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The World's Newest, Most Gloriously Designed Maps

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Cartographers, rejoice.

Calling all map enthusiasts: the North American Cartographic Information Society will soon be releasing the 2018 Atlas of Design, its latest compendium of the world’s newest and best maps. Every two years since 2012, NACIS, a nonprofit organization that supports and promotes cartography, has released a new volume of maps, carefully selected from hundreds of entrants by a panel of judges. This year reveals a bumper crop of map-makers: NACIS received over 300 submissions for just 32 spots.

The entrants were judged by a panel of 12 and Lauren Tierney, who co-edited the Atlas of Design along with Alethea Steingisser and Caroline Rose, acknowledges a healthy divergence of views. “We don’t believe there’s any way to really be objective about something like this," she says. "The judges were often in disagreement; almost every map was scored well by at least one judge and poorly by another. This disagreement was exactly our goal in bringing the panel together, because our aim was to ensure that the final selection was not dominated by one style or taste, but held something for everyone."

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While the editors of the latest edition of the Atlas of Design don't identify any dominant trends in cartography over the past few years, “new techniques and cartographic designs emerge that are incredibly varied and different than the last year. As different techniques become popular in the field, they emerge in some of the entries we received.”

One vertical map depicts the boundaries of the Earth’s tectonic plates in startling, luminous colors. Another shows the life of a king eider sea duck. Another, by Heather Smith, is in the style of a 19th-century strip map: it depicts the Annapolis river, and runs six-feet long.

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“The Atlas aims to inspire readers both within the field of cartography and without toward new understandings of design, and of the power that a well-crafted map can have,” says Tierney. “In an age when more and more mapping tasks are being turned over to computers, the Atlas provides one more answer to the question: What do cartographers do?”

Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from the upcoming fourth edition of the Atlas of Design, which will be released in October 2018; pre-orders are available until September 15, 2018.

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What Is Walden Pond?

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Its cultural meaning may be calcified—but off the page, it's changing fast.

On a typical summer day at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, swimmers pull themselves from shore to shore, safety floats in tow. Planes buzz by overhead. A few times an hour, silver and purple commuter trains rocket through the trees, on their way to or from the center of Boston. Even the back shore, far from the beach house, is crowded. A man flays a fly-fishing rod back and forth, seemingly oblivious to the couple canoodling behind him. “I can see you guys,” he reassures them after a few dozen whips.

In 1854, Henry David Thoreau published Walden: Or, Life in the Woods, an account of the two years he spent living in a one-room cabin on the shores of Walden Pond. The book has since cemented itself in the American consciousness—as well as on many American school reading lists—and the words "Walden Pond" now conjure, in the imaginations of many people who have never been there, stillness, self-sufficiency, and untouched natural majesty. Even as people have reassessed the book and its author for living less independently than he claimed, the pond itself has largely escaped such scrutiny.

But the real Walden is different from this Walden of the mind. The actual body of water has lived through centuries of change and use. These days, it's often full of people, our sporting equipment, our trash, and our excretions. The historic pond reflects us relentlessly, and the image often shifts. So I spoke to a photographer, a scientists, and a computer game developer, and asked them: What is Walden today?

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The Photographer

As of press time, Walden Pond has 176 reviews on Yelp. Many of these are positive. People call the pond "majestic," "serene," "bucolic," "inspiring," and "internationally acclaimed." They give high marks to the the visitor's center, the bathrooms, and the beach house, all of which are the work of the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR), which has managed the site since it became a State Reservation in 1975. (They also like the statue of Henry D. himself, who is posed with his left arm outstretched and his hand open, as if pleading with people about something, perhaps to leave him alone.)

Others find themselves less impressed. Reviewers have docked stars for "rude people," the slant of the beach, the parking fees, and the firm anti-pet policy ("I think HDT would have let me bring my dog"). "I get the historical importance of this place but I have to say I was a bit underwhelmed," wrote one visitor who came earlier in 2018.

"Walden—it's its own cultural meme," says S.B. Walker, the photographer behind the 2017 book Walden. "Everybody has an idea. When people go there, there's almost a little bit of disappointment, I think."

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Every year, Walden Pond hosts hundreds of thousands of people. Most—half a million, some years—come in summer. A scroll through the pond's official Twitter account reveals that the whole place ended up "closed for capacity" for 11 days this past July, often before noon. "No walk-ins or drop-offs," the Tweets warn. (Savvy locals ignore all of this and go in through a back trail marked "Not a Public Entrance," often risking a ticket by parking at nearby Concord High School.)

Walk around Walden on a hot day, and you'll certainly find transcendentalists and English teachers. "People will go there to do spiritual or quasi-spiritual activities," Walker says. "People come to do yoga, and other things that are mindful"—to live deliberately, at least for a little while, before they have to dash out to beat rush hour. Once I saw someone dressed in purple velvet, shooting a video for her philosophy Youtube channel about the place of nature in contemporary life.

But other motivations (and outfits) are more prevalent. "The majority of people are there to cool off during the summer," says Walker. "They're there to swim."

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Walker grew up just southeast of Concord, in a similarly small town called Lincoln. He got into Thoreau in college—his gateway drug was a deep cut, an 1862 Atlantic essay called "Wild Apples"—and when he returned from a stint abroad in Greece, he found himself wandering around Walden, remembering his own childhood and thinking about transcendentalism.

He was interested in the clash between what people expected from Walden and what they got—and whether this was really a clash at all, or just a choice of how to pay attention. "Even when [Thoreau] was there, the railroad ran 20 feet from the pond," he says. "People were cutting wood in the forest, and cutting ice out of the pond in the winter. It’s only been in his telling of it that somehow, it comes across as more remote than it is."

In 2009, Walker decided to start taking photographs. For the next four years, he visited often, getting to know the regulars and collecting small, illustrative moments. "So much of Walden's place in America's moral geography has to do with how we relate to our surroundings," he says. In his own Walden, Walker captures the various forms that such relating actually takes today. A Target bag floats on the surface of the lake. Kids play on the railroad tracks, which are just a few yards from one of the pond's edges. A man in a beach chair reads about toe fungus.

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Written out, it sounds a bit bleak. But each shot is suffused with a sense of eerie magic—of the possibilities, aesthetic and emotional, of these new relations. People's belongings are strewn through the underbrush and almost meld with the landscape. In 2010, after heavy rains flooded the beaches, Walker captured a couple kneeling on a submerged bench. A downed ice cream cone, photographed in early fall, brings to mind a winter shot of cracks spiderwebbing across the ice.

"There were a lot of times when I’d walk around the whole pond and I wouldn’t take a single picture," he says. "Then there were days when there were real sparks… real patterns were emerging." In Walker's telling, this possibility, rather than solitude or self-sufficiency, is one of Thoreau's main lessons: "If you are open and perceptive, there’s just an incredible mystery behind every little thing." In other words, if you're looking for two Waldens—the crowded, flooding, too-sloped one that exists in the world, and the untouched one that exists in peoples' minds—"they're both there."


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The Scientist

Curt Stager, too, sees several Waldens at once. A professor of natural science at Paul Smith’s College in New York, Stager reads the past lives of lakes through sediment cores—long, cylindrical samples of what lies at the bottom of them. He often studies bodies of water around the Adirondacks, assessing how climate change has affected them over the past millennium or so.

But a few years ago he branched out—“I needed a comparison site,” he explains—and he and his students spent a summer coring in Concord. When I ask him why, of all the gin joints, he chose Walden Pond to focus on, he answers tautologically. “Because it’s Walden Pond!” he says. “What’s the one lake in New England that you’d want to study?”

Like most lakes, Walden Pond has a long geological past and a shorter, somewhat more dramatic anthropogenic one. (“We always think of Thoreau, but that’s only 150 years ago,” says Stager. “That’s a hundredth of the history.”) It’s a glacial kettle lake, and was first formed about 15,000 years ago, after a massive ice sheet called the Laurentide retreated from New England and left a bit of itself behind, embedded in the bedrock.

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That iceberg "slowly melted down into a gritty pit like ice cream in a cone," as Stager put it in his recent book, Still Waters: The Secret World of Lakes. "Eventually, only the cone remained, exposing the surface of the local groundwater table." Walden's water—which stretches 102 feet down in one basin, making it the deepest natural lake in Massachusetts—now comes about half from groundwater and half from snow and rain.

In an article for Nautilus, Stager imagines how people might have used the pond millennia ago. Three thousand years ago, "people of the late Archaic to early 'Woodland' cultures used some of the earliest clay pots while they camped and cooked beside the lake," he writes. A thousand years ago, Native Americans were seasonally burning forest underbrush and planting maize. Pollen from other core samples reveals that they might have started planting rumex, an edible herb, around the pond in the 16th or 17th centuries.

Then, in 1635, the British came. As Stager and his coauthors summarize in a recent paper, over the next few centuries, as they colonized Concord, the lands around the lake began to change more rapidly. Trees were logged, drowned by high water levels, and burned in forest fires—often thanks to sparks cast off by steam engines, which started chugging through after the Fitchburg Railroad was built in 1844.

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By the time Thoreau moved in a decade later, the lake and its surrounds were far from pristine. In Walden, although Thoreau famously describes himself as living “a mile from any neighbor,” he also talks about hearing the trains go by, borrowing an ax from a man who lived in a nearby shantytown, and smelling a dead horse left in a cellar hole.

After Thoreau’s time there, the surrounding towns continued to grow, bringing new visitors who wanted to do new things. Again, Walden Pond absorbed the impacts, sometimes literally. In the early 1930s, Stager et. al. write, “a new footpath to Thoreau’s cabin site … caused large amounts of soil to wash into the lake.” Swimming beaches and their accompanying infrastructure were created and torn down several times. In the 1950s, Concord established a 35-acre town dump a few hundred yards away; in 1968, the state dosed the water with rotenone, killing the pond's fish in order to refill it with more "sporting" varieties, like rainbow trout.

All these shifts left their mark, but one was bigger than others. When Stager and his team pulled up their cores, “we found a big change in the ecology of the lake starting in the 1930s,” he says—a tipping point that mirrors previous studies. This timing doesn’t match up with rising temperatures, increased precipitation, or decreased winter ice cover, all of which occurred closer to the 1960s. Rather, Stager says, “that’s when the use of the pond [itself] was increasing a lot.”

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Starting around that time, Stager and his team found four telltale species of diatom, single-celled algae that thrive in phosphorus-heavy environments. While digging through slightly older research, they found a U.S. Geological Survey study that pinpointed the source of this phosphorus: It’s pee. Human pee, to be more specific. Currently, “about half the summer phosphorus is from swimmers,” Stager says, diplomatically.

Understanding Walden’s past also helps Stager predict its future, and all this urine could mean we're in for a problem. The more phosphorus in the water, the more microorganisms can thrive there. The more microorganisms, the cloudier the lake. This murk could also cut off light to the mats of green algae at the bottom, which Stager describes as "underwater meadows," and which are also crucial to maintaining water quality. If we lose the meadows, the paper warns, we risk hitting "an ecological tipping point that could severely and permanently reduce the clarity of the lake and degrade its recreational value."

Meanwhile, the stakes are rising with the temperature. Climate change is coming for Walden Pond, as it is for all of us. (Another Walden-adjacent scientist, Richard Primack, has been using observations from Thoreau's journals to pinpoint just how quickly that's occuring.) “It’s going to get warmer there,” says Stager. “That tends to make lakes more vulnerable to algae blooms.” It might also get either wetter or drier, he adds, “both of which could do it, too.”

Hotter temperatures also mean more swimmers, which means more pee, more phosphorus, and more murk. Stager and his colleagues ended their paper with a strong recommendation: "construction of a separate swimming pool facility nearby to relieve pressure on the lake."

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Originally, Stager told the Boston Globe that banning swimming at Walden altogether would be even better. Then, during a meeting with the Thoreau Society, he learned that the state can't do that. "So I recommended that they just restrict where they do it, so it's just where the swimming beach is—and the bathrooms—and not allow swimming elsewhere," he says.

"When I mentioned that, other people got all upset because they're competitive swimmers. They love to swim across the lake." What about putting bathrooms on the other side of the lake? "The DCR people rolled their eyes, yeah right! How are we going to service those on the remote road?"

"Everybody cares about it," Stager concludes. It's just difficult to figure out what to do. But it's imperative, he believes, to do something. "The big picture is learning how to see ourselves as part of nature …. It's not that the lake is in trouble because we've touched it, and our touch is evil or a pollutant. It's just that we have the option of determining or controlling what our influence on the lake is. Why in the world wouldn't we want to have a positive influence?"

At the moment, all is not lost. Stager’s analysis indicates that, compared to 20 years ago, things are pretty much holding steady. “The take-home message is, the DCR has done a great job of stabilizing the lake,” says Stager. “But everybody’s going to have to work harder in a warming future to keep it the way it is—to avoid the risk of loving it to death.”


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The Game Designer

There is one worry-free way to go to Walden, kind of. Last year, after a decade of work, a group of game developers at the University of Southern California's Game Innovation Lab, released Walden, a game. It's a transcendentalist RPG, set on and around the pond. You don't have to deal with the crowds, and you don't have to moralize about your own bodily functions. Your dog can even watch over your shoulder if he wants.

