Roberto Benavidez makes eye-catching art inspired by centuries-old paintings and illuminated manuscripts.

You aren’t going to want to take a bat to Roberto Benavidez’s piñatas, and he’ll never tell you what’s inside of them.

His paper-fringed sculptures, some of which will be on display in February 2019 at the Riverside Art Museum in Riverside, California, take months to finish and are inspired by animals in medieval imagery.

Benavidez’s original inspiration for his medieval piñata project came from The Garden of Earthly Delights, a modern name given to a Hieronymus Bosch oil painting containing a phantasmagoria of naked people and mythical animals. When Benavidez first saw the painting, he was drawn to the strange creatures. He wanted to bring the flat images to life.

“I could spend probably my whole life making everything I would like to from that painting. There's so much detail,” he says. Benavidez’s beasts are at once ominous and friendly, hearkening to something old while simultaneously feeling fresh and new.

This mix can partly be attributed to his medium, rarely seen in the world of fine arts. “When I decided to pursue the piñata technique it really was to pursue a medium that was limitless to me,” says Benavidez. “There was no financial limitation. It's just like glue and paper. You can really make anything with paper.”

Benavidez’s approach combines traditional piñata elements and motifs to create his own kind of hybrids. His latest project, “Illuminated Piñata,” pulls animal characters from the Luttrel Psalter, a richly painted 14th-century manuscript full of strange beings.

Piñata-makers often struggle with copyright privileges, notes Benavidez, so working with 500-year-old texts helps him draw on inspiration without getting sued. “There are so many images out there you can use that are interesting,” he says. “Why not expand beyond these images that are protected by intellectual property and go a little further back and celebrate what's been done in the past?”

Like most medieval art, the texts that inspire Benavidez’s work have religious themes, and piñatas also have a religious history in North America. Some believe Spanish missionaries used piñatas to convert indigenous people to Christianity. “I kind of like that there is that slight parallel,” says Benavidez, “but that's not what drove it.” For him, it was all about the creatures, and their “soft and hard qualities.”

Benavidez says he has received some pushback against the piñatas, and some of his friends have asked him why he won’t just call them “paper sculptures” instead. “There was incredible resistance to just the word ‘piñata’ being used in a higher art form,” he says. “I love presenting them as piñatas because I love the tension that it brings.”

Growing up in South Texas, Benavidez saw many piñatas at parties. He likes to think that he is highlighting an art form that hasn’t been highlighted before in this way. He identifies as mixed-race, a fusion of histories and cultures, and he thinks his piñatas are the same way. “The piñata’s history is very multicultural,” he says. “In my mind, it’s a reflection of me.”

The largest of his pieces are over six feet tall. Thousands of paper strips are hand-cut and layered to achieve the different hues and textures. He used to make the piñatas in the traditional way, with wheat paste and newspaper, but he has since shifted to more durable acid-free papers.

Most of the pieces are designed to hang from the ceiling, and Benavidez has to place the ring in the exact right spot early in the construction process to achieve the right equilibrium.

In Benavidez’s work, these creatures balance between the curious world of medieval animal imagery and the exuberance of a South Texas birthday party, between tradition and something completely new. “I just want to spark people's’ imagination of what’s possible,” he says.

What do you eat or drink when the good times turn ugly?

New Year’s Day is approaching, and no matter how you celebrate, chances are good that a lot of you will be staring down a January 1 hangover. There are a mind-boggling number of wondrous hangover "cures" out there, from nearly every global cuisine—and we want to hear about your favorites.

South Korea has a grapefruit "hang-in-there" ice cream bar that claims to ease the pain. There’s Japanese umeboshi, a pickled, salty ume fruit that's thought to be a good remedy for terrible mornings. In Lima, eating the Churo snail is said to slow the waves of nausea that can accompany hangovers. And there's always the ol' Prairie Oyster Cocktail, which is pretty much just swallowing an uncooked egg. (Editor's note: water, rest, and time are the only true cures for a hangover, and we recommend taking any food or beverage that claims to be a "cure" with a hearty dose of skepticism).

Fill out the form below and tell us about the go-to hangover "cures" you've encountered on your journeys, how you discovered your favorite remedy, and most importantly, do you think it works? Give your morning-after anxieties a rest, and tell us what you plan to do about them!

Pebble Island could be your windy getaway.

Between April and September, the farmers are mostly alone on Pebble Island.

Sort of. They have their cattle—a herd 120-head strong—plus a few horses and several thousand sheep, but they don’t have many human neighbors to talk with on the island, which is one of more than 700 little landmasses in the Falklands archipelago. Military troops sometimes stop by for training, and a supply ship docks every few weeks, but for the most part, things are quiet and a bit cold. It all picks up a bit in October, when farming season gets cracking. That's when a slow trickle of visitors arrive to stay in little cottages or a lodge, where they can look out at the rolling, grassy landscape, and the choppy water and rocky, white-sand shore, where sea lions loaf and five species of penguins wobble.

It’s a pretty place to stay for a weekend or a week—and someone will soon be able to stay on the island as long as they like, because it’s up for sale. (Penguins included.)

A 45-minute flight from Stanley, the Falkland Islands' capital, Pebble Island is certainly private, but it's not the stuff of a billionaire’s turquoise, tropical dreams—you’d be wind-whipped and shivering in a bikini. But the landscape, roughly 19 miles long and four miles wide, is home to scores of animals and a complicated military legacy. On the west side of the island sit the mangled metal remains of an Argentine military aircraft shot down by the British during the 1982 Falklands War. Stark, simple crosses memorialize the crew of the HMS Coventry, which was bombed and sunk nearby during the conflict. (Several of the crew members perished at sea, though many others were rescued by another ship.)

This is the first time the island has been for sale in nearly 150 years. John Markham Dean—lured to the Falklands by the idea of a fish-curing business, the BBC reported—bought this island and a few others in 1869 and set up a farm. The Deans haven’t lived on the island in decades, but lease the land to farmers. Now, Dean’s descendants are selling the island privately, and they'll be taking bids through January 2019. “We are open to offers and there is no guide price,” says Claire Harris, whose mother and uncle are Deans. The winning bid is sure to clock in far above the £400 that John Markham Dean paid at the time. Whoever buys it, Harris says, “we would want farming, tourism, and conservation to continue.”

Only in Portland.

Michelle Ly has coached countless Americans through their first sips of baijiu. Even though it's the world's most popular spirit, few of her non-Chinese customers have tried it, and even in Portland, Oregon, where having adventurous tastebuds is a lifestyle, its funkiness and potency can provoke puzzlement and polarized reactions.

The spirit can be equally baffling to Americans in the industry. One time when Ly explained the production process to another distiller, he stopped her in confusion, thinking she had left out a step. Most alcohols start with malting: grains left in water until their starches convert into sugars, with fermentation as step two. But as baijiu makers know, making this over-100 proof liquor means combining the two steps: a process called parallel fermentation, for, some would say, a liquor without parallel.

Distillers make more than 10 billion liters per year of baijiu, which translates to “white alcohol.” But most of it is consumed in its home country of China. Often fiercely strong and flavorful, famed baijiu include Kinmen Kaoliang and the tremendously popular Moutai. The latter is powerful enough that on President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, secretary of state Alexander Haig scrambled to warn him against drinking too much. (Nixon disregarded this advice.)

Despite the ancient tipple’s popularity and the size of the Chinese diaspora, baijiu makers outside China are relatively rare. In the United States, there is only one. At Vinn Distillery, in Wilsonville, Oregon, five siblings make the only U.S. baijiu in an unexpected place: a pole barn behind the family home. Ly is one of the five siblings who own Vinn Distillery. Originally set up by her retired father in their backyard, the distillery makes whiskey, vodka, fruit liquors, and America’s first and only baijiu. While companies often import baijiu into the United States, she says, none make it from scratch.

Unlike many home brewers, Ly’s father, Phan Ly, didn’t have to trawl Google for information—his family had been brewing baijiu for centuries. He grew up in Vietnam, part of an ethnically Chinese community where many people made their own liquor (after all, says Ly, there were no liquor stores). But in 1978, when the five siblings were still young, the entire family was deported for being Chinese, the result of tensions leading up to the Sino-Vietnamese War, which broke out the next year.

Their uprooting sent them on a long road to Oregon. They first settled in a small farming village in China. After the local villagers plied Phan with baijiu, though, he revealed he had sailing skills from working aboard ships in Vietnam’s Ha Long Bay. Wanting to escape Communist China, villagers pooled their money to purchase a fishing boat. The destination was Hong Kong and a new life. The arduous journey took a month and a half. “Our family’s ticket onto that ship,” Ly says, was Phan’s sailing ability. From there, a church in Oregon sponsored the Ly family, and they settled in the United States.

But when they arrived, there was no baijiu. “We couldn’t get our hands on it," says Ly. Phan wanted to sell drinks of baijiu at the family restaurant, but the entire family missed it. "[It's essential for] honoring our ancestors, welcoming the new year," says Ly. "Any kind of holiday celebration, baijiu is toasted."

After Phan retired from the family restaurant business, he told his children he planned to start a distillery in the pole barn. “We thought it was just going to be his retirement project," says Ly. "We thought there was no way he could actually get this going." Two years later, he surprised his children by telling them he had completed the paperwork to become a licensed distillery. “Let’s sell the restaurant and start selling baijiu,” Ly remembers her father saying. Originally, Phan wanted to name the distillery “Five Siblings,” for his children, but they convinced him to go for the “Vinn” moniker instead: the shared middle name of the siblings, all of whom work for the distillery in some way.

The family patriarch passed away in 2012, but every summer, the siblings and their mother still make qu, the key substance for making baijiu, from rice flour, herbs, and spices. Like a sourdough starter, the qu is filled with yeast and enzymes. Baijiu makers form qu bricks or balls, and add it to cooked grains, such as sorghum or rice, to kickstart fermentation. Vinn's "little qu," Ly says, is more common in southern China, where more rice is grown, than in the north, where wheat-based, brick-like “big qu” is dominant. After powdering the qu, the Lys add it to cooked, cool brown rice, which they then ferment in vats for six months. After distilling it in pot stills, they age it for a year or more, resulting in Vinn Distillery’s unfiltered, rice-scented liquor. According to Ly, the rice fragrance is a feature of southern Chinese baijiu: other categories include honey fragrance, light fragrance, and sauce (that is, soy sauce) fragrance.

According to baijiu researchers, some of the best Chinese baijiu is made in temperate zones. Ly is unsure how much the cool Pacific Northwest climate influences their baijiu. But much of the taste, she says, comes from the microbial makeup of the qu, which develops from the local air, water, and ingredients. The result? One-of-a-kind Oregon baijiu.

While the Ly family’s liquors began with baijiu, they’ve branched out with rice-derived vodkas, fruit liquors, and even an accidental whiskey. One of Ly’s sisters put some baijiu in barrels and left it there for a year. “Does it qualify as a whiskey?” she and her siblings wondered. After doing some research, they decided it did. (It's made with a grain and fermented in barrels.) Now, they sell it as "America's first rice whiskey."

While baijiu is increasingly available worldwide, its potency and funky, fiery flavor can shock the uninitiated. Their standard baijiu, Ly notes, is 40% abv: intentionally low for a baijiu, so as to meet the expectations of Americans used to relatively weaker whiskeys, vodkas, and rums. But as a posthumous tribute to their father, the Lys also sell his “go-to” baijiu, a proudly potent 106-proof spirit.

