Including the occasional turd.

Carl Mehling warned me that if I wanted to see the good stuff, I needed to arrive early.

Sure enough, shortly after the American Museum of Natural History in New York threw open its doors on a blazing blue recent Saturday, an eager queue had taken shape in front of Mehling’s table in the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall. Milling around a slew of life-sized dioramas, visitors carried their own treasures. Some cradled fossils in plastic food containers or plastic baggies. Others swaddled pottery sherds in paper towels, the cushioned fragments tucked inside an orange plastic pill container, as though a pharmacy had dispensed an ancient prescription.

They all wanted a pair of expert eyes on their finds, and Mehling, a senior museum specialist in the division of paleontology, was ready to oblige. The museum began hosting annual identification days in 1979, inviting the general public to unwrap their most intriguing or befuddling fossils, rocks, feathers, and more for an assessment. A self-described “professional nerd” with a quick and easy laugh, Mehling first lent his expertise to the effort roughly 20 years ago. He’s rarely missed an identification day since.

ID day separates the fools’ gold from the true treasure, and this kind of triage is a public service that curators, conservators, and other custodians of museum collections perform on top of their other institutional duties, explains the author Douglas J. Preston in Dinosaurs in the Attic: An Excursion Into the American Museum of Natural History. It’s not an appraisal blitz; no one exits ID day with specific dollar signs twinkling in their eyes. But they might leave with a better sense of whether the find that has loomed large in family lore is real, or a tall tale that has swelled into myth. Over the course of an early summer afternoon, I tagged along as dozens of curious attendees lined up in front of Mehling’s table and waited their turn in front of his light and magnifying glass.

Tom Shamy approached the table with what appeared to be a phalange, packed gingerly in a plastic container. The bone was flat, vaguely beige, somewhat rounded, and bulbous at the end. He said he found it on a dig at the Sangiran archaeological site in Central Java. Rains had caused a hillside to crumble open, and Shamy picked up the bone, which had been buried a few feet underground. "Oh, wow," Mehling sighed, excited, drawn out, a little bit growly.

Mehling held it up to his ear and scratched it with his fingernail. "Normally, what I would have done is tap it on my tooth," he said, "but I don't do that in this venue. I wasn't gonna eat your bone. I eat my own bones." The tooth test helps him estimate mineral quality, which reveals clues about age. "If it's modern bone, it'll make a clicking sound, and if it's fossil bone, it's more ceramic, like ting, ting, ting,” he said. “That subtle difference can imply that it's much older." Even without bringing his incisors into it, Mehling had a hunch. "I think it's modern, I think it's a mammal, I think it's a toe bone," he told Shamy. He referred Shamy on to another table, where mammal experts could rule out other things—human bone, a domesticated animal—and hazard a more concrete guess.

Identification day is a structured throwback to wonderment and the thrill of discovery that magnetized Mehling to his profession in the first place. As a kid growing up in Jackson Heights, Queens, Mehling would tag along with his family on short journeys to Long Island or New Jersey, where beaches and woods held secrets. “Anyone who starts in natural history is picking stuff up in the woods, on the ground, wherever. That’s where we came from,” Mehling says. He’d turn over rocks or squat down to study a leaf. “I loved anything unfamiliar in nature,” he said. “Even if you’ve seen it in a book, it’s completely different to find it on your own.” One early find was a dearly departed bat wedged deep into the roofing shingles of a Quaker church. “That really messed me up for a while,” he says, laughing. “I pulled it out against my mom’s wishes.” In paleontology, Mehling has found a way to funnel the personality traits that lead a kid to inspect a decaying bat into a profession. At the root of it, the inclination is the same, he says—“picking things up and trying to figure out what they are.”

Sometimes, that’s a tough ask, and a reminder arrived early in the day, when Dana Orlinsky, a science teacher at P.S. 340, offered something that looked, to me, like a rock. That’s what Orlinsky reckoned, too, but a student had brought it into class, and she said she’d investigate. Mehling knew what to look for. The find, whatever it was, had broken into fragments, and these reveled a dentine middle sandwiched between two rough enamel sides. It suggested a tooth—a big, old one, and Mehling figured it came from a mammoth. “Delicious!” he said. “That's awesome! That’s a score. Hold on, I gotta write that down.”

Cultivating the skills to recognize these things takes time. Mehling is still improving, too. “If someone brought that into me a few years ago, I probably would have said it was a rock,” Mehling tells me. “The primary objective here is education, but it’s also really good practice for me to hone my skills identifying stuff. This and all the other fossil ID I do is always fine-tuning that collection of search images I play with.”

Once such images are cataloged in his mental filing cabinet, though, rifling through them to match an object with a name tends to be quick work. “A lot of that is really subconscious,” Mehling says. “You’d be surprised how fast we can identify these things—literally a split-second.” He likened the process to seeing a $20 bill flashed before your eyes: You’d recognize the color, shape, and dimensions, even if you only saw it as a blur. A fossil’s location is crucial to the identification process, too. Coordinates and surrounding rock can help place it in the long timeline of world history. But even if Mehling has cracked a puzzle nearly instantaneously, he still takes a beat. “You can’t react as fast as it happens in your mind because no one trusts what you’ve just done—they assume you’re not being careful,” he says.

Mehling recognized one surprising find right away. Peggy Feitell, going on 25 years as a volunteer in the museum’s Discovery Room, brought something squat, pale, and log-shaped. The object was unlabeled, and Feitell wanted to know what it was so that she could better field questions from kids and parents. It was glued down inside a plastic container sealed around the edges with tape. “It’s stuck,” Mehling told her. “So the kids don’t get it,” Feitell replied.

No matter. “Mmm hmm, I think I know what this is,” Mehling told her. “I’m pretty sure that’s a turd.”

It was hard to say which animal passed the prehistoric stool—sometimes, pieces of bone can suggest that it might have traveled through the gut of a carnivore, but Mehling didn’t spot anything like that. “I was hoping more that it would be shells in a rock, but apparently not,” Feitell said. She would have loved to crack it open and find gems inside, but then again, “it’s still amazing that something like this lasted so long and fossilized like this.”

At ID day, the concept of “value” is a little vaporous. Some objects have accrued a kind of worth by virtue of how beloved they are. An attendee named Peter Burdi brought two pottery fragments he'd found on a Spanish beach in 1972, when he was nine years old. He's 55 now, and they've been wrapped in a tissue and tucked in a drawer next to paper clips and other household detritus. Sentimentalism counts for something. Other visitors are just mildly curious or somewhat forgetful. (This year, one young visitor turned up to get another assessment of a sharp little tooth, because she couldn’t remember what Mehling had told her last time they met.) Of course, some ambitions are much grander. Mehling said that a few people come armed with “wishful arrowheads” or other things that their imagination has contorted into something unique and precious.

In reality, it’s “incredibly rare that someone walks in with something genuinely scientifically valuable,” he added. “I get people coming in saying, ‘I’m certain this is a dinosaur egg,’ and I have to say, ‘Sorry, no, it’s a rock.’” Those spectacular disappointments are part of the longstanding tradition, too. When New York magazine covered the first ID day in 1979, a reporter noted that “the frauds outnumbered the real specimens.” One purported dinosaur bone was a cut of prime rib, and a piece of ancient pottery turned out to be shards of clay from a skeet-shooting mission.

But special finds do sometimes surface. At one ID day a few years back, Mehling noticed something out of the corner of his eye. There were five or six people standing in line, and he saw one of them holding what looked to him to be a fossil whale bone. He jotted something down in his notebook to jog his memory when that person arrived at the front of the line. When Mehling flipped the bone over, he realized he’d been wrong. There were two holes on one side, and “those two holes turned it into something else,” he said.

He recognized it: The color and shape “all locked together in this search image, and I thought, ‘I know where this is, I know where it’s from, I know how valuable it is,’” Mehling said. The real origin story, he added, was “ten thousand times more interesting” than he’d wagered. The vertebrae had come from a plesiosaur, a prehistoric marine reptile, and it was something special—Mehling has been collecting in New Jersey for the better part of three decades, and he’s never found one there. This one wouldn’t have surfaced if it hadn’t been for two brothers picking up rocks to toss in the creek behind their house. If they’d chucked the vertebrae along with a handful of pebbles, the artifact could have slipped through their fingers and out of sight.

This year, one of the most valuable finds may turn out to be a 200-million-year-old dinosaur footprint on a slab of rock broken apart in East Hampton, Massachusetts. Dinosaur footprints are well-documented nearby, and this alleged footprint was up for grabs at a yard sale there; a construction worker had found it while yanking up a road. Mehling looked at the slab a few separate times. At first, he waffled and hedged. The conditions were right, but the footprint seemed—at first—partial and somewhat muddied. "I'd give it about a 50-percent chance,” Mehling told Marisa Klages-Bombich. Her young, dinosaur-obsessed son, Amadeo looked on, sporting a green t-shirt with a T-Rex skeleton print.

