When the Koryo Saram were forcibly relocated, they forged new identities.

In 2010 Dave Cook, a food writer with a talent for highlighting lesser known cuisine, endorsed a mom-and-pop cafe just off Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach boardwalk in the New York Times. By writing about the restaurant, which is known interchangeably as Eddie Fancy Food, Cafe At-Your-Mother-in-Law, or Y Tëщи, he gave most Americans their first look at a unique fusion cuisine: Korean-Russian-Central Asian, or Koryo Saram, food.

Ever since, interest in this subtle blend, which mixes the heavy yet cool flavors of the Eurasian steppe with the fire and tang of the Korean peninsula, has exploded. Enticingly, though, it does not simply mix-and-match the traditions’ ingredients. Koryo Saram food presents, for example, a standard Central Asian dish, such as lagman, a cool beef noodle soup, straight up, only revealing an unexpected dash of fermented Korean chilis when diners taste it on the tongue. And chim cha salads often look for all the world like white kimchi, but one bite reveals cabbage deep soaked in vinegar, rather than fermented, and sometimes cut with distinctly Central Asian flavors, such as pickled tomatoes. Tourists from across the U.S. and as far as South Korea now visit Y Tëщи, or Brooklyn’s other Koryo Saram eatery, Café Lily.

Yet Koryo Saram food is not like other Korean fusions that have caught the public eye. Mixes like Korean-Mexican food are often the result of serendipitous encounters between American immigrant communities and intentional experimentation by chefs. Koryo Saram food, though, is in many ways the creation of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, a product of a massive and brutal ethnic cleansing campaign.

Koreans have likely lived in the slice of Russia above North Korea and east of China for centuries, says Jon Chang, an ethnographer of the population, albeit in small and perhaps itinerant numbers. The population exploded not long after Russia acquired the region in a treaty signed with China in 1860. Drought and famine in Korea’s northeastern Hamgyong province sent thousands across the border, until they outnumbered imperial settlers in some areas. Russian Czars initially welcomed the Koreans as part of efforts to tame their new territory, a surprisingly warm and hospitable, but still mountainous, forested, and rugged and remote corner of the Russian Far East. As regional historian Dae-Sook Suh has documented, though, Russian rulers grew increasingly racist and nervous, attempting to shut the border with Hamgyong and offering citizenship and land only to Korean settlers who agreed to embrace Russian culture and the Orthodox Christian faith.

Many Koreans played ball with Russia. They joined the imperial army and fought in the Russo-Japanese War and World War I, and they joined the Bolsheviks in holding the territory against foreign incursions from 1918 to 1922. By 1923, up to 100,000 Koreans lived in the region, and those who lived in or near cities, says Koryo Saram academic and Kazakhstani native Dr. German Kim, had adopted Russian culture and language. Soviet cultural and nutritional policies in the 1920s, notes Jeanyoung Lee, a Koryo Saram foodways scholar, also introduced them to European staples, such as breakfasts of bread, milk, and coffee. “In kindergarten in the Soviet times,” says German Kim, “all the kids ate standard foods. It was all regulation, to make all people the same.” Many, German Kim adds, saw themselves as distinct from their peninsular kin.

Still, Hamgyong culture and food maintained strong footholds in the region: Koreans in urban centers lived primarily in ethnic enclaves, while farmers rarely encountered Russian culture. Immigration from Hamgyong continued too, especially after Japan seized the Korean peninsula in 1905. By the mid-1930s, says German Kim, only half of all Koreans in the area were meaningfully assimilated, and most still spoke the Hamgyong dialect. They grew Hamgyong ingredients, such as rice, millet, potato, cabbage, and pepper, and cooked and ate Hamgyong foods, such as seaweed soup with crab, millet porridges, pollock fish dishes.

“The Koreans were a strong social group who maintained their language and culture during the first generations in the Russian Far East,” says Michael Kim, an Argentine-Korean photographer who has documented Koryo Saram communities. “They had founded cultural establishments, such as newspapers, radio programs, cultural centers, as well as theaters.”

Then in 1936, with no warning, evidence, or clear precipitating event, Soviet agents rounded up hundreds of Koreans, accused them of being Japanese spies, and killed or imprisoned them. In 1937, officials suddenly gave the more than 170,000 Koreans in the Far East days to pack their belongings. They forcibly relocated some 95,000 to Kazakhstan and 76,000 to Uzbekistan, in what was then the USSR.

This was not the first time the Soviet Union engaged in ethnic cleansing. In 1935, officials moved at least 7,000 Finns out of the Leningrad region, and in 1936, they relocated 20,000 Finns and almost 36,000 Poles and Ukrainians. But the Korean cleansing was the largest prelude to a wave of forced deportations throughout the 1940s, which swept millions of minorities, especially from the Caucasus, Ukraine, and the European border, from their homes to often remote parts of Central Asia and Siberia.

Historians still debate the logic and logistics of these cleansings, which were justified officially by notions that entire ethnic groups were disloyal, but perpetrated unevenly. In the Korean case, scholars such as Chang have convincingly argued that the purge was an extension of longstanding anti-Asian racism—an insistence on seeing a loyal frontier group as a scheming, forever-foreign other.

All of the purges, though, were sudden and brutal, corralling tens-to-hundreds of thousands into cattle cars, killing those who resisted or could not travel, tossing the dead aside in transit, and dumping survivors in ill-supplied labor camps, where between a third and half died of illness, starvation, and exposure within the first year. Nikolay Ten, the son of Korean exiles, told Uzbek-Korean writer Victoria Kim that, on the trains, families like his collected snow for meltwater and traded belongings in towns they passed for survival rations. At least 72,000 Koreans died on the month-long, 4,000-mile journey, or during the early months of camp life.

Survivors found their lives upended. In an interview with Chang, Elizaveta Li, a native of Vladivostok in the Far East, recounted losing her father to the Soviet roundups, being shipped to Uzbekistan, and losing her best friends and neighbors, Suna and Kuna Tsoi, who were relocated some 500 miles away in Kazakhstan. They never saw each other again.

The communities the exiles formed in Central Asia could have fostered an even stronger, insular Korean identity. Given their strong agricultural roots, the Soviets wanted them to cultivate Central Asian swamps, and they set up remote, often all-Korean work camps and farming towns. Suh’s research on these communes showed, by the 1980s, that only one in 20 married a non-Korean.

But especially in the early years, conditions in these communities were harsh and the environment was foreign. An Uzbek-Korean survivor told Chang that they ate whatever they could, including birds, dogs, and rabbits. Nikolay Ten recounted food shortages into the 1950s, which forced his mother to bake grass bread to survive.

After some initial caution, Chang notes, locals developed ties with the Koreans, helping them learn what to hunt, grow, and eat. Aside from the rice and other staple crops they grew on their farms, this new local diet lacked many Hamgyong standards, such as seafood and, due to the region’s Islamic bent, pork. The Soviet Union also made efforts to eliminate Korean cultural institutions and impose Russian language, ways of life, and, of course, foodways.

While all the USSR’s forcibly deported peoples faced similar cultural pressures, Soviet Korean culture and food witnessed perhaps the most dramatic transformations, says Pohl. They had undergone less Russianization, and their food and culture was especially distinct from their area of exile. And while most exiled populations were resettled to their home territories in 1957, four years after Stalin’s death, the Koreans, like a few other groups, didn’t get to go back to the Far East. Moreover, says German Kim, the Koreans, having lived in that region for a few decades at most, didn’t feel like they had a home to return to. “Other peoples were all dreaming of going back to native places, preserving their identity, language, cuisine, customs,” he says of groups who remained in exile post-Stalin. “The Koryo Saram had no dream.”

So, more than any other group, they decided to integrate into Central Asian-Soviet society. They shed their dialect, to the point that few today even speak it as a heritage tongue, intermarried at higher rates, and as German Kim put it, “began to eat Russian bread and drink Russian vodka.”

By the 1960s, says Kim, the deportees had developed a distinctive culture and started, at a critical mass, referring to themselves as Koryo Saram. Soviet nutritional policies, familial blending, and a radically different environment produced major culinary shifts that worked heritage flavors into primarily Central Asian or Russian dishes, and used steppe flavors and cooking techniques in the Korean soups, salads, and other sides that could still be readily made in the region.

Not every family experienced the same level of blend; Michael Kim notes that he’s met at least one Koryo Saram woman in her 90s who still primarily cooks recognizably Korean food. But for many, combined with the fact that the rural Hamgyong cuisine was already distinct, these influences have led to a complete break with Korea.

“The first time I came to South Korea,” says German Kim, “I couldn’t recognize a lot of their cuisine. There are many things in South Korea I still cannot eat. I don’t like how it smells.”

The Koryo Saram story is hardly unique in human history. Many American culinary traditions, for example, are defined by the forced movements and cultural deconstruction of African slaves or Native American tribes. The freshness of the Koryo Saram’s trauma, though, and the centrality of it to any review of a cafe like Brooklyn’s Y Tëщи, serves as a reminder of the importance of looking for and recognizing the pain that forged other, older food traditions, in order to better appreciate them and honor the achievements of their often anonymous pioneers.

It looked like the Hollywood Sign in Los Angeles.

Over the weekend, an anonymous hero erected a sign at a spot in Winnipeg officially known as Westview Park. In big white letters echoing the design of the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles, the sign read: GARBAGE HILL.

Starting back around 1875, this place was a landfill. For decades, ash and glass piled up, creating a small hump of garbage. In the 1940s, the city decided the landfill was full. In 1960, this pile of trash was landscaped and transformed into a park. Once called “Lil’s Hill,” after the local luminary who came up with the idea to repurpose the site, it was officially named Westview.

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But civic memories are long, and no one has forgotten the park’s origins. Whatever its official name, locals call it “Garbage Hill.” There's even a local podcast network named in honor of Garbage Hill.

By all accounts, Garbage Hill is a perfectly pleasant place—a good spot to run, let your dog off leash, photograph sunsets, or watch fireworks. Winnipeg is pretty flat, and Garbage Hill is the rare place where there’s elevation and slope.

The Garbage Hill sign was not long for this world, though. On Monday afternoon, city workers took the sign down, though not without apology, reports CTV News. (Canada! Always living up to its reputation for Canadian-ness.)

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Winnipeg’s mayor, Brian Bowman, wrote on Twitter that he would support the return of the Garbage Hill sign, “provided City processes are respected.” It’s still a mystery who put the sign up to begin with, but we hope they start the permitting process right away. Garbage Hill already has a place in our heart.

The southern summit of Kebnekaise was the highest point in Sweden. Then it melted.

