomte’s herd is smaller than Girardet’s—he has 15 female bison, which bear 12 to 15 calves a year.

But over the past 25 years, Lecomte’s bison have also become a full-fledged tourist attraction. People travel from all over the world to see them roam, and to taste bison meat. The restaurant on Lecomte’s farm serves a wide range of bison dishes, including bison filets, entrecote, and fireplace-roasted steaks. For those who want to take some bison home, he sells bison salami and bison terrine.

On top of that, bison are symbolic creatures, he says, as people know and love them from movies and documentaries, particularly those set in North America. (In the United States, bison have a far more contentious history— they have been a crucial part of life for Native Americans residing in the Great Plains regions, but risked extinction in the 19th century, when settlers slaughtered millions of them.)

Michel Prêtre, of Jura Bison, located about 130 miles north of Geneva, began raising bison more recently. Back then, it was more precarious to raise cows, given the threat of an impending epidemic. “There were a lot of problems due to the mad cow disease,” he notes. So he sought alternatives. He brought 13 bison over from Geneva in 2004, and later six more from the United States. Despite their might and wild temperament, he believes that bison are simpler to care for than cows. “It’s easier to raise bison because they don’t need as much care and maintenance as cows,” he notes.

His farm is popular not only with tourists, but also with local schools, which organize frequent visits. Prêtre sells about half of his meat to local restaurants and distributors, and uses the other half on his farm. During summer barbecue season, he serves steaks, roasted bison sausages, and various tasting selections, as well as bison burgers for kids. People enjoy bison meat so much, he says, that it’s hard to keep up with demand.

Compared to beef, bison meat is still a relatively niche product in Switzerland. It's not available in supermarkets, and it's not everyday fare. Raising bison itself is still a slow-growing practice, too, given that bison farmers need a lot of land. Still, the bison's popularity has benefited from consumers' interest in humane and sustainable ways of raising animals, Girardet says. “Every bovine should pasture in a spacious grass field, without being fattened in feedlots or undersized paddocks,” he says. “We consider ourselves lucky to be raising such amazing animals, which underwent no selection or genetic manipulations from the hands of men.”

One researcher thinks mollusks called chitons are more complex than they seem.

With eight separate, flexible plates of shell held together by a skirt of muscle called a girdle, chitons look a bit like armored pebbles, ready for battle. The marine mollusks aren’t actually suited for action. They spend most of their time stuck in place, suctioned to rocks in the intertidal zone. While they’re clinging, their radula, a sort of tongue barbed with scores of sharp “teeth,” scrapes algae and other food from the surface. For chitons, that’s about as exciting as it gets.

They might seem simple, uncomplicated, even boring, but Lauren Sumner-Rooney, an evolutionary biologist at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, thinks that reputation is a little unfair. “Even things that we've considered very, very simple,” she says, “may have a lot more going on.”

Sumner-Rooney roots for underdogs. She’s fascinated, for instance, by Astyanax mexicanus, a cave-dwelling tetra fish that evolved without eyes, and cave salamanders, whose ghostly pallor and gangly limbs are adapted to a lightless life. Her work focuses on brain structure in poorly understood animals such as chitons or tusk shells, which use tentacle-like organs called captacula to assist in gathering food.

Growing up around science—two grandparents were chemists, and her mother taught her basic concepts of genetic inheritance by tracking the colors of their chickens—Sumner-Rooney couldn’t decide whether she wanted to be an astronaut or a biologist. She had a thing for the weird and unfamiliar, but in the end, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea won out over 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sumner-Rooney embarked on a career trying to understand how animals perceive their world—worlds that can be just as alien, to most people, as a distant planet.

In a new paper newly published online in the Journal of Morphology, Sumner-Rooney and coauthor Julia Sigwart, of Queen’s University Marine Laboratory in Northern Ireland, make the case that chitons haven’t received their due.

Chitons don’t have anything we'd generally consider to be heads, and it’s long been thought they don’t have brains, either, and instead sport a rudimentary, ladder-like nerve network. Sumner-Rooney and Sigwart argue in their paper that chitons aren’t really brainless, but rather have a brain that defies our expectations and understanding.

When humans think of brains, we think of our own—two hemispheres, dizzy with coils, a pinky-beige helmet snugly ensconced in a skull. But brains in a lot of other creatures aren’t just scaled-down versions of ours.

Across species, the morphological differences between brains are vast and numerous—so much so that, in 2010, Stefan Richter, a biologist at Universität Rostock, and a slew of colleagues set out to codify a shared vocabulary for describing exactly what a brain is and isn’t. They laid out a working definition of “brain”—along with 46 other terms used to describe parts of invertebrates’ nervous systems—in a neuroanatomical glossary in the journal Frontiers in Zoology.

They defined a brain as a particular, distinctive cluster of neurons—specifically, “the most prominent anterior condensation of neurons.” Sumner-Rooney relies on this definition in her work, but she acknowledges, as Richter and company also note, that this umbrella leaves some species out in the rain—including a few generally thought to be capable of sophisticated tasks.

Animals with radial symmetry, such as jellyfish and sea urchins, don’t have a front or a rear, so there’s no place to put an “anterior [front] condensation” of neurons. But somehow they still manage to coordinate muscle movement and process sensory information coming in from across their bodies. “They pose quite a problem for very classical definitions, but they're clearly very capable of complex tasks that we would usually attribute to a brain,” Sumner-Rooney says. Such a brain, she adds, “doesn't quite fit with the image we have in our heads.”

In the case of a chiton, there is a dense concentration of nerve tissue inside what’s known as the circumesophageal nerve ring, a flattened cord around the top of the esophagus. If a chiton does have a brain, Sumner-Rooney reasons, the nerve ring might be the place to find it.

Sumner-Rooney, who scouts flea markets for old illustrations from biology books, was excited to get her hands on nearly 3,700 slides of histological sections of chiton parts from Berlin’s Natural History Museum, made in the late 1800s and early 1900s by researcher Johannes Thiele. For one thing, they are beautiful. Each specimen is stained a brilliant pink, and each slide is hand-labeled with a swoopy, elegant script. The slides cover a range of chiton species, so she thought they would allow her to look at neuroanatomy across different varieties. (They consulted a bit of newer material, too, to account for what was missing from Thiele's collection.) Then, as she and her team digitized the slides, they began examining the nerve ring in light of Richter’s definition of a brain.

More than a century ago, at least one researcher had hinted that the ring might be divided into parts that corresponded to major nerve cords. Even then the observation was buried deep in footnotes, and in the decades since, Sumner-Rooney says, it slipped into what she calls “dormant knowledge.” With the exception of a very small handful of papers, it had been neglected, as researchers focused on cephalopods and gastropods. Most scientific literature about chitons still describes their brains as simple, "ladder-like" structures. "I think it was largely because there aren't big ganglionic swellings in chitons like we see in other mollusks like gastropods, bivalves, and tusk shells," Sumner-Rooney says. Since the nerve cord is fairly consistent in width, she adds, there was an assumption that no particular area was specialized or advanced.

Much of the most in-depth anatomical work on chitons dates back decades, and the recent work that considers the architecture of the entire nervous system includes some research that's not especially accessible—such as a thesis published 30 years ago, in German. More recently, Sumner-Rooney says, modern techniques such as 3-D imaging “are finally starting to open up our ability to look at these animals and reevaluate what we think about the nervous systems that they do have,” she says.

When Sumner-Rooney and Sigwart used these strategies, they found that the nerve ring isn’t as simple as it might appear to be. It is divided into clearly defined segments, and these are related to structures seen in other classes of mollusks. “This represents a far higher level of neural structure than is reflected in the established literature,” the authors write. “Contrary to almost all previous descriptions,” they conclude, “the size and structure of the chiton anterior nerve ring unambiguously qualify it as a true brain.”

When Sumner-Rooney tells museum visitors about mollusk brains, things quickly escalate into lofty philosophical questions. “Instantly you make this connection between, ‘Ok, if that has a brain, does it have feelings? Is it aware that it's alive?’” she says. She finds that it’s often hard for people “to separate the notion of brains from the notion of emotion, feeling, and a sense of self.”

But she isn’t studying consciousness, to whatever extent chitons are capable of “thinking” about the currents churning around them. Instead, she’s interested in what all those neurons are doing, what they’re capable of, and why. For example, some species of chitons demonstrate homing habits; they can roam to find food, and then find their way back. Does the nerve ring help make this possible? Maybe the neural ring has some role in supporting the hundreds and hundreds of eyes, or ocelli, that stipple many species’ shells. There’s evidence that these can perceive shadows passing overhead, and that chitons clamp down on their rocks when they do. Is it an integration of information or a response driven by reflexes—similar to a human jerking a hand away from a flame?

To learn more, researchers must look deeper at structure and behavior. Sumner-Rooney hopes to do both. Other strategies could involve electrophysiology—taking measurements directly from the nerves—severing portions of the nerve ring, or inserting dye into living or freshly dead specimens to retrace the connections. “One of the beautiful things about the nervous system is that they do just work in a similar way to electrical circuits,” Sumner-Rooney says. “You should be able to disentangle them using logic.”

Meanwhile, the work is a reminder that we have to use our own brains if we want to understand another species', and this means watching out for pitfalls, such as seeing only what we’re looking for. “The interpretation of chiton anatomy may be historically stymied by circular logic,” the authors write. “If we assume that chitons are primitive, then we see their nervous system as primitive, and the nervous systems are seen as ‘proof’” of that simplicity, they add. Instead, we could expand our own minds at the same time that we expand our definition of what a mind might be.

Understanding what shinobi ate, amid a stew of myths and misconceptions.

The truth about ninjas is as slippery as its subject. These mysterious assassins, sometimes referred to as shinobi, lived lives so inscrutable that the line between history and the fiction they inspire is irremediably blurred.

Though the specifics sometimes differ, ninja experts usually agree on a few common facts: Secretive guerrilla fighters are said to have lived in Japan’s mountainous Mie Prefecture between about 1487 and 1603. During a century of considerable military strife, they are believed to have been for-hire killers who used highly specialized, secretive techniques. Yet even these details, writes scholar and military historian Stephen Turnbull, who has published extensively on ninja culture and history, are hard to prove. Still, he doesn’t believe they are a total fabrication. “All invented traditions have a basis in fact,” he writes, “no matter how tenuously the links may be made between the developed tradition and recorded history.”

A few decades after ninjas are said to have lived, historians and storytellers began writing extensively about them—who they were, what they did, and how they ate. Various accounts describe how they avoided smelly foods (to better sneak up on enemies), restricted their diet to remain agile, or even used food to send secret messages. A vivid picture emerges of ninjas and their diets—though how much of it is based on the real medieval fighters is near-impossible to say, if they existed at all. (Turnbull, for his part, believes that even the earliest conceptions of ninjas are an amalgamation of “genuine belief in a unique local expertise that was bolstered by folk memories and old soldiers’ tales,” as well as an active desire to believe in an appealing military fantasy.)

Modern depictions of ninjas usually portray them as mythic, pyjama-clad figures, scurrying around in the shadows. Yet the earliest accounts, which are most likely to approximate the truth, suggest they were essentially farmers—a half-agricultural worker, half-samurai, who ate like his rural peers. “Many ninja [are said to have had] their origins in the lower social classes,” Turnbull wrote, in an earlier book. “Their secretive and underhand methods were the exact opposite of the ideals of noble samurai.” Accounts describe them hiding in wait for days, infiltrating enemy territory, or serving as spies or assassins.

If they ate like other farmers, says researcher Makato Hisamatsu, from Mie University’s recently opened ninja research center, they might have had two meals a day, mostly made up of millet, rice bran, miso, and wild vegetables and plants. “They’re thought to have eaten grasshoppers, snakes, and frogs, too,” he told the Japanese magazine Aera. “It was a more balanced diet than today.” Certainly, the nutritional advantages of brown rice are well documented—though insects, reptiles, and amphibians seldom appear in today’s many ninja-inspired healthy eating manuals.

But source texts dating from the late 17th and 18th centuries suggest several distinctions between their diet and that of their farmer peers. Ninjas are said to have avoided particularly pungent foods, for fear of being sniffed out by the enemy, Hisamatsu told the Japanese Health Press. Garlic, leeks, and other members of the allium family were all off the menu. (Red meat was too, though most people living in medieval Japan were Buddhist or Shinto, and therefore mostly vegetarian.) There’s a scientific basis for this concern: Recent research shows marked changes in body odor for men who adopt a vegetarian diet, while at least one study linked increased garlic consumption with a more pleasant, but perhaps more pungent, personal musk.

There were other differences. Ninjas are said to have kept an eye on their waistline to remain agile, Hisamatsu said. He described a commonly cited “iron-clad rule,” which stipulated that they should not weigh more than 60kg, or about 130lb: the then-standard weight of a bag of rice. In practice, this meant observing a simple, nutritious regime, so that when they needed to “be a stealthy ninja” (and hang from ceilings or scale walls), they’d be light enough to do so with ease.

The famous Bansenshukai is one of the best-known source texts about ninjas, though it dates to 1676, long after their supposed heyday. It’s a hodgepodge of documents, many of which draw extensively from Chinese military philosophy, and reads almost like a manual—a how-to guide that claims to be the ultimate accumulation of Ninjutsu knowledge, and in the process, helped lay the foundation for the ninja mystique. It includes instructions for how to make so-called “hunger pills” that can fuel long, secretive journeys when food might be scarce.

One recipe combines Japanese yams, cinnamon, glutinous rice, and lotus pips. Another instructed ninjas “on the go” who lacked adequate rations to make a powder out of pine bark, ginseng, and white rice, and then steam balls of the mixture in a basket. “Divide this between 15 people and they will not starve, even if they eat nothing else for up to three days.” Modern calculations suggest that each ball had about 300 calories—not enough for a meal, perhaps, but a decent, nutrient-dense snack for the long road ahead.

The Ninja Museum of Iga-ryu, a Japanese museum dedicated to ninjas and their history, describes a similar “thirst ball,” which helped ninjas avoid dehydration. They were made with crushed umeboshi pulp, rye ergot fungus, and crystallized sugar—a potent, electrolyte-rich combination of foods often used today as hangover cures. Such pills would have been crucial for these “long-distance scouts,” writes Antony Cummins in Samurai and Ninja: The Real Story Behind the Japanese Warrior Myth. “They were expected to be in the field for extended periods of time with little or no food, and their health was expected to decline.”

Texts by the 18th-century Japanese military writer Chikamatsu Shigenori describes another use for food in ninja culture—as a way to send secret messages. To communicate a date, ninjas could send pieces of fish, with the size and number of pieces corresponding to the month and day. “To promise to [carry out] treachery, you should send salted fish,” writes Shigenori. “When you are going to commit arson, you should send dried fish.” Sweet cakes meant a call for reinforcements; bread rolls were a call for forces to attack the enemy from the rear. Rice cakes indicated a request for provisions—though presumably ninjas wouldn’t send them unless they were quite sure they’d be resupplied. The fighters apparently sent an anodyne letter along too, to protect the messenger if their bounty fell into the wrong hands.

All of this, however, should be taken with at least a sprinkle of salt. There’s a textual basis for these dietary innovations, and many have a scientific basis to boot. But experts still question to what extent “ninjas” even existed and debate how much of our knowledge is centuries-old fabrication, founded on layer upon layer of legend. There’s only one contemporary source that describes ninjas—not much to base an entire military tradition on. While Turnbull accepts that some written records may have been destroyed, “the important point is that there are no authentic records after it.” Those we have are shaky, and date from long after the time ninjas allegedly roamed Japan.

Whether or not ninjas truly ate the way the texts describe is hard to say. But what these sources do reveal is the origins of a dearly-held national tradition, and where our modern conception of these fighters may come from. As early as the 1670s, people imagined ninjas as being like a deadly gas: lighter than air, capable of infiltrating impenetrable areas, and undetectable, even by smell.

Maybe it's best not to think too much about what's in your bed now.

Our bedrooms feel like cozy, tidy cocoons, insulated from the outside world. But they have ecosystems all their own, teeming with bacteria and other microscopic life, both from the body's resident biome and from what we bring in with us from beyond the threshold. The chimpanzee equivalent of a bedroom is an aerie—a woven nest of branches and leaves in a tree. Recently, a group of researchers led by Megan S. Thoemmes, a graduate student in ecology at North Carolina State University, wanted to know whether their bedrooms are any tidier, microbially speaking, than human ones.

To find out, they studied 41 abandoned chimpanzee beds in the Issa Valley, in western Tanzania. (Chimps spend a single night in a nest before moving on to another, and it's best not to disturb them when they're up there.) The researchers swabbed for microbes, and sucked arthropods, such as spiders or mites, up with a vacuum.

The authors had assumed that the chimps’ beds would follow a pattern similar to human ones—less diverse than the surrounding environment, and liberally sprinkled with microbes and organisms from the chimps’ bodies. (Previous studies on the microbiome of human bedrooms estimate that 35 percent of the microbes on our pillows and sheets come from our mouths, skin, or gut.) The data, published today in Royal Society Open Science, tell a different story. Those types of microbes account for only 3.5 percent of what they found. "We also expected to see a significant number of arthropod parasites, but we didn't," Thoemmes said in a statement. "There were only four ectoparasites found, across all the nests we looked at. And that's four individual specimens, not four different species.”

The researchers suspect that this could be due to a number of factors, including what they dub the chimps’ “toilette hygiene," a combination of fastidious grooming practices and good aim. Chimps might be plucking mites or other arthropods off their bodies before they bed down, and are probably careful to poop off the side. A single night is also a comparatively short time to spend in a bed. Humans are more likely to plop down in the same place night after night, and we aren’t always great about washing our sheets.

This finding prompted the researchers to think about the time when early humans made the move indoors. Chimpanzees’ nests don’t look dramatically different than neighboring leaves or the forest floor. While it's almost impossible to seal a room against anything and everything, we have created any number of distinct microbial worlds—beds are different than sidewalks, which are different than the walls of the bar down the street. Our walled-in spaces are just a different kind of wild.

They're all different colors, too.

Earlier this year, the Queen appointed Sarah Clarke to fill the office of Usher of the Black Rod, the first time in more than 650 years a woman has held this job. When Clarke entered Parliament, she wore a tailored black coat, a frilled shirt, and a medallion around her neck. As she walked, back straight, to her seat, she held the symbol of her office—a black wand, three-and-a-half feet long, with gold ornaments—over her shoulder.

Back in the 14th century, Edward III created the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod in part to keep check on the boisterous knights of the Order of the Garter, which still exists today. As the oldest society of knights in Britain, with a limited number of slots available, the Garter has since become the most prestigious chivalric order. The Black Rod acted as an aide to the king and could arrest or summon knights. The rod was a symbol of his power, “being used only for those who offend against and act contrary to the statutes and ordinance of this noble order,” as one 19th-century guide put it.

Today, the Black Rod usually uses the rod just once a year, to rap on the door of Parliament before the Queen arrives to give her annual address. During this ritualized occasion, another member of the Queen’s house, the Vice-Chamberlain, is held “hostage” at Buckingham Palace. Ever since the 17th century, when King Charles I and the legislature were at odds (the king was, eventually, executed), the monarch has taken precautions when visiting Parliament. For a few hours, the Vice-Chamberlain, who’s also a member of Parliament, stays under guard at Buckingham Palace (although reportedly both wandering and gin-and-tonics are allowed). The Vice-Chamberlain, too, brings along a ceremonial “wand of office”—a white staff, which, according to custom, the Queen is supposed to break into two pieces when the Vice-Chamberlain steps down. The Lord Chamberlain also has a ceremonial white staff, which is supposed to be broken over the grave of the monarch when he or she dies.

These fancy sticks—call them rods, wands, or staffs—are part of the long-standing tradition. The Queen herself has multiple scepters and rods among the royal jewels. In the United Kingdom, the Black Rod is the oldest and most prominent of the rod-bearing officials. But they have proliferated since the 14th century. British monarchs have also appointed White Rods, Green Rods, Blue Rods, Scarlet Rods, and Purple Rods.

While the black rod is made of ebony and the white rod of silver, the more colorful rods are enameled; all are topped with golden ornaments, of specified design. Each Rod is associated with a particular chivalric order; the Scarlet Rod, for instance, is the usher for the Order of the Bath, named for the purification ritual once associated with knighthood. These positions do have ceremonial and some administrative duties that accompany them. But one of the great perks must be the secret joy of getting to carry a special stick around in public.

Step inside the hidden green spaces of cities around the world.

For centuries, the church of St-Dunstan-in-the-East, in London, has been a place for quiet contemplation. It was constructed in the 12th century, and survived the Great Fire of London, along with several refurbishments, until 1941. One night during the Blitz, German bombs devastated the church. All that remained was the tower and some of the walls. After lying in ruins for nearly three decades, the City of London decided to repurpose the site. Since 1971, St-Dunstan-in-the-East has been a public garden. Just a short walk from the Tower of London, yet tucked away between three narrow streets, vines cascade from the ancient walls, trees climb through former windows, and benches welcome any city-dweller in need of some calm.

Green spaces in cities are proven to have a multitude of benefits for urban dwellers. Countless studies have found that access to parks and gardens benefits everything from stress levels to heart health to children’s developing brains. And while many major cities have vast public parks, a respite from city living can also take the form of a smaller, more secluded space like St-Dunstan-in-the-East. It and other public or semi-public spaces like it are the subject of the new book Green Escapes: The Guide to Secret Urban Gardens.

The book covers more than 260 "secret" urban gardens around the world. In Moscow, you can visit the 18th-century Apothecaries’ Garden, founded by Peter the Great, which includes greenhouses and beds of medicinal herbs. In Cape Town, you can stroll among the vegetable plots of the Orangezicht City Farm. And spread across three floors of a high-rise building above Osaka Station, a major railway terminal in Japan, there are three separate gardens, one of which has a small vineyard.

Osaka Station isn’t the only transport hub in the world with gardens to discover. At Singapore’s Changi Airport, weary travelers can visit gardens devoted to sunflowers, orchids, or cacti. And if you're visiting at the right time of year, you can wait for your flight to be called among 1,000 butterflies in the airport's seasonal Butterfly Garden. In 2019, Changi will further expand its green space to incorporate the 14,000-square-meter Canopy Park, which will include an indoor garden and mazes.

Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from the book that show that in any busy global city, green is good.

The collection holds 105 starters and counting.

In the tiny municipality of St. Vith, Belgium, there’s a most unusual library. Unusual, that is, because the objects on its shelves need to be fed every few months. Burbling away in refrigerators are 105 sourdough starters from around the world. It’s a modern way to store what used to be a familiar feature of home kitchens: starters, the fermented mixtures of flour and water added to dough to provide rise and flavor.

The Puratos Sourdough Library is not in an area famous for sourdough. Especially among Americans, San Francisco may be best known for the bread. But according to Karl De Smedt, the sourdough librarian, sourdough belongs to the entire world. Until 160 years ago, “everyone who was making bread was using sourdough.”

De Smedt is both an obvious and unlikely candidate for the world’s first sourdough librarian. A confectioner and baker by training, he is passionate about sourdough and has worked at the Belgium-based bakery supply company Puratos since the '90s. He’s also essentially allergic to flour. But this is not uncommon for bakers—De Smedt developed his asthma-like symptoms in 2002 due to his long exposure to flour dust.

Due to the condition, De Smedt shifted to corporate training at Puratos. At the time, global interest in artisanal bread, especially sourdough, was growing. Puratos had long been collecting bread starters for research, starting with a San Francisco sourdough in 1989. Puratos opened a Center for Bread Flavor in St. Vith in 2008. As the Center collected bread starters, De Smedt proposed displaying them in one place. Given essentially carte blanche by Puratos to promote the center’s projects and sourdough in particular, De Smedt oversaw the opening of the Sourdough library at the center in 2013.

The library’s website likens the project to other preservation centers, such as Norway’s Svalbard seed vault. According to Anne A. Madden, a microbiologist at the Rob Dunn Lab at North Carolina State University, the story of humanity has long been entwined with sourdough. Madden, who works on the Dunn Lab’s Sourdough Project, nevertheless says that microbes in sourdough “remain somewhat of a mystery.” (Researchers have long devoted more attention to other fermented products, such as beer.) Efforts like the library are important, since by not studying sourdough, “we might be losing flavors and bread aspects that we’ve not yet experienced.” But there’s undoubtedly a commercial element to the library: In 2015, Puratos CEO Daniel Malcorps told attendees at an industry event that customers are clamoring for artisanal tastes with a heritage, especially that of sourdough.

When collecting starters, De Smedt prioritizes renown, unusual origins, and often, their estimated age. When I ask about the oldest starter in the collection, De Smedt says there’s no surefire way to tell. “If someone tells me I have a 500-year-old sourdough, I have to believe them,” he says. How a starter is fed and maintained can change its microbial colonies, sometimes completely. At some point, it's hard to say if a century-old starter is really that old. Part of the purpose of the library is to maintain the sourdough starters in a state close to how De Smedt gathered them. De Smedt hopes that over decades, the starters collected in the library will be continuously maintained so that they can be researched for aging, a new frontier for sourdough.

The lack of sourdough knowledge is surprising given its long, ubiquitous history. Ancient Egyptians in 4000 B.C. were likely the first to use fermented dough, creating a raised bread with a complex flavor. Madden defines sourdough as bread fermented with the yeast, lactic acid bacteria, and occasionally acetic acid bacteria present in its environment. The different types of bacteria influence the flavor, sometimes even producing dough that isn’t at all sour. Humanity was addicted to naturally-leavened bread. Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, a French scientist, published a book in 1778 lamenting “the laborious slavery of the bakers,” whose livelihoods so depended on the microbial health of their levains that they would be checked and fed every three to four hours, depriving the poor bakers of sleep.

Sourdough’s universality declined when easier methods developed to make bread. By adding brewer’s yeast to dough, some bakers managed to get a rise without needing to keep a starter. Out of brewer’s yeasts came the first commercial yeasts, which proliferated in the 1860s and created a more predictable, if less interesting, bread. Understandably, many people swapped out their starters for less-laborious yeast cakes.

To amass his collection, De Smedt travels to areas that have maintained strong sourdough traditions. This often means former gold-rush frontiers, such as San Francisco and the Yukon, where humble conditions once made early commercial yeasts unreliable. Last week, De Smedt returned from Seattle, Alaska, and Canada, where he collected three starters said to be left over from the Klondike Gold Rush. (His visit caused a small local news furor.) He took one of his own starters with him, and when his camper got too cold, he took a cue from miners of yore and slept with it to keep it warm.

De Smedt's process of collecting sourdoughs—whether in Greece, Mexico, America, or Japan—sounds as delicate as transporting a kidney. “It’s a very strict protocol,” he says, meant to prevent contamination and changes in temperature that could affect the starter. The library provides a special box with components that need to be frozen before the starter is poured in. Then, it’s airmailed to Belgium. The original baker also needs to donate yearly supplies of flour to the library to maintain the starter. “This week we are feeding the sourdoughs to keep them alive,” De Smedt explains, a process that happens every two months.

According to De Smedt, there’s a hippie element to sourdough’s resurgence. Many artisanal bakers began experimenting with natural leavening in the 1970s, as a way to make bread that tasted more old-world. The interest in sourdough has renewed studies of yeast and bacteria strains for hints about the past and clues on how to make bread even better.

By sequencing the microbiological makeup of starters, the library is already finding patterns linking the world’s sourdoughs. Two starters, one from Switzerland and one from Mexico, share a wild yeast, Torulaspora delbrueckii, present in none of the others. It’s a puzzling phenomenon that De Smedt thinks may be linked to their high-altitude origins. In another instance, two starters contained the same combination of lactobacilli, and the only connection was that they were both created by women.

The library also has a website called “The Quest for Sourdough,” where bakers worldwide can register their starters and the ingredients used to make them, which include everything from rye flour to juice. Another feature showcases the flavor profiles of the library’s collection: whether a starter will produce a bread that is sour, umami, or even sweet.

One collaboration, with the Rob Dunn Lab, has resulted in a particularly important finding: that each baker who makes a starter puts a stamp on it—and the bread they then bake. Last year, the library sent identical flour and a starter recipe to bakers from 16 countries, including Madden. Then, the bakers traveled to Belgium with their starters. The point is to research the effect of microbes on bakers' hands. Though the data is still being analyzed, Madden says that the flour is a major source of microorganisms, and “some of the microorganisms that vary across sourdough starters are also found on the hands” of the participants.

But unlike most libraries, you can’t check out the starters in St. Vith. The library isn’t open to the public (although if you’re in St. Vith and contact De Smedt through social media, he’ll happily show off the collection), and De Smedt says that the starters are still the property of their home bakeries, so he can’t dole them out. On occasion, though, De Smedt takes some starter home and bakes some sourdough. (As long as he’s careful, he won’t aggravate his allergies.) With 105 different sourdoughs to choose from, he likely won’t get bored anytime soon.

The United States' first iftar took place at the home of the third President.

In 1805, the month of Ramadan fell in December. Far from his friends, family and home, one Tunisian man was attempting to observe it in Washington, D.C. This was the statesman Sidi Soliman Mellimelli, who was spending six months in the United States, on a diplomatic mission.

Observing this holy month and its daily fasts in such a foreign environment must have been a challenge. Newspaper commentators at the time thought of him contemptuously, variously "depicting him as a sex-crazed barbarian, or associating Islam with licentiousness," writes Jason Zeledon. But in Thomas Jefferson, he had an unexpected ally. Despite facing criticism for his hospitality from Federalists in Connecticut and Vermont, Jefferson looked after his Muslim visitor graciously, going so far as to rearrange a dinner party around Mellimelli's fast. In doing so, America's third president became the country's first ever host of an iftar meal.

On December 7, Jefferson's secretary visited Mellimelli to invite him to a 3:30 p.m. dinner with the President. When he arrived, Mellimelli was praying on his mat. "Rising from the ground, he addressed the Secretary in the same manner as if he had just come in from another room," senator William Plumer reported. "He replied he could not eat this month until after sunset."

That could very easily have been that. Instead, Jefferson postponed the meal by around 90 minutes to "precisely at sunset." (Modern calculations suggest this was likely just before 5 p.m.) John Quincy Adams, who also attended the dinner, noted that this move was due to "it being in the midst of Ramadan, during which the Turks fast when the sun is above the horizon."

That night, Mellimelli was a little late—he may have decided to say his evening prayers at home, before attending the dinner—but sat down and broke his fast with them. They smoked together, shared copious dishes, and talked through Mellimelli's interpreter.

It was, by no stretch, a traditional iftar, nor what Mellimelli would have been used to, without sweet dates to start the meal or the Tunisian dishes he was familiar with. But this gesture of hospitality must have seemed an outstretched hand at what was perhaps a very lonely time—a recognition that Jefferson and his peers respected and valued Mellimelli's religious practice, and would do whatever they could to accommodate him, and it.

An astronomer translated the sounds of galactic gases into a piece of music.

Mark Heyer, an astronomer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has spent more than a quarter of a century dreaming about the sounds of space.

At first, he just wanted to get a better grasp on his data. Heyer studies galactic gases, and in the 1990s, he was using a telescope to collect 3-D measurements of specific clouds of gas in the Milky Way. He could see that the clouds were turbulent, often collapsing or expanding, but when he examined the data with the help of a computer, the velocity variable got lost. Heyer needed a way to visualize not just two points on a map, but what happened between them. Translating three dimensions into something viewable on a two-dimensional screen required a little creativity, and he landed on the idea of transforming the motion into sound. As you moved your cursor around, you'd hear something different; various pitches corresponded to various velocities. “Initially, it was a functional idea,” he says. “But if you’re going to that effort, why not make music?”

Eventually he wanted to scale up to a musical composition that captured the "sound" of the atomic, molecular, and ionized gases across the Milky Way. “I thought it would just sound like noise or randomness,” he says. “But the more I thought about it, I realized you’d be hearing the rotation of the galaxy,” which has “big, obvious motions,” he says. Heyer suspected that, by transforming the data collected by radio telescopes into a musical scale, he would end up with something rather consonant.

He just wasn’t sure exactly how to pull it off. Heyer couldn’t compose and play the music himself—he has dabbled with guitar and mandolin and once built a dulcimer, which he “can hack on a little bit,” but he’s not an especially skilled musician. (“I know just enough to be dangerous,” he says.) Recently, he discovered that he could outsource some of the work to an algorithm, and that sounded promising.

Once he had the tools, Heyer knew he wanted to first try emulating the instruments of a jazz ensemble—but which ones? His simulator has over 100 instruments. Some didn’t make the cut because they wouldn’t be able to leap between octaves they way they’d need to in order to bring the data to life. The glockenspiel was an early casualty, as was the flute. “It’s such a high-pitched instrument, and there are so many low notes,” Heyer says. “You’d never hear it.”

In the final composition, titled Milky Way Blues, baritone saxophone stands in for the ionized gas, the bass represents atomic gas, and piano and wooden blocks draw from the data about molecular gas. (To account for the span of the Milky Way, Heyer collated data from different sources and hemispheres.) High notes denote gas moving toward Earth, and low notes reference gas moving away. The longer the note, the greater the intensity. Heyer tried to keep tinkering to a minimum in order to preserve the integrity of the data the whole thing is based on. You can listen on Astronomy Sound of the Month, or above.

The ditty is a bit goofy, but it's a creative way to help bridge the gap between what we know and what we can imagine. It's a twist on Heyer's original impulse to visualize data, but tailored for people who aren't necessarily scientists. Pictures don't give us the complete story of our galaxy, and it's hard to fill in the gaps. Though Earth-locked viewers are accustomed to seeing still images of our galaxy, all twinkling and sherbet-hued, it’s actually kinetic and in constant motion. We can know that, intellectually, but it’s hard to translate it into something relatable. Heyer says that’s a common refrain. “Even astronomers don’t really understand the vastness of space,” he says. “It’s mind-boggling.” He can calculate the distance from Earth to a particular star or cloud, for instance, “but perceptually, I don’t know what that means.” Taking a cue from the corner jazz band, tooting and blaring away, is one strategy for making the whole thing just a tiny bit easier to wrap our minds around.

Heyer says his composition is landing on receptive ears; two people have already reached out to see if they can snag a copy of the score to play themselves. In the future, Heyer might zero in on different parts of the galaxy, too—after all, if you translate motion into music, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy would sound much different than places farther away, where gases are more sparse. Sampling different regions of our solar neighborhood would be like a sonic road trip to a place we wouldn’t otherwise hear—and maybe never dreamed we could.

"Conduct unbecoming to Tower Residents" is not tolerated.

George had a very good assignment, for a raven in the '70s. Living at the Tower of London, he was fed better than any raven would have been in the wild—a steady diet of raw meat and blood-soaked biscuits. He lived alongside a small corps of other ravens, where visitors streamed by each day. The one restriction on his life was movement: With one wing clipped, he was confined to the Tower grounds.

That captivity chafed, though, and George would not abide it. As Boria Sax recounts in his book City of Ravens, George figured out how to climb a fire escape, perch high up on a wall, and glide down safely. Finally, in 1981, he went AWOL. Apprehended at a pub, he was forced to return to duty at the Tower. But still, he could not uphold the standards demanded of his station. Five years after, the Tower announced:

“On Saturday 13th September 1986, Raven George, enlisted 1975, was posted to the Welsh Mountain Zoo. Conduct unsatisfactory, service therefore no longer required.”

His final offense? He had destroyed five TV antennas in just one week.

According to the mythology surrounding the Tower, the ravens live there because, centuries before, Charles II was warned that if ravens ever abandoned the tower, the Crown would fall. There are a few different versions of this story, and historians now believe that they’re all apocryphal. Records of ravens in the Tower go back only to the 19th century; they may have been kept as pets following the Poe-related raven craze.

For many years, though, the ravens have been seen as having a military duty to the Crown. The Yeoman Warders who care for the birds have military backgrounds, and, like George the wayward bird, the ravens are said to be enlisted in the armed services. A 1936 article reported that the Tower kept a "Nominal Roll of the Corps of Tower Ravens.”

This was always a cheeky exercise—one bird’s occupation was listed as “thief.” But it does mean that when birds misbehave they can be dismissed from their posts. In 1995 two ravens, Hugine and Jackie, were dismissed for "conduct unbecoming to Tower Residents,” The Independent reported. They had gotten riled up during mating season and were never able to settle down. Like any soldiers who put their personal life before their duty, they were discharged. It’s a rare occurrence—most of the ravens at the Tower seem happy to fulfill their obligations to the Crown, as long as they’re fed raw rabbit, liver, and blood-soaked crackers.

Shinbun nishiki-e were the country's answer to penny dreadfuls.

In 1875, the residents of Tokyo were alerted to a murder. Hundreds of miles away, in the remote mountains, a lonely man named Gitarō had been visited by a local woman who sold old clothing. She asked to stay the night; cordially, he invited her in. Then, far from the eyes of any prying neighbor, he stabbed and killed her, took her money and possessions, and cut off her head. Months later, a dog walked through the village with her severed head in his mouth. The corpse was found, wrapped in a straw mat in the man's home, and he was caught and arrested.

Stories of this sort—lurid, sensational, violent—were the bread-and-butter of Tokyo's early tabloids. Printed in the mid-1870s, they were produced by some of the country's most able artists, using traditional woodblock printing. For a time, it was a potent combination: the country's most salacious stories, gorgeously illustrated and framed like the dust jacket of a book. Around 1,000 editions of these were produced, before changing technology ended the practice. These were the shinbun nishiki-e—a kind of Japanese analogue to the penny dreadful, with a moralistic twist. In one edition, the text concludes: "Ah, the moral powers of our land of the gods. That Heaven used a dog to reveal a bad man's hidden evil is something to fear and revere."

Earlier in the 19th century, people in Japan got most of their news from illustrated broadsheets called kawaraban. They told scurrilous tales of murder and suicide, gave details about natural disasters (of which Japan had many), or spun yarns about monsters and the unknown. Rather than having regular print runs, kawaraban came out only when there was something to say—published, quick and dirty, in a single color. The sheets were approximately twice the size of today’s letter paper and sold from towering piles by furtive salesmen on street corners. (You could buy four for the cost of a bowl of noodles.)

The 1870s brought something of a revolution in Japanese media. Publications today considered Japan’s first modern newspapers sprung up one after another, providing more authoritative views on Tokyo's stories. Not everyone could read them, however. Printed only in complex kanji, with minimal illustration, they were out of reach to the uneducated. And so shinbun nishiki-e arose to fill the gap and provide an alternative revenue stream for struggling woodblock publishers.

Like the kawaraban, they told wanton stories, sometimes lifted from the “mainstream” press and reprinted under the original newspaper’s name. There was still kanji text, certainly, but also phonetic hiragana, a simpler syllabary. And they included a vivid illustration for the roughly 60 percent of the population that was entirely illiterate. Shinbun nishiki-e were designed to be accessible and appealing to all, and as a consequence, they sold like onigiri.

In these papers, editorial coverage tended towards the sensational—illicit love, ghosts, freaks, revenge. Even when they had some basis in fact, the reporting was only slightly better than in the kawaraban, and multiple competing accounts of the same event might swirl simultaneously. Stories might have been related weeks or even years after they had taken place, rewritten in splashy, didactic copy, sometimes with a moral.

In fact, embellishment and even fabrication do not appear to have been particularly bothersome to those in power, writes Rebecca Salter in Japanese Popular Prints: From Votive Slips to Playing Cards: “The authorities, who may have known the full facts, were content with the confusion sewn by this uncertainty, as long as one version of a story did not appear to gain ascendancy as the correct one.”

Without any kind of censorship in place, therefore, images went quite explicit: the gang rape of someone’s girlfriend, or the bloody mouth of a man poisoned by his wife. Others were decidedly political—rebels defeated, or the tragic tale of a government soldier reuniting a woman with her husband’s body. A controversial edition in which a woman serves her husband his mistress’s genitals as sashimi is a riot of color—and showed that there was a limit to how far these papers could go. That one provoked so much outrage that its publication was stopped. (Whether this was due to the high rank of the husband or the gratuitousness of the image remains a mystery.)

But for all their gore, the images are quite beautiful. The lines and colors were often as subtle as their subjects were shocking. Many artists who produced them were among the best in the country, including Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, who contributed mostly to the paper Yubin hochi shinbun and Utagawa Yoshiiku, who cofounded and mainly drew for the Tokyo nichinichi shinbun. People visiting the city bought them as souvenirs and then took them back to the countryside, so friends and family could gawp at the scandal and sophistication of metropolitan affairs. “My god!” wrote one visitor. “What a sign of civilization! What a sign of culture!” For foreigners, they had far less appeal: The text wasn’t legible, and the pictures far less appealing than “Japanese-y” geishas, cherry blossoms, or pastoral scenes.

Shinbun nishiki-e were never intended as art. When profits dwindled, then, they were extinguished like a candle. “Real” newspapers were increasingly illustrated, and a rise in Western printing techniques made these traditional woodblock images seem dated. It was also a slow, laborious way to produce papers—especially if no one was buying. Movable type was faster, Western paper was heartier, and, like locomotives or the telegraph, both were seen as signs of progress. By the end of the 1870s, the shinbun nishiki-e illustrated pages were all but gone, with their one-of-a-kind illustrations as valueless as yesterday’s newsprint.

Geological features, toxic fumes, and visions of the future.

One hot spring day, two scientists began climbing a steep, boulder-strewn ridge near Selcuk, in southwestern Turkey. The few stunted pines sprinkled here and there offered little shade. “Don’t touch the rocks with your hands too much,” warned their guide. “Scorpions.” Several hundred feet up, a dark, narrow opening pierced the slope. They climbed in and descended about 20 feet to the floor of a small, cool cavern. In the indirect sunlight, they could see stalactites lacing the walls, and curving passages, too small to enter, spiraling down. A newly shed snakeskin lay on the floor. At the rear, five natural steps led up to a rock formation resembling a tangle of human bones. They had found their quarry—an oracle of Cybele, earth goddess of Asia Minor, curer of disease, granter of fertility, seer of all things. From prehistoric times until 2,000 years ago, and perhaps longer, people came to this cave to ask Cybele the same questions we ask today. Whom should I marry? How can I make more money? How long will I live? Today, we have therapists and algorithms, risk analysts and actuarial charts. The ancients had oracles.

The scientists were John Hale, an archaeologist from the University of Louisville, and Jelle Zeilinga de Boer, a geologist from Wesleyan University. They had formed themselves into a sort of oracle detective team, seeking out the sites of these ancient prognosticators and attempting to figure out why they are located where they are and what role they played in the ancient world.

Around 50 B.C. the Roman politician Cicero wrote, “As far as I know, there is no nation whatever, how polished and learned, or however barbarous and uncivilized, which does not believe it is possible that future events maybe be indicated, and understood.” Oracles were the most famous and enduring institutions of the ancient world. The best known was Greece’s Oracle of Delphi, where, for at least 1,000 years, kings and common pilgrims visited a cave where a priestess leaned over a sacred spring and inhaled from it the breath of the god. Elsewhere, the future was divined via haruspicy, the reading of organs from sacrificed animals; empyromancy, the interpretation of flickering flames; or augury, which involved observing lightning flashes and other phenomena. At Dodona, priests of Zeus were said to hear the future in the rustling leaves of a sacred oak. At Sura, on the Turkish coast, it was in the patterns of fish congregating around a magical whirlpool. On earthquake-prone Mount Garganus in Italy, the method was incubation: A supplicant performed purification rituals, slaughtered a black ram, and slept on its skin in the sanctuary. That night’s dream held portents, interpreted by a resident priest. At the Cybele shrine visited by Hale and de Boer, divination apparently involved dice made from the knucklebones of sheep. Thousands have been found at its entrance, along with votive statues, coins, and other offerings.

Almost all these sites had one thing in common. They all were located upon or within extraordinary natural features—deep caverns, strange rock formations, bubbling springs, ancient groves—that apparently had something to do with their powers. Some researchers believe cults connected to some of these sites could go back to well before the rise of civilization, as far as 25,000 years. As religions and belief systems changed, some sacred sites went with them—Cybele shrines were renamed for more familiar Greek gods—at least until Christianity came to dominate the Mediterranean. That was when the Roman Emperor Theodosius declared Christianity the state religion, and outlawed oracles, in A.D. 385. Sites great and small were pillaged, repurposed, or just buried and forgotten. (One exception is the cave on Mount Garganus, now a sanctuary of the Archangel Michael of Mont Sant' Angelo.) Sixteen centuries later, archaeologists started digging.

In the 1990s, looters rediscovered the cave of Cybele before archaeologists got there. Years later, Hale and de Boer were led there by the director of the Ephesus Museum in nearby Selcuk, Cengiz Icten. Outside the cave, Icten poked the dry ground with a walking stick and grinned. Suddenly, we saw what he was seeing. Everywhere in the loose soil were pottery sherds, shaped stones, even a corroded bronze coin, “It took many centuries for all this to build up,” he said. “This place goes back a long way.”

Suddenly, a huge, dark shape exploded from the mouth of the cave, almost knocking us all down, and flew into the sky. It was a large owl. As it flapped off, we could hear its babies cooing from some hidden crevice within. “This place does not feel spooky to me,” said Hale. “This seems like a growing place. It feels like a revelatory place.”

Hale and de Boer got their start in the oracle business at the famed Delphi itself. The archaeologist and geologist had met in 1995, while both were touring ancient ruins elsewhere. They became friends over a bottle of wine and their shared interest in the oracle—a space where their spheres of academic interest overlapped. That night they vowed to solve the mystery.

Hale brought a deep knowledge of ancient history, languages, mythology, and architecture. De Boer supplied expertise in the even more ancient: the origins of rocks, the mechanisms of earthquakes, the workings of volcanoes. He had surveyed the area around Delphi in 1981 for a study of Greek earthquake hazards. “Geology is at the ground level of everything, whether it’s biological, archaeological, anthropological or ecological,” he said.

“It’s my hope,” Hale said, “that by learning about the past, one might find some inspiration about how to live today.”

Delphi sits on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, about 75 miles west of Athens. It is thought to have originated as a sanctuary of Gaia, the pre-Greek earth goddess. The Greeks later said it was where Zeus had placed the center of the world. It was also the main abode of Apollo, god of the sun and of prophecy, near where he slew the giant serpent Python. By the fifth century B.C., it hosted an elaborate complex of ritual buildings. Over the colonnade of Apollo’s temple was carved “γνῶθι σεαυτόν.” “Know Thyself.”

According to Greek writer Plutarch (A.D. 46–120), inside the temple a small, dimly lit underground sanctum enclosed a cleft in the bedrock. The feature exuded a sweet-smelling vapor—the pneuma, or “breath of the god.” The pneuma, he wrote, was produced by “natural underground forces,” and was emitted “as if from a spring.” Once a month, a priestess, or Pythia, went through elaborate purification rituals, sat in a special chair, and hung her head over the chasm to inhale the pneuma. Then she began speaking in a strange, disembodied voice. Questioners were admitted.

The Pythia’s answers could be cryptic or unwelcome, but they were always taken seriously. Matters of business, marriage, treaties, and wars were undertaken on her counsel. In legend, it was the Pythia who told Oedipus he would kill his father and marry his mother. Some time before 399 B.C., one Chaerephon asked the Pythia if anyone was wiser than his friend Socrates. “No,” said the oracle—either confirming either the philosopher’s greatness or denying the very existence of human wisdom. According to fourth-century B.C. historian Herodotus, in 546 B.C., the Lydian king Croesus sacrificed 3,000 animals, burned piles of valuables, and sent a huge treasure to honor the oracle. Then he sent a messenger to ask whether he should attack his rival, Cyrus of Persia. The priestess replied that if he did, he would “destroy a mighty empire.” Croesus attacked and was defeated. By some accounts, he was given a last-minute reprieve from being burned alive, and sent a messenger to the oracle to ask why it had betrayed him. The Pythia replied: “Croesus ought, if he had been wise, to have sent again and inquired which empire was meant, that of Cyrus or his own; but if he neither understood what was said, nor took the trouble to seek for enlightenment, he has only himself to blame for the result.” Her message was simple. Know thyself.

What kept people coming back to oracles—outside, of course, of the universal desire for certainty about the future? Perhaps the seers did, indeed, have a good track record in predicting the future. One reason for this could be that oracles were the greatest intelligence-gathering and -disseminating agencies of their day. According to a 1956 history of oracles by historian H.W. Parke, temple officials often subjected powerful people to days or even weeks of questioning before allowing them to consult the oracle. This meant that those officials had deep access to political developments, military strategies, and economic trends—sometimes from opposite sides of a conflict. This may have helped them make informed judgments that they could pass on to the priest or priestess. Another factor is that oracles often favored the most generous tippers—who were, thanks to their wealth, probably more likely to prevail in an economic or military conflict anyway. Croesus notwithstanding.

Then, there is the third theory: the uncanny. “There is a hell of lot more around us than we know about,” said de Boer, a die-hard scientific empiricist with little patience for speculation. “When people ask me, ‘Do you know how it all worked?’ I have to say no. There are some things we will never know.”

It should be noted, though, that something can seem extra-natural without being outright supernatural. The investigation of many such phenomena is often known as geomythology, or the study of how natural processes—from earthquakes and volcanic eruptions to floods and eclipses—get encoded in religious stories, mythology, and folklore. In the case of Delphi, it had been speculated that the pneuma was some gas or vapor, emitted from a natural chasm or spring, with psychoactive effects.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Delphi was rediscovered by archaeologists. At the time, scholars denounced the whole idea of the pneuma, supernatural or geological, as a myth or even a hoax. Excavation of the ruins revealed no obvious cleft or cave where the oracular sanctum might have been. There was also no obvious sign of volcanism that would account for the release of gases. According to Parke, some researchers believed that the priestess was inspired by sitting over a hole filled with burning marijuana. Another, more recent, theory has it that the Pythia was high from chewing the toxic leaves of the oleander tree, or inhaling their smoke.

De Boer, however, had examined the area closely in his initial survey, with a geologist’s eye. To the east of Delphi, he spotted an earthquake fault exposed by a modern road cut, and followed it on foot to near the temple complex. “It was beautifully expressed on the surface,” he said. To the west lay a known fault, striking in the same direction. And if you connected the ends, the thread clearly ran under the temple, though that part was obscured by rocky debris and the buildings themselves. De Boer had read Plutarch, and connected that cleft with what he saw in the ground. It was not a geological smoking gun, exactly, but it was a geomythological lead. “Present-day humans are pretty arrogant when they think the ancients could not have observed things clearly,” he said.

Later, in the late 1990s, de Boer and Hale visited Delphi together and, among other things, dug up Greek government geological maps showing that the limestone in the area was laced with tarry petrochemicals. There was no evidence of geothermal features, but a slow slippage of the fault could create enough heat to vaporize those deposits. They also found traces of a second fault, almost perpendicular to the first, also below the temple floor. This intersection would have created an ideal vent for underground gases. There was no spring, as Plutarch suggested, but Hale and de Boer found evidence of a drain, and, uphill, some still-running spring water. They sampled this water and chiseled out pieces of travertine, a chalky rock that forms when chemical-laden spring waters react with air. In both they found traces of hydrocarbon gases.

One of the gases in the flowing water is ethylene, a substance used in the early 20th century as an anesthetic, and still widely used in the chemical industry. In small doses, it is said to induce an out-of-body euphoria and a release of inhibition. In the interest of science, of course, Hale and a couple of friends in Louisville got hold of a tank of ethylene, opened the valve in a backyard garden shed about the size of the alleged inner sanctum, and took turns, well, huffing it. Hale is pretty sure this was legal. They lost the feeling in their hands and feet, and began seeing the world as if from outside. “Very strange, but not scary,” said Hale. The next logical step? Predicting the outcome of the next Kentucky Derby.

Starting in 2001, the team published a series of scientific papers laying out the case that the Delphic Oracle operated exactly as described, and that much of it could be explained scientifically. Though not everyone bought into all their conclusions, many scholars were converted. Modest fame followed, and a book. There was just one problem. Every garden-shed prediction about the Kentucky Derby was dead wrong.

Hale likes pointing out that the Greek words for “prophet” and “madness”—mantos and mania—come from a common root. “When Plato considered the Delphic Oracle, he said that the priestess was never of any use when she was in her right mind. But when she was mad, she benefited all mankind,” said Hale. “That is a beautiful thought. It tells us that there are special places on Earth that shape human belief.”

Emboldened by their work at Delphi, Hale and de Boer looked farther afield. Southwest Turkey was a logical starting point. In the centuries before Christ, the Greeks had colonized the region. At other times there were Hittites, Lydians, Persians, and Romans. There are multicultural ruins all over the place, including the oracular Greek temples of Klaros and Didyma, nearly as important as Delphi in their time, if not quite as well known. According to inscriptions dating back as far as 600 B.C., rulers from as far away as present-day Russia and Mauritania consulted these oracles about plagues, labor disputes, and religious crises. Locals asked about planting crops, money matters, or, in one case, whether to embark on piracy. (Didyma approved.) So one spring they set out to explore as many of them as they could, gather samples, and devise, if possible, a unifying theory of ancient oracles.

To reach Klaros, we drove through wooded hills and farmland near the Aegean coast to a small valley, where we followed a dirt road through the lemon groves. The road entered a swampy area and dead-ended against a rocky wall. From out of high reeds rose a set of broad steps leading to a great stone platform. Only a few columns and walls still stood, but in the remains of the sanctuary were fragments of a sculpture of Apollo said to have once been over 20 feet high. Countless names and inscriptions had been carved into the ruins—possibly the greatest surviving collection of ancient Greek inscriptions in a single place. Artifacts found around the temple foundations date at least as far back as 1200 B.C. “People obviously sensed early on that there was something special about this place,” said Hale.

The stone slabs that once formed the main temple floor had been hauled away. This had exposed a basement labyrinth once hidden within the platform—and, Hale and de Boer suspected, Klaros’s oracular secrets. The labyrinth, excavated by French archaeologists in the 1980s, led from the front steps to two chambers in the rear, all now filled waist-deep with stagnant water.

According to an A.D. 18 description by Roman aristocrat Tacitus, prophecies here were offered only on certain nights: “A priest, after hearing merely the number and names of the clients, [went] down into a cave; there he [drank] from a secret fountain.” The priest went into a trance, and then cried out his prophecies from an unseen corner. About 50 years after Tacitus, Pliny the Elder noted that these priests served only one-year terms—possibly, he noted, because the fountain “inspires wonderful oracles, but shortens the life of the drinker.”

For decades prior to the site’s excavation, researchers had looked for such a cave in nearby hillsides. The discovery of the labyrinth and these chambers suggested that the oracular cave was, in fact, embodied by the temple itself. It even looked like the structure had been repeatedly expanded and elaborated around it, much like at Delphi.

“Let’s try and get a feel for the oracular experience,” said Hale. In bathing suits and water shoes—we knew ahead what to expect—we descended four steps into the watery labyrinth entrance. The water was warm, opaque with algal scum, and alive with frogs and turtles. I tried not to think too hard about what else might be down there, rubbing against our legs. We waded through six turns to reach the chambers. At least we had the open sky above us. The experience would have been a lot spookier for ancient pilgrims following the priest. It would probably have been pitch black, the tunnel barely shoulder-wide with the ceiling at head-height. At the end of the labyrinth, we came to a room covered with surviving stone arches, and with stone benches along the walls. Here questioners must have waited to hear prophecies.

Beyond this room was a rectangular inner chamber where archaeologists had found a circular hole in the floor, containing water—the secret fountain, apparently. Perhaps the water source had shifted and begun to overflow, or maybe rain had filled the old basement. In any case, we could not see the hole and had to feel for it with our feet—carefully. A caretaker had warned us it went down at least 20 feet. Off to one side, we finally felt it. It was covered by what felt like a modern metal grate.

Hale and de Boer suspected this spring was effervescing hydrocarbon gases like those at Delphi—maybe even a lot more potent, if the priests were dying prematurely. “In a closed space, it would be like sniffing gasoline, only worse,” suggested de Boer. “Of course, not very healthy.”

By feel, we fed a long, plastic hose down through the grate. A big plastic syringe was attached to the other end, and we sucked up water samples from the depths. These samples would go back to de Boer’s lab. Our next target would be Didyma.

Pilgrims originally reached Didyma by walking 10 miles from the coastal city of Miletus along the Sacred Way, a stone path flanked by sphinxes, fountains, and tombs. Remnants of it can still be seen from a parallel, far less impressive asphalt road. The temple lies on the outskirts of the small village of Didim, where a century of excavations has revealed a stupendous building with a multistory central court, much bigger than Klaros—much bigger than the Parthenon, actually, which would fit comfortably inside it. Like Delphi, Didyma is said to have featured a spring above which a priestess sat. The spring is thought to have dried up after Persian invaders burned and looted the place in 493 B.C. It miraculously returned, supposedly, after Alexander the Great passed through some 150 years later. Today its exact location has been lost.

When we arrived the place was crawling with tourists. This didn’t bother Hale or de Boer. They were looking for something very specific: the site of a now-vanished little house in the center, where a priestess “receive[d] the god by imbibing the vapor of the water,” according to the fourth-century A.D. writer Iamblichus. In the courtyard, we spotted three round, well-like structures, all currently dry. Any of them could have been the spring. De Boer speculated that they all could have been the spring; maybe it had dried up and popped up elsewhere periodically, he said, due to natural shifts in underground waterways. “They must have moved the well from time to time to keep up,” he said.

In the absence of any water within the temple itself, de Boer went to a well in front, where pilgrims are thought to have purified themselves before entering. It held plenty of water, as well as coins that people had tossed much more recently. We poked the hose down and sucked up some water. “Second or third best, but better than nothing,” said de Boer.

Some months later, de Boer called me with the results: The water at both Klaros and Didyma contains ethylene, along with other hydrocarbon gases including methane and ethane. Ever the cautious scientist, he said he needed to go back for more investigation.* But, he said, “This gives us a good indication that a similar process was going on at all these places.”

We tried to investigate other oracular haunts over the next few days, but time had shifted the landscape and muddled evidence at many. Patara, once a seaside city said to host an oracle of Apollo, was sunken into silt and underbrush, leaving little to see. At Sura, ancient people had once bought kebabs that they tossed into a strange whirlpool—possibly a freshwater spring blending with the sea below the tide line—and priests told the future by observing the fish that gathered for the feast. We found the ruins of the temple there and a nearby spring, but the shoreline had long since receded, and the site itself was mired in a swamp. We hunted for Acharaca, a long-lost cave dedicated to the god of the underworld Pluto and his queen Persephone. There, sacrificial bulls led in were said to simply drop dead. Near the rumored site, we sniffed hydrogen sulfide—a sign that perhaps the bulls were victims of volcanic gases. Locals told stories of collapsed underground vaults, and warned of venomous snakes. Hale and de Boer, patient but weary, resolved to return some other time.

We also ventured to the ancient town of Hierapolis, whose ruins sprawl out over a mountain slope. Pure white terraces, formed of travertine-type minerals precipitating from dozens of chemical-laden springs, mantle the mountainside. The waters, used as a spa in ancient times and still available for wading or swimming, are said to treat high blood pressure, skin disease, rheumatism, and eye problems.

In the ruins above the spa was the place de Boer and Hale had come to see: a small oracle called the Plutonium. “It was supposedly an entrance to hell,” said Hale. Ancient authors write of a dense, deadly vapor issuing from it. Sacrificial animals such as sparrows were thrown in and quickly died. “Mysteriously taken by the god,” said Hale. The apparent portal is a tiny arched doorway cut into a cliff next to the ruins of a modest Apollonian temple. Except for a head-size gap, the door was closed off with a recent-looking block-and-mortar job. On a nearby wall was a partly obliterated Greek inscription. Hale struggled to make it out: “dreams … earth … oracle ...”

As we approached, we were struck with a terrible stench. It was hard to say if this came from the cave or two small dead porcupines on the marble pavement nearby. An elderly lady was sweeping up a pile of dead birds with a broom, like it was her regular job.

De Boer said that in the 1980s Turkish scientists had shown the vapor to be largely carbon dioxide, which can come from volcanic sources. Heavier than air, it can kill by displacing oxygen wherever it pools. They also identified whiffs of sulfuric acid and a few other asphyxiants and poisons. Ancient accounts said that while the sacrificial animals died in the Plutonium, the priests could go in and out unscathed. “I believe they had bladders of air under their robes,” said de Boer. “It must have made people really afraid.” Since our trip, German scientists have shown that carbon dioxide around the Plutonium tends to pool up in the cool of the night, creating a lethal layer a couple of feet thick. The concentration of the gas falls rapidly with height—so it could quickly suffocate animals close to the ground, while humans could wade through, safe and unperturbed.

In poking around before the trip, I had come across a vaguely sourced article in Omni magazine that asserted that two vacationing Australians had entered the Plutonium recently and disappeared. An equally vague website claimed, “Many people throughout history who went past the mouth of the cave never returned.” We were undeterred as we eyed that head-sized gap.

I volunteered. “Promise you’ll wave or something, if you’re passing out,” said Hale, as I prepared to look in. “Oh, sure. If I look like I’m slumping, just grab my legs and pull,” I said.

My head just fit through. A hot, humid billow burned my eyes. I held my breath and blinked as my vision adjusted to the darkness. In a cell-like room, a square shaft descended about six feet down, where a narrow black cleft curved to the right and out of sight. A dark shape lay on the floor, unidentifiable. Gasping for air, I pulled my head out.

Later, Fettah Anli, the friendly owner of the nearby Hal-Tur Hotel, told us he had grown up playing among the ruins. He was quite sure no one had ever disappeared in the Plutonium, but he did say that locals had once hung a sign over the door saying “Devil’s Hole,” and lowered small dogs and other unfortunate animals to their deaths for the entertainment of paying visitors.

Fifteen years ago, he went on, a tourist from New Zealand—he remembered the man’s name was Thomas—went swimming in a mineral-water pool nearby, and decided to explore a narrow underground feeder channel. “After he swam in, his wife kept waiting for him,” said Anli. “But he did not come out. Then she started screaming.”

It took three days for a backhoe to reach Thomas’s body. He had become wedged in a tight spot 40 feet into the cave, and apparently drowned. It seemed that repeated retellings of the story had morphed his journey to the underworld into yet another myth.

* This, sadly, would not happen. Jelle Zeilinga de Boer passed away before he got a chance to go back.

It's not meant to be pleasant.

Just outside a Burger King on Market Street, San Francisco's main thoroughfare, classical music plays day and night. Instead of the hits circa 2018, it's more the hits circa 1718, from composers such as Vivaldi and Bach. For years, San Franciscans have puzzled over why baroque constantly plays at a high volume on this block. But as an article published today in the Los Angeles Review of Books explains, the otherworldly music serves an earthly purpose: to discourage local homeless people from sticking around.

Sound has long been used in public places to discourage loitering. In LARB, author Theodore Gioia writes that classical music as crowd dispersal probably dates to 1985, when a Canadian 7-Eleven pioneered the playing of Mozart in parking lots where people gathered. The tactic became store policy at almost 200 locations. Other methods are less sonorous. In 2008, increasing sales of a device called "the Mosquito" made news as it was installed in malls, movie theaters, and parking lots. Since the Mosquito emitted a tone that only young people could hear—due to more sensitive hair cells in ears—it was touted as a way to deter lingering teenagers.

While the Mosquito incited outrage for targeting the young, it's harder to be outraged about classical music. On one hand, it's often seen as cultured and even soothing. Other fast food restaurants, such as McDonalds, tested using classical music to break up drunk brawls. But instead of its calming properties, it's other aspects of classical music that appeal to those trying to tame "anti-social" behavior: It's loud, and some people dislike classical tunes, considering them elevator music-like or elitist. That effect seems to have been sought after at the Market Street Burger King, where local property owners put forward the idea of playing classical music to shoo away anyone uninterested in buying Whoppers.

This musical strategy is similar to hostile architecture, which uses design features such as strategically placed spikes and dividers on benches to keep homeless people from lying down. Neither solves underlying problems; instead they drive them away. And in both cases, once you're aware of the tactic, you may start to notice it everywhere.

It took 200 years to rid the island of rats, and three dogs to make sure they were gone.

Erik Sörling was doing everything he could to catch a rat. It was 1905, and the assistant taxidermist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History had tagged along with the Swedish Antarctic Expedition on a voyage to South Georgia Island. This rocky, windswept landmass is the largest of a smattering of islands—all now designated British Overseas Territories—in the southern Atlantic Ocean, near the Antarctic Circle. Sörling knew it was plagued by rats. He just couldn’t find them.

He followed their footprints in the mid-April snow, then laid out steel traps baited with fish, fried pork, and chunks of carrots and apples. These enticements weren’t enough, and the traps stayed empty. Weeks passed. When the moon was bright, Sörling ventured out at night with a shotgun. He kept spotting their little prints and tracked them through tufts of tussac grass, but all he found were dead ends—at the foot of a stone heap or at the water’s edge, where he suspected the rats scavenged for food. “I was not lucky enough even to see any,” he recalled.

Conservationists have long been concerned about the rodents scurrying around the island. The brown rats are thought to have landed in the 18th or 19th century, as stowaways on sealing or whaling ships that stopped there. While black rats on some of the neighboring islands have kept to a largely vegetarian diet, their brown cousins on South Georgia have been omnivorous and indiscriminate, chowing down on greenery, insects, and the South Georgia pipit—the world’s southernmost songbird, which doesn’t live anywhere else. Apparently, rats have a thing for them. “The pipit is almost absent wherever rats occur,” noted Robert Headland, a former officer in the British Antarctic Survey.

To give the birds a fighting chance, the South Georgia Heritage Trust kicked off a massive rodent eradication effort in 2011. The $13.5-million project covered roughly 400 square miles of the 1,500-square-mile island, and had the tenor of a military assault—tactics included flinging millions of poisoned pellets from helicopters. (The pellet rain was a late-summer project, to limit the collateral damage to king penguin colonies that lay eggs there from November to April.)

Since the island is segmented by glaciers, which rats can’t scramble across, the team could work on one portion at a time. It was slow and methodical work, but by the end of 2016, scientists were pretty sure that they’d gotten all of the rats. They weren’t positive, though, and the stakes are high: "Even one pregnant rat getting back on to South Georgia could restart this whole cycle," Mike Richardson, the chair of the restoration project’s steering committee, told BBC.

As Sörling had learned, failing to see rats doesn’t mean they’re not there. Finding them sometimes requires superhuman senses. So, for the final stage of the project, the team enlisted some furry, four-legged sleuths with excellent sniffing skills.

Dogs have amazing noses that we can’t even begin to imagine or understand, really,” says Miriam Ritchie, a dog handler and trainer with the New Zealand Department of Conservation, who joined the project as a contractor.

Ritchie starts introducing the dogs early to the animal they’ll be asked to find—months before they deploy. She devises games around the scent, and rewards the dogs with heaps of praise when they successfully follow a trail. “It’s just making use of their natural instinct,” she says.

At home, Ritchie’s working dogs sleep in kennels; older, retired ones, curl up indoors. On the island, the team spent months living out of a little tent with no bathroom or running water. The terriers, Will, Wai, and Ahu, woke up at 6:30 a.m. each morning. After a quick morning walk and breakfast—dry food, canned food, and sausage—they got to work.

The project directors passed along a list of sites for the dogs to check. So, for hours at a time, that’s what they did—off-leash and muzzled, across brown, barren hills and around lakes reflecting white peaks. Most days there was no one else around, but cruise ships occasionally stopped by so passengers could marvel at the penguins.

Massive penguin and seal colonies may look stunning in photographs, but “when you’re right next to them, they absolutely reek,” Ritchie says. “They basically wallow in their poo.” Seals would call to each other, and the sound bounced off the cliffs. “It was endless,” she says. “So noisy, in a good way.” Sometimes, as they descended from a glacial valley, Will and Ahu got excited, thinking that the barking seals were other dogs.

Ritchie says the dogs are “best mates,” but have different demeanors. “Will is very waggy and quite needy—he always wants to bump your foot or hand to get you to pet him,” she says. Ahu, on the other hand, “is quite a cool character,” she adds. “He acts like he doesn’t care, and it’s a privilege for you to pet him.” All of them were focused on the task at hand, and Ritchie watched the dogs closely to see whether they were swinging their tails or scratching a line in the dirt to point to a rat burrow.

They weren’t. “Everyone wants to find nothing, but as a handler, it’s more fun when something does happen,” Ritchie says. It isn’t unusual, she adds, for the dogs to walk around “looking for something that might be there but generally isn’t.” That’s the best-case scenario for ecologists—a clean bill of health for the island—but it’s kind of boring for the dogs. To keep the terriers interested, Ritchie sometimes planted frozen rat carcasses for them to root out. But they never found any live ones.

Once the dogs smelled their way back and forth across the island, the South Georgia Heritage Trust officially declared it rat-free. After a couple of weeks in quarantine, where the three dogs were checked for diseases they may have picked up on the island, they went back to work at home in New Zealand, noses to the ground in search of mice. The dogs didn’t need a lot of down time, and they seem to like running around all day, Ritchie says. “They took it in stride.”

A children's book about Larry Itliong aims to rectify history.

In 1965, the grape pickers in California’s Central Valley, incensed by decades of discrimination, shoddy pay, and poor working conditions, snapped. The farmers, many of them immigrants, went on strike in the city of Delano, California. The movement gained support from unions (including the United Auto Workers), activists, and church groups, and evolved from marches into a nationwide boycott of table grapes. Years of work led to the creation of United Farm Workers, an agricultural labor organization that helped farmers negotiate for benefits and better wages.

To many, the name Cesar Chavez rings familiar as a leader of this revolutionary movement. It was a huge coup for farmers, immigrants, and minority groups within the United States, and brought visibility to their struggles, particularly for Chicanos. Chavez has been honored with street names, profiles in textbooks, and a memorial that Barack Obama visited during his presidency. But what has been immortalized in history as Chavez’s victory was the effort of many people who also led that fight, and who rarely get their due. That includes Dolores Huerta, a Chicana labor leader, and scores of Filipino Americans, particularly the labor organizer and migrant farm worker Larry Itliong.

In fact, it was through Itliong’s efforts that the highly-publicized Delano Grape Strike happened at all. For years, the Filipino and Mexican migrant workers had been both kept apart and pitted against each other by the growers, who often responded to collective demands by evicting workers or disrupting life in their camps. (The great irony is that many of these farmers had taught the growers about harvesting grapes in the first place.) In the early 1960s, each of these groups had been mobilizing on their own. But one day in September 1965, farmers gathered in the Filipino Community Hall and voted to go on strike against the growers. Itliong eventually approached Chavez, and asked him to join forces for the strike. Itliong also co-founded the United Farm Workers the following year, and helped lead the organization as an Assistant Director. So it’s strange that he’s not mentioned in the same breath as Chavez.

Itliong’s own story has hid in plain sight from many Filipino Americans, too. “The crazy thing is that we had to go away to college to find out about Larry Itliong,” says Gayle Romasanta, a writer and publisher who grew up in Stockton, where Itliong resided. Romasanta, who is a descendant of agricultural workers, was dismayed when her eldest child came home one day with a list of potential historical figures to write a report about. “And there was nobody for her to really identify with, or people of color period,” she says. In searching for an alternative, she thought of Itliong, but came up short on information. “I was really surprised there’s no book written about him,” she says. “There’s actually no nonfiction book about Filipino American history, which blew my mind. And we’re the oldest Asian-American group in the United States—we've been here the longest.”

Romasanta, who had written the children’s book Beautiful Eyes, called up Dawn Mabalon, a historian, San Francisco State University professor, and old friend, who happened to be working on a biography of Itliong. “So I approached her and said, ‘Hey, listen: We’ve got to write [a] children’s book.” For Mabalon, her proposal was serendipitous. “I was really frustrated because I couldn’t find the time, the resources, to finish my scholarly biography [of Itliong],” she says. “Meanwhile, we were cognizant of how absent Filipino American history was in K-12 schools.”

In her 2013 book Little Manila Is in the Heart, Mabalon wrote about the Filipino story on the United States’ West Coast, particularly about the "struggle to make communities, build families amidst just virulent racism and violence, laws that barred them from citizenship and marrying white women,” she says. It was only through this research that she began to learn much more about Larry Itliong’s story. Like Romasanta, Mabalon—who also hails from Stockton, and comes from an agricultural background—didn't know that Filipinos had kick-started the grape strike until she left for college.

That’s how the pair’s book, Journey For Justice: The Life of Larry Itliong (due out via Romasanta's publishing house Bridge + Delta in October), came to be. The story of Larry Itliong will be the first of eight children’s books, with each focusing on a pivotal figure from Filipino American history. They started with Itliong because, as Mabalon puts it: “Of all historical figures, he makes the most impact on a national scale, yet he is the most invisible and the most ignored.” The book’s publication also comes at the heels of recent legislation passed by California in 2013, which now requires the state's curriculum to include the contributions of Filipino Americans in the farm labor movement. The late labor leader's birthday, October 25th, is now recognized as Larry Itliong Day in California.

One reason for Itliong’s low historical profile has to do with how social movements have historically been covered in the media. Romasanta recalls a story about a writer, who decided not to include any of Larry Itliong's interviews in a piece about the UFW, and perhaps spurred a trend of reporters only speaking to Chavez. “I think that Cesar had a very charismatic personality ... [During] the Civil Rights movement, so many other people played big roles, but the media only wanted to talk to Martin Luther King,” Mabalon adds. “So I feel like it’s not just [Itliong]. Historians have spent the last few decades trying to recover the stories of so many unsung people in all of these freedom movements.”

Romasanta and Mabalon felt it was crucial for Americans to learn about these efforts earlier, hence the decision to write a children’s book. The book addresses Itliong’s youth in the Philippines, which was then a colony of the United States, and the staggering racism he encountered upon his arrival in America in 1929. It weaves through Itliong’s labor in the fields, his contributions to the movement, and the strike itself. “I hope that for young people, it becomes: How do we build coalitions and solidarity?” Mabalon says.

The Bay Area-based illustrator who created the visual part of the book, Andre Sibayan, was inspired by the prospect of a Filipino American history book that kids could identify with. “I wanted kids to see themselves in the imagery. Not just, ‘Hey, it’s just this group of people that struggled. There are people who look like me, my mom, my dad, my uncle.’”

But untangling a gnarled history came with its own set of challenges. One of those included depictions of Itliong himself. A complex figure known as “Seven Fingers” (because he mysteriously lost the other three), Itliong was a known gambler and a prolific cigar-smoker. Another obstacle was describing the movement in a way appealing to children. So they turned to their community. “We had so many people read it: elementary school librarians, college librarians, we had experts in farm labor history, former UFW organizers, Larry Itliong’s son, Johnny, and his son all read the book,” Mabalon says. They also had kids ages 9 to 12 read the book and offer feedback. “People have been so excited, parents as well as kids,” she says. “There’s just so much hunger for an inclusive history.”

The two authors stress that the intention isn’t to detract from the efforts of Mexican migrant workers, Cesar Chavez, or Dolores Huerta: It’s about sharing the spotlight, and recognizing the shared efforts behind large-scale change. “At the end, we wanted it to be uplifting and to show that Filipinos and Mexican Americans were able to work together, demand their rights as farmworkers, and get their dignity back,” Romasanta says. Mabalon adds: “That’s a lot more useful, accurate, and powerful story, and has so much more utility for our lives today."

The unidentified marine carcass has made the beach rather unpleasant.

In some legends, sea monsters are frightening creatures that wreak havoc on coastal villages or lure ships to certain doom. But mostly they are just unassuming aquatic creatures—squids, turtles, whales—with cases of mistaken identity. When a 20-foot oblong carcass, covered in glob-like white strands, washed up on a Philippine beach in Oriental Mindoro, locals were understandably a little alarmed. The beach reeked with the wretched smell of death, according to The Sun, but that didn't stop onlookers from taking selfies. Some, however, chose to keep their distance.

"An earthquake is heading for Oriental Mindoro," local Tam Maling told The Sun. "The big globster is a sign of something bad coming. Please pray for us." "Globster" is what people have taken to calling the mystery carcass, but it’s a term that’s actually been used since 1962. Scottish-born biologist Ivan Terence Sanderson reportedly devised it to describe decomposing tissue, corpses, or other stranded dead animals that come ashore—and inspire a lot of tales of sea monsters.

It hasn't been long since a globster last inspired intrigue and horror in the Philippines. In February 2017, a misshapen, 4,000-pound example floated ashore in the Dinagat Islands.

The Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources has determined that the latest globster is a decomposing whale, but will have to wait for DNA analysis and dissection to zero in on the species. Fishery Law Enforcement Officer Vox Krusada told The Sun, "the local government of Gloria will now bury the carcass. And damn it smells awful. It smells like something from another planet."

It's not a word you can just throw around.

In honor of the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, this week we’re telling the stories of some of the United Kingdom’s oldest and oddest traditions. Previously: Why the queen owns all the swans in England, the "pricking ceremony," the royal appointees who carry special rods, Tower of London raven expectations

In Manhattan, it's easy to feel like a king just by shopping around. Within a few blocks of 42nd Street, you can find Royal Grill Halal Food, Royal Hair Extensions, and Royal Realty. Farther out, you've got Royal Pizza, Royal Jewel Setting, and The Royal, a gay bar in Jersey City.

You will not find such a diversity of regal nomenclature in London. Why not? Blame the actual Crown. In the U.K.—and in other Commonwealth nations, including New Zealand and Canada—"Royal," "King," "Queen," and associated terms are considered "sensitive words." Before you slap them on a storefront, letterhead or product, you generally have to ask.

It's not just a question of manners. As the U.K. business consultancy Jordans puts it in a blog post, royalty-related business names are restricted "because of their potential to mislead, confuse and/or offend the general public." The provision is not so different than those that prevent businesses from calling themselves banks when they aren't accredited, or from naming themselves after unaffiliated famous people. The idea is to avoid suggesting that the nonprofit, hardware store, or chippy in question is genuinely Palace-approved.

An official document by Companies House—the government agency that registers all of the U.K.'s limited companies—gives the details. Using the words "Royal," "Royalty," "King," "Queen," "Duke," "Duchess," "Prince," "Princess," or "His/Her Majesty" in a business name requires "a letter or email of non-objection from the relevant body," it explains. (This is true for both sole traders and limited companies.) In England and Northern Ireland, the relevant body is the Cabinet Office. In Wales, it's the government's Communications Division, and in Scotland, it's the Protocol and Honours Team.

When applying, the document continues, it helps to namedrop: businesses should include "details of any Royal or Government associations." Pubs are called out specifically, and asked to provide "evidence of location and length of time in existence." And if it's just that your last name is, say, "Duke," you have to prove that, too. Approval is "a mark of Royal favour," and is "sparingly granted," another guidance document warns.

A name alone does not a company make: you also need a logo and, of course, something to sell. If you feel like sidling up to royalty in either of these areas, it's time to involve the Lord Chamberlain's Office, which is "empowered to grant consent … on behalf of Her Majesty the Queen," and has its own guidance documents. Such consent is required to sell objects that involve the Royal Arms, the Duke of Edinburgh's Arms, the Prince of Wales's Three Feathers Badge, or any royal flags. (Again, this isn't dissimilar from rules that prevent companies from, say, using the U.S. Presidential Seal.)

Royal crowns are a special case. The Lord Chamberlain's Office has one document showing designs of crowns (and coronets) that can't be used in trademarks or products, and another showing those that can. And while you can sometimes sell items that depict members of the royal family, or royal residences, these must be "of a permanent kind, free from advertisement, [and] in good taste."

Finally, there's a provision against using product names "in such a manner as to be likely to lead persons to think that the applicant either has, or recently has had, Royal patronage or authorization." The rules here are realist: while the public might be tricked by the word "royal" used in conjunction with the sale of "high quality porcelain" or "luxury foods," they are unlikely to fall for it when it comes to "goods which are far enough removed from any association with the Royal family" such as "skateboards … computer games, or T-shirts." In other words, you're more likely to get away with "Queen Mother Elbow Pads" than "Princess Caviar." (If you actually do supply goods to a member of the royal family, and thus have a royal warrant, you can use the relevant coat of arms in certain circumstances.)

All rules have exceptions. The official documentation explains that these may be varied "on occasional events of national importance," such as the May 19 royal wedding. As a recent memorandum states, Prince Harry recently approved the "temporary relaxation" of rules related to souvenirs bearing his own coat of arms, as well as images of himself and Meghan Markle.

If you've made it this far, you won't be surprised to learn that the exceptions have exceptions too. You can't put the couple on T-shirts, aprons, or "drying up cloths." If they're on packaging, it must be at least "semi-indestructible." (You can, apparently, put their heads on Pez dispensers.) It's also a limited-time offer: "Souvenirs of the Marriage of Prince Harry and Ms Meghan Markle may not be manufactured after," the document cautions. In other words, sneak through this royal loophole while you can.

Tell us about the culinary wonders you've sampled and savored.

Since we launched Gastro Obscura in November, many of you have sent us tips about amazing foods and drinks that you’ve encountered around the world. Javanese coffee that bubbles with a red-hot lump of charcoal. The Midwest’s multicolored mystery swirl of Superman ice cream. Nepal’s bottomless mugs of millet beer.

Our community of travelers, readers, and explorers have added more than 13,500 places to Atlas Obscura, our guide to the world’s hidden wonders. So we’re thrilled to announce that you can now also add foods and drinks. Currently, we have 500 entries. To expand that to thousands more, we’ll need your help.

Tell us about the lesser-known dishes, curious cocktails, and rare ingredients that reveal a hidden side of the food world. Have you sampled fruits with surprising flavors? Been mesmerized by a vendor whose cooking technique was a dying art? Savored a mash-up meal that also told the story of a culture's diaspora? We want to hear about it. Check out our Food FAQs for further guidelines on what we’re looking for. Or just start adding foods now!

Capturing the years of work it takes to master a craft.

The photographer Francesco Pergolesi grew up in the town of Spoleto, in central Italy. It’s a place of Roman ruins and churches, surrounded by rolling green hills, the type of community where you might greet the greengrocer or cobbler by name. That was, at least, Pergolesi’s childhood experience. In recent years, Pergolesi began to notice that small store owners and artisans were leaving town. That realization prompted him to begin documenting the intimate, artistic charm of these traditional spaces and the people that inhabit them.

“These people preserve human relationship with their customers,” he says, “and this is rare in this era when everything is becoming automated.” For his first series, titled Heroes, Pergolesi photographed stores at dusk, showing the owners at work, under a warm glow of light. He included cobblers and carpenters, bookstores and butchers, and called the series Heroes because of his subjects' ability to survive a changing commercial environment. “Heroes is a photographic project about small business and craft shops that for generations handed down their work,” he says.

In 2016, Pergolesi decided to delve more deeply into the subject with his series Tableaux, a more detailed look at the work tables of local artists and artisans. “Every table is a canvas generated unconsciously, thanks to the traces of daily work,” he says. He photographed the work surfaces of bakers, watch-makers, painters, blacksmiths, sculptors, and doll-makers; in the resulting images, many of the surfaces he photographed are shown up-close, devoid of any interior details. Every scratch, scribble, and scrap of leather fills the space, suggesting years of continuous labor.

Photographs from both series are currently on display at the Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago. Atlas Obscura has a selection from the exhibition, which runs through to July 7, 2018.

In 18th-century Russia, a two-kopeck coin could be worth much more than face value.

The modern pickpocket's arsenal might include a signal jammer (you don't want anyone calling the police) or surgeon's tongs. His 18th-century Russian equivalent used a simple two-kopeck coin. Russian archaeologists found a specially modified coin while digging in a historic part of central Moscow, the BBC reported, the latest in a string of similarly illicit objects uncovered beneath the city's streets.

It, of course, is no ordinary coin. The enterprising thief had hammered one edge flat, then filed it into a blade. This sharpened edge could then be used to slice open pockets, moneybags, or purses, and send their contents tumbling into the pickpockets' waiting clutches. Known as "thieves' coins," they were a critical tool for the Russian cutpurse. (If the pickpocket was caught and the encounter turned nasty, as frequently happened, it could then be repurposed as a shiv.)

The coin was found during construction work in the city's Soymonov Passage, a central road near the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, as part of a larger effort to restore and revitalize the city's center. Since the "My Street" project began, in early 2017, other finds have included a stamp used to make counterfeit coins, dating from the 17th century, and a cache of copper coins—around one in ten of which were counterfeit, Alexei Yemelyanov, the head of the city's Cultural Heritage Department, told the mayor's official website. And beneath Manezh Square, workers uncovered a former thieves' den, with walls made of stolen gravestones. Inside, archaeologists found a treasure trove of items designed for heists and hoodwinking, including double-bottomed perfume bottle, used to scam people buying expensive scents.

While criminality of this sort may not be an appealing part of Moscow's history, Yemelyanov said, it's certainly a source of secrets and mysteries for the city's present-day inhabitants.