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A Dazzling Reindeer Camp in Norway Focuses on Preserving Indigenous Culture

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The animals are the main source of livelihood for the Sámi people.

On a dark, frigid morning in mid-January 2019, two tour buses pull out of the Radisson Blu parking lot in Tromsø, Norway, heading north. They whizz past modern developments, seaside fishing shacks, and dense pine forests. After about 20 minutes, a large, tent-like structure appears in the distance. Called a lavvu, it’s the epicenter of a winter activity that’s attracting more and more travelers looking to get off the beaten track: a visit to a reindeer camp.

The camp consists of a smattering of buildings on the edge of a vast expanse of tundra. A light snow falls as the buses back up the driveway. Tourists, who come here from around the world, bundle up into their wind pants and down jackets to weather the cold. As they step off the bus, they’re greeted one-by-one by their hosts for the day, members of the indigenous Sámi tribe.

Inside the lavvu, seated on reindeer pelts around a roaring fire, the visitors learn about the day’s activities: reindeer feeding, sledding, lassoing, and storytelling.

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Founded in 2016 by the reindeer herder Johan Isak Turi Oskal, the Tromsø Arctic Reindeer Experience has two aims. The first is to protect reindeer from the effects of climate change by enclosing them in one area during the winter, and feeding them. The second is to introduce visitors to the culture and lifestyle of the Sámi people, about 40,000 of whom live in Norway.

As northern Norway increasingly becomes a tourist destination—offering a number of winter activities like Northern Lights chasing, dog sledding, and alpine skiing in the winter and cruises and hiking in the summer—projects like this serve a third purpose: showing the economic value of protecting natural ecosystems.

“We try to make it here like the true story,” Oskal says, “how we really are.”

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For Sámi herding communities, reindeer are the main source of livelihood, and have been for many generations. Before the invention of the snowmobile, the animals were hooked onto sleds and used for transportation. Their pelts are still used for shoes and rugs, and their meat is exported worldwide.

Reindeer don’t just sustain the Sámi, though; they are an integral part of the Arctic ecosystem. Lately, that precious ecosystem has been disrupted by climate change.

“Our family, we have been feeding reindeers now for about 20 years, and it’s the warmer winters that we don’t like,” Oskal says.

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According to the December 2018 Arctic report card, an annual peer-reviewed status report put out by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the population of wild reindeer and caribou in the Arctic circle has been cut in half in the past two decades. Unpredictable winters have made it harder for reindeer to get food in the winter, and emboldened predators whose traditional prey have been affected by changing weather conditions.

Fencing off the reindeer was one way Oskal felt he could prevent them from dying. So eight years ago, he followed in the footsteps of other herders who had found this tactic successful. “I had my best winter ever,” he says. “I didn’t lose the reindeers.”

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In the early afternoon, after spending several hours with the reindeer, who number around 300 at this particular camp, the visitors gather back in the lavvu for a cultural presentation.

Tourism has long provided the Sámi a source of income outside of reindeer herding, and has mediated their relationship with the outside world. Their interaction with the Norwegian government, on the other hand, was often not so voluntary.

Starting in 1850, the government sought to “Norwegianize” the Sámi population, first through restricting—and later seeking to eliminate—the Sámi language and religious practices. Laws required primary education to be taught in Norwegian and made proficiency in Norwegian a prerequisite for owning land. Sámi children were sent to boarding schools, where they were taught how to become “Norwegian”—a practice all too familiar to indigenous communities around the world.

After centuries of Sámi resistance to oppressive official policies, the Norwegian government began to open a dialogue with the Sámi people in the 1950s. In 1956, it established the Sámi Committee, which officially put an end to the Norwegianization process. A Sámi Parliament was established in 1989. A year later, Norway became the first country to ratify the International Labor Organization Convention on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

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But such acknowledgements cannot heal earlier wounds. “People have lost their language, their history,” Britt Kramvig, a professor at the Arctic University of Tromsø, says. “[They] have lost connections and the relationship to the land. [They] are still losing land because of windmill parks and road building and mining.”

