Goodbye, glaciers.

Lisa McKeon remembers the moment it happened. She was eating a bagel with cream cheese when she heard it: a thundering crack, followed by a splash. The sound reverberated off the basin’s walls of sedimentary rock.

McKeon is a physical scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Northern Rocky Mountain Science Center (NOROCK), stationed in West Glacier, Montana. She spends a lot of time in the field in Glacier National Park. That afternoon last month, though, she was off the clock—picnicking with her 13-year-old daughter on the smooth rocks 50 yards from the shore of Upper Grinnell Lake, a body of meltwater at the terminus of Grinnell Glacier. “I wanted to bring her to a place I have been going to since I was her age,” McKeon says.

McKeon goes out to Grinnell a few times a year, and some things never seem to change. It’s always cold there—enough so that, when the wind whips off the ice, carrying the smell of wet dirt, she has to pull on every layer of clothing she stuffed into her backpack, no matter the season. The ice, embedded with little pebbles and bits of rock, always pops underfoot when she gets up close to measure Grinnell’s margins. The glacier itself is always loud. While these ice giants may look static, active glaciers are perpetually on the move. They creak and moan; inside, water courses through rivulets and tunnels. These can be so deep in the ice that they seem invisible—still, you can hear the rushing.

But in all her time around glaciers, McKeon had never heard a sound like this. Even so, “I knew exactly what was happening,” she says. The glacier was calving.

She didn’t see the fracture, but when she heard the inescapable, unmistakable sound, McKeon turned her gaze to the water. “You couldn’t see any waves across the top, but [the water level] started rising,” she says. “Icebergs were sloshing back and forth.”

Glaciers calve—it’s part of their natural life cycle—but in a warming world, it is happening more often. In July, a tremendous iceberg separated from a glacier near Greenland’s west coast and bobbed over to Innaarsuit. Residents evacuated the small fishing village as more than 10 million tons of ice loomed just offshore. The behemoth was a harbinger. “As things continue to warm up, more ice is gonna come off and float around,” Joshua Willis, a glaciologist from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, told The New Yorker at the time.

In addition to that falling ice, glaciers are losing bulk to melt, too. It’s already happening at Grinnell. In one picture from 1938, the glacier is so huge and richly marbled that it’s easy to miss the person standing atop it. (The first hint is two tiny, dark shoes against the large expanse of white.) By 2016, there was nothing left to summit—where the figure had stood, the ice had given way to water.

That is the other thing that now stays the same at Grinnell, year after year—loss. Climate change is coming for glaciers, and the national parks as a whole. It’s coming fast. We can’t shield all of these protected areas from the future we have given them. So then what? What’s Glacier National Park without its famous ice?

The iconic landscapes of America’s national parks occupy potent places in the cultural imagination—and they can make for stunning demonstrations of the impacts of climate change. That’s not only because the parks are so familiar, but also because, compared to the rest of the country, they are being hit particularly hard.

That’s the thrust of a new paper from researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In the journal Environmental Research Letters, the authors report the results of the first survey measuring both historical temperatures and rainfall across all 417 sites in the system—parks, battlefields, monuments, and more—alongside projections for future changes under various emissions forecasts. The researchers found that, between 1895 and 2010, the land within the parks has warmed at double the rate of the rest of the country. Meanwhile, precipitation in the parks has decreased by 12 percent, as opposed to the 3 percent average across the rest of the United States.

Some difference between the parks and the rest of the country isn’t entirely surprising, because so much of the parks' total area is baldly exposed, at high elevations or northern climes, where warming occurs most dramatically. (Sixty-three percent of total national park area is in Alaska; 19 percent is above the Arctic Circle.) As snow melts, the landscape it once blanketed loses its reflective properties, and absorbs more heat. Even if the pattern was predictable, “the magnitude of the difference was not expected,” says lead author Patrick Gonzalez, a forest ecologist at Berkeley.

In the years between 1950 and 2010, Denali National Park and Preserve, in Alaska, warmed most of all. The authors report that Denali’s temperatures rose by 4.3°C over the last few decades, which squares fairly neatly with the National Park Service’s own measurement of 4°C.

The authors project that curbing greenhouse gas emissions could cushion future blows. “Cutting emissions can save parks from the most extreme heat,” Gonzalez says, but under any reduction scenario the team modeled, more than half of the total national park area would still experience warming above 2°C, the limit imposed by the Paris Agreement (of which the United States is no longer a party).

Cutting emissions is a mitigation tactic—ultimately cheaper and more straightforward, Gonzalez says, than cleaning up a mess once it’s made. At a local level, parks are chipping in to cap emissions: Joshua Tree, in the Mojave Desert, doubled down on energy-efficient lights and air conditioning, and prohibits cars from idling. The roof of Alcatraz is now covered with solar panels, which offset the diesel needed to run the island’s generators, as well as emissions from boats that haul visitors, supplies, and waste.

Beyond this, the parks will need to adapt, too. They ought to be “managed for potential future conditions, rather than keeping them as vignettes as the past,” Gonzalez says, which was once the prevailing management mentality. “Right now,” he adds, “fire managers use an estimate of what the forests looked like before European settlement, and [are] essentially trying to get the forest to look as it did long ago.” The effects of climate change, he adds, have already made this impossible. “We can’t go back.”

Adaptations vary by ecosystem, but may include building corridors to help species migrate north or uphill—or even, in certain circumstances, manually moving plants and animals if they can’t do it themselves fast enough, says John (Jack) Williams, a study coauthor and geographer at the Center for Climatic Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The other big thing you can do is preserve microhabitats or microclimates—pockets of favorable climates that could locally help preserve the species,” Williams says. This might include planting more trees to keep a river, and the fish in it, shaded and cool.

Cameron Barrows, a research ecologist at University of California, Riverside’s Center for Conservation Biology, has spent years searching for these refugia in Joshua Tree National Park, for example. There, he worries that temperatures will soon soar higher than young trees that give the park its name can manage: In one model, Barrows and a colleague predicted that a rise of 3°C would shrink the species’ range by 90 percent. Barrows looks for sites in the park where Joshua trees have managed to grow and produce viable saplings, even in drought-stricken years.

Trouble is, Barrows has found that these areas are also favorable to invasive grasses. And when lightning strikes, these grasses go up like tinder, and spread fire from tree to tree. Getting those grasses out of the way is the key to allowing “the refugia to act like a refugia and protect this species,” Barrows says. He’s proposed a slew of ideas, including recruiting a hungry goat to munch on the invasives, deploying a grass-specific herbicide, and building fire lanes to hem in blazes. “Doing nothing is not an option, as far as I’m concerned,” Barrows says.

Heroic interventions aside, it might already be too late for glaciers.

In the summer of 1997, a ranger named Jerry DeSanto walked into the USGS field office with a befuddling pair of images of Boulder Glacier.

In the older of these pictures, taken in 1932, the landscape is capped with snow and ice. A yawning, frozen cave dwarfs the four figures who stand at its mouth. When DeSanto went to photograph the spot again, from a similar vantage point, he found a very different scene. From where he stood, the ice had vanished.

Aerial measurements quantified the change; the glacier's overall area had shrunk by roughly 78 percent since 1966. Soon, scientists—including McKeon—were digging up other old photographs in the archives and then trekking around the park, snapping contemporary photos in the same places.

Gauging the difference between past and present has been the goal of a similar photography project at Denali. This one launched in 2005, when the park received a trove of hundreds of images from Fred Dean, a former professor of wildlife biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks who had taken the dutifully annotated photographs in the 1970s, while he was mapping the region. Staffers began trawling archives for other historical images. Other geologists have since shared their own, and park staff captured contemporary scenes on foot, from windows, or up in helicopters. “Many repeated images of glaciers in Denali reveal a consistent theme,” the project staff writes: “Shrinking and retreat of glacial ice and permanent snow fields.”

So far, staffers working on NOROCK’s repeat photography project have recreated more than 80 scenes on roughly 20 glaciers. “We’ve gotten to all of the easy ones, basically,” says McKeon. Grinnell, which is accessible via trails, falls into this category. But in this region, nothing is ever easy.

The early photographers rarely annotated their images as Dean had, so it can be hard to retrace their paths, even with the help of Google Earth and careful attention to the horizon and recognizable features such as boulders. McKeon can’t get into the field until mid-to-late August, when the seasonal snow has vanished, exposing the more enduring freeze beneath it. But that’s also the season when wildfires char portions of the park, and those blazes can stymie the photography project, too, by obscuring views with smoke and making portions of the park unreachable. Going around a fire might stretch a three-day journey into five.

The payoff, though, is an ever-growing batch of before-and-after images. “You put those two images together, you don’t need any words, McKeon says, “anyone can interpret what’s happened.” And it’s not hard to imagine the even-bleaker future, in which the sheets of ice get progressively thinner and sparser, until they disappear entirely.

In the 1850s, the land of Glacier National Park was home to 150 of the giant ice flows that would later give the park its name. By many estimates, in the not-especially-distant future, there will be none.

It won’t happen at once. One decades-old model predicted that they’d all be gone by 2030, but now that researchers know more about glacier behavior, McKeon says, the picture is more complicated. Some will go early, others will linger, kept cool by wind or shade. There won’t be a single mass extinction, McKeon says, but the end is near. “All of the glaciers are melting, and the trend is very obvious,” she says. It’s a matter of decades, not centuries.

There’s no good way to extend a glacier’s life. When climate change comes for smaller targets—say, a cultural heritage site—naturalists can sometimes take steps to save them, perhaps by nurturing plants to hold soil in place and buffer an area against a storm surge. Reducing emissions is good, but has diffuse, delayed benefits. Immediate stopgaps have so far produced only so-so results. For years, a group in the Swiss Alps has swaddled the Rhône Glacier in a kind of reflective comforter in an effort to halt the melt. But it’s not a fix—one glaciologist told Agence France-Presse that Rhône still retreats by as many as five centimeters on a balmy day.

Though they weren’t expressly intended to do so, the NOROCK photos may end up being all that is left to keep the glaciers’ legacies alive. Some of them were included in a traveling art exhibition, and with the help of the National Park Service’s interpretive staff, McKeon’s team compiled these photos into a classroom curriculum. McKeon has sent a trunk of the photos all the way to Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Michigan, and down to Florida and California. Surely, some of the Sun Belt kids who study the images will have never seen snow up close. By the time these students have kids of their own, there they may be no ancient ice left in Glacier to see.

Even when the glaciers are gone, they’ll leave ghosts. For thousands of years, they have carved out valleys, cirques, and chains of lakes across the Montana landscape, and left behind moraine full of the boulders, pebbles, and silt picked up and deposited along the way. Their fingerprints are all over the place, right in the land itself.

And so, even without its namesake features, “Glacier Park will still be here, and it will still be a wonderful place to visit,” McKeon says. “A glacier-less Glacier Park is still worth ticking off your list.”

At his DIY institution in Colombia, Javier Fernando Rua Restrepo watches the stars.

Ask around for Javier Fernando Rua Restrepo in his home pueblo of Villavieja in Colombia, and locals will nod knowingly and point you in the direction of his modest apartment. Most people around here are familiar with Restrepo: After all, he is the astronomer who built his own observatory in the nearby Tatacoa Desert.