When Klages-Bombich circled back to the table a little later, it was a different story. “The lighting was totally different, and the track was totally obvious, right in the middle, like duh,” Mehling said. “The lighting is everything. When people collect these, normally they’ll only go out at the crack of dawn or right before dusk, because the light’s coming in sideways and you can see them right on the ground. At noon, they disappear. They’re just invisible.” A second look paid off, and the track may be destined for an exhibition of ID day’s greatest hits. After that, Klages-Bombich says, “it’ll just go back in Amadeo’s bedroom, on the bookshelf, where it’s always been.”

Because Mehling has been doing this for decades—and probably because he’s fun to hang out with—he has a coterie of regulars who stockpile their finds throughout the year and save them for annual diagnosis. Mehling recognized one of these crews right away. Robert Jaffe has been coming in from Long Island since before his kids were born. Sixteen-year-old Nate and 13-year-old Vita have been tagging along since they were in strollers. Mehling has seen them grow up, and, like a distant uncle, he can’t stop himself from remarking on the changes. “You’re taller than your dad now, what are you doing?” he hollered to Nate, and then filled them in on the day's identifications—the footprint, the tooth. Nate credits Mehling with inspiring him to study geology when he gets to college. Mehling grinned. “That’s one step away from paleo,” he said. “We’ll get you sooner or later.”

Mehling is infectiously enthusiastic about paleontology, and he becomes visibly jazzed when a kid gets excited about it, too. In addition to sharpening his own chops, the identification festivities give Mehling a chance to evangelize about the field he clearly loves. He hopes that enthusiasm is contagious, and that it sticks.

Before heading home with his now-confirmed dinosaur footprint, Amadeo informed Mehling that he wants to be a paleontologist, too. (And also a zookeeper, chef, and stuffed-animal designer.) "You might replace me someday, doctor," Mehling told him. "I'll be 150 years old, and I'll bring you my dinosaur footprints."

Scientists filmed the break-up of a Greenland glacier.

This past June, late one night, a team of scientists camped out on a fjord in Greenland heard a roar. When icebergs are born, they fill the ocean with noise, and the Helheim Glacier was cracking. The researchers saw, LiveScience reports, “puffs of ice” tossed into the air as a new iceberg began to break off from the glacier. They began filming, and the result is here, a sped-up version of an iceberg calving:

In real time, it took 30 minutes for an iceberg four miles long to break off and float away into the sea. It’s hard to get a sense of scale from the video, but the researchers pointed out in a statement that this iceberg would cover most of Lower and Midtown Manhattan. It’s a tabular iceberg, long and flat; in the video, you can also see tall, thin pinnacle icebergs crack off and flip over.

Helheim Glacier, named after Hel, the Viking realm of the dead, is the fastest flowing glacier on the eastern side of the Greenland Ice Sheet, NASA says. But even though the icebergs tossed into the sea here are contributing to sea level rise, scientists still don't know exactly how such break-ups work. “The calving process itself is relatively poorly observed, understood, and modeled,” wrote David Holland, one of the scientists who captured the video, in a 2016 paper. This video captures data about calving events that can be used to better understand break-ups like these.

Ignore the Lycra—look at the flowers.

On April 5, 1981, the Dutch cyclist Hennie Kuiper won the Tour of Flanders by a full minute. His compatriots Frits Pirard and Jan Raas came in second and third. Odds are, as the three were pedaling towards the finish line, they didn't notice whether the trees they were whizzing by had bloomed or not.

Decades later, though, another group decided to go back and take note. In a recent paper in Methods in Ecology and Evolution, a team of researchers describes how they used old footage from the Tour of Flanders to study a different kind of cycling: the plant life cycle. Figuring out exactly when trees leaf and bloom can help us understand what motivates them to do so, and how climate change affects that timing.

The study of plant and animal life cycles is called phenology. Keeping track of this in real time is laborious but straightforward: "People go out in nature and simply write down the date when the plants produce their leaves or flowers," explains Pieter De Frenne, a bioscience engineer at Ghent University and the lead author of the Tour of Flanders paper.

But if you're trying to get this data for past time periods, it's necessary to get more creative. In recent years, researchers have pieced together phenology data from herbarium specimens, an 18th-century book of grapevine illustrations, and the journals of Aldo Leopold and Henry David Thoreau.

De Frenne and his coauthors came to their own method naturally. "We're cycling fans," De Frenne explains. "When the big spring races are coming up, many television stations show archived video footage from the same races." They noticed that while the course stayed the same, the scenery changed: In the older races, the bikers pedal past bare trees and flowerless bushes. "In more recent editions, the landscape is green," he says. "[Spectators] are wearing shorts and t-shirts."

It struck them that bike race footage could be a great tool for phenology. For one thing, many of the races happen in the spring, when all the bloomin' action is. They also tend to cover the same ground: the Tour of Flanders, for example, has had a fairly consistent route, and is generally held the first weekend in April.

Finally, "they are very popular," De Frenne says. "They are broadcast around the world by television stations. So this means there is high potential that some of these stations will have archived the footage." (The Tour of Flanders tape, which was held at the VRT archives in Brussels, clocked in at 200 hours—all of which was viewed by another of the paper's authors, Lisa Van Langenhove.)

They decided to figure out a way to quantify this change. First, the researchers identified 46 individual trees and shrubs that made cameos in different races between 1981 and 2016. Then they came up with a scoring system. "We quantified the percentage of leaves and the percentage of flowers that were present on the tree at the time of the race," says De Frenne.

"We then gave them a score between zero and four, with zero meaning no leaves visible, and four meaning all leaves visible." They compared these scores over time, in order to pinpoint how much earlier each plant was getting in the game.

They found "surprisingly strong shifts," says De Frenne. Although it depended somewhat on the species in question, plants were 67 percent more likely to have flowered before race-time in 2016 than in 1981, and 19 percent more likely to have leafed. Using weather data, the researchers were also able to connect higher winter temperatures with earlier flowering and leafout.

De Frenne thinks the footage holds even more potential. It contains plenty of landscape features we could use a long view on, from lakes and rivers (what's the water level?) to fields full of crops (when did they get planted, and when did they sprout?).

And other recordings could provide similar insights, the authors add, including "news items, sport events, demonstrations or pop concerts." As we've taken care to film our own small dramas, a larger one has been playing out in the background; you just have to know where to look.

Early images of people enjoying and surveying the monument were recently released to the public for the first time.

Five people enjoy a sunny day in the countryside. Some lie on the grass. Others sit on or lean against boulders. All are dressed in fine clothes, and none seem particularly perturbed by the fact that their makeshift seats are some of the most famous stones in the world.

The image above, which was recently made public by the photo research company TimePix, is from 1867, and is part of the first known photographic sequence ever taken of Stonehenge. (There are older individual photographs, in the Royal Collection.) It's from a book called Plans and Photographs of Stonehenge, released by the U.K.'s Ordnance Survey and written by the department head, Colonel Henry James.

Since the Ordnance Survey began in the late 18th century, its workers have used various tools to get the nation down on paper. In the 1860s, much of the agency's energy was focused on mapping all of Great Britain, county by county, at six inches to the mile. As James's preface explains, Plans and Photographs of Stonehenge was made for the agency's officers, to prepare them for encounters with any "Objects of Antiquity" that they might come across during their work, as well as to "stimulate them to make Plans and Sketches."

"It was a very gentlemanly pursuit to have an interest in archaeology, or antiquities as they called it back then," says TimePix founder Elaine Owen. James didn't want his employees to come across an ancient treasure and mess up how they measured it.

To that end, Plans and Photographs of Stonehenge is full of meticulous detail. After explaining that the center of the arrangement consists of "five stupendously large trilithons," James goes on to note just how stupendously large they are. His careful sketches of the stones show every divot and rough surface.

But when he wasn't busy surveying, James apparently did some lounging as well. While "we can't be 100 percent certain" exactly who is in the photos, Owen says, the man in the tall top hat "could easily be him." (This impression is underscored by the fact that James was quite into self-promotion—when the Ordnance Survey built new buildings during his tenure, he had his own initials carved into them.) If it is him, the other figures are likely his wife and children, making this "an early version of a family snap," Owen writes in a press release.

A century and a half after he published it, James's survey is no longer accurate: Since the early 1900s, the stones have been rearranged and repositioned by various groups for various reasons. The book's long section on the ancient Druids has also lost relevance, as scientists now believe the structure originated about a millennium before Celtic people arrived in the region. But his photographs—in which people turn an ancient monument into a carefree picnicking ground—exude a cheekiness that is truly timeless.

The oak tree that sheltered Charles II once had a place in the night sky.

In 1651, after the Battle of Worcester, Charles II—who would go on become the king of England—climbed a tree. The future monarch would later claim to have ensconced himself in the branches of an oak in Boscobel Wood while his enemies (troops who fought the Royalists over how England should be governed) passed just below. Legend has it that “he had to stay there, dead quiet, until they buggered off,” says Matthew Edney, a geographer at the University of Southern Maine.

The hiding spot, dubbed the Royal Oak, was commemorated on pieces of pottery and, once the monarchy was restored, with a holiday. It was also—for a little while, at least—mapped onto the cosmos.

In 1676, years before he observed the comet that would carry his name, a young astronomer named Edmond Halley set up an observatory on the volcanic island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean. From this far-flung speck of land, he intended to catalog the stars of the Southern Hemisphere. Halley returned to England with a slew of observations, in which he eventually included a new constellation, Robur Carolinum, or “Charles’s Oak.” The once-arborially-besieged king had become a patron, and had made Halley’s journey possible.

It wasn’t uncommon for astronomers and cartographers to transplant earthly concerns—political allegiances, debts, cultural values—into their maps of the heavens, Edney says. In national mythology, the oak tree had become a protective symbol for the monarchy. “This is a way for Halley to curry favor with Charles II,” Edney says. Halley said as much himself. When he presented his findings to the Royal Society, he included a note that read, “In memory of the hiding place that saved Charles II of Great Britain etc., deservedly translated to the heavens forever.”

In addition to maintaining the king’s good graces, Halley’s constellation was also a relatively straightforward way to resolve (or at least obscure) an issue that had long confounded astronomers with a penchant for constellations: the fact that the stars don't always organize themselves into an imagined image.

Take Argo Navis, named for the mythological ship that Jason and his compatriots took in search of the Golden Fleece. “Nature did not exactly oblige in giving astronomers a complete set of stars with which to define the ship,” writes the astronomer and author John C. Barentine in The Lost Constellations: A History of Obsolete, Extinct, or Forgotten Star Lore. A handful of stars could credibly form the hull, mast, and other parts, but nothing quite resolved into the prow. To compensate, Barentine continues, “those seeking a figural depiction of Argo were left to come up with ad hoc ways to hide the fact that part of the boat was literally missing.” Cartographers sketching the constellations disguised its absence with a strategically placed atmospheric flourishes—a cloud or a boulder. Halley’s plopped a tree in its place, obviating the need to actually complete Argo Navis.

The French were not on board. As Barentine notes, “there was probably some patriotic chauvinism involved, since to include the oak would have honored the king of a foreign country that still claimed ceremonial sovereignty over France.” In any case, the tree wasn't rooted for long. Describing constellations in the 1750s, the preeminent French astronomer Nicolas-Louis De La Caille rapped Halley’s knuckles over “detaching” some stars from Argo Navis; it wasn't proper to have the stars belong to both. De Caille added that he “cannot approve of the fashion in which Mr. Halley took them to make up his constellation."

Back on Earth, an oak still stands on Boscobel's grounds, and is often described as a descendant of the one where Charles II hid. And another answer was found to the Argo Navis conundrum—it was broken up into a handful of smaller, perhaps more coherent constellations, but the tree did not find its way back in.

A lawsuit alleges that people have been overpaying since 2009.

Conventional wisdom holds that it’s more comforting to not know how the sausage is made. But in the case of Big Pork, revelations of how the meat is made, and priced, can be pretty juicy. A new federal class action suit holds that several big-time producers, including Hormel and Tyson Foods, conspired to fix the prices of hot dogs, bacon, and other lunch meat products since 2009.

The suit, filed in late June at a Minnesota U.S. District Court, holds that the producers “entered into a conspiracy from at least 2009 to the present to fix, raise, maintain and stabilize the price of pork.” It alleges that these companies were approached by Agri Stats, an external market monitor, who started to give the companies "benchmarking reports." These reports allegedly divulged detailed information about profits, slaughter information, and other prices that weren’t shared publicly.

With that knowledge, the suit goes on to say, these companies functioned as a sort of meat cartel: They could keep an eye on one another’s production, and control how much consumers were shelling out for their pork products. In this case, they claim that the pork industry showed "abnormal price movements" specifically in 2015, when "the hog market year average price" shot up to $76.30 per pound. That's over 50 percent more than the $50 average it hovered at from 1998 to 2009.

For that, the plaintiffs are seeking over $5 million in damages, and to refund people who overpaid for the likes of their bacon strips. It's worth noting that Agri Stats is also currently embroiled in a similar price-fixing suit, this time within the broiler chicken industry.

As CBS News notes, the price-gouging worked for years because control over the pork market is so concentrated. For several decades, small and mid-size pork producers have been steamrolled by the big four processors of pork: Smithfield, Tyson, Cargill, and JBS. These four conglomerates also held the bulk of the market share in 2015 (roughly 70 percent).

The meat industry has been historically rife with price-fixing. When a mere five companies controlled the vast majority of the meatpacking industry in the early 20th century, Congress passed the Packers and Stockyards Act with the intention of protecting “fair trade practices, financial integrity, and competitive markets for livestock, meats, and poultry.” The 1921 measure not only stated that these companies weren’t allowed to manipulate prices, but they also couldn’t put smaller, independent meatpackers at risk. Nearly a century later, it seems that meat industry heavyweights still has a huge hand in determining how pricing works.

“We’re seeking to hold Tyson, Hormel and others accountable for this nearly decade-long scheme to hog their share of profits,” said Steve Berman, of Hagens Berman, the firm representing consumers in this particular suit. It’s not clear what will happen when Big Pork has their day in court, but at least it may shed some light on mystery meat. Or, at least, how it’s priced.

A saturnine soundtrack.

Before NASA's Cassini spacecraft burned up in Saturn’s atmosphere in September 2017, it captured a massive trove of data, including striking close-ups of the planet and images of its cosmic neighborhood. (And ours.) We now know that Cassini also recorded a soundtrack of sorts—data that has now yielded a series of thrillingly eerie whooshes and warbles that represent the relationship between the ringed planet and Enceladus, one of its moons.

Plumes of water vapor that spurt from Enceladus interact with Saturn's magnetic field, according to NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. An instrument on Cassini recorded resulting plasma waves—oscillations in the particles and fields between the two bodies. Back on Earth, physicists and planetary scientists then translated the waves into sound.

"Enceladus is this little generator going around Saturn, and we know it is a continuous source of energy," said Ali Sulaiman, planetary scientist at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, and a member of the team that recorded the waves, in a statement. "Now we find that Saturn responds by launching signals in the form of plasma waves, through the circuit of magnetic field lines connecting it to Enceladus hundreds of thousands of miles away." The recording you can hear below captures 16 minutes of these waves, compressed to 28.5 seconds.

Of course, a space traveler wouldn't actually hear this while hanging out around Saturn, but it is definitely a way to feel closer to everything going on up there—without leaving Earth.

It's 1.1 billion years old, and it's bright pink.

It's hard to imagine the prehistoric world. What did the sun feel like? What did the ancient oceans sound like? What did it smell like back then? (It can't have been good.)

Thanks to new research, we've now got a tiny inkling of what we might see if we traveled a billion years back in time. It turns out that, as far as living things were concerned, Earth was pretty pink.

By grinding up pieces of marine shale, a team of researchers from the Australian National University has discovered the oldest known colors produced by living things. The pigments, which are 1.1. billion years old, once belonged to cyanobacteria, and were used in photosynthesis. They were found in marine shale dug out from the Taoudeni Basin in Mauritania, and when diluted, they're about the color of a sunrise.

It was a lucky find: As senior researcher Jochen Brocks told LiveScience, chlorophyll doesn't usually stick around this long. This particular batch of bacteria must have died all at once and sunk down to the seafloor, where it was isolated from oxygen long enough to fossilize. It stayed preserved underground until about 10 years ago, when a mining company dug it up.

The pigment molecules were discovered by the Ph.D. student Nur Gueneli, who extracted them by pulverizing the shale and running a solvent through it. "When held against the sunlight, they are actually a neon pink," Brocks told the BBC. "At first I thought [the sample] had been contaminated."

Besides being nice to think about, the pink also gives us a picture of who ran the seas back then. Larger animals don't appear in the fossil record until around 600 million years ago, and scientists have long wondered why they did not evolve more quickly. "The precise analysis of the ancient pigments confirmed that tiny cyanobacteria dominated the base of the food chain in the oceans a billion years ago," at the expense of bigger, tastier algae molecules, Gueneli said in a press release. "[This] helps to explain why animals did not exist at the time." Pink is nice to look at, but it doesn't make a meal.

As Arctic waters warm, shipping traffic is rapidly increasing in their favored habitats.

Narwhals are sometimes called the “unicorns of the sea.” Like their fictional equine counterparts, narwhals appear to have a horn or tusk—it actually functions more like a tooth—galloping straight out of their heads. Over the centuries, narwhals swam through the realm of folklore, figuring especially prominently in Inuit tales. They also float amid not-quite-truths: In the 16th century, naturalists depicted narwhals as something like razor-toothed alligators with saws erupting through their skulls. One described the whale as “a sea-monster that has in its brow a very large horn wherewith it can pierce and wreck vessels and destroy many men.”

Unlike unicorns, narwhals occupy space in the real world. The whales mostly congregate in Arctic waters around Greenland, Russia, and northern Canada, where they're known to dive nearly a mile deep, and surface for air in between fractured ice. But today, their landscape is changing.

In recent years, as their native waters have warmed and ice cover has shrunk, ship traffic has increased in the region. A handful of countries, including the United States, are “racing to put icebreakers into Arctic waters as rising temperatures uncover new shipping routes, resource deposits, and fishing areas,” as Scientific American reported. In one area where narwhals spend their summers, ship traffic surged by 300 percent between 2015 and 2016 alone.

Narwhals haven't been in dire straits—last year, the International Union for Conservation of Nature downgraded their status from "near threatened" to "least concern"—but shipping traffic could be bad news for these wondrous whales, according to a recent report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers from the University of Washington and the University of Alaska Fairbanks estimated how vulnerable 80 populations of marine animals are to ship traffic that passes through in September, the month when melted ice yields the most open water. More than half of these populations are exposed to ship traffic, the authors found, and narwhals most of all.

"Narwhals have all the traits that make them vulnerable to vessel disturbances—they stick to really specific areas, they're pretty inflexible in where they spend the summer, they live in only about a quarter of the Arctic, and they're smack dab in the middle of shipping routes," said study co-author Kristin Laidre, a polar scientist at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory's Polar Science Center, in a statement. Since the whales communicate underwater, use sound to navigate, and are “notoriously skittish and sensitive to any kind of disturbance,” Laidre said, they’re also susceptible to being troubled by the noises emanating from ships.

The authors surmised that beluga whales, walruses, and other mammals that hug shipping routes are also vulnerable. Less so for polar bears and roving groups of seals. The researchers found that the risks were especially pronounced in narrow segments of shipping routes—so-called "geographic bottlenecks" such as Lancaster Sound, in Nunavut, and the Bering Strait.

Despite those centuries-old warnings, narwhals aren’t preying on ships, or ramming their crews. But, in a sense, the danger is flowing the other way—at least for now. The Bering Strait and other “pinch points” represent “potentially high conflict areas,” the authors wrote, “but also opportunities for conservation-informed planning” if researchers gather more data about these unusual whales' dark, deep world.

One film studio in Los Angeles pioneered the trope of flying pies.

One of the last places you might expect to find a commemorative plaque is on a concrete self-storage building in Los Angeles. But there, on 1712 Glendale Blvd., a plaque memorializes what was once a sprawling film lot known as Keystone Studios. The film company, now located in present-day Echo Park, was famed for its uproarious slapstick comedies—particularly those involving tossed pies.

For over a century, flinging a pie into someone's face has been a comedy trope, thanks in part to Keystone. Established in 1912 by director Mack Sennett, the studio was once touted as a comedy pioneer, and had a hand in making pie-throwing ubiquitous. Yet pie-tossing is a more common stunt in the popular imagination than it is in reality.

This phenomenon can be traced back before the earliest days of pre-1920's silent film. Tossing a pie into someone's face for comedic effect first existed on the vaudeville circuit. The hilarity of seeing an elegant dessert hit an an actor, and watching them react with either anger or bewilderment, soon made its way to the screen. In 1913, Sennett's muse Mabel Normand and Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle "launched the first such missile in a Keystone film," notes The Oxford Companion to Food. Soon, the studio became known for pie-tossing shenanigans, and the high-flying desserts flew so freely that the studio needed its own bakery to make them.

The answer turned out to be right across the street. One Sarah Brener owned a variety store there, but she also supplied the studio with its pies. Sometimes, they were delicious. Charlie Chaplin said that Brener's pies were the best in town (he once gave her one of his trademark canes as a memento, too.) But often, they had to be specially formulated for films. The ones Keystone used were "a special ballistic version of the pie, with heavy-duty pastry and especially slurpy 'custard.'" As pie fights in film grew more elaborate, Brener's bakery was soon making nothing else.

Filmmakers preferred custard pies for flinging. They were appropriately messy and, without a top crust, likely less painful than a lattice-edged cherry pie would be to the face. In one biography of the silent film comedy star Buster Keaton, author Marion Mead recorded his pratfall-ready custard pie recipe. In it, two baked pie crusts were welded together with a solid foundation of flour and water. Then, they were filled with an inch of thick flour-and-water paste. If the pie was to be thrown at a blonde or a man in a light suit, a chocolate or strawberry garnish was added. For a man in a dark suit, the pie would be garnished with lots of whipped cream for the wreckage to show up well on camera. He also gave advice on how to throw it: like a Roman discus, for instance.

For a time, Keystone Studios was a powerful studio, launching stars like Charlie Chaplin to prominence. But by the time the 1920's rolled around, people had grown tired of the custard-pie shtick. It wasn't long before comedies were being advertised on their pie-less merits: one ad trumpeted that "a custard pie and a pretty girl or two in a bathing suit do not make a comedy." Pieing was so commonplace that Sennett had even developed rules for what characters could be taken down a notch with an ignominious pie to the face: mothers-in law, yes, mothers, no. (The humbling effect of a pie to the face has also made them a tool of political commentary.)

Widespread pie-throwing faded, but it didn't die completely: Comedic films and animation alike have been peppered with pieing ever since, from Bugs Bunny to the Three Stooges. In 2015, The New York Times even reported that a "holy grail" of film history had been re-discovered: the second reel of the Laurel and Hardy 1927 short "The Battle of the Century", where 3,000 pies sail through the air. It was supposed to be the pie fight to end all others, but in 1965 the film "The Great Race" promised viewers "the greatest pie fight in history." Thousands of real pies were used, and after filming, the entire set stank of the rotting dessert.

Now, the Keystone building is a storage facility, and Brener's bakery is long gone. But the studio's influence lives on in film, in the occasional tossing of a pie, and on a plaque on the corner of the sole remaining building that reads: "This was the birthplace of the motion picture comedy."

Researchers uncovered evidence of the cetaceans at sites connected to the Roman fish-processing industry.

About two millennia ago, Pliny the Elder described a dramatic sight. In the Bay of Cádiz, on the west coast of Spain, just beyond the Strait of Gibraltar, where the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea meet, killer whales would attack the young calves of other whales, small and vulnerable. Pliny was one of Rome’s preeminent natural historians, but he can’t be entirely trusted—he also wrote about unicorns as if they were real. And the scene he describes would never happen today: Few whales visit this part of the world. For centuries, his description was not taken as fact. Perhaps he was thinking of dolphins.

But according to new research, Pliny's description may have been correct—there's evidence that at least two species of whales that spend time near the coast once traveled to the Mediterranean area as part of their yearly migrations.

Evidence of the existence of these whales is scarce, as a team of researchers writes in a new paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. “Whale bones seldom make it to human settlements,” they write. “Most whales die and sink in the sea; and those that make it to the shore typically have their skeletons broken down and dispersed by the action of the waves.” When humans have kept the bones of whales that they’ve caught or found, they often break or carve those bones into smaller pieces, making them hard to identify.

But in the new paper, the researchers use two techniques—DNA analysis and collagen fingerprinting—to analyze ancient bone fragments, found in Roman era settlements near Gibraltar, that might have come from whales. Of the 11 specimens they analyzed, nine did indeed come from whales. The team identified six of those as species that are no longer found anywhere near the Mediterranean.

Three of the fragments, the team reports, came from North Atlantic right whales, which now live only much further north, in a threatened population. Three other fragments came from gray whales, now found only in the North Pacific.

While the whales that live in this region today are large and live out in the deep waters, North Atlantic right whales and gray whales come close to the coast while they’re migrating to calving grounds. Thousands of years ago, naturalists like Pliny would have been able to catch sight of them. And, the researchers write, it’s possible that Roman society had an active practice of catching the whales for their meat and blubber.

The bone fragments they analyzed came from archaeological sites connected to the Roman fish-processing industry, where huge salting tanks have been discovered. Gibraltar was a fishing and processing hub, where the Roman condiment garum, a fish sauce, would have been made. Whether the whales beached on shore or were actively hunted, archaeologists and historians knew how they might have been used.

The researchers found another intriguing bit of the past, too, in their analysis. One of the other bone fragments came from a dolphin. But the last came from a North African elephant subspecies, the type used by Carthage in the Punic Wars, now extinct. What it was doing in Spain isn’t clear.

Knowing that these particular whales once lived in the Mediterranean is a clue to grasping how much the world has changed over the past couple thousand years, through the influence of humans. Why don’t these species live in the Mediterranean any more? Hunting pressure has changed the ecology of the oceans so dramatically that no one quite believed that coastal whales ever lived in this area. As the researchers write, “understanding the full extent to which humans have modified natural ecosystems is not straightforward, because we have been doing so for millennia, and then forgetting about it."

These unmistakable squares and circles are the remnants of settlements from as far back as the Bronze Age.

For farmers in Wales, an ongoing drought has meant stressed water supplies and crops. But for Toby Driver, an aerial investigator for the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, it has meant long hours logged in a plane, capturing images of elusive cropmarks that reveal the sites of long hidden ruins.

From above, these cropmarks stand out starkly from the landscape—unmistakable squares and circles that outline settlements from as far back as the Bronze Age. In the past weeks, Driver has captured cropmarks across the Welsh countryside, including those made by a previously undiscovered medieval cemetery, a rare type of monument in this area.

Cropmarks make sense when you think about them. Years ago, the people who settled in these places dug furrows and moats to help protect their lands, built foundations into the earth, and constructed walls. Those features are now invisible on the surface of the land, but their remnants still lurk beneath. Where walls once stood, the soil might be shallower; a filled-in ditch can mean a deep pocket of rich soil.

Most years, these variations in the ground don’t make much of a difference to plants, especially if they’re hardy and shallow-rooted. But when resources are scarce, a filled-in ditch can be a source of much-needed water, allowing the lucky plants above to grow green and strong while their neighbors wilt. Conversely, plants growing above old walls might struggle while their neighbors thrive.

On the ground, the patterns these resource allocations create might be hard to discern. But from the air, they’re clear and distinct. Driver is trying to capture as many as he can before, as everyone hopes, the current drought breaks, and the fields of Wales grow green and strong, whatever lies beneath them.

There might be surprises inside.

It's not a great idea to sunbathe on Mars. But if you really wanted to, and you lived a few billion years ago, we now know where you might have gone. In a recent study in the Journal of Geophysical Research, planetary geomorphologist Mackenzie Day and astrobiologist David Catling announced their discovery of about 800 "ghost dunes"—the imprints of ancient sand piles—clustered in two different locations on Mars. Examining these former dunes can tell us more about the red planet’s historic climate, and might contain more surprises as well.

As Liza Lester explains at the American Geophysical Union's GeoSpace blog, when the dunes formed, Mars was a little more exciting, with flowing water and active volcanoes. About two billion years ago, streams or lava flows began covering the dunes with sediment, which hardened around them like a mold. Then wind blew the sand away from the inside, leaving an empty shell behind—a "ghost dune."

On Earth, you can find ghost dunes in the Snake River Plain, in Idaho. (They date back to the late Pleistocene.) They have also been spotted on Mars before: there's a really good field near the Medusa Fossae formation, for example. In this new study, Day and Catling identified about 300 previously undiscovered ghost dunes in the Hellas Basin—a 1600-mile long impact crater that also boasts volcanic flows and canyon systems—and nearly 500 in Noctis Labyrinthus, a mazelike tangle of steep valleys.

They found them by examining images of Mars' surface for clusters of crescent-shaped pits, "aligned like croissants on a baker's tray," as Lester puts it. This particular shape indicates that the dunes were "barchan dunes," which form on flat surfaces in unidirectional winds.

By taking note of the dunes' orientation, the researchers were able to figure out which way the wind was blowing. In both cases, it was coming from the north, and slowly pushing the dunes south—different than the winds there today. This indicates that the environmental conditions on Mars have changed over time.

By comparing these ghost dunes to existing Martian ones, the researchers were also able to size them up. They found that the Hellas Basin dunes averaged around 250 feet tall, while the Noctis Labyrinthus dunes were about half that.

If we're really lucky, the dunes might be able to tell us even more about the ancient landscape. As Day and Catling point out, it's possible that the wind didn't manage to completely clear out the molds. In that case, some ancient sand—and whatever it contained—might still be stuck in them, protected from surface radiation and other destructive elements.

"There is probably nothing living there now," Day told Lester. "But if there ever was anything on Mars, this is a better place on average to look."

And your irises, rosebushes, and spruce trees, too.

Earlier this year, a woman in Calgary, Canada, planted a blue spruce tree near her house. It started to grow, which was good. Then it kept growing. Spruces can get up to 60 feet tall even in yards—something she hadn't considered when she picked this one out. She started to weigh her options.

This story could have ended whimsically—she could have named the spruce Clifford. It could have ended sadly, with the young tree chucked in the woodchipper. Instead, it ended practically: The woman picked up the phone and called Sarah Adams. Now the spruce has a new home a little ways away, one of a motley crew of formerly abandoned plants that all live together on Adams's land.

Adams runs a cut flower farm called Alberta Girl Acres. She sells bouquets at local farmer's markets and through a CSA program. But this past summer, the farm expanded its purview: They now do plant rescue, too. "Rehome your pretties," advises a dedicated section on the farm's website. "No plant left behind."

Adams's tender heart is connected to her own green thumb. Before she bought her farm last summer, she was a renter in the city, and moved around a lot. "I would do a lot of gardening in those rental yards," she says. "I'd plant raspberries, or a pine, or peonies, or ferns, or whatever, just because I loved the idea of creating these spaces." Then the landlord would sell the property, and Adams would move on. "I thought, 'Wouldn't it be great if there was someone I could call—somewhere for these plants to go?'"

Now that she has her own farm, Adams is trying to turn it into that place. She started by rescuing 500 irises from a woman who didn't have room for all of them. "They now have a spot and they're all thriving and doing really well," she says.

Since then, media coverage, from the CBC and local outlets, has brought penitent plant-owners running. A couple gave her three 25-year-old rosebushes, displaced when the pair expanded their deck. She took in over a dozen shrubs from the president of a condo board. ("They were redoing their landscaping," she explains.) And she still gets spruce calls: "There's quite a lot of people who have asked if I would take those little baby saplings that are popping up in their yard," she says.

There are some practical limitations. Adams will accept drop-off plants from anywhere, but she only does rescues in the Calgary area. "Doing deliveries or farm errands, we pick them up as we go," she says. She asks that plant donors do their own digging if at all possible. And mostly, she has to focus on her primary business: Being a botanical samaritan doesn't pay the bills.

But it does lend itself to big dreams. "In my imagination it would be so sweet to walk into an established farm where, say, 75 percent of the plants were adopted," she says. "A jungle of all of these different things that have their own stories... We could be a resource for people who are looking for affordable plants, where they can come and pick them up."

For now, though, everyone is focusing on putting down roots. "It's a fairly simple plan, right?" she says. "We'll take your plants."

Centuries-old latrines in Denmark drop big hints about diets, trade, and health.

The moment that researchers closed in on the wine barrels, they braced against the stench. The vessels, found at an archaeological site in Copenhagen, Denmark’s Kultorvet neighborhood, emitted a rank smell—mightily sulfuric, like an egg rotting over the course of hundreds of years. Wine wasn’t the culprit: The bottles brimmed with centuries-old human poop.

At first glance, latrines may look like trash heaps, studded with bits of brick, the odd piece of straw, and other rubbish jumbled in over time. To tell the difference between a trash-strewn latrine and a regular garbage pile, researchers sometimes analyze phosphate levels to gauge how much urine has accumulated over time. In the case of the wine barrels, though, there was no need. They were self-contained and stinky, and “there was no doubt that this was fecal material we were looking at,” says Mette Marie Hald, a senior researcher at the National Museum of Denmark.

Most latrines “are not as bad as they sound, actually,” Hald adds. “They’re more like a compost heap with rich, organic soil.” But this instance was different: When the Museum of Copenhagen excavated the barrels a few years ago, the contents inside were fine-grained and moist, almost buttery. The barrels had essentially been buried beneath an 17th-century road that bisected the neighborhood, and sealed this part of its smelly history away to stew in secret.

While the centuries-old stool has been unusually funky-smelling, it was also uncommonly well-preserved: In it, fruit pits and seeds were still intact. It was ripe for analysis, and Hald reckoned “it would be a shame” to focus solely on archaeobotanical inquiry, her field of expertise. She recruited museum colleagues and scholars from the University of Copenhagen to learn even more. Latrines are stuffed with smelly wisdom, so the team dug in, analyzing grains, seeds, fruits, bones, and parasite eggs. In a new paper published this month in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, Hald and her collaborators describe the surprising nutritional, economic, and public-health revelations from centuries-old poop.