At the Vinn Distillery tasting room in Portland, the company educates newcomers about baijiu. Some sippers have experienced cut-rate baijiu on trips to China, while others simply have no basis for comparison. Baijiu expert Derek Sandhaus lovingly describes Vinn's flagship baijiu's taste as nutty and delicate, even lemony. Some of Ly's first-time customers, in contrast, are taken aback or have “negative" reactions on the first sip, says Ly. But she adds that one of the joys of baijiu is that the flavor profile changes as you savor it, intriguing people into going back for more.

He revised and revised whenever he took his show on the road.

Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, published in 1843, swiftly entered the holiday-season canon—the sort of story readers return to year after year, wherever there’s a crackling fire, a dusting of snow, and a mug of eggnog at hand. But when Dickens gave public readings from the text, the story changed a bit from one performance to another. His marked-up stage copy of the book, on view at the New York Public Library, gives readers a peek into the writer’s mind as he reworked his spirited prose.

Dickens intuited that his devoted public would get a kick out of listening to him read from the already beloved text, and he spent decades taking his A Christmas Carol act on the road. He devised different voices and styles for each character, so Tiny Tim sounded nothing like Ebenezer Scrooge. Writers of the period commonly traveled to give lectures, but “reading from your own work was new, and his degree of literary celebrity took it into the stratosphere,” says Carolyn Vega, curator at the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.

People turned out in droves. “Enthusiastic crowds have filled the halls to the roof each night, and hundreds have been turned away,” Dickens wrote to his friend John Forster about readings in Dublin in March 1867. Attendees attempted to pack in even tighter, Dickens continued, asking for “chairs anywhere, in doorways, on my platform, in any sort of hole or corner.”

The author received a warm reception in America, too. When he landed in Boston for a series of readings in fall 1867, the city was "in exstacies," with 8,000 tickets sold, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported. The Eagle predicted that, when Dickens made his way to New York City, "the great novelist will meet with a no less cordial but more sensible reception," and would find the venues "none too large for the audiences his readings will draw." Dickens spent that December “basically ping-ponging between New York and Boston,” Vega says. He’d do a few readings in one city, hop into the coach bound for the other, and then repeat the whole routine. There was such fever for admission to Dickens's readings at New York City's Steinway Hall, the Buffalo Commercial reported, that "speculators have got hold of the tickets and are endeavoring to sell them at extravagant prices." Forged tickets were thought to be floating around, too.

Dickens probably could have recited the whole story from memory, but the book itself was part of the appeal. “Even before he started the series of readings, he knew [the book] inside and out,” Vega says. “By the end of doing it for 20 years, he knew exactly what hooks the audience, what worked and what didn’t, but always went up with the book in hand. The idea of Dickens reading to you was the performance you were paying for.” He sat or stood behind a tall desk, with the volume always at hand—even if it was much too far from his face for the text to be easily decipherable.

The book was a prop and a prompt, and Dickens toted it with him and annotated it relentlessly. Over the years, Dickens wanted to fit stories beyond his Christmas fable into a single performance, which meant that each needed to shrink in order to fit into the allotted time. Dickens took a regular, off-the-shelf copy of A Christmas Carol, had the binding removed, and then set the pages onto larger ones, whose margins had plenty of room for notes.

Some of these are standard-issue edits, such as struck-through sentences or entire canceled paragraphs. (The text got leaner over time, Vega says.) Other notes evoke reminders like stage directions, such as a note about conjuring a specific tone. Dickens reminded himself to convey a sense of "mystery" just before Scrooge spots Marley's ghostly face in his door knocker, and to sound "cheerful" when channeling warm tidings from the humbug's nephew. In edits to another text he performed, Vega says, “he reminds himself that the tone should be ‘very pathetic,’ circled and written large.”

The edits also offer a window into Dickens’s speedy working style. The author often worked serially, submitting stories under deadline pressure, and “you get a sense of that energy when you look at the prompt copy,” Vega says. Some pages have blots and smudges, indicating that he was working fast, loose, and frantically, without waiting for the ink to dry. Until January 7, 2019, library visitors can take a look at Dickens's copy, and see that a writer's work is never really done.

'Tis the season for emotionally significant decorations.

Many of the best holiday decorations are ultimately more like artifacts, cheerful objects that are passed down within families and accumulate sentimental attachment with each passing year. Recently we asked Atlas Obscura readers to show us their personal holiday heirlooms, and the spirit of the season was in full force in every response.

You sent us stories about all sorts of magical trinkets and heart-warming ornaments, each one doing its part to help make your holidays special. Among them were Christmas lanterns, a hanukiah made from welded coins, and a... Sasquatch. For those still looking to get into the spirit of the season, you'll find some of our favorite submissions below. Oh, and happy holidays!

Christmas Lantern Ornament

“This lantern ornament once lit up. It belonged to my mother's grandmother, and has survived multiple moves, for over a century. It joins all the other glass ornaments I inherited from the elderly women in my Detroit neighborhood growing up, from all over Europe. It is history on a Christmas tree with a Shiva on top.” — Joan Winslow, Salt Lake City, Utah

Heirloom Hanukiah

“The hanukiah is made of old silver coins from various countries, some going back to the 18th century. The story is that in the village in Poland, near the Ukraine border, members of the congregation supported the rabbi by giving him money. Sometimes the rabbi would bless a few coins and return them to the donor. Since blessed coins were special, they were saved. Eventually, looking for a way to display them, the crafting of the hanukiah was commissioned. In the 1950s, when oil was replaced by candles, the hanukiah started to come apart. We think the flames were too hot. Whenever a repair was attempted, the solder would melt and it would fall apart even more because the silver conducted the heat. In the 1990s we found a jeweler who knew the ‘cold solder’ method required to repair it. By then, some of the coins had been lost. The jeweler used his own coin for a foot, so that the hanukiah would stand. The coin is from Uruguay.” — Nitza, Connecticut

Grandfather’s Crèche

“My grandfather made a crèche, which our German-American family always called a 'crib,' in 1935. He made it from discarded orange crates (roof and floor) and rods used to ship tires, and added electric bulbs to illuminate it. My mother was in kindergarten at the time and was so thrilled that she went to school and told all the nuns, who, of course, roped my grandfather into making one for the convent. She treasured it for her whole life in Kansas City, Missouri, and before she died, she passed it on to me. We decorate at the beginning of Advent, but we only put the figure of Jesus in on Christmas Eve. I have a picture of me putting the figure in every year throughout my childhood, and have carried on the tradition with my daughter.” — Valerie Gotaskie, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Dad’s Christmas Village

“Before my dad passed away in 1997, he made a small holiday village using balsa wood for both my sister and me. He added a snow blanket and small items like snow-covered evergreen trees, small street lights, and an ice skating pond with a bridge over it. It is my most cherished holiday item. It wouldn't feel like Christmas without it. I am planning on handing it down to one of my children, who have always enjoyed it. It makes me feel close to my father at the holidays!” — Amy Dahn, Aurora, Illinois

Homemade Advent Tree

“My wife and I made this from scratch for one of our first Christmases together. She designed it, and we both cut it out and assembled it. Everything is made from wood, and hand painted by both of us. We used this for many years in our first house, when we had six kids growing up. After a decade, almost all of the kids knew which picture would be shown each day.” — Blair Frodelius, Syracuse, New York

My Moose Menorah

“It was made by an artist out of an old Chevy pickup hood.” — Carol Hyman, Baltimore, Maryland

Christmas Tree Angel

“This porcelain doll was first put on top of a Christmas tree for my grandfather's first birthday in 1901. She has had several outfits over the ages, and this one since 1974. Five generations have now enjoyed Christmas with her overview.” — David Elms, Newmarket, Ontario

Self-Stitched Advent Calendar

“I started to make this calendar 45 years ago, when my eldest son was 2 years old, waiting for Christmas to come. Now I use it for my grandchildren!” — Elisabeth Vitouch, Vienna, Austria

Ceramic Christmas Tree

“My wonderful mother-in-law at the time, Frances, made and gave me the tree in the early 1970s. Her son and I weren't married long but there was a grandson, and Frances and I stayed close throughout the rest of her life. The tree is the first to come out of the garage, first out of the box, and always takes its place in the living room where its lights are reflected in the window. It would not be Christmas without it!” — Linda Hubbard, Menlo Park, California

Christmas Spinner

“This spinner ornament had to hang above a lightbulb so the heat would make it spin. My mom said that it was Christmas magic that made it spin when I was little. It's from the early '60s. — Lori Gibbs

Sasquatch Statue

"Once, as my dad and I were driving from Columbus, Ohio, back to the D.C. area, we passed a big outdoor statue shop in the middle of rural Ohio. Finding a three-foot-or-so Sasquatch statue, we bought it and brought it home as a gag. The next Christmas, we put it in our family's almost-life-sized glowing nativity scene, inside the manger and right behind Baby Jesus's cradle, there to watch over Our Lord and Savior and protect him from the prying Romans just as Chewbacca protected Han Solo in a galaxy far, far away. There's no particular reason we do this. Perhaps it is a mere testament to my family's absurdist sense of humor surrounding issues of tradition and modernity. I like to think that while Balthasar, Melchoir, and Caspar traveled from Ethiopia and India and Persia to bring Jesus frankincense, myrrh, and gold, Sasquatch also saw the bright star and trekked from Cascadia, across continents and oceans, to bring Baby Jesus a gift of cedar-smoked salmon from the Pacific Northwest, and we merely do homage to that. In any case, though the statue itself does not look like a Christmas heirloom, we contextualize it into one every year." — Luke Phillips, Northern Virginia

Raccoon Jingle Bell Ornament

“It’s something that I’ve had since I was a child. We stopped getting ornaments as presents fairly young, so I’ve had the same ones for almost 30 years.” — Mike Whittaker, Pottstown, Pennsylvania

Little Angel Ornament

“This little angel belonged to my grandmother and I remember it in her tree every year when I was growing up. It’s a little piece of my grandma that I get to have for the holiday.” — Michelle Kirby, Coos Bay, Oregon

A Two-Foot, Handmade Star of David

“My father and uncle made it in our basement in 1958. Both of them had no clue as to what they were doing, judging by the wonderful cussing back and forth to each other. I remember it clearly, as they were having so much fun putting this together. I'm so blessed to have the star, and the precious memories each year. By the way, it still has the same faulty electrical wiring, that I refuse to change out.” — Nancy Helman, Santa Fe, New Mexico

A Small, Satin Christmas Tree Ornament

“My husband saw it laying in a muddy ditch when we were walking in Puerto Natales, Chile. He picked it up and washed it off. It had a few dents in it and the ribbon on it was damaged. But, in spite of its flaws, it had a charm to it and we kept it. Because we found it together in a very cool place, and it became a special ornament to us. We put it on our Bodhisattva statue each Christmas season to celebrate the beauty in simplicity.” — Regina Dunn, DeLand, Florida

1946 Hanukkah Prayer Book and Menorah

“My parents had a Hanukkah children's prayer book from 1946, and a lovely menorah, probably from the same era. My brother and I still use them.” — Suzan Lowitz, Los Angeles, California

Embroidered Felt Christmas Ornaments

“My mother made these in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I learned to embroider very young, and always enjoyed it. I still have some of my favorite and most challenging projects. My mother did many handcrafts including sewing, knitting, crochet, and embroidery throughout my life. These handmade decorations are well crafted, colorful, and various classic shapes. My mother passed away in 2017 at the age of 86.” — Valerie Henderson, Salinas, California

Responses have been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

An unusual hydrothermal ecosystem erupts in the Gulf of California.