Restrepo’s is not the only observatory in Tatacoa, a region known internationally for its constellation viewing. Nor is it the biggest or most modern; those claims go to the government’s official Observatorio Astronómico de la Tatacoa.

But Tatacoa Astronomia offers something different. Restrepo likes to point out that thanks to the generosity of scientists around the world, it is better stocked with top-range telescopes than the government’s observatory. It is only open on starry nights, and only when Restrepo is able to tend to it himself, as he is the sole employee. From the outside it looks like a makeshift camp, but step inside and Restrepo’s enthusiasm, eagerness, and love for the stars make it something special.

A rarity for the inhabitants of Villavieja, Restrepo was not born in the pueblo. He grew up in Cali, a gruelling 230 miles away.

When he was a child, Restrepo developed a love for astronomy not from school, but from his family. “My father was a big reader of astronomy books and science books, and he had lots of books by Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov,” he says. (This conversation was conducted in Spanish and translated.) “When I was growing up, the science education in schools was not very good. Especially in cities like Cali, where I am from, space for interaction with science didn’t exist at all.”

As he grew older, Restrepo finally started to understand the books in his house. “I started to get to know like-minded people in Cali, and I found out about an astronomy association in the city, and so I signed up,” he says.

One day following a small conference at Cali’s Universidad del Valle, a member of his club suggested watching the imminent Comet Hale–Bopp—dubbed by NASA as the “great comet of 1997”—“somewhere very dark.” The group decided to head to the Tatacoa Desert. The trip would be Restrepo’s first visit to a place that would eventually become central to his life.

“The day came to meet at the bus terminal and no one turned up,” Restrepo remembers. “So I just went on my own, saw the comet, and then returned to Cali. But within a month, I went back—I couldn’t stay away.”

Although Tatacoa is known as a desert, it is technically a dry tropical forest. Thanks to its remote position, nearly 30 miles and more than an hour’s drive away from the nearest town of Neiva, Tatacoa has no light pollution to muddy its view of the stars. Up to 88 constellations—that is, all of the official ones—are visible over the course of a clear night.

“Because we’re so close to the equator, from this part of the world you can see the whole of the sky of the north and the whole of the sky of the south,” Restrepo explains.

Tatacoa’s warm, dry climate also helps with stargazing. When a star’s light rises and falls rapidly, a phenomenon known as twinkling or scintillation, it can be hard to spot the star in the night sky. A stable atmosphere, which happens in either dry spots or in places at a high altitude above sea level, decreases scintillation and increases the quality of stargazing.

Between its location and its dry atmosphere, Tatacoa’s view of the sky is extraordinary.

Restrepo, who never attended university and describes himself as a “self-taught astronomer,” camped for nearly two years in Tatacoa, as he couldn’t afford proper accommodation.

“I just wanted to see the stars,” he says. “Every night I would take my small telescope and I would look up at the sky. Maybe some people would say that wasn’t any kind of life. But for me, it was like heaven.”

The government opened its observatory in 1994, and Restrepo started working there in 1999, after “pestering them to employ me.” He worked there for 15 years until he was laid off in response to budget cuts.

“So, I just thought, why not build my own?” Restrepo says. “The comet led me to this amazing place and I am still here.”

Restrepo had managed to save enough money while working for the government to buy a small plot of land, just a few square meters large, in Tatacoa, and build the structure of his own observatory. He fenced off the small building with tarpaulin, to give a sense of excitement and intimacy inside.

However, it was another matter stocking the observatory with the right equipment.

In 2015, Restrepo opened his observatory’s doors with just one telescope: his own. Initially few people came. But as Colombia’s reputation as a country for backpackers grew, the DIY observatory attracted more and more visitors. Word quickly spread, and Restrepo says he started receiving calls from astronomers in Russia, the U.S., and Europe wanting to find out more and asking how they could help. Although the scientists didn’t donate financially, Restrepo says he has constant moral support whenever he is in need, and a few even donated their own telescopes.

Restrepo’s observatory now boasts seven telescopes, and a pair of giant Orion astronomy binoculars.

Stargazers from as far flung as China, Iceland, and Australia come to Tatacoa Astronomia to view the stars, while Restrepo’s “star party,” which he holds once a year in July, has become popular among tourists and locals alike. Not to be confused with Fiesta de Tatacoa, a thumping electronic festival held by the superclub Baum, the Fiesta de Estrellas is a quieter affair, with participants camping in the grounds surrounding the observatory, and watching the stars to the sounds of traditional Colombian music. It’s an occasion to gather with other astronomy aficionados, participate in workshops, and have the chance to go for a midnight hike. Guests also receive an attendance certificate.

“There was one man,” Restrepo recalls, “who came to one of my star parties. He was so impressed with what I was doing he bequeathed me his telescope that he’d brought with him.”

Representatives from almost all of the country's major universities have taken part in the star party. Benjamín Calvo-Mozo, a respected physicist from the Universidad Sergio Arboleda, has been “especially supportive,” as has Colombia's National Astronomy Network, says Restrepo.

“When I see a starry night, it becomes the crowning moment of my day, apart from my wife and children, who are of course very important,” he hastily adds. “But to see the sky on a clear night is just something extraordinary. It is hard to put it into a short sentence.”

In his study, which doubles as his daughter’s bedroom, Restrepo keeps a huge collection of physics and astronomy books. He also has numerous framed pictures of accolades: awards, pictures with astronauts, letters from NASA. He’s become a well-known name in the astronomy world, but fame and fortune don’t register in his orbit.

“The stars… they put my life into its tiny perspective,” he says, “and they constantly remind me there are greater things out there.”

A collector's Japanese paradise exists in an inconspicuous downtown loft.

One of the most intriguing places in all of Los Angeles is hidden in plain sight. On the edge of Little Tokyo in a 5,000 square-foot warehouse, a "Japanese Cultural Village" exists. The vast space brims with vibrant costumes, tapestries, dolls, kimonos, antiques, ceramics, lanterns, knick-knacks, ephemera and more. In addition to a museum-worthy collection of artifacts, the space also holds a theater, a temple, and a tea parlor.

Chase Sapphire® gave cardmembers and Atlas Obscura readers the unique opportunity to explore the place and interact with its owner, Peter Lai, whose commentary provided an additional splash of color in the lush, florid space.

Born in Hong Kong, Peter Lai became enraptured by Japanese design when he was 18 while on vacation in the country. Though he initially planned to move there, life interrupted with the passing of his father. He took on his family's trade of costumery, becoming an award-winning designer for opera, theater, television, and celebrities. For more than 30 years over the course of his travels, he collected Japanese items from around the world.

Below, take a look at just a few treasures from Lai's mind-boggling collection.

The vast majority are languishing in museum storage. Is it time to dig them up all over again?

Imagine: The year is 1918, and you're walking on the beach in California when you stub your toe. You look down to see what you've hit, and you notice that it's not an ordinary rock—it's a fossil, perhaps some sort of prehistoric snail. You dig it up, clean it off, carefully write down where and when you found it, and donate it to your local museum, as you have been taught. This is to be your contribution to history, to the scientific record. In your most hopeful moments, you picture your fossil providing vital information to a scientist, or on careful display in a glass case, delighting visiting children.

Now fast forward a century. Your specimen is neither changing minds nor on display. Instead, it's hidden away in a drawer in an offsite storage facility, along with your handwritten index card. No one has looked at it in decades. In a way, it needs to be dug up all over again.

According to a recent study, such is the fate of nearly all the fossils ever found. "There are enormous amounts of data sitting in various museum collections," says Peter Roopnarine, the curator of geology at the California Academy of Sciences and one of the authors of the paper, which was published last month in Biology Letters. "Our picture of what's going on is based on whatever small fraction we manage to study, and publish upon."

For the study, Roopnarine and his co-authors quantified this fraction across nine different institutions in California, Washington and Oregon. They calculated that of all the specimens housed in these collections, more than 95 percent are from locations that have never been written about. Extrapolating their findings globally, they predict that "perhaps only 3–4% of recorded fossil localities are currently accounted for" in published literature.

In the process, they also set out to change that, committing themselves to digitally documenting a particular subset of all of their specimens: Marine invertebrates found in the Eastern Pacific that are 66 million years old or younger. Each crab, clam, cockle and cowrie is getting its age, identity, and location put online, and some are being photographed and scanned as well. The resulting database—called Eastern Pacific Invertebrate Communities of the Cenozoic, or EPICC—is growing every day.

Petrified ocean critters may seem like a strange candidate for digitization, but there are many reasons to put them online. One is that it helps researchers get a more comprehensive idea of whatever it is they're trying to study. As the new paper details, for past generations, taking any kind of long view required painstakingly compiling information by hand. It's probably no accident that the geologist John Phillips—who, in 1841, made the first published attempt at a geological time scale—began his career in the discipline by organizing museum fossil collections.

In the 1980s, Roopnarine says, paleobiologists began undertaking even more in-depth literature reviews. It was at that point, he says, that "we began to discover ways to approach questions we hadn't before." In 1982, for example, two geologists trawled through nearly 400 papers and databases of marine fossils, and managed to pinpoint the five mass extinction events Earth has experienced since life first formed. "The advantages of accessing big data became very obvious," says Roopnarine.

Online databases like EPICC make this kind of thing even easier. The compilers' goal is to "allow any researcher to be able to reconstruct the history of this region from whatever perspective they're coming from," and study anything from food webs to species movements to the effects of climate change, Roopnarine says.

Another reason is to hedge against disasters. The loss of a specimen is tragic no matter what, but if you have information about it—its species and location, or even better, a photograph or scan—"at least we know what existed," says Roopnarine. After Brazil's Museu Nacional burned down in early September, several groups put out calls for images, scans, or 3D models that people might have taken of its holdings. A large number of its natural history documents are also available online, previously digitized by the museum.

Institutions in the American West are particularly aware of this danger, says Roopnarine: "We are absolutely paranoid about fire here." The California Academy of Sciences burned down in 1906, after the San Francisco earthquake. Before the blaze, it had housed the second-largest natural history collection in the country; by the time the flames snuffed out, it had lost 25,000 taxidermied birds, most of its entomology and herpetology holdings, and its entire library. (Alice Eastwood, the curator of botany, saved over a thousand plant specimens by bundling them together and lowering them from the sixth floor to the ground with ropes.)

"If the tragedy in Rio tells us anything, it's that you never have a good forecast of how much time you have to do this. And we need to do it sooner rather than later," says Roopnarine. "Unless you make these efforts to distribute [data], to back it up… this story's going to be told over and over."

Last but not least, you simply find neat things. "Every now and then we come across a gem of a specimen," says Roopnarine of getting his own department's fossils in order. The other day, they found the shell of a predatory snail that had been eaten by one of its peers. Inside was a fossilized hermit crab, who had taken up residence there. "I don't know what the deep scientific value of that is going to be," he says, "except it's awfully cool." Somewhere, maybe, its discoverer is smiling.

Devastation on the ground affected the sky, too.

Of course, the bombs dropped from planes during World War II wreaked havoc on the ground, claiming lives and reducing buildings to rubble. But according to new research in the European Geosciences Union journal Annales Geophysicae, the bombs’ effects also stretched high into the sky—all the way to the ionosphere, the portion of the upper atmosphere that reaches as much as 620 miles above the wreckage.

For this study, researchers at the University of Reading analyzed records from the Radio Research Centre in the English city of Slough. For years, the Centre collected daily data about shortwave radio pulses. By analyzing a trove of these spanning 1943 through 1945, and comparing fluctuations against time-stamped air-raid warnings and eye-witness accounts, the researchers were able to piece together a picture of how bombs briefly changed the sky—even when they detonated pretty far away.

Instead of measuring the sky-high impact of Nazi attacks, the researchers trained their focus on Allied campaigns across Europe. Allies’ four-engine planes could haul larger numbers of bombs packed with huge amounts of TNT, the authors write; also, it was easier to isolate data for their bombing sprees, whereas Nazi air raids were sometimes more or less continuous.

Looking at records corresponding to 152 air raids, the authors concluded that the bombs temporarily weakened the ionosphere by decreasing the concentration of charged electrons. (The effects appeared to dissipate after a day or so.) A single metric ton of TNT delivers as much explosive energy as a cloud-to-ground lighting stroke, the authors write; a typical air raid rained down the equivalent of roughly 300 bolts of lightning. "Aircrew involved in the raids reported having their aircraft damaged by the bomb shockwaves, despite being above the recommended height,” said co-author Patrick Major, a historian at the University of Reading, in a statement.

The researchers didn’t investigate the extent to which smaller explosions might still register up there, near the fringe of space. This region is a bit of a marginal zone, and it behooves us to learn about it—fluctuations there, in the turf of radio waves and satellites that beam GPS data, affect us here on Earth. More research could help researchers gauge how other terrestrial events, such as earthquakes or eruptions, shape the sky high above us, and our lives down below.

They led to one of the worst famines in history.

In 1958, Chinese communist cadre descended into farmers’ homes on an official government mission: to confiscate food supplies and cooking equipment, and destroy private kitchens. Officially, the communist government demonized private kitchens as “symbols of selfishness.” But for Chinese farmers, this meant that the ubiquity of cooking and eating meals at home suddenly became illegal.

The measure stemmed from Chairman Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward,” a series of communist government initiatives that revolutionized the Chinese countryside. Mao believed that agricultural collectivization was central to building a new socialist consciousness in China, and thought of rural society as critically important to furthering that goal. The People’s Commune, a system that consolidated farmers into communes averaging 23,000 members, also became pivotal to this ethos.

Besides abolishing private property and dividing work among households, these communes centered around communal canteens (Gonggong Shitang), a free dining system designed to feed commune members. Communal dining didn’t last all that long, and was eliminated in 1962. But contemporary academics believe it played a major role in causing one of the worst famines in human history, killing an estimated 30 million people.

Officially introduced in August 1958, the communes cropped up swiftly. By October 1958, 99.1% of all farmers were placed into communes containing 2.65 million canteens. Canteens varied in size (some could serve 1000 people during meal times) and were constructed from confiscated tables, utensils, and kitchen equipment. A ringing bell signified the start of meal times, prompting farmers to line up single file to be served cafeteria-style rice or wheat buns, soup, and vegetables before sitting down to eat in a central dining area.

Although food was free, there was no other choice. Dining was restricted to canteens, and all private kitchens and food supplies were banned. Still, most Chinese farmers kept private stockpiles of rice along with preserved foods to supplement fresh vegetables. But fearing confiscation, many farmers ate these stockpiles before the collectors came. And with all food grown by the farms sent directly to canteens, the entire food supply became monopolized into the canteen system.

In the beginning, the canteens were treated like a miracle. A popular slogan invited diners to “open your stomach, eat as much as you wish, and work hard for socialism.” Farmers reveled in this new system and gorged themselves. Some farmers even ate when they weren’t hungry. Author Han Suyin, who wrote an autobiography spanning her experiences in early Communist China, observed farmers stuffing “themselves with vast amounts of pork flesh, each peasant eating and carousing, ‘Why save? The government will provide. This is communism.’” This cavalier attitude meant that leftovers were thrown away, resulting in massive amounts of food waste.

Problems arose almost immediately, and signs of famine appeared as early as the winter of 1958. Historically, Chinese farmers maintained food stockpiles to prepare for shortages or slow harvest years. In some of the new canteens, farmers ate through a six-month supply of rice in 20 days. According to professors Gene Hsin Chang and Guanzhong James Wen, two historical experts on the famine, overconsumption and the canteens' monopoly on food became major catalysts for the famine. When famine conditions encroached, farmers had no access to their traditional supplies of food and were hostage to the dwindling food supply of the canteens.

By spring 1959, the famine had metastasized beyond control and resulted in extreme misery. The carefree days of feasting quickly morphed into hunger. Accounts from famine survivors paint a grim picture. Famine survivor Lao Tian describes canteen meals during the famine as consisting of “a bun or two with a bowl of water. At most we got to eat 500 grams of food a day...The buns were made of a mixture of corn and bark. Only very occasionally we got buns made of corn only.” According to other accounts, average food amounts for farm laborers were as low as 150 to 200 grams of food per meal. Rice, a staple of the Chinese diet, was unavailable. Instead, meals during the famine included the likes of watery wheat porridge, sweet potatoes, sweet potato leaves, carrot leaves, and hemp noodles, which were made by cutting “the roots of the plant into long silvers.” Farmers also ate the bark from parasol and loquat trees.

Massive corruption further exacerbated the problem. Corrupt cadre took advantage of their status to eat as much as they wanted from the canteens and often reported inflated agricultural production numbers. It didn’t help that farmers had little incentive to work, since everyone received the same food. They still had immense production goals at the time, which many farmers found impossible to fulfill.

To combat the outsized production goals, inventive farmers created a method called “roadside farming” to fool government inspection teams. This method involved planting crops only on the fields closest to the roads and leaving the remaining fields outside of view deserted, which then mislead government inspectors. Despite these deceptions, by the end of 1960, the rising death toll and drastic food shortages forced the government to acknowledge that the canteen system had failed. After a series of debates with high-ranking officials, Mao finally relented. All communal canteens were eliminated two years later.

Despite the canteen system’s disastrous consequences, restaurants that harken back to Mao’s China have emerged in cities such as Beijing and Chongqing. These spaces, with staff donning time-appropriate communist suits, use gimmicks to project nostalgia about a simpler time, and a China that no longer exists. These modern restaurants, with their abundance of food, may have been close to what Mao originally imagined for his communal canteens. Only now it exists is in ultra-capitalist, modern China, an ironic twist of fate for the canteen of the People’s Commune.

But they're still bad news for birds.

The ability to hunt, kill, and eat rodents is a permanent part of the cat brand, right alongside aloofness and scratching up the couch.

Not so fast, says a team of researchers with a new study out today in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, which provides rare insight into the cat-rat dynamic in an urban environment. The team, led by Michael H. Parsons of Fordham University, has found that feral cats (Felis catus) are seemingly ineffective predators of city rats (Rattus spp.), despite the cats’ reputation as urban rat-control agents. The team studied a rat colony living in a waste management facility in Atlas Obscura’s own Greenpoint, Brooklyn, over a period of five months, between December 2017 and May 2018. In that time, the surrounding feral cats landed just three confirmed kills.

That’s not what Parsons expected, though he says he didn’t really expect anything. Parsons just wanted to study rats—common culprits in food contamination, disease spread, and gnawed-wire fires—but it wasn’t easy. Finding a site willing to host his research into “socially phenotyping” rats, effectively a cultural study of an animal almost universally seen as vermin, took more than a year of rejection. “I cried more than once,” he says. “Can I catch and release a rat on your property? There’s nothing good that can come out of that.” He was finally able to set up shop in the Greenpoint facility, where the dust falls so heavily that it “almost looks like it’s snowing inside the building,” in fall 2017, and began rat pheromone–based experiments in December.

The researchers think the pheromones and trapped rats attracted cats, and Parsons assumed that his research into rodent society would be doomed by the unwelcome intrusion. “This is just another headache,” he thought at the time, but he decided to lean in. “Let’s publish the headache.”

The team continued with their plan to trap rats and tag them with microchips, which helped the researchers track behavioral patterns over time and document the rats’ “individual life histories.” All told, they chipped roughly 60 rats, and observed at least five cats.

“Are the cats gonna be plucking rats, my microchipped, precious rats, that cost 30 to 50 dollars each?” Parsons asked himself. They didn’t have to change their observational setup much to find out. Rats exhibit “site fidelity,” or the tendency to walk the same pathways over and over again, so the team had installed just two cameras to follow them, pointed at the colony’s “rat runways”—one east-west, one north-south. The cameras were triggered by movement—rat, cat, or human—so the researchers could observe interspecies interaction. That interaction, it turned out, rarely involved a cat killing a rat.

Other findings from their five months of observation are just as telling, and they attribute the low rat death toll more to rodent caution than feline incompetence. “For every 1% increase in the number of cats on a given day,” the researchers write, “it is 100 times less likely that a rat will trigger a camera on that day.” In other words, when the cats were there, the rats made themselves scarce, by staying inside and—who knows, making more rats? And they were more likely to stay out of sight the next day, too. What’s more, as anyone who’s walked through a particularly infested block knows, the appearance of humans didn’t seem to influence the rats’ behavior at all.

Cats are often praised for taking care of rodent infestations and sometimes even deployed for that specific purpose. Since 2016, Chicago’s Tree House Humane Society has provided some 400 cats to willing caretakers with rodent problems, says the society's Director of Operations Darlene Duggan. While it’s true that cat pheromones alone can inhibit rodent reproduction, Parsons is not yet convinced that the presence of cats meaningfully influences rat populations over time: The rats might just be hiding or, as Duggan admits, moving next door.

Parsons, in fact, would be “horrified” to see more cats introduced for this purpose. A 2017 study in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment called Felis catus one of “the most ubiquitous and environmentally damaging invasive predators on Earth,” thanks to its role in the extinctions of at least 63 vertebrates all over the world. A 2013 study estimated that cats kill 2.4 billion birds annually in the United States alone. (Cats also become pretty prodigious disease carriers themselves.) For Parsons, the key to rat management is in waste management. With less trash lying around, especially overnight, the rats would effectively “control themselves,” he says.

The new research is suggestive, but not definitive, in part because Parsons didn’t have another site, such as one with less rat food on hand, which would depress reproduction and perhaps allow cats to make a real dent. Even then, however, city rats don’t make easy prey. They weigh on average more than 10 ounces, roughly ten times the weight of a mouse. “I don’t want to argue whether cats can control rats,” says Parsons. “What I want to say is cats take the easier meal.”

Archival photographs show the spectacle of babies who went on display, in an effort to save their lives.

Before Lucille Horn came to be under the care of Martin Couney, in 1920, the doctors who'd brought her into the world had provided a bleak prognosis. “They didn’t have any help for me at all. It was just: you die because you didn’t belong in the world,” she later recalled. Horn had been born prematurely, weighing around two pounds; her twin had died at birth. Hospitals at that time did not treat such small babies, but her father knew someone who did. So he bundled her up and took her to the only place he knew that might be able to care for her: a sideshow attraction at New York City's Coney Island, which featured babies in incubators.

Incubators were still relatively new by the time Couney set up at Coney Island. Developed for infants in the 1880s, in Paris, Couney first displayed incubators—with babies—at the Berlin Exposition in 1896. From there he traveled to more expositions, including an event in London in 1897 and the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901. But in 1903 he settled in the U.S. to run his babies-in-incubators summertime sideshow, which would continue until the early 1940s.

The premise of the attraction was straightforward enough: pay an entrance fee to see something you wouldn’t usually be able to see. What set Couney's sideshow apart was that his subjects were premature babies in incubators, receiving care that hospitals did not provide. The entrance fees he collected went toward his operating costs, including round-the-clock care and wet nurses. Couney did not charge the parents of his tiny patients.

Reporting in 1903, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle described the “seriousness and value of the system shown.” A visit to Couney's showcase revealed rows of warmed, glass-fronted incubators supplied with filtered air, containing “little pitiful pinched looking waifs... the only things that indicate that they are alive are the healthy color of their little faces and the faint flutterings of movement which are perceptible on closer inspection.”

In the new book The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies by Dawn Raffel, recently reviewed by JSTOR Daily, Raffel reports that Couney may not have actually been a doctor. He also seems to have been cognizant of the theater element of a good sideshow. On occasion, he reportedly dressed infants, as they grew, in too-large clothing; his nurses were known to have slipped a finger ring around the entire wrist of their tiny charges. Speaking to the New Yorker in 1939, Couney explained, “all my life I have been making propaganda for the proper care of preemies, who in other times were allowed to die," he said. "Everything I do is strict[ly] ethical."

By one estimate, Couney saved the lives of 6,500 infants. His decades of caring for premature babies has been credited in the development of neonatal care in hospitals. But by the early 1940s, interest in Couney’s exhibition had waned and hospitals were beginning to open units dedicated to the care of premature babies. Couney died in 1950, at age 80. At the time of his death he was reportedly broke, but he was memorialized in The New York Times as "the incubator doctor."

In 2015, two years before she died at the age of 96, Horn was asked by her daughter, as part of NPR’s StoryCorps program, about being on display as a tiny infant. “It’s strange,” she said, "but as long as they saw me and I was alive, it was all right.”

Newly found and already almost lost.

It all started in April 2017, when Francisco Sornoza-Molina, an ornithologist at the National Institute for Biodiversity in Quito, Ecuador, was wandering the alpine plateaus (called “paramos”) of Cerro de Arcos, a rock formation in the country’s southwestern region. He was on the lookout for hummingbirds.

The paramos are belts between forest and snow line, where the landscape is cold and nearly treeless. Wind whips across tufts of tussock grasses and clusters of cushion plants, flat as emerald mats. Rabbits and foxes roam among the flowering shrubs, and rodents do their best to dodge caracaras—birds of prey with an appetite for all things small and furry. Despite the wind and low temperature, there are a lot of hummingbirds in this part of the Andes, too.

Sornoza-Molina spotted a bird, except it didn’t look quite like he thought it would. He snapped a photo, thinking it was probably an immature hillstar hummingbird, but male hillstars have brilliant violet or green plumage spangling their throats, while this one wore a deep, royal blue. Sornoza-Molina left, but soon trekked back to stands of Chuquiraga jussieui to get a closer look (hummingbirds often drop by to enjoy nectar from the orange and yellow flowers). Researchers then headed to areas nearby to collect sound recordings, install a camera to capture behavioral data, and eventually nab some specimens.

Genetic testing and vocal analysis confirmed what Sornoza-Molina had begun to suspect. He had a new species on his hands. He and a group of collaborators dubbed the bird Oreotrochilus cyanolaemus, or the blue-throated hillstar. But just as soon as they’d identified it, they realized the bird’s days might be numbered.

Researchers only spotted individuals in five places. When they modeled the species' possible range, even the most optimistic estimate spanned barely 62 square miles. As they describe in a new paper in The Auk: Ornithological Advances, the grass and bush habitats the bird seems to prefer are increasingly grazed by livestock, transformed into cropland, eaten up by fire, or reserved for gold mining. The authors estimate that the species probably numbers no more than 750 individuals, and maybe as few as 250.

“It’s very scary,” says Elisa Bonaccorso, a study coauthor and ecologist at the University of San Francisco, in Quito. “My fear is that, anything that’s new that’s there, we’re going to lose it before we describe it.” In certain circumstances, she says, conservationists could band together, raise money, and buy up land to save the habitat. But that’s not an option here, she says, where the land is “so valuable for mining that owners wouldn’t sell.” So the researchers found themselves with a conservation challenge—and an existential one.

In the montane forests of Africa’s Albertine Rift, which stretches more than 620 miles from Democratic Republic of the Congo down to Zambia, another recently recorded bird is facing a similar struggle. This landscape is home to a full 50 percent of the continent’s bird species, including many that aren’t found anywhere else. One of these is Willard’s sooty boubou (Laniarius willardi), an ink-colored bird first described a few years ago. Using a hybrid of museum sources, fieldwork, and remote-sensing data, researchers recently estimated that the bird’s range is limited, and probably contracting all the time. “Niche modeling combined with data layers on current land use and forest cover confirm that few areas outside of designated [protected areas] have suitable habitat for L. willardi,” a team of ecologists write in a recent paper in The Condor: Ornithological Applications.

This scenario has played out before, sometimes with expectedly grim results. In the late 1970s, biologists from Rio de Janeiro revisited Brazil’s northeastern region, where European colonizers had obliterated the lowland forest in favor of agriculture and cities. The researchers came across a handful of isolated ecosystems that seemed fairly unscathed, explains Tom Schulenberg, an evolutionary biologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. On some hilltops, they found tiny patches of forest—wild islands in a sea of sugarcane. “To everyone's surprise, [they] discovered several previously unknown species,” writes Schulenberg in an email. One of these was the Alagoas foliage-gleaner. The rust-colored passerine bird was first spotted in 1979, then described in 1983, and there’s been no trace of it for at least seven years. In a recent paper in the journal Biological Conservation, a team from BirdLife International recommended classifying it as extinct.

Is it possible to keep blue-throated hillstar and Willard’s sooty bouboun from the same fate? How do you get people interested in saving a newly recorded species, before most have even heard of it? Gorillas, elephants, and other iconic animals are a comparatively easy sell. It’s harder to convince someone who has never seen one of these birds that they’re worth saving, especially when doing so could impact the local economy.

Bonaccorso’s team proposed that one way to save the species (and its ecosystem) is enticing people to come seek it out, which could provide reliable income to local people. Ecologists, she says, have to try something besides arguing for the intrinsic value of protecting nature. “[It is] not about how beautiful the bird is, but how we can use this bird to have an income.” The researchers are beginning to explore how ecotourism initiatives could bring birdwatchers to the area, and how locals can benefit from their interest.

Across the Albertine Rift, the key might be doubling down on sections of the sooty boubou’s habitat that are already theoretically protected, says Fabio Berzaghi, a data scientist and lead author of the paper in The Condor. That approach depends on the strength of enforcement. “If an area has been assigned a protected-area status, it’s basically not even useful if you don’t do any enforcement or protection,” says Berzaghi, who conducted the work at the University of Tuscia, in Italy. In any event, he adds, it’s easier to devise strategies for this than it is to convert land designated for crops or communities back to a wilder state.

Meanwhile, this extinction quandary is also motivating some researchers to look more closely at sensitive habitats. The team in Ecuador wasn’t expecting to find new species where they did, Bonaccorso says, but then again, they weren’t always looking for them. Research institutions tend to be concentrated in Quito, not in this region, more than 370 miles away. There’s sometimes a perception that “because there’s so much development already, everything is lost,” she adds. Bonaccorso considers the discovery a “wake-up call,” and a reminder that the landscape still has the capacity to surprise. “There could be some remaining forest or paramos that we haven’t studied, surrounded by destroyed ecosystems,” she says. “I think we have to try our best.”

A close-up look at giant isopod specimens.

The deep-sea isopod looks similar to a roly-poly you might find in a backyard, except it can grow up to a foot long and lives between 300 and 800 meters under sea. Chicago's Field Museum keeps giant isopod specimens preserved in alcohol for research. As Invertebrates Collection Manager Jochen Gerber explains, giant isopods are scavengers that eat dead fish, crustaceans, and even whales. When he shows them to people, they often draw comparisons to the creatures in the Alien films, says Gerber.

In the video above, Atlas Obscura gets a close-up look at what it takes to maintain these unusual specimens.

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Candidates include a tunnel made of yews, the flaky-barked "Filo Tree," and a hawthorn planted on a giant's grave.

In the mood for an arboreal arbitration? You're in luck: Until voting closes on October 8, 2018, you can help choose the Tree of the Year for the United Kingdom.*

There are a number of Tree of the Year competitions worldwide. This one is run by the U.K.'s Woodland Trust. As the nonprofit's spokesperson George Anderson explains, it was started in 2014, inspired by the similar, continent-wide European Tree of the Year competition. "We wanted to give a higher profile to the one-off special trees around the country," Anderson says.

Competition is stiff this year. Each country has six trees to choose from, and all of them are indeed special. Northern Ireland has a multi-stem giant redwood, and a hawthorn tree that was planted upon a legendary giant's grave. Wales offers the Pwllpriddog Oak—an enormous hollow tree where concerts are held—as well as several yews fused together into a tunnel.

In England, there's the Old Electric Oak, which has repeatedly defeated a power line's attempt to encroach upon it, and a mulberry tree that hung out with John Keats. And a few of Scotland's most notable contenders illustrate this article.

More than glory is on offer: After the public makes its call, judges will choose one overall winner to represent the U.K. in the European Tree of the Year contest. Also, each country's winning tree receives £1,000 (about $1,300) in prize money, and select runner-ups get some cash too.

Past winners have spent their winnings in various ways: "The Scotland winner in 2016, The Ding Dong Tree, had part of its award spent on planting a successor as it wasn't in the best health," says Anderson. "One of our runner-ups that year, The Craigends Yew, had some signage erected as people were having difficulty finding it and often mistook a nearby cedar for the yew."

You can read further descriptions of the candidates, and see more photographs, at the Woodland Trust website, and you can cast your vote there as well. You don't need to have met the trees to vote—"People can vote for no matter where they are, and they can vote for a tree in each U.K. country," writes Anderson. Remember: With great power comes great responsibility, except for sometimes, when it's just fun.

*Correction: This post previously misidentified the region covered by the contest. It covers the United Kingdom.

In 1917, two young girls with a camera pranked the world.

In summer and autumn of 1917, teenage Elsie Wright and her adolescent cousin, Frances Griffiths, borrowed a glass-plate camera from Wright's father and tromped to Cottingley Beck, in West Yorkshire. They photographed each other on the bank of the stream and in the grass of a sun-dappled glen—and also captured some special guests.

One image shows Griffiths, looking wistful, chin in hand, with a cavorting troupe of fairies. In another, a smiling Wright greets a gnome high-stepping through the grass.

For those inclined to believe in the existence of small, magical forest creatures, the photos felt like ironclad proof—the ultimate rebuke to the skeptics, clear as day. Some of the most ardent support for the veracity of the images, known as the “Cottingley Fairies,” came from Arthur Conan Doyle. Years after he had dreamed up Sherlock Holmes, the author campaigned for belief in Spiritualism, which boomed during and after World War I. Conan Doyle, who had lost his son Kingsley in the war, seized on the girls' photographs as evidence of the mystical world. He compiled his arguments into a volume called The Coming of the Fairies. The pictures, he wrote, “represent either the most elaborate and ingenious hoax ever played upon the public, or else they constitute an event in human history which may in the future appear to have been epoch-making in its character.”

The cousins stuck to their story for decades. It wasn’t until the 1980s that an elderly Wright finally fessed up, after Geoffrey Crawley, a chemist and photography editor, embarked on a 10-part, nearly forensic analysis of the images in the British Journal of Photography.

The hoax, it turned out, wasn't so elaborate. The cousins had carefully cut the creatures out of paper and staked them to the ground with little hat pins to create the illusion of floating. Hints of this sleight-of-hand were there, for those looking closely. The gnome’s belly, for instance, had a tiny hole where the pin poked through. Conan Doyle, for one, proposed that the little hole was a navel.

Now we have a fresh chance to be duped and charmed, when two of the photographs go up for sale at Dominic Winter Auctioneers, in Gloucestershire, on October 4. The auction house suspects that these prints were made in 1920, probably to be peddled at theosophical lectures. Each is expected to fetch between £700 and £1000 (roughly $900 to $1,300). Where Lots 921 and 922 will go next is a mystery, but they’re still magical reminders of a truly fantastic prank.

Southern salt-making operations became prime military targets.

Louisiana’s Avery Island is the ancestral home of Tabasco hot sauce, manufactured there since 1868. But Avery Island isn’t an island at all. Surrounded by marsh, it’s a massive salt dome. That salt sat relatively undisturbed until the Civil War, when it suddenly became a precious commodity.

Salt is easy to overlook today, but before refrigeration, it was essential for preserving food and curing leather, not to mention that a minimum amount of salt is necessary for a healthy diet. Union officials realized early in the war that salt was the key to feeding soldiers and civilians in the South. As soon as southerners built their own facilities to make salt, they became military targets.

In the 1800s, most American salt production took place in the North. Millions of years ago, an inland sea near Syracuse, New York, gradually filled in with sediment, leaving behind massive salt deposits and brine springs. In 1862 alone, the Onondaga salt works turned these deposits into nine million bushels of salt. Workers pumped water from the salty springs, and boiled and sun-dried it. (Even today, a Central New York specialty consists of potatoes boiled in powerfully salty water, a remnant of when salt workers cooked their lunches in the salt brine.) On the other hand, the South depended on imported salt, much of which was used as ballast when foreign ships came for Southern cotton.

The Civil War began in April 1861, and immediately, the Union blockaded the Confederate states to stall the export of money-making cotton. While scholars debate its ultimate effectiveness, the blockade made staples such as coffee and flour scarce almost immediately. Some imported salt continued to come through the blockade, but it was never enough, not to mention difficult to distribute. Even as recipes for “Confederate Plum Cake” swapped cornmeal for flour, sorghum for sugar, and lard for butter, finding a salt substitute was harder. According to historian Andrew F. Smith, desperate Southerners even re-used salt, by brushing it off their salted meat or boiling it out of the floorboards of smokehouses.

Preserving meat was the biggest problem. Salted beef and pork were staples for soldiers and civilians alike. In the hog-raising South, the situation quickly became dire. The Commissary General of the Confederacy, Lucius B. Northrup, fretted over the lack, writing to another official in 1862 that "in consequence of the insufficient quantity and inferior quality of salt among the inhabitants, much of their meat is spoiling.” Speculation and shipping difficulties compounded the problem. At the beginning of the war, a 200-pound sack of salt in New Orleans cost 50 cents. By 1862, the price was $25.

Soon, Southern states offered rewards to those who found and harvested salt. During the Civil War, Avery Island became one of many burgeoning salt works across the South. Salt was so important that many laborers working rock-salt mines and saline wells were exempt from military service. Some workers, though, didn’t have a choice. Many enslaved people, men and women, were forced to labor in the salt works.

Union leaders realized early on that keeping salt from the South could win the war. “What good could it do to destroy salt?” the United States Navy admiral David Dixon Porter asked rhetorically, 20 years after the war. “It was the life of the Confederate army … they could not pack their meats without it. A soldier with a small piece of boiled beef, six ounces of corn-meal, and four ounces of salt, was provisioned for a three-day march.” Soon, raids on salt works became a matter of course.

More than once, what led to the downfall of Southern salt works was the bravery of the enslaved, who gave vital information on their location and defenses. In one account of the destruction of a Florida salt works, a group of enslaved men escaped to the U.S. ship Kingfisher. They came with news of a half-finished salt works off of St. Joseph's Bay. According to the officer recounting the event to Harper’s Magazine in 1862, the ship “sent a flag of truce, and politely informed them they must stop, or we should destroy them.” When the salt-works refused to acknowledge their flag, the Kingfisher fired two shells into the building, then, after it was vacated, disembarked to dismantle it.

It was a huge blow. Historian Adam Wasserman notes that the Confederacy had been depending on a whole winter’s worth of salt for Florida and Georgia from the destroyed site. This made the attack equivalent, perhaps, to taking 20,000 rebel soldiers out of commission. For the rest of the war, fire, gunpowder, and sledgehammers were used to destroy boiling pots and furnaces. Tales abound of the black men and women forced to produce the salt assisting in this destruction. At times, this meant leading Union forces to salt-making cauldrons hidden in swamps. The result was millions of dollars in damage to Confederate facilities, skyrocketing salt prices, and what Southern leaders called a “salt famine.”

The effectiveness of these salt raids was clear to both sides. One sailor, recounting the story of the raid of Darien, Georgia’s salt-works in 1863, wrote, “Salt is a scarce article in the [Confederacy], and the more works destroyed the sooner we shall have peace, for the rebels can’t live without their bacon, and to have bacon they must use salt.” One Southern diarist, the author John Beauchamp Jones, groused in 1862 that “the President [Jefferson Davis] may be a good nation-maker in the eyes of distant statesmen, but he does not seem to be a good salt-maker for the nation.” As for Avery Island, its defenders successfully fended off attack until 1863, when General Nathaniel P. Banks and his men razed its salt works to the ground.

The Union’s strategy culminated with repeated attacks on the aptly-named Saltville, Virginia, which was finally captured in December of 1864. In the words of historian Rick Beard, it was the end of “most of the salt making in the South.” This lack of salt and other supplies was a major factor in the Confederacy’s defeat in the Civil War.

After the Union destroyed Avery Island’s salt works, their former manager, a one-time banker named Edmund McIlhenny, was ruined. Returning to Avery Island years after fleeing Union forces, he had nothing to do but putter around his garden, where he grew some interesting hot peppers. It only took a few years before McIlhenny was using a potato masher and an old Confederate-supply-depot-turned-factory to manufacture tart, spicy Tabasco—seasoned with Avery Island’s salt, of course.

“Alas for me! I am dead!”

Just think what Virgil, Ovid, or Horace could have done with Superman. A recently unearthed Roman tomb in the northern Jordanian town of Beit Ras features a collection of striking, sequential paintings complete with speech-filled captions, forming what looks to many like an ancient, proto-comic strip.

The hypogeum, or underground tomb, measures an impressive 550 square feet and holds two separate funeral chambers. The main room is adorned with four paintings that, together, depict nearly 260 gods, humans, and animals. It’s important to note the order: In the central painting, an officiant makes a sacrifice to the patron deities of Capitolias (present-day Beit Ras) and Caesarea Maritima, capital of the province Judea. A second painting features peasants working the fields with oxen and chopping down trees with help from the gods, the third painting renders the construction of a rampart (with some of the workers even getting into accidents as they climb walls or cut stones), and the fourth illustrates a priest making another sacrifice to those deities.

Researchers believe that the paintings—and their arrangement—tell a story about the founding of Capitolias. First, a priest turns to the gods for advice on where to establish the city, workers then develop the land and raise defenses, and the community finally offers its thanks with another sacrifice when the work is done. In a release, researchers called the tomb’s decorations unusually ornate.

The most exciting aspect of the discovery, however, may be the text that accompanies these images. More than sixty inscriptions explain the action, like speech bubbles that give direct voice to the characters on the walls. It's not exactly Alan Moore—“Alas for me! I am dead!”—but the inscriptions promise interesting research. Most are written in Aramaic but with Greek letters, merging the two primary languages of the Roman Middle East, but it’s more complicated than that. The inscriptions attached to the deities are written in Greek alone, which distinguishes them from the hybrid text of the toiling peons.

Capitolias belonged to a part of the Roman Empire known as the Decapolis, a group of 10 cities that retained the legacy of Hellenistic culture and enjoyed relative autonomy from the empire. There’s no shortage of Roman artifacts in the Beit Ras area, but this find was pure serendipity. It was uncovered by routine roadwork outside a school in 2016.

Readers share how they tackled this singular recipe.

Last month, Atlas Obscura challenged readers to make their own version of black sesame sweet soup, a dessert soup that’s popular in Hong Kong. In its most basic form it comes out pitch-black, creamy, and nutty, and it's just one of the more than 800 wondrous foods featured on our food vertical, Gastro Obscura.

All of the adventurous home cooks who took us up on our challenge deserve a round of applause. Many of you found a way to personalize your soups by subtly varying the recipe, and one of you even dared to cook yours over a campfire. Most importantly, you wrote in to tell us about the entire experience, including helpful hints you learned along the way.

We've collected our favorite submissions below. Read on, and perhaps you'll be inspired to try making your own black sesame sweet soup.

Sandra Donabed of Jupiter, Florida

Tell us about your experience! Did you discover any useful hints?

You can skip ahead if you use roasted black sesame tahini in place of the raw sesame seeds. And try with black rice too to keep it really black and not gray. Who eats gray food? That way you can roast with rice, let sit overnight together, blend together, and cook together.

How, if at all, did you change the recipe?

I stopped blending it before complete puree, so it has a bit more texture. And it was badly in need of a pinch of salt! Also, I garnished with some white sesame seeds.

Did you like the soup?

Once I added some salt it became quite good!

Karen Wiggins-Dowler of Pacifica, California

Tell us about your experience! Did you discover any useful hints?

If you are straining the sesame seeds, use a cloth bag and not cheese cloth! Sesame liquid squirted everywhere.

How, if at all, did you change the recipe?

I used black rice and hulled millet, and after soaking it for an hour and rinsing it, I put the rice mixture in the freezer for an hour before blending it (I didn't want to wait overnight and the freezing helps to break down the outside cell structure) in a soy milk maker. I then strained the mixture with a wire mesh, producing a rice paste. I also added 1/2 cup dried lily bulb to the sesame seeds before I blended them.

Did you like the soup?

I liked it after adding more rock sugar and a pinch of salt!

Chantal-Lise Mirman of Brighton, Colorado

Tell us about your experience! Did you discover any useful hints?

With Halloween coming up, how could I resist this La Brea Tar Pits simulacrum? Sticky and sweet, this concoction is as likely to swallow you up as you are to slurp it down! I felt more like a modern day alchemist, creating new life, than a culinary expert as I measured, toasted, combined and simmered exotic ingredients for this relatively simple recipe. However, don’t be surprised if an eye of newt or bat wing happens to fall in…

How, if at all, did you change the recipe?

I seasoned my Primordial Black Sesame Seed Soup with: ground roasted ginger, ground star anise, ground grains of paradise, ground cayenne, lemon pepper seasoning, sriracha, a little white shoyu and a hunk of honeycomb. Crumbled crystalized ginger and a can of drained black beans (for texture). Would be great paired with warm sake! Also, like all soups, it’s better the next day, once the flavors have had a chance to set.

Did you like the soup?

Not your everyday, run-of-the-mill soup, but a welcome addition to my soup repertoire. Surprisingly delicious and spicy/sweet way to start an Asian-themed meal or end it on an equally surprising note, with a sprinkle of crushed gingered black sesame seed brittle (perhaps accompanied by a small scoop of green tea ice cream).

Grey Maier of Providence, Rhode Island

Tell us about your experience! Did you discover any useful hints?

I made this recipe over a campfire in middle-of-nowhere, upstate New York. There isn't much to be had up there. Food, water, and electricity all take some work to get, which made cooking this soup exponentially harder. Water came from a nearby stream, heat from the fire, and all sources of sugar came from the local wilderness (wild berries and syrup). I had no blender, so I had to hand-mash the sesame and rice after soaking. This was the biggest flaw, since the sesame seeds didn't really blend. Water and fuel limitations turned this soup into a porridge, and the challenges of campfire cooking made every step a hundred times more complicated and labor-intensive.

How, if at all, did you change the recipe?

Oh boy... How did I change the recipe? Let me count the ways. I toasted the sesame seeds over a fire, smoking them as much as toasting them (with surprisingly flavorful results). I couldn't blend anything, so I soaked the seeds and rice for over two days, and mashed them by hand. The rice mashed pretty well. The seeds sort of came apart, but they didn't become smooth or anything like that. I could have done a better job with this step. The soup boiled over the fire, thickening and turning into porridge because I didn't want to add more water and risk maxing out the fuel supply. It became very thick in the end. There was no sugar, so maple syrup substituted (about 3/4 cup). Once done, the porridge was served with more maple syrup poured over the top, as well as with homemade jam (blueberry, blackberry/raspberry), made with very local wild berries. The end result was better than I expected. The sesame seeds were smoky and crunchy, while the rice took on the maple flavor.

Did you like the soup?

Yeah it was pretty good. The smoke and maple flavors really added to it, and the fruity jam worked better than I thought it would. I got lucky with the extremely seedy raspberry jam (wild raspberries have many more seeds than supermarket berries), since it matched the poorly-ground sesame. Overall, a good (if exhausting) three-day experience that definitely made me thankful for modern kitchen appliances.

Annie Wang of Minneapolis, Minnesota

Tell us about your experience! Did you discover any useful hints?

This actually inspired me to write a whole blog post. Using yellow rock sugar instead of granulated sugar is pretty important IMHO because that is what is traditionally used and the granulated sugar gives a drying/sour after taste.

How, if at all, did you change the recipe?

I altered it to how I prefer it because I like mine a little more on the gritty side.

1 c. black sesame seeds

2/3 c. long grain white rice

7 1/2 c. water

6 oz. yellow rock sugar

Did you like the soup?

No. A relative used to order this occasionally when we would go out to eat in Taiwan. I don't like the flavor of black sesame.

Lucia Yee Lipitz of New York City

Tell us about your experience! Did you discover any useful hints?

Easy to make, but a cup of sugar is too sweet for my taste.

How, if at all, did you change the recipe?

Less sugar, of course. And less rice to enhance the sesame seed fragrance.

Did you like the soup?

I have always loved Black Sesame Sweet Soup since eating it as a child in Hong Kong. This delectable soup is my Proust's Madeleine; it brought back memory of an innocent time. I enjoyed this Gastro Obscura cook-off challenge. Thank you.

Against all odds, 28 percent of Scottish people still use it.

Over the past few decades, as efforts to save endangered languages have become governmental policy in the Netherlands (Frisian), Slovakia (Rusyn) and New Zealand (Maori), among many others, Scotland is in an unusual situation. A language known as Scottish Gaelic has become the figurehead for minority languages in Scotland. This is sensible; it is a very old and very distinctive language (it has three distinct r sounds!), and in 2011 the national census determined that fewer than 60,000 people speak it, making it a worthy target for preservation.

But there is another minority language in Scotland, one that is commonly dismissed. It’s called Scots, and it’s sometimes referred to as a joke, a weirdly spelled and -accented local variety of English. Is it a language or a dialect? “The BBC has a lot of lazy people who don't read the books or keep up with Scottish culture and keep asking me that stupid question,” says Billy Kay, a language activist and author of Scots: The Mither Tongue. Kay says these days he simply refuses to even answer whether Scots is a language or a dialect.

What Scots really is is a fascinating centuries-old Germanic language that happens to be one of the most widely spoken minority native languages, by national percentage of speakers, in the world. You may not have heard of it, but the story of Scots is a story of linguistic imperialism done most effectively, a method of stamping out a country’s independence, and also, unexpectedly, an optimistic story of survival. Scots has faced every pressure a language can face, and yet it’s not only still here—it’s growing.

Scots arrived in what is now Scotland sometime around the sixth century. Before then, Scotland wasn’t called Scotland, and wasn’t unified in any real way, least of all linguistically. It was less a kingdom than an area encompassing several different kingdoms, each of which would have thought itself sovereign—the Picts, the Gaels, the Britons, even some Norsemen. In the northern reaches, including the island chains of the Orkneys and the Shetlands, a version of Norwegian was spoken. In the west, it was a Gaelic language, related to Irish Gaelic. In the southwest, the people spoke a Brythonic language, in the same family as Welsh. The northeasterners spoke Pictish, which is one of the great mysterious extinct languages of Europe; nobody really knows anything about what it was.

The Anglian people, who were Germanic, started moving northward through England from the end of the Roman Empire’s influence in England in the fourth century. By the sixth, they started moving up through the northern reaches of England and into the southern parts of Scotland. Scotland and England always had a pretty firm border, with some forbidding hills and land separating the two parts of the island. But the Anglians came through, and as they had in England, began to spread a version of their own Germanic language throughout southern Scotland.

There was no differentiation between the language spoken in Scotland and England at the time; the Scots called their language “Inglis” for almost a thousand years. But the first major break between what is now Scots and what is now English came with the Norman Conquest in the mid-11th century, when the Norman French invaded England. If you talk to anyone about the history of the English language, they’ll point to the Norman Conquest as a huge turning point; people from England have sometimes described this to me, in true English fashion, as the time when the French screwed everything up.

Norman French began to change English in England, altering spellings and pronunciations and tenses. But the Normans never bothered to cross the border and formally invade Scotland, so Scots never incorporated all that Norman stuff. It would have been a pretty tough trip over land, and the Normans may not have viewed Scotland as a valuable enough prize. Scotland was always poorer than England, which had a robust taxation system and thus an awful lot of money for the taking.

“When the languages started to diverge, Scots preserved a lot of old English sounds and words that died out in standard English,” says Kay. Scots is, in a lot of ways, a preserved pre-Conquest Germanic language. Guttural sounds in words like fecht (“fight”) and necht (“night”) remained in Scots, but not in English.

Over the next few centuries, Scots, which was the language of the southern Scottish people, began to creep north while Scottish Gaelic, the language of the north, retreated. By about 1500, Scots was the lingua franca of Scotland. The king spoke Scots. Records were kept in Scots. Some other languages remained, but Scots was by far the most important.

James VI came to power as the king of Scotland in 1567, but was related to Elizabeth I, ruling queen of England. When Elizabeth died, James became king of both Scotland and England in 1603, formally joining the two nations for the first time. (His name also changed, becoming James I.) He dissolved the Scottish parliament, moved to London, and, in a great tradition of Scotsmen denigrating their home country, referred to his move as trading “a stony couch for a deep feather bed.”

Scottish power was wildly diminished. The country’s poets and playwrights moved to London to scare up some patronage that no longer existed in Edinburgh. English became the language of power, spoken by the ambitious and noble. When the Reformation came, swapping in Protestantism for Catholicism in both England and Scotland, a mass-printed bible was widely available—but only in English. English had become not only the language of power, but also the language of divinity. “It's quite a good move if you're wanting your language to be considered better,” says Michael Hance, the director of the Scots Language Centre.

At this point it’s probably worth talking about what Scots is, and not just how it got here. Scots is a Germanic language, closely related to English but not really mutually comprehensible. There are several mutually comprehensible dialects of Scots, the same way there are mutually comprehensible dialects of English. Sometimes people will identify as speaking one of those Scots dialects—Doric, Ulster, Shetlandic. Listening to Scots spoken, as a native English speaker, you almost feel like you can get it for a sentence or two, and then you’ll have no idea what’s being said for another few sentences, and then you’ll sort of understand part of it again. Written, it’s a bit easier, as the sentence structure is broadly similar and much of the vocabulary is shared, if usually altered in spelling. The two languages are about as similar as Spanish and Portuguese, or Finnish and Swedish.

Modern Scots is more German-like than English, with a lot of guttural -ch sounds. The English word “enough,” for example, is aneuch in Scots, with that hard German throat-clearing -ch sound. The old Norwegian influence can be seen in the converting of softer -ch sounds to hard -k sounds; “church” becomes kirk. Most of the vowel sounds are shifted in some way; “house” is pronounced (and spelled) hoose. Plurals are different, in that units of measurement are not pluralized (twa pund for “two pounds”) and there are some exception forms that don’t exist in English. There are many more diminutives in Scots than in English. The article “the” is used in places English would never use it, like in front of days of the week.

Almost everything is spelled slightly differently between Scots and English. This has caused some to see, just for example, the Scots language Wikipedia as just a bunch of weird translations of the Scottish English accent. “Joke project. Funny for a few minutes, but inappropriate use of resources,” wrote one Wikipedia editor on a Wikipedia comments page.

That editor’s suggestion to shut the Scots Wikipedia down was immediately rejected, with many Scots speakers jumping into the fight. But it’s not really that different from the way the ruling English powers treated the language.

There are, generally, two ways for a ruling power to change the way a minority population speaks. The first happened in, for example, Catalonia and Ireland: the ruling power violently banned any use of the local language, and sent literal military troops in to change place names and ensure everyone was speaking the language those in power wanted them to speak. This is, historically, an extremely bad and short-sighted strategy. This sort of blunt action immediately signifies that these minority languages are both something to fight for and a unifying force among a population. That usually results in outright warfare and underground systems to preserve the language.

What England did to Scotland was probably unintentional, but ended up being much more successful as a colonization technique in the long run. The English didn’t police the way the Scottish people spoke; they simply allowed English to be seen as the language of prestige, and offered to help anyone who wanted to better themselves learn how to speak this prestigious, superior language. Even when the English did, during the age of cartography, get Scottish place names wrong, they sort of did it by accident. Hance told me about a bog near his house which was originally called Puddock Haugh. Puddock is the Scots word for frog; haugh means a marshy bit of ground. Very simple place name! The English altered place names, sometimes, by substituting similar-sounding English words. Scots and English are fairly similar, and sometimes they’d get the translation right. For this place, they did not. Today, that bog is called “Paddock Hall,” despite there being neither a place for horses nor a nice big manor house.

This strategy takes a lot longer than a linguistic military invasion, but it serves to put a feeling of inferiority over an entire population. How good a person can you really be, and how good can your home be, if you don’t even speak correctly?

Scots is a language and not a dialect, but this strategy is not too dissimilar from what happens with African American Vernacular English, or AAVE, in the United States. Instead of recognizing AAVE as what it is—one American English dialect among many—education systems in the U.S. often brand it as an incorrect form of English, one that needs to be corrected (or as a “second language”). It isn’t different; it’s wrong. Inferior. This is a wildly effective, if subtle, ploy of oppression. “There are plenty of people in Scotland who actually think it's a good thing,” says Hance. “The narrative is, we've been made better through this process.”

The Scottish people even have a term for their feeling of inferiority: the Scottish cringe. It’s a feeling of embarrassment about Scottish heritage—including the Scots language—and interpreting Scottishness as worse, lower, than Englishness. “Lots of Scottish people think to demonstrate any form of Scottish identity beyond that which is given formal approval is not something that should be encouraged,” says Hance.

Scots faces a unique and truly overwhelming set of obstacles. It’s very similar to English, which allows the ruling power to convince people that it’s simply another (worse) version of English. The concept of bilingualism in Scotland is very, very new. And English, the ruling language is the most powerful language in the world, the language of commerce and culture. More than half of the websites on the internet are in English, it is by far the most learned language (rather than mother tongue) in the world, is the official language for worldwide maritime and air travel, and is used by a whopping 95 percent of scientific articles—including from countries where it isn’t even a recognized official language. Until very recently, says Hance, even Scottish people didn’t think their language was worth fighting for; today, the funding to preserve Scottish Gaelic outstrips that for Scots by a mile.

Amid all this, Scots is defiantly still here. In the 2011 census, about 1.5 million of Scotland’s 5.3 million people declared that they read, spoke, or understood Scots. “Despite being in this situation for centuries, we kept going,” says Hance. “We still exist. We're still separate and different, and have our unique way of seeing the world and our unique way of expressing it.” Scots isn’t endangered the way Scottish Gaelic is; it’s actually growing in popularity.

Census data isn’t always as clear as it might sound. There are people who only speak Scots, and can probably understand English but not really speak it. There are people who are fully bilingual, capable of switching, with awareness, between the languages. Some people will start a sentence in Scots and finish it in English, or use words from each language in the same conversation. There are those who speak English, but heavily influenced by Scots, with some words or pronunciations borrowed from Scots.

Technology has been a boon for the language, for a host of different reasons. Spellcheck has been a headache; computers and phones do not include native support for Scots, even while including support for languages spoken by vastly fewer people. (There are a few university research projects to create Scots spellcheck, but they’re not widespread.) But this has had the effect of making Scots speakers ever more aware that what they’re trying to type is not English; the more they have to reject an English spellcheck’s spelling of their Scots, the more they think about the language they use.

The informality of new forms of communication, too, is helping. Pre-email, writing a letter was a time-consuming and formal process, and the dominance of English as a prestige language meant that native Scots speakers would often write letters in English rather than their own language. But texting, social media, email—these are casual forms of communication. Most people find it easier to relax on punctuation, grammar, and capitalization when communicating digitally; Scots speakers relax in that way, too, but also relax by allowing themselves to use the language they actually speak. “Texting and posting, those are largely uncensored spaces, so the linguistic censorship that used to take place when you communicated with other people in written form, it doesn't happen any longer,” says Hance. “People are free to use their own words, their own language.”

Scots is still wildly underrepresented in television, movies, books, newspapers, and in schools. Sometimes students will, in a creative writing class, be allowed to write a paper in Scots, but there are no Scots-language schools in Scotland. The lack of presence in schools, though, is just one concern Scots scholars have about the language.

“In general, it’s better now,” says Kay, “but it’s still not good enough.”

Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Perkins Gilman were both patients of his infamous rest cure.

For over a month, “Mrs. C” laid in bed, gulping down quarts of milk. Aside from occasionally sitting up and relieving herself, the 33-year-old New Englander remained horizontal. She had been deemed sick, or “wearied” at the least. But according to Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, his strict “rest cure” regimen had her on the mend. By the end of the month, she’d gained 40 pounds and a spot among his most successful cases.

The rest cure that Mitchell pioneered rose to surprising popularity in the late 1800s, and several physicians adopted and practiced the treatment for decades. Only later did it become a textbook example of the disturbing nonlinearity of American medical progress, the quackery that can live alongside rigorous medical innovation.

In the 19th century, the practice of psychiatry was rapidly evolving, and Mitchell, a neurologist from Pennsylvania, was at its forefront. The Civil War created a fresh need for young physicians willing to cut their teeth on the battlefield, particularly psychiatrists able to work with wartime trauma and surgeons treating injuries of the nervous system. New front-loading rifles and flattening bullets called “minnie balls” burst through bone and tore across tissue, leaving soldiers with devastating wounds treated by rapid amputation. Arms and legs were removed in mere minutes, and by the war’s end, tens of thousands of limbs had been amputated.

Mitchell found his place on the battlefield as a young surgeon, working at a specialty ward in Philadelphia. He quickly took an interest in the not-yet-understood “nerve injuries” of amputees who experienced inexplicable, ghostly pain lingering where an arm or leg had once been. Mitchell wrote extensively on the subject, and coined the phenomenon “phantom limb syndrome.” As a quickly ascending physician in the fledgling field, he was awarded the title “Father of Modern American Neurology.”

But Mitchell’s interest in “nerve injuries” began to branch beyond the battlefield. After the war, he became increasingly concerned with the neurological and biological effects of a technologically advancing America. “Have we lived too fast?” he asks in his 1871 book, Wear and Tear. The “cruel competition for the dollar,” he posits, along with the “racing speed which the telegraph and railway … introduced into commercial life” had planted something insidious in society, as well as within the human body.

American progress, he believed, was not without its neurological consequences. Something must be amiss among the urban elite, who were at the crux of rapid change and hurtling trains. Modernity, he posited, could deplete finite stores of “nervous energy,” leaving bodies and minds exhausted and sick. And when people overexert their minds, the only way to return to normalcy was to rest.

According to the neurologist, a person sick with “neurasthenia,” a term coined by a contemporary of Mitchell’s, might show symptoms ranging from headaches to lethargy, or weight loss to impotence. For men, the antidote was simple: Go West, chop some wood, maybe even cook some mannish meat over a rip-roaring fire. In a way, it was the 19th-century, professionally-prescribed analogue to a trip to the dude ranch.

But the cure was not quite so simple for women. Ladies, too, found themselves impaired by the pace of modern life, or, at least, swept up in the medical trend. More specifically, white, upper-class, educated women came to dominate Mitchell’s patient demographic. Women who occupied privileged positions like this, who were often writers and artists, had been increasingly afforded time outside of the home, the opportunity to socialize, and higher education. But using their minds so extensively, Mitchell believed, could easily deplete their energy and fry their fragile nerves.

Mitchell proceeded to prescribe the rest cure almost exclusively to these women—“nervous women,” writes Mitchell, “who, as a rule, are thin and lack blood.” And the way to quell the overexerted brain and depleted blood supply of a woman was to, essentially, prescribe her a long, milky, much-needed rest.

According to author and historian Dr. Jennifer Lambe, a number of symptoms brought women to Mitchell. Often, they looked like what many psychiatrists at the time would call manifestations of “hysteria,” an intense mixing of the psychological and the somatic. Some patients complained of anxiety, fatigue, and even blindness. Others had stopped speaking entirely.

Though customized to cater to each patient’s symptoms and severity, the treatment typically entailed six to eight weeks of absolute bed rest. Patients were most often placed in complete isolation, interacting only occasionally with a nurse. “I would describe it as a kind of hibernation,” says Lambe. “Combined with the pre-hibernation period, when, for instance, a bear has to eat a lot beforehand.”

During the first phase of the cure, Mitchell typically forbade his patients to rise at all, with the exception of sitting up for spoon-feeding or getting up to relieve themselves. But when dealing with particularly extreme cases, Mitchell writes, this period of total repose could be stretched to months. Once they were allowed to sit up more frequently, however, reading, writing, drawing, or doing anything that might require using the mind remained forbidden.

But bed rest was only one aspect of the treatment. Mitchell prescribed his patients frequent “massages” to stimulate the muscles without exhausting them. These, however, were incredibly vigorous and were likely far from relaxing. “The whole belly is shaken by a rapid vibratory motion of the hands,” writes Mitchell, “to which is sometimes added succussion by slapping with the flat or cupped hand.” Massage could be supplemented with the passage of an electric current through the leg muscles, belly, back, and loins, apparently to stimulate muscles and provide what he referred to as “painless exercise.”

Perhaps the strangest aspect of the treatment was its strict overfeeding regimen, which was heavily reliant upon milk. Mitchell writes that it was nearly impossible to treat any case without the dairy product. It was often doled out exclusively to the resting patient for the first few days, and later supplemented with high-fat, highly caloric meals. As the case progressed, Mitchell suggested, milk might be swapped out for various "children's foods," such as malted milk or “Nestle’s food.”

There’s something deeply disturbing about this infantilizing, womb-like treatment. The milk, consumed in excess, gave rise to extreme sleepiness, he writes, as well as “a white and thick fur on the tongue, and often for a time an unpleasant sweetish taste in the early morning … neither of which need be regarded.”

Mitchell writes with apparent satisfaction about his successes in his essay, Fat and Blood. Mrs. C's “gain in flesh about the face" and resumed menstruation after years of missing periods was evidence enough for the neurologist that fat, blood, and vitality had been restored. Soon, other physicians adopted the practice, which seemingly encouraged Mitchell, or at least allowed him to absolve himself of full accountability. “I am fortunate now in having been able to show that in other hands than my own, this treatment has so thoroughly justified itself as to need no further defence or apology from its author.”

But there’s a glimmer of self-awareness in the book's final, somewhat ominous, conclusions. Perhaps the physician intuited that his actions would be controversial. “I am now more fearful that it will be misused, or used where it is not needed, than that it will not be used,” he writes, “and, with this word of caution, I leave it again to the judgment of time and my profession.”

With time, condemnation arrived. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author and patient of Mitchell, wrote The Yellow Wallpaper, a fictionalized account of her experience undergoing treatment. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the main character is driven to madness. Virginia Woolf, too, was prescribed the rest cure by her gynecologist, one of Mitchell’s British contemporaries, and wrote passionately against the practice.

It would be easy to describe this as yet another case of systemic, patriarchal oppression. But Lambe points out that there was also a more complex dynamic at play. Women, it seems, weren’t always entering the position of patient involuntarily. Being part of an advancing society, suggests Lambe, often begets a bemoaning of it. In other words, there’s a glimmer of pride in experiencing the afflictions associated with technology and modern life, because it also reflects privilege and status.

The women who were treated by Mitchell’s cure belonged to an elite group that could afford to engage with, and bemoan, technological and social progress. While it was strange and suffocating, it was also likely somewhat stylish. Lambe points out that there were countless women, often immigrants or from poor populations, who could never have afforded private psychiatric care. Instead, these women often ended up in public asylums, or received no care at all, and their suffering and part in the history of American psychiatry stayed out of sight.

It wasn’t until the 20th century that the catch-all diagnoses applied to women began to decline. Bed rest wasn’t fully debunked until World War II, when physicians noticed that extended periods of repose weren’t incredibly effective in helping soldiers recover. Soon after, studies revealed that immobilization was, in fact, harmful to the body, negatively affecting every major organ system. Eventually, the rest cure was put to rest, a dark blip on the evolution of neurology, and a warning that science and pseudoscience, the Father of American Neurology and the inventor of the rest cure, can coincide.

But the core idea behind the cure, Lambe suggests, is not so far behind us. “You can find analogues in today’s wellness culture,” she says, “such as the retreat, where you remove yourself from all the things that are ailing you, eat a very specific, austere diet, and reboot.”

Who, after all, hasn't itched to ditch the ever-increasing pace of work and inescapable chatter of social media? Overworked and overstimulated, we’re told to take breaks, seek out quiet spaces, replenish the body, and get enough sleep. If the world outside can’t slow down for us, we can do it ourselves, by reclining on the couch (perhaps spoon-feeding ourselves a pint of ice cream), turning on Netflix, and turning off the mind.

They will be transformed into an underground entertainment space.

A century ago, city planners in Sydney, Australia, were working to create an underground rail system for the growing city. From the city’s center, the tunnels would extend out to the east, west, and south, connecting to the suburbs. Under the St. James Station, located in the central business district, there was meant to be a major hub.

But the plan was never completed. When the Depression swept through in the 1930s, part of the underground station had been built, but a couple of the planned tunnels were still at their stubby beginnings. Work stopped, and for decades the tunnels remained incomplete.

Now, though, the New South Wales government has a new plan for the St. James Tunnels. A year from now, the government is hoping to have a concrete proposal to transform them into a subterranean space for shopping, bars, and restaurants.

The tunnels were never entirely abandoned. In the ‘30s, after it was clear they wouldn’t be running trains there any time soon, the government leased the space to a mushroom farmer for a short-lived experiment in underground farming. During World War II, the tunnels were converted into an air raid shelter and an operations base for the Royal Australian Air Force. (The air quality down there was so bad, though, that workers would only spend six hours at a time beneath the surface.) In later years, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation installed a bell in the tunnels that it used to produce unusual sounds, including a facsimile of Big Ben’s chime. The tunnels have also been a set for movies and television shows.

For many years, the tunnels were also a destination for city explorers. The walls are covered with graffiti dating from World War II up to the present. One tunnel flooded long ago and was reportedly a decent place to swim.

The local government, though, has realized the potential of a space like this one. "Around the world, hidden spaces are being converted into unique experiences and we want St James Station to be part of that," NSW Transport Minister Andrew Constance told the Australian Broadcast Corporation. Let’s just hope the air quality in the converted spaced is better than it was in World War II.

The former factory is now a UNESCO world heritage site.

During the 19th century, the small town of Fray Bentos, in western Uruguay, was heralded as “the great kitchen of the world.” The industrial site exported more than 200 meat products across the globe, especially corned beef and steak and kidney pies. In 2015, this history earned the site UNESCO World Heritage status. It wasn’t just a preeminent food supply hub—it developed technologies that were adopted worldwide.

The town of Fray Bentos was founded in 1859, first as Villa Independencia. The area—near a river basin bordering Argentina—featured swathes of cattle grazing neighboring grasslands. An Englishman, Richard Hughes, bought the area in 1859 for salting meat.

But the site didn’t become an industrial meat powerhouse until the 1860s, when Georg Giebert, an engineer, bought the land. He founded Giebert et Compagnie (later known as the Liebig Extract of Meat Company). Giebert liked that the Uruguayan site had its own harbor, where workers could export products around the world, and he saw that there were cattle being slaughtered for their hides alone. (It was also far less expensive to raise cattle there than in Germany.) As UNESCO notes, the complex’s location adjacent to “prime, fertile land conducive to cattle-raising and agricultural production” made it unique. So Giebert brought over machinery from Scotland, then began breeding cattle and producing meat in new ways.

The site’s first great hit was a meat extract. It was developed in Europe, when Justus von Liebig, a German chemist, created a meat extract as cheap fare for destitute Europeans. To do so, he took cuts of meat and boiled them down in water, producing a kind of tonic that then hardened. He developed it in Munich, but without commercial prospects (German beef was too expensive), he offered his meat tonic formula to anyone who could produce it. Giebert contacted him, and Liebig moved to Uruguay, where he became the plant’s first scientific director. In an era where refrigeration was not standard, and sanitation problems were common, Liebig's invention found fans. It even made an appearance in Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon. In the novel, astronauts nosh on beef extract during their cosmic journey.

Yet making meat tonic required a ton of beef. As Argentina Independent notes, one kilogram of tonic required a whopping 32 kilograms of beef. By using technologies such as chutes, pulleys, and an elevated floor structure—a huge novelty at the time—the company became an industrious meat processing plant, both in terms of speed and in using every part of the buffalo, so to speak. At its peak, the factory could process one cow in five minutes. Previously, the town had “only slaughtered the cow for its hide, tongue, and some cuts of meat," as Rene Boretto, a historian, told the BBC. Blood was repurposed as organic fertilizer, hair was refurbished into brushes, and hooves were made into glue. The company even sold bile stones to the French perfume industry.

Yet it was von Liebig’s other’s invention, tinned corned beef, that became iconic. Twenty years after it opened, the factory experienced such high demand from exporters, especially in Europe, that it had workers from over 50 countries on staff. In 1924, it changed hands to British owners, becoming Frigorífico Anglo Del Uruguay. Eventually, an entire community cropped up around the plant, complete with housing, workers’ cooperatives, an English school, and sports facilities. At one point, the factory employed 5,000 people, nearly half of the town’s population of 12,000. It had electricity three years before Uruguay’s capital, Montevideo.

The company’s revolutionary approach was—like Henry Ford’s automobile factories—to centralize production. The livestock grazed nearby, workers processed and packaged everything on site, and the company even managed how their products were exported on their docks. Soon enough, similar techniques appeared elsewhere. In 1915, the sizable Frigorífico Puerto Bories factory opened in Chile. It was the first industrial site to process sheep, and it had similar workers’ accommodations and state-of-the-art facilities. (The site is now an industrial museum.)

Fray Bentos’s ability to mass produce corned beef—as well as its portability in cans—made its products ideal war fare during the First and Second World Wars. As CNN notes, the rate at which the company exported its food to Europe during the impoverished time caused it to be known internationally as the nation of “fat cows.”

The term “Fray Bentos” also crept into the soldiers’ slang. "In World War I, soldiers would say 'Fray Bentos' to indicate that something was good, the same way we nowadays say OK,” said Boretto. In her book A History of Cant and Slang Dictionaries: Volume III: 1859-1936, Julie Coleman writes that the term arose out of a play on “très bien,” the French way of saying “very good.” Julian Walker, author of Words and the First World War: Language, Memory, Vocabulary, writes that this was likely borne out of a larger practice of the English teasing French soldiers by punning words, sometimes earnestly and sometimes more maliciously. In this particular case, the term “très bien” evolved into “tres beans,” which eventually became “Fray Bentos.”

This embrace is ironic, considering how much British troops loathed the “bully beef” rations, along with hard biscuits and marmalade, that they were rationed. The corned beef, under the auspices of the British-owned company, also then became a staple for people living overseas during the wars.

The factory closed its doors in 1979, but is still making wartime headlines. Earlier this year, a story surfaced from historians at the Tank Museum in Dorset, England, about an abandoned tank crew whose tank became stuck in mud during the Second World War. Eight of the nine British soldiers stood their ground for three days, dodging attacks from German troops, at the Battle of Passchendaele in Belgium. They were known as the Fray Bentos boys—so named because before the war, their captain had a license to sell Fray Bentos. Inside the tank, they felt not unlike the famed tinned meat they’d been eating.

While the meat products are still produced in the UK, the structures in Fray Bentos that once housed workers and meat-processing tools are immortalized these days in the Museum of the Industrial Revolution, which charts the simultaneous growth of the factory and the town. Some inventive locals have even been putting it on contemporary menus. The Fray Bentos complex was recognized by UNESCO in 2015 for its contributions to meat processing technology—and for beefing up what we think of as slang in the process.

One resident compared the swarms to snow flurries.

Hurricane Florence flooded the crawl space below Shirley Chao’s house. She had to wrangle a pump and a dehumidifier, and then tackle the mold. Then there were the mosquitoes—huge, persistent, and traveling in hordes. “They are everywhere right now,” Chao says, and not only at night. When she steps into her backyard, she’s greeted by a dozen or so.

Chao is a biologist at Fayetteville State University, in a North Carolina town that is home to 204,759 people. In the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, they've all become a smorgasbord for untold millions of giant, aggressive Psorophora ciliata, also known as “shaggy-legged gallinippers.” No mosquitoes are particularly beloved, but these bloodsuckers have an especially bad reputation. One 1897 paper described “the little zebra-legged thing” as “the shyest, slyest, [and] meanest … of them all.”

Florence dumped up to 20 inches of rain on Fayetteville, causing the Cape Fear River to swell well beyond its banks—it rose more than 20 feet in 24 hours. The flood water pooled in yards and streets, and even drowned the "Road Closed" signs that had been set out. It was a paradise for gallinippers.

Female gallinippers lay slews of eggs in the fall or winter in overgrown, damp areas, where “the eggs are good at surviving, kind of riding it out and waiting for a big flood,” Michael Reiskind, an entomologist at North Carolina State University, explained to The Fayetteville Observer. Their voracious larvae eat up other developing mosquitoes and invertebrates—and even tadpoles. Speaking to the Observer, Chao described them as “bullies in water.” The offspring take to the air a few days after a deluge, and they’re big buggers—often weighing three times more than other species.

Most of these newly hatched gallinippers and other species swarming the Carolinas are classified as “nuisance” mosquitoes—pesky, but unlikely to transmit disease. Even so, they’re really freaking people out.

The mosquitoes are so thick that one resident likened swarms of them to snow flurries. Another compared the scene to an invasion from a “bad science fiction movie.” Robert Phillips, of Eastover, was not glad to make a gallinipper’s acquaintance. “I told my wife, ‘Gosh, look at the size of this thing,’” he recounted to The Observer. “I told her that I guess I’m going to have to use a shotgun on these things if they get any bigger.”

While it’s tricky to gauge the exact size of the buzzing boom, multiple entomologists have estimated that Florence gave rise to billions of mosquitoes. Reiskind conducted a small-scale before-and-after census near Raleigh, USA Today reported. Prior to the storm, he found three mosquitoes in a five-minute period. Two weeks after it, he tallied 50.

The horde will probably die off as the weather cools, but since mosquitoes can lay upwards of 100 eggs at a time, "we can't just wait," Chao says. "Meanwhile, you've got all these adults reproducing like crazy." Local officials are encouraging residents to drain any standing water that has pooled in trash cans or tires, and the governor allocated $4 million for mosquito-control efforts across 27 counties.

Entomologists are encouraging people to take the usual precautions—wear long sleeves, load up on DEET—and also chill out a little. Though their numbers, their size, and their creepy striped legs definitely seem plague-like, it's not really a dangerous situation, Reiskind explained to USA Today. “People shouldn't worry too much,” he said. "They aren’t radioactive or genetically modified or some exotic species. This is just what happens after a hurricane hits."