In August of 2014, journalist Oliver Gee packed a knapsack, rented a pair of hiking boots, and set out on an adventure. He was headed to climb the south peak of Kebnekaise, the highest mountain in Sweden. "The idea of standing on top of Sweden's highest peak seemed like a really tangible challenge," says Gee, who, at the time, worked for expat publication The Local.

In the article he wrote about his experience ("Kebnekaise: How I tamed Sweden's highest peak"), he describes the feeling of triumph he and his girlfriend felt as they reached the top: "Eventually we couldn't climb any higher. We were on the top of Sweden. We'd done it."

Four years later, the whole article is suddenly suffused with nostalgia. As of the beginning of August 2018, the south peak of Kebnekaise is no longer the country's highest. That title now belongs to the north peak of Kebnekaise—less than half a mile away, but much more difficult to access. The switch, though expected, has thrown many people for a loop, from scientists to mountain safety officials to hobbyist climbers. Even in an age of climate change, some things still seem like they should be unchangeable.

Although it is all one mountain, Kebnekaise has two main peaks. The northern one is made of rock, and holds steady at 2,096.8 meters tall, or just under 6,880 feet. The southern one is glaciated, which makes it more mercurial: As the temperature rises, it shrinks. It grows again in the winter, when snowfall builds up. Depending on how these two seasons balance out, the peak may gain or lose a few meters over the course of a year. Scientists at the Tarfala Research Station keep tabs on it, measuring it each summer as though it's a kid about to go back to school.

In 1902, the first reliable measurement on record, the southern peak was 6,958 feet tall. It stayed within a few stories of this height up until 1999, when it dropped below 2,110 meters for the first time. Since then, it's been steadily dwindling: 6,890 feet in 2011, 6,886 in 2013, 6,881 in 2014. "This year it was really hot," says Gunhild Rosqvist, the station's director and a professor of physical geography at Stockholm University. "It lost the battle."

The team took its measurement on Tuesday, July 31, and found that the south peak was just six inches taller than its brother. The next day's heat, they knew, would knock off its crown. "When we actually got the number, we looked at each other, and we just said, 'Oh my god,'" she says. "'It's happening.'"

Although Rosqvist and her colleagues had been waiting for this day, it was still a strange one, capping off a strange season. The heat wave that swept Northern Europe this summer also brought eerily hot weather to the station, and the researchers had found themselves searching for shade, though the mountains provided none. In July, Rosqvist left for a while; when she came back, the peak, normally furred with snow, looked bare and sickly. "It was really exposed, like I've never seen it before" she says.

The aftermath has also been emotional, says Rosqvist, who explains that glaciers play a very particular cultural role in Sweden. Unlike someplace like the Himalayas, where glacier melt provides fresh water to hundreds of millions of people, "people don't depend on them as such," Rosqvist says. "We can live without them, but it's sad if they go. They mean a lot symbolically."

Combined with the scalding summer, the fall of the south peak seems to have provided an opportunity for people to experience the effects of climate change in a newly visceral way, she says. "It's like everybody walks around waiting for examples, waiting for it to hit you as a person. And I think it did this year somehow."

This transfer of power may have at least one other practical repercussion. The south peak of Kebnekaise is that rare combination of stately and accessible. About 10,000 people scale it every summer, and many of them, like Gee, are inexperienced climbers, willing to put in a day's rigorous trek to see the views. A whole ecosystem has cropped up to support their efforts. In 2016, a private company flew in a team of Sherpa mountain experts to build steps along the main set of trails. Close to the summit, the Kebnekaise Mountain Station offers shelter, food, guided tours, and equipment rentals.

From the top of the south peak, you can see the northern peak: the new highest point in Sweden, and much more difficult to access. The route from one to the other "is a peaked glacier—it's like a razor edge that you have to cross," says Per-Olov Wikberg, the coordinator for Sweden's Mountain Safety Council. "It's very slippery in August when the snow has melted away. You have to use crampons, and ice axes. It's almost a 60-degree slope on both sides."

In other words, the new ruler is much less democratic. "It will not be maybe so easy for any ordinary person to get to the new peak, I would say," says Rosqvist. "You don't want to take your kids there, probably." But because it's now on top, its appeal has increased. "People are talking about it—that they really would like to reach the north peak as well because now it will be higher than the south peak," says Wikberg.

A recent meeting of mountain safety officials in Sweden focused heavily on the new safety challenges that could result, he adds. "It could be a severe problem next summer, but we really don't know yet." (Marit Sarri, the manager of the mountain station, told the New York Times that she doesn't expect this will affect their operations very much, predicting that "the southern peak will still be the natural peak for many visitors.")

As the melting continues, these priorities will continue to shift, says Per-Olov. "If you look forward 20 years, I think the peak glacier of Kebnekaise could have disappeared—nothing left," he says. "And then you have just rocks and stones to walk on to reach the peak. So it will be much easier."

Gee, for one, doesn't plan to take on the north peak. "On the one hand, it's frustrating to know that my solitary success on my list of ultimate challenges is now void," he says. "But on the other hand, I still climbed a monstrous mountain. Maybe it will be something to tell my grandkids one day—I climbed what was once the highest mountain in Sweden."

Three colors of yarn, seven panels, and all 88 constellations.

Until a few months ago, the largest thing Sarah Spencer, of Melbourne, Australia, had ever knitted was a baby blanket. But she recently decided to scale things up—astronomically. The result is a vast tapestry of the cosmos, 21 times bigger than her blankets.

Spencer is a software engineer by trade, and pulled this project off by tinkering with a domestic knitting machine from the 1980s. She grabbed star data from publicly available maps, and then designed an algorithm that could translate pixels into stitches in one of three different colors. And then, bang! “Yarn is a fuzzy material to work with," she says, "so it wasn't a perfect science."

It might not be up to the engineer's standards for precision, but it includes all 88 constellations, including Spencer’s favorite, Orion. Visible, at various times of year, from both hemispheres, the warrior has been a friendly fixture in the sky for Spencer, “like having a friend from home join me on my travels," she says. "I was always able to find him whenever I went looking.” The white stars are scaled based on their brightness, and the tapestry includes our close neighbors, including the Sun, Moon, and visible planets. A gray band like a rippling stream represents the Milky Way.

The tapestry is roughly nine by 15 feet, and weighs about 33 pounds. The graphic spans seven separate panels, each of which the machine executed overnight—between dusk and dawn, appropriately. It then took days to stitch them together into a single skyscape.

Spencer debuted her piece at Electromagnetic Field, a camping tech-and-arts festival in the United Kingdom that had offered her a grant to work on the installation. She even arranged the planets to correspond to their locations the night of the festival’s kickoff, on August 31, 2018.

Now that the event is over, Spencer isn’t sure where the map will go next. She hopes to find a home for it that will inspire the next generation of craft- and tech-savvy space nerds. “As a woman in tech, I wanted to create something which would engage young minds in an area of STEM,” she says. It's sure to inspire makers, too.

And meet the determined enthusiast bringing them back to life.

It's a terrible pourer, it spills tea everywhere.” Jack Hanlon is holding up an undistinguished brown teapot. Like everything else in this tiny, windowless room—measuring just 13 feet by 16 feet or so—the teapot is not for appearance or entertaining or even utility, but for basic survival. It would, in theory, be able to provide cups of tea for up to three weeks. Jerry cans of water are lined up along one wall, the cupboard is rammed full of cans, and narrow bunk beds, complete with gray blankets that look as though they were made primarily to be itchy, sit in the corner.

We're standing in a room buried 10 feet below the North Yorkshire moors in northeast England, near the village of Castleton. The wind howls over the hatch above our heads as Hanlon—no expert, just an enthusiast—describes how the room would have been used, as an outpost of English civility and resourcefulness in the face of a nuclear attack. This bunker is one of hundreds just like it, scattered across the country. They’re no longer in use, having been decommissioned for decades, but they’re a nationwide network of relics of fear—a fear that seems never to have left.

Today the “Doomsday Clock,” maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is just two minutes from midnight—the closest it’s been to nuclear annihilation since the height of Cold War in 1953. If, as UN Secretary-General António Guterres declared in April 2018, “the Cold War is back with a vengeance,” our old monuments to precaution, paranoia, and practicality take on a new, chilling life. We're not privy to our governments’ current top-secret contingency plans, but these bunkers provide a glimpse of the difficult, high-level decisions and calculated sacrifices that were once made, and how both officials and regular people corralled existential fear with work and routine.

At 23 years old, Hanlon never knew the Cold War first-hand, but he has always been fascinated with the period, and is perhaps a little wistful that he missed it. The quietly unassuming millennial has worked various jobs, most recently as an undertaker, but he is defined by his hobbies—campanology (the art and practice of bell-ringing) and restoring Cold War bunkers. His gritty determination has earned him the respect of many former military and volunteer officers from the period, some of whom have donated old equipment. Even vandals who took aim at the bunkers have not been an obstacle—he encouraged them to volunteer with the restoration work, and a couple of them are still involved. Today, the fresh coat of “khaki-green” paint on the bunker entrance at Castleton, and the neat post-and-rail fence around the site, just hint at the hard graft, skill, and attention to detail that made this living museum piece.

The term “Cold War” is attributed to a 1945 article written by George Orwell to describe a nuclear stalemate between “two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds.” Only the United States had the bomb at that point, but Orwell saw where things were going, and by the 1950s his prediction had come to pass. So it was that in 1955, the British Ministry of Defence commissioned a top-secret report (declassified in 2002) to get a sense of what nuclear annihilation might look like. The Strath Report, as it was called, concluded that a Soviet nighttime attack with 10 hydrogen bombs would kill 12 million people (a third of the population at that time) and seriously injure another four million. Food and water would be contaminated, industry shut down, and the National Health Service utterly overwhelmed. There are, in such a case, bad options and worse options, but doing nothing, it was decided, was no option. So the kingdom invested in bunkers.

A network designed to protect as many people as possible was estimated to cost £1.25 billion (equivalent to £30 billion today), and the government decided this was prohibitive. So they prioritized a network of smaller underground facilities that emphasized information, communication, and function after a nuclear attack. Over the next few years, more than 1,500 holes were blasted into the ground, from Cornwall to Shetland, and then a standard concrete bunker was built in each one. These were to be the “eyes and ears” of the country, and the people who manned them tasked with sending data to a network of 29 larger regional headquarters, where they would be collated and used to understand where blasts had occurred, the power of the weapons, and possible fallout patterns. The information could then be shared with military and civilian authorities to help them plan their responses.

These were not, however, military installations to be manned at all times. Rather, the government recruited a network of 10,000 volunteer civilians, known as the Royal Observer Corps (ROC), which gathered weekly for training at their respective bunkers. During periods of rising tension—such as during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962—volunteers were expected to drop their lives, leave their families, and head to the bunkers, where they would be organized into three-person shifts. If a nuclear strike occurred, the entrance hatch would be sealed and it would more or less stay that way for three weeks. “We knew that psychologically this job would be immensely difficult, particularly in the full knowledge of what our families were likely to be facing, just a few miles away,” says Tim Kitching, who served as an ROC officer during the 1980s.

The network was activated in the late 1950s and was in continuous use until 1991, when nuclear tensions eased. The bunkers, which were built on both public and private land, were released into the wild. Today the majority has been demolished, or simply left to flood and rot. But two of these bunkers—Castleton and another nearby called Chop Gate—escaped this fate, thanks to one Jack Hanlon.

The village of Castleton nestles into an alcove in one of England’s bleakest and most remote regions. Above the village an icy wind rips across the landscape, tearing over sturdy heather shrubs and sending the native red grouse scurrying for cover. This is where, just 20 miles from Fylingdales—a key military target and one of the 30 or so radar stations tasked with watching the skies and providing the country with a four-minute warning of impending missile attack—12 dedicated ROC volunteers trained and met, and where they would have gone had the worst come to pass.

After driving a half-mile up the steep hill out of Castleton, Hanlon pulls over where the moorland plateau begins. In steep glacial valleys off each side of the plateau are marginal pastures enclosed by traditional dry-stone walls. Hanlon and I stomp up a short grassy track to find the timeless view interrupted by something distinctly modern. A small hummocky enclosure emerges from the heather, with a couple of small, angular concrete structures in the middle. A black metal tube like a submarine periscope sprouts incongruously from the ground.

“I first came across this when I was 14,” Hanlon explains. “The hatch had been ripped off and the interior was flooded. I realized it was too big a project for me to tackle at that time, but it stuck in my mind.” Some years later he also came across the neighboring Chop Gate bunker and met the owner of the land it was on, a former ROC officer who used to work at it. With the officer's blessing, Hanlon started to restore Chop Gate. Soon after, he returned to Castleton and boldly approached the landowner—it is on the Danby Estate, owned by Richard Henry Dawnay, the 12th Viscount Downe—for permission. His work at Chop Gate convinced the viscount that Hanlon was up to the task.

Hanlon undoes three padlocks and heaves open the blast-proof hatch to reveal a dark hole, roughly two feet square. A ladder leads into the gloom. We climb gingerly down and step off 15 feet below the surface. Claustrophobia sets in quickly, with only a small square of daylight above, but Hanlon's presence is oddly reassuring. He feels official—clean-shaven and dressed in heavy work boots, a high-vis waterproof jacket, and warm wooly hat—and exudes an unruffled air of capable competence.

My flashlight reveals a tiny vestibule off the entrance shaft containing a chemical toilet. To my left is a darkened doorway. Hanlon flicks on a light, casting the room in a dim orange glow. There's a ticking noise. The lights are on a timer to conserve precious battery power.

Fixing the lights was one of the first jobs Hanlon tackled when he started work on the Castleton bunker in earnest in April 2017. “We had to remove 300 liters of water first, using a bucket and a pulley,” he says. With a team of practical and handy friends, Hanlon prioritized electricity and used fans on full-throttle to get the place dry. He is not the boasting type, but the before-and-after pictures are remarkable, and the wide range of skills and knowledge required to bring this place back to its original state and function is evident. Former ROC officers—many of whom have advised Hanlon on details and shared old photos, documents, and inventory lists—delight in visiting for a trip down memory lane.

Along the long wall to the left of the entrance are two canvas chairs neatly tucked under a plain wooden table. A small mirror is propped on a shelf above—a rare concession to vanity. On the table, neat piles of forms lie ready for the documentation of weather observations, radiation levels, and whatever other details the volunteers could glean about the location of the blast. At the far end of the room, the metal-framed bunk beds take up the entire width. A map showing the network of bunkers across the country and charts to aid cloud identification line one wall.

Many of the pieces of period equipment have been donated by ex-ROC officers and are testaments to the power of social media. Hanlon's Facebook page for the bunker has more than 450 followers, and he has another for Chop Gate with 400 as well. Meanwhile, more than 600 showed an interest in his first open day, when the public was invited to visit. “We had to take bookings as there was no way we could manage 600 people in one day!” he says. Discussions on the page have inspired locals to get involved, and resulted in generous donations of both equipment and specialist knowledge.

Some bunkers were sited in towns or cities, but Hanlon’s are rather remote. Here, the ROC volunteers were most likely to have been called to duty via phone or radio bulletin. If attack was thought to be imminent, one of their first jobs upon arrival would have been to alert the local population with a hand-cranked siren, just like the ones used during air raids in World War II. The other two volunteers would prep the “Ground Zero Indicator”—an instrument that sat above ground. The device used the same principle as a pinhole camera, only it had four holes, one corresponding to each compass point. The bomb blast would sear an image onto light-sensitive paper, and the location and size of the resulting marks could indicate its height and direction. “The big problem," says Hanlon, "was that one of the volunteers had to go outside after the blast, potentially exposing themselves to the radiation, to collect the paper.”

But this vital information was worth the risk, and the volunteers were expected to communicate it to the regional headquarters at first opportunity. A regional headquarters could then plot a number of ground-zero measurements to determine the power of the weapon, where it detonated, and whether it was an air or ground burst (ground bursts produce far more residual radiation from their fallout).

The other essential instrument they operated was the “Bomb Power Indicator,” which consisted of a pipe that connected the surface with the interior of the shelter. Inside, a small set of bellows was attached to the end, which would expand as air rushed in from the blast. The bellows moved a needle, which would indicate the pressure produced by the blast wave—another critical piece of information.

The three observers would then be expected to settle into a pattern of regular readings. Exterior radiation levels could be measured safely from inside, using a “Fixed Survey Meter,” a small console on the desk connected to a detector above, but further meteorological measurements required more trips outside, to record the wind speed, direction, and cloud type.

The original Fixed Survey Meter from the Castleton bunker disappeared long ago, but Hanlon went to enormous lengths to find a replacement. “I heard about a Fixed Survey Meter in a flooded bunker on a remote Scottish island, so I traveled up there, pumped the bunker out, and went down to retrieve it,” he says. He traveled up and down the country and scoured eBay to find period-correct equipment, and took care to renovate and repair what he found using the same materials and equipment as would have been used when the bunkers were in service. “I've always been interested in history and I'm a determined kind of person,” he says, with characteristic understatement. “When I first came across photos of these bunkers online I just knew I had to go and find out more.”

Thanks to Hanlon’s efforts, it is now possible to imagine how it might have felt to live down here, isolated and afraid, while a nuclear war may or may not have been raging overhead. Deep in the cupboard is a small tin of Tommy's Cooking Fuel, solid fuel that could be used to heat up the contents of a mess tin. Such a moment of gathering to eat baked beans and share a pot of tea would have served as a vital focal point for the bunker inhabitants, a way of creating a routine and distinguishing the hours in the absence of normal day-night cycles.

Despite having somewhat better shelter than most of the general population, the inhabitants of these bunkers knew that their chances of survival would be still relatively slim. As the howling draft coming down the ventilation shaft into the Castleton bunker demonstrates, the protection the bunkers could offer was modest at best. Furthermore, the volunteers were expected to leave for measurements, so long-term safety was clearly not a goal. Despite feeling confined, I am reassured by the organization and purpose I see around me. Even if it didn't offer the greatest protection, I can imagine that useful activity would feel superior than merely awaiting my fate.

Over a steaming coffee in the city of York, former ROC officer Tim Kitching explains the government's Cold War strategy to me. “The risk of losing observers [due to radiation exposure] was outweighed by the gain in information from the Ground Zero Indicator readings,” he says. Certainly the bunkers were intended to aid survival, and support the continuance of some form of governance after a nuclear exchange, but their primary role was as a passive deterrent. “This warning and monitoring system was designed to support our own forces in surviving a first strike in sufficient numbers to strike back, thereby deterring any aggressor in making first use, knowing that there was a degree of certainty that they would be hit back,” he says.

Kitching, who is smartly turned out in creased slacks, and has an organized and efficient air about him, was motivated to serve in the ROC out of a desire to contribute to the defense of the country. “Being ready to do what we were training to do was simply part of the country's insurance policy,” he says. Kitching was confident that the system would have worked well. “Within the Corps there was multiple 'redundancy' built in throughout,” he explains. “So, for example, posts had a complement of 10, but only three were needed for an operational crew.” The overall simplicity enabled them to live off the grid—without piped-in gas, electricity, or water.

There was, however, one link—a weak link—between the bunker and the rest of the world, its overground telephone connection, which was used to transmit information between monitoring posts and to the regional headquarters. The wooden poles and looping wires that connected bunkers in the early days of the network would almost certainly have been knocked over by a nuclear blast, which would have left the bunkers isolated and the precious observations completely useless. By the 1980s, the British Government lessened this risk by investing in private, underground telephone wires between bunkers. Furthermore, monitoring posts were grouped into clusters of three or four, each about 15 miles apart and linked by telephone. One bunker in each cluster served as a “master post,” equipped with radio communications to back up the telephone system. Castleton was one of the lucky bunkers, and held a radio and antenna.

In the Castleton bunker, Hanlon points out the bright yellow “Tele-Talk” loudspeaker telephone on the desk, and the prized VHF radio set on a small shelf above. With luck, Castleton would have been able to communicate its observations, and hopefully those of the other bunkers in its cluster (Hinderwell and Goathland, in this case), to the regional headquarters, 50 miles away in the historic city of Durham.

The Durham regional headquarters no longer exists, so instead I travel south to York to see the only one of the 29 regional headquarters to have been preserved. The York Cold War Bunker is one of the city's best kept secrets, situated out in the suburbs, on a nondescript street, lined with ordinary houses and neatly mowed lawns. At the end of a cul-de-sac, however, is a distinctly extraordinary sight. A rectangular grassy mound rears up to around 10 feet above street level. A flight of concrete steps leads up the mound to a flat-roofed, boxy green building. Locals call it the “Aztec Temple.”

When it was in use, this building was hidden in a hollow, surrounded by an orchard, hundreds of yards from a main road. Since 2006, English Heritage has operated it as an unusual tourist attraction. The visible structure is just the top level of a three-story building hidden in the hill. The lower two levels are further covered in three layers of asphalt, and then at least three feet of earth—all to protect against a blast, heat, and radiation.

Twenty steps bring me to the top of the mound and the green concrete box. A strange cylindrical structure like an outsized chimney pokes out of the flat roof, and a radio aerial bristles to my right. A small wooden noticeboard just inside the door informs me that the “attack state” is “black.” Once inside the door, I pass through an airlock—two rubber-sealed, gas-proof doors—and then descend stairs into the heart of the bunker. It is around 4,000 square feet, containing a kitchen, canteen, dormitories, plant room, generator room, telephone exchange, and officers’ room, with a large gallery overlooking the operations room, another level down. This bunker is an entirely different beast than the drafty underground cell in Castleton.

“One-hundred and twenty volunteers and four paid officers were trained up to use this bunker,” says Jake Tatman, who works behind the scenes there. “If nuclear war was likely you'd have everyone working on shifts with 60 staff manning the bunker at any one time.” If a nuclear strike occurred, the door would be locked and the crew inside would prepare for 30 days of tracking radiation and weather, and collating and plotting measurements from the surrounding posts. And just like at Castleton, one poor sod would have to go outside after the blast to retrieve the light-sensitive paper from the Ground Zero Indicator. He or she, however, would have had the added luxury of a shower, to help wash off some radioactive particles.

This bunker also would have had a few specialists. “During an emergency it was essential that the bunker had at least one engineer, capable of keeping the generator and air conditioning system going,” explains Tatman, outside the diesel generator room. In the gallery, a team of specialist plotters would have sat at a row of desks, listening for information from outlying bunkers and putting it up on rotating Perspex display boards, which could be swiveled around to be viewed by still more specialists in operations below.

Data would be plotted on the triangulation table, and the location of blasts would then be transferred to four large maps on the wall: the current situation, the cumulative situation, the United Kingdom situation, and the European situation. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the gallery, a group of tellers would pass this information to other group headquarters, as well as government and military facilities. It is through this process, ideally, that the contributions of volunteers at local bunkers like Castleton would make their way into the corridors of power, where the difficult decisions were to be made.

At least in theory. In practice, the York bunker might not have survived the first day. “York was the hub of the railway industry and it had four RAF [Royal Air Force] bases, so it would have been a big target,” says Tatman. “The chances are that this bunker wouldn't exist at all after a nuclear attack.” The volunteers running the more remote observation posts might survive the initial attack, only to have to fend for themselves.

With all of this in mind, utility, survival, and maintenance of a functional society were hopeful, secondary goals for the bunkers. The network was, by design, one of Cold War Britain’s worst-kept secrets, at home and abroad. The very existence of these bunkers, and the willingness of thousands of volunteers to train to defend their country, could have played a role in preventing a nuclear strike from occurring in the first place.

And today, as tensions rise again, it feels like we need to rediscover something of the calm and stoicism that these bunkers were built to encourage. Perhaps we would be more confident if we knew that our friends and neighbors had our backs. Throughout the Cold War, this system—of both bunkers and people—played a significant role in boosting morale and containing fear. Neither of these things seems particularly possible today. The restored York and Castleton sites evoke a kind of nostalgia, for when it at least seemed like ordinary citizens had the power to help each other, even if it was rather illusory. Teapots that don't pour properly and itchy blankets are important comforts when you feel like there’s a greater purpose to them.

What heavenly sweet, cheese, or beer have you tried?

Nuns, monks, and other members of religious orders around the world have been making beloved food and drink for generations. Ranging from simple sweets and jams to an herbal liqueur whose ingredient list of 130 plants is known by only two silent monks, these handmade confections fund charity, places of worship, and the lives of religious acolytes.

These culinary efforts now also align with reigning values of the food world: They tend to be handcrafted, made of local ingredients, and infused with tradition. Each cheese, jam, sweet, or other edible treat has a great story to go with it.

Unlike private businesses, though, monasteries and convents making hugely popular food products don't open new factories and expand internationally. For the most part, their wares need to be bought or sampled at abbeys or seasonal markets, and these cloistered comestibles remain a local secret.

That's why we're asking for your help. Have you ever tried a delicious or unique food or drink made by nuns, monks, or other members of a religious order? We want to hear about it! Share your story via the below Google form, and send any images, if you have them, to anne.ewbank@atlasobscura.com with the words "Cloistered Comestibles" in the subject line. We'll share our favorites in an upcoming feature on the site.

It included Portuguese and Japanese recipes for caramel, cake, and an early tempura.

These days, treats including tempura, konpeitō hard candy, and fluffy castella cake are available in restaurants, convenience stores, and bakeries across Japan. It might seem hard to believe that these dishes, especially fried tempura, were once curiosities even to the Japanese. Early recipes for these things and more were compiled in a cookbook manuscript dating from the 17th century. It's called the Nanban ryōrisho, or the "Southern Barbarians' Cookbook."

Who were the "southern barbarians?" According to Eric C. Rath, author of Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan, that was the term for the largely Portuguese Europeans who sailed to Japan beginning in the 16th century. As traders and missionaries, they brought along Christianity and Western technology. But they also brought their food.

The author is unknown, though Rath writes that they were obviously very familiar with Iberian cuisine, perhaps even knowing Portuguese and Spanish people personally. A collection of 45 recipes, which Rath translates in his book, the Barbarian’s Cookbook long existed as a handful of handwritten manuscripts in Japanese libraries, only to be published by the 20th century. The recipes therein offer a glimpse into changing attitudes towards food in Japan at the time, and the development of the nanban cuisine still enjoyed today.

Nanban, or "southern barbarian" cuisine, comprised the foods and dishes from abroad that the Portuguese brought along with them, starting in 1543. Compared to Japanese food, these dishes were often heavily-spiced, meaty, oily, and, of course, sweet. The wide reach of Portuguese trade made sugar more accessible than ever, even in Japan, where sugar had previously been known as a rare, valuable commodity.

In the cookbook, recipes for sweets, both Japanese and Portuguese, are front and center. Karumeira, made with sugar and egg whites, is nothing other than caramel. A recipe for Portuguese confeito hard sweets results in a tri-colored, spiced candy mix. The resulting konpeitō candy already had some history. According to Rath, a Jesuit missionary gave a container of konpeitō to the warlord Oda Nobunaga decades before the cookbook was compiled. Sugary treats soon became nearly synonymous with Christianity.

The other half of the Barbarian’s Cookbook contained savory dishes, notable for the eggs and meat they required. At the time, lingering dietary taboos over both existed in Japan for health and religious reasons. But the cookbook listed recipes for the likes of "Southern Barbarian Chicken Dish," meat stew, and a fried chicken dish called tenpurari, which Rath posits could be an ancestor of tempura, the most famous nanban dish of all. Seasoned with warm spices such as cinnamon, cloves, and ginger, then fried in oil, the final dish is colored with gardenia water (gardenias can produce bright blue or, more likely in this case, bright yellow dyes).

By the time the Barbarian’s Cookbook was written, Christianity had been outlawed, and most foreigners prohibited from Japan. But nanban cuisine lingered. The sweet and meaty treats in the Barbarian's Cookbook "became increasingly popular over the course of the Edo period," writes Rath. But even today, many nanban treats remain favorites.

Sailing frozen lake water across the world was big business.

When the British swaggered into India in the 18th century, they were paralyzed by the sun-charred summers of the country they had colonized. Many would peel away to the hills for the summer. Others, marooned in the blistering cities, indulged in plenty of mawkish whining. Plain Tales of the Raj, for instance, records one Reginald Savory grumbling, "The wind drops, the sun gets sharper, the shadows go black and you know you're in for five months of utter physical discomfort."

The British found various coping mechanisms to tame the season's cauterizing heat. They slept sashed and scarved in water-drenched garments. They sloshed ice from northern India's rivers, then drew it to the plains at tremendous expense. They hired abdars to cool water, wine, and ale with saltpetre. They hung wet tatties (mats) made of cooling khus (a type of grass) on their windows and doors. Ice pits were built and small pots of water placed outside on wintry nights. In the morning, the coating of ice that formed was sliced away and stored in the pits, but this ice was usually too gritty and slushy to be consumed.

Enter Frederic Tudor, a Bostonian entrepreneur, astute and indefatigable. Tudor dreamt of ice, cut from the ponds of native New England, and sent to hotter climes on constellations of ships. Through the years, he was staggered by bankruptcy, by vagaries of weather, and by the derision of sceptical peers who couldn't imagine ice surviving such a long sea voyage. “No joke,” reported the Boston Gazette, on Tudor's first voyage. “A vessel with a cargo of 80 tons of ice has cleared out from this port for Martinique. We hope this will not prove to be a slippery speculation.”

It wasn't. Tudor solved the full puzzle of harvesting, insulating, and transporting ice long distances. By the time he turned his gaze to India, he had already infiltrated New Orleans and the Caribbean.

In 1833, he sent forth his first ship to Calcutta. It was packed with 180 tons of pristine ice culled from the lakes of Massachusetts, mantled in sawdust, belted into the ship's hold in double-planked containers, and sent scudding towards India. Together with the ice went barrels of Baldwin apples—a more reliable export.

Four months later, when Tuscany sailed grandly into Calcutta on September 6, 1833, a thrum of residents beetled their way to the docks to ogle with wonderment at this strange, foreign marvel. It is said that one Calcutta dweller enquired whether ice flowered on trees in America. Another laid his palm on the ice for several minutes, then, jarred by the inevitable blisters on his palm, screamed that he had been scorched as by fire. Yet another urbanite, J H Stocqueler, editor of The Englishman, was in bed when he was woken by the cries of his orderly, vivid with excitement at the news. Tottering back with a piece of this precious cargo, the orderly, alas, neglected to swathe “the ice in cloth nor close the basket lest the ice became too warm.” Consequently, he returned with a nail-thin chink of ice. Some Indians, alarmed at the ice’s brisk disappearance, demanded their money back.

Nevertheless, the ice trade became an astounding triumph, spreading to Madras and Bombay. Along with the ice, Tudor ignited a frenzy for American imports including New England apples and American butter. His business grew fat on a government-supported monopoly and concessions to import tax-free ice. Enormous icehouses began to pock the streets of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras.

Tudor's ice trade, swollen with success, began to be noticed by Americans—most famously, Henry David Thoreau wrote fleetingly about it in Walden: "Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well." Tudor became the millionaire Ice King, snagging himself a 19-year-old bride when he was 50 and fathering six children.

At the vanguard of this trade were private clubs in India, set up by the colonizers as offerings of an Elysian British experience, complete with uniformed wait staff serving roast beef and boiled mutton to the administrative elite. The clubs invested heavily in the construction of ice houses; consequently, their dining tables teemed with cold drinks and well-preserved meat. In Bombay, for instance, the Byculla Club ordered 40 tons to be delivered by May 1840, the beginning of summer.

Ice also functioned as a palliative for an antiphony of illnesses, from fever and stomach disorders to kidney defects. During ice “famines” (when ships were delayed), it could only be purchased in limited quantities, and anyone wanting a sliver more needed a doctor's note. Easy availability of ice became so entrenched that one famine in 1850 produced gales of outrage in Bombay, with the Telegraph and Courier even calling for an agitation.

But while ice from New England was a boon for British colonizers, for Indians, it proved mainly another burden.

It was a delirium of differences. Most Indians, far too poor to purchase such frivolities as American frozen water, and already burdened by heavy taxes, were further throttled by taxation used for building (and later expanding) the icehouses. There were also more humble casualties—the ice trade whittled away at the jobs of the abdars, rendering their positions obsolete. Some Indians availed of ice in major hospitals; many more barely laid their hands on it.

Still, there were exceptions. The first cargo of ice, for instance, was consigned to a Parsi firm, Messrs Jehangir Nusserwanji Wadia. (The Parsis are a tiny community of Indian Zoroastrians, with roots in Iran.) The firm then disseminated the ice to a clamor of Britishers.

Sir Jamsetji Jeejeebhoy, a wealthy Parsi merchant and philanthropist, and the first Indian baronet, was another such. Jeejeebhoy was the first to offer ice cream at a large public reception. Guests gorged on them. A few days later, the Bombay Samachar newspaper wrote priggishly that the hosts and the guests had since been besieged with colds, but having had the temerity to try this “foreign” food, a cold was a fitting penalty.

By 1860, though, ice was no longer considered a treat. "Like most of the conveniences which habit renders familiar, the ice has almost ceased to be a luxury," wrote the British artist Colesworthy Grant, from Calcutta, in a letter to his mother, "and though little children still continue to seek and to suck it as though it were a sweetmeat, they no longer consider it as the novelty which, when first holding it in their nearly paralyzed fingers, they declared, in amazement, had burnt them!"

Tudor's vice-grip on the ice trade continued until the 1860s, until, enfeebled by old age, his hold wore thin. Massachusetts lakes, smothered with pollution from new steam railways, lost their allure. Simultaneously, artificial ice-manufacturing units (the first being the Bengal Ice Company) entered the trade, while a skein of new railway lines made it easier to transport the goods around India.

Today, the idea of an ice trade seems almost chimerical. Freezers in Indian homes hold creamy discs of kulfi, while refrigerator shelves are heaped with Thums Up, Sosyo, and other carbonated delights. But a lone ice house still stands near Chennai’s Presidency College. Once containing blocks of ice, it later housed, at various times, a High Court judge, a clutch of poor students, and the Indian sage Swami Vivekananda. Today, most traces of Tudor have been wiped away. Rather poignantly, it is now named Vivekananda House, a paean to the monk and mystic who spread awareness of Hindu Vedanta philosophy around the world and across the seas to the United States.

It took a headstrong friend and decades of cultural change before the city embraced its hometown hero.

Franz Kafka’s face is ubiquitous in his hometown of Prague. In the Czech city’s Old Town, a large statue depicts the writer riding what appears to be a suit without an owner. Downtown, close to where Kafka once worked at an insurance company, David Černý’s mirrored bust of the author rotates using the same processes as traditional Czech clockwork.

Then there are the sites where visitors can experience Kafka's Prague. The Café Louvre (opened in 1902 and still serving guests today) was once a gathering place for philosophers and intellectuals like Kafka. Café Savoy (established in 1893 and also still in business) used to host Yiddish theater presentations that Kafka was known to frequent.

Kafka himself had a conflicted relationship with Prague, as a German-speaking Jew in a Czech Catholic city. He was famously quoted as saying of the city's allure: "Prague never lets you go… this dear little mother has sharp claws.” As evidenced by the streets, squares, plaques, and souvenirs– not to mention institutions such as the Franz Kafka Museum or the Franz Kafka Society (just behind the Franz Kafka Bookstore)– the city is less ambivalent about its native son.

But Kafka's palpable presence in the city likely wouldn't exist were it not for the persistence of the author’s friend and literary executor, Max Brod. In publishing many of Kafka’s most beloved works posthumously, Brod disregarded the author’s wishes and single-handedly expanded Kafka’s fame. Even more poignant is that in one pivotal period of time, a substantial amount of Kafka’s work was contained within a single one of Brod’s suitcases.

In 1902, Kafka met Max Brod while they were studying law together at Charles University in Prague. The two became fast friends through their shared passion for literature and their similar backgrounds (Brod, too, was a German-speaking Jew who had grown up in Prague). The two became so close that when Max Brod was excluded from Kafka's philosophical circle at Cafe Louvre in 1905, Kafka abandoned the group in solidarity.

Brod was a champion of Kafka’s, encouraging the author to publish what little work he did during his lifetime, including The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, The Stoker, and The Judgment. An accomplished figure in his own right, Brod achieved a level of success during his life that Kafka never did, eventually publishing 83 books. In contrast, Kafka spent most of his adult life toiling in an insurance company, writing only in his spare time.

Kafka’s insecurities held him back in this regard. He destroyed much of his own work while he was alive and demanded in his will that Brod do the same upon his death. When Kafka died in 1924 at the age of 41, Brod wasted no time in ignoring his friend’s request. He saw to it that The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika were published in 1925, 1926, and 1927, respectively. Brod would later claim that Kafka knew all along of his intentions to do so.

In 1939, Brod and his wife escaped the Nazis' closure of the Czech border by minutes, eventually arriving in Tel Aviv with a suitcase full of Kafka's papers in tow. Even as he settled into an entirely different life, Brod continued to release the contents of Kafka’s manuscripts until his death in 1968, carrying on a personal mission of “bring[ing] Kafka’s works before the public.” He succeeded in doing so, though the papers never made it back to Prague. Today, they're owned by the National Library of Israel.

In the years after their publishing, Kafka’s work would garner acclaim from around the world. His influence was arguably most deeply felt among existentialists and absurdists, from Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina to Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre in France. But in his home country, it would ultimately take decades before Kafka ascended to the venerated status he holds there today.

Back in what was then called Czechoslovakia, Kafka’s works were treated with active disdain thanks to a wave of anti-German sentiment following World War II. Under Communist Party rule, the country did little to celebrate the writer’s legacy. It wasn’t until the fall of the Iron Curtain, when tourists began flocking to Prague, that the writer was fully celebrated as one of the Czech Republic’s most well-known and beloved sons.

Today, curious visitors to Prague can easily discover that Kafka spent nearly his entire life within the span of a few blocks of the city. Needless to say, his legacy traveled much farther. "Kafkaesque," (or Kafkárna in Czech), is common vernacular in literary circles. The feeling of malaise triggered by ludicrous situations beyond one's control, it seems, is universal.

We’ll never know whether or not Kafka sincerely hoped to remain as anonymous in death as he had in life. The author’s motives in his contributions to the literary canon and the city of his birth are, fittingly, enigmatic.

When people post about bugs and birds, ecologists can gain some solid data.

In the United Kingdom, it goes the same way every year. When the weather is just right—warm, dry, and not too windy—black garden ants (Lasius niger) crawl out from underground en masse and take to the sky in a mating ritual known as "nuptial flight." In a moment, it seems, the insects are everywhere.

This very visible courtship routinely inspires a lot of attention from people. This July, the insects swarmed the courts of Wimbledon, where they became too much for some athletes and spectators to bear. Danish pro Caroline Wozniacki stopped—mid-match—to ask the umpire for bug spray. “You want to focus on playing tennis,” she said later. “Not eating bugs."

Tweeters keep tabs on the insect activity, too. This year, #FlyingAntDay began trending on Twitter in Britain soon after the insects burst forth. The posts were a mixed bag—some dispatches, some jokes, some squeamishness bordering on meltdowns. One user welcomed the insect overlords. Another complained that he’d swallowed so many while cycling home that he’d spoiled his appetite for dinner. Yet another shared a photo of them pouring from a rift in concrete: “Epicentre, MY GARDEN.”

Ecologists are interested in these dramatic, short-lived natural phenomena, and want to know more about how factors such as climate and geography influence them. But even the most intrepid researchers can't be everywhere at once, so some have begun to wonder whether social media streams might pour forth with useful information. After all, Twitter traffics in the ephemeral, transient—and immediate. The platform lends itself to reports of clouds of flying ants, clusters of house spiders, or swirling murmurations of starlings.

While tweeters don’t intend for their spellbound or sickened dispatches to become part of the ecological record, a team of researchers led by Adam Hart, an entomologist at the University of Gloucestershire, recently set out to see if these 280-word data points could be translated into useful scientific information.

Hart and his collaborators compared thousands of tweets about winged ants, indoor spider sightings, and starling gatherings to three ecology papers published in 2017 or 2018. “We had previously studied these three phenomena using nationwide citizen science campaigns, where members of the public had sent in data,” Hart says. “This meant that we had large, published datasets with which to ground-truth our Twitter-mined data.”

As the researchers explain in a new paper in Methods in Ecology and Evolution, the two modes of info-gathering often lined up pretty neatly. This was particularly true for temporal data—that is, exactly when the ants emerged. In some instances, the authors write, the tweet-data points “were so similar to the published data that Twitter mining would have yielded conclusions identical to those in the published dataset.” The datasets were in such agreement that Hart initially assumed he’d goofed. “I thought we had confused the two graphs,” he says. “It was only on really close inspection that I could see minor differences. That was an exciting afternoon because until that point we had no real idea whether this technique could generate anything remotely useful.”

In the case of starlings, the tweets also provided solid location data. (Though Twitter doesn’t carry geolocation data, up to 90 percent of users who tweeted about starlings added a geographical note.)

Twitter-mining won’t replace field work, lab analysis, or organized citizen science campaigns, but it might have a place alongside those data sources, especially for surprising, massive natural events most likely to make people stop, stare, and share, by reaching for their phones. “We need to consider such data as supplementary, not a substitute to other data that we, or citizen scientists, go out to collect,” says Mason Fidino, a quantitative ecologist at the Lincoln Park Zoo’s Urban Wildlife Institute who was not involved in the project. “The authors do a great job illustrating that these data are useful, we now just need to figure out ways to incorporate them into our models.”*

As one might expect, detail and specificity were generally lacking in the tweets. They didn't carry enough information to address the hypotheses that the authors of the previous studies had put forth. For instance, an ecologist wondering about the effect of heat-retaining spaces, such as greenhouses or compost heaps, on ant emergence would find little but frustration on Twitter—only six tweets out of 2,345 mention them. “Few tweeters provided the necessary (possibly rather obscure) biological detail,” the authors write.

“I had the idea that people staring in wonder at murmurations would be bubbling over with enthusiasm to such an extent they would report all the nitty-gritty details we needed,” Hart says. “That was, of course, naive. When you are watching a murmuration, you are awestruck with the beauty and spectacle of the event, and those sentiments tended to be the content of the tweets—rather than comments on the weather, birds of prey hovering around, and the type of habitat.” The average observer is likely to be stunned—and it seems like #holycrap is a more natural reaction than #cloudyday, #hawk, or #marsh.

* This article was updated to add comment from Fidino.

Meet the Royal D. Suttkus Collection.

Hidden in a bend of the Mississippi River just south of New Orleans, 29 concrete bunkers lie on a grid of dirt and grass roads. Some hold remnants from the past—40-year-old gas masks and biohazard signs still hang on a wall. Most of them have been abandoned for decades. But inside two of those bunkers, 15 million fish eyes stare at the walls through the glass of their jars. This is the Royal D. Suttkus Fish Collection, the largest collection of preserved fish in the world, and almost no one knows it exists.

In the Type Room, Dr. Henry Bart—curator of the collection and director of the Tulane Biodiversity Research Institute (TUBRI, which houses the collection)—shows me the rare fish.

It is a small room, maybe the size of a car, but it is the most important room of the institution because it’s where the holotypes and paratypes are kept. “These are the most important specimens because they bear the names, so if there’s any doubt about what a species is, these are what you consult,” Bart says. Here is the famous pocket shark, a small deep-water marine shark found just a few years ago in the Gulf of Mexico—only the second one known to exist in the world. Here is a harelip sucker collected in 1893. It’s been extinct since that year. The tail fins have eroded off, and I can see its brain. Here is the oldest fish in the collection—a shiny minnow collected in Italy in 1838.

As Bart picks up jars of fish, the species’ names roll off his tongue as if he grew up fluent in Latin. “We keep these specimens here because we’re trying to protect them from fire…We have to keep a lot of protections in place,” he says. We are surrounded by cinder block—a fortified vault in a hurricane-proof, tornado-proof, bomb-proof, and camouflaged mausoleum. In the main room down the hall, rows and rows of sea-green shelves hold over seven million other fish.

The history of how the collection came to exist in this place is so storied and mysterious that it could only have happened in the Cajun bayou. Over 260 years ago this swampland was the site of a French, American, and Spanish military fort, after which it was thought to be a plantation, and then later a freedman’s village. The bunkers were built during World War II for the Navy to hold artillery for war ships, and then during the Cold War, the CIA used the property as a training facility. Once the Cold War ended, the government no longer had a use for the property, so they leased it to Tulane University for $1. At first, Tulane used several bunkers for medical research and other natural history collections, but now only the fish remain.

The Royal D. Suttkus Fish Collection was founded in 1950 when the legendary ichthyologist Royal D. Suttkus, who had a hand in collecting over five million of the collection’s fish, joined the faculty at Tulane. The collection was originally housed on the university’s main campus, but by 1968, it had outgrown its space and was moved to its current bunker-home in Belle Chasse, Louisiana. Before Suttkus retired from his position as director, he asked Bart, who had volunteered for him as a student, to apply for the director job. Bart is one of only around four or five hundred ichthyologists working in the country.

Today the collection has approximately 204,291 lots (or containers of the same species that were collected together) holding between seven and eight million specimens, mostly from the freshwaters of the Gulf South. In the ichthyology world, the Suttkus Collection is a vital resource. Each year, Bart and his team mail hundreds of preserved fish to ichthyologists around the world, and scientists travel to New Orleans to research the larger fish in person. These researchers are examining relationships between species and discovering new ones, learning new information about the deepest parts of the ocean, and studying the effects of global warming. “Essentially, we are the holders of history,” explains Justin Mann, the collections manager.

In the bunker that holds the large fish, Mann warns me to stand back before opening a tank the size of a truck bed. The evaporated alcohol from the isopropyl that preserves the fish collects at the top of the tank, and the smell is nearly suffocating at first. Creatures far larger than human bodies lie on top of one another inside. Mann puts one rubber glove on before reaching in, but he doesn't bother with the other. “You’re touching that with your bare hands,” I acknowledge. He laughs. In the tank are the largest fish in the collection. Mann holds up each of them to show me—the gar, the sturgeon, the paddlefish. At around eight feet long, the bramble shark is the largest. This one was only the third ever found in the Gulf of Mexico. He grabs a large rubbery piece from the top of the fish pile and adds, “Oh, here’s the liver,” and goes on to explain how they use their livers as buoyancy control and to process salt.

Though collections like this outnumber public museums, they’ve recently started disappearing. Last year, the keepers of the fish collection at the University of Louisiana at Monroe were told they had just 48 hours to find a new location for their fish because their space was needed to renovate the running track. Tulane and a handful of other universities collectively offered to take in their collection, and overnight, the Suttkus Collection acquired 85,000 new specimens. Ironically, ULM had already absorbed another university’s collection when it closed. Around the country, natural history collections are worried this might happen to them next. “This has been happening for a while, but recently, as funding has dropped significantly, a lot more collections like ours are being consolidated or redistributed, or just left to rot,” Mann says.

The recent development of genetic research has played a role in the loss of funding. Because genetics research requires only a tissue sample, some people feel that collections that preserve the entire fish are no longer useful. And while there are great benefits to using genetic research, Mann does not view it as a replacement for specimen collections. “If you are describing a species and you’re focusing so much on genetic material that you ignore archive material, you’re only getting half the picture,” he says. But government agencies are more likely to fund the newest technology, and the amount they have to distribute is rapidly decreasing. The current administration’s unwillingness to invest in science is a major cause of concern for the entire science community, and especially for collection like this one. “For a long time, it was just us justifying our existence to these agencies,” Mann says. “Now these agencies are having to justify our existence to the administration as a whole, and that’s scary for us…The funding has shrunk, and the competition has gotten a lot harder.”

The Suttkus Collection is lucky in that they receive support from Tulane, but the budgetary constraints of the university, in addition to the decrease in government funding, has proven to be a major challenge. One of Bart’s major goals is to raise enough money to create an endowed position with a reliable source of funding, but finding donors has been difficult since few people have heard of the collection. Because the property was not designed to accommodate visitors, they do not have the capacity to open to the public, and so they remain an unintentional secret outside of the ichthyology bubble.

But Mann is trying to change that. He’s recently started to do outreach projects to spread the word that the collection exists, that it’s important, and that it needs the public’s support. The situation is even more precarious because of the property. The land itself is an unofficial wildlife preserve and a trove of archeological treasures and history waiting to be discovered.

Jonathan Walczak is an investigative journalist and archivist hired by TUBRI to collect and piece together notes of Royal D. Suttkus that were damaged or lost during Hurricane Katrina. “I don’t even know how to describe in a quick way what I do, so I just jokingly tell people that I work in a swamp bunker with 8 million dead fish. Which is accurate.” he says. The property is what fascinates him most.

“It’s a very peaceful place,” he says. “I’m probably 15-20 minutes from my house right now, but also in the middle of nowhere.”

The property spans 360 acres with three dirt roads (Alligator, Armadillo, and Wild Boar). Of the 29 bunkers, two house the Suttkus Collection, and one has the new specimens still being sorted from the ULM collection. The rest of the bunkers are sources of mystery and rumor.

Walczak shows me where the old fort once stood (though it’s been covered by the Mississippi River and is no longer visible), and the area of the property where old maps show a freedman’s village. After studying old documents, he discovered that the CIA secretly used the property during the early 1960s for Cuban dissidents training in underwater demolition (among other things) for the Bay of Pigs invasion, information that’s still not well-documented. Every piece of the property is rich with history waiting to be uncovered. Coyote, deer, hogs, river otters, and alligator roam freely.

“On one hand, we want as many people to know about it as possible because it’s a special place,” Walczak says. “On the other, you worry about the pristine-ness of it being tainted. But if no one knows about us, we’re going to sink into oblivion.” There’s recently been talk of Tulane selling the property, and it’s unclear whether the Suttkus Collection would remain where it is, or what would happen to the property if the collection were moved to a new home. “I worry, especially as empty, vacant land becomes increasingly scarce and the coast gets closer. I worry that this land might one day be developed and I really hope that’s not the case,” Walczak says. “People come and go as funding comes and goes. And I hope that when I’m gone, that somebody cares about the history.”

There’s a storm coming. Charcoal clouds prowl up the river from the Gulf. Wild boar and water moccasins linger nearby. But for now, the fish lie safe in their indestructible lair, holding secrets still undiscovered about our oceans, as they have for decades. The elements can’t hurt them here—it’s humans that are dangerous.

Lessons from an avian surveillance project.

It's a common trope in fiction: When people aren't around to watch, other creatures of the world let down their guard. Zoo animals have secret meetings. Toys come to life. So it would make sense if, settled into bed one evening, you were suddenly seized with a white-hot nighttime question: What are the flamingos up to?

As birds go, flamingos don't seem all that mysterious. They're brightly colored and quite recognizable. They tend to hang around out in the open, and sometimes, when they're in a mingling mood, they even dance.

But appearances can be deceiving. "For a large animal in the 21st century, there are still so many unknowns about them," says Paul Rose, a flamingo expert based at the WWT Slimbridge Wetland Centre, in Gloucestershire, England. For a recent study published in Zoo Biology, Rose decided to get a new view on his study subjects, setting up a nighttime surveillance system to figure out exactly what they do when we're away.

Rose describes himself as "a little bit of a flamingo obsessive." He's the co-chair of the IUCN's Flamingo Specialist Group. His "Flamingo Diary," which traces the lives of the Centre's birds, covers everything from avian flu to preening habits. In his Skype profile photo, he is wearing a pink shirt.

For his dissertation, Rose focused on one particular unknown: whether flamingos form social relationships within their flocks. (It turns out they do—"They have very strongly bonded friendships, which is very nice," he says.) Figuring this out required long days of watching individual birds interact.

But while Rose was digging through existing research on wild flamingos, he found a few papers that mentioned nocturnal behavior, too. "I thought, am I only seeing half the story with my own observations?" he says. Soon after, he continues, "I got three night vision cameras."

Rose and a student researcher set up the cameras around one particular Slimbridge enclosure, which houses about 270 greater flamingos. They put one on each side of the large pool, and one near a small island where the flamingos nest. They then programmed them to take photos every five minutes. After about five months of this, they were able to draw some conclusions.

For one thing, Rose says, flamingos like to snack at night. Foraging behavior, which includes searching for food in the pools or or in pellet bowls, peaked around 8 p.m. (This was particularly true on moonlit evenings, says Rose.) Parents often fed their chicks at night as well. Some birds also perform courtship displays, although most prefer to do this during the day, when their moves are more visible.

Most interestingly to Rose, they use the space differently: "They spread out much more over their pool," he says. He is hoping these conclusions will influence the design of future enclosures, and help zoo staff to better understand the birds under their care.

In other words, when we're not watching, flamingos mostly keep being flamingos. "Nothing too weird or wonderful to report," Rose says. "Just what you'd expect a flamingo to do." We can all rest easy.

One of Mexico's most unique streets for candies has ties to Emiliano Zapata.

Every morning in Puebla, Mexico, most of the 40 dulcerías that line Avenida 6 Oriente open their front doors around ten. Owners shuffle down from their homes, often located above the shops, and set out displays of crystallized peaches and rainbow oblea wafers packaged like poker chips. Others polish glass cases of sweet potato camotes and caramel-colored Tortitas de Santa Clara. Another owner plays banda tunes over a single standing speaker. A paleta salesman bikes by, advertising his wares in a shout.

While passing foreigners might see this and think Willy Wonka took his genius to a two-block street in Central Mexico, this is daily life for people on La Calle de los Dulces. Situated in between the modern-style Mercado Victoria and the Teatro Principal, La Calle is the place where Puebla's candy artisans have the advantage of upped sales and public familiarity. And, of course, friendly competition.

“I can tell you that every house has its own recipes,” Claudia Soto, the owner of La Gran Fama, says as she walks from the foyer to the kitchen in the dulcería she inherited from her grandmother, Dolores Espinoza. In the nearby front room, two-dozen types of Poblano sweets—from dulce de leche varieties to hen-shaped sugary figures—sit under a glass display case, glittering like pieces of jewelry. “It’s just like talking about chile en nogada or, let’s say, picadillo,” she says. “One abuelita likes to put [in] pine nuts, while the other likes to use almonds.”

Before we sit down to taste test the honey-made mueganos and mezcal borrachitos lathered in sugar flecks, Soto talks of La Gran Fama’s history as inseparable from her own. Her great-grandaunt, Victoria Ortiz, a child of Spanish immigrants, began the official business—which Soto says was Puebla’s first—sometime in 1892. This was a few decades before Mexican Revolutionaries roamed around the city (records show a “La Guadalupana” dulcería, where La Fama now stands today, going back to 1852). Though Ortiz owned two other shops, as many owners did, La Gran Fama persisted, and flourished long after her death in 1938.

Three generations later, Soto’s the boss. She also has a career in interior design, which has ensured that her family’s long-standing dulcería doesn't shut its doors. In fact, it’s now the street’s most popular. “I was born here,” she says, “Right in the back house. I don’t see my life without it. Without La Fama.”

Although dulces existed in Mexico long before the Conquest, the Spanish influence—along with the Arabic and French—had an impact on present-day varieties. Seventeenth-century Franciscan monjas, or nuns, are often cited as its originators (such as Santa Clara of Assisi, patron saint of her eponymous cookie). In the kitchens, they mixed together milk and sugar cane, along with pumpkin seeds or almonds cultivated from native land.

Popular recipes emerged from nearby convents, like the one La Gran Fama’s building used to be, and were both produced and perfected by the nuns’ African and Indigenous slaves. That production kept Santa Clara’s proprietor as one of the wealthiest convent owners in the city. “People always talk about the myth of the monjas,” says Raymundo Padilla Narvaez, a third-generation owner of Dulcería Maryfer. “But they often forget who had the greatest part in the process: the people that labored in the kitchens.”

On November 18, 1910, Carmen Serdán—whose brothers Aquiles and Máximo wrote anti-government treatises and stockpiled rifles for Emiliano Zapata from their boarding house on 6 Oriente—is said to have fired the “first shot” that sparked the Mexican Revolution. All the while, La Gran Fama operated next door. Today, a placard hangs on Soto’s shop dubbing it “witness to one of the most significant events in Mexico.” “We’re neighbors, sure,” Soto says. “But I don’t know if there’s any direct connection.”

By the 1950s and 1960s, La Calle de los Dulces had grown into a centralized hub for típico-style confectioners, backed by Puebla’s government, earning its current nickname. Soto says a burst of 1970s-era tourism birthed nearly half of the dulcerías you see up and down the two blocks—though quality, she says, is what made its reputation. I ask to try some of Fama’s best, so Soto fills a tasting tray with seven well-known sweets. I pick up a dulce de pepita, a pumpkin-seed sweet with a soft center reminiscent of a cinnamon roll. “Te gusta?” Soto asks.

A few blocks southeast of Soto’s two-store operation lies Calle 6 Norte, which, if you follow it far enough, runs into a similar hub called the Barrio Artesanal. There, tucked in a side house of a gold-colored colonial structure, is Cecilia Reyes Mendiola and her husband José Emilio. The two are the proprietors of El Colibrí, a dulcería shop and factory that's been in business for several generations, and that was started by José Emilio’s grandparents. In a two-room kitchen, Cecilia and her husband prep all 28 of Colibrí’s sweet offerings, including mounds of powdery yemitas, gummy gomitas, and borrachitos made with the house special (white wine). Of course, like any other shop, Colibrí has its own special charm.

“Mira, aquí,” Cecilia orders, and shows me what she and her husband are producing: tiny Día de los Muertos calaveras (skulls) made from a mixture of water, egg whites, and pulverized sugar. They craft the eyes from cut sequins and sculpt the heads from a mold refurbished from motorcycle parts. Espinas de maguey (agave thorns) are used in place of wire tools. It’s especially impressive, given that Colibrí will ship hundreds of these crafted skull dulces around the world by the end of October—with only four family members to help. “Y todos,” she reminds me. “Son a mano." No machines or blenders are used; these are made by hand.

In the factory, gigantic cazuelas de barro (the clay pots mole is stirred in) hang on the wall, along with bright-colored papel picado (festival flags) and various homages to Frida Kahlo. While José Emilio works, Trío Los Panchos sing old boleros over the record player. Skeleton figures (catrinas) greet patrons hanging from the ceiling. As Cecilia explains, color comprises the base of this tightly-guarded tradition, one not separate from a cultural philosophy of the senses: taste and presentation coupled as one. “The advantage of us Mexicans,” Cecilia says, “is that we’re really colorful. We love color here.”

Though most owners, such as the proprietors at Colibrí, admit that the majority of their sales are geared towards Puebla tourists, a good percentage of patrons are dulce regulars. José Emilio says it’s primarily because of La Calle’s inherent magic, its legacy of location. “You see, I don’t have to leave the street,” José Emilio tells me. “All that I need is right here.”

Expensive shipping fees, a lack of preservatives, and scarce international importers have kept knowledge of Colibrí’s—and Puebla’s—goods solely within Mexico. It’s the same for Soto at La Gran Fama: Most of the shops and factories on Avenida 6 don’t ship their sweets outside the city. If they do, it’s not too far. “There’s only one disadvantage to dulces tipicos,” Cecilia says. “We can’t ship the most delicate kinds too far around the world. If we did, they’d break.”

It's possible that beer even came before bread.

It’s a long-standing ritual to raise a glass of something brewed, fermented, or distilled to honor those who came before. New research indicates that humans have been brewing beer for ritual purposes far longer than was previously thought—for up to 13,700 years, perhaps predating agriculture itself.

An international team of researchers, led by Stanford University archaeologist Li Liu, analyzed stone mortars found in Raqefet Cave in present-day Israel, a site used for burials by the people of the Natufian culture. The team was trying to use microscopic residues for insight into which plants the Natufians consumed in their mortuary rituals, Liu said in a release. They found phytoliths—tiny silica particles from plant tissues—and remains of starches that appeared to be related to the transformation of wheat and barley into alcohol. Perhaps the Natufians were honoring their dead with a prehistoric microbrew.

So the scientists did the responsible thing: They brewed their own protobeer. The idea was to apply possible ancient brewing methods to different kinds of grains to see if the starches produced matched the residue from the mortars. Jiajing Wang, a doctoral student at Stanford and coauthor on the study, said in the release that the cave-beer wasn't exactly what we think of as beer today, but likely resembled a porridge or gruel. As they explain in their new paper in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, the process goes like this. First, grains are malted—germinated in water and then dried out. The malt is then crushed, mixed with water, and heated to around 150 degrees Fahrenheit. Finally, yeast is added, and the concoction sits covered for at least a day. The resulting starches, they found, closely resemble the Natufian leftovers.

The finding, Liu said in the release, represents “the oldest record of man-made alcohol in the world.” It also reinforces an old theory, that beer was actually a critical step in humankind’s development of agriculture. This hypothesis has been around for over 60 years, and challenges the conventional wisdom that bread, rather than beer, was the catalyst for the domestication of cereal grains. Whatever came first, the Natufians appear to have been involved. Archaeologists recently uncovered the world’s oldest-known bread remains nearby, in Jordan, at another Natufian site. Bread and beer? We have much to thank the Natufians for.

Dwellings like these were originally designed for workers and their families.

Not so very long ago, New York Public Library buildings were heated by coal furnaces. Those furnaces required a lot of upkeep, and needed full-time custodians to look after them. That's why New York's early library buildings also included apartments—they were designed as dwellings for on-site custodians and their families. But by the 1970s and '80s, newer heating systems had replaced the coal-powered versions. Custodians retired and the apartments were left empty, some to decay and some to be renovated for new purposes. Today, only 13 of these original apartments remain.

In the video above, Atlas Obscura's Sarah Laskow explores the secret apartment located in the Fort Washington library. To read more about these hidden apartments, read her feature story about them.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel to explore more Atlas Obscura videos.

Colorado is in the midst of its worst drought since the Dust Bowl in the 1930s.

There’s an old saying in the West: Whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over.

In Colorado, home to more breweries than almost any other state, it’s probably more accurate to say that beer is for drinking. And although brewers haven’t yet come to blows over access to their product’s main ingredient, the state’s water is on its way to becoming a fought-over commodity.

Colorado is in the midst of its worst drought since the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which manages water in the West, predicts that reservoirs along the Colorado River will reach critical low points by 2020, leading to water shortages throughout much of the western U.S.

“We need to get ahead of this,” said Kelissa Hieber, owner and head brewer at Denver’s Goldspot Brewing. “We are getting to a point where we could have a crisis that could be catastrophic for small breweries.”

Hieber was speaking from behind a keg at her brewery’s stand at the Save the Ales Festival in downtown Denver in August. Hers was one of more than 40 local breweries that donated beer to the festival to raise money for water conservation initiatives throughout the state. Like most of the 200-some other craft breweries in Colorado, Goldspot uses city water to produce its beer. If a water crisis were to strike, these breweries would be subject to the same restrictions as any of the city’s other commercial water users.

Most of Colorado’s cities have yet to face serious water restrictions, but the bleak forecasts have grabbed the attention of leaders in the state’s booming beer industry. “Even though it takes 10 times the amount of water to make a hamburger than to make a beer, people look at the beer and they see the water, so they have a relationship with it,” said Katie Wallace, the director of corporate social responsibility at New Belgium Brewing in Fort Collins. “I think that gives us a greater responsibility and a greater opportunity to talk about water.”

Wallace refers to Colorado’s rivers as the brewery’s “lifeblood,” a sentiment shared by many other brewers in the state—and a driving force behind a groundswell of water advocacy from the industry. Craft breweries all over Colorado are now championing initiatives to restore rivers and preserve the state’s valuable water resources. New Belgium, for instance, donates to organizations that help protect its watershed and keep water in the river.

Concern over water shortages has pushed many brewers to find ways to save water in their own brewing process. Though municipal water restrictions are likely a long way off, drought and climate change present other risks to the state’s beer. Recent droughts have decreased barley and hops harvests—driving up costs for breweries—while wildfires have spread across the region, contaminating some surface water sources.

In 2012, Fort Collins lost half of its yearly water supply when the largest wildfire in Colorado history contaminated the Poudre River, forcing the City of Fort Collins to drain its reservoirs to meet water demand. The fire was just seven miles from New Belgium’s brewery, and for years, the brewery employed a sensory panel to taste-test the water for smokiness before putting it into their beer.

“People are a little bit surprised at the degree to which climate change is already a problem for something like brewing,” said Dan Carreno, one of the founders of Colorado’s Save the Beer Tour, which educates beer drinkers on the effect climate change has on the brewing process. “This problem is happening now. It’s not happening 20 or 30 years from now.”

The issue of water quality is particularly sensitive in Colorado, where the supply of mineral-rich Rocky Mountain water was the catalyst for what has become a strong brewing tradition in the state. The tasty water first attracted Adolph Coors to Golden, Colorado, in 1873, when he set up the original Coors Brewery right on the river. The brewery has since grown to become one of the largest in the world, producing up to 10 million barrels a day.

Unlike small craft breweries, Coors has insulated itself to the risk of city water shortages by purchasing legal water rights to draw directly from a river, and the company is able to replicate the taste and mineral content of the water at its Colorado brewery in its outposts throughout the country.

Most craft breweries tweak a water’s flavor profile before using it in their beer, but only a little, since the process is energy-intensive and expensive. So they place a high value on the quality of the original water coming through their pipes.

“It’s a lot to do with the brewers respecting the water and wanting to have high-quality water in their product,” said Greg Schlichting, the head brewer at Denver’s Declaration Brewing Company. “It’s the same thing when they source malt and source hops and they source everything.”

High-quality ingredients are the staples of any craft brewery, but so is innovation, and brewers can improvise when resources aren’t available. In April, Declaration brewed a beer for a special event using only water they recycled in-house. Although the beer was costlier to produce, the water quality after treatment was nearly identical to their other beers. However, not all breweries have the resources to resort to these measures when strapped for water, especially very small ones.

Recycled water could be an option in an extreme situation, but Declaration’s brewers don’t think it will get to that point. Besides, even in a beer mecca like Fort Collins, craft brewing uses only about 2 percent of the city’s water, while lawn care accounts for nearly 50 percent.

“Bottom line: People are going to give up their lawns before they give up their beer,” Schlichting said.

The more magical, the better.

Who doesn't love a treehouse? Big or small, elaborately engineered or charmingly ramshackle, it's hard not to feel a sense of childlike wonder whenever you come across one. Almost all treehouses have some feature that is special to the people who get to hang out in it—an elaborate entrance, or an amazing view, or even a hidden cubbyhole in which to store treasures. With fall nearly upon us, and all those leaves set to turn, we're daydreaming about afternoons spent tucked up and away among the trees. Help us, dear readers, by sending us photos and descriptions of your own favorite treehouse.

Whether it's in your own backyard or just one you've been lucky enough to visit, fill out the form below to tell us about a special treehouse. Most importantly, email a photo or photos to eric@atlasobscura.com with the subject line, “Treehouse Secrets.” We’ll publish some of our favorites in an upcoming article.

Among the elaborate plans for his death were 26 Victorian mourning rings. What happened to them?

Before he died in 1832, philosopher Jeremy Bentham set his affairs in order in a way that few people will ever do. This pre-death planning went way beyond bequeathing old books or settling debts. Bentham famously insisted that his corpse be dissected and partially embalmed—then reassembled, padded out, clad in a smart outfit, and perched on a chair. From there, Bentham’s "auto-icon," as it’s known, could continue to participate, in a way, in lively debate with his peers, well after Bentham himself had passed on.

His will was done. Save for a brief recent jaunt to America, where it was on display at New York’s Met Breuer museum, the auto-icon has stayed fairly close to home. You can visit him, most days, in his comfy accommodations at University College London (UCL).

The auto-icon wasn't Bentham's only pre-death plan. He also commissioned mourning rings bearing his bust and—in quintessential Victorian fashion—snippets of his hair. Bentham chose 26 recipients for these pieces of memorial jewelry. Each band carries the name of its recipient and the dates of Bentham’s birth and death. Work on the bands likely began a decade before he died, when Bentham had the portrait sketched by John Field, known for his ability to dash off silhouettes in five minutes or less. His assistant tagged along on the sitting, bearing plaited bits of his hair.

When Bentham died, the rings fanned out across the the world—to French military commander Marquis de Lafayette, for instance, and to intellectual and politician José Cecilio Díaz del Valle, a former mayor of Guatemala City. Today, few of the rings are accounted for, and a team at UCL wants to know where the rest of them ended up.

UCL is in possession of four of the rings, and one inscribed to French economist Jean Baptiste Say was auctioned off at Christie’s in June, where it fetched £11,250. Another ring is known to have remained in the family of William Stockwell, who worked for Bentham as a servant. That leaves 20 missing pieces of Bentham. Tim Causer, senior research associate at the UCL’s Bentham Project, is among those leading the project to find them. Causer invites anyone who comes across one to get in touch with him. They could be anywhere: One of the rings in UCL’s collection, made for fellow philosopher John Stuart Mill, surfaced at a jewelry shop in New Orleans.

The researchers hope that mapping the rings' routes through the world can deepen their understanding of the philosopher's reach. “I’d like to think that tracking down the remaining rings would be a physical manifestation of just how far and wide Bentham’s ideas traveled, and of his influence in Europe and the Americas,” Causer says. Among his philosophical contributions was utilitarianism, under which he emphasized the importance of the greatest happiness for greatest number of people.

And if those bands ever get back together? An exhibition at UCL would be likely, Causer says. A totally normal one, no funny business: “Best not to mention the specially constructed underground vault in which we’ll gather all 26 rings to perform the ceremony to bring the auto-icon back to life.”

And it’s all thanks to her peculiarly damaged bones.

Long after we’re dead, our bodies hold onto information about our lives. This was the case, at least, for one woman in Eleutherna, an ancient city-state in Crete. Three thousand years ago, she almost certainly spent her days working as a ceramicist, molding large pots, vases, and other vessels. Experts figured this out not because of what she was buried with, but because of how she used her body.

It's tempting to think of one's skeleton as solid and inert, but "bone is a live organ," explains anthroarchaeologist Anagnostis Agelarakis, who led the research into this skeleton along with site excavator Nikolaos Stampolidis. It responds to the stresses of the day-to-day. Millennia later, archaeologists can use the signs left by this wear and tear to work backwards and "reconstruct … what actions were done most often in life," he says. In recent years, this technique has been used to figure out how gladiators fought in ancient Ephesus, and to identify elite archers who once traveled on King Henry VIII's warship, the Mary Rose.

This particular Eleuthernan died when she was about 45 years old. Compared to her peers, she developed a number of "unique skeletal manifestations" from "repetitive, exacting, and physically demanding … activities," the researchers write. She had worked the upper right side of her body so hard, for example, that the cartilage had worn away in 16 different places, and the nearby bone had become dense and smooth. Her right knee and hip were in the same state.

To figure out what she might have been doing, the researchers worked with digital and physical models. But they also decided to ask around. Over the course of seven summers, Agelarakis says, the team observed and spoke to people in the area who were still performing the types of tasks that characterized life in Greece 3,000 years ago: spinning wool, for example, or planting and harvesting crops.

The breakthrough came when the team met a female master ceramicist, who lived and worked about 10 minutes from the Eleutherna site. As she took them through the process of making large vases, they realized that her descriptions of what muscles she used, and what was hurting, matched up with what the skeleton was telling them. The team also tried making vessels themselves, observing their own physical responses.

"The more we were looking into things, the more it was going toward the fact that it was not loomwork, it was not spinning the wool, it was not harvesting cereals or almonds or olives or anything like that," says Agelarakis. "It was not functions in the kitchen or in the rearing of children. All the effects of pain and swelling in the joints, and the muscles that were in use, were pointing toward [her] being a ceramicist"—and not a hobbyist, either, but someone that dedicated much of her time to her craft.

Agelarakis, who says we don't know much about gendered division of labor in this particular period, describes this find as "a tiny bit in a bigger puzzle." "It signifies that women… held craft specialization roles in antiquity, which I think is very important," he says. As this person spent her life shaping pots, she also shaped herself. Three thousand years later, she has helped shape our understanding of her culture, too.

A camera is live-streaming the storm.

As Hurricane Florence begins to deliver lashing winds and pelting rain to the Carolinas, hundreds of thousands of residents have fled for drier ground. A camera mounted to the top of the Frying Pan Tower—a rusted, retired Coast Guard light station marking dangerous shoals—is streaming the sight they left behind.

The Frying Pan stands 34 miles from North Carolina’s Cape Fear, in water 50 feet deep. Overnight, the National Weather Service forecasts that wind in the area could gust up to 85 knots (or nearly 98 miles per hour), with seas swelling up to 20 feet. Water may surge inland all the way from Virginia down to the edge of Georgia.

The camera mounted on the Frying Pan—which, in less-ferocious weather, now functions as a hotel—is capturing all the squall and spray in real time. The stream is hosted on Explore.org, and shows the awesome power of the storm. Through a rain-smeared lens, you’ll see the gray-green, white-capped waves, and a flag tattered by the the wind—an onslaught of air so loud and constant that it stops sounding like anything but noise. The storm has sharp teeth. Happily, no one is staying at the Frying Pan right now (on Facebook, the tower's custodians noted that they’ll be back when things calm down, and will retire the battered flag). For now, the camera is alone up there, facing down the breath of the wailing, wild wind.