In the fading daylight, Oskal takes a bucket of reindeer kibble and begins to shake it. He holds the bucket high in front of him. His gákti, a traditional cloak used by herders to keep warm on the tundra, flows behind him in the wind. A group of 20 or 30 reindeer surround him, some jostling their neighbors lightly with their antlers to get the best position. He laughs as they try to stick their entire faces into the bucket, and calls for his two sons to join him.

“I’m thinking about my next generation,” he says. “I have two boys here, and I want them also [to] continue to work with reindeers.”

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Ensuring the future of the herds is a major challenge, and climate change is perhaps not even the greatest threat, according to Gunhild Rosqvist, a researcher at the Resource Extraction and Sustainable Arctic Communities project.

“When I first started to talk to [the Sámi], the climate issue wasn’t what they were most worried about,” she says. “‘No, that’s not the worry,’ they said, ‘It’s the mining and the exploitation of our land.’”

Conflict between indigenous communities and their governments over land use occurs across the Arctic region. In Norway this conflict goes back to the 17th century.

However, it wasn’t until the late 1970s that the issue gained notoriety in the national and international press, when the Norwegian government announced plans to dam the Alta-Kautokeino River and build a hydroelectric power plant in Finnmark County, where most of Norway’s Sámi live. Locals protested that the plant would, among other things, affect reindeer migration routes. Although it was eventually constructed, the large-scale protests against it contributed to the passage of the 2005 Finnmark Act, a massive transfer of land ownership to Sámi communities.

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Still, Oskal says, the government should do more to protect Sámi lands. As recently as February 2019, Norway gave the go-ahead to a copper mining project near the village of Kvalsund, despite opposition from reindeer herders and indigenous leaders. In 2018, it green-lighted a 288-megawatt wind farm on Sámi land. “The tourist industry here is based on the nature,” Oskal says. “If they now are destroying this nature, what’s happening then?”

He thinks the Tromsø Arctic Reindeer Experience, which has seen more visitors each year since opening, might make the government more receptive to their land claims.

Nighttime comes early in northern Norway at this time of year, around 2:00 p.m. Before the guests head back to Tromsø, they are treated to a final demonstration of Sámi culture: a traditional yoik, or song. A yoik can convey many things, explains Anneli Guttorm, one of the guides. This includes respect toward others and toward nature.

Transmitting those values to the visitors is a key element of what Oskal hopes to accomplish. Showing respect for the animals and for the natural ecosystem is a tradition as old as the Sámi culture itself.

“Reindeers means everything,” he says. “It’s how I plan my life. A reindeer herder is always learning. He is learning from nature and from the reindeers, of course. Wherever the reindeers are, there should also be you.”


Pig Remains Show How Far Prehistoric People Traveled to Visit Stonehenge

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Epic Neolithic feasts drew crowds from opposite ends of Britain.

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It turns out that Stonehenge has been drawing visitors from all over for thousands of years. A gathering place for ceremonial Neolithic feasts, the iconic, enigmatic structure down in southern England may have been welcoming pilgrims from as far away as Scotland, according to new research published today in the journal Science Advances.

Analyzing isotopes from the bones of 131 pigs, which are known to have served as these feasts’ featured entrées, the researchers were able to trace the animals’ origins to a wide range of locations around the modern-day United Kingdom, including contemporary northeastern England and western Wales. In a press release, the lead author Richard Madgwick of Cardiff University said that these findings shed new light on the “scale of movement and level of social complexity” inherent in these prehistoric gatherings.

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The researchers studied pig bones from four different sites—Durrington Walls, Marden, Mount Pleasant, and the West Kennet Palisade Enclosures—with close proximity to either Stonehenge or Avebury, an analogous Neolithic site of arranged stones. The prehistoric peoples who built Stonehenge or Avebury might have lived at these other sites, and then gathered at the monuments for ceremonies marking, perhaps, the midwinter sunset. (English Heritage points out that Stonehenge was “built to align with the movements of the midwinter and midsummer sun,” and that many of the pig remains indicate that the animals—likely born in springtime—were slaughtered at nine months old, during winter.)

During their analysis, the researchers looked at strontium to assess the animals’ native geologies, oxygen for their climates, and sulfur for their distances from the coast. They found isotope values covering “all the biospheres of Britain” and even some coastal influences, despite the henge sites’ locations more than 30 miles inland. The remains’ geographic diversity, said Madgwick, indicates that these feasts “could be seen as the first united cultural events of our island,” events that may have enforced some rather strict ceremonial codes. Pigs are more difficult than cattle to transport over long distances, meaning that there was likely a kind of symbolic significance attached specifically to eating pigs in order to justify that labor. Moreover, feast attendees apparently felt an obligation to supply the south with their own local fare, highlighting the lengths people had gone to in order to converge. The remains suggest the existence of a transregional cultural identity among prehistoric Britons, at a time when such contact required treacherous levels of effort and care.

What, Exactly, Are Southern California's Coyotes Eating?

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Piles of poop are helping researchers dissect the diet of urban and suburban canids.

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Again and again and again, the volunteers went looking for poop. They tromped through cemeteries and parks, hugged the fence line, and wandered paved and dirt roads in search of links about the size of their thumbs, with tapered ends. They avoided smaller nuggets—no thanks, opossums—and ones with rounded tips, which suggested they’d been dropped by a bobcat. These poop scouts were scouring Los Angeles and the Conejo Valley in search of hints about coyotes’ palates.

For several years, biologists have kept track of the canids moving around Southern California’s cities and suburbs. Researchers have tracked them with GPS collars and camera traps, and confirmed that they’ve been chowing down—but they haven’t gotten a full picture of all the meals coyotes are consuming.

“You hear a lot of different things, like, ‘Oh, they’re living off of rats, my neighbor’s feeding them, they’re only living off of cats in the neighborhood,” says Justin Brown, an ecologist at the National Park Service's Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. “People had a wide variety of thoughts.” To get a better picture of how the coyotes were flourishing in these urban and suburban enclaves, “you need to know what resources they’re using,” Brown says. Food is fuel, and the proof’s in the poop.

For the past two years, Brown has led a project to collect coyote scat around the Conejo Valley, including Thousand Oaks, and compare it to samples collected in denser, busier Los Angeles. “Our goal was to look at urban to suburban gradient, and see how that affects their diet,” Brown says.

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After a crash course in scat identification, volunteers fanned out to their assigned sites (27 in L.A., and 14 in Thousand Oaks), and looked for poop that fit the bill. To distinguish the coyote poop from piles left by domestic dogs, they only collected samples that had visible evidence of bone, hair, or fruit seeds—unlike Fido, coyotes eat their dinner whole. They plopped the piles into paper bags. Back in the lab, researchers put them in pantyhose and ran them through the washer and dryer to clean them up and help make it easier to isolate and identify the bones, seeds, and other components inside. They also baked the poop, to kill parasites.

Coyotes tend to trod the same territory again and again, Brown says, so it’s likely that scat collected from the same site over time is shedding light on the behavior of the same individuals from one season to another. (It's a more complete picture than, say, a stomach necropsy, which only gives a glimpse of the animal's last meal—though the team did some of those, too.)

Still, scat’s not a perfect portal into the animals’ meals. Human food—such as burgers and bread—doesn’t tend to show up in the poop “unless the coyotes eat the wrapper,” Brown says, because our grub is more fully digestible than bone or tufts of hair. The team did find evidence of work gloves, a condom, shoe laces, and plenty of packaging. Whiskers provided a clue about how and when the animals were consuming the food intended for us and our pets. By snipping these into segments and performing stable isotope analysis—looking for ratios of carbon and nitrogen—researchers could gauge whether the animals had eaten corn, for instance, and how that had changed over time (give or take a few weeks).

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By early April 2019, they expect to be done with dissections—more than 3,200 in all. Then the team will tidy up the data and start submitting it to scientific journals. Based on their findings so far, it seems that the coyotes of Los Angeles are feasting on food for humans and pets, plus pets themselves (especially domestic cats), and fruit from ornamental trees, such as figs. The scat from Thousand Oaks indicates that the coyotes with more green space to roam around are noshing primarily on rabbits, followed by fruits, gophers, and insects.

Over the past few years, the relationship between Southern California's humans and their canid neighbors has been more than a little strained. There have been several reports of coyotes eating family pets or biting people; humans, meanwhile, have occasionally taken out a coyote with a gun, and packed city council meetings wearing shirts calling on officials to evict the animals from their towns. Meanwhile, researchers have found that “a lot of [coyotes] are living pretty much everywhere, and a lot of them aren’t causing conflicts,” Brown says. Where they’re unwelcome, he adds, “we can control the food sources,” whether those are trees, or a buffet of offerings from overflowing trash cans. Some residents will surely think it's not enough, but decoding the poop is one place to start.

How Puma Leftovers Help Shape the Forest Ecosystem

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They feed loads and loads of beetles, in addition to foxes, bears, and more.

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A male elk can weigh in at 700 pounds or more—over three times the size of a male puma. Yet pumas—also known as mountain lions—are extraordinarily strong and crafty, and can take down large game, such as elk and mule deer, that they can’t possibly eat on their own. We’re not supposed to bite off more than we can chew, but the puma’s habit of doing just that can be an ecological boon. In addition to providing food for scavengers such as bears, foxes, and birds, their leftovers provide a windfall for hundreds of beetle species.

“Most of the focus around mountain lions is typically related to state management objectives,” says Josh Barry, a graduate researcher with Panthera, a global wildcat conservation organization that conducted a study, led by puma researcher Mark Elbroch, examining the impact of puma hunting habits. Researchers in places such as preserves are typically asked to document the prey killed by the big cats report back to the state management offices. “With this research in particular, Mark thought, why not ask questions while we’re at it, as opposed to just recording the kills,” Barry says.

In previous studies, Elbroch had already documented dozens of large vertebrates—wolves, foxes, black and grizzly bears—that feed on carrion left by pumas. He also grew interested in the insect populations attracted by their kills. The researchers studied a total of 18 elk and mule deer carcasses killed by pumas in Bridger-Teton National Forest in Wyoming, returning weekly over the course of six months from May to October 2016 to check beetle traps and observe how populations shifted over time. They collected more than 24,000 individual beetles belonging to 215 different species from the bodies of puma prey—greater numbers and diversity than found in surrounding areas. The results show that pumas as more than predators: They’re “ecosystem engineers,” researchers write in the study, published in the journal Oecologia.

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Different beetles came to feast at different stages of decomposition. A decaying carcass releases volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, like those released when gasoline is burned or perfume is sprayed, which change over the course of decomposition. This allows specific beetles—some of which can detect carrion from five miles away with the help of VOCs—to know when the meat has reached the stage of decomposition that best matches their evolutionary appetite. It’s a win-win, ensuring that a variety of ecological niches are filled, and the carrion gets cleared away, in a process that usually takes around two months, from kill to skeleton.

The northern carrion beetle, the most commonly sighted beetle in the study, is attracted to fresh meat, and bullies other beetles who come by for a bite. Hide beetles, on the other hand, such as the cosmopolitan blue-boned beetle, come to a carcass much later, to feed on dry skin and scraps. There are also predatory beetles that follow the others in order to prey on them, or other critters. Snails are attracted to the blood-moistened soil around a carcass, and they are in turn preyed on by snail-hunter beetles. Orange-and-black burying beetles form meat-fueled family units. They pull away a chunk of carcass and cover it with dirt. They then lay their larvae below the ground with it, so that when their young hatch, they have a ready food source so they can grow into healthy adults.

Many predators prefer to pick their prey clean, but pumas spin a finely constructed web of relationships that seems to feed the entire forest.

New Hampshire’s Mountain-Climbing ‘Railway to the Moon’ Turns 150

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The Mount Washington Cog Railway is still chugging.

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In 1852, the entrepreneur and inventor Sylvester Marsh got lost in a storm and nearly died on the slopes of New Hampshire’s Mount Washington. The Northeast’s tallest peak is home to some of the worst weather on earth—in 1934, observers at the summit measured a wind speed of 231 miles per hour, one of the fastest gusts ever recorded not associated with a tornado or cyclone—and over the years it has claimed dozens of lives.

After wandering the slopes for what must have felt like an eternity, Marsh stumbled through the doors of a shelter near the summit. As he recovered from his ordeal and prepared to spend a night 6,288 feet above sea level, Marsh thought to himself that there had to be a better way to reach the summit. Marsh would end up spending the next 17 years solving that problem by building the world’s first mountain-climbing cog railway, which in 2019 is celebrating its sesquicentennial.

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In the mid-19th century, when Marsh set out to design his new mountain-climbing contraption, railroads were still a new technology. The first railroad in the United States had only been built about 25 years earlier and generally only ran on flat ground. But if anyone could figure out how to run a train up a mountain, it was Marsh. The New Hampshire native had made his fortune in meatpacking in Chicago and held nearly a dozen patents. According to legend, Marsh even invented the first coffee percolator, although for some unknown reason he never filed a patent for that.

Marsh decided to build a railroad that used a cog-and-rack system, not unlike a bicycle chain on a sprocket, to help propel a train up hill. By 1858, he was confident enough in his design to approach the New Hampshire legislature for a charter to build a railroad up the west slope of Mount Washington. But politicians were less than impressed with his proposal and nearly laughed him out of the State House. One legislator suggested Marsh build a “railway to the moon” while he was at it. But despite their snide remarks, the state legislators granted Marsh a charter anyway.

The Civil War delayed Marsh’s plans, but by 1866, track was being constructed at the base of the mountain. To aid in the construction of the railroad, Marsh had a steam locomotive built and named it Hero. Unlike most locomotives of the era, Hero’s boiler stood vertically and some said it looked like a bottle of hot sauce. Soon the locomotive was given the nickname “Old Peppersass” and most people soon forgot its real name.

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Three years later, the railroad—by then dubbed the Mount Washington Cog Railway—was completed to the summit. The railway was approximately three miles long and featured a maximum grade of 37.4 percent. Others quickly took notice of Marsh’s cog railway and, within a few years, they began to pop up elsewhere, particularly in Switzerland. One of the first passengers to the summit of Mount Washington was U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant. The showman P.T. Barnum was another early passenger who declared that the railroad was the “second greatest show on earth,” after his grand circus, of course.

Although the ride to the summit was spectacular, it was also slow, with a top speed of just under three miles per hour. Unlike most trains, where a locomotive pulls cars, cog railway locomotives push cars up the hill. When the train itself was not fast enough for them to complete their daily tasks, track workers used something called the “Devil’s Shingle” to quickly travel down the mountain. The toboggan-like contraption clipped into the cog rack in the middle of the track and could reach speeds of up to 60 miles per hour. According to legend, at least one man made the three-mile trip down the mountain in just two minutes and 45 seconds.

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Marsh stayed with the railroad until his death in 1884. It was about the same time that Old Peppersass was retired and replaced with more modern steam locomotives. Old Peppersass sat at the base of the mountain until it was sent to Chicago, Illinois, for display at the 1893 World’s Fair and later the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Missouri. Afterwards, the historic locomotive ended up in a warehouse in Baltimore, Maryland, nearly forgotten for 30 years.

Old Peppersass turned up again in 1929 when the cog railway’s new owners brought it home to New Hampshire to mark the 60th anniversary of the operation. To celebrate the occasion, they decided to fire up the locomotive for one more trip up the mountain. Unfortunately, the trip ended in disaster when the cog wheel broke and the locomotive went careening down the mountain, derailing on the steepest part of the grade. While the locomotive’s crew jumped from the moving train, a photographer recording the historic run did not and he was killed.

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Today, the ride up Mount Washington is much safer and smoother, according to Wayne Presby, the current owner and president of the railway. In recent years, the railroad has taken steps to modernize its operation, including replacing most of its steam locomotives with more efficient diesels. In years past, steam locomotives would use one ton of coal and nearly 1,000 gallons of water during a trip up the mountain whereas a diesel can do it with as little as 15 gallons of fuel. The diesel can also make the trip much faster, with a top speed of 4.7 miles per hour. However, the railroad still uses the steam locomotives for those who want to experience the trip as it was more than a century ago.

“People really love the steam locomotives,” Presby says. “Those trips sell out every time.”

Despite some modernization efforts, one thing that hasn’t changed is the weather. “Winter leaves late and comes early to Mount Washington,” Presby says, adding that harsh conditions are the biggest challenge to operating the railroad—a constant reminder of why Marsh decided to build it 150 years ago.

Explore a Bustling Nevada 'Ghost Town'

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History comes alive in Virginia City.

Nevada is famous for its ghost towns. There's Rhyolite, where crumbling, abandoned structures mingle with contemporary outsider art. And there's Hamilton, known for its picturesque, receding stone structures (notably, a stately, freestanding arch that's survived even though the bank it once supported hasn't). These deserted settlements are relics of the state's 19th-century mining boom and bust.

Virginia City may be the most unusual of all of Nevada's ghost towns. But to call Virginia City a "ghost town" is a mischaracterization. Though its permanent population has dwindled from around 25,000 in the 1870s to 900 today, the town receives about 2 million visitors per year, eager for a glimpse into the past. Preservation efforts have kept some of Virginia City's most-storied structures alive, many open to the public.

The site of the largest silver strike the world has ever seen, Virginia City has found a new resource to mine: its rich history. Watch the video above to tour some of the town's most intriguing sites.

Meet the 'Comet Egg,' Which Definitely Did Not Come From Space

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Investigating the old myth that cosmic events can have a fowl impact.

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The year 1986 was approaching, and earthlings were gearing up for a flyby from a long-awaited cosmic guest star. Anticipation was high, so much so that some people were wondering if the celestial visitor would wear out its welcome. “By the time Halley’s Comet swings past the sun … and heads back into the dim and distant reaches of its orbit, everybody on Earth may well be tired of hearing about it,” wrote Ruth S. Freitag, a senior science specialist at the Library of Congress, who compiled a bibliography of information about the comet a year prior.

That’s not the way it turned out. The comet, though predictable, has never failed to captivate. Named for English astronomer Edmond Halley—who analyzed its past visits and predicted its return around 1758—this particular “dirty snowball” is what’s known as a periodic comet, meaning that its orbit brings it around to us at regular intervals, leaving a bright, milky smudge across the sky. Sightings in 164 B.C. and 87 B.C. appear to have been recorded on on Babylonian tablets, and it was also embroidered on the 230-foot-long Bayeux Tapestry, which depicts the Battle of Hastings and England falling to the 11th-century Norman conquest. (There, it looks like a plucked sunflower cast on its side.) The comet has inspired generations of artists, chroniclers, scientists—and chicken owners.

Comets had long been associated with mysticism and maleficence—occasionally a bringer of luck, but more often a harbinger of war or misfortune. So there could have been an unsavory dimension to the more recent legend that whenever the comet shot past, some kind of extraterrestrial image would appear on the shell of a chicken egg.

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This lore dates back at least to the 17th century, as Brian G. Marsden, late director of the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, recounted to NASA. In December 1680, when a comet shot past overhead, a hen in Rome was said to have laid an egg spangled with a cosmic pattern. When word of the “wonder egg” spread, Marsden writes, the Paris Academy confirmed that “the event caused the hen to cackle extraordinarily loudly, that the egg was uncommonly large, and that it was marked … with several stars.” If the report was true, one French journal noted at the time, “it would not be the first prodigy of this nature that has appeared in Italy during eclipses or comets.”

The shape of a sun was said to have appeared on an egg in Bologna during an eclipse, and another “comet egg” reportedly turned up in Reno, Nevada, when Halley’s Comet soared by in 1910. When a county clerk, identified only as Mr. Fogg, stumbled out in his bathrobe at 3 a.m. to watch the comet, “he was puzzled to see his pet hen running around in the yard cackling and looking into the heavens,” the Reno Gazette-Journal reported. Fogg was, presumably, even more surprised the next morning, when he found that the hen had laid an egg “with a long tail on it,” seemingly modeled after the comet itself. This special egg was front-page news.

By the time 1986 rolled around, Thames Valley Eggs, a British producer, put out a call far and wide: Bring us your comet eggs. More than 350 people joined the publicity stunt, each claiming possession of an honest-to-goodness specimen. (No staining, drawing, or other shell-meddling was allowed.)

Officials from the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food—tapped as judges—reviewed the entries, and weren’t convinced that any of the streaks or bands were cosmic, or even in any way remarkable. “Many of the markings on these eggs are fairly commonplace, resulting from excessive calcium deposits on the shell, or from irregularities in the chicken,” one said, in a press release.

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But they did declare a winner. Linda Franklin’s triumphant egg didn’t bear a stardust pattern, but it did have a bit of a tail, though it actually looked kind of like a skinny, palm-sized bowling pin, or a maraca. Franklin collected it near Studley, England, the Associated Press reported at the time, from “an anonymous hen with an odd affinity for astronomy.” She said she’d put her ₤5,000 winnings toward a car.

The egg traveled to London, where it’s now in the Natural History Museum, emptied of its contents and resting on a deep blue pillow beneath a bell jar. The museum has a vast trove of oological specimens—more than 200,000 clutches totaling 1 million individual eggs—but “this is somewhat of an anomaly in the collections,” says Douglas Russell, senior curator of birds’ eggs and nests. Russell is currently in the midst of a cataloguing project, and shared a photo of the egg on Twitter after finding it in a drawer.

Assuming that the comet didn’t have any direct connection to the egg’s shape, how did it come to look the way it does?

The shape of bird eggs varies across species, and by what’s going on in a bird’s life at a given time. Broadly speaking, eggs come in a gradient colors, sizes, and shapes, which range from spheres to ovals to teardrops. In 2017, a team led by Mary Caswell Stoddard, an evolutionary biologist at Princeton University, analyzed 50,000 specimens from 1,400 species, and plotted them on axes of ellipticity and asymmetry. The eggs laid by brown hawk-owls look almost perfectly round, like little white gumballs, while the speckled eggs of the least sandpiper are tapered to a point at one end. Writing in Science, the researchers reported that egg shape corresponds with birds’ flying ability, concluding that asymmetrical, elliptical eggs indicated a body structure that gave certain species a boost toward “high-powered flight” while “maintaining a streamlined body plan.”

An egg from a hen will never look like an egg from a sandpiper, but they can still get wonky. A bird may lay eggs with a surprising shape if she’s feeling stressed or sick—infectious bronchitis can affect the thickness and texture of hens’ eggshells, for instance—or if something is off in the oviduct, the stretchy tube the egg travels along. “A bird’s oviduct is a complex, dynamic place,” says Stoddard. “Sometimes things go wrong.” Stoddard says that while researchers “still have a great deal to learn about how egg shapes are generated,” she and her colleagues have proposed a biophysical model, suggesting that unusual shapes may arise because of changes to the properties of the egg membrane, or the pressure applied to it.

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“What you’re seeing with this particular egg is something that’s gone drastically wrong,” Russell says. Franklin’s prizewinning egg “is a result of the egg being constrained during egg formation,” he adds. He’s not sure what caused this particular instance, but notes that constrained eggs are “relatively commonly seen in domestic fowl.” (They’re seen in other species, too, but humans are particularly likely to notice them in the species we breed and eggs we see often.)

Setting aside the gimmick of a comet egg competition, researchers really are curious about how animals respond to cosmic events. During the 2017 solar eclipse, for instance, they collected reams of data, and tapped citizen scientists to share their observations about how birds, insects, and other creatures behaved. Many of the people who shared their observations on the iNaturalist app’s "Life Responds" project, a collaboration with California Academy of Sciences, observed hens clustering together or roosters beginning to crow as the sun vanished. Some people who set out to document other animals’ responses ended up capturing human excitement, too, in roars of applause or shouting. In theory, it’s possible that the human frenzy around a celestial event—a comet, say—could startle a chicken and throw off the egg-laying process. The idea that witnessing a passing comet could induce a chicken to lay a comet-shaped egg “is probably science fiction,” but “we do know that stress can influence egg formation, because the egg’s journey down the oviduct can be altered,” Stoddard says. “Anything that can freak out the female at the point that she’s about to lay can cause problems,” Russell notes.

Russell isn’t surprised that people often look for oddities on the ground when something striking happens in the sky. “People like the weird, they like the obscure,” he says. “The idea that Halley’s Comet could cause a chicken to produce a comet-shaped egg is amusing to people, but these are perfectly normal anomalies that happen. It’s just that this time, it happened to look like a comet.”

Halley’s Comet will visit again in July 2061. If you have chickens, hey—it can’t hurt to check the coop.

An Amazing Butterfly Irruption Is Swarming Across California

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Painted ladies are taking the skies by storm.

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Currently, skies in Southern California look like a scene out of Hitchcock—a little less moody, maybe, and a bit more ethereal. From Burbank to Redondo Beach to South Central Los Angeles and beyond, swarms of butterflies have been flitting throughout the air in a fever dream of irruption and migration. And with the overall numbers of these tiny, two-to-three-inch butterflies, known as painted ladies (Vanessa cardui), appearing to be down in the region (from around 300,000 in 2017 to 25,000 last year, according to one monitoring program), this magical burst of lepidopterans brings both wonder and hope.

The painted lady fluorescence is the result of an unusually rainy winter in California—and in the deserts in particular, which also helped spur this spring’s wildflower superbloom. In a statement, James Danoff-Burg, conservation director of the Living Desert Zoo and Gardens, said "the average annual rainfall in the Coachella Valley is three inches. This year, we had three and a half inches on Valentine's Day alone." Art Shapiro, an ecologist at University of California, Davis, who’s been studying butterfly migration since 1972, told CNN that “Painted ladies tend to thrive when there's a superbloom because there are so many plants for the butterflies to lay their eggs on and for caterpillars to eat.” While these butterflies migrate from Mexico every year, through Southern California’s deserts, to the Pacific Northwest, they usually go relatively undetected because there aren’t quite so many of them.

This year’s phenomenon is referred to as an irruption. “The difference is that a migration is a seasonal occurrence,” says Matthew Shepherd of the Xerces Society, an invertebrate conservation nonprofit based in Portland, Oregon. “An irruption is a sudden and massive surge in population size that doesn’t happen each year. Essentially, there is a super-abundance of something that leads to a population that is so large that the pressure just keeps pushing the butterflies on the edges further and further is search of flowers.”

Another reason the critters are making their way up the coast from Mexico, where they winter in the Sonoran Desert, is because of this crowding. “The pressