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The Cosmic Fetus of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ Hasn’t Aged a Day

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One of the most iconic props in film history is still circling the world.

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This year marks the 50th anniversary of the release of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s iconic science-fiction movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, as well as the birth of the iconic space baby that changed the face of the genre.

From the enigmatic monolith to HAL 9000 the rogue AI, 2001 introduced some of the most iconic concepts of the sci-fi genre. Maybe the most visually memorable was the Star Child, the uncanny infant that marked the cosmic evolution of the human race. Not only does the original Star Child prop survive today, it has continued to travel the world on a decade long baby’s day out.

Released in 1968, (so, 50-year-old spoiler alert) the film chronicles the journey of astronaut Dave Bowman, the first human to travel through a stargate seemingly left behind by ancient aliens. After doing so, Bowman is transformed by a mysterious black monolith into a new form of life, a wide-eyed fetus held in a glowing orb. The meaning and exact details of this event are widely debated, but the Bowman/Star Child represents the birth of the human race into a new future as a universal species. Fight me.

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The Star Child only appears for a brief instance at the very end, yet it has still become one of the most important icons in the history of film. And while in the movie it is left overlooking Earth from the stars, the real-life prop is on display in a traveling exhibition of Kubrick artifacts.

“The Star Child was built in autumn 1967 in the 2001 art department at the British MGM Studios,” says Tim Heptner, curator of the traveling Stanley Kubrick Exhibition, which features the original Star Child prop as one of the main attractions. “I started to look after the prop when it became part of the Stanley Kubrick exhibition in 2004 ... so I have been traveling with this prop for quite a while.”

Sculptor Liz Moore created the Star Child after test shots of a living baby lying on a black velvet backdrop didn’t work out to Kubrick’s liking. According to a history of Moore, and the prop’s creation, on the fan blog 2001 Italia, Kubrick wanted the transformed Bowman to look more cosmic than an actual baby, and was inspired by then-ground-breaking in-utero photography. “Inspiration for the fetus-like (and a bit eerie) star baby sculpture which is traveling in space in an uterus-like bubble came from an illustration in Robert Ardrey's book, African Genesis, and through the intra-uterine photographs by Lennart Nilsson which were published in 1965 in LIFE Magazine,” says Heptner.

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Moore sculpted the two-and-a-half foot tall baby creature out of clay, incorporating the facial features of actor Keir Dullea, who played Bowman in the film. Then a final version was made from fiberglass and outfitted with mechanisms to make the eyes movable. The baby's crown detached, allowing the insides of the bulbous head to be accessible.

In addition to appearing in the film, the fiberglass fetus was used in promotional materials, including the “Ultimate Trip” poster shown below. Most shots of the Star Child have an ethereal, heavenly glow, and a placental halo, which Kubrick created using a handful of tricks including shooting the prop through a layer of pre-WWII women’s stockings. But at their heart was the same fiberglass baby.

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After the film's release, the Star Child prop dropped out of view, tucked away in Kubrick’s personal collection. “We don't know what happened exactly with the prop between 1968 and 2003, but in [2003] the archivist of Deutsches Filmmuseum, my colleague Bernd Eichhorn, found it when he was sifting through the estate of the film director at his country manor in England,” says Heptner. Luckily, despite decades of earthly disregard, the prop was largely undamaged, with just a few tape marks to be removed. It remained as oddly serene as it had been in the 1960s. Not long after that, the Star Child was added to the traveling exhibition, where it is still cared for today.

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Unlike a real baby, the Star Child doesn’t require a whole lot of maintenance. It’s dusted and cleaned like any other exhibited object and has been lucky enough to avoid any major damage over the years. When it’s moved it’s safely placed in a padded box that itself could be part of the exhibition’s display. “We store and transport it in a vintage trunk which the Kubrick family has used before, on their Atlantic passage, when they were relocating from the U.S.A. to England in the mid 1960s,” says Heptner.

Currently the Stanley Kubrick Exhibition is on display at the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt, and will continue to travel the globe, showing off the Star Child for the foreseeable future. With CGI increasingly replacing props and practical effects, such artifacts are becoming increasingly rare. “It is a striking and unique object, a strong and attractive ‘character’ in the narrative of the exhibition,” says Heptner. It’s a piece of cultural history that, like the evolved form of the astronaut Bowman, symbolizes a vision of the future.


Found: A Rare Tiny Deer in Vietnam

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It's called a muntjac, and the last time it appeared was nearly two decades ago.

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In 1994, scientists researching in Vietnam first documented the elusive large-antlered muntjac in the semi-evergreen Vu Quang Nature Reserve, in the province of Ha Tinh. The creature’s shoulder height measures roughly 26 inches, it weighs roughly 66 to 110 pounds, and lives around the Annamite Mountains that border Laos.

For years, the tiny deer has been drastically absent because of illegal wire-snare hunting. So, when the researchers from Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research and WWF-Vietnam caught a photo of a male and female muntjac, there was much to celebrate.

To honor the occasion, they plan to enhance camera-trapping efforts. The last record of the muntjacs wandering the Annamite region was in the 2000, which worried many scientists and conservationists. The fear was that the critically endangered mammal was close to extinction, but the rediscovery is small win for those who want to witness the deer's stride in Vu Quang Nature Reserve.

"Finding these rare and beautiful species gives new hope for Vietnam's precious biodiversity treasures," said researcher Nguyen Van Thanh in a statement.

Searching for Genesis StoryTime, a Lost Canadian Cable Channel

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It used a technology known as videotex to distribute children’s books over television screens.

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A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

The late 1970s and early 1980s were an exciting time for technology and communications. Engineers and programmers were racing to put new developments to use, some seeking to make the world a better place, others just wanting to see how the technology would develop. Greg Stetski and Art Doerksen wanted to do a bit of both.

Genesis StoryTime debuted in 1982 to a small contingent of cable service subscribers in western Canada. The brainchild of Stetski and Doerksen, two Canadian engineers, Genesis StoryTime used a service known as Telidon to distribute children’s books over television screens. Describing the technology powering the channel can be challenging—it’s somewhat similar in nature to the technology used on the Prodigy computer network, an infamously hard-to-archive service—but comparing it to flight information monitors at airports, in which a computer is used to display simple information over a variety of screens, is useful.

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Developed by Canada’s Communication Research Centre, Telidon is videotex technology that uses coordinated shapes to create simple graphics and even crude animation. Some hail Telidon as a pioneer of the graphical web. Unfortunately, because of the constraints of this technology, graphics were about all Genesis StoryTime had to offer. Sound wasn’t available. While some saw this as a limitation, Stetski and Doerksen saw an advantage.

“The channel was always intended to be silent,” Stetski says from his home in Manitoba, Canada. “We wanted to use television to bring parents and kids together.”

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Publishers were quick to jump into the project, and soon the channel had more than 300 stories. With a 90 words-per-minute read rate, stories typically ran from 10 to 15 minutes. While the majority of the content came from mainstream authors, like Roger Hargreaves of Mr. Men fame, Stetski estimates about 10 percent were Bible stories. The decision to run the Bible stories was somewhat practical as the rights were in the public domain. However, Stetski kept them in rotation out of personal conviction, despite financial pressure to do otherwise.

“[One cable system owner] said if I got rid of the Bible stories he’d put us in every home in Florida,” Stetski says. Still, he kept the faith.

The channel steadily grew to reach 40 cable stations across North and Central America, and Stetski says they hit between two and three million at one point. Nevertheless, footage of Genesis StoryTime is incredibly difficult to come by. It was never intended to be recorded then played. What aired was a computer program generating a series of coordinated graphics and text. As a result, there are almost no long-lost VHS copies. Nothing to upload to YouTube.

One writer referred to footage of Genesis StoryTime as a “pop culture ghost.” Even the Barco Library at the Cable Center, an archive dedicated to the preservation of audiovisual resources and equipment exclusive to the cable and media industry, only has still images of Genesis StoryTime.

As near as we can figure, this, from Stetski’s personal collection, is the only known footage of content from Genesis StoryTime on the internet.

Locating even a brief glimpse of Genesis StoryTime was no small effort. We reached out to niche YouTube channels and specialty archives. We even called the Christian Broadcasting Network because there was a tip they had aired some of the Bible stories, but weren’t attached to the Genesis cable system—in other words, they had tapes. None of it panned out it, until Stetski himself shared the clip above with us. But as we waited and looked, we learned more and more about the channel and the men that sweated through to make it a reality. Then we learned what happened after it failed.

By 1990, the Genesis Research Corporation, the company behind Genesis StoryTime, was collapsing when the owner of a Winnipeg commercial real estate firm swooped in to save the day.

“We had come to a place where we needed someone else to come take it over,” Stetski said to the Winnipeg Free Press in 1990. “We were on the verge of shutting it down and that’s when Helmut came on the scene.”

Helmut Sass purchased Genesis Research Corporation after seeing StoryTime while on vacation in the U.S. His intentions for the company weren’t profit-oriented. “My motive isn’t so much to make money in this, but to provide wholesome stories for children again,” Sass told the newspaper.

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The timing of the transition also provided an opportunity for Art Doerksen to change his life. “He gave me all his parkas and winter boots and moved to Vancouver!” Stetski says. Doerksen ultimately ended up pursuing a career in alternative medicine, becoming involved in the design and marketing of zappers, devices that purportedly kill “parasites, bacteria, viruses, molds, and fungi.” Though the two remained friends until Doerksen’s death in 2016, Doerksen wasn’t involved in the next iteration of Genesis StoryTime, known as Story Vision Network, and rarely returned to Winnipeg. Nevertheless, Stetski attributes much of their success to Doerksen, and called him “one of the best engineers in Canada.”

Story Vision Network wouldn’t fare much better than Genesis, with the channel ceasing operations in the late 1990s. Stetski had moved on. He became a preacher and executive director of the Union Gospel Mission Winnipeg, a post he only recently retired from.

He would also go on to continue the work of Genesis StoryTime, albeit in a different form. Since he still retained the rights to the images that accompanied the Bible stories, he began distributing them as PDFs to churches and youth groups around the world. His organization, Bible for Children, now offers 60 Bible stories in dozens of languages. The nonprofit is even on the App Store and Google Play.

The men behind Genesis StoryTime leave a hazy legacy. Their work was innovative and somewhat popular. Stetski says that Genesis StoryTime was receiving 200 to 300 letters a month from children requesting stories or generally just saying they liked the channel. However, evidence of their endeavor is scant, relegated to newspaper clips and the occasional blog bemoaning the lack of footage. These days, Greg Stetski is better known as a pastor, Art Doerksen is better known for his advocacy of alternative medicine, and Genesis StoryTime remains largely a footnote in television history.

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

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We Have Probably Been Imagining Pterosaurs All Wrong

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New research suggests we've misunderstood the legs of these prehistoric flyers.

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Picture a classic Cretaceous scene. Sure, you're a bit too late to have caught it in person, but if you've seen a kid's book lately, you know the one. Broad-leafed plants cover the landscape. Triceratops graze, and velociraptors sneak around. Above everything flaps a flock of pterosaurs, their wings spread wide and their legs akimbo.

It's a nice view. But according to a new paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, at least one detail is almost certainly off: Pterosaur legs simply didn't bend that way. By pinpointing the range of motion of more contemporary animals, researchers have narrowed down how flexible these prehistoric flyers were, and weren't.

When the first pterosaurs were found, in Bavaria in the late 1700s and early 1800s, "people thought they were reptilian bats," says Armita Manafzadeh, a Ph.D. student at Brown University and the paper's lead author. "The first drawings of them that came out, both scientifically and to the public, were extremely bat-like."

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This image has stayed steady through the centuries, she adds: "It has permeated every aspect of our pterosaur-related lives." Hanging museum models cast star-shaped shadows. When the winged menaces of Jurassic World start tossing the heroes into the air, they do so with their legs splayed out. Even scientific papers, she says, assume that the animals favored "this really, really extreme hip pose, where the legs are slung out all the way to the side."

Constructing whole organisms out of the bits that have been left to us is a difficult job. With few exceptions, only the hardest tissues get fossilized, which gives an incomplete picture. "We can't really figure out what extinct animals look like and how they moved just based on how their bones were shaped, because that's a very small part of how an animal works," says Manafzadeh. Paleoartists struggle to fill out prehistoric skeletons with the various soft tissues—fat, skin, fur—that gave particular creatures their distinct character, but didn't get preserved.

But there's also another thing to consider: ligaments. Imagine you had never seen a chicken, and came across a pile of fossilized chicken bones, Manafzadeh says. Not only might the bird's dangling wattle and lustrous feathers be beyond your imaginative reach, it would also be tough to deduce its posture.

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Like a real paleontologist, you might try piecing its bones together and moving them around—but without the supporting architecture of ligaments and muscles, “there are barely any constraints on that [movement],” Manafzadeh explains. Manipulating those bones, you'd probably think your chicken quite flexible. You might even start imagining chicken splits.

Seeing a chicken in the flesh would quickly set you right. But what if one wasn't available? In that case, you might be able to deduce some things about it based on other birds. "If we want to know something about an extinct animal, we can look at its living relatives and then kind of extrapolate backwards," says Manafzadeh. In this case, the extinct animal was the pterosaur, and the living relatives were birds.

"Initially I did this with grocery store chickens, a protractor, and a kitchen knife," says Manafzadeh. "I got the muscles off, got it down to ligaments," and compared a bones-only skeleton with a ligamented one, seeing how far its limbs could bend. (One benefit of this methodology, she adds, is that your specimen doubles as dinner.)

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Next, Manafzadeh moved onto quail: wilder than chickens, so probably a better analogue for a pterosaur, she says. She took x-ray videos of quail bones and ligaments, and used 3D animation to determine all the possible positions for the hip joint. When she compared the bones-only assemblages with these more realistic ones, she came out with a "greater than 95 percent reduction" in pose possibility, she says.

One ligament in particular prevents quails from bending their legs like bats do. Almost all birds and reptiles have this particular ligament, she says, and pterosaurs "almost certainly" did too, suggesting that the splayed pose in which they're so often pictured was actually beyond their reach. (This also has implications for pterosaur wings, she says: While some conceptions have the wing membranes stretching from the fingers to the ankles, this seems less likely if the feet are, say, dangling down.)

So what was the pterosaur's preferred flying position? Although Manafzadeh carefully lists all possible quail leg arrangements in the paper, "I would not extrapolate that entire hip mobility to extinct dinosaurs and pterosaurs," she says. There are some things we still don't know. But if you do somehow find yourself in that Cretaceous scene, ducking to avoid a pterosaur, maybe take a moment to check out what it's doing with its legs.

Tell Us About Your Hometown's Hidden Tunnels

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We want to hear your local stories about secret underground passages—real or rumored.

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The world beneath our feet is an endless source of fascination. No wonder—it's hidden, dark, and mysterious. As a result, many cities and towns have some kind of local legend about secret tunnels running beneath their streets. Now we want to hear the tales of hidden underground passageways from your hometown!

I’m originally from Salt Lake City, Utah, where I grew up hearing stories about a secret network of tunnels built by the LDS Church that spanned the entire city and beyond. Into adulthood I've been fascinated by the idea of finding these buried routes, and even embarked on a handful of unsuccessful adventures to get into them. All I ended up discovering were some decidedly non-mysterious bits subterranean infrastructure that I probably shouldn’t have been in.

Nonetheless, the legend persists, and I’ve found that my hometown is far from the only place with a claim to some secret underground world. Many places actually do have secret tunnels under the streets, from the Tulsa Underground to the prohibition passages beneath Los Angeles. Sometimes they’re simply mundane—sewers or service areas no longer in use—and other times they're rumored (truth notwithstanding) to have had nefarious purposes. But whether they're real, semi-real, or complete myths, we want to hear about what people say is under your hometown.

Submit your local tunnel tales via the form below, and we’ll share our favorite responses in an upcoming round-up. Let’s explore the secret world under us all!

The Wit and Wisdom of Ancient Jewish Graffiti

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Researchers in the field have uncovered related messages ranging from "Lasius is a pervert" to “Good luck in your resurrection.”

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“You will come to an evil end if you rob this grave” and “My beloved was here” ranked among the most popular messages for graffiti writers in ancient Jewish communities.

Starting some 3,000 years ago, Jews scratched walls at homes and public spaces with prayers, warnings, blessings on deceased relatives, and store advertisements. They even used graffiti to mark rows of theater seats that were reserved for Jewish groups. In the margins of the texts, they sketched outlines of ships, people, menorahs, and synagogue columns.

Carving the letters and images “required time, diligence, steadfastness, and a degree of pain tolerance,” Karen B. Stern, an assistant professor at Brooklyn College, observes in her new book, Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity. As the graffiti artists hammered away at doorways, pillars or cliffs, she writes, “powders and fragments would cover one’s face and fill one’s lungs with dust; hardened dirt, rock, and plaster could push back and split fingernails; and carving implements, including metal nails, blades, and stones, surely drew blood when the lighting faded or surfaces grew unwieldy.”

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She has documented graffiti written by Jews, dating back as early as the 8th century B.C., at archaeological sites from modern-day Croatia to the Persian Gulf. Clusters survive at the Dura-Europos synagogue in eastern Syria, El‐Kanaïs in Egypt along the Nile near Aswan, the Beit Shearim necropolis in northern Israel and the Aphrodisias ruins in western Turkey. They come in a babel of languages, including Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Lihyanite, and Nabataean. Some people who carved the walls were clearly uneducated, while others used neat handwriting that indicates elite upbringings. Interspersed are markings from non-Jewish neighbors: pagan sayings, Byzantine crosses, and praise for Allah.

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Dr. Stern notes that for countries that have been torn apart by religious strife, and places where hardly any Jews live anymore, the graffiti now serves as evidence of past centuries of peaceable coexistence. Privileged and ordinary people of many faiths all had the same habit of emblazoning their names, interests and accomplishments on the walls. Decoding the inscriptions, Dr. Stern says, sheds light on those who left few other traces on the sands of time: “It’s about paying attention to voices that have otherwise been drowned out.”

Travelers with Jewish names wrote on El‐Kanaïs’s cliffs, to record how many times they passed through the area. At Aphrodisias’s theater, Jews used graffiti to label and reserve some rows of seats close to the stage. At the hippodrome complex in Tyre, in southern Lebanon, a female merchant named Matrona painted a wall with a menorah outline plus her name, as well as references to her market stall’s inventory of purple cloth. Dr. Stern explains that Matrona’s signage reveals the relatively tolerant atmosphere of ancient Tyre. Although it was dominated by Christians and Samaritans, Jewish business owners there including women felt comfortable advertising in front of thousands of hippodrome ticketholders.

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Relatives of Jews buried in Beit Shearim’s tombs etched its passageways with crude pictures of ships, tear-stained mourners and armed gladiators, to transport, comfort and protect the dead. In one catacomb, an inscription in Greek wishes visitors “Good luck in your resurrection.” Dr. Stern says she does not know if the graffiti author was sincerely hoping to impart good fortune, or instead showing signs of a “morbid sense of humor.”

Scholars have long dismissed archaeological graffiti as “random and incidental,” Dr. Stern says, and there have been few attempts at systematic documentation. (Major studies so far have focused on Pompeii and Herculaneum, where the Latin and Greek scribbles range from cryptic mentions of cheese to insults like “Lasius is a pervert.”)

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The last century of global warfare has erased untold wisps of ancient graffiti in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. More destruction occurs constantly in regions engulfed in unrest, where insurgents target archaeological sites. Carvings have also vanished due to looting, neglect, and vandalism. Well-intentioned restorers have done damage, too, by smoothing out surfaces without realizing which scratches on the walls represented important words from the past.

Dr. Stern plans to create an online database of Jewish graffiti, which can be updated as more examples surface. “Sometimes it’s accidents that produce exciting finds,” she says. People plowing fields or excavating basements still uncover ruins sometimes, where someone Jewish once engraved messages to grieve, scare away thieves, market local products or save seats for some cousins.

The Artist Who Imagined Zaire as a Miniature Utopia

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In his multimedia sculptures, Bodys Isek Kingelez offered a fantastical vision for the freshly independent country.

When Zaire, now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo, gained independence from Belgium in 1960, a cohort of people who had grown up under the colonial regime set out to draw the future of the country.

Bodys Isek Kingelez was trying to figure out where he fit into it all. Born in the agricultural community of Kimbembele-Ihunga in 1948, he'd moved to the new capital city of Kinshasa a decade after independence. He attended university, where his coursework included industrial design. As he mulled over his career prospects, he wondered how to square them with the seismic social and political shifts that trailed decolonization.

In that place, at that moment, there was a “tremendous desire on the part of that country’s citizens to build a country, to build a nation, to build an identity for themselves,” said Sarah Suzuki, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. Kingelez found this prospect thrilling, and he wanted in.

Civil service was intriguing. He considered a job as a magistrate, but knew that he was too reflexively judgmental to weigh evidence. Instead, he became a teacher. It was a way to shape the future of the country by helping to mold its youngest citizens, but Kingelez was “restless,” Suzuki said. He wanted to create something with his hands.

So, he did, and with a smattering of materials—paper, corrugated cardboard, twine, straws, wire, pushpins, plastic packaging, soda cans—he laid out a miniature sculptural blueprint for a city he'd like to see at human-scale.

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He took his work to a museum, where the staff were so impressed that they hired him as a restorer. After a six-year stint caring for other people’s art, he devoted himself fully to making his own. Now, more than 30 of his architectural sculptures, which he dubbed "extreme maquettes," are on view at MoMA in the solo retrospective Bodys Isek Kingelez: City Dreams.

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Artists often envisage familiar utopias: worlds that meld the best parts of ours with other elements that feel out of reach. The show, curated by Suzuki, shows off Kingelez's vision for little cities that he considered to be more perfect versions of the ones he'd seen.

In an era of rapid urban growth, he recast his hometown of Kimbembele-Ihunga as a metropolis outfitted with railroad stations, skyscrapers, and plenty of shopping.“What’s very present in Bodys’s work is an alternative," Suzuki said. "A forward-looking, optimistic proposition for what the world could look like.”

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In another instance, he dreamed of a town that had no use for doctors or police officers. Ville Fantôme, he said, was a “a peaceful city where everybody is free.” (And also free to slog through the drudgery of their daily lives—there’s ample parking, and a post office.)

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The kinder, cleaner, more egalitarian neighborhoods of artists' pages and canvases often remain in the realm of fantasy. Kingelez recognized that a brick-and-mortar utopia wouldn’t sprout up within his lifetime—many of the works incorporate dates that are still 1,000 years in the future—but he also thought he had hatched pretty good ideas. His version of Kinshasa is ringed by a kaleidoscope of blue butterflies, wings outstretched. He was convinced, Suzuki said, that "Kinshasa as planned by Bodys was much more beautiful."

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In the exhibition, a virtual reality tour leads visitors through the alleys between buildings, Suzuki explained, “as though you were a citizen on the street.” It's not a guide to on-the-ground architecture, then or now. Instead, it's one artist's vision—colorful, glitzy, staggeringly exacting—for where to move the goal posts.

“Without a model, you are nowhere," Kingelez once said. To be vital and sustainable, he suggested, an artist—or a populace—had to strive for something future-looking and envelope-pushing, however implausible. "A nation that can’t make models is a nation that doesn’t understand things," he said. "A nation that doesn’t live.”

The World's Tiniest City Park Just Got a Little More Official

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Mill Ends Park in Portland, Oregon, now has its own sign.

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When you think "green space in Portland, Oregon," you probably don't picture Mill Ends Park. At about two feet in diameter, and located on a median in the middle of busy Naito Parkway, it's tough to picnic in. A circuit around it wouldn't give your dog much exercise. It's really only big enough for about one very small tree.

But, puny though it may be, Mill Ends Park—the world's "smallest park," according to Guinness World Records—is a legitimate city park, listed on the Portland Parks & Recreation department's official roster. And as of this week, you have fewer excuses to count it out: The department just built it a very authoritative sign.

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According to Matt Ross of Portland Parks & Recreation, Portland is home to over 200 parks and natural areas. "The city was planned for having parks," he says, but Mill Ends was more of an accident. In 1946, Dick Fagan, a writer with the Oregon Journal, surveyed the view from his second-story office window and noticed, on the median of the street below, a hole about two feet wide where a light post was supposed to be. The light pole never came. According to the Parks & Recreation website, when weeds started popping up instead, "Fagan decided to take matters into his own hands and to plant flowers."

Fagan had a newpaper column named "Mill Ends," a term for leftover wood scraps. He started covering the goings-on at the tiny verge, calling it Mill Ends Park. In his writing, he claimed leprechauns lived there. In real life, he hosted snail races, planted and tended a single tree, and "made it well known," as one local fan put it.

After Fagan died in 1969, others kept the park's spirit alive. On St. Patrick's Day, 1976, it was added to the official roster of city parks. "It's managed by the Parks bureau," says Ross. "It has a regular maintenance schedule, with weeding and watering. Horticulturists attend to it." (To mark this particular occasion, they planted some bright pink miniature roses.)

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It still gets plenty of what Ross calls "community-assisted enhancements:" People have set up tiny swimming pools and sheep farms, and, in 2011, there was a bite-sized Occupy Wall Street protest. This past 4/20, someone planted some cannabis plants, which the city quickly yanked.

This year, the Portland Parks & Recreation carpentry shop decided to get in on the action. The official sign—which is a scaled-down version of the ones found at more traditionally-sized parks—has been installed on the very edge of the median, right next to the park. It is made out of scrap wood and metal, and was built in spare moments, says Ross, who adds that everyone outside the carpentry shop was surprised to see it. All of this befits the park's own special origins, as surplus space made good.


The Designer Making Board Games You Can Eat

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Win or lose, all that's left are crumbs.

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Food is an occasional subject in board games, but you can't actually eat Candy Land. Game designer Jenn Sandercock, though, wants to bring food to the table in a new way, by making board games where eating is essential. She’s created 12 edible tabletop games so far, all of which require a trip to the supermarket.

Sandercock has the background of a video game character herself. An Australian, she studied mechanical engineering, computer science, and applied mathematics. For years, she worked for the Australian Defense Force on artificial intelligence and experimental aircraft. "I never thought games were a valid career option," she says, though she grew up inspired by adventure games. Looking back, she realized she had been steadily designing games for some time. She remembers the realization she had nine years ago: "Oh! I'm a game designer. That's actually what I do well."

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After that realization, she worked in the video game industry on high-production games such as L.A. Noire. As a coder and designer, she also worked on ambitious, solo video game projects in her own time. Around five years ago, she made her first edible board game (though in her opinion, it was only okay). "I've always liked baking and I've always liked games," she says. Two years ago, after feeling inspired by an independent games festival, she decided to fully explore the edible game concept. The result is The Edible Games Cookbook, a game manual she plans to fund on Kickstarter starting this June.

The cookbook contains instructions for baking and assembling 12 edible tabletop games. The goofy game The Order of the Oven Mitt begins with chocolate cookie pieces—each topped with different candies—on a gingerbread checkerboard. Players have fondant avatars, or "squires," and have to perform rituals to become knights. The game can be cooperative or competitive: Either squires collaborate to make sure everyone gets their preferred candy, or they block opponents from getting their favorites. But the chocolate tablets come with a price: to eat, you must perform a "ritual," such as pirouetting or neighing like a horse. The only way to lose is to get too full of cookies to eat any more.

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While that might sound like a sugary overload, it's not just cookies on the menu. Another game is called, appropriately, Veggieland. It features dice and a chutes-and-ladders element, and Sandercock says the only way to win is to eat all your vegetables (in the form of game pieces, of course). While Veggieland is aimed mostly at children, Sandercock says that swapping out vegetable pieces and playing Cheeseland or Chocolateland makes it "instantly a game for adults."

Sandercock is making her games in the midst of a board game renaissance. Classics such as Ticket to Ride and Settlers of Catan are more popular than ever. Kickstarter abounds with game ideas. Newer games, such as Pandemic Legacy, can be played over months, and complexity and long gameplay times seem to be markers of prestige. According to Sandercock, her games are different. "I don't want to create games that take three hours to learn," she says. "But I'll make a game that takes three hours to bake."

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Many games are about war, and Sandercock even manages to make that edible. In The Patisserie Code, a baker who is part of the French resistance has left players a coded message. The key to breaking the code is in the variety of cream puff flavors. At the game's climax, the final test leaves one player with a blue tongue as a sign of success.

Even people without baking savvy can play Sandercock's games. For The Order of the Oven Mitt, a paper game board can be ripped out of the book: no gingerbread checkerboard needed. Store-bought cookies and icing are a possibility, and Sandercock makes suggestions for alternative game pieces for players with food allergies. Otherwise, players prep for their game nights with cookie-and-cream puff baking sessions.

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The point of edible games is their "destroyability," Sandercock says. "In traditional board games, you don't want to destroy any of your pieces." If a chess piece or card is out of play, it's set off to the side. But in Sandercock's games, pieces removed from play are eaten and gone forever. Destroying them is a pleasure. It's a different approach to gaming, which adds an underused sense. "Flavor, texture, and the social construct of eating together with friends," Sandercock says, can become part of gameplay.

Most of all, Sandercock wants to make eating an inherent part of her games. Playing chess with edible pieces wouldn't truly change the game, but most of Sandercock's games don't work if the pieces aren't food. She's trying to reach out to traditional board game gamers who might be intrigued by the experimental aspect of her games. But she has a feeling that edible games may draw a new crowd: People who haven't played a lot of tabletop games before, but like the prospect of eating an entire cookie gameboard. You can't do that with Monopoly.

Inside Birmingham’s Disappearing Balti Cuisine

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Historic establishments struggle with staff crunches and competition.

To successfully make Balti—a subspecialty of Pakistani curry that's prevalent in the United Kingdom—is to rely on intuition. Apart from the sauce, which typically consists of a heady mix of ginger, garlic, coriander, garam masala, and other traditional spices, the Balti is, in essence, mastering the art of using scorching heat.

What makes Balti especially extraordinary is that its maestros are expected to concoct the sprightly stir-fry of meat snd vegetables at swift speeds—usually within minutes, nearly half the time an average curry takes to prepare. The dish is then served in the same vessel in which it was cooked, a pressed, thin-steel contraption called a karahi. It’s eaten with a sizable naan, which is perfect for soaking up the last of the caramelized juices etching the bottom of the pan.

How the dish came to be called Balti is the subject of debate: It either stems from the Urdu term for bucket, or is used to commemorate the Baltistan region of Northern Pakistan. Its popularity and ubiquity, however, is uncontested in Britain—particularly in Birmingham, England. About a 20 minute drive from the city center, Ladypool Road, Stratford Road, and Stoney Lane collide to make the “Balti triangle.” There, family-run Balti restaurants co-mingle with sellers hawking their wares, jewelers, traditional dressmakers, and South Asian sweets shop owners.

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The Balti triangle has its roots in the 1950s and 1960s, when immigrants from the Indian subcontinent settled in Birmingham. At the time, a wave of new economic opportunities cropped up after the Second World War, particularly in the industrial city. Looking for a way to support themselves and their families back home, new residents set up restaurants and hired staff that often lived in cramped quarters right above their culinary establishments.

Mohammed Afzal Butt, the owner of Imran’s Balti house, arrived with his family in 1967. After working in a factory, and then as a chef, he bought a clothing shop in 1981 and converted it into the storied institution. He and many other entrepreneurs ended up staying in Britain, and eventually brought their families over. In time, their children became poised to take over the shops, too.

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Mohammed Arif, who’s said to have created the Balti in the late 1970s, came to Birmingham from Pakistan. He was already cooking homemade food for his peers, so it made sense to open a restaurant. After he opened it, Arif spent several weeks in Pakistan, where he saw flavorful, spicy curries being served in the same pan they were cooked in. When he came back, he had an idea. His creation, which appealed to European palates, involved a lighter version of traditional curry. The rapid-fire, high-temperature approach to cooking Balti, coupled with many spices and herbs, gave it its distinctive flavor.

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At first, they faced animosity from some white Birmingham locals, several of whom once approached the city council and asked for discounted housing, citing the smell of the spices their new neighbors cooked with. But in the 1970s, South Asian establishments began to replace fish & chip joints in the Balti triangle area. In his book Going for a Balti, author Andy Munro notes that back then, many inebriated club-goers tottering back home went for curry, as most culinary establishments tended to shut shop as the sun set.

“When the Balti came about, I think [it] changed the face of curry,” Munro says, adding that it became more of a family-style meal. Especially since many a Balti house, including Shababs, Imran’s, and Al Frash, owned by Muslims, did not serve alcohol. All these restaurants had “dicky bows, silver servers, white napkins, and hot towels,” he notes.

Balti houses soon attracted a wide customer base, and dozens of restaurants achieved popularity throughout the 1980s and 1990s. It wasn't just Balti houses, either: Curry houses in Britain saw a particularly huge boom during that decade, swelling from about 3,000 houses in 1980 to nearly 6,600 establishments in 1990. Special vegetable, cutlery, and knick-knack suppliers sprouted to work with the Balti houses. Now, it's estimated that two to three curry houses close per week, and with them, the Balti houses have been disappearing in recent years, too. The beloved Saleem's shuttered in 2014, and a mainstay, Dawat, closed its doors in 2016.

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Even these suppliers, including Uncle’s and Raja Brothers, saw their popularity begin to wane first under the auspices of Margaret Thatcher’s government, which saw the advent of 24-hour supermarkets. Uncle’s was considered an institution in itself as a seller of kitchenware and other knick-knacks. "We were the original suppliers of the Balti dish … we sold them by the hundreds," says Surinder Singh, who ran the store until it closed earlier this year. "We've had a good innings—60 years is a long time."

In 2016, a long-standing and fraught attempt to acquire the coveted Traditional Specialty Guaranteed (TSG) status—a European Union food designation for products made with "traditional" ingredients—for the Birmingham Balti was abandoned. Those fighting for the cause, including locals and British politicians alike, were unable to convince the gatekeepers that it’s the swift, high-temperature cooking method that makes the Balti special, and not any specific ingredients.

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Other forces are encroaching on Balti’s once-dominant reign, too. Several restaurants face fierce competition from cheap fast food joints such as steakhouses and pizza places. Others are enticed by the city’s numerous Michelin star offerings.

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Even if parents want to have a Balti, the kids often ask for burgers instead, notes Butt. Some Balti proprietors, such as Butt, are contemplating changes to adapt to evolving tastes, including serving alcohol. “We're thinking of getting licensed because over the years we've learned that beer goes well with a Balti," he says. "We don't drink ourselves, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't sell what goes well with a Balti."

In addition, succession planning has become trickier, as second-generation children of Balti shop owners and suppliers hope to pursue other educational and entrepreneurial opportunities in Britain. “We've worked hard. I just think we don't want to see our kids pushing trolleys, lifting baskets," says Singh. "We've worked for their education, and hopefully they better themselves. Personally, my daughter wants to go into medicine."

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Finding and hiring new staff has also been problematic. Working in a Balti house—putting naan into a hot tandoor, working on a high flame in a sweaty kitchen—is an acquired skill set. Additionally, acquiring work visas for chefs and other culinary staff arriving from the Indian subcontinent has become an even unlikelier prospect.

The staffing issues impacting the livelihood of Balti and other curry houses have not escaped the notice of political circles, either. Last year, Liberal democratic leader Sir Vince Cable urged the British government to issue one-year visas to redress this personnel crunch. The chef recruitment crisis also prompted the support of Andy Street, the West Midlands mayor, when he urged the government to relax immigration regulations. But as it stands, the once-booming Balti industry in Birmingham is in real danger of a bust, unless steps are taken to revive it.

A Collection of Your Most Incredible Vintage Board Games

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We asked you to send us your oldest board games, and you didn't play around.

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Memorial Day weekend is upon us, and what better time to bust out one of those old board games that has been languishing in your closet? We recently asked our readers to do just that, and send us pictures and the stories behind the oldest board games in their collection. We figured that in this game, there could be no losers. We figured right.

We received a surprising variety of submissions, from aging versions of old classics such as Monopoly and Risk!, to long-forgotten cash-ins such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Why. Readers sent pictures of some amazingly preserved vintage board games that they'd managed to preserve down the years. They not only have distinctly historic looks, but many of them serve as cultural time capsules—somewhat uncomfortable societal views and all.

Each one is a fascinating artifact from long before today's video games could even be imagined. Check out some of our favorite vintage game submissions below!

Monopoly

"I have a wartime Monopoly game that belonged to my mother, I know it is wartime because all of the playing pieces are wooden. When the war was over and the metal restrictions lifted, the original playing pieces: top hat, scotty dog, etc., came back." —Sarah Marks, Atlanta, Georgia

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Kreskin's ESP
Mystic Skull: The Game of Voodoo

"I have two games from the mid-1960s (both estate sale finds): Kreskin's ESP and Mystic Skull: The Game of Voodoo. Amazingly, they each had most of their original parts. They're definitely conversation starters at dinner parties." —Celia Cackowski, Richmond, Virginia

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Careers

"My oldest board game is Careers. I think it’s from the ’50s ,but I think my mum bought our copy in the ’70s. No one ever seems to have heard of it, but it’s amazing. It’s kind of a cross between Monopoly and The Game of Life, where you work your way around the board collecting happiness, fame, and money taking on careers such as uranium prospecting and ‘Hollywood’ and losing money when you have to fork out £100 at an art sale or wind up lost in the Bermuda Triangle, happy but falling into obscurity." —Natasha Arbia

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Escalado

"We have a 1928 tabletop Escalado game. You attach clamps to one end of a table, line up the heavy lead horses and have someone turning a hand crank at the other end. The vibration makes them move along the table towards the finish line. My dad loves watching live horse racing, so when the horse he's bet on comes dead last, he can get this game out at home and fix it so he wins (in the game at least)!" —Ainsley Ryan, Melbourne, Australia

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Risk!

"When I first encountered Risk!, an impromptu gang of neighborhood boys gathered in the garage of a friend's house after school. I guess this was our idea of getting in trouble! He set up the pieces and proceeded to adjudicate a game about submarines and army invasions using the ovoid 10-unit counters as naval vessels. Afterward, when I begged to play again, he admitted he had made it all up. Undaunted, some time later I bought it in his garage sale. My parents contributed the 10 cents, probably having no idea how important board games would become to me." —Vince Londini, London, Canada

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Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Why

"My favorite game growing up in the ’50s was Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Why. The game board is a haunted house, and each player is a detective (Charlie Clam, Shylock Bones, Dick Crazy, Sargent Monday). Your job is to move about the house and find a ghost, a weapon, and a motive, but they are all in pieces, so it takes four cards to make a ghost or weapon." —Bob Rinker, Lakeland, Florida

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The Wonderful Game of Oz

"Most every Sunday my grandmother, Nana, would come from her city residence out to the suburbs via the streetcar to have lunch and spend the afternoon with my family. After our lunch and a short walk around our property, it would then be nap time. Immediately after was game time and this was one of the games we would often play. After rolling the cubes that spell WIZARD, you could advance on the board. If you rolled a 'W' you would advance one space, or a 'WI' for two spaces and so on. If you did not roll a 'W' you got a second chance. If again no 'W,' Nana would exclaim "Nuttings and nuttings make nuttings!" and the roll went to the next person." —Ronald Kreiger, Kirkwood, Missouri

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Space Race

"The oldest game in my collection is called Space Race. It’s a two-player card game from 1952 (the year my father was born, coincidentally). I bought it at a dusty old comic book store in Norfolk, Virginia. It was buried in the back corner of the store, and definitely the only boxed game they had in the whole place." —Jason Franks, Tokyo, Japan

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Mr. Ree, The Fireside Detective

"My oldest board game is easily Mr. Ree, The Fireside Detective. It was the first game I ever bought with my own money. I found it at an estate sale with my mom. We would go every weekend looking for hidden treasures. I was amazed that a game so similar to Clue predated it by 12 years! I wondered why it wasn't more popular, so I started looking into the differences in the rules. Until that moment I had never considered board games an entertainment industry. They were just something people had lying around their house. That moment really stuck with me." —Austin Mace, Tulsa, Oklahoma

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Big Business

"Here is a game I dearly loved when I was a little girl. It is called Big Business. Later we had Monopoly and my older sisters preferred that, but I always thought Big Business was fun! " —Wynette Schwalm, Fort Worth, Texas

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Waddington's Spy Ring

"Players are spies with a 'Contact Man,' collecting secrets from the 16 embassies, one of which is Yugoslavia, which doesn’t exist any longer. Great Cold War game! I played it as a kid of 10 and now I play it with my grandchildren!" —Christi Barfield, Central Florida

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Pirate and Traveler

"The board is a map of the world, and in the first half of the game you travel to destinations based on the 10 cards you drew. Each card has the name of the city, country, and continent, as well as its main exports, which determine the card’s value. The most coveted card was Pretoria, South Africa, which was worth 100 points because of its diamonds. We were very proud because our town (Portland, Oregon, United States, North America, lumber, salmon, 50 points) was one of only a handful of U.S. cities in the game. Anyway, you traveled to each of your 10 destinations, and along the way, you could land on other players and send them back to 'home port.' Once you had traveled to your 10, you then became a pirate and raced to Greenland, capturing other players and their cards along the way. It was great fun, and my sister and I both credit the game with our love of geography and the fact that we each have a world map imprinted in our brains." —Susan Gilpin, Portland, Oregon

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Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

What Makes a Lava Lake Stick Around?

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There's one at Kīlauea.

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As lava continues to flow across Hawaii, threatening to cut off the remaining escape route for some communities, the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory reports that lava from two fissures is now streaming into a newly created lava pond.

A lava pond is, more or less, exactly what it sounds like—a collection of molten rock. These can form when lava flows hit a change in topography and start to move laterally instead of downslope. This sudden redirection sucks the heat from the lava (it is still very hot) and limits the size of these “perched lava ponds” to “at most a few hundred meters, under almost all circumstances,” according to a report in the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research. These pools are a transient phenomenon, but eruptions can also form lava lakes, which, rarely, can persist indefinitely.

A lava lake is, again, pretty much what it sounds like—a lot of lava pooled in one place. They can form when a vent erupts into a crater, lava pours into a crater, or a vent builds a crater up around itself. Lava lakes can behave very differently from each other. One that formed in Kīlauea during the late 1960s and early 70s circulated evenly, in what seemed to be a steady state, while another lava lake would fill, then drain after gas pierced its surface, then fill and drain again. Even in a simple model made to try to understand the underlying mechanisms, the lakes exhibited “a remarkable richness of behavior,” one team of researchers wrote.

They have one common denominator, though: To last over time, a lava lake needs a heat source that can keep feeding energy into the system. There are very few places in the world where the conditions are exactly right. Kīlauea is one of them, though in this current eruption, one of its persistent lava lakes has been draining, a whole different kind of danger. (If it drops below the groundwater level, the magma and water mixed together could cause a steam-driven explosion.) There is a long-lasting, giant lava lake in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and another in Antarctica, which are both stable enough—for now.

Glass Dresses, The Fairytale Fashion Trend That Never Quite Took Off

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The World's Fair showstopper highlighted the appetite for mingling science and apparel.

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The Libbey Glass Company was facing stiff competition. It was the summer of 1893, and as many as 27 million people were shuffling through the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. They pressed in to gawk at the grand plaster buildings rising above the Lake Michigan—meant to evoke ancient Greece and Rome—or marvel at new-fangled neon lights. The grounds were crammed with the old and the new, from recreations of ancient Egyptian temples to an early prototype for a fax machine. (Those crowds were also among the first to encounter a moving sidewalk, pancake mix, and elongated souvenir pennies.) In all that hubbub, it paid for exhibitors to have a gimmick.

The Libbey Company’s so-called crystal palace on the Midway Plaisance was not short of gimmicks. The Toledo, Ohio, glass company had built a soaring pavilion, with a 100-foot glass dome that also served as a chimney for the glass furnace inside, where guests could watch the molten material be worked into gleaming vases and lampshades. Trouble was, no one seemed especially interested.

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To drum up enthusiasm, the organizers changed from free admission to a 10-cent price tag, which they soon pushed up to 25 cents. Something worth paying for was something worth waiting for, they reasoned. And soon enough lines were snaking out of the building. Attendees were able to put their admission fees toward Libbey-branded souvenirs, especially novelties such as neckties and dolls that incorporated spun glass. Visitors also queued up to be awed by the centerpiece: an evening gown made from threads of glittering glass, custom-made for American stage actress Georgia Cayvan.

For Libbey, the exhibition was a chance to show off their inventiveness, “not only what they usually did, but amazing, unheard-of things they could do with glass,” says Rebecca Hopman, outreach librarian at the Rakow Research Library of the Corning Museum of Glass.

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When Eulalia, the Infanta of Spain, laid eyes on the gown, she knew she had to have one. In her memoirs, Eulalia bemoaned being a royal—one chapter was titled “The Irksome Duties of a Princess”—but she had regal taste in clothing. So she commissioned one from Libbey.

To “spin” these glass fibers, a glassworker used tweezers to pluck filament after filament from a rod dipped into a flame. These threads were often wound onto a wheel and then woven on hand looms, dressed with some organic fiber to cushion the fragile glass. According to Charlotte Holzer, a textile conservator who studies glass clothing, the ties and belts were fashioned by gathering bunches of fibers into braids. Dresses like Eulalia’s weren’t boxy sheaths made from pieces of glass, but rather consisted of very thin strands mingled with other fabrics, such as silk. The garment would have been shiny and fragile, but not so brittle that it would shatter at the slightest touch.

An advertisement on view in Curious and Curiouser: Surprising Finds From the Rakow Library, an exhibition at the Corning Museum, details the particulars of her outfit. A team of workers spent more than 67 hours spinning and weaving to create a gown that weighed nearly 14 pounds—not counting the dangling trimmings—and carried a $2,500 price tag. Eulalia was so enamored with the result, the story goes, that she granted Libbey the right to print the Spanish coat of arms on their advertisements, quite a seal of approval.

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European royals had long been fashion trendsetters, so one would not be surprised that Libbey and other exhibitors thought that their "fiberglass" clothes could be the start of something new. Today, it’s hard to picture what we know as fiberglass as a component of clothing. “We know it for insulation, or hulls of boats,” Hopman says. “We think of it in a more industrial kind of way.” At the time, though, when it was woven with other soft, shiny fabrics, some people "thought that fiberglass clothing was going to be this new big trend.”

Newspapers agreed. Even before glass clothes captivated fairgoers in person, U.S. papers were reporting on experiments overseas. “It may seem a transparent falsehood to state that people wear glass clothing,” San Francisco’s Daily Evening Bulletin quipped in 1879, describing glass cuffs, collars, and veils said to be spun in Vienna, “but this sort of apparel may yet come into use.” After the fair, papers extolled glass fabric’s many virtues. Women who wore it would be “quite independent of the cleaner and the laundress,” they promised, because the glassy garments just needed a quick scrub with soap and water. Wool made with glass fibers was “lighter than feathers,” another paper added, and “cannot be distinguished from the genuine article.”

A Pittsburgh paper reported that three local ladies had ordered glass outfits, and an Indiana daily noted that spun glass bonnets were “being turned out by the thousand by a Venetian firm.” And, as ballrooms became illuminated with electric light, women’s gowns were often ornamented with crystals, satin, and other fabrics and accents that could catch and scatter the light. Glass fibers fit right in.

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By the early 1900s, displays of glass garments traveled to department stores in Cleveland, Toronto, Chicago, and Detroit, where they stood in windows alongside some of the equipment—pots, iron molds, sand, lead—needed to produce them. One trade journal estimated that curious shoppers spent as much as 20 minutes gawking at a glass dress, which was modeled by a mannequin bearing a strong resemblance to the actress Maxine Eliot, who was said to have worn the garment on stage.

But Sarah Byrd, a fashion historian and instructor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, suspects that there wasn’t much of a real-world market for these clothes. The dress served a different purpose, she says, in “a moment of scientific explosion when it comes to synthetic fibers.” Silk was luxurious and valuable, but expensive and susceptible to pests. Textile makers and the general public were eager for cheap, durable alternatives.

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Over the coming decades, synthetic materials blossomed and then reigned. The early 20th century saw the development of rayon—made from cellulose—and then nylon, the first wholly synthetic fabric. Marketing materials often variously trumpeted its similarity to the material it mimicked and its wondrously unnatural origins, Byrd says. The fascination with fiberglass dresses presaged the textile innovations that really did revolutionize fashion.

Eulalia’s sister donated her glass dress to the Deutsches Museum in 1924, but it didn’t hold up well. By the time Holzer examined it in detail a few years ago, it was pocked with holes and covered in grime. (She speculates that the poor condition could be, in part, a consequence of damage sustained during World War II, when its storage facility was a hard-hit bomb shelter.)

The glass dress never became as ubiquitous as nylon stockings, but it is a wearable distillation of the excitement about science that brought nearly one in four Americans to Chicago in 1893 for awe-inspiring glimpses of the past and the future. And, before long, synthetic textiles would be hanging in just about every closet in the country.

The Many Possible Uses For Scotland's Knobbly Orbs

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We asked for your thoughts on the function of these mysterious relics, and boy did you deliver.

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Like Stonehenge, the knobbly orbs of Scotland, England, and Ireland conjure much speculation among theorists. We only know the 5,000-year-old stone artifacts date back to the Neolithic era, are approximately 2.75 inches to 4.5 inches in diameter, and engraved with cryptic geometric designs. There over 400 of them collected in such places as the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford and the National Museum of Scotland.

Besides that, the orbs are shrouded in mystery. Were they dice, résumés, or lethal bludgeons? It’s likely we’ll never know, but we might as well give it the old college try and theorize away.

We asked Atlas Obscura readers to submit their best guesses on what they thought the knobbly were used for, if at all. From Serbia to South Africa to Pakistan, we received over 650 responses from every continent except Antarctica. We couldn’t list them all, but here are a few of our favorites:

Fidget Spinners

Haven't you people taught middle-schoolers? These are fidget balls that “help” you focus! —Marc Hamlin from Rhode Island, U.S.

Perhaps, they could be used for Komboloi, or worry beads? —Jack R. Rigdon from Colorado Springs, Colorado, U.S.

Clearly, they are an early form of fidget toys. What better way for an ancient Pict to pass the time between getting chased by dangerous animals and fending off starvation and disease? —Abby from Seattle, Washington, U.S.

Massages

They appear to be similar to modern day massage balls. They were rolled against the back or other muscle areas using the palm or perhaps a trencher-like slotted wooden holder. Yusef from Malaysia

These balls would be very useful for massages! Quite seriously, if one examines the latest foam rollers for example, they have knobbly bits, which are excellent for releasing trapped tension in muscles. —Ben Davies from Oxford, United Kingdom

Fortune Telling

Possibly oracles used them as a “right to speak” tool.—Kim from Wiltshire, United Kingdom

These were part of shamans’ tool kits, passed down through generations of masters and apprentices. Shamans used the orbs for mystical healing and foretelling the future.—Don Martin from Columbia, Maryland, U.S.

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Games

Found in Scotland? Golf balls, of course. —Bonnie from Massachusetts, U.S.

They were used as Boule or Varpa orbs. Games like Boule and Varpa have been around for a very long time.—Rolf from Stockholm, Sweden

They were used as individual game pieces in a pick up game. I used to play a similar game with ox bones as pieces.—Laura Lucas from Calitzdorp, South Africa

I played Dungeons & Dragons in high school. The first thing I thought of when I saw them was, "Oh look, ancient multi-sided gamer dice! —Sera Hartman from Tulalip, Washington, U.S.

They were used in competitions to determine the best or longest hand-projectiles someone could hurl. —Maxwell Holland from Thailand

In Malta, there is a game called bocci. It is based on getting the closest to the mark and knocking your opponent. My guess is these are for some sort of game. —Chris Sacco from Malta

Math

This idea is influenced by the Japanese researcher Yasushi Kajikawa, but this stone is neither a weapon nor a decoration, it must be a trace of pure geometric thinking. —Narie Wakamatsu from Japan

They were hand held calculators, but not necessarily a mathematical calculator. A technician would use it for mental mapping. —Guy Taylor from Tucson, Arizona, U.S.

To learn spatial, geometric designs such as spheres and polyhedrons. —Javier Soto from Avila, Spain

Weights

They were line fishing weights. The knobs ensured that the line could be securely tied to the weight. Easy peasy. —Toby Turander from Norway

These were used as paperweights for papyrus. —Swatilekha Bhattacherjee from India

They were used as weights to tie down individual strings that served as a formal entryway partition or barrier curtain. —Jack Frydenlund from Santa Rosa, California, U.S.

To me, these look like weights used in the weaving process. The knobs would secure yarns in place as they were being woven. —Laura Peterson from Old Town, Florida, U.S.

Cooking

They were heated stones dropped into the liquid in order to cook stews or meals.—Judith Berkowitz from San Francisco, California, U.S.

They were used for kneading, possibly for cooking and grinding grain into a fine flour. —Leeann Hamilton from Meath, Ireland

Record Keeping

Perhaps they are record-keeping objects associated with pacts, religious offerings, or taxes. —Rebecca Migdal from Easton, Pennsylvania, U.S.

They are story or record keepers. One may represent a treaty or marriage contract, another shows a family history, another is a storyteller's illustration for their listeners, and perhaps another provides geographic information. —Colin Mulholland from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

According to researcher Dr. Lynne Kelly, they served as memory aids to recall information for oral transmission in preliterate societies. —Julie Mitchell from Adelaide, Australia

Currency

To me these knobby orbs are coins of different denominations. —Wilayat K. Bhatty from Lahore, Pakistan

They’re currency, but this might reflect more of the society I live in than that of ancient times. —Svenna from Germany

Weapons

They started out as simple weapons, serving as weight that could be swung around the head on a rope to strike an animal. —Dave Henderson from Wellington, New Zealand

They were personalized throwing balls that could be used as a weapon. —Brian Robert Pipe from Dubai, UAE

They look like a netsuke, sewn or bound on belts and even serving as bolo-style weapons if the need arose. —Joan Traffas from Fayetteville, Arkansas, U.S.

Stories

They could be visual aids for storytelling. Pictures carved into the orbs may have accompanied different stories or parts of a story. —E.J. Hagadorn from Connecticut, U.S.

Perhaps, held up in firelight, they casted shadows that illustrated or evoked storytelling. The incised marks identified the type of story that would be told. —Dulcy Freeman

They were used to tell life stories that were passed down within the family. Each member would have their own. —Marsha Wood from Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.

Navigation

They were maps. Orbs with plainer patterns and more knobs showed a map covering a broad area of land. Orbs with intricate patterns and fewer knobs represented a detailed map of one specific area. —Jorge Jaramillo Villarruel from Ciudad de México, México

The patterns showed surrounding landscapes and locations visually, and the orbs were used so people could orient themselves when traveling. —Jan Olausson from Sweden

Stamping

They were used for stamping a soft material. For example, rolling the orbs over a sheet of dough before baking to make nice patterns on flatbreads or scones. —Alix from France

They’re printing blocks for leather, fabric, or body adornment. All you would do is dip them in dye, heat, and roll them on as substrate. —Steve Ogden from Oakland, California, U.S.

They acted like stamps or temporary tattoos. You could cover one side or multiple sides in ink, roll them along a person's body or other surface, and instantly it’s art! —Nick from Michigan, U.S.

Voting

They were voting stones. Each stone was unique and identified a voter in public or secret balloting. They may have also been used in ritual stoning. —Eugene from Illinois, U.S.

Portfolio Work

One such explanation from scholar Dr. Andrew Meirion Jones from University of Southampton is that they represent practice pieces. Perhaps they were worked on (and then erased and redecorated) by novice stoneworkers in order to hone their skills–similar to Jeff Nisbet’s resume portfolio theory. —Misha from London, United Kingdom

Music and Art

Art, for art's sake. They were beautiful intricate tokens made for aesthetic and sensory enjoyment. —Charlotte High from Warminster, Wiltshire, United Kingdom

These could be the very first zentangles. —Daisey Traynham from Vietnam

They were used for music. When rolled around on wood or rock surfaces, they would make different noises. —Madelyn Patlan from Texas, U.S.

Identification

I believe that the stones represented a person's lineage and family history, much like a family crest. —Rachel Hug from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.

They depict spiritual family trees to aid in ancestor veneration. Each knob represents a person or branch of the family tree and the designs show the spiritual connections among them. —Rick from Washington D.C., U.S

Possibly they were a way to identify tribes and positions in a tribe while traveling. —Tim from U.S.

Keys

The orbs were keys to unlock the past, present, and future. —Robin from Vancouver, Washington, U.S.

Some responses have been edited for clarity and readability.

Why Beans Were an Ancient Emblem of Death

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Fava beans can be lethal.

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The Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras, who you might remember from geometry class, had his very own cult. Followers lived communally, studied the cosmos, and ate vegetarian. But unlike today’s vegetarians, they also avoided beans. This wasn’t just a quirk. Like the Ancient Egyptians and Romans, they considered broad beans (also known as fava beans) a supernatural symbol of death. And due to a deadly allergy, the beans likely deserved their reputation.

Fava beans remain common in Greece, but other popular beans, such as green beans, kidney beans, and lima beans, only reached Europe and Asia after 1492. “When the word bean is used in European texts prior to 1492, it is almost always the fava,” writes food historian Ken Albala. Cultivated for millennia, they were an important source of protein across the classical world.

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Despite being one of the first cultivated crops in history, many cultures had mixed feelings about favas. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that Egyptians refused to cultivate beans at all. Though this was untrue, beans were often used for sacrifices, and in later Rome, priests of Jupiter couldn’t touch or even mention beans, due to their association with death and decay. For Roman funerary feasts, or silicernium, certain ritual foods were served: eggs, lentils, poultry, and favas.

Pythagoras’s aversion to beans, though, always got a lot of attention, even from ancient writers. According to Pliny, Pythagoreans believed that fava beans could contain the souls of the dead, since they were flesh-like. Due to their black-spotted flowers and hollow stems, some believers thought the plants connected earth and Hades, providing ladders for human souls. The beans’ association with reincarnation and the soul made eating fava beans close to cannibalism. Aristotle, writing earlier, went much further. One possible reason for the ban, he wrote, was that the bulbous shape of beans represented the entire universe. Nevertheless, other Greeks ate plenty of fava beans, and Pythagorean beliefs were mocked. The poet Horace tauntingly called beans “relations of Pythagoras.”

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There’s also more earthly reasons to avoid beans. Diogenes Laertius, the Roman biographer of the Greek philosophers, wrote that beans were made of soul-stuff, much of which was present in humans. As it happens, the Greek word anemos means both “wind” and “soul.” Famously, beans are the magical fruit. Diogenes thought the excessive farting caused by eating too many fava beans was downright disturbing. Aristotle also thought that Pythagoreans abstained from beans as a political protest against democracy, since colored beans could be used to cast votes in elections (Pythagoreans favored oligarchy).

All symbolism aside, Pythagoras's aversion to beans may have even contributed to his death. Legend has it he had to live in a cave for a time, to hide from a dictator. Some accounts of his death describe him fleeing attackers, who chase him until a field of flowering fava beans blocks his way. When he refuses to run any further, he’s killed.

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This may seem ridiculous, but for certain people, a field of fava beans can spell certain death. Some researchers believe that historical suspicion about fava beans could be rooted in favism, a genetic disorder more common in the Mediterranean than anywhere else. Named for the triggering bean, people with favism develop hemolytic anemia from eating favas, or even inhaling the pollen from its flowers. After consumption or contact, red blood cells start to break down, which can cause anemia-like symptoms, jaundice, and even heart failure. Even today, one out of 12 people affected die of favism.

Perhaps Pythagoras had favism, or perhaps not. But the association between beans and somber rituals still exists: They are a Lenten meal in Greece and give name to the Italian All Soul’s Day cookie, fave del morti, or beans of the dead. Certainly, otherworldly beans give a whole new meaning to the requisite funeral three-bean salad.


How the U.S. Army Botched Feeding Its Female Soldiers in World War Two

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Outcomes included weight gain, sexual harassment, and skipping meals.

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It was 1942, and over 100,000 women were expected to join the newly instituted Women’s Army Corp. For the first time, women could contribute to the war effort from within the military, in an all-female auxiliary unit modeled on the British equivalent.

American officers believed themselves to be ready for this female onslaught: Jobs had been sorted into two piles—406 deemed “suitable” for women; 222 more active or technical roles “unsuitable.” Women’s barracks had been set up; hair and uniform regulations had been considered; smelling salts were on hand for when women needed vaccinations. Yet when women did join the army by the thousands, the officers discovered they were woefully unprepared and had created rules that were impossible to follow. Hair was supposed to be kept above the collar, but there was often nowhere for women to get it cut or set. Skirts that had looked stylish and demure on the page were cut for men’s bodies—they constantly rode up and made even the slimmest women seem “pot-bellied.” WAC hats were so badly designed that they cut women’s foreheads. Almost no women fainted after receiving shots.

But perhaps the greatest oversight was in what women wanted to eat: Thousands of WAC members unexpectedly gained weight on rations designed for male combat fighters, or were forced to skip meals to avoid sexual harassment.

Army officials had planned a one-size-fits-all menu and mess schedule for men and women: same sinks, same utensils, same chow. As time went on, however, it became clear that their initial inflexibility had caused women serious harm. Toward the end of the war, some adjustments were made—though, for more than two years, women had to find solutions themselves.

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Some modifications were practical necessities: In the kitchens, ad hoc adjustments made it easier for women to use service stations designed for men—duckboards to make sinks less deep, or shelves and wheeled carriers to minimize lifting or bending. “Similar mechanical contrivances made it possible for women to manage heavy equipment designed for men,” writes Mattie E. Treadwell in The Women’s Army Corps.

Other changes were aesthetic—or simply represented a desire for a mess hall that felt like home. The buildings and kitchens were standardized across male and female barracks, and had an identical budget—yet walking into the women’s mess was quite a different experience. Women transformed their mess halls into a kind of hearth: They added potted plants, color, and even curtains, all salvaged at no expense or funded themselves. (“I’ll never see a sweet potato vine without thinking of the WAC,” Lieutenant Colonel Helen H. Woods said, in a later interview.) Messes became the soul of women’s barracks: A borrowed piano or phonograph provided music, and at holidays, they were decorated with bunting or autumn foliage. “The WAC unit mess invariably tended to take on something of the function of the kitchen in pioneer homes,” writes Treadwell, “a center for family life, visiting, and entertainment.”

Meals also differed. The master menu had been written for men: Women found it heavy, fatty, and overly sweet. To counteract this, women mess officers bartered with the men’s barracks next door to swap out undesirables for things women wanted to eat. Pastry, lard, and syrup, for instance, might be swapped out for fresh fruit and vegetables. “For the first years of the war, adjustment was attempted on a local level,” writes Treadwell, “with the WAC mess sergeant ordinarily adept at swapping mayonnaise for salad oil, potatoes for lettuce, and large quantities of pork for small steaks.”

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When these adjustments could not be made, women’s health and happiness often paid the price. At communal messes between men and women’s barracks, Treadwell writes, “company commanders reported not only loss of esprit, but a serious nutritional problem.” Women’s barracks were smaller than men’s, which meant they were outnumbered in mess halls. Walking into the communal mess meant fending off the advances of sometimes hundreds of male soldiers. It was too much for many to bear, with female soldiers instead choosing to skip breakfast or go to bed without dinner. Sweets or candy bars bought from in-army retailers helped fill the gap—though they had little nutritional value.

In the end, the idea of “consolidated messes” was dropped, and women were permitted to eat among themselves. The outcome, the army reported, was an improvement in health and morale, where women came together in a non-threatening, pleasant environment to sit and talk, read their mail, or listen to records together.

Forced to eat army menus where a day’s meals might total nearly 4,000 calories, women soldiers were often unhappy to find themselves gaining weight. Their posts included working as clerks, typists, drivers, or cooks—not wholly sedentary roles, but not active enough to justify eating twice as much as they had at home.

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One study indicated that 82 percent gained about six pounds in their first six weeks of basic training. By the end of that stint, some 45 percent of female soldiers were deemed overweight. It was this perceived health risk that led to an overhaul of the women’s menu—though the unfortunate title of the 1944 army-issued circular Weight Control in the WAC meant that women were mostly “unmercifully ribbed” by male personnel “who found the circular enjoyable reading matter.”

And so, in January 1945, the New York Times reported, the army introduced a widespread diet revision for all women, which saved an estimated $2.7 million a year: “The Wac, though a soldier and leading an active life, does not eat a man’s ration, and so can be nourished adequately on 3,100 calories a day, which is 650 calories less than is required for male soldiers.” From now on, women would be served fewer fried potatoes, less breakfast sausage, and more fruit.

Nine months after the army Quartermaster General finally introduced a women’s master menu, the Second World War came to an end. It’s not clear how much of an impact the new menu made to women, though it certainly saved the army money. WAC servicewomen returned to civilian life, after years of having to forge their own path and prove themselves amid what historian D'Ann Campbell describes as “intense hostility from their male comrades.” Despite it all, they excelled: General Douglas MacArthur, Treadwell writes, said the WACS were his “best soldiers"—more industrious, more disciplined, and more cheerful than their male counterparts. All that, and interior design flair to boot.

Did Mister Softee Just Taunt New York City?

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An eerie version of the jingle sharply contrasts a former attempt to silence it.

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Earlier this week, several New Yorkers noticed a strangely familiar noise emanating from midtown LinkNYC kiosks. Gothamist reports that as many as ten kiosks along Third Avenue, which provide free wi-fi access across the city, began all trilling simultaneously with the the iconic Mister Softee jingle. Normally the music is a happy announcement of warm weather and ice cream for sale. But it sounded off and slowed-down from the usual, twinkling song.

At first, onlookers thought they might be hearing distant trucks. But locals, such as bike courier Steve Burges, soon discovered that it was indeed coming from kiosks, and that "something was off because of the slow rhythmics [of] the song, and it was really eerie," as he described to the paper.

The haunting jingle doesn't seem to be part of a promotion or a prank: On Twitter, LinkNYC assured people that, no, they were "not hacked," and they rebooted the system to stop the music. So what really happened? It's tough to say at this point, as no one has claimed responsibility. But it's curious that a city-backed infrastructure project is blasting a jingle that, a little over a decade ago, city administrators wanted to silence.

Back in the early to mid aughts, New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg sought to stamp out Mister Softee's song once and for all. The battle against the ice cream jingle was a part of the Bloomberg administration's crackdown on noise in the city, dubbed Operation Silent Night. The ordinance took on stereos, construction projects, barking dogs, the hum of air conditioners, and, yes, the sound of approaching ice cream.

In 2004, Bloomberg cited scores of complaints rolling into the city's 311 hotline about the jingle. New Yorkers quickly disagreed. "That's not necessary," Teniqua Frontis told the New York Daily News. "The jackhammers, the motorcycles, the cars. Those are the problems." Mister Softee representatives protested, too, saying that silencing the call would decimate their business. Some lawmakers weren't totally onboard, either; one told Bloomberg that he would "traumatize a lot of children in this city."

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Mister Softee's distinctive song was allowed to continue after all in 2005. The administration struck a compromise that stated the jingle must cease playing when trucks stop moving. Bloomberg continued to take shots at Mister Softee in ensuing years, but the distinctive song lives on—spilling out of ice cream trucks and LinkNYC kiosks alike. Maybe it's a coincidence, or maybe it's a frosted middle finger to the former mayor's war on ice cream. But either way, the tune undeniably signals that summer is now in full swing.

The Russian Philosopher Who Sought Immortality in the Cosmos

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To create the Kingdom of Heaven, simply reanimate the space-strewn molecules of your ancestors.

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The elderly librarian was a staple at the Rumyantsev Museum and public library in pre-Revolutionary Moscow. With a long white beard growing from his weathered face, he looked almost as old as the ancient artworks and tomes that he shuffled about each day. He was a quiet, humble, and deeply pious man who spoke softly. His demeanor was so unobtrusive that he appeared to seamlessly blend into the Rumyantsev’s austere neoclassical architecture. But like the books he dedicated his life to tending, this man was a silent wealth of knowledge, full of groundbreaking ideas that would influence scientists, philosophers, and writers for years to come.

This librarian’s name was Nikolai Fedorov. He lived from 1829 to 1903 and was one of the most ambitious and quietly influential thinkers in Russian history. His philosophy, which is classified today as “Russian cosmism,” explores ideas of space travel and scientifically-engineered immortality through the lens of Christian mysticism. Though his writings were repressed by Stalin in the 1930s, Federov was highly influential to the Russian space program. One of his students was the astrophysicist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who is widely considered to be the father of spaceflight for the groundbreaking equations he developed.

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Federov was the illegitimate child of a prince and a noblewoman. Fedorov, his mother, and his siblings were forced out of his family home after his father’s death when Nikolai was only four. In spite of this embarrassment, the family remained relatively wealthy. In 1868, he became the librarian at the Rumyantsev Museum, the first public museum and library in Russia, where he worked for 25 years. It was during this period that he became the teacher and mentor of Tsiolkovsky. His works were compiled and published posthumously in 1903 under the name The Philosophy of the Common Task. Fedorov never copyrighted his works and insisted that they should be available to the public free of charge.

Fedorov’s insistence that his philosophy be highly accessible to all perhaps owed to the fact that it proposed nothing short of a new phase of human evolution. As a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church, Fedorov was dismayed by what he saw as a rampant lack of love and compassion amongst human beings. While good will towards man is a familiar and central tenet of Christianity, Fedorov found its focus only on the living to be exclusionary. His proposed cures for the lack of love he saw between the living and the dead were ambitious to say the least: immortality and resurrection.

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Using science, art, and technology, Fedorov believed that humanity’s primary goal should be to create the Kingdom of Heaven. He, unlike most Christians who equate this concept with the movement of the disembodied soul to the afterlife, saw the acceptance of death as false Christianity and believed that it was every human being’s duty to work towards abolishing death. “Death is merely the result or manifestation of our infantilism [...]” he wrote in The Philosophy of the Common Task. “People are still minors, half-beings whereas the fullness of personal existence, personal perfection is possible.”

On top of being a daring religious philosopher, Fedorov was also an avid and highly capable student of the sciences. His propositions for a death cure were shockingly prescient, though they seemed outlandish during his lifetime. To fix what he believed was the innate “flaw” of decay, Fedorov proposed replacing human body parts with artificial organs when needed. Today, the practice of using artificial organs, including hearts, eyes, lungs, livers, and more, is fairly commonplace and an area of intense focus for contemporary Transhumanists, who support life extension via machine augmentation. In fact, theorists such as Ray Kurzweil, author of 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines, propose replacing the entire body with a technological host by uploading the brain to a computer.

For Fedorov, the quest for immortality required all of humanity to unite against the universal enemy of death. He was convinced that immortality would act as a panacea for all of humanity’s greatest struggles, including war, poverty, and disease.

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But The Philosophy of the Common Task stipulates that immortality for the living is impossible without the resurrection of the dead. In order to accomplish this, Fedorov proposed that humanity should assemble expeditions to fly out into the cosmos in search of particles belonging to their long-dead ancestors. He also suggested that dead tissue, specifically the tissue of the deceased ancestors, could be used to somehow revive them, effectively arriving at the idea of cloning without having any knowledge of DNA structure.

In order to make room for all the billions of resurrected dead and immortals, Fedorov envisioned the human race colonizing the galaxy, making homes for the returned on larger planets such as Jupiter. This idea clearly influenced Tsiolkovsky, who was a lifelong supporter of space exploration and colonization, believing that it would lead to “the perfection of the human race.”

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The sweeping beauty of Fedorov’s ideas inspired early Soviet artists and writers. The paintings of the Amaravella Collective, Aleksei Tolstoi’s science fiction novels, and Iakov Protazanov’a film Aelita, for example, all fused space exploration with mysticism.

“[Fedorov’s] quasi-mystical ideas were in some ways deeply embedded in many of [Tsiolkovsky's] more scientific and technical writings from the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s,” explains Dr. Asif Siddiqi, author of The Red Rockets' Glare: Spaceflight and the Russian Imagination, 1857-1957. “Because Tsiolkovsky's influence was monumental in the establishment of the Soviet space program, one can say that Russian cosmism was also an important part of the puzzle of the history of Russian space.”

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Today, Fedorov’s ideas continue to influence philosophers, scientists, and historians the world over, particularly in the field of Transhumanism. Both Federov and the Transhumanists believe that it is humanity’s destiny to defeat death, becoming immortal either by bioengineering or technology.

Many Transhumanists find Fedorov’s spiritual approach to life extension and space exploration deeply inspiring. Take for example Giulio Prisco, founder of the Turing Church, a “meta-religion” dedicating to finding the intersection between spiritual beliefs, science, and technology. “In particular, cosmism is open to the possibility that future science and technology might be able to resurrect the dead from the past, and to the idea that our universe might be, for want of a better word, a simulation,” says Prisco. “These ideas are, like it or not, both compatible with science and totally indistinguishable from religion. Many Transhumanists, who tried to kick religion out through the back door of superstition, are now finding that religion is coming back to them through the main door of science.”

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Cosmism’s popularity in the early decades of the Soviet Union was crushed under Stalin’s regime. On top of their spiritual approach to science and technology, which ran directly counter to Stalin’s atheistic vision of Soviet Russia, many cosmists were publically supportive of his rival Leon Trotsky. As a result, the vast majority of Cosmists were jailed, sent to labor camps, silenced, or executed after Stalin’s victory. By the early 1960s, when the Soviet space program was in full swing and cosmonauts were lauded as national heroes, it seemed that cosmism’s mystical influence on space exploration had been forgotten entirely. For example, one of the first cosmonauts, Gherman Titov, famously proclaimed during a visit to the United States that “no God helped build our rocket,” adding that during his 17 orbits of Earth he had seen “no God or angels.

But in spite of its suppression, cosmism lived on thanks to a few dedicated adherents who were able to save Fedorov’s writings, which finally emerged from Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Transhumanism’s revisitation of Fedorov’s work poetically speaks to his philosophy, mentally reviving him from the dead through a camaraderie that crosses several lifetimes.

Remembering When Only Barbarians Drank Milk

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"Butter eater" was once a terrible insult.

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This article is adapted from Milk! A 10,000-Year Food Fracas by Mark Kurlansky.

During a visit to conquered Britain, Julius Caesar was appalled by how much milk the northerners consumed. Strabo, a philosopher, geographer, and historian of Ancient Rome, disparaged the Celts for excessive milk drinking. And Tacitus, a Roman senator and historian, described the German diet as crude and tasteless by singling out their fondness for “curdled milk.”

The Romans often commented on the inferiority of other cultures, and they took excessive milk drinking as evidence of barbarism. Similarly, butter was a useful ointment for burns; it was not a suitable food. As Pliny the Elder bluntly put it, butter is “the choicest food among barbarian tribes.”

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Ancient Romans were not alone in looking down on butter and milk. In Greece, the word “butter” was not spoken kindly. The Greeks called it boutyros, cow curds, and as sheep and goat people, they regarded those who kept cows and made butter as an alien lot. The Thracians, the people who lived to the north of Greece, ancestors of the Bulgarians and others, ate butter. Greeks contemptuously referred to them as “butter eaters.”

For centuries, this was the norm in many parts of the world: People who ate butter and drank milk were uncivilized outsiders.

Curiously, the Greco-Roman disdain for dairy stopped short at cheese. In Rome, cheese was eaten by both the rich and the poor. A considerable variety of hard, soft, and smoked cheeses were produced in the city, and others were imported from around the empire. Smoked goat’s-milk cheese from Velabrum, the valley by the Forum that runs up to Capitoline Hill, one of the seven hills of Rome, was especially popular—part of a general fondness for smoking foods. Cheeses were often given as gifts, and they were a standard breakfast food, along with olives, eggs, bread, honey, and sometimes leftovers from the night before.

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But Mediterranean people had little need for butter. They already had olive oil, which is less prone to spoilage, heats to much higher temperatures without burning, and was and is regarded as more healthful. Even now in North Africa, most of Greece, Mediterranean France, Spain, and most—but certainly not all—of Italy, olive oil dominates and butter is rarely used. An omelet may be made with butter in Greece today, but until recently, even that was made with olive oil.

Climate, then, determined the poor status of butter and milk. Because they spoiled quickly in the climate of southern Europe and kept far better in northern Europe, northerners used far more milk. Germanic people were avid butter eaters and were said to have perfected salted butter. The Celts, who settled down in good dairying spots such as Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, also became known for their butter. Milk was so important to the “barbarians” that a dry cow was considered a family crisis.

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This led southern classical cultures, which were already contemptuous of northerners, to take the greater consumption of dairy as evidence of their barbarian nature. To hear the Romans tell it, the barbarians to their north were swilling milk by the mugful. (In actuality, they were consuming milk conservatively; a cow was an expensive animal to maintain.)

Differences in climate made butter and milk a mark of otherness—unlike cheese which kept better in warmer climes. Since the presence of large, powerful cities and cultures in the far north is a relatively modern development, this linked any non-cheese dairy with inferior (or at least less powerful) groups.

Drinking milk wasn’t unknown in places such as Ancient Rome. But for similar reasons, it was linked with the country and lower classes. Until the age of refrigeration, very little fresh drinking milk was consumed in the Middle East. In Rome, due to the inevitability of spoilage, and because fresh milk was available only on farms, it was consumed mostly by the farmers’ children and by peasants who lived nearby, often with salted or sweetened bread. This led to fresh milk’s being widely regarded as a food of low status. Drinking milk was something that only crude, uneducated rural people did and was rare among adults of all social classes.

The link between milk, butter, and rural farmers ensured that even after Rome fell (to milk-swilling barbarians), dairy remained uncouth. The English, whose model for imperialism was the Romans, sneered at what they thought was the barbaric overuse of butter by the Irish. Fynes Moryson, secretary to the viceroy, who spent much time in Ireland in the reign of Elizabeth I, reported that the Irish “swallow whole lumps of filthy butter.” And southern Europe never lost its sense of superiority over its neighbors, still considering them to be milk-swilling barbarians.

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If anyone can take credit for raising milk and butter up to respectability, it is the dairy-crazed Dutch.

In the country’s early years, the Dutch were singled out as a crude and comic people endlessly engorged on milk, butter, and cheese. Even the Flemish laughed at them, calling them kaaskoppen, or “cheese heads.” Northerners, too, belittled the Dutch for their dairy habits. One English pamphlet said, “A Dutchman is a lusty, fat, two legged cheese-worm.”

Insults aside, it wasn’t exaggeration. The upper classes prided themselves on setting their tables with several types of butter. The Dutch enjoyed whey or buttermilk with breakfast—even in the poorhouses, breakfast was buttermilk and bread—and butter was used wherever possible. A traditional meat stew, hutsepot, used butter too.

The Dutch navy, which in the 16th century was becoming a formidable force, issued to each sailor a weekly ration of half a pound of cheese, half a pound of butter, and a five-pound loaf of bread. The historian Simon Schama calculated that a Dutch ship with a crew of 100 in 1636 would need among their provisions 450 pounds of cheese and one and a quarter tons of butter.

An ample supply of cheese and butter was the right of every Dutchman. They believed that dairy food was an essential part of a good diet, and artists from the celebrated Dutch school of still-life painting often included cheeses in their compositions. The Dutch made many cheeses and had an effective distribution system, with numerous urban centers featuring cheese markets.

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In the 13th and 14th centuries, the Dutch became skilled at reclaiming land from the sea by building dykes and creating polders, drained patches of reclaimed seabed. This led to dramatic improvements in cattle breeding and land maintenance. Farmers began having tremendous success crossbreeding livestock to develop cows that produced more milk—between the mid-16th and mid-17th centuries, the value of a Dutch cow quadrupled. The Dutch were starting to understand what best to feed cattle, and how best to cultivate pastureland. Soon, their cows were producing more than twice the yield of cows in neighboring countries.

Though at first unnoticed, a huge shift occurred in the European perception of the Dutch. Their country, which had broken off from Spanish rule in the 1590s, was rapidly changing from a former lowly possession of the Holy Roman Empire to an independent republic displaying a genius in art, science, and engineering. Seemingly overnight, the Netherlands became a global trading empire and leading maritime and economic power of the world. Suddenly, the cheese heads were considered brilliant.

All over Europe there were discussions and writings about what made the Dutch such geniuses. And those having these discussions often freely admitted that they had once thought of the Dutch as idiots who just drank milk and ate cheese. The Europeans also started recognizing that there was genius in Dutch dairy farms—in their better pastures, better cows, and ability to farm below-sea-level land. Dutch dairying, too, was now considered brilliant.

After the cheeseheads proved themselves geniuses—and established a widely emulated, global empire—the main bastion of anti-dairy sentiment was East Asia. Japanese Buddhists avoided dairy products and looked down on Westerners, who they thought consumed too much dairy. They claimed they could smell it on them, and even into the 20th century used the pejorative term Batā dasaku, or “butter stinker,” for a Westerner.

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Similar sentiments existed in China, where the consumption of dairy has been so rare that historically, many have assumed that the Chinese as a race were lactose-intolerant. This contrasted with their neighbors, the Mongols, who drank mare milk and traveled with dried cheese curds.

But this is changing. China has become the world’s third-largest milk producer, and today, almost 40 percent of Chinese drink milk, the highest percentage in Chinese history. The new and growing upper class tends to crave everything Western, and dairy is Western. Ice cream is popular, and yogurt parlors are in, too.

Milk has been debated for at least the past 10,000 years. It was the first food to find its way into a modern scientific laboratory, and it's the most regulated of all foods. People have argued over the importance of breastfeeding, the healthful versus unhealthful qualities of milk, farming practices, animal rights, raw versus pasteurized milk, the safety of raw milk cheese, and more.

But one argument that seems to have been finally set to rest is that milk and butter are no longer just for barbarians.

This article is adapted from Milk! A 10,000-Year Food Fracas by Mark Kurlansky, available now wherever books are sold.

There Is a Whole World Inside Every Plant

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Plants have microbiomes, too, and they're full of untapped secrets.

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In Corvallis, Oregon, Posy Busby works in a garden planted with 3,000 black cottonwood trees that represent 1,000 unique genetic specimens, each originally found somewhere on the West Coast of North America, from California to Canada. Cottonwoods are some of the fastest-growing trees in the world, and the garden looks a lot like a timber company plantation. But Busby, an ecologist at Oregon State University, studies something on a much smaller scale than trees—the microbes that live inside their leaves.

Busby started paying attention to microbes because she wanted to understand why wild plants plagued by a disease, such as leaf rust, fall ill in one place and not another. Genetics and environment could explain only part of this puzzle. But inside a plant is a whole world of microorganisms, and some of the cottonwoods’ resident microbes seemed to have an impact on the severity of the leaf rust.

At first Busby thought of these bacteria and fungi as individuals that could be either troublesome or beneficial to the plants, like the fungus that causes leaf rust. But as she read up on the human microbiome, she realized that the microbial communities within plants were as complex as those within us. “We’re really dealing with the same thing,” she says.

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Scientists have known for centuries that soil is packed with microscopic organisms and, since the late 1800s, that some plants form symbiotic relationships with fungi. But now they are finding that microorganisms live not just around but inside plants—in their roots, stems, and leaves—in greater numbers and with more diversity than anyone realized.

Busby’s cottonwood trees, for instance, were known to have a handful of microbial pathogens. “But when we looked at the overall diversity of the fungi in the leaves, it was more like a thousand or 1,500 different fungi living in and on these leaves,” across the tree’s range, she says. “So that was an astounding number.”

Just as we have learned that the human microbiome has a greater influence on human health than anyone imagined, there’s an emerging understanding that the plant microbiome could be the key to floral health. One initial goal of exploring the plant microbiome has been to determine who’s part of this community and what they’re doing for the plant. The answer, it turns out, depends on location. If you’re a plant, the place you live changes the ecosystem inside you, and that can affect your whole life.

“The plant’s microbiome is strongly determined by where that plant is growing,” Busby says. “It matters whether you’re on one side of the mountains or the other. It even matters if you’re 30 miles a way.” As an example, about an hour north of Corvallis, there’s another scientific garden of cottonwood trees, and, Busby says, “we see very different communities form in those two different places.”

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No one knew much about the microorganisms that colonize plants' external surfaces—and internal tissues—until the arrival of relatively cheap DNA sequencing. A single cottonwood leaf, for instance, might have 50 species of fungi and bacteria living inside. Roots and leaves in the same plant can have notably different microbial communities, but for any particular plant species, there are certain types of microorganisms that make up the community’s core. But across a plant’s range, this can vary greatly.

Some of the best-known mushrooms in the world are the fruits of mycorrhizal fungi, which grow in association with plant roots. When people raised in Europe or in the eastern half of America traveled west, they thought the mushrooms they found were the same as the ones they already knew. But now we understand that they’re different species. “You find very regionally distinct communities of mycorrhizal fungi depending on where you are,” says Kabir Peay, an assistant professor of biology at Stanford. These fungi, by the way, live both inside and outside a plant. They have filaments that reach out into the soil to fetch nutrients, but they also form what Peay calls “these really intimate structures, where they come in close proximity with plant cells,” inside the plant.

Those regional variations in microbial or fungal communities, in turn, affect the structure of plant communities. Disease-causing microbes, for example, can keep one tree species from becoming dominant, but their impact depends on the mix of other microbes they live among. “What does it mean on a large scale when you change the composition of these communities and decrease their diversity?” says Peay. “I don’t think we have the answer quite yet.” But there are indications that it will matter—in a big way—as environments begin to shift. It seems like different microbes are “doing wildly different things” to forests, says Colin Averill, a postdoctoral researcher at Boston University, in Jennifer Bhatnagar's lab. “If you know which types of fungi are on the roots of trees, you can better predict the ability of the forest to sequester carbon and forecast [the effects of] climate change.”

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How exactly a plant's microbiome makes changes like this is still a mystery, but last year a group of scientists, Busby included, proposed an agenda “analogous to the Human Microbiome Project,” to promote research that could start answering these questions. Scientists are beginning to discover how incredibly diverse the metabolism of plant-associated microorganisms is, says Bhatnagar, an assistant professor at Boston University, with a potential impact on a variety of fields, such as drug discovery and environmental management. “That’s one of the treasures of the plant microbiome that’s still untapped—all the molecules these guys can make and how we can help make them,” she says.

And keeping plants healthy is, in the end, a matter of human health, too. Understanding how to promote or manipulate a plant's microbiome so that it's healthier and more productive could lead to breakthroughs in agriculture and give farmers powerful tools other than fertilizers to boost production. If we can understand plant microbiomes, it might help us manage the rocky environmental future. “These cryptic organisms that live in plants contribute in meaningful ways to plant growth, plant development, and plant immunity,” says Busby. “They could be the key to growing enough food for our human populations in the future.”

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