In some places, deep at the very bottom of the ocean, nearly as far out of sight as possible, streams of scalding water burst through openings in the seafloor called hydrothermal vents. Researchers affiliated with the Schmidt Ocean Institute in Palo Alto, California, recently shared what they found in a newly discovered vent field in the Pescadero Basin, on the floor of Mexico's Gulf of California.

The finds demonstrate just how vibrant and bizarre the invisible, mysterious, and thoroughly unexplored seafloor can be. In a release, the scientists describe “steaming hot sediments laden with orange-colored oil,” microbes that are blue for some unknown reason, and “shimmering” water that lends the vent field its name: Jaich Maa, or “liquid metal” in an indigenous language of the Baja Peninsula. The researchers report watching this gleaming water spill up from calcite mounds—some of which stretch to more than 80 feet tall—“in an upside-down waterfall” erupting from the ocean floor. The warmest vents in the field, according to a second release, shoot water at a staggering 550 degrees Fahrenheit.

Given the heat and depth, the researchers used several kinds of advanced robots to map and observe the area. First, in a practice known as “mowing the lawn,” the team used an autonomous underwater vehicle to explore a preprogrammed area, says Robert Harris, a geologist and geophysicist at Oregon State University involved with the research. This preliminary exploration helped the scientists find the vents, which they then explored with a remotely operated vehicle that they controlled from a boat on the surface.

Harris says that Jaich Maa is unusual among hydrothermal vent fields in that it does not appear to be associated with “spreading centers,” such as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where continental plates break apart and generate new oceanic crust. He is hopeful that, as the team continues to study the still-mysterious system, Jaich Maa can help shed new light on “how continents rift apart,” as the Baja Peninsula slowly drifts to the northwest. There will also be much to learn from the tube worms, sea anemones, and other species living in the vent field—“extremophiles” that inhabit some of the most intense ecosystems on Earth.

Get ready to fall in love all over again.

When you're traveling and getting to know a new city, it’s easy to fall in love fast and hard. Unfamiliar foods, streets, and sights can be deliciously dizzying; there’s the potential for wonder on every corner. When we’re on our home turf, though—wherever that may be—the charms right in front of our faces can go unnoticed.

Last week we asked Atlas Obscura readers to tell us how they see their usual surroundings from a new perspective. We’ve compiled some of our favorite responses below. Give them a try, and then hop over to our new community forum and tell us how they worked for you, or offer ideas for what else fellow readers can try to be freshly wowed by places they know by heart.

Turn exploration into a game

“My three children and I made a goal to visit and play at every one of Pima County's 202 parks during the calendar year. We drove roads we’d never driven before. We attended bird walks and guest speaker events we’d ignored before. We invited both longtime and new friends along with us. We made scavenger hunts to get closer looks at familiar places. We skipped school (!) to visit distant parks. In the desert, I bemoan the lack of beauty, of color, and plants and trees and flowers; I whine about limited art and culture. I was humbled and reprimanded by the desert and by my hometown. I have 5,000 photos of stunning natural beauty and architecture, art, and culture—most of them adorned with the expressions and playful actions of my children. Our Parks Project changed my life.” —Holly Ledcke, Tucson, Arizona

Recruit a guide with a different perspective

“I allowed my daughter to be my tour guide at the North End Beach. I always notice the small details, like crab holes and shell fragments. My daughter has opened my eyes to the larger picture. She sees dogs running down the beach, bird formations in the sky, old and new faces—things that I would normally overlook.” —Michelle Dain, Virginia Beach, Virginia

Look up

“When I am in a foreign city, I am diligent about looking upward to take in the fullest scope of architecture that I can as a pedestrian. On one particular spring day, I was taking a routine jog down Eastern Parkway, in Brooklyn, and noticed the vibrant buds emerging from the trees. Now, every time I am on the Parkway, I look upward to see how the branches arching over it have changed.” —Luke, Brooklyn, New York

Stop to smell the mushrooms

“My Aspie daughter was struggling with a poetry project; her theme was mushrooms. So as I walked my daily walk through the neighborhood last autumn, I tried to imagine how she would see the surroundings. It was a very wet season and mushrooms were flourishing. I had only noticed plain, white, boring mushrooms on previous walks. But looking more carefully, with my daughter's perspective in mind, I found an incredible variety of weird fungi.” —Jennifer, Virginia

Focus on where things are changing

“On New Year's Day 2014, the old San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge was being dismantled, so I decided to capture where it met the new one—just weeks before it was forever gone. I took the newly finished bridge bike path as far as it went from Oakland. I saw how much the bridges bounced from car traffic, and how different it must have been before our iconic bridges were built.” —Scott Page, Berkeley, California

Make an archive

“On the walk from my house to the sidewalk, I take the same photo, year after year—watching the changes not just from seasons, but from years. [I saw] how much my digging in the front garden has changed a flat lawn, [how] the tree has grown, [how] I took the abandoned shopping cart of wood and built a raised bed, [and how] I've moved the stones around the property.” —Zhoen (Joan) Winslow, Salt Lake City, Utah

Return at different times of day

“Depending on the time, you can walk through the streets during the day and no sunlight will touch your skin. The streets are pleasantly fresh, even during scorching summer days. In some streets at night, the lights hang from suspended wires, and it creates an elegant effect. It's a mishmash of workers, students, street performers, preachers, tourists, lawyers, homeless people. The place on workdays feels like a heart beating, accepting every possible kind of blood as its own. During the weekends, it feels much quieter. And there's a quiet contentedness in those deserted streets during the weekend. I paid more attention to the buildings, to the way the streets are lined, to the way they interconnect, and I paid more attention to the bits of old history that I can find around.” —Nic, São Paulo, Brazil

Think like a naturalist

“I got a notebook to sketch observations in and downloaded the iNaturalist app, and it opened up this whole new world of seasonal changes and flora and fauna around me. It isn't just ‘going outside’ now: It's seeing the way the landscape varies from week to week, and the cycles of flowers and pollinators and fungi. There are whole worlds on every tree trunk! Once you slow down and find all the little animals hiding under rocks and in creeks and look closely at the growing things, you have a much deeper appreciation of the place. It's a great exercise in mindfulness. You see a caterpillar, and two weeks later, the butterfly it became. You notice the order that the leaves change color in during the fall. I used to think nature was something you looked at in the ‘wild,’ out in the forest. But there are so many growing things everywhere, even in the middle of the city. It's magical!”—Jillian Kern, Shasta Lake, California

Researchers don't know exactly why they're so clique-y.

Historically, two dolphin species were abundant in the Northern Adriatic Sea, the narrow body of water nestled between Italy’s boot and the Balkan Peninsula: the bottlenose and the common dolphin. In the 1970s, both species seemed to disappear from the Adriatic. People thought they were gone for good.

“Local elderly people and will tell you, ‘When I was young we used to see them all the time, and then we never saw them anymore,’” says Tilen Genov, a marine biologist with Morigenos - Slovenian Marine Mammal Society, “For a long time people just assumed that they are no longer here.”

When Genov was working on his undergrad degree over a decade ago, he was told there were simply no marine mammals in this part of the sea. Turns out the received wisdom was wrong. So what changed? People such as Genov started looking.

“We spent hours and hours at sea staring into the horizon,” says Genov. The research group sometimes went days without seeing anything. But, “slowly and surely, we started seeing dolphins.”

The research group spent years observing the region’s small population of bottlenose dolphins, as part of their Slovenian Dolphin Project. The bottlenose dolphins appear relatively close to the shores of Slovenia, where they gobble up the sea’s sardines and anchovies, some bottom-dwelling fish, and even the occasional octopus or cuttlefish. Not only are they relatively abundant, after all (Genov estimates at least 100 of them live there), but they also seem to show specific and surprising social patterns.

In a study in the journal Marine Biology, out this week, Genov and his colleagues describe eight years of observations. They focused on a subset of the Northern Adriatic’s population—the 38 animals that they saw enough times be confident that they are permanent “residents.”

They found the dolphins had fairly rigid groups that they moved with, “associates,” says Genov, “or friends.” In other parts of the world, bottlenose dolphins generally live in social structures known as fission-fusion, in which members associate and disassociate from loose groupings. But the Northern Adriatic’s dolphins have a surprisingly stable social structure. In other words, they are a little clique-y. The scientists observed two distinct groups, with 19 and 13 individuals.

Genov’s team also observed a third, much smaller, group, which they refer to as the “freelancers” because they were transient and joined other groups at random. “They don’t really have any particularly strong friendships,” says Genov. “They're kind of social butterflies.”

But the most surprising finding was that these two groups seem to avoid each other expertly, in a careful dance. They feed in the exact same areas of the sea, but never at the same time. Genov says that in the 16 years they have been observing the dolphins, they have only seen them at the same place at the same time four times. According to Genov, this particular social dynamic has never been observed in nonhuman mammals before.

“You have a single population using the same space, but clearly separating, not seasonally, not spatially, but based on time of day,” says Genov. The pattern became so pronounced, they started referring to them as the “morning group” and the “evening group.” The morning group was often seen following fishing boats, to catch stray fish. The evening group doesn't seem to do this.

When the researchers first noticed this, they thought they must be missing something.

But years of data are compelling evidence, though Genov and his team couldn’t come up with a reason why the dolphins were avoiding each other so meticulously. He has ideas—maybe genetics or diet? His research will continue, but for now it remains a mystery.

When asked, Genov admits that it’s possible the arrangement may be for reasons that humans will never be able to understand—something that only makes sense to cetaceans.

“We know that they are quite cognitively advanced animals with long-term social memories. They remember both places and other dolphins very well,” says Genov, “It might be that they just worked out some sort of a schedule. Like you know, you can be there in the morning and I'll be there in the afternoon.”

Genov hopes his research will help spread awareness of threats to the dolphins of the Adriatic, which has seen heavy development in recent years. He hopes that the knowledge will motivate people to protect the animals from pollution, fishing, and interference.

Genov remembers one time when a dolphin mother and her baby came up to the boat, and he thought the mother was showing the humans to her baby—or maybe vice-versa. “They clearly know us, not individually, but as a group,” he says. “They know who we are.” In some sense, we’re still trying to figure out who they are.

Our readers share the favorite foods they eat to soothe their souls.

Holiday blues creeping in? Time to smother those feelings in a thick blanket of comfort food! And don't feel bad, because you're not alone. All over the world at this time of year, people are indulging in emotionally motivated eating habits. Recently we asked Atlas Obscura readers to tell us about their own favorite comfort foods, and after reading their submissions, I feel warmer inside already.

You suggested everything from Indonesian noodles to Welsh seaweed bread to oh-so-many soups. Many of your responses also made a clear connection between a beloved comfort food and a treasured personal memory. But no matter the reason, each and every one of your replies made a strong case for filling one's spirit as well as one's stomach.

Take a look at a collection of some of our favorite submissions below, and maybe you can discover a new comfort food to power you through the rest of the holiday season.