In the game, you are Thoreau, living your Walden life from the summer of 1845 to the spring of 1846. Your days are filled with tasks both practical and transcendental: you have to find food and chop firewood, but you also have to constantly top off your "inspiration," which you can get from watching animals, hanging out alone, or reading Homer. Although you play as Thoreau, and often hear his words read aloud, you don't see him—just his hand when it reaches out to gather blueberries, or pick up an arrowhead off the path. The real stars are Walden Pond and Walden Woods, which have been meticulously, virtually reconstructed.

"Several times people came into the lab, and without even knowing we were making a game about Walden, would say things like 'Hey, is that Walden Pond?'" says Tracy Fullerton, the head of the lab and the game's lead developer. "When locals are able to recognize the landscape just like that, you know you've nailed it."

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While putting the game together, Fullerton visited the real pond frequently. She consulted with historians and scholars, as well as with Thoreau's writings, to get a good sense of the layout and of the ecosystem's other inhabitants. She took photos of the woods and water at all different times of the year, so that the team could get across, pixel by pixel, what she calls "that sense of granular change in all of the trees and plants." Her sound designer even recorded the game's ambient noise—crows, mourning doves, footsteps crunching through leaves—at the site itself.

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The game caused some ripples when it came out—Smithsonian Magazine described it as "the world's most improbable video game"—but to Fullerton, this misses the point. "I think it's fairly ironic that one form of media is considered more incongruous than another when expressing ideas about nature," she says. "Walden, the book, is a mediated account of Thoreau's experiences in nature, in much the same way that Walden the game is a mediated account of the book itself ... the game is just another form of media describing the pond."

Playing also reminded me that the cathartic aspects of Walden have always been inextricable from more practical concerns. In the case of the game, these concerns are less cultural or scientific than personal: Fullerton has written that she made the game to inspire players to "find a balance between survival and the sublime."

During my game-playing, this was tough to achieve. What with the planting of beans, the visits to family in Concord, and the constant search for Emerson's lost books, there wasn't enough time some days to go down to the virtual shore. When a warning screen popped up—"Soon Walden Woods will change to reflect the passing of seasons"—I laughed out loud. I wish I got a pop-up like that when summer was ending, to remind me to properly enjoy myself, to shut my laptop, and to spend more time at whatever Walden we have.

Tattooing in the Civil War Was a Hedge Against Anonymous Death

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Hidden tattoos captured soldiers' pride and patriotism, but also had a practical use.

In 1876, on Oak Street between Oliver and James, a long-lost block of lower Manhattan that now lies underneath a housing project built in the 1950s, a New York Times reporter found the sign he had been looking for—"Tattooing Done Here." Inside the shop, which he described as “a tavern with a well-sanded floor,” he found Martin Hildebrandt, the most famous tattoo artist in 19th-century America.

Short and talkative, with a crucifix inked on his back, Hildebrandt was happy to tell reporters about his unusual trade. As far as historians can tell, he was the first person in the United States to set up a permanent shop as a tattoo artist, at a time when body art was still a hidden practice in the country, associated with circus performers, faraway cultures, sailors, and native tribes.

But quietly Americans of all sorts were getting tattoos. Secret societies such as the Masons and Good Fellows had their members inked with special signs, and as Hildebrandt would tell the Times reporter, he’d worked on people from high and low society—from mechanics and farmers to “real ladies” and gentlemen. During the Civil War, when he’d served in the Union's Army of the Potomac, Hildebrandt had initiated at least a brigade’s worth of soldiers into the culture of ink.

“During the war time I never had a moment’s idle time,” Hildebrandt told the reporter. “I must have marked thousands of sailors and soldiers.”

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Hildebrandt is the only tattoo artist known to have spoken openly about creating Civil War tattoos. But other accounts and historical records hint that the practice of getting inked became more widespread during the war. “It probably means there were other tattoo artists; we just don’t know who they were,” says Michelle Myles, the co-owner of Daredevil Tattoo, a Lower East Side shop with its own museum collection of antique tattooing memorabilia. For the first time in American history, tattooing was becoming part of mainstream American culture.

The Civil War helped tattooing begin a transition from the military to wider society, and ushered in the style of classic tattooing unique to America. Tattooing had long been widespread among sailors, but during the war men who would never have considered getting a tattoo before wanted a way to show their allegiance to their cause and to identify themselves in the event of death.

“Your stripes can get torn off in battle,” says Paul Roe, a tattoo historian. “Tattoos can’t.”

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Tattoos have a long history as a means of identification in the military. In ancient Rome, mercenaries were marked with a permanent ink made from acacia bark, corroded bronze, and sulphuric acid to help in identifying deserters. Around the fourth century, the Roman military had a standard operating procedure for tattooing—a recruit would not be tattooed right away, but would “first be thoroughly tested in exercises so that it may be established whether he is truly fitted for so much effort,” the writer Vegetius noted. Even in the military, tattooing was a deliberate choice, not to be rushed into.

In the event of a soldier’s death, a tattoo could be a powerful tool for identification. During the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the defending king, Harold II, was disfigured beyond recognition while fighting the invading Normans, led by William the Conqueror. Edith Swannesha, who spent her life as Harold’s companion and is sometimes called his common-law wife, was summoned to identify his body. She was only able to recognize him based on his tattoos—the words “Edith and England” across his chest.

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But despite the royal and military history of tattoos, for many centuries there was a taboo attached to the practice. Tattoos were used to mark slaves, criminals, and gladiators, and the Latin word "stigma" was used interchangeably to mean tattoo, brand, or scar—any permanent mark left on a person's skin. In the United States, tattooing was associated with native tribes; when French and British traders met native people, they often recorded the markings on their bodies, instead of their names, in trading logs. This practice continued when Europeans recruited tribes as allies during colonial wars. For American settlers, tattooing would have been most closely associated with Native Americans or criminals, and deemed unacceptable for “civilized” people.

But that first started to change during the Revolutionary War. American sailors decorated themselves with symbols of their newborn country—the “goddess” Columbia, the face of George Washington, the American flag. For these sailors a patriotic tattoo served both as personal and group identification. "It was the old striving to frighten the enemy with magic representations of the tribe’s invincibility,” tattoo historian Albert Parry writes.

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With the onset of the Civil War, these patriotic themes gained in popularity and began to shift from sailors to land-bound infantry. By this point in history, tattooing was not as uncommon as it seemed. There are accounts, for instance, of Irish workers bound for naval ships, who were already tattooed but had no previous maritime experience. At least among the Irish working class in New York, tattoos were not restricted to the military, navy or otherwise, and during the war the stigma began to lift.


There’s a story about Hildebrandt’s work in the Civil War that comes up in almost every account. He fought for the Union, but, people say, he crossed battle lines as an artist. The story, however, doesn’t seem to be true.

Myles, the Daredevil Tattoo owner, has looked deep into Hildebrandt’s history and tracked down every scrap of evidence she could find about his life. She has never found a primary source for that tale, but it endures, perhaps because it adds a touch of humanity to an inhuman time. Part of the myth, according to the Roe, the tattoo historian, is that Hildebrandt would charge soldiers in the South less, because they got paid less—a kind gesture in a grave situation. “I put the name of hundreds of soldiers on their arms and breasts,” he told a reporter in 1882, during another interview in that shop on Oak Street, “and many were recognized by these marks after being killed or wounded.”

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In addition to identification and patriotism, tattooing during the Civil War was used to memorialize the experience of war and the lives of fellow soldiers. Much like the sailors who pioneered tattooing before them, these soldiers wanted to honor the memories of fallen comrades, show regimental pride, and demonstrate their love for their homelands. “A sailor may not wear his heart upon his sleeve, but he does wear it upon his chest,” Eleanor Barns of the Seamen’s Institute, an agency for mariners affiliated with the Episcopal Church, told Parry, the historian.

Tattooing can be excruciating, and in the Civil War methods were relatively primitive and conditions less than sanitary. After Robert Sneden, a mapmaker, illustrator, and Union soldier was captured one foggy night near Brandy Station, Virginia, he was taken to the notorious Andersonville POW camp, where a sailor named Old Jack tattooed the prisoners using “six to eight fine needles.” The going rate was $1 to $5 (anywhere from about $30 to $150 in today’s money).

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“The ink is pricked into the flesh on arm or leg on the design there,” Sneden wrote in his memoirs. “The jabbing takes an hour or more. The arm soon swells up and inflames, which is painful for a few days only.”

Hildebrandt’s tattoo method was similar, and involved binding together a handful of #12 needles, roughly 0.35 mm in diameter, “in a slanting form, which are dipped as the pricking is made into the best India ink or vermilion [sic],” the Times reported when visiting his shop. “The puncture is not made directly up and down, but at an angle, the surface of the skin being only pricked.” Colorants could be made up of ink and wet gunpowder. After the tattoo was done, any excess blood and ink was washed off with water, urine (it’s sterile!), or alcohol, usually either rum or brandy.

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Some of the most vivid accounts of Civil War tattooing come from works of fiction, written after the war but based heavily in fact. In 1887, Wilbur F. Hinman, who’d been a lieutenant colonel in the 65th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, published the novel Corporal Si Klegg and His "Pard”, in which he “attempted to present a truthful account of soldiering.” In the book, he described tattooing as a ubiquitous practice.

“Every regiment had its tattooers, with outfits of needles and India-ink,” Hinman wrote, “who for a consideration decorated the limbs and bodies of their comrades with flags, muskets, cannons, sabers and an infinite variety of patriotic emblems and warlike and grotesque devices.” Many a soldier, according to Hinman, had his name, regiment, and residence inked for identification. “It was like writing one’s own epitaph, but the custom prevented many bodies from being buried in ‘unknown’ graves,’” he wrote.

Sneden, the POW, described tattoos of “flags, shields, and figures,” along with “anchors, hearts, men’s names and regiments” and “crossed flags and muskets.” A sergeant reported that by 1864 it was becoming popular in his unit to have a tattoo of a goddess, Venus, or some other “half-covered women” as a memento of the war.

One ship's crew reportedly had stars tattooed on their foreheads to celebrate victories, but such memorials could be dangerous provocations in future battles. In another account from the war, a cannoneer is killed because he has the words “Fort Pillow”— the site of a massacre of Union troops—inked on his arm. “As soon as the boys saw the letters on his arm, they yelled 'No quarter for you!' and a dozen bayonets went into him and a dozen bullets were shot into him,” writes amateur historian Mark Jaeger in Civil War Historian.

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Though tattooing had become a widespread practice, after the war publicly visible tattoos were still an oddity. In the 1880s, Hildebrandt’s tattooed daughter toured as part of a circus troupe. But beneath their clothes, many men held the marks from the war—voluntary scars to commemorate a shared trauma, claims of individuality in the face of mass death, assertions of humanity that couldn't be taken away.

For Sale: A Hat Made of Woolly Mammoth Hair

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An expert confirmed its authenticity.

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What would you do if you happened to come into possession of a bag of woolly mammoth hair?

Vladimir Ammosov, of Yakutsk, the capital of one of Russia’s eastern provinces, thought long and hard about this problem, the Siberian Times reports. A relative in need of funds had collected a bag of this ancient hair and sold it to Ammosov, who eventually lit upon a unique use for this treasure. He had it made into a hat.

Now, according to the Siberian Times, the mammoth-hair hat, made in a traditional style usually applied to horse hair, is up for sale for $10,000.

In the past decade or so, as Siberian permafrost melts, hunting for mammoth remains has become a lucrative business for locals. Sometimes the mammoth remains were frozen fresh enough that they still ooze when they’re found; one scientists reportedly tasted a bit of preserved mammoth meat. Scientists are most interested in well-preserved mammoths that might have decent DNA still intact, but there’s also a commercial market for these ancient remains—particularly tusks.

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On eBay, Amazon, and Etsy, though, sellers offer samples of mammoth hair for as little as $15 for a small amount. Mammoth hair comes in three different types—the downy, curly hairs of the undercoat; the longer, rougher guard hairs; and the fluffier overhairs. They’re similar to yak hairs and, predictably, some of the “mammoth hair” for sale online is fake.

The mammoth hair that made the mammoth hat, according to the Siberian Times, came from a site near Kazachye, a longtime base for mammoth hunters. Ammosov took extra care to authenticate his product, by enlisting Semyon Grigoryev, the director of Yakutsk’s Mammoth Museum, to examine it. According to Grigoryev, it’s the real deal.

The hat itself is a sort of beanie, made by a hat maker in a style used for holidays. Apparently it’s quite itchy. Ten thousand dollars is a steep price for an itchy hat, but it may be the only mammoth-hair hat to have ever existed in the world. Certainly, it’s the only mammoth-hair hat to have been made in the past 3,600 years or so.

The Fictional Foods We Wish Were Real

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Atlas Obscura readers weigh in on the fake snacks they'd most like to try.

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Sure, you can buy a Wonka Bar at any candy store. You can drink a sugary Butterbeer at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter attraction in Orlando. And you can find a recipe for Lembas Bread on about a million Lord of the Rings fan sites. But none of these initially fictional foods could ever live up to how we imagined they would taste when we first saw or read about them. Fictional dishes invite us to open our mental palates to the possibility of new flavors and experiences. And because they are the product of imagination, they often also carry an emotional weight that real food, no matter how exotic, can rarely bring.