It’s hard to say exactly who squatted above the barrels, though researchers know that the latrine was situated behind a row of houses in the late 17th century. Due to the coins, tiles, and other archaeological materials found in the area, they’ve surmised that these homes may have belonged to Dutch merchants—or at least residents with a fondness for Dutch culture. Even so, “we can’t say whether the latrine belonged to one family or 10 families, or if they shared it with servants,” Hald says. The researchers can’t reconstruct a single, specific meal, either—all of the components are jumbled together, and likely spanned many tables and intestines.

But the contents do provide a partial snapshot of what a certain cluster of people—probably wealthy, well-to-do ones—ate in the 1680s. It’s also a rare chance to chance to fact-check the written record against the decidedly more pungent one. “Around this time, we get the first recipe books in Denmark,” Hald says. “But are recipe books a proper reflection of what people actually ate?” It’s possible that Renaissance-era recipe collections were stuffed with concoctions that rarely made it to the plate. If these tomes can sometimes represent an idealized version of the palate and stomach, Hald adds, preserved poop is “sort of like an uncensored version, as it were.”

While poop doesn’t exactly help to spell out specific recipes, it does reveal the ingredients that filled shelves and larders. Hald and her team found evidence of grains (probably from bread, porridge, and beer, the authors write), as well as herring, cod, eel, pork, and a bounty of fruit and vegetables. It’s unclear whether these apples, pears, figs, and carrots would have been consumed fresh, pickled, dried, or preserved. In any case, they were a surprise to Hald, who had expected to find more along the lines of bland gruel. “I was struck by the variety, and how healthy it looked,” she says.

While some of this produce could have grown in local gardens, other fruits and spices flourish in different climes, which is why the authors suggest that this feces can also map historic trade routes. Pollen from cloves and citrus fruits (possibly bitter orange or lemon) “shows that the Kultorvet residents were not restricted to local foods, but were able to purchase often quite expensive exotic products for their meals,” the authors write. The researchers speculate that cloves’ presence indicates a connection with Indonesia, and that Dutch merchants returning home from the trading colony of Tranquebar, in India, could have stopped in the Mediterranean and picked up figs, oranges, and lemons along the way.

As a snapshot of what’s living inside a gut, poop offers a picture of public health, too. The researchers found proof of parasites in the stool, in the form of roundworm, whipworm, and tapeworm eggs. When parasites are found in soil around streets or homes, it can be unclear if they infected humans or the animals that lived nearby, explains Piers Mitchell, a paleopathologist and senior research associate in the department of archaeology of the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the research. “The most reliable evidence for human infection by intestinal parasites comes from latrines,” he says. “Some parasites can infect both humans and animals, but only humans sit on a latrine.” Based on the presence of parasite eggs, Hald and company also concluded the latrine's users ate food that was commonly “contaminated and undercooked.”

Next, Hald will analyze the contents of 10 other latrines scattered across a few different towns in Denmark. If the study in Copenhagen offered a peek into the habits of a well-to-do merchant family in the Renaissance age, these others will extend that glimpse farther into the past, and broaden that view. Hald wonders what sorts of differences might emerge across geography and class, and whether samples from the 1400s or 1500s might also reveal traces of cloves, citrus, or other things that would suggest even-earlier trade routes. Who consumed fresh fruit, and where, and when? “We don’t know yet,” Hald says. But the answer may be there, if someone is willing to sift through a bunch of crap.

From 1903 until 1969, women flocked to Siglufjörður to spend long hours gutting and packing fish.

Herring can be brined, smoked, or pickled in vinegar, brought to your table as matjes, kippers, or if you’re lucky, marinated in cream by Zabar’s deli on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Today the fish is automatically processed by fillet and brining machines. But up until a half a century ago, the process had historically been done by hand, specifically female hands.

They were called Herring Girls in the North Atlantic countries—places such as the Scottish Shetlands and Outer Hebrides, the Danish Faroe Islands, and Iceland. They were the women who processed the fishermen’s catch, standing for long hours on the piers, sorting, chopping, filleting the herring before brining and packing them in barrels. Like flocks of gulls, these women followed the fish supply to the cold-water ports where the Atlantic herring (Clupea harengus) were so plentiful that a massive school could contain more than a billion fish.

In Iceland, from the 1910s through the 1960s, the herring industry was an economic life-raft for a far north Atlantic island nation burdened for centuries with food scarcity, inclement weather, and lack of a cooperative growing season. Before, during and after the world wars, Siglufjörður was the capital of the herring industry, accounting for 25-45 percent of total export earnings. During its heyday, this small town at the northern tip of a very northern fjord jutting out to the Greenland Sea was home to Iceland’s equivalent of the gold rush.

Herring is a highly perishable fish and the loads were large. The industry flourished because while the men fished the seas, coopered barrels, and worked in the fish meal factories, the women were needed to do the fast work of preserving the fish before it spoiled. From all over Iceland, women came to Siglufjörður from their small towns and family farms for the opportunity to make money.

“During the 1930s, an active herring girl could earn as much as $10 a day,” says Anita Elefsen, Director of the Herring Era Museum in Siglufjörður. “Each girl gutted and packed their own barrel. After filling a barrel, a token was put in their boots, and the tokens were then exchanged for receipts at the end of the workday. Once a week they were paid out with cash.”

Margret Thoroddsdottir was born in Siglufjörður and worked for nine summers as a herring girl. She started when she was 14 in the summer of 1951. “As soon as the boats came in the girls were called to work. If it was at night, we were awakened by callers who had that specific duty. They would shout loudly, ‘Get up, get up – the herring has arrived!‘”

The work was hard, Elefsen says. “Since they were paid by the barrels, they competed with time to accomplish as much as possible every single work day, to earn as much as they could.”

“Depending on the catch, we would work all night if we had to,” says Thoroddsdottir. “Sometimes the work lasted for more than 24 hours straight.”

But then, these are the white nights of Icelandic summers—the town is a hair’s breadth from the Arctic Circle. There is no real darkness; night becomes a muted day, prolonged dusk until dawn finally shows. Icelanders are used to working under the night’s sun. It’s as if the solar energy seeps into their skin, creating seasonal indefatigability.

Like Alaska during the years of the Klondike Gold Rush, getting to Siglufjörður was difficult. Even today, there is only one road into town, Route 76, which takes you along a sweeping blind bluff of dizzying heights without any guardrails. Then the road pitches you into a one-lane tunnel with no red-green light warning you of oncoming traffic. But this is an improvement. From 1946 until 1967, when Route 76 was completed, there was only an old mountain pass. Before that, the only means of reaching Siglufjörður was by sea. Despite the remoteness, during the Herring Era, the town’s population quadrupled each summer.

Thoroddsdottir remembers it as a bustling, lively place. “There were two cinemas in town. And lots of romances going on as well. The town was full of young people working hard but also enjoying themselves as best they could. There were dance halls with live music on the weekends.”

The romances spurred an entire genre of popular music about the herring girls. And while Scotland and northern England have a few mournful ballads dedicated to the plight of their own herring ladies, Iceland’s musical tribute to their “fish women” is surprisingly energetic and upbeat, many employing an accordion with a waltz/polka beat. The contrast is striking. The songs are relentlessly buoyant and heady with temporal lust:

They greeted us with their merry song,
the herring girls,
and then the evenings were bright and long,
but the nights were sweetest.

Because we were young and the love was pure
and our blood hot,
The summer passed and the sun shone
and the sea was boiling with herring.

The women were housed in Róaldsbrakki, which were rooms above the shipping offices. “The ones that came from around the country were provided with housing at the cost of the employer,” says Elefsen. There could be up to 50 women at a time in the apartments.

“The living quarters were primitive, to say the least, and the shared spaces were cramped,” recalls Thoroddsdottir. “But there were no curfews for women, and men were allowed to visit any time.”

The rooms of the Róaldsbrakki, as part of the Herring Era Museum, have been restored, and the decor and personal items donated either by the former herring girls or their families.

Without the herring girls there, the rooms look cozy, not cramped, with painted bunk beds, an iron and ironing board left out. Skirts, cotton shirts, slips, and bathrobes hang in the open closets. In the kitchen are the coffee urns and teapots, flour and sugar tins, cups, toaster, a floral-painted bread box. Spread out on top of several portmanteaus are album covers of Nordic troubadours of the time—and also of Harry Belafonte and Elvis Presley. The wall calendar is left open to a moment when the museum decided to make time stop: August 1941. It looks as if the girls temporarily stepped out and will be coming back—and the sea will be boiling with herring again.

The herring girl era ended in the summer of 1969 when the boats came back empty.

“The herring was fished up,” says Helgi Thorarensen, professor of Aquaculture and Fish Biology at Holar University in Iceland. “The disappearance of the herring caught everyone by surprise. And it was not until later, in the 1980s, that Iceland began to implement proper fish management and farming.”

The herring girls left overnight. “It was very difficult for many in Siglufjörður,” says Thoroddsdottir. By then, she had moved away too, though came back often to visit her parents. She moved back permanently later in life, and she sees the town changing all over again.

“Most of it relates to the opening of the tunnel that connects Siglufjörður to the Northeast of Iceland and Akureyri. The tunnel made things possible with new investments in the town. We now have a brand-new hotel and new businesses. Tourism has increased here, but it is not a new herring adventure.”

At 81, Thoroddsdottir still sees some of her old friends she worked with on the piers. “I do keep in touch with a few of them," she says. "We meet regularly to chat and share old stories.”

"Thanks a little, thanks the most, please just share your drinking toasts."

I love a good toast. That moment when friends, family, strangers, or even enemies stop to raise a glass in mutual celebration is a nearly universal human experience. And thanks to the ingenuity of drinkers across the globe, there are as many unique ways to say "cheers" as there are people who make them.

Some are funny, some are sad, but more often than not good toasts contain a bit of hope and barstool philosophy. Personally, I’m partial to saying, “May we be who our dogs think we are.” I wish I had a dog...

We want to hear about the toasts and sayings from around the world that you like best. Check out some of the initial suggestions we got from our Facebook community. Some are darkly funny odes (“I drink to your health when I'm with you, I drink to your health when alone, I drink to your health so often, I'm a little concerned for my own”), while others are more sincere (“salud, amor, y dinero, y tiempo para gozarlos,” which translates to "health, love, and wealth, and time to enjoy them.”). Still others are borrowed from movies or literature, such as this gem from Lord of the Rings: “I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”

Even if you prefer a simple “bottom's up,” “sláinte,” or “kampai,” we want to hear about it. Share your favorite toasts with us via the form below, and we’ll publish our favorites in an upcoming article. Here’s to you and all your toasts! May they make us laugh, make us cry, and make for one hell of a post.

It happened on the playground.

Of all the changes within Nicaragua to come out of the overthrow of the Somoza regime by the Sandinistas in 1979, perhaps the least anticipated was the birth of a new language. Nicaraguan Sign Language is the only language spontaneously created, without the influence of other languages, to have been recorded from its birth. And though it came out of a period of civil strife, it was not political actors but deaf children who created the language’s unique vocabulary, grammar, and syntax.

When the Sandinista National Liberation Front gained power, they embarked on what has been described as a “literacy crusade,” developing programs to promote fluency in reading Spanish. One such initiative was opening the first public school for deaf education, the Melania Morales Special Education Center, in Managua’s Barrio San Judas. According to Ann Senghas, a professor of psychology at Barnard College who has studied NSL, it was the first time in the history of the country that deaf children were brought together in large numbers.

These children, who ranged in age from four to 16, had no experience with sign language beyond the “home signs” they used with family members to communicate broad concepts. American Sign Language, which has existed since the early 19th century, is used throughout the Americas and is often considered a “lingua franca” among deaf people whose first sign language is a national or regional one. But the first Nicaraguan deaf school did not use ASL or any signs at all. Instead, they focused on teaching children to speak and lip-read Spanish.

This educational strategy, known as “oralism,” has long been a subject of debate in deaf education, one that was particularly fierce in the United States where ASL originated. Around the turn of the 20th century, some deaf-education advocates believed that the ability to speak and lip-read a language would be more beneficial to deaf individuals than “manualism,” communication via sign language. By learning English, they argued, deaf individuals would be able to fully participate in U.S. society.

English immersion for the deaf was part of a wider effort, epitomized by the eugenics movement, to stamp out differences within the American population. Among the most vocal proponents of eugenics when it came to the deaf community was the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell. Bell argued that if deaf people were allowed to communicate via sign language, their isolation from the hearing population would lead to more deaf marriages and, consequently, a larger deaf population.

“Oralism, Bell believed, allowed deaf people to leave their educational and cultural corners and participate in society at large,” writes Brian H. Greenwald, professor of history at the deaf institution Gallaudet University, via email. Bell, Greenwald notes, “used oralism as a form of assimilation.” It was a strategy that Bell hoped would eventually lead to the eradication of deafness in American society.

In Managua in the 1980s, too, though free of the influence of eugenicists, the Sandinistas focus on Spanish literacy resulted in the immersion of deaf students in Spanish speaking and reading skills. But while the country’s deaf children were being taught Spanish inside the classroom, outside the classroom they were spontaneously developing their own method of signed communication.

Though older and younger students attended separate classes during school hours, on buses and playgrounds the children quickly began to select “conventions” for necessary words. Such conventions occur when a community of speakers, who at home may have all used different signs to refer to an object or action, begin to consistently default to using just one, says James Shepard-Kegl. Kegl is co-director of the Nicaraguan Sign Language Project, which administers programs to empower the Nicaraguan deaf community through the use of sign language. “You start building a vocabulary this way,” he says.

All languages have grammar and syntax, but the first children at Managua’s deaf school had no model for how a language worked because they had been isolated from signed, spoken, and written language all their lives, Shepard-Kegl notes. When the children interacted, instead of adapting their signs to fit an existing language, they developed something unique. While the older students had more life experience, it was actually the younger kids that drove the language’s development. “As you get older, your language instincts tend to diminish,” says Shepard-Kegl. “A lot of those older kids weren’t generating grammar the way little kids did. They copied the grammar the little kids generated.”

No one knows exactly how many individuals are needed to generate a new language or what percentage of those individuals need to be young children. Smaller-scale isolated deaf-education programs had existed previously in 20th-century Nicaragua, Shepard-Kegl says, but the critical mass needed to spontaneously develop Nicaraguan Sign Language only occurred with the opening of Melania Morales. Within a few years, teachers and education officials recognized that something incredible was happening at the school and, in 1986, Nicaragua’s Ministry of Education invited the U.S. linguist Judy Kegl to visit as a deaf-education consultant.

For Kegl and the other linguists that accompanied her after the initial visit, the opportunity to identify and study Nicaraguan Sign Language was “extremely rare,” writes Senghas in her 1995 MIT doctoral dissertation, Children’s Contribution to the Birth of Nicaraguan Sign Language, which focuses on the years she spent working with Kegl. (Kegl is today co-director of the Nicaraguan Sign Language Project and married to Shepard-Kegl.) It’s an opportunity that owes much to the birth of NSL occuring in the 1980s, when researchers had access to video cameras and could accurately record exactly what was happening. “To my knowledge,” Senghas writes, “there has not been another case of linguists and psycholinguists documenting the birth of a language on a community-wide scale.”

This is not to say, however, that other independent community-based sign languages never existed. In fact, the linguistic world is rich with a wide variety of mutually unintelligible signed languages. Though American Sign Language and some other widely utilized sign languages, such as Chinese Sign Language and Indo-Pakistani Sign Language, have long histories, they were often inaccessible to deaf families and institutions in rural, mountainous, or politically-charged regions. In order to communicate manually, these communities had to develop their own signed languages. For example, in early-to-mid-20th century Jim Crow-era Raleigh, North Carolina, under-resourced and pedagogically isolated African-American deaf schools independently developed unique languages, says Susan Burch, an American Studies professor at Middlebury College. It’s something that has occurred many times in history.

Nicaraguan Sign Language similarly developed in a vacuum. Whereas American Sign Language could have extended into Nicaragua by the 1980s, as it did in neighboring Costa Rica where it combined with a locally developed sign language in the 1960s, Nicaragua’s geo-political isolation prevented ASL from entering the country, notes Shepard-Kegl. Not only did this allow for the independent creation of Nicaraguan Sign Language, but it helped the nascent form of communication to survive.

Around the world, deaf sign languages, including the one spoken among African Americans in Raleigh, have disappeared or changed significantly when a more widely used language has entered the region. Linguists refer to this displacement as “linguistic imperialism.”

It is a concept that has generated considerable controversy. Some linguists feel that the “contamination” of a local language by a more globally dominant one results in the marginalization of a native community because it supplants the indigenous form of communication with something from outside. Others believe that when dominant languages arrive, they are appropriated by indigenous communities, often combining with an existing language to create a distinctly local version. Deaf Costa Ricans born prior to the 1960s, for example, primarily use what is referred to as Old Costa Rican Sign Language. When ASL arrived in the country after the 1960s, its appropriation by the deaf community resulted in the creation of New Costa Rican Sign Language (sometimes called Modern Costa Rican Sign Language), around 60 percent of which is made up of ASL signs.

In Nicaragua today, changes in technology and communication have led to the increased use of American Sign Language within the deaf community. While ASL has not replaced the pristine, isolated NSL of the 1980s, which still dominates deaf education there, Nicaraguan Sign Language has begun a natural process of integrating elements of ASL. “Languages, by nature, borrow,” says Shepard-Kegl. “They either borrow or they perish.”

For all that linguists have learned from the study of Nicaraguan Sign Language, perhaps most important is the proof it has provided for a controversial theory of language. In the 1960s, Noam Chomsky suggested that children are born with an innate ability to learn human language. Babies are not given grammar lessons and yet they reliably learn grammar because they have inherent expectations about how languages function, says Shepard-Kegl. Kids “don’t know what the [grammatical] rule is but [they] expect that there is a rule.” In Managua’s first deaf school, there was no model and no one to guide the children in sign language and still a language was created in a way never observed before.

The seals depict Greek gods and—surprise, surprise—erotic scenes.

Deep in the collection of the Israel Museum, in Jerusalem, the assistant curator Morag Wilhelm found a small cardboard box. Inside, the AFP reports, was a gold ring set with a small ancient seal. The box was labeled “Freud Nike.”

It had belonged to Eva Rosenfeld, a psychoanalyst who grew up in Germany and settled in Vienna. She became close with Anna Freud, the daughter of Sigmund Freud and a psychoanalyst herself. As their relationship deepened, Rosenfeld became a patient of Anna’s father. The ring was a symbol of his connection to her—he handed them out only to his closest associates and students.

Wilhelm decided to track the rest of those rings down, and now the museum has collected six into a new exhibit named, brilliantly, “Freud of the Rings.” It’s the first time these signet rings will be displayed together.

Freud began gifting rings to other psychoanalysts after he broke with Carl Jung in 1912, the AFP writes. Initially, he gathered five of his most dedicated friends and colleagues into a “secret society of psychoanalysts” and gave each a ring to signify their connection. The rings are set with stones from antiquity, carved with goddesses or erotic scenes. These ancient myths had a particular resonance for Freud and his work. (Think: the Oedipal complex.)

The exhibit includes rings Freud gave to Sandor Ferenczi, a Hungarian psychoanalyst; Ernst Simmel, a German psychoanalyst who later emigrated to the U.S. to escape Hitler; and Anna Freud. Wilhelm tracked them down in collections around the world, including London’s Freud Museum, the Jewish Museum in New York, and the Austrian National Library.

These six rings represent only a part of the small group of rings Freud gave out. There are at least 20 altogether; perhaps this exhibit will prompt their owners to reveal their whereabouts.

The underground "Chinês Clandestinos" have persisted throughout the years.

Lisbon, Portugal, is renowned for culinary offerings such as salty, charcoal-grilled sardines, the addicting pasteis de nata, and an increasingly innovative fine dining scene. The city's Chinese cuisine isn’t usually mentioned in the same breath—until you head to the maze-like backstreets of Mouraria and Martim Moniz, where red lanterns dangle from upper-floor windows of apartment buildings. For those in the know, these are symbols of covert culinary operations.

A secretive universe lies within these apartment buildings: Chinês Clandestinos, or “clandestine Chinese.” Clustered in the historic Moorish quarter behind Martim Moniz, these no-frills restaurants are an open secret among a handful of Lisboetas. Often operating out of family homes, they’re typically not official dining establishments, and are often referred to merely by road name and number, such as Rua da Guia 9. New spots come and go, yet some have been operating under the radar in one form or another for decades.

What makes clandestinos special is their exceptional food, a world away from the Westernized Chinese restaurants that have cropped up in the city. Here, crispy frogs’ legs intermingle with chicken. Strips of pork are seared with hot peppers, and eggplant is liberally doused with a bean, ginger, and chili sauce, and then fried so that the sauce both caramelizes and softens it. Ravioli frito de porco (fried pork dumplings) are also a staple across clandestinos.

The cobbled, car-free streets of Mouraria lie in one of Lisbon’s most ethnically diverse areas. It’s a legacy tracing back to 1147, when the crusaders conquered Lisbon and King Afonso Henriques decreed that Muslims remaining in the city should live in these hilly streets beneath the castle walls. It’s long been the spiritual and literal home of immigrants in Lisbon: Today, many of the neighborhood’s residents are of African and Asian descent.

The Chinese community has an especially strong presence in Lisbon. Around the turn of the millennium, some entrepreneurial Chinese families began running small-scale catering operations. There were no menus, no formal opening hours, and no non-Chinese diners present. But the clandestinos have recently begun to attract a new type of clientele. In large part due to the dramatic gentrification of Martim Moniz square, restaurant owners have suddenly found themselves catering to groups of Erasmus students, new residents, and the occasional traveler who’s heard about these spots.

One June day, I take a stroll around the clandestino epicenter of Mouraria, often known as the birthplace of Fado music, and for the Moorish castle sitting above the steep cobbled streets. With me is the German-born Anna Gruber, an adopted Lisboeta who has been living in the city for over a decade. She now runs the Estrela Park guest house, and runs tours specializing in hidden Lisbon spots. “Many of the clandestinos here are really busy now,” she says, pointing to a recently-opened locale tucked into a yellow apartment building.

We walk along flag-strewn squares to Rua da Guia 9, thought to be one of the first clandestinos to open in Lisbon. When we get there, the owner, Senhora Zhang, tells us that she’s been running the restaurant for seven years, having taken it over from a previous owner-occupier. “It used to be mainly Chinese families eating here,” she says. “But that’s changed in the past few years. We have big crowds of students, and many different nationalities. One of the biggest challenges has been communicating in other languages, but we have had our menus translated, and it’s easy for diners to write down the numbers of the dishes they want.”

Since her clandestino is still underground, Zhang says that word about the restaurant has spread on social media. But the local community is one step ahead. “Our restaurant is so full of foreigners now that when new restaurants open up, word spreads quickly and the Chinese community eat at those places instead,” she says. Zhang says that the heightened spotlight has brought opportunities into the fold, but something’s been lost, too. Online reviews mean that the once-informal spots now have to be spotlessly clean, and family members can no longer treat the place as if it were home. (Still, a handful of personal effects, such as school books and family photographs, are present.)

While some less-established clandestinos still feel like home living rooms—with friends and family members playing cards—Rua da Guia 9 has immaculately-laid tables, a full bar, and a menu with roughly 10 pages of dishes designed for sharing. Among these dishes includes wide rice noodles, cooked with everything from chili-spiked tofu to garlicky spinach. We order a plateful with spinach, along with gambas na chapa quente, or prawns served sizzling on a hot plate.

Other clandestinos have found success amidst shifting tides, such as the one run by Zhiaming Lu. Lu was known as one of the top chefs in Northern China before he moved his entire family to Lisbon some 14 years ago. Lu ran one of the first clandestinos in the city from his apartment in Mouraria, and was so successful that he pulled in enough money to apply for the relevant permits and go “above board.” “Moving to Mouraria was a change and a challenge, but it was not hard,” he says. “There was a well-established Chinese community here, and as I had built a reputation in Northern China, it was easy to find employment first in clandestino kitchens, and then my own place.”

These days, his eponymously named restaurant is far from clandestine: Wide glass windows on all sides draw hungry gazes from locals passing by, and his name is emblazoned on bright yellow and red signs outside. Lu’s former clandestino, on Rua do Benformoso, continues to be one of the most popular in town, although many say it lacks Lu’s presence both in the kitchen and as a notable figure in the dining room, surveying his dishes with an artist’s critical pride.

While his clandestino has changed over the years, Lu adheres to traditional dishes and ingredients from China's Shandong region, such as chili, peanut, cilantro, and cumin. “Most restaurants here are second-generation Chinese restaurants. They have already adapted to Portuguese tastes and ingredients,” he says. “But it is not hard to source the ingredients here, and to make the dishes the same way I cooked them in China.”

It’s proved to be a winning combination—at one point, he shows me a Best Regional Chef trophy he was awarded in China. These days, Lu attracts a wide range of diners, Chinese and Portuguese alike. That’s partially due to how special his menu is: It brims with spicy chicken hearts, and squid, prawn, and fish dishes are abundant (as befits a cuisine that has traveled from one coastal region to another). And vegetarians can feast on tofu and seitan seared with peanuts on a hot plate, or spiced, stir-fried, and served as mock duck with crunchy vegetables.

The clandestinos’ family-style cooking, and their place in Lisbon, has prevailed as everything else has seemingly changed. “There may be more tourists and students heading [to the clandestinos], but at heart they remain the same,” Lu says. “I made my success based on the quality of my cooking, and the same is true of these places: The best ones survive, even with their restrictions. In my time, it was all word of mouth. Today there is more publicity, but they will adapt, they won’t disappear. And I will still eat at them.”

Want to eat your way through Lisbon? Explore the city’s many culinary offerings in 2019 on an Atlas Obscura trip.