Chicken and Dumplings

Tell us about your comfort food

“Warm-salty-chicken-carb goodness!”

When do you eat it?

“When the world has been cold, cruel, rude or mean to me.” — Babzilla, Lexington, Kentucky

Scrambled Eggs With American Cheese

Tell us about your comfort food

“This was the first thing I learned how to cook for myself. My sister taught me how to make it, and I suppose it always takes me back to her warmth and nurturing ways.”

When do you eat it?

“At the end of a really tough day, I'll make it so that I can have breakfast for dinner. I'll switch into pajamas as early as possible, whip up some eggs, and serve it with buttered toast. Heaven.” — Lainie L., Chicago, Illinois

Blanquette de Veau

Tell us about your comfort food

“My mom made it numerous times over the winter growing up in Cleveland. My mother, a Parisian transplant, brought her love of soups and stews to our home.”

When do you eat it?

“When I'm sad.” — Martine Rothstein, Morristown, New Jersey

Pasta and Cheese

Tell us about your comfort food

“Hot, melty cheese and soft pasta with any savory sauce. It just tastes amazing."

When do you eat it?

“Once a week if I'm lucky! I cook for my family, so when I feel like it, I'll make it.” — Laura, South Africa

Laverbread (Mixed with Oats and Fried)

Tell us about your comfort food

“It reminds me of Sunday morning cooked breakfasts with my parents when I was growing up. It was a big treat and, being so far from fresh lavabread [sic] now, it's even rarer to have it these days. It's hearty, goes well with the other elements of a British cooked breakfast (especially some Scottish additions). And most importantly, it's a reminder of simpler times.”

When do you eat it?

“Sunday breakfasts, especially during the (even more dark) winters up here in Scotland.” — Adam Fenton, Scotland

Rice Pudding

Tell us about your comfort food

“It's sweet, it's creamy, it's filling, and I prefer it hot, right from the stove. My mom, who passed away, used to make this for my brothers and me. We used to eat it topped with cinnamon sugar. I still make it using her recipe from time to time.”

When do you eat it?

“When I'm really cold. Or when I'm sad. Or... who needs a reason?” — Carin Jansen, Netherlands

Asian Beef Noodle Soup

Tell us about your comfort food

“I grew up with it as a child. It's warm, meaty, and rich, but also not too heavy, and it takes your full attention to eat.”

When do you eat it?

“Winter.” — Brandon, Alabama

Just Soup in General, Really

Tell us about your comfort food

“Due to the relatively straightforward preparation it involves and cheap ingredients, soup is a staple. A lot of people eat it in their childhood; some will grow up to hate soup and some will grow up to like it. I'm in the second group. Soup is nutritious, filling, and comforting, and takes you back to a time when everything was simpler (let's face it, being an adult is exhausting).”

When do you eat it?

“I will turn to soup when it's cold outside, when I'm sick, or just when life is too much to bear.” — Diana Rocha, Lisbon, Portugal

Sweet Potato Casserole

Tell us about your comfort food

“The warm sweet potato filling topped with candied pecans is about as Mississippi as collards and catfish. It reminds me of warm family gatherings in my home state.”

When do you eat it?

“Thanksgiving and Christmas.” — John B., Mississippi

Indomie (Ayam Bawang Flavor) With Rice

Tell us about your comfort food

“This food is crazy easy to make: boil water to cook the noodles, poach the egg, put everything into a bowl already sprinkled with seasoning, and eat it with a plate of steamy rice. Is it healthy? No. But is it satiating? Hell yeah. Is it filled with tons of flavor? Of course. The combination of the savory soup, the slick noodles, along with rice bits will always be beyond wonderful to me, regardless of how humble and simple it is. Plus, I ate this a lot back in Indonesia, and now that I'm far away from home, eating it's probably more important than ever, to remind myself of it by eating it. Bonus points if you slurp the remaining soup after you've finished the rice and noodles. Absolute bliss for less than five euros.”

When do you eat it?

“Back home I'd always eat it whenever there was no other food lying around, but sometimes I'd eat it just when I felt like eating noodles, too. Nowadays it's sort of a last-resort dish, but that's only because I don't have the privilege of having a quasi-infinite stock of indomie here in France.” — Fadi, France

Heinz Tomato Soup

Tell us about your comfort food

“As a child I suffered mightily from tonsillitis. And as I was allergic to penicillin there was little I could do to get over it. When I felt well enough to eat, Heinz Tomato Soup was my reward. And before you get all hot under the collar and say, ‘But Heinz don't make tomato soup!’, I'd like to point out that I grew up in the U.K., where they certainly do! And I can buy it in New York City!”

When do you eat it?

“At home, with a bag of salted chips, in front of the TV.” — Nicola Lagonigro, New York City, New York

Tuna Sandwich

Tell us about your comfort food

“On white, soft, Wonder Bread with diced pickle and onion with Hellman’s Mayonnaise. It reminds me of lunches that my mother made me as a child.”

When do you eat it?

“When I'm stressed.” — Niki Cotton, Alexandria, Virginia

Pho

Tell us about your comfort food

“Asian noodle soup of any kind is so satisfying, but if I'm feeling under the weather it has to be pho. There is something reminiscent of the chicken noodle soup my mom would make when I was sick as a child, but so much better. It hits the spot because it's steaming hot, slurping noodling is so satisfying. The flavor is rich and fragrant at the same time, and if you make it spicy like I do, it feels so cleansing.”

When do you eat it?

“Anytime really, but I seek it out when I'm sick or hungover.” — Staci Owen, New York City, New York

Sundubu

Tell us about your comfort food

“In winter nothing is better than stew, but none are as comforting as the boiling hot and spicy mixture of soft tofu, seafood, meat, kimchi, etc.”

When do you eat it?

“All year round, but not the easiest thing to find outside of Korea unless you live somewhere with a solid Koreatown.” — Jarryd, U.S.A.

Hot Dogs and Beans

Tell us about your comfort food

“My mom used to make it for us and it was a special, fun dinner.

When do you eat it?

“When it's cold and I'm in a bad mood.” — Allison Mick, Oakland, California

If you have a special comfort food of your own that you'd like to share, head over to our new community forums to tell us about!

Lam Qua's paintings depicting people with huge, bulbous tumors remain mesmerizing.

In the basement of the medical library at Yale, there is a box of stones, yellow and ivory and strangely whorled. Nearby are more than 80 portraits of men and women in dark gowns. Their expressions are calm—reserved, even—and they regard the onlooker coolly, despite the pendulous tumors that hang from their arms, noses, and groins. These are relics of a time nearly 200 years ago, when a man intending to collect souls for God found himself instead saving lives for the Emperor of China.

Peter Parker was born in Massachusetts in an era when American trading ships went back and forth incessantly between Boston and Guangzhou, also known as Canton, swapping opium for tea, silks, and other Chinese goods. When Parker graduated from medical school and seminary at Yale in 1834, he felt a call to go to east. He would found an eye hospital in China, he decided, where modern medicine’s miracles would convince patients of Christianity’s power. They would literally see the light, and become Presbyterians.

That was the plan, at least. In the cramped alley where the hospital had its clinic, Parker did start out as an eye doctor. But patients with other problems began to appear out of the throngs in the foreign settlement’s streets. At the time, surgery was not often performed in China, and these people had tumors grown out of control, ranging from the size of turnips to small children. Woo Kinshing, aged 49, Parker wrote, had a two-foot growth on his chest the shape of a cello. When it was finally removed, in an operation that took 16 minutes, it turned out to weigh 15 pounds. There was no anesthesia, as the surgical use of ether had not yet been discovered; when people asked Parker for relief, they were facing an ordeal that is hard to imagine. And yet they came, thousands and thousands of them.

More than 40,000 patients were treated at the Canton Hospital over the next two decades, including fishermen, shoemakers, and merchants from every class of Cantonese society. Parker recorded their cases in his journals and published articles in missionary newspapers, hired assistants, taught local medical students. And, at some point very early on, he appears to have run into someone who would have been a neighbor, the renowned portraitist Lam Qua. In a transaction whose exact details have been lost to time, he commissioned the first of the paintings.

Today, thousands of miles away from home, the paintings have outlived their commissioner, their maker, and their subjects. And yet, they are consistently requested by the Yale library’s patrons, from historians to filmmakers to journalists. They were even summoned forth by a medical school professor this year. “[They] remain a source of intense fascination to anyone who views them,” writes Ari Heinrich, a scholar of Chinese cultural studies in The Afterlife of Images, one of the few books that addresses the paintings. At the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, which is planning to put a Lam Qua tumor portrait on display for the first time in more than 25 years in 2021, curator Gordon Wilkins muses about them, “There is something that’s quite eerie, but also quite beautiful.” What is behind their enduring power to obsess?

In the Yale collection, a silver earring dangles by the throat of the young woman labeled Number 6. She wears bangs cropped fetchingly high across her forehead, but her right hand, with its beautifully kept nails, emerges from a black-and-pink mass the size of a housecat. A fault line of lava red creeps across its surface. She opens her mouth as if to speak.

In the early 1990s, Stephen Rachman was working in the Yale medical history library when a librarian friend tapped him on the shoulder. “Do you want to see something gross?” he whispered. Rachman, who was a graduate student at the time, left the reading room and descended with the librarian to the storage area. “I'm the kind of person who doesn't turn that kind of thing down,” reflects Rachman, now a professor of English at Michigan State University.

They unlocked a metal grate and entered the dusty stacks, making their way back to an ancient cabinet. On the inside of the door hung a yellowed piece of paper with a poem. Rachman leaned in to read it. Peter Parker’s pickled paintings / Cause of nausea, chills & faintings / Peter Parker’s putrid portraits / Cause of ladies’ loosened corsets… Peter Parker’s pics prepare you / For the ills that flesh is heir to.

The irreverent couplets of some long-ago writer were correct in at least one particular: Within was the collection of paintings. The box of stones—bladder stones, it turned out, that been removed surgically by Parker and his colleagues—was on top. The cache of portraits had grown crepuscular as the oil pigments aged and darkened, but the nameless patients still looked out from the twilight of China's last dynasty with that uncanny directness. Rachman’s thesis was on something else altogether. But he could not get them out of his mind.

A few years later, he happened to visit the 300-year-old Guy’s Hospital in London, where paintings from the old teaching collection were on display. Among them were several that sent a thrill of recognition through him. “I knew exactly what they were. You don't forget these things,” he said. He began to dig. In addition to the 84 tumor paintings at Yale, there were 27 in the collection at Guy’s, 4 at Cornell, and one at the Peabody Essex Museum, as well as numerous watercolors at Harvard and the Wellcome Institute in London. Yale’s library also had Peter Parker’s journals. Rachman spent hours poring over them on a microfiche machine, putting names and stories to faces. Along the way, he learned about the works’ creation.

The artist Lam Qua—urbane, talented, prolific—was one of the most acclaimed portraitists on the South China coast, and initially he painted the pictures for free, according to Parker, in recognition of the hospital’s decision not to charge, as well as in appreciation of Parker’s taking on his nephew as a student. Later, he was paid at least once for his services. Parker was likely to have had multiple motivations himself: In the beginning, he may have been thinking of using the pictures to teach medical students. They may also have been intended as encouragement; visitors to the Canton Hospital reported that the waiting area featured paintings of patients before surgery and after.