Recently, we asked Atlas Obscura readers to tell us which fictional food had sparked their imaginations more than any other. The results were delicious. You told us about your love for make-believe foods from books, television shows, films, and more. Most importantly, you got super specific about what you think these foods must taste like, including an alien dish that reminds one of you of "raw horse meat or sashimi with a kind of hot spice.”

We've collected our favorite responses below. Next time you encounter a mouth-watering food that doesn't exist, try and decide for yourself what incredible, impossible flavors it might actually have.

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Literature

Roast Beast from How the Grinch Stole Christmas

What might it taste like?
“It sounds like the best aspects of beef, pork, and turkey but very tender and juicy. It’s fictional but relatable. There’s no doubt that it’s the center of a festive feast.” — Mary Gow, Brooklyn, New York

Lunch Boxes That Grow on Trees from Ozma of Oz

What might it taste like?
“I think that all the items would have a slight wood aftertaste. I figured that each box would have a slightly different flavor depending on how ‘ripe’ it was. There was also a dinner tree in the book too. I am guessing even though it was described to have meat and milk that it must all taste like vegetarian alternatives like tofu, or almond milk.” — Dianne Guindon, Santa Cruz, California

Frobscottle from The BFG

What might it taste like?
“Sweet, exotic, and downright delightful. As described in the book, it would certainly hold its own among popular soft drinks today. If it’s good enough for the Queen, it’s good enough for me! Incredible taste, physics-defying properties, a name that sounds like a sneeze, and amusing after effects, definitely an experience worth having!” — Leah, Canada

Red Kibble from The Expanse series

What might it taste like?
“As a biologist and lab manager, I’m pretty sure everything described in the books tastes like chicken (except the pseudo-chicken in a can) but no one knows, as there aren’t any chickens in the Belt.” — Johnny O Farnen, Bellevue, Nebraska

Metheglin from The Kingkiller Chronicles

What might it taste like?
"'Like summertime.' Sweet, light, a floral honey flavor. The description makes it sound like some of my favorite beers, but more rapturous and intoxicating!” — Nick Yonge, Vancouver, Canada

Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

What might it taste like?
“A cataclysm of citrus with an effervescent apocalypse. Anything that would make you simultaneously evolve and devolve seems like an interesting way to not die.” — Ian Maxwell, Denver, Colorado USA

A Shmoo from the Lil’ Abner Comics

What might it taste like?
“It says it can taste like steak, chicken or oysters… They are genial playmates for children and then will jump into your frying pan and become dinner. I've always remembered the shmoo.” — Roseann Milano, Tucson, Arizona

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Cauldron Cakes from the Harry Potter series

What might it taste like?
“A small sponge cake with a ganache, a smooth interior that tastes like chocolate and pepper. So, a spicy chocolate taste. I love sweets and I adore the world of Harry Potter. I immediately envisioned chocolate, and the ‘cauldron’ makes me think spicy. I imagine a delectable treat.” — Cherie, Jacksonville, Florida

Bilbo Baggins’ Seed Cakes from The Hobbit

What might it taste like?
“Not quite sweet, not quite savory, but very pleasant. It reminds me of adventure, and the feeling one gets of coming home after an adventure.” — kimwim, Meriden, Connecticut

Great Hall Cake from the Redwall series

What might it taste like?
“Honey, tart fruit, creamy, and dark all at the same time. I loved the Redwall series when I was growing up. There are many of the foods mentioned in the abbey feasts like the otters' Hotroot Soup or the moles' Deeper'n'Ever Turnip'n'Tater'n'Beetroot Pie, but the Great Hall Cake was always described as a masterpiece of plant-based confection. Since a feast was always a part of Redwall, and most of the feasts took place in the abbey, the Great Hall cake is in almost every book, and its description has never failed to make me salivate—just a little.” — Mary Garrison, Birmingham, Alabama

Klah from Dragonriders of Pern

What might it taste like?
“I imagine klah, a coffee analog, to be a cross between cinnamon and rooibus tea. That one would be prepared like Mexican Cafe de Olla, kept simmering in communal areas and to which you could add other things like nuts or fruits. I loved these books growing up, and in middle school we were challenged to recreate fictional foods from our favorite books. I made klah. Good times.” — Cynthia, El Paso, Texas

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Fruit From the Toffee Tree from The Chronicles of Narnia

What might it taste like?
“I imagine it with the texture of a plum but with a rich, sticky toffee sweetness, like sticky toffee pudding, but juicy! I loved the novelty of it! The toffee tree was accidentally planted when the land of Narnia was fresh and full of possibility, and the toffee tree is the realization of some of that possibility.” — Rohini, Silver Spring, Maryland

Subtraction Stew from The Phantom Tollbooth

What might it taste like?
“I have no idea, but I should get hungrier as I eat it.” — Sabrina Sobel, Farmingdale, New York


Television and Film

Scooby Snacks from Scooby-Doo

What might it taste like?
“Hopefully not dog food. I imagine a really hardy shortbread or savory cookie. Shaggy and Scooby go crazy for this, and I have to wonder why.” — Zach Van Stanley, Denver, Colorado

The Giant Ribs from the end credits of The Flinstones

What might it taste like?
“Like the best take-out ribs you’ve ever had in your life! They don’t look too saucy so I’m guessing they have a dry rub. The meat is probably a little exotic tasting as well as it is likely dinosaur or mammoth.” — Matt, St. Cloud, Minnesota

Roast Porg from The Last Jedi

What might it taste like?
“Teriyaki chicken. Chewbacca wanted to cook one in The Last Jedi. Might be succulent and savory.” — Leon Easter, Stockton, California

The Stuff from The Stuff

What might it taste like?
“The Stuff, from the satirical 1985 sci-fi schlock horror movie of the same name, is advertised as being sweet, creamy, and filling (in spite of the fact that it contains zero calories). I figure it'd taste like fluffy yogurt, or gelato with a marshmallow texture.” — James Clayton, Manchester, United Kingdom

Doozer Sticks from Fraggle Rock

What might it taste like?
“Orange peppermint. Kind of an orange liqueur mixed with Goldschläger without any bitterness or bite at all. I always thought Fraggles were jerks for constantly tearing down and eating Doozers' life work. Because the Fraggles were genuinely nice, I figure the sticks must taste really good, give some kind of narcotic/alcohol buzz, and be a bit addictive. Maybe they're edible crystal meth? That could be why Fraggle eyes are always bugged out and they have so much energy.” — Andrew C. Hockessin, Delaware

Ed's Special Sauce from Good Burger

What might it taste like?
“Vinegary Chipotle Mayo with lemon maybe? When it came out, my dad let me and my brother mix up weird concoctions to try to recreate it. I would love to know how far off we were, haha!” — Jessica, St. Louis, Missouri

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Klingon Bloodwine from Star Trek: The Next Generation

What might it taste like?
“Kool-Aid. Because when Guinan served Worf a drink because she thought he was out of sorts, he looked at it, grunted, and said ‘Ah. Warrior's drink.’ Guinan replied, ‘We call it prune juice.’ If prune juice turned on Worf, maybe blood wine was only something like Kool-Aid, which their Klingon systems experienced as alcoholic. For instance, I can't eat or drink anything with sugar in it. Makes my ears ring, and start feeling sort of wired.” — Nikoli McCracken, Panaca, Nevada

Bajoran Hasperat from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

What might it taste like?
“Something akin to kimchi, or a very spicy pastrami with spicy pickled vegetables.” — Sandi Rust, Elgin, South Carolina

Snozberries from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory

What might it taste like?
“A tart peach with hints of strawberry.” — Timothy Broach, Carmel, Indiana

Breen from Babylon 5

What might it taste like?
“Swedish meatballs. Every civilization in the galaxy has a version of this dish” — Jim, Upstate New York

Soy Pop from The Simpsons

What might it taste like?
“I'd love to try the Soy Pop snack that features in the Simpsons episode 'Lisa's Wedding.' My guess is that it would be just the right amount of salty, slightly chewy (I'm thinking the consistency of a mango), and with a creamy tangy center. However, the packet says it now has a 'gag suppressant' so I could be very wrong!” — Eduardo J Lopez Morton S, Mexico City

Bachelor Chow from Futurama

What might it taste like?
“Cheerios plus meatballs.” — Kevin, Maine


Miscellaneous

Ambrosia from Greek mythology

What might it taste like?
“It would be light and fluffy and airy, kind of like a mix between cake and a light biscuit (British bap). It would have a touch of coconut —not too much—and sparked with citrus. It is not overly sweet, yet has no need of any icing. Simply put, it is ‘heavenly.’” — Beth, Riceboro, Georgia

Power Pellets from the Pac-Man games

What might it taste like?
“Giant Kix cereal puffs. When I was a kid, there was a Pac-Man cartoon where he would eat the power pellets. I had not seen them as food in the video game so this was literally a ‘game changer.’” — Chris Rice, Los Angeles

The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs from Aesop's Fables

What might it taste like?
“I imagine it might taste, if roasted correctly, extremely tender, but with a metallic aftertaste, like regret, or fear. I always wondered what it would be like to eat the last thing ever, as in, the last piece of chocolate, and the last strawberry, or the last glass of wine, and know, you'll never have that experience again. We, as a species, may find this out in the next couple of decades.” — Marie Clare Lecrivain, Los Angeles, California

For Sale: A House With a Roof Made of Seaweed

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Homes like this one only exist on Læsø, an island in Denmark.

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On Læsø, a large Danish island in a bay of the North Sea, there are centuries-old houses that are unlike any others. Their roofs are made entirely of a thick cushion of seaweed, harvested from the water and layered to make long-lasting and uniquely charming structures, which look a little like giant, manmade mushrooms or like ‘80s rockers on a great hair day.

Once, Læsø had about 250 houses in this style; over the years, they disappeared, and their numbers dwindled down to a couple dozen or so. Today, some are preserved as parts of museums and tourist destinations, but they aren’t just relics from the past. Some of them still serve as homes, and one of these tangtag houses, originally built in the 1700s and called Andrines Hus—Andrine’s House—is up for sale, for around $400,000.

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The backstory of the seaweed roofs isn’t quite as charming as the results. Læsø has an unusually high concentration of salt on its land and in its groundwater, and back in the medieval period, a salt industry hub developed here. Harvesting salt meant concentrating that brackish water down over huge fires, fueled by the island’s wood supply. Only, the fires needed to burn so hot and so long that eventually the industry had denuded the island of all its trees, making it all but unlivable and hurting the salt industry. Around the same time, in the 17th century, the Little Ice Age changed the salinity of the island’s groundwater, and soon the industry collapsed altogether.

In the years that followed, the people who still lived on the island made do with the resources they had. The bay around them was abundant with eelgrass, Zostera marina, and they harvested it as a building material. Teams of builders (usually women) would form the seagrass into giant bundles with long necks, used for the lowest layer of roofing, wound around a building’s rafters. On that base, they would add a layer of branches, then pile on loose seaweed, climbing up to the roof to trample it down. The roof could be around five feet thick, a deep enough layer to keep water from pouring into the house. On the very top, the builders would add strips of turf to help the roof form.

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Over time, the seaweed roof would harden into its final form, turning a silver gray and becoming water-proof. The very last step was to cut away the overhang around the windows, letting light into the house. Resistant to fire and pests, the roofs could last for hundreds of years. Almost every building on the island was topped in this way: Only special buildings, including two churches, had tile roofs.

But in the 20th century, this ingenious solution to a human-made resource crisis started to fail. In the 1930s, a disease started killing off the seaweed around the island, limiting the supply available to repair the roofs and make new ones. As the economic conditions on the island improved, too, people moved into more standard houses. As charming as the tanghus might look, inside it often felt dark and damp.

By the end of the 20th century, only a handful of the seaweed houses remained. The island, too, had transformed again, reforested with trees. This new forest may have also contributed to the decline of the seaweed roofs. It’s possible that the salty winds blowing across Læsø helped preserve the roofs; once the trees grew in, blocking the winds, wildflowers and grasses had an easier time growing in the roofs and contributing to their rot.

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Over the past decade or so, though, there’s been a push from the government, nonprofits, and locals to restore and conserve the houses. In 2007, the national government listed them as a wonder of North Jutland, the region on the northern tip of Denmark, and the next year, some of the restorers started a “seaweed bank” to source their roofing materials from nearby islands. Slowly, the roofs of older buildings started to be repaired or redone. The architectural and planning company Realdania also created a modern seaweed house that used the eelgrass as hidden insulation and as a building material on the exterior.

The roof on the Andrine’s House has been recently restored in the traditional style and could last for hundreds of years more. Inside, the scullery shows the roof’s underside, but most of the rooms have white, low ceilings. The house has been on the market for a few months already—it will take a rare buyer to take on the responsibility of a seaweed roof. But imagine coming home to this small wonder, a place unlike any other.

Atlas Obscura Readers Imagine Their Future National Dishes

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The food of 2050 includes crickets, plastic, and nothing at all.

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Rarely official and often humble, most national dishes have deep roots in the past. However, some national dishes don't reflect current gastronomic interests. For example, while apple pie speaks to many people as a quintessential symbol of the United States, Chinese food historian Jennifer 8. Lee poignantly notes in the television series Ugly Delicious that most Americans eat Chinese food more often than they down a slice of pie. The Europe-based Center for Genomic Gastronomy, an "artist-led think tank," is currently considering the subject, too. At museums in France and Portugal, the Center asked visitors to ponder what their nation's national dishes would look and taste like in the year 2050, taking into account climate and cultural changes on the horizon.

At Atlas Obscura, we asked our global audience to imagine what their national dish would be like in 32 years' time. Some readers write that their current national dishes could change for the worse, as climate change and xenophobia make ingredients tougher to source. Some readers try to make the best of a nebulous future, speculating that less-favored proteins, such as crickets, will become commonplace. Others have a rosier view, and suggest that the melting pot might serve up something entirely new. Below is a selection of our favorite answers, to savor and think on.

The United States's New National Dish Will Be: Sturgeon Dogs

Jochosturg: a high-protein, quarter-pound of farm-raised sturgeon in a tofu casing, topped with equal parts of julienned kimchi and cabbage slaw. With a sauce made of hummus, all wrapped in a very thin naan made of ground, dehydrated, broccoli-stem flour (so, basically, a hot dog!) —Kris Winfield, U.S.A

The United Kingdom's New National Dish Will Be: Old-School

After Brexit (the U.K.'s exit from the European Union), I'm imagining that there's going to be less taste for—or simply less ability to afford—the imported ingredients that contribute to our cosmopolitan food culture. The agricultural industry will also go into decline as a result of lower migration. As a consequence, I predict that our future national dish will be a beef pasty with baked beans and/or mushy peas on the side. Either that, or fish fingers and custard, which is an especially British combo: it's eccentric, it combines local processed delights, and was celebrated in the great Brit TV series, Doctor Who. —James Clayton, United Kingdom

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The United Kingdom's 's New National Dish Will Be: Jetsons-Esque

The "UKFT" (or U.K. Food Tablet) will be any one of numerous small tablets, each 20 centimeters in diameter, packed with numerous highly concentrated compositions of the most nutritious edible foods. To be taken with water, on waking, each day. —Jon Knox, United Kingdom

The United States's New National Dish Will Be: Nothing at All

My country, like most countries on earth, will have empty plates as the national dish. Climate change and political manipulation of hunger as a weapon against soaring populations will see to that. —Richard Derus, United States

Northern Ireland's New National Dish Will Be: A Sky-High Fry-Up

I don't think the national dish, Ulster fry, will change much. (Note: Ulster fry is Ulster's favorite breakfast of sausages, bacon, eggs, griddled breads, and tomato.) But the future dish will probably have small changes. The future national dish will include the usual bacon, fried egg, and sausage, but it will have much more flavorsome breads: like black pudding potato bread, chili flakes soda bread, honey pancake, and a big hash brown. They will also be stacked up in layers like an apartment block with a bread, meat, bread sequence, and possibly a sauce or runny egg yolk, with greenery added to the top. —Nicholas Davis, Northern Ireland

The United States's New National Dish Will Be: Clawful

Plastic lobster. The oceans will be so polluted that we no longer will be able to eat the actual lobsters, assuming they’ve survived that long. So we’ll use fake plastic lobsters as centerpieces of other dishes instead. —Emeline, United States (Maine)

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India's New National Dish Will Be: Modified Favorites

Cricket flour rotis, soy tikka, and synthetic lemon shikanji [a popular spiced lemonade]. With the weakening monsoons across the Indian plains, farmers will raise more water efficient proteins, bugs mainly. Dairy, once north India's mainstay, will be replaced by the much less thirsty, humble soy bean. Fruits will be mainstays only in the house of millionaires, and so, to feed the nostalgia of the teeming masses, the industry of synthetic flavorings will boom. A traditional dinner will start by offering the guest a tumbler full of cool water, to let the guest know that no expense will be spared. - Susruta Chakraborty, India

The United States's New National Dish Will Be: Comfort Food

Chili mac with cheese. It combines two traditional American comfort foods and the two most popular ethnic cuisines, Italian and Mexican, with the one food Americans associate with our British cultural ancestors: cheddar cheese. I've experimented with it, and wasn't surprised when I found a bunch of recipes online. It's something you could envision any recent president eating and it reminds them of food when they were younger, even if it didn't exist then. With a vegetable side dish of mixed stir-fried veggies (broccoli, carrots, pea pods, and bok choy) and oatmeal-cranberry cookies, you have an all-American meal of the future. —Steven Kluth, United States

Malaysia's New National Dish Will Be: Coconut Rice in Your Coffee

Nasi lemak [a fragrant coconut rice dish with a variety of savory sides]. The future of nasi lemak is an intriguing one! McDonald’s had a go at reinventing the dish by introducing the nasi lemak burger. I think nasi lemak will head towards a radical futuristic reinvention; perhaps a deconstructed nasi lemak coffee! —Vickram Thevar, Malaysia

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The United States's New National Dish Will Be: Without A-Peel

Fake animal protein that resembles, smells, and tastes like steak. GMO potatoes grown without peels for faster processing, and hydroponic salad, watered via desalinated water. —Louise Fadness, United States

The United States's New National Dish Will Be: A Dish?

I think our national dish will still be white porcelain but larger than it is now. Probably more like a platter than a dish. It will have the White House on it with the flag flying overhead. The added diameter will be needed to show the pictures of the half-dozen-or-so additional U.S. Presidents. On it will sit our national sandwich, the quarter-kilo. Heart-stopping! —Mike Glazer, United States

Italy's New National Dish Will Be: The Eternal Pizza

Assuming pizza is Italy's national dish: 2050 is 32 years from now. 32 years ago it was 1986. In 1986, pizza was basically the same as it is today, so my prediction is it'll be basically the same also in 2050. Possibly, there will be a wider selection of acceptable ingredients on top of it. That's actually the only change that happened in the last 32 years. —Matteo M., Italy

Responses have been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Why Are All These Vaseline Jars Showing Up on a Calgary Street?

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It's a slippery situation.

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Where do you keep your Vaseline? Is it in the cupboard above your bathroom sink? The cupboard below your bathroom sink? Is it hidden away somewhere in your bedroom?

You can be honest, dear reader, for you are not the odd one out here. For years, someone (or someones) has been keeping their Vaseline on and around the median of 68th St. NE, a five-lane road in Calgary, Alberta. Scores of jars appear there regularly, bemusing maintenance workers, stymying investigative reporters, and sending local residents down slippery slopes of speculation.

Like many mysteries, this one found its initial fingerhold on Reddit. "For the last couple years my family and I have been noticing tubs of [V]aseline at [the intersection of 68th St. and 32nd Ave]," the user SamaelSwine wrote in October of 2014, in what appears to be the first thread about the phenomenon. "Like dozens… They are replaced every few months evidently, since sometimes they are full, and other times they are empty, then full again."

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As the thread grew, he provided more details: It is always Vaseline brand, pharmacy-sized. The tubs are generally evenly spaced, as if placed there deliberately (although later posters would describe them as "strewn about").

More recently, the poster WCRClassic started a new thread with an even more urgent tone, citing a "sudden overabundance of tubs" and calling 2018 "the year of Vaseline Alley." (He also posted a bunch of images.) Soon after, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation sent a team to investigate, and found several jars at 68th St. NE and 16th Avenue, about a dozen blocks from the location cited on Reddit. Rodel Bique, a maintenance worker, told reporters that he and his colleagues find between 15 and 20 containers per month. The CBC was unable to come to any conclusions, beyond speculating that "the culprit must be very slippery to have remained anonymous for so long."

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The Reddit boards have been more enterprising. Over the years, in several different threads, commenters have scooped up and shut down gobs of theories. Is it for greasing machinery? Probably not, and there's no road work going on nearby anyway. Do cyclists use it, for their arcane cyclist purposes? "I don't see why anyone would ride there," SamaelSwine wrote. Do ne'er-do-wells use it, for villainous or lewd purposes? If a Vaseline-adjacent act comes to mind, odds are someone has dared to imagine it happening on 68th St. NE.

Others have spun elaborate explanatory scenarios. The user hornblower_83 guessed that many people, chapped by the harsh Calgary winds, have been buying value packs of Vaseline, slathering themselves, and throwing the empty containers away. "Maybe they blow out of the garbage truck [as it goes] around the turn," he continues, adding that "This [theory] needs more work."

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It's possible that people just like leaving stuff on roadway medians. Earlier this year, Atlas Obscura reported on a similar mystery unfolding in Des Peres, Missouri. Drivers there have become attached to a jar of highway pickles, which intermittently appeared and disappeared from its perch on a concrete wall next to an exit ramp, for no reason yet ascertained. (As of July 31, 2018, it was still there.)

You can't really get to the bottom of a tub of Vaseline—there's always a slick of mystery left. But now that they've found each other, the slippery sleuthers of Calgary aren't going to give up. "I'd just like to think there's an extremely well-greased person running around the city somewhere," writes Redditor GlassCentury wistfully. Us too.


Science Can Now Break a Strand of Spaghetti Into Just Two Pieces

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Also, you're not supposed to break spaghetti.

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Can you break a single piece of uncooked spaghetti into just two fragments (while holding it by the ends)? The question has long bedeviled both Nobel laureates and flummoxed YouTubers. We tried, too.

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Nope—four pieces.

While he was a senior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2016, Ronald Heisser got serious about this question. For his senior thesis, he found that there is indeed a way to do it, and learned something about how things fail in the process. To do it, he needed to construct a custom spaghetti bend-o-twister (our term of art), possibly based on a medieval torture device. A clamp grabs each end of a strand—one fixed, the other mobile. After a single spaghetto is locked in, the mobile piece inches toward the other end by means of a knob, sending the noodle arching gracefully upward. The apparatus—and this is the key—can also twist the noodle to a precise degree.

Heisser’s research built on an existing theory that explains why bent rods break this way (but doesn't show how you can change that behavior): A first break, in the center of the rod, sends a destructive, “bending wave” reverberating back down the split halves, which can cause them to fracture. But Heisser found that twisting spaghetti before bending it unleashes a counteracting “twist wave” that unravels the noodle into its resting position. Critically, the twist wave travels faster than the bending wave, so it can stop the residual fractures before they happen.

With great consistency, Heisser says, the spaghetto could produce a clean break when twisted by 270 degrees (with exceptions attributable to pasta manufacturing variation). Heisser’s thesis provided the basis for a study published yesterday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which involved filming spaghetti fractures at up to a million frames per second.

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Heisser, now a Ph.D. student at Cornell University, finds in his results a lesson about the nature of failure itself. Breakages, fractures, failures, he says, are typically regarded as disorderly, runaway processes—out of our control. Thinking about the relationship between twists and bends, on the other hand, can help scientists and engineers plan for “how something breaks if it is going to break.”

But not spaghetti, actually, because you're not supposed to be breaking it anyway.

In the 1960s, the U.S. Government Set Off a Pair of Nukes Under Mississippi

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It’s a nearly forgotten chapter of Cold War history that seems hard to fathom today—even for those who were there.

By all accounts, it felt like the carnival had come to Baxterville that morning.

Kids were out of school on a Thursday. Families were going on picnics. People from the government were handing out Cokes and sandwiches.

“We all got up and got dressed up, and they told us to go to Caney Church,” says Dorothy Breshears, who was 13 at the time. “When we got there, everybody we knew was there.”

But as 10 a.m. drew near, the party-like atmosphere started to grow tense. Which was understandable, considering that an atomic bomb was about to go off about three miles away.

In the decades of the Cold War, the U.S. government conducted more than 1,000 nuclear tests. Most of them were in the Nevada desert or on faraway Pacific islands. But Breshears and her neighbors lived in southern Mississippi, around 100 miles from New Orleans. And on October 22, 1964, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission was about to blow a gaping cavern in the Earth beneath the pine forests of Lamar County.

It was the first of two nuclear tests conducted there, the only ones on American soil east of the Rockies. It’s a nearly forgotten chapter of Cold War history that seems hard to fathom today—even for some of those who lived through it.

“I never did know why they wanted to do that,” says Donald Nobles, now 80.

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Two factors brought the Bomb to Mississippi: suspicion and salt.

By the late 1950s, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain were setting off atomic and hydrogen bombs on land, at sea, and in the air. The tests spewed radioactive fallout around the globe, fueling widespread public fears of cancer and birth defects. Pop culture was full of insects and reptiles turned monstrous by radiation. And the countries that did have nuclear weapons wanted to make it harder for others to join the club.

So the nuclear powers started talking about banning bomb tests. And in 1958, experts meeting in Geneva proposed a worldwide network of sensors that would detect nuclear blasts, which appear on seismographs like earthquakes.

But how could you tell if someone was cheating?

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In 1959, the American physicist Albert Latter theorized that setting off a bomb in an underground cavity could muffle the blast. After tests with conventional explosives, Latter wrote that a detonation as big as 100 kilotons—more than six times bigger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima—“would make a seismic signal so weak it would not even be detected by the Geneva system.” His theory, known as “decoupling,” became a rallying point for people who wanted to keep testing, says Jeffrey Lewis, of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California.

“They wanted to come up with a reason that we couldn’t verify an agreement with the Soviets,” says Lewis, who’s also the publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog. But in 1963, after the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world nose-to-nose with the unthinkable, the superpowers signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty. It kept future tests underground, and researchers turned to making sure those tests would be spotted.

The Atomic Energy Commission wanted to test Latter’s theory using actual nukes. And salt deposits were considered the ideal places for tests, since they could be excavated more easily than rock and the resulting cavity would endure for years. So the search was on for a salt dome in territory similar to where the Russians tested their bombs, Auburn University historian David Allen Burke says.

“It had to be a certain diameter. It had to be a certain size. It needed to be a very large salt dome that was still a distance underground and not where it could interfere with water or petroleum or anything else,” says Burke, who wrote a book about the Mississippi tests.

That led the agency to southern Mississippi, which is full of salt domes. The government leased a nearly 1,500-acre patch of forest atop one of those domes and got to work.

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The idea of nuclear testing in an area with several medium to large cities nearby wasn’t universally popular. But Governor Ross Barnett was eager to host the AEC, even as he battled with the Kennedy administration over civil rights.

“Barnett, even though he was a Dixiecrat and a segregationist, and one of the most vociferous, bombastic, and worst, was more than happy to welcome the image of Mississippi as helping to protect the United States from communism,” Burke says.

And Breshears says, when she was growing up, Lamar County was “a small county, very patriotic.”

“If the government told you the moon tomorrow night would be green, everybody would expect a green moon,” she says.

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The first blast, code-named Salmon, was a 5.3-kiloton device that would blow a cavity into the salt dome half a mile underground. The second, Sterling, was only 380 tons, and would go off in the cavity left behind by Salmon. AEC crews drilled a 2,700-foot hole down into the salt dome, lowered the first bomb into it, plugged it with 600 feet of concrete… and waited.

The Salmon test was put off nearly a month by a string of technical problems and bad weather, including Hurricane Hilda, which hit one state over in Louisiana. People living up to five miles from the test site were evacuated and recalled twice in preparation for blasts that never happened. They got paid $10 a head for adults and $5 for children for their trouble.

Finally, at 10 a.m. on Oct. 22, came the boom.

Steve Thompson and his family had cleared out of their house for a picnic at Lake Columbia, about 10 miles away. They watched a wave spread across the water—and then through the ground underneath them.

“It was like being in a boat,” says Thompson, who was 15 at the time. “There was two big waves and a bunch of ripples.”

To Brenda Foster, “It felt like the Earth just raised up and set back down.”

“The windows on the house were shaking and rattling, and you could see the chimney on the house cracked all the way down,” says Foster, who was a few days shy of her 10th birthday. “That’s about all I remember of that, but I never will forget it.”

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In the aftermath, about 400 people filed claims for damages with the government, mostly for cracked plaster or masonry. On Nobles’s father’s farm, eight miles from the blast site, two wells quit working after the blasts. But one man, Horace Burge, found his house was “completely destroyed,” says Nobles, who was friends with Burge’s son.

“It broke everything on the inside of his house, threw the stuff out of his cabinets, and messed his foundation up,” Nobles says.

More than two years later, in December 1966, the AEC lowered the second bomb into the 110-foot hole gouged out by the first and set it off. The smaller device went almost unnoticed at the surface, and the scientific results weren’t spectacular, either.

Far from Latter’s predictions that a blast as big as 100 kilotons could be kept off the scopes, Lewis says, it turned out that decoupling “is not a worry for anything but a very small explosion.” However, the data helped shape a later treaty which limited underground tests to 150 kilotons.

And the fact that the tests were something of a wash is a good thing, Lewis says. A country that wanted to start building its own nuclear weapons isn’t likely to be able to conceal a test, even if it wanted to—and most aspiring nuclear powers, such as North Korea, are happy to let the world know they have the Bomb.

“Iran has big salt domes,” Lewis says. “The last thing we would want Iran to do is have confidence in how big an explosion they could conduct without being detected. So there are some things we’d rather not know.”

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After the tests came a letdown among the locals, Burke says. There were hopes they would help Mississippi’s economy and land a new high-energy particle physics center, but it eventually went to Texas. The AEC was slow to address damage claims, and as the work wound down at the site, “the locals were no longer being involved in things,” he says.

And some people feared the bombs left behind more than a hole in the ground. Everyone seemed to know someone who died of cancer, including Breshears’s uncle, who regularly ate fish he caught nearby.

“Everybody was happy, everybody was laughing and talking and happy,” Breshears says. “Then it was probably five or six years, people started mumbling about ‘What did they do?’”

Most of the radioactive waste produced by the blast was fused into the surrounding salt. But in early 1965, a mix of water and acid poured into the still-hot cavity caused a burst of contaminated steam to spew out of the hole. Drilling into the chamber between and after the tests brought up irradiated chunks of salt, dirt, and drilling fluid, which were dumped back into the cavity or injected deep underground.

In 1989, after residents complained to then-U.S. Senator Trent Lott, the state looked at cancer rates in the area. The results were inconclusive, but the federal government eventually built water lines to nearby homes to replace old wells. Federal records now indicate cancer rates in Lamar County are lower than both the state and national average.

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Today, a chest-high granite monument marks the spot where the bombs went off below. It’s tucked away in a clearing down two miles of sandy dirt road, and the buildings and equipment that neighbored it are long gone. The surrounding 1,450 acres are a state timber preserve where conservation officials are trying to bring back the native longleaf pines, quail, and black bears.

The marker is surrounded by test wells for the local groundwater, which gets analyzed regularly for signs of contamination by tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen. Despite the fears of local residents, the results are well below the maximum safe limit set by the federal government, and often too low to detect. Before the state took over the site in 2010, scientists also took samples from dozens of surrounding trees to test for radioactivity, and found nothing.

The United States and the Soviets halted nuclear testing in the early 1990s, as the Cold War wound down. Only India, Pakistan, and North Korea have lit off nukes since then, and nearly 200 countries have joined a treaty swearing off future tests. (The United States has yet to ratify the pact.)

Burke said the detonations that shook Lamar County not only contributed to arms-control treaties, but helped build a network of scientific instruments that has life-saving applications today, such as estimating tsunami risks after an earthquake.

“This stuff has saved a lot of lives,” he said. “I think that properly understood, that’s something the people around that site have a reason to be proud of.”

A Beer-Lover's Ultimate Summer Friday

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Blue Point Brewing Company led guests through their brand new facilities in Patchogue and kept their cups full.

Ernest Hemingway once described a moment immediately after eating an oyster thusly: "I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans." Though he was writing from a time and a place far away from Patchogue, Long Island, one could see a similar reaction across the faces of guests who joined Atlas Obscura and Blue Point Brewing Company for a decadent evening of oysters, beer, and exploration last Friday night. One might even describe the experience as a moveable feast...

Together, Atlas Obscura and Blue Point encouraged would-be weekenders to exercise their right to celebrate Summer Fridays by hopping on the LIRR, brown-paper-bagged beers in hand. After arriving at the Patchogue station, guests were whisked away by tour bus to the site of Blue Point's soon-to-be opened brewing facilities, where they were treated to a private, hard hat tour by the president of Blue Point, Jenna Lally. Those who went on the tour got to taste Blue Point's new Summer Friday IPA, which had been bottled the day previously in anticipation of the event.

From there, the mobile party continued, as guests took a bus ride along Long Island's South Shore to the Blue Island Oyster Farm. On the ride, they were treated to a "colorful" lecture about the history of talking like a sailor from historian Mark Roberts. At Blue Island, guests got to see a real working oyster hatchery that provides mollusks for some of New York City's best restaurants. There they sipped beers, slurped oysters, and learned the inner workings of sea farming. They viewed impossibly tiny baby oysters under a microscope, and witnessed the bubbles and burbles of an algae laboratory.

Finally, guests headed to Blue Point's original brewing location for a indulgent lobster dinner. Guests feasted, banquet style, and then made their way to the tap room where they continued imbibing. Aerial acts, burlesque performers, and a live band playing sea shanties transformed the parking lot into a oceanic carnival. After a relaxing Summer Friday with Blue Point and Atlas Obscura, guests returned to the LIRR, full, happy, and ready to make plans for their next adventure.

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The Ups and Downs of Being a Canal Lockmaster

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Keeping a 170-year-old tradition alive on the mighty Muskingum.

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The mighty Muskingum River winds 112 miles through southeastern Ohio, from Coshocton to Marietta, where it flows into the Ohio and, in turn, the even-mightier Mississippi. The Muskingum was, for decades, a critical route for the movement of people and goods in the region, though today it’s almost exclusively used by pleasure boaters. As the river bends around downtown Zanesville, a small city with an emerging art scene in the gentlest foothills of the Appalachians, there’s a dam, one of 10 on the river. Boaters who want to pass it need to steer toward an old but well-maintained canal on the eastern side of the river, and grab the attention of a man sitting in a small wooden shack. That’s Tim Curtis, and he’s one of the few full-time lockmasters still manning America’s waterways.

A boat that wants to get past the dam has to rise or drop 15 feet, so the canal is equipped with locks. The Muskingum’s locks are some of the last period-correct examples in the country, Curtis says, and his job has barely changed in 170 years.

Curtis’s shack sits on a narrow, verdant island, approximately 600 yards long, formed where the canal splits off the river and accessible from the town's three-way Y-Bridge. As a boat approaches, Curtis dons a small lifejacket—“we have to wear these even if we’re mowing”—and grabs the crank handles from the shack, where they are kept under lock and key.

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He attaches a crank to an old mechanism, and then uses it to manually open the first doors of the lock to let the boat in. Once the boat is in place, he shuts the door behind it and begins the process of lowering or raising the water in the lock via a valve on each door. They’re opened by crank, too, and water then flows in or out, depending on which way the boat is going. Once the lock chamber is level with the water on the other side of the lock, he opens the other set of doors and the boat can progress. His lock, #10, is unusual on the Muskingum because it is a double lock, so the process is repeated in another chamber. Approximately half a million gallons are displaced during each step. Once the boat makes it through the lock, Curtis goes back to tending the grounds until the next boat arrives.

According to Ron Petrie of the Canal Society of Ohio, there only a few hundred lockmasters employed throughout the United States, and most of them are in the industrial waterways of upstate New York. On the Muskingum, Curtis and the 11 other trained lockmasters are there to help the 7,000 fishers and boaters who use the river each year. They’re mostly taking local river trips, but it is quite possible to take a boat from Lock #10 all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico.

Curtis, 32, is rangy, with hair sprouting from his chin and a small moustache. He is from nearby McConnelsville, a rural upbringing reflected in his drawl and good-old-boy charm. The locks are operated by Ohio’s Department of Natural Resources as part of the state park system, and Curtis works for the parks department as a “rover,” attending to park upkeep. The longtime operator of Lock #10 moved on from the job not long ago, so Curtis has been working with it for around two years. The job requires a year of on-the-job training, he says, but most lockmasters, like himself, grew up on the river and already feel at home there.

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Adjusting his camo hat, he explains that the dams and locks are what made the Muskingum navigable in the first place. The river is fairly shallow, and the dams create a “slackwater” system that deepens it, and the locks are needed to get around them. “Without the dams, it would be like a creek,” he says. “I’ve seen people walk all the way across the river.”

In fact, when European settlers arrived in the late 18th century, the shallow river meant they could only use flatboats with a miniscule draft, and most were chopped up for lumber once they reached their destinations (rather than get paddled back against the current). Plans for a lock system on the Muskingum River were hatched as early as 1812, but the Ohio General Assembly didn’t authorize construction until 1836, during an “epidemic … of internal improvement,” according to Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Muskingum County, Ohio. Twelve locks and 11 dams were installed by 1841. (One lock since has collapsed and is permanently closed.)

Lock #10’s original stone walls from 1837 are intact, and the doors are made of massive timbers held together by metal frames. The wood on the doors was replaced as recently as 1984, Curtis says, due to their creosote coating, a wood preservative that can leach out and pose environmental hazards.

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At the height of the lock’s usage, people and freight moved from Zanesville to all over Ohio and beyond so frequently that the lockmaster lived in a house on the canal island, ready to allow a boat through at any hour. That house still stands, but is now used only for storage.

Operating the lock is an art, Curtis says, and requires some finesse. If you go too fast, boats can bounce around and be pulled off the cables that hold them steady. If the boat is too close to the door, it can be pulled into the whirlpool created by the valve and sucked into the door. But after years of working the river, Curtis can intuit adjustments so the water flows calmly and evenly, and boaters hardly notice what’s happening. Going through the double lock takes about half an hour. Though if you want a really quick and bumpy ride, Curtis laughs, it can be done in 20.

After a day on the Muskingum, “the boaters can get a little rowdy. In the evenings it’s not PG-rated,” Curtis says, but once they’re in the lock, they tend to respect its history and seriousness. (The danger of boating on the Muskingum is quite real. Two boaters drowned in Zanesville in June 2014 when they stole a boat and tried to go straight over the dam.) They certainly don’t want to end up in the canal water, or stay in the stuffy lock for any longer than they need to.

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Once the locks and dams had been installed, the more reliable river led to an economic boom on its banks—both for the capitalists who used the system and the pool of labor necessary to staff and maintain it. Passenger boats in the 19th century were alive with card games and songs, while others carried “rather more freight and less frivolity”—upwards of 300 tons of goods at a time. Boats leaving Zanesville could go north to Cleveland, east to Pittsburgh and New York, south to New Orleans, and west to St. Paul. (Travel from Zanesville to New York took roughly two weeks.)

“For nearly 25 years … every lock frequently had a string of boats waiting to pass,” writes J. Mark Gamble in Steamboats on the Muskingum. “Each passenger boat carried 40 to 60 people. They have been called the ‘Pullman cars of the [18]50s.’” At least two babies were born en route to St. Louis in 1855, and a contingent of soldiers sailed from Zanesville to fight in the Mexican-American War, though they arrived after the fighting stopped.

The downside for Zanesville and the surrounding areas—a common predicament for towns that benefited from canals, railroads, and other means of transportation—was that business no longer had to stay in town. Local farmers were able to move their wares elsewhere for competitive prices. Land along the river became incredibly expensive, and some local people introduced ordinances against the “horrible, odious, and useless steam whistle” to their local legislatures.

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Boating helped knock out the area's stagecoach business, but river traffic was in turn diminished by the railroad, whose bridges, as Gamble put it, were built “with little regard for the needs of water carriers.” Steamboats lowered their fares to compete and bragged that while trains could only stop at stations, boats could pick up passengers anywhere along the river. But then the automobile came along, and the age of river travel and freight was largely over. Commercial traffic on the Muskingum was done by the 1920s.

Today, Ohio’s dams and locks are less pieces of necessary commercial infrastructure than tranquil historical sites, waypoints on countless summer excursions, idylls away from interstate traffic or the unending struggle of air travel. Cranks in hand, Curtis surveys his surroundings. “This is a unique place in the U.S.,” he says.

For Centuries, People Thought Lambs Grew on Trees

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The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary puzzled scientists and philosophers.

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Imagine you're strolling through the woods in Central Asia, in a region formerly called Tartary, sometime during the Middle Ages. As you adjust your woollen cloak, you spot an eye-catching plant. A long, swaying stalk juts out from the ground, bearing a bleating, life-sized lamb hovering a few feet off the ground.

According to ancient lore, you’ve encountered the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary. Luckily there’s no need to run, as it’s solidly tethered to the ground. But though this animal-plant hybrid couldn’t go very far, the legend of it did—although completely imaginary, the vegetable lamb of Tartary crops up in ancient Hebrew texts, medieval literature, and even poetry, philosophy, and scientific musings of the Renaissance. Also called the borametz, the Scythian lamb, the lamb-tree, and the Tartarian lamb, this mythical zoophyte intrigued, inspired, and perplexed writers, philosophers, and scientists for centuries.

According to Henry Lee, a 19th-century naturalist who wrote rather extensively on the vegetable lamb, the woolly plant first appeared in literature around 436 A.D., in the Jewish text, Talmud Hierosolimitanum. According to Lee, Rabbi Jochanan included a passage detailing the plant-animal that is “in form like a lamb, and from its navel grew a stem or root by which this zoophyte ... was fixed ... like a gourd, to the soil below the surface of the ground.”

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Later, Sir John Mandeville would refer to these creatures in his travel writings on Tartary. He refers, rather sweetly, to the lambs borne from gourd-like fruits as “little beasts,” and rather quickly follows that with, “of that fruit I have eaten.” Though we now know Mandeville wasn’t the most reliable narrator, his thoughts on the lamb-tree were taken seriously in medieval England.

In Mandeville’s imagined anatomy of the zoophyte, the plant branched out into several seed pods from which newborn lambs would spring forth. But Mandeville’s configuration wasn’t the only one in existence. In another version, each plant bore a single fully grown lamb, with a thick coat of wool “as white as snow.” The fabled creature hovered off the ground on a highly flexible stalk, which allowed it to bend deeply enough to chomp on the grass below. There was a catch to this seemingly laid-back life: Eventually, the grass would run out. Once it had devoured all the vegetation within reach, the lamb-plant would die.

Though it may have seemed helpless, swinging around aimlessly on its stem until it starved to death, procuring a vegetable lamb for one’s own was apparently a difficult task. Most iterations claim that, because the lamb could not be extracted from the plant without severing the stem, the borametz could not be hunted, except by wolves, who somehow always get the best of the poor lamb in folklore. A human looking for a leafy lamb could track one down, too, but would have to shoot arrows or darts at the stem until fully severing it to get the woolly prize. (Writers of the time did not specify why knives could not be used.)

If one could track down a live vegetable lamb, however, it was a delicacy. Both humans and wolves alike loved the taste of lamb-plant meat, which, according to ancient writer Maase Tobia, tasted “like the flesh of fish.” And as if a lamb-vegetable that tasted like fish flesh weren’t peculiar enough, it allegedly also contained “blood as sweet as honey.”

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But there was a more sinister version of the narrative. Lee includes a passage from Rabbi Simeon, who hints that the zoophyte was not a lamb-plant hybrid, but rather a human-plant hybrid. He claims that, according to the Jerusalem Talmud, the ‘Jadua,’ was a plant found in the mountains that grows "just as gourds and melons," but in the form of a human—with a face, body, hands, and feet. Similar to the vegetable lamb, it was connected at the navel to the stem, which, if cut, would cause the Jadua's demise. "No creature can approach within the tether of the stem, for it seizes and kills them,” he wrote. It seems that iteration was too dark for philosophers of the Dark Ages to stomach, as most devout believers of the borametz seemed to stick to the version featuring the fluffy, tasty, non-human plant.

Whether one believed the zoophyte to be lamb-like or man-like, it took until the 16th century for scientists and philosophers to begin publicly questioning the Scythian lamb. The renowned Italian polymath, Girolamo Cardano, tried to disprove it by pointing out that soil alone couldn’t provide sufficient heat for a lamb to survive embryonic development. But his argument was highly controversial. Claude Duret, an Italian linguist, botanist, and, above all, firm believer in the existence of the lamb-plant, passionately denounced Cardono. Echoing a common claim at the time, he affirmed that “in a place filled with heavy and dense air (such as is Tartary), the Borametz—true plant-animals—might exist.”

Soon enough, however, naturalists began to make the point that, maybe, there were plants that simply looked like lambs. In 1698, Sir Hans Sloane brought forth a lamb-like specimen from China, the rootstock of a fern, which was “covered with a down of dark yellowish snuff colour.” It seemed, he argued, that it had been manipulated by a clever artist to look strikingly similar to a lamb. However, there was an issue with this argument: The species that birthed these lamb-like sculptures wasn't native to Tartary. Besides, Lee argues, the coat of the lamb-plant was depicted as “snowy-white,” while the woolly substance produced by the rootstocks was decidedly orange. There’s a better theory, Lee offers, and it looks a lot like a poorly played game of ancient Greek telephone.

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Cotton was likely brought to Western Asia and Eastern Europe from India—and while the ancient Greeks didn’t really know much about the cotton plant, they felt very comfortable waxing poetic about it. Greek historian Herodotus’s writings refer to the cotton padding of a corselet sent from Egypt as “fleeces from the trees.” Alexander the Great's admiral would later write that “there were in India trees bearing ... flocks or bunches of wool.” A bit further down the line, Pliny the Elder (whom Lee calls “admirable as a writer,” but “incompetent and worthless as a naturalist”) went further off-script, erroneously claiming that “these trees bear gourds ... which burst when ripe.”

And then, there’s the fact that the Greek word for “melon” can be translated into “fruit,” “apple,” or “sheep.” It’s possible that, throughout various translations of early texts describing the cotton plant among other trees, the “fruits” resembling “spring-apples” could have been misinterpreted as “spring-lambs.”

Though the vegetable lamb isn’t real, its story paints a very real picture of how science and mythology, fact and fiction, are closely connected—and often resemble one another. And while the vegetable lamb has disappeared from the minds of scientists and philosophers today, it will likely persist as a strange scientific history, an overblown origin story, and perhaps, a far-away fantasy for vegetarians with a craving for lamb.

How a Heat Wave Revealed the Outlines of a Hidden Garden and Ghost Village

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At an English estate, the ground still remembers its past.

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Across the United Kingdom and Ireland this summer, heatwaves and wildfires have been revealing hidden signs of the past, from crop marks dating back thousands of years to giant signs meant to signal World War II pilots. At Chatsworth House, a Derbyshire estate perhaps most famous for its connection to Pride and Prejudice, the heat wave has exposed the outlines of a long-gone world—the gardens and village that existed here back in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Going back centuries now, this piece of land has been a large estate in a picturesque part of England. Many years ago, starting toward the end of the 1600s, the first Duke of Devonshire had parterre gardens, a style developed in France, put in, with curling paths and highly designed, elegant flower beds. By the mid-1700s, though, the fourth Duke was ready to make a change.

This duke was drawn to natural landscapes and replaced the garden with a less formal arrangement. The village on the estate, Edensor, also needed to change, he thought. He had parts torn down, in order to complete the more natural picture he’d envisioned.

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In the 1830s, the sixth Duke had his own plans for the village, which he imagined could become a tidier, more comfortable, and more beautiful place. Under his management, the village high street was demolished, along with the small homes of his tenants. In their place, he built more modern, more charming cottages and instructed tenants that only one family could live in each one, instead of crowding in as they had before.

Parts of the village were missing, though. In the new Edensor, there was “neither a village ale-house, blacksmiths’ forge, wheelwright’s shop, or any other gossiping place,” according to an account from 1872. (The Duke did make plans for tenants who were displaced: The blacksmith, for instance, was given a new place a mile away.)

More than 150 years later, though, the mark of these gardens and the old village is still hiding on the estate. This summer’s heatwave has stressed the lawns enough that the plants living above old foundations and paths, where water can be scarcer, have browned and revealed traces of the past and the history of the Dukes’ work on their land.

How a Nature Lover Spends 3 Obscure Days in Asheville

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Field biologist Josh Kelly shares his perfect long weekend in the verdant North Carolina city.

Asheville, North Carolina, is a city of superlatives. It’s located in one of the most scenic spots in the U.S., thanks to the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains and the sparkling French Broad River. The combination makes for a stunning urban landscape, one that’s also environmentally significant. “It’s arguably the best area in the eastern United States to explore old-growth forests,” says Josh Kelly, a field biologist for MountainTrue, a conservation organization based in Asheville.

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Asheville’s abundance of edible plant species has put it at the forefront of the food-foraging movement. The city also boasts one of America’s most vibrant craft beer scenes. And there’s the palatial Biltmore Estate, built by George Vanderbilt III at the height of the Gilded Age. The local mansion still claims the distinction of being the largest privately owned residence in the United States.

You could spend a lifetime studying this region’s incredible biodiversity (more than 2,000 species of fungi alone are known to grow in the Southern Appalachian Mountains, for example, and more salamander species exist here than in any other single place on Earth). But you needn’t quit your day job to experience the area’s natural wonders. With Kelly’s help, we’ve put together this guide to spending “Three Obscure Days” exploring Asheville’s wild beauty.

Day 1: Agenda

  • Learn about local plant species at the Botanical Gardens at Asheville

  • Meet the animals of the area at the Western North Carolina Nature Center

  • Forage for food at George Washington Carver Park

  • Experience the nightlife of West Asheville


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Botanical Gardens at Asheville

As you kick off your three-day adventure, take a moment to get your bearings and learn about local flora and fauna at the Botanical Gardens at Asheville and the Western North Carolina Nature Center.

“[The Botanical Gardens at Asheville] is one spot, it’s free to get into, and it has a really approachable, easy trail system to walk and just a ton of information,” says Kelly.

In the late summer and early fall, you can expect to find sunflowers, goldenrods, and heart-leaved aster, or “a lot of yellow and purple flowers,” as Kelly puts it. You’re also likely to see several species of lilies. Kelly suggests you keep your eyes peeled for North Carolina’s official state wildflower, the Carolina lily, or lilium michauxii. The flower’s scientific name refers to the famed botanist who “discovered” it, André Michaux. Under French royal command in the 18th century, he was sent to North America to investigate plants that could be of benefit to France’s soil. His contributions to botany were ultimately more appreciated in North America than in his home country. Several species of plants native to North Carolina are named after him.


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Western North Carolina Nature Center

At the Western North Carolina Nature Center (WNC), you’ll become acquainted with the non-human residents of Asheville and its surrounding wilderness. The park highlights each animal’s story via informative signage, making even the most common of animals appealing to observe. According to the center's website, Sassy the raccoon, for example, is known for her peculiar habit of sucking her foot like a toddler might suck their thumb.

Don’t miss the shier species such as the bobcat or the black bear, and take a moment to appreciate the zoo’s American river otters, Olive and Obi Wan. Once critically endangered in North Carolina, they were rescued from extinction through reintroduction programs in the early 1990s. They’re back to being ubiquitous in the area; Kelly sees otters a few times a year while fly-fishing.


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George Washington Carver Park

For a literal taste of Asheville’s foraging scene, Kelly recommends booking a trip with a guide to forage for “a bounty of wild plants and mushrooms” with one of several outfitters that specialize in such trips. “This will help with your identification abilities for the rest of your stay,” he advises. Alternatively, you can wander on your own into George Washington Carver Park, a public park stocked with edible plant species.

In the summertime, expect to find berries. But according to Kelly, the best time to go is actually in the fall, when the fruit and nut trees are in bloom. As the temperature begins to dip, apples, pears, pawpaws, hazelnuts, and chestnuts beckon you to pick them.


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West Asheville

If you’re at all squeamish about eating food you’ve found on the ground, in a bush, or hanging from a tree, don’t worry: Asheville has plenty of dining establishments that take advantage of locals’ penchant for foraged food. Restaurants that utilize found ingredients particularly abound in downtown and West Asheville. Some of them will even cook up ingredients you’ve found yourself.

Local bartenders have taken to adding foraged herbs to their cocktails, infusing the city’s vibrant nightlife with a new menu of flavors. Take a seat at one such drinking establishment in West Asheville and end the night by strolling through town, admiring the many colorful murals that have splashed onto buildings in this part of the city.

Day 2: Agenda

  • Hike the picturesque Craggy Pinnacle trail

  • Continue onto Douglas Falls

  • Make a stop in Black Mountain

  • Learn about Black Mountain College's legacy at the Black Mountain Museum + Arts Center


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Craggy Pinnacle Trail

Armed with your newfound knowledge of the local ecosystem (and, hopefully, with some foraged apples or berries for breakfast), head out for one of Asheville’s most photogenic hikes, the Craggy Pinnacle Trail.

You’ll travel the famously scenic Blue Ridge Parkway to get there, which winds through cloud-level mountain crests and acts as a gateway to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Stop by the Craggy Gardens along the way at mile post 367 to take in views among mountain-top meadows, or relax at one of the facility’s picnic tables. Then, head just a bit farther up the road to the trailhead of Craggy Pinnacle, accessible by the Craggy Dome parking area at milepost 364.

Less than a mile round-trip, the trail to the hike’s summit is as easy as it is visually rewarding. Along the way, you’ll pass through dense thickets of fairy-tale-esque forest. In the springtime, these areas are awash in fuchsia as the bountiful rhododendron bloom.

At the summit, a walled overlook allows for safe viewing of the vista you came here to see. If you missed the rhododendron in the spring, perhaps you’re lucky enough to arrive in the fall. “In the fall, those higher elevations change color first, and then after they pass their peak, you can look down on the progression of color as it fades into the valley,” Kelly says.



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Douglas Falls

Hikers who haven’t had their fill of nature can continue farther down the Douglas Falls trail, a route that leads to a 60-foot waterfall. “More impressive, from the naturalist’s point of view,” Kelly says, “is the old-growth northern hardwoods forests along the trail.” The trees in these old-growth forests, he notes, are some of the biggest you’ll find east of the Mississippi.

If the 3.5 mile, downhill hike from Craggy Pinnacle doesn’t sound appealing, there’s an easier way to view the falls. At the end of nearby FS 74 (a narrow, Forest Service road), there’s a trailhead that ends at the falls. This is a comparatively easy hike that covers just under one-mile, round-trip.


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Black Mountain

“If you’re passing through and want to see a cute little town in the area, Black Mountain is a great one,” Kelly says.

Still closely associated with Black Mountain College (a former art school with a faculty and alumni list that reads like a who’s who of luminaries across disciplines in the 20th century), the town has retained a creative spirit that’s reflected in its restaurants, cafes, and boutiques.

The grounds of the college are closed to the public (and occupied by a summer camp for boys), but they're open several times per year to host the Lake Eden Arts Festival in May and October and {Re}HAPPENING in March, an evening of supper and performances inspired by John Cage’s Theatre Piece No. 1.


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Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center

If you’re back in Asheville before it closes, visit the Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center to learn more about the college and those who were involved with it, including Ruth Asawa, Allen Ginsberg, Cy Twombly, Merce Cunningham, and Buckminster Fuller. The permanent collection includes more than 2,000 pieces of artwork and ephemera, all related to the college. One highlight of the museum is alumnus Robert Rauschenberg’s Opal Gospel, 10 American Indian Poems, a piece composed of 10 movable, silk-screened panels depicting American Indian stories and images.

If you’re lucky, you might even catch one of the space’s readings, concerts, or other special events, which are scheduled about once per month.

Day 3: Agenda

  • Hike to the highest point in the U.S. east of the Mississippi

  • Learn about traditional, southern Appalachian craftsmanship at the Folk Art Center

  • Kayak or tube down the French Broad River


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Mount Mitchell's Summit

You’d be remiss not to visit the peak of Mt. Mitchell on a trip to Asheville. Heading up N.C. Highway 128 (off the Blue Ridge Mountain Parkway at milepost 35), you can drive nearly all the way to the top of the 6,683-foot summit. Mt. Mitchell holds the distinction of being the highest point in the U.S. east of the Mississippi, and the man who gave the mountain its name (the educator and geologist Elisha Mitchell) died in pursuit of proving that fact.

Mitchell first observed that a mountain that was then known as Black Dome appeared to be higher than what was previously believed to be the highest peak in the east (Grandfather Mountain, also in North Carolina) on a geological survey in 1828. He returned to measure the mountain three times between that trip and 1844, in the process proving that his theory was correct. More than a decade later, he would return to the mountain one last time, after his claim was challenged by a state senator. On that fateful journey, he fell to his death at nearby Mitchell Falls.

A short, mile-long hike (round trip) from the parking area at the end of Highway 128 leads visitors to an observation deck where they can take in panoramic views from what is without a doubt the highest point in the U.S. east of the Mississippi river. They can also pay their respects to Mitchell—his tomb is located here.

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At this elevation, Kelly explains, you’re also likely to see red spruce, yellow birch, and mountain ash trees, which tend to be associated with states like Maine rather than North Carolina.

Another type of tree to watch out for is the Fraser fir. “Here in the southern Appalachians we have the Fraser fir, which only occurs in this area,” Kelly explains. Plenty of farms in the area harvest these trees for the winter holidays.


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Folk Art Center

Head back to Asheville on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Stop about eight miles outside of the city at milepost 382 at the Folk Art Center, the home of the Southern Highland Craft Guild, which represents over 900 juried craftspeople from the South. In addition to a permanent collection featuring historical artifacts and rotating exhibitions, the center also maintains the oldest continuously run craft store in the U.S.

One of the guild’s founding members, Frances L. Goodrich, had originally come to this area in the late 19th century as a Presbyterian missionary. Surprised and inspired by the utilitarian yet thoughtful designs of the local people (especially women), she began to unify their efforts to market their wares. Within a few years, she was selling local products nationally, working within the larger Southern Appalachian Handicraft Revival movement.

In contrast to Black Mountain College and its museum in Asheville, the Folk Art Center celebrates traditional craftsmanship. The handmade baskets, pottery, and tapestries on display here favor craft over concept.


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The French Broad River

The French Broad River is believed to be one of oldest rivers in the world (behind the Nile River and the New River, which also flows through North Carolina). It runs through the center of Asheville and helped shape the Appalachian mountains that surround the city. Named by French settlers who arrived in the region in the late 18th century, Connestee settlements along its course have been dated back to the year 200.

This river is also rare among urban waterways in the U.S., in that residents will happily jump into it. Over the past three decades, Asheville has rallied around keeping its river clean enough for everyone to enjoy. Frequent community “clean-up” days demonstrate the city’s continued devotion to the cause.

The French Broad’s waters flow gently through the city, perfect for paddle-boarding, kayaking, or canoeing. There’s even a portion that runs through Biltmore Estate, offering views of the palatial mansion and its grounds that can’t be seen anywhere else.

Another popular activity is tubing—perhaps the best option for those exhausted from three days spent exploring Asheville.

Kelly has lived in the Asheville area since he was born and isn’t making plans to leave any time soon. For someone with his passion for nature, Asheville is paradise. “I like the fertility of the land,” he says matter-of-factly.

For those with a deep appreciation of the outdoors, Asheville is the perfect getaway. After three days, you’ll have encountered a hemisphere’s worth of disparate plant and animal species, plus the culture, history, and recreation areas that come alongside this thriving natural landscape.


No One Knows the Exact Year of the Largest Volcanic Eruption of Our Age

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Scientists are hoping archaeology, carbon dating, and tree rings together can help solve the mystery.

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They left before the eruption came, abandoning their island, their frescoes, their furniture. When the volcano blew, sending ash more than 18 miles up, into the stratosphere, it blanketed the the island and darkened the sky. Across the Mediterranean, people saw the effects of the eruption at Thera, which was so large it changed the climate for a time. It was larger than Vesuvius, or Tambora, or Krakatoa. It’s thought to be the largest volcanic eruption ever witnessed by humankind, or the largest volcanic eruption in the current geological era, which goes back almost 12,000 years.

This catastrophic event, which spelled the end of Bronze Age Minoan civilization, may have cast a shadow over Mediterranean tales and myths for ages. It is thought that the eruption could be the origin of the myth of Atlantis, a lost island world, or the source for the Biblical plagues of Egypt—polluted river, darkened sky.

But over thousands of years, details and dates have a way of blurring, so that now no one knows exactly when the eruption took place. It was almost certainly more than 3,500 years ago. Evidence in texts from Egypt’s New Kingdom suggests the 16th century B.C. Radiocarbon dating of materials found from Thera (known today as Santorini), though, put the date a little further back, in 17th century B.C.

For years, experts have struggled to reconcile this gap and pin down the exact date of the eruption. The ash that spewed from the volcano settled across the Mediterranean and the layer can still be found in the ground. If the event could be precisely dated, that layer would provide a very useful time horizon for understanding chronology across the region. In a new paper published in Science Advances, a team led by scientists at the University of Arizona has gathered new data that they think could help resolve the mystery.

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The problem of the Thera eruption gets at one of most basic questions of archaeology: How do we know when things happened in the past? In the absence of written records that can be lined up with known calendar systems, pinning down the specific year of an event can be tricky, if not impossible.

But archaeologists have a few strategies. The growth rings of trees, for instance, keep a record that can be traced back thousands of years by matching up rings of trees whose lives overlapped. Some long-lived species, such as bristlecone pine, can contain records going back thousands of years on their own. Radiocarbon dating is another critical, widely used tool. It measures the amount of a radioactive carbon isotope, carbon-14, in organic material, using the rate of the carbon’s decay as a clock that can be wound back. To estimate the calendar year in which that plant or animal lived, the results of carbon dating need to be adjusted to account for the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere, which fluctuates over time.

This calibration is critical to how radiocarbon dating works, and over the years researchers have joined together to create a standard curve representing the change in atmospheric carbon over time, using information trapped in wood, coral, rock, and other materials. Tree rings, which can be tracked to specific years and are made of organic material, can be a useful tool—combining two of archaeologists' more important dating techniques—for refining the calibration curve and making radiocarbon dating more accurate. In the past, this data encompassed a series of rings covering a stretch of years. But now is possible to test tiny bits of wood—as small as a single, annual tree ring.

“It’s the next step in how we understand time,” says Charlotte Pearson, an assistant professor of dendrochronology at the University of Arizona and the lead author of the new paper.

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Pearson and her colleagues measured the carbon-14 in individual tree rings of a known age from bristlecone pine in California, as well as from oak trees in Ireland, specifically for the period in which Thera likely erupted, between 1700 B.C. and 1500 B.C. Using these new results, the researchers found that the organic material from Thera could be a few decades younger than radiocarbon data had previously indicated.

It’s a small shift in time frame, but if they’re correct there is some overlap between the timing suggested by radiocarbon dating and that suggested by archaeological evidence. It's not a smoking crater, but it might be a breakthrough that points to the solution of the Thera mystery.

But it's too early to say for sure. “The new data is welcome, but there are a number of question marks until it’s replicated by other labs,” says Sturt Manning, a professor of classical archaeology at Cornell University, who has long studied the dating of the Thera explosion but was not involved in this study. To adjust the standard calibration curve will require data from many sources to back up the annual tree ring data. There’s new archaeological evidence from the beginning of Egypt's New Kingdom that could also help narrow the window of Thera’s date.

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If these sources of data ever come into alignment, the eruption—and its ash layer—would become a chronological signpost across a large region of the world. Events like these, that can be matched precisely across an entire region, help bring the ancient past to a more human timescale. “Humans live at a very fast pace,” says Pearson. “We’re not around for very long. The events that can affect human society, they happen in one or two years. If we’re really going to study their effects in past societies, we need really well-resolved timelines.”

The new paper will likely at least help push forward ongoing work on the carbon dating calibration curve. Already other labs are working to replicate the results for parts of the period, but it’s unlikely to end the long-running debate over the date of Thera’s eruption by itself. To do that, says Manning, a great piece of evidence would be a piece of a tree that formed rings annually and clearly died in the eruption, and could be dated clearly using these tools. “So far no one’s found that tree,” he says.

Found: A Mummification Recipe From Prehistoric Egypt

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New research shows ancient embalmers were using resins and gums far earlier than we thought.

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Thousands of years ago—long before he arrived at the Egyptian Museum in Turin and became known as S. 293, the oldest preserved body in the collection—a man died in the desert. Estimates place his death somewhere in the vicinity of 3600 B.C., but it’s hard to say exactly when he perished or where his remains were found. There are no provenance records for the remains before 1901, when an Italian Egyptologist purchased the mummified body from a dealer and delivered it to the museum. S. 293 has spent millennia curled on his left side, knees tucked up toward his elbows. Judging by wear on the man’s teeth, he was probably in his 20s or 30s when he died.

Researchers had long assumed that this mummy, like many others that predate Dynastic Egypt (which begins around 3100 B.C.), was preserved somewhat spontaneously—desiccated by the natural scorching and parched sand of a shallow desert grave. Scientists have often considered this hands-off approach to be a major precursor to the painstaking process of deliberate mummification that was refined over the next 2,000 years and reached its apex during the New Kingdom era (c. 1550–1070 B.C.), when embalmers excised organs and drained fluids before swaddling a corpse in strips of linen.