And that presents a mystery tied to the pictures’ lasting interest: Only a single example of a post-surgery painting is known to exist today. Po Ashing, in his first portrait, is seen against a wall, exposing the globe of tissue that has engulfed his left arm. In the second, he stands on a shore with mountains in the distance, erect. The arm and its growth are gone. The wound has healed well. He looks much less remarkable than before. Is this normalcy why we know of no other surviving post-surgery paintings? Parker’s conversion numbers were disappointing to his American missionary board backers—Protestantism, it turned out, incited considerably less enthusiasm than medical treatment. To raise his own funds for the hospital, Parker took the portraits on a successful fundraising tour up and down the East Coast and across Europe. One missionary society even gave money in exchange for the promise of paintings for their own collection. Perhaps the portraits’ value to him, and to the medical schools where some have been preserved, lay in the patients’ pre-operative strangeness.

There is something about the paintings that goes beyond gawkery, however. “I can’t speak for all humanity. I know some people find them stomach-churning,” Rachman says. “But to me … if you’re the kind of person who actually thinks maturely about human affliction rather than just turning your head away from it … these people are fascinating.” He reflects on the intensity of preparing for major surgery, the fear, the pain, the distress. At the thought of posing for a portrait first, he trails off. “It’s almost like watching someone get ready for battle.”

“There’s something going on here that’s really way beyond ordinary clinical portraiture,” he says. “People have turned them into specimens. And they refuse it. They resist.”

The paintings have an oddly familiar quality. In fact, they are in a style similar to Regency-era portraits of English aristocracy by Thomas Lawrence. Posing with rumpled cravats and pink cheeks before a stylized landscape or a moody wash of black and grey, Lawrence’s subjects’ expressions are carefully neutral, while in the distance a winding river or a grove of trees hints at a greater world within. “There’s meant to be some kind of resonance, a visual encyclopedia of that person’s essences in the environment,” says Ari Heinrich, who learned of the patients as a graduate student and is now a professor at UC San Diego.

Lawrence’s contemporary, George Chinnery, was the premier English portraitist of the British Raj. He fled his debts and responsibilities in India, arriving on the South China coast in 1825 as Lam Qua was beginning his career. While the nature of their connection is not clear—was Lam Qua his student? Or just a savvy competitor and imitator?—what is clear is that Lam Qua’s Western-style works draw heavily on Chinnery’s lineage of British portraiture. That feeling of recognition comes from the skillful use of a familiar visual language.

The paintings were seen by hundreds, if not thousands of viewers—not just patients and missionaries but both houses of the U.S. Congress, the archbishop of Canterbury, and the king and queen of France. The otherwise ordinary people in the portraits extravagantly encumbered with disease likely broadcast something to Western viewers about their nation, says Heinrich. In the west, China has stood for many things over the years; as historian Jonathan Spence writes, to outsiders it has embodied the exotic and the terrifying, the backwards and the advanced. Missionary writers, Parker’s contemporaries, often expressed the idea that something ailed China, body and soul, that Christianity could cure. “Not only the minds of the people, but their bodies also, are distorted and deformed by unnatural usages,” held the Chinese Repository, a missionary gazette.

Yet despite this, the paintings evade pity. Nor do many subjects seem particularly ill. A mandarin labeled number 38 in the Yale collection, with a red button shining in his cap, is watching something we cannot see, his pale brown eyes calm and his relaxed face faintly jovial in its lines. There is a gentle fearlessness in this face; this is someone to whom no harm will come. He appears almost divorced from the lumps protruding from his left cheek. The pink knob highest in the mass echoes the red button, and on the growth’s surface blackened pustules are rendered with a blurred brush, suggested rather than described. A single dab of white indicates the shining skin, stretched taut over the swollen tissues. Overall the feeling is not of a medical precision, but rather of an almost impressionistic capturing of the sense of the person.

Lam Qua himself may have known the patients more intimately than Parker, who cared for them tenderly but was still separated by barriers of culture and language. And he may have seen a delicious irony in the whole project. When one takes a form that has been applied to the vanity of the wealthy and applies it to surgical patients, it feels almost subversive.

In Ingres’ painting La Grande Odalisque, a famous 19th century Orientalist fantasy of a Turkish concubine, a nude woman looks back over her shoulder at the viewer, her rear exposed in full view, her anatomy somehow strange and elongate—some critics have remarked that the Grand Odalisque has two too many vertebrae. Lam Qua painted a copy of that work for another client, perhaps before he collaborated with Parker. In one of the tumor portraits, Lam Qua sets up an echo, Heinrich suggests. Lew Akin, a young woman with a tumor on her buttocks, sits with her voluptuous growth exposed and regards the viewer with the same enigmatic backward glance.

At the Peabody Essex Museum this summer, I met up with Gordon Wilkins (he has since moved positions) who took me into a basement where wooden statuettes and golden filigree boats waited on shelves against the walls. Lying on a table, carefully covered with cardboard, was the museum’s Lam Qua tumor portrait. A man with beautifully formed eyebrows sits looking out, a sac of goose egg-like tumors hanging from his left cheek. This is a duplicate of a painting that is also in the Yale collection, which I had visited a year before. On that visit, when I walked into the medical history library’s reading room, and saw the five paintings I had asked to see lined up, I felt a wave of excitement.

The paintings may have been produced for utilitarian purposes, but they have become great works of art. Wilkins compares them with the photographs of Rosamond Purcell, whose bewitching chronicle of burned books, preserved natural history specimens, and other slightly creepy subjects have transfixed viewers for years. “[She’s] made a career of photographing things that to the outside world would seem unphotographable,” Wilkins says. “She elevates that to the level of beauty, which is true of the Lam Qua portraits.” Their immortality comes from the way they erase the distinction between the viewer and the subject.

Indeed, you can cross the line at any time. I learned about the paintings when I was a patient at the Canton Hospital myself. The institution founded long ago by Parker was eventually absorbed into a large public hospital system in Guangzhou, where, on the day I had my blood drawn for some tests, the person who was supposed to take samples to the lab was away. I carried the hot vials of my blood against my stomach across a courtyard into a curious old building. Inside it was dim and high-ceilinged. There was wainscoting, the dark wood paneling receding back along the halls like in a New England sanatorium. I had seen nothing like it in south China, a place of sulfurous sunlight and seething tropical greenery even in this megacity of 13 million people. After I delivered the blood to a surprised pathologist, I went back through the darkness to the entrance. Beside the door was a plaque mentioning Peter Parker, which led me, after a little quick Googling, to the paintings. That was several years ago, and now they are familiar to me, even beloved.

The growth that they found inside me turned out to be nothing serious. Bodies are mysterious; sometimes they surprise us. But now, years later, having followed the thread to the 84 long-dead patients whose faces still haunt my imagination, I often think back to that moment, when I didn’t know what would happen. “There’s a strange identification between the viewer and the subject,” Wilkins would remark years later, as we gazed at the man in the painting. Peter Parker’s pics prepare you / For the ills that flesh is heir to.

Their signature noodles are eaten for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

“Have you ever eaten Ashlan Fu?” Aman Janserkeev, a young Kyrgyz student, asks as he guides me through the city of Karakol. “It’s the best cure for a hangover.”

Ashlan Fu, a soup mixed with Laghman and starch noodles, is one of the most popular dishes in Kyrgyzstan. Prepared with copious quantities of vinegar and chilli, alongside egg and diced vegetables, it’s extremely spicy and best served cold. Kyrgyz students love it for its low cost, and almost everyone else appreciates its supposed restorative qualities.

“Some of my friends might eat Ashlan Fu once, twice, or even three times a day,” Janserkeev says when I ask about the dish’s popularity. At the unsubtly named market street of Ashlan Fu Alley, students, the elderly, and entire families greedily slurp down huge bowls that cost just 30 Som (50 cents) for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Ashlan Fu, though, is not native to Kyrgyzstan.

Despite its enthusiastic consumption by locals, this dish was brought to Kyrgyzstan by the Dungans, exiled Chinese Muslims who fled over the Tien Shan Mountains after a failed rebellion in 1877. Even as Dungan language and culture has been diluted in their new home, their food has remained a constant, all while becoming a fixture of Kyrgyzstan's culinary scene.

In the small village of Yrdyk, just outside of Karakol, I meet Luke Lee. A spritely old man, he is the enthusiastic curator of the local history museum and a descendant of the first Dungan refugees to make the long journey to Kyrgyzstan.

In a distinctly Chinese-inspired Dungan house that displays a curious blend of Soviet, Kyrgyz, and Dungan exhibits, Lee recounts the legends and myths of his ancestors. “I want to tell you a story,” he says, “of the Dungan people.” In poetic fashion, he describes the seventh-century arrival of Arab warriors in western China who brought with them the Islamic faith that the Dungans still practice today. “The Emperor wanted these warriors to stay, and they were given Chinese wives,” Lee says. (Historians also cite the ebb and flow of Arab traders in seeding early Muslim influence in China.) For centuries, cultures and people intermingled, until the failed rebellion in the 19th century.

When fighting broke out, it was a continuation of longstanding tensions and rival alliances. The Muslims of western China had fought the Qing Dynasty when it was established in the 1600s, and they faced religious and ethnic discrimination. The resulting war involved many parties, lasted 15 years, and was one of history’s bloodiest, resulting in millions of deaths.

In 1878, Central Asian researcher Henryk Alff writes, the first Muslim refugees arrived in Kyrgyzstan. Dungan Historian Svetlana Rimsky-Korsakoff Dyer cites estimates that more than 10,000 Dungans arrived in Russia during these migrations. Thousands more died crossing the mountains in the harsh winter of 1877. Around 1,100 Chinese Muslims, she says, settled in Yrdyk, the town where Lee’s museum stands today.

“In China, my people are known as the Huizhou, but we would be known in Kyrgyzstan as the Dungans, the people from the east,” Lee explains.

Imperial Russia welcomed refugees who survived the harsh flight over the Tien Shan Mountains. As part of Russian efforts to populate the predominantly nomadic lands with sedentary farmers, they allowed them to settle along the frontier provinces in Central Asia. “My ancestors were mostly farmers, and they were very good at trading in the markets too,” says Lee. “[But] when they arrived here, things were very difficult, to begin with.”

The challenges faced by the refugees were immense. Rimsky-Korsakoff Dyer notes that they received mainly “barren, virgin land,” and many Dungans arrived “maimed … with frostbitten feet.” The agricultural knowledge of the Dungans, though, combined with the ability to market their produce, helped establish the first communities around Karakol, and helped make them welcome. From the start, Ashlan Fu was a big part of that recipe.

As early as 1897, just 20 years after the Dungans first crossed the Tien Shan, Russian writers and world travellers were already praising Dungan cuisine. In an early description of Ashlan Fu, two Russians, V. Tsibuzgin and A. Shmakov, wrote that “Dungan food is very distinctive and mainly consists of noodles made of wheat or pea flour and spiced with such ingredients as chili, onion, garlic, vinegar, salt, radish, and cucumber.” While also taking note of Dungans’ affinity for cards and the women’s hairstyles, they added, “Dungan food is very tasty and of great variety.”

But Dungan language and culture was not equally embraced. Scholar Elisabeth Alles writes that when the Dungan first arrived in Kyrgyzstan, they “still used their specific Chinese local dialects (Gansuhua and Shaanxihua), but very early they lost familiarity with Chinese characters.” For the last century, the Dungan language has been written in Cyrillic. During the Soviet years, Alles writes, many Dungans were sent to gulags or executed, and after the collapse of Communism, the diaspora was separated across newly formed countries and pressured to show national loyalty.

Despite cultural hardships, Dungan cuisine has retained many of its original features and has been undeniably embraced. Indeed, Rimsky-Korsakoff Dyer writes that despite fundamental shifts in Dungan culture (“Their clothes and even more so their homes have undergone a change”), their food has hardly changed at all (“They still use chopsticks, and the names of their dishes and cooking terms are Chinese”). While Dungans were assimilating Russian and Kyrgyz language and culture, it was the Russians and Kyrgyz who were adopting Dungan food, particularly Ashlan Fu.

In Yrdyk, after seeing rusting farming tools, Dungan clothing, and Soviet military uniforms in Lee’s museum, I’m invited into the house of Mamieva Hamida, where her family is busy preparing a traditional Dungan dinner. They first show me, of course, how to prepare Ashlan Fu. We mix Laghman noodles, starch preserves, onion, garlic, chilli, dark vinegar, and egg into a round bowl. But this is just the start of the feast.

“You must eat every dish, or you cannot leave,” Hamida says as she sets out more and more dishes. Amongst the dumplings and soups are Chinese-inspired, sweet-and-sour entrees and several Kyrgyz and Russian specialities. As I eat, I enjoy that none of the foods dominate or feel out of place. They all complement each other.

One generation commutes one way, the next comes back.

You’re a green darner dragonfly. One day in March, you emerge in a Florida pond. You join sizable ranks. Your kin are one of the most common dragonfly species in North America, but you won’t have much time to get to know each other. You’ll all be dead within weeks.

But you’re going to make them count with an epic journey. Your three-inch wingspan will carry you hundreds of miles—over roughly 55 days, depending on the winds. You might stop along the way to rest before you reach Vermont, Maine, or maybe even Canada. You may have mated en route, and you'll do it soon after you land. Then you'll die. You’ll never make it back to your hatching grounds, but your offspring will, by migrating back in the other direction. That pattern will repeat for generations: hatch, migrate, mate, die.

Scientists have long known that some insect species make annual migrations over long distances, and that green darner dragonflies are among them. Until recently, though, they didn’t know much about what the route looks like, how long it takes, or what the insects’ annual cycle is like. In a new paper in Biology Letters, researchers from the Migratory Bird Center at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute; University of Maryland, Baltimore County; and Vermont Center for Ecostudies describe the dragonfly’s big trip.

To gather data, researchers mined specimens in museum collections and years of citizen science data about when and where dragonflies emerged. The team sampled stable hydrogen isotopes from 852 wings of specimens in more than 15 public and private collections across eastern North America, from Florida to Ottawa. “When the larvae crawl out of the water and the adult emerges leaving the skin behind, it opens the new wings and they dry before flight,” writes coauthor Kent McFarland, a conservation biologist at the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, in an email. “The wings no longer grow, so the chemistry found in them is locked there.” The hydrogen isotopes are a reliable indicator of the insects’ starting points—latitude, at least, but nothing so specific as a particular pond, says Michael Hallworth, a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center and the paper’s lead author. Citizen science data then provides some additional clues.

It's possible to get more specific details, at least on a small scale. In 2012, another group of researchers led by Martin Wikelski, then an ornithologist at Princeton, fastened radio transmitters to 14 green darners and tracked them over 12 days of their autumn migration (which goes from north to south). That team found that the insects migrated exclusively during the day, and only when winds blew at less than 15 miles per hour.

With a larger-scale survey—an enormous undertaking—it could be possible to learn more. There's much to investigate, says Colin Studds, a coauthor and ecologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Some of the winged insects could be traveling as far south as Jamaica, he says—he’s found them there—but it’s not yet clear how fast they fly, how often they stop, or how many survive the trip.

Based on the new research, scientists now believe that the green darners are made up of at least three cohorts: one born in the south that migrates north in the spring, another born in the north that migrates south in the fall, and a third generation born in the south that sticks around and sends its progeny north the following spring. But this pattern is susceptible to change in a warming world. Right now, the researchers notice the migration beginning when temperatures are around 50 degrees Fahrenheit. “As the average temperature is getting warmer, migrations could get shorter,” Studds says. Eventually, if dragonflies can breed all year long across their range, he adds, “those migrations could disappear altogether.”

There’s a "fifty-fifty" chance.

Recently, the rise of women-only spaces has peppered conversations on politics and design. From powder-pink coworking clubs to hotel floors reserved for ladies, companies are putting their money behind women’s interests—and their privacy. But trains, a decidedly co-ed space for travelers and commuters, are a tougher sell. In advance of Indonesia’s forthcoming mass rapid transit launch in March of next year, management is still undecided on whether women-only passenger cars will be set in motion or not.

Since 2015, solo trips booked by female travelers have increased by 45 percent worldwide. While this suggests an uptick in women’s comfort in international and domestic travel, women who ride trains as part of their daily routine have a slightly different set of concerns. To put it simply, public transit exposes people to a dangerously covert brand of sexual harassment.

Just last year, activists in Mexico City went viral after installing a polarizing “penis seat” on the metro to raise awareness about the violence female passengers undergo daily. In Japan, train companies have responded to omnipresent and unprovoked groping by designing schedules (like during rush hour or weekdays-only) that designate when certain passenger cars accept women exclusively. A 2005 report from Tokyo’s police force claimed that there were 2,201 reported incidents of train touching the year prior. Similarly, every fourth and fifth car on all Cairo Metro trains is reserved for Egyptian women who choose to not ride in mixed company; this system began in 2007 as a reaction to the gender-based dangers of overcrowded public transport. In a country where 94.9 percent of the population is Muslim, men and women are accustomed to occupying separate spaces for prayer and school. But the separate train cars are motivated by something different.

Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, once followed this transit trend, too. In October 2012, PT Kereta Api Indonesia (the government-owned operator of public railways in the country) debuted seven colorful carriages labeled “women-only” in an attempt to mitigate sexual harassment on their rides from the city center further out. The initiative was halted a mere six months later. At the time, Eva Chairunnisa, the commuter rail’s spokeswoman, claimed that overcrowding on the remaining mixed-gender cars became impossible to ignore: "To increase capacity, we decided to convert the women-only trains into regular ones," she said.

But now, the PT MRT Jakarta railway company is reconsidering this decision to eradicate segregated seating. The company’s president director William Sabandar says they are “seeking input from the public,” but has not specified how this input will be gathered. Though Indonesia’s public, city-owned TransJakarta buses do still provide separate areas for women, carving out safe spaces for women is hardly standardized, especially among private companies.

“The chance [for women-only passenger cars] is fifty-fifty,” Sabandar said at the Lebak Bulus MRT station. “We might [provide the service] during rush hour.” Construction of the MRT service is nearly complete, and its first line is set to operate soon from South Jakarta to Central Jakarta’s Hotel Indonesia traffic circle.

The legacy we’re leaving behind looks like a post-apocalyptic KFC.

Imagine, millions of years from now—long after humans have been wiped out by a wayward meteor or giant robot insurrection—a team of alien archaeologists sifting through our rubble in an attempt to piece together our mysterious history. Leafing through stray plastic bags and errant packing peanuts, they happen upon a surplus of something strange. Scattered around the excavation site are giant, porous, chicken bones. Once gnawed upon and discarded, these fossilized remnants of someone’s 10-piece bucket of chicken will be a significant part of our geological legacy. According to a recent study, the broiler chicken, now the most populous bird on the planet, will someday be a defining feature of the Anthropocene, a greasy marker of our epoch.

To put it plainly, we grow, slaughter, and consume an outrageous number of chickens each day. According to Dr. Carys Bennett, honorary fellow at Leicester University and principal investigator of the recent broiler chicken study, there are currently three cluckers for every human on the planet. “It’s the most common terrestrial vertebrate on the planet,” says Dr. Bennett. “Estimates for the number killed per year is thought to be around 65.8 billion—and that’s probably an underestimate.”

Not only are they numerous, they’re enormously different from their recent ancestors. Also, they’re enormous. With an average life expectancy of six weeks, modern chickens have been bred to live fat and die young. Their fragile skeletal structure, porous bones, and extremely massive bodies render them totally incapable of surviving without human-created technology on modern farms. If a flock were plopped in the middle of the woods Survivor-style, they’d be royally clucked.

"I think it would just astonish people," says Dr. Bennett of future paleontologists who might stumble upon an abundance of broiler chicken bones. "How did this animal evolve when it really can’t support its own body weight and grow to an adult size? And why’s it got such a strange, porous bone?"

In other words, we’ve created an evolutionarily hopeless monster. But we can't stop eating it. So we've kept it alive across the globe—to the extent that broiler chickens have a biomass greater than all other wild bird species combined.

Understanding why and how the broiler bird became so metaphorically and literally big requires jumping back a few decades. Though first domesticated thousands of years ago in Southeast Asia, it wasn’t until the mid-20th century that the modern supermarket chicken began to take wing. “Other animals have been modified by humans, but with the chicken, it happened so rapidly,” says Dr. Bennett. The changes have been so dramatic, rapid, and widespread that the broilers of today are vastly different from those of just half a century ago.

Throughout the first half of the century, there were all sorts of chickens to choose from—from the muppet-like Mottled Houdan to the fluffy-footed Light Brahma. But everything changed when Howard C. Pierce, the poultry research director for the A&P, declared the need for a better bird with a breast like that of a turkey. The Chicken of Tomorrow Contest, an initiative led by the USDA, called for a chicken “chunky enough for the whole family ... with breast meat so thick you can carve it into steaks, with drumsticks that contain a minimum of bone buried in layers of juicy dark meat, all costing less instead of more.”

And thus, a juicy chicken was born. Charles Vantress, who had created a red-feathered hybrid by crossing a California cornish with an east coast New Hampshire, was declared the winner and celebrated in style. Chicken enthusiasts paraded through the streets, and a beaming festival broiler queen waved glamorously from the top of a car.

From then on, chickens were subjected to decades of breeding that optimized being bigger and better for human consumption, until their body mass had increased nearly fivefold. Now, says the research team, the broiler chicken’s skeleton, bone chemistry, and genetics are vastly different from what they were 50 years ago. In particular, Dr. Bennett notes, the tibia, or lower leg bone, of the modern-day broiler is twice as long and twice as wide as that of its ancestor. "And the actual bone density is different as well—they’re really quite porous and low in density because they’ve had to grow so fast," she says. "These bones are just ginormous."

Dr. Jan Zalasiewicz, a paleontologist and geologist on the project who's been studying the Anthropocene for decades, says it's these rapid, widespread skeletal and morphological changes that make the broiler chicken, a new, distinct marker of this epoch. “For awhile, we didn’t really have any new, real morphospecies—a distinctly different skeleton you can recognize from its bones," says Dr. Zalasiewicz. But the broiler chicken is changing that.

Though it may sound sad that one day we'll be partly defined by our insatiable appetite for chicken, it's a testament to humans' ability to harness technology in agriculture, and a striking reminder of how what seems trivial up close might be astronomical at a large scale. “Chicken sandwiches are part of many people’s everyday life, but they’re actually linked to the history of the Earth” says Dr. Zalasiewicz. “If you translate these everyday things into geology and see the scale of it, the modern world becomes a little bit of a Sci-Fi world.”

Welcome to heaven on earth for skaters.

Skateboarding has long relied on the presence of empty space. When the counterculture kids of California first started occupying kidney bean-shaped, water-less swimming pools found in residential backyards under construction, skaters became known as a community of people who could reimagine abandoned architecture into places of utility. Skaters are known to revamp their worn boards by applying a smattering of skate stickers to their undersides; similarly, skate communities around the world have implemented a similar process to converting old spaces into new parks.

While the omnipresence of vacant pools is particular to the Golden State, other forms of architecture are being repurposed elsewhere around the United States. In St. Louis, Missouri, one church has been converted into a private skate park, providing a sanctuary for skaters in the Midwestern city.

St. Liborius was established as a German national parish in 1856, and construction of the church was completed in 1889. This large Gothic Revival building, marked by its pointed arches and thin, vein-like pillars, went through several transformations to reach its current form. Over the years, St. Liborius gained a clergy house and a convent, and merged with nearby parishes due to a dwindling number of Catholics in the neighborhood. Before its official closing in 1992, St. Liborius was declared a City Landmark in 1975 and recognized as a National Historic Place four years later. Today, it exists as a shell of a church, where the stained glass windows shine vibrant light on skate ramps instead of pews. Its new name is Sk8 Liborius.

This indoor skate park, with fresh graffiti at its altar, is a privately owned space that members of Sk8 Liborius’ community can access. Public skate sessions are offered occasionally, though there is no set schedule; when the church does open its doors to curious skaters, suggested admission is a $5 donation. Engineers, skateboarders, and extreme BMX riders transformed the 129-year-old cathedral into the maze of adrenaline-boosting slopes it is today. Sk8 Liborius is anchored by a particularly impressive 40-foot miniature ramp in the center, leading right up to where a priest once stood in the pulpit.

In fact, the St. Louis skate community is so dedicated to its chosen activity that a band of local skateboarders started building a DIY skate park beneath the Kingshighway Bridge, sans city permits, in 2009. It was demolished in July 2015, which ended the reign of the city’s only free, public skate park. Sk8 Liborius came in and provided a similar do-it-yourself alternative, mostly thanks to blind faith.

In a 2016 Viceland documentary on Sk8 Liborius, two of the park’s operators discussed the chapel’s transition from abandoned building to skate haven. Apparently, St. Liborius was “pretty destroyed” when they first moved in, and the crew “pulled five roll-out dumpsters full of garbage” out of the space that once held a congregation. “In some ways, it’s really become kind of like a sanctuary for the fringe artists and fringe skaters,” says one of the renovators. St. Liborius’ second life as the resurrected Sk8 Liborius proves that there’s no need for the separation of church and skate.

Christmas, Easter, and weddings all call for the spicy dough.

You might already know about Hungarian gingerbread. After all, in 2018, a set of cookie-decorating videos made their way around the internet. In them, a pair of hands busily lays line after line of white icing with the mathematical accuracy of a 3D printer. Incongruously, the baker pipes a vaguely Old World piece of embroidery atop the cookie in mere minutes. The videos, which were many people’s first introduction to the elaborate, painstaking art of Hungarian gingerbread, went viral.

Such masterful work, at least to me, seems to exist almost entirely on the internet or in the realm of "cookiers" extraordinaire. But gingerbread artists walk among us. At a Hungarian Christmas fair, I saw traditional gingerbread art by Klara Repas. While Repas is not the baker in these viral videos (that honor goes to decorator Tunde Dugantsi), her creations were equally stunning, and prompted me to ask for a demonstration.

A week later, I visit Repas at her sunny New Jersey home, overlooking the Hudson River. (I’m ignoring my coworkers’ jokes, inspired by Hansel and Gretel, about fleeing at the first sight of a human-sized oven.) There’s a tiny gingerbread house on an entryway table, mitten and star cookies along a sideboard, and deep Tupperware bowls filled with undecorated cookies on the counter. Repas herself is soft-spoken and elegant, donning a pair of eyeglasses every time she needs to peer at the fine pattern of her gingerbread, or mézeskalács.

While it’s mainly a Christmastime treat in countries such as the U.S., Repas says gingerbread is a year-round affair in Hungary, made by bakers for weddings, Easter, and birthdays. In this respect, her homeland hews to “very old tradition," she says. Ancient Greeks enjoyed an ancestor of gingerbread, cakes made with honey, and put it in the mouths of the dead for the trip to the afterlife. In many countries, bakers made honey cakes for all kinds of events, such as saint's days. In the days before icing, the dough was pressed into carved wooden molds, and esteemed bakers had their own proprietary designs.

When spices from the east circulated throughout Europe, gingerbread made with ginger, pepper, and other warming spices became a hot commodity for special occasions. Repas’s recipe includes a Hungarian spice mix, of pepper, cardamom, and others. To make it easier to handle, she allows the dough to rest a minimum of eight hours before baking it.

Since Hungary has long been a honey-producing powerhouse, it was a natural place for honey-based gingerbread to take root (though Hungarian mézeskalács don't typically contain ginger). The Hungarian town of Debrecen, Repas says, "was a center of gingerbread preparation," and the home of a guild dedicated to baking it.

As Repas tells me this, she busily swipes red food coloring over a heart-shaped gingerbread cookie with a paintbrush. Red is a traditional color for Hungarian gingerbread, and can be added in two ways. For a brighter look, decorators brush cookies with a mix of food coloring and egg yolk and set them in the oven to dry. But for a darker sheen, color can be painted on after baking, with hints of the gingerbread shining like gold underneath.

One of the reasons gingerbread is not solely associated with Christmas in Hungary is the popularity of these hearts. Once traditional gifts from young men for their sweethearts, the hearts often feature small mirrors and the word Szeretlek, a declaration of love. (Similar hearts are popular in Germany and Croatia.) A girl might return the boy's regard with a gingerbread hussar, or solider.

The Hungarian love for gingerbread has stayed strong year-round. Hungarian Easter also features three-dimensional gingerbread eggs, painted and covered in royal icing. When white icing became common, says Repas, many designs were inspired by the other famous Hungarian folk art, embroidery. Flowers, hearts, and birds are the traditional designs for both embroidery and cookies. Yet despite their ethereal decorations, "Gingerbread is very practical," Repas says. It stays fresh for a long time, and some varieties can even be kept for years as a decoration.

Repas always made gingerbread for her family in Hungary, but it's not always been her occupation. She was trained as a chemical engineer, and gingerbread and drawing were her two complementary hobbies (though her hands are often too tired from squeezing tubes of icing for drawing). But a few years after moving to Paris for her husband's job in 2005, she started a business baking and decorating installations for French stores, chocolatiers, and salons de thé.

In minutes, I see why fancy French shops wanted Repas's work in their windows. With small piping bags filled with royal icing, she rapidly outlines the red-painted heart with perfect, unerring accuracy. With impossibly small loops, she covers the edge of the cookie with a lacy border, adding pinprick dots of icing inside each one. Squeezing the piping bag with the thumb and forefinger of her right hand, she delicately keeps it steady with the forefinger of her left hand, moving with surgical accuracy. Repas uses a thicker blend of royal icing for detail work, and a more liquid version for filling in sections and flourishes.

Then, she fills in the lacy design on the interior of the cookie. First, she adds a mirror: In this case, a rectangle of aluminum foil set in the center. Setting a mirror into gingerbread, Repas later explains, "is a symbol of sincerity, purity, and [the] reflection of emotions." Pinprick dabs of icing around the edges of the mirror weld it to the cookie. She frames the mirror with two perfectly symmetrical leafy stems, culminating in tulip flowers: a popular Hungarian cookie and embroidery motif.

In 2014, Repas moved from Paris to Mumbai, India, again for her husband's work. There, she added vibrant greens and oranges—and henna-like patterns of royal icing—to her repertoire, and found herself teaching both children at an orphanage and pastry chefs at five-star hotels. "I was always inspired by other cultures and other designs," she says, showing me a photo of a cookie emblazoned with the Eiffel Tower, and another with the Taj Mahal.

Gingerbread gives off a “warm, very friendly” feeling, Repas says, describing the joy she feels watching it rise in the oven and change color. It's a special part of everyday life, a gift of love and gratitude for everyone from lovers to teachers. She does have an explanation for Hungary's impressive gingerbread culture: You need a lot of patience to painstakingly decorate impermanent cookies. "Hungarian people, they have this patience," she says. (These words haunted me as I blobbily decorated my own gingerbread the next day.)

As she decorates a large red house cookie and a little white bird, Repas tells me that while the gingerbread guilds of the past are long gone, there's a Hungarian gingerbread association in Debrecen, led by decorator Judit Szmelo. Szmelo and other folk artists visited New York in early December to demonstrate their work at Manhattan's Hungarian House. Some of them are professionals; others are hobbyists. Having recently moved to the U.S., Repas, who is waiting for confirmation on a work permit she needs to re-start her gingerbread business, is waiting to see which she’ll be. But in the meanwhile, she'll keep baking and decorating.

I spent a day with one of the few people on the planet still teaching the sport.

There are several ways these birds could maim me. They could slam into me, pummeling me to the ground and knocking me unconscious. They could pierce their lethal talons through the thick leather glove on my wrist, or crush my arm with one squeeze. And they could always scratch or peck my flesh, leaving me a bloody, shredded mess.

These are among the warnings Martin Whitley gives me throughout my first ever lesson in horseback falconry. “Are you feeling brave?” he asks, holding a golden eagle as I sit atop one of his horses, a retired racehorse named Caymans. Caymans, too, could do some damage. If he spooks, I’m in for the fastest ride of my life, thundering toward the moors before anyone can stop us. If I fall, I’ll have only a few seconds to contemplate my fate before smashing into the ground. But Caymans remains still. I extend my arm, allowing Martin to place the eagle on my wrist.

Flying an eagle while sitting on a horse isn’t something I get to do every day. I’ve traveled to Dartmoor National Park in Southern England for what in all likelihood will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Whitley’s Dartmoor Hawking is one of the few places on Earth where equestrians can still learn an ancient sport: mounted falconry, or flying birds of prey from horseback.

I’ve ridden horses since I was seven and have had my own horse for the last 12 years. I spend so much time around horses that I often feel more at home at a stable than in a human’s house. But my experience with birds doesn’t stretch far beyond rescuing the occasional sparrow from my favorite barn cat’s mouth.

As eager as I am to try something new, participating in a sport that centers around death makes me uneasy. I’m the kind of vegetarian who can’t even stomach killing a mouse that wanders into my apartment, so the thought of using an animal to take down another animal makes me decidedly uncomfortable.

But this particular falconry class doesn’t involve hunting. It’s a crash-course on the basics, a chance to learn the mechanics of the sport without using the birds for their true purpose. It’s also a chance to get unusually close to magnificent raptors, and to learn a new equestrian skill. Until recently, taking a horseback falconry class wasn’t something I’d been aware a person could do.

I’ve never tried any type of falconry before today, though it turns out I’ve been exposed to it in a variety of ways without realizing it. Words and phrases associated with falconry have shaped the English language. Common idioms—such as to be “under someone’s thumb” or “wrapped around their finger”—originally referred to how a falconer secures a bird before setting it off to fly. William Shakespeare, an amateur falconer himself, peppered his plays with hawking jargon. References to “hoodwinking” (to cover a bird’s head with a hood) and “rousing” (when a bird shakes its feathers as a sign of contentment) appear throughout his work.

Of course, falconry existed long before Shakespeare’s time. There's good evidence humans have been using birds to hunt since prehistory, upwards of 12,000 years ago. Originally, it was not a sport, but a means of acquiring food, even if was typically reserved for nobility. By the Middle Ages, the practice was so popular across Europe that even peasants had their own hunting birds (though their social class still dictated exactly which species they were permitted to keep). Wealthier medieval falconers often rode horses during their hunts, as the animals’ speed and endurance meant they could cover more ground at a faster pace.

It wasn’t until the 19th century that European interest in the sport waned. Hunters traded in their feathered companions for firearms, and the French Revolution brought about a decline in traditionally aristocratic activities.

It took a century for interest in falconry to pick up again. Today, there are at least 10,000 falconers throughout the world, and most of them hunt for pleasure rather than survival. The sport is strictly regulated, and the birds are often used for more than just hunting. Some are put to work as pest control, particularly for farmers, while others are trained for military purposes.

Despite falconry’s modest resurgence, flying a raptor while riding a horse remains all but obsolete. Horses are still used in falconry in parts of Central Asia—watching mounted hunters fly golden eagles is a highlight of Mongolia’s Golden Eagle Festival—but even there, the tradition is at risk of disappearing.

To have the chance to sit atop one of the most powerful prey animals while an apex predator with a wingspan the size of a grown man clenches your wrist with its talons is a rare opportunity, to say the least. And in the Western Hemisphere, Dartmoor Hawking is the place to do it.

We move through the barn, where horses crane their heads over doors, birds shriek, and dogs frolic about. Whitley talks to the animals as we pass, greeting his horses and telling the birds and dogs to hush, like a parent scolding his rowdy children. He is, in a way, their parent. Each of his raptors was bred in captivity, since British falconers can only work with captive-bred birds. He usually acquires his birds when they’re young, around the time their bird mother would begin teaching them to hunt.

His falconry horses, meanwhile, have had previous owners and trainers. They’re all Thoroughbreds, and not just any Thoroughbreds, but retired racehorses. “Dartmoor’s a really wild place, it’s really tough going,” he says. “I want a horse that’s quick on its feet because if I’m watching a flight, I don’t want to be placing my horse’s feet on the ground.”

Whitley first began flying hawks from horses in 2001, and after taking a break from riding, picked the sport back up in 2013 before opening Dartmoor Hawking with his wife Philippa in 2015. Their main business is falconry demonstrations and lessons, which they offer from a scenic piece of land atop a hill on the Bovey Castle estate. The wet, wild moors of Dartmoor National Park are just over the ridge, which is where Whitley takes his horses, birds, and dogs when he goes hunting.

We head to the weigh station near the barn’s back door. Martin places each bird on the scale before I fly them—too thin and hungry, and they won’t be healthy enough to fly; too fat and full, and they won’t have the motivation to hunt. I won’t be hunting with them, though. I’m here to fly them, to learn to hold and release them. Rather than racing through the sky in search of prey, the birds will be passing between me and a wooden perch.

The first bird I meet is Merlin, an 18-year-old, 4.5-pound Eurasian Eagle Owl. Martin places him on my gloved arm and weaves his jesses (thin leather straps) between my fingers, instructing me to move with Merlin as though I’m carrying my favorite drink. I walk in a haphazard figure-eight, my upper arm clasped to my ribcage and my forearm extended at a 90-degree angle. Merlin rests on my arm like a feathered growth, his head bobbing and swiveling as I move. And though his eyes, two fiery, burnt-orange saucers, remain wide in a way that makes him seem surprised, he’s actually content. He rouses, briefly ruffling his feathers before settling again into stillness.

Next I fly Charlie, a five-year-old, 3.5-pound ferruginous hawk. He soars between me, Martin, and a perch, landing at each spot with ease. With Harold, a 15-week-old, nine-ounce falcon, I continue getting comfortable handling birds, placing my fingers near their talons to secure their jesses and sticking my hands near their faces to remove their hoods.

After a morning filled with what Martin refers to as the “boring” part, it’s time to move on to the highlight of the day. At lunch, I learn I won’t be riding Tommy, Dartmoor Hawking’s calmest, most-used falconry horse. Because I’ve done so well with the birds, I get to ride Caymans.

Before his falconry career, Caymans, a 13-year-old, 17-hand gelding, raced in Australia, Dubai, and the United Kingdom, earning more than £200,000. He was forced to retire after losing his right eye to an infection. Though he may no longer race, he still looks like an athlete: his clipped, bay coat hugs his muscles like a tight t-shirt.

Dawn, a four-year-old, two-pound falcon, is the first bird I fly while on Caymans. We walk around the yard, Dawn sitting on my arm as I steer Caymans with one hand. Caymans fidgets, shaking his head, but soon slows his pace. It’s easy to imagine I’m some kind of medieval huntress in training, learning to handle these two beasts before taking to the moors for a high-speed, exhilarating hunt.

I take off Dawn’s hood, trusting Caymans to stand still while I use my right hand—the hand I’ve been holding the reins with—to slip the cover off the bird’s head and let her take flight. Caymans doesn’t flinch as a blur of feathers streaks by, he’s so used to this.

I've done well enough with Dawn that there's time for a big finale: a chance to fly a golden eagle. Floki, like me, is new to mounted falconry. Martin only got him 10 days before my class. Most of Whitley’s students fly Artemis, an 11-pound female golden eagle, but at this point my arm is tired, so I opt for the smaller bird. Floki has never been flown from the back of a horse before, and Martin warns me there are no guarantees things will turn out well.

My right hand fumbles near Floki’s head until finally, my fingers clutch his hood and slide it off his face. Making brief eye contact with an eagle, a creature that can spot rabbit-sized prey over a mile away, is, as someone who struggles to recognize my coworkers without my glasses on, humbling.

Floki shifts on my wrist as I raise my arm to the side, his cue to launch. He stretches his wings, revealing a six-foot wingspan. His feathers crash into my face in a flurry of softness and strength. As Floki prepares for takeoff, his right wing drapes across my upper back. I’m not much of a hugger, but this is an embrace I can get excited about. And then he’s off, flapping his great wings in a whoosh of power, swooping mere feet above the earth.

I fly Floki a few more times, aiming him toward the perch for our final round, a milestone Martin had been working toward. Martin and Philippa cheer as his outstretched talons clasp the wood. Caymans stands beneath me, solid and steady, each time the eagle launches from my aching arm.

It’s an incredible dynamic, that of a horse, rider, and bird. It is, as Martin says, a simple relationship, but also a complicated one. The horse, human, and bird must all trust one another, a kind of familiarity that takes patience and understanding to build. I’d thought the birds might be wary of a stranger, but somehow we manage to work as a team. It feels a bit like being the filling in some kind of racing animal sandwich: below me, a horse bred and trained to run fast, and on me, a bird evolutionarily engineered to speed through the sky, all three of us relying on one another for a sense of security. As Martin later tells me, that’s the whole point of this class, to learn to understand the relationship between you and the animals. “It’s something unique,” he says, “because very few people are doing it."

Individual Falconry from Horses lessons at Dartmoor Hawking start at £195. For details visit www.dartmoorhawking.co.uk.

It's fun to imagine it leapt out of the water like a torpedo—but unlikely.

The Pteranodon could be imposing, majestic creatures: flying reptiles with pointy skulls, wingspans of up to 18 feet, and, well, lean frames that typically weighed in at about 100 pounds. Not hefty, but you wouldn't want to run into one in the Late Cretaceous equivalent of a dark alley. Unless you were a shark, like the one that somehow lodged a tooth in a Pteranodon neck about 70 million years ago.

The finding is detailed in a new study, published in the journal PeerJ. It offers a surprising entry in the well-stocked Pteranodon fossil record. Though more than 1,100 Pteranodon specimens have been documented, only seven of them bear marks of predation. This is the first case in which the predator is the Cretoxyhrina mantelli shark, a species roughly comparable to today’s great whites, says Mark P. Witton, a research fellow at the University of Portsmouth and an author on the study.

These sharks were no less impressive than the Pteranodon—big and fast, with sharp teeth and a big appetite. What makes the discovery more remarkable is that this shark appears to have been quite young (about eight feet long) at the time it bit into the flying reptile. Its tooth, says Witton, is about an inch long, and usual Cretoxyhrina teeth can be three times as big. The fossil itself is not a new find—it was excavated in the Smoky Hill Chalk region of Kansas in the 1960s, and has been on display in the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum for years—but the novelty of the tooth inspired the researchers to take it back out for further study.

It’s clear that this was the result of a bite, and that the tooth and neck did not randomly end up together in the ground, because the tooth is wedged neatly between the vertebrae. Contrary to other reports of the study, however, there is no evidence that the shark leapt from what is called the Western Interior Seaway (the inland sea that used to split North America down the middle) and grabbed the pterosaur in mid-flight. Far likelier, says Witton, is the possibility that the reptile was hovering close to the water, or maybe even swimming, when the shark grabbed it. It’s also possible that the pterosaur was already dead, and the juvenile shark just scavenged a free meal floating on the surface.

There’s no way of knowing for sure how it happened, but it's pretty exciting even without a dramatic, teeth-out leap from the water. Any meeting of these prehistoric behemoths—with fossil evidence to prove it—is exhilarating to imagine.

No, it's not a chemtrail. Or space junk. Or aliens.

Late Wednesday evening, December 18, San Franciscans gazing out their windows saw something unusual in the darkened sky. It was a squiggle—bright, jagged, maybe a little unsettling. It looked almost like a question mark hanging in the air.

Some observers wondered if it had something to do with a rocket launch scheduled for earlier that day, or if it was flaming space junk reentering the atmosphere. Others thought it could be Santa, getting an early start, or aliens descending to ring in 2019 by annihilating us all.

Nope. The rocket launch had been canceled, and astronomers nixed the space junk theory. It appears to have been a meteor, whose “bright tail was visible for many minutes in the western sky,” the University of California’s Lick Observatory noted on Facebook. Sightings were also reported in Nevada and Oregon.

The meteor itself flashed by for just a second or so before it broke apart about 34 miles above the sea. But meteors can leave a few types of traces in the sky, according to the American Meteor Society. One is known as a train, comprised of ionized air molecules. Trains generally occur at least 65 miles up in the atmosphere, and may change shape as atmospheric winds blow. Smoke trails, on the other hand, are lower down, and more likely to be visible in the day. Sometimes smoke contributes to a phenomenon known as noctilucent clouds, which occur when water molecules form ice crystals in the smoke. The clouds resemble blue-green ripples dancing in a sunlit pool—or, maybe, a portal cracking open to another dimension.

This fireball left a lingering streak that was brightened by the way sunlight reflected off dust particles that persisted as the meteor fractured in the atmosphere, according to the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. The center attributes the curious shape to the way that “upper atmosphere winds distorted the train over time, giving it a curvy, ‘corkscrew’ appearance.” Happy Holidays, though, aliens—wherever you are.