But in a new paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science, a team of researchers led by Jana Jones, an Egyptologist and honorary research fellow in ancient history at Macquarie University in Sydney, makes the case that this was no accidental mummy. Instead, they suggest it was the result of a carefully concocted recipe.

Back in 2014, Jones detected traces of fats, oils, and resins on funerary textiles from graves in Upper Egypt, dating to between 4500 and 3350 B.C. To Jones and her collaborators from Oxford and the University of York, these findings suggest that bodies were preserved using specific ingredients long before experts had thought. At the time, the researchers only had the textile scraps, and the bodies themselves weren’t available for study. “Museums are very jealous of their collections,” Jones says. “Egyptology is a very conservative science.” But the museum in Turin allowed the team to come in and work with S. 293. The mummy was particularly appealing because it hadn’t undergone any known conservation work that could adulterate its chemical signatures.

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In textile fragments from strips encircling the body’s torso and wrists, the researchers found plant oil, conifer resin, and a plant-based sugar or gum. “These would have been lightly heated and mixed together,” Jones says. “The chemistry shows evidence of heating, which is why we can refer to them as ‘recipes.’” The researchers believe that the resin and aromatic plant extracts functioned as antibacterial agents—and they would go on to become the main preservatives in later mummification, too, Jones says.

“It's fair to say that the natural environment and being buried in the hot dry sand certainly played a part in the preservation of these prehistoric mummies, but what's important here is that there was also an artificial—anthropogenic—treatment of these bodies with 'balms,'” says paper coauthor Stephen Buckley, an archaeologist at the University of York. Jones thinks the textile wrappings may have been dipped into the mixture, then wrapped around the body; Buckley suspects that the concoction was slathered on with some sort of stick, though he hasn’t found one yet.

It’s easy to think we know mummies—they can be such familiar figures in both museums and movies—but there is still a great deal to learn about their early years and how they came to be. Jones won’t be the one to do it, though: “I’m going to retire after this!”

Tracing the Overlooked Legacy of the Silk Road's Fruits and Nuts

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A new archaeobotanical study is helping shift the historical record.

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The Silk Road was one of the world’s preeminent points of exchange between the East and West. The historical record details how goods, ideas, cultural practices, and foods moved through this ancient commerce region in Central Asia, but historians' focus has traditionally been on the interplay between East Asia and the Mediterranean. The flow of trading goods that came from areas mid-route is less studied, even though many fruits have their roots in this point of intersection.

This is the core of a study published this week in PLOS ONE, which examined seed and plant remains found at a medieval archaeological site named Tashbulak, located in the foothills of eastern Uzbekistan’s Pamir Mountains, and other archaeological revelations in the area. The excavation (led by Farhod Maksudov, of the Institute for Archaeological Research, Academy of Sciences in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and Michael Frachetti of Washington University in St. Louis) looked at peach and apricot pits, apple, melon, and grape seeds, and shells from walnuts and pistachios.

The researchers discovered that many of these crops not only spread because of the Silk Road, but also either originated along the route or were directly shaped by it.

Consider the apple, which is thought to have originated from the Malus sieversii, the domestic apple’s ancestor, in the Tian Shan mountains of Kazakhstan. The study advances that idea by suggesting that “the Silk Road probably led to what we think of as the apple today by bringing smaller varieties together that hybridized,” says Robert Spengler, the Director of the Paleoethnobotanical Laboratories at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, who conducted the botanical analysis from samples Tashbulak.

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For the study, Spengler and his colleagues examined remains found in a deposit near the center of this high-elevation site, at a place that researchers believe was an ancient market bazaar. Given the elevation, it’s likely that fruits were carried from lower-elevation farms to be sold, consumed, and taken elsewhere on the Silk Road. In the study, the authors suggest that the orchards and vineyards around cities including Bukhara and Loulan were crucial to producing crops for travelers and merchants.

For several reasons, this is the first study to systematically probe the medieval crops along the Silk Road. Many years of political tumult made it challenging for teams to consider excavations in Central Asia. “There were a few collaborative Soviet projects, mostly with the French, but there were few teams that were able to get in before the Soviet Union collapsed,” Spengler says. “And even after it collapsed, the political unrest for much of the ‘90s made it very difficult to work there.” Studying plant and seed remains is also a relatively new area of focus in archaeology. “Looking for plant remains, [which are] basically, small carbonized leaves, isn’t quite as flashy as if you were looking for glass from Rome, or coins from the Persian world.”

In recent years, there’s been a move to study more underrepresented components and areas along the Silk Road, particularly in Central Asia. “History is very Eurocentric, and so everybody thinks that Rome was one of the major hubs of the Silk Road,” says Spengler. “The traders and the major economic and political players of the Silk Road were in Central Asia, and it has been a region largely overlooked in scholarship. But if you are a historian or archaeologist studying the Mediterranean, you really need to know what was going on [there]."

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The study also questions the way people have long imagined movement along the Silk Road. “Everybody thinks of these long-distance camel caravans that brought goods from China to the Mediterranean,” Spengler says. “I think now more historians have accepted that that’s not really how it functioned. You can probably think a lot more along the lines of short-distance movements between these market hubs.”

That’s why further scholarship in the region is vital. There’s still a lot of work to be done at Tashbulak: For instance, it’s unclear how and why people built a settlement at such a high elevation, where night frost makes growing many of these crops challenging. But this research is part of a larger reckoning.

“I think in the next few years you’ll see in Central Asia archaeology major changes in what the history and prehistory look like," Spengler says. "And as these new discoveries come out, it becomes increasingly clear how influential Central Asia was in the actual development of human cultures, across both Europe and Asia.”

'Batnadoes' Can Protect California’s Crops

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Bats are farmers' new best friends.

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For anyone driving the Yolo Causeway, the sight can come as a shock. As the summer sun sets behind the marshy floodplain of the Yolo Bypass, a swirling stream of bats soars out from beneath the elevated thoroughfare. To the delight of bat-lovers and a local rice farmer, roughly a quarter-million bats have made the underside of the tall, 3.2-mile causeway their summer home.

The Yolo Bypass is a study in coexistence. Water routed there keeps the nearby city of Sacramento from flooding, and some of its 59,000 acres house the Yolo Basin Wildlife Area, a refuge for waterfowl, animals, and fish. It's also home to rice farms: Sacramento Valley produces most of the nation's sushi rice, and several are located within the bypass. Since rice farming also creates a habitat for marshland animals, the Wildlife Area even leases land to one rice farm.

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At this farm near the Causeway, Mike DeWit grows wild rice. "Never really had a problem with insects," he says laconically, "because of the bats." For him, the bats are a benefit: They eat half their weight in insects each night, and pregnant bats eat even more. In his other rice fields in southern Yolo County, he has to spray for armyworms, and he knows rice farmers who have lost 20 percent of their crop to the pests. While weather conditions might also play a role, DeWit swears that the local bat population plays an outsized role in keeping his wild rice worm-free.

He's likely right, according to Rachael Long, a farm advisor with the UC Cooperative Extension in the Sacramento Valley. She's researched for decades how bats can help farmers control pests. "Armyworms are always a big problem in rice production," she says. "Bats are predators, of armyworms, cutworms, and other pests." Bats’ nocturnal feasts prevent adult moths from laying eggs that will hatch into hungry, rice-eating caterpillars, and, Long says, their impact cannot be overstated. When pest populations get out of control, "it can be really devastating."

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It's a happy accident that so many bats have made the Causeway their summer home. The conditions are ideal for bats, says Mary Jean “Corky” Quirk. Quirk is program coordinator at the Yolo Basin Foundation, but she's also the founder of NorCal Bats, a rescue and educational organization. As program coordinator, she leads the Foundation's wildly popular Bat Talk and Walks, which are currently completely booked except for one date in late September.

The bats beneath the Causeway, Quirk says, are Mexican free-tailed bats, who are making a migratory stop. Since they form gigantic colonies, they are the region's most numerous variety. The spaces between expansion joints beneath the Causeway make for comfortable roosting. Summer is when the bats come to give birth, and the hot asphalt of the bridge keeps everything warm, providing a heated nursery. Their large population has an equally large effect, Long says. "We've got three hundred thousand of them group feeding and patrolling over these fields," she says. Quirk agrees. "These guys are the farmers' best friend."

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The surrounding marshland and farms in the Bypass act as a bat buffet. Bats can travel far in search of food, flying up to 30 miles every night. They can also go vertical. According to Quirk, bats will chase moths two miles up into the air. The Causeway "batnado," which is a locally famous phenomenon, consists of bats going out to feed each night. Quirk is ambivalent about the term, though. "That kind of sight is more associated with caves, where they do a spiral," she says. "I call it a ribbon."

All this hard work from the bats is burnishing their reputation. Outside of rice fields, they also eat insects in California's orchards, which produce almonds, walnuts, and more. During Long’s 25 years of researching the topic, superstition and fear of rabies have long made people cautious of bats. But farmers are now interested in their insect-eating capabilities. Organic farmers, who have limited pest-fighting options, are particularly intrigued. According Long’s research—based on examining bat guano for the number of moths eaten each night at a local walnut orchard—a single bat can save a farmer up to $10 a season in pest control.

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Multiply that by a quarter-million and … well. "If they're saving me $30 to $40 per acre a year? Because of the benefits, I love bats," DeWit tells me. He's not alone. Long regularly receives calls about bats, and she says roughly half are from farmers looking to attract them. She advises farmers to build bat houses. (Although both Long and Quirk warn emphatically against touching bats: It's extremely rare, but they can carry rabies.) It's not easy to attract bats, though, because bats like to return to where they were born.

That means the Yolo Causeway will host bats for many summers to come. The Mexican free-tailed bats arrive in spring and disperse in September. Where they go, Quirk says, remains a mystery.

After a Century in the Ice, Maud Has Returned Home To Norway

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The polar exploration ship survived freezing, sinking, and seizure by creditors.

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On June 7, 1916, the polar explorer Roald Amundsen took a moment to christen his new ship. As in many places, sailors around Vollen, Norway generally did this by smashing a bottle of champagne over the bow. But Amundsen, who intended to take the ship to the North Pole, changed this tradition a bit.

"It is not my intention to dishonor the glorious grape," he reportedly said, "but already now you shall get the taste of your real environment. For the ice you have been built, and in the ice you shall stay most of your life, and in the ice you shall solve your tasks." He then crushed a block of the stuff against the front of the ship, and named it Maud, after the Queen of Norway.

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Amundsen was a little too correct. Although Maud never made it to the North Pole, it did spend most of its life in the ice, either stuck, sunk, or conscripted into labor. This Saturday—August 18, 2018, over a century after it first set out—Maud will finally creak back into Vollen.

The ship's life "represents a big, but quite unknown, part of polar history," writes Jan Wanggaard in an email. Wanggaard is the leader of Maud Returns Home, a project dedicated to bringing the ship to Norway from Nunavut, Canada, where it foundered in the early 1930s. At press time, he is onboard Maud, which is being towed along the Norwegian coast, stopping at various ports along the way. "We have sailed since June, and it's good to be back in Norway," he writes.

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Maud first left home in 1918, carrying Amundsen and three crew members northwards. The plan was to freeze the ship into the ice cap, where it would serve as a scientific research station and eventually drift all the way to the pole.

Amundsen's most recent journey had been quite successful—in 1911, he led the first team to reach the South Pole—but this one was more difficult. Amundsen was attacked by a polar bear, and crew members got carbon monoxide poisoning from working in an unventilated observatory lit by a faulty kerosene lamp. The ship didn't cooperate, either—as Wanggaard writes on the project website, "Maud spent several years in the Arctic ice without reaching the North Pole, and thus the expedition never got the deserved public attention."

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Amundsen tried again, hatching a plan that involved both airplanes and boats, but that failed, too. No attention means no money, and in 1925, Maud was seized by creditors. It was sold to the Hudson Bay Co., rechristened Baymaud, and put to work supplying company outposts in the Arctic.

The explorer did finally reach the North Pole, making it there by plane in 1926. But the loss of Maud to bankruptcy was "a big tragedy for him as a person," Wanggaard writes. "He died a bitter and sad man," disappearing in 1928 while trying to help rescue the crew of a downed airship.

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Baymaud, née Maud, struggled, too. As its new owners soon learned, the ship wasn't well-suited for transport work. In 1927, it was moored in Cambridge Bay, off the coast of Nunavut, and used as a warehouse and wireless station. In the winter of 1931, it sank. People salvaged material from it, and law enforcement eventually dynamited its stern, in order to remove the fuel tanks.

Even as the ship slowly rotted away, people remained fascinated by it. In 1990, the Norwegian municipality of Asker, where Vollen is located, bought Maud's remains from the Hudson Bay Company for one dollar. Asker eventually gave the project over to a private company called Tandberg Eiendom.

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In 2011, they brought Wanggaard on board, and over the past few years, he has jumped the various hurdles required to bring the ship back, from raising it off the seabed to negotiating with the residents of Cambridge Bay, some of whom wanted to keep it. (They ended up building a large stone cairn on the beach near the bay, to remember it by.)

Finally getting the ship back to Norway "feels pretty surreal," writes Wanggaard. After they reach Vollen, they will turn Maud into a museum, similar to ones built for Amundsen's other vessels, Gjøa and Fram.

"We have taken on one challenge after the other over the years," Wanggaard writes. "I feel happy but also extremely tired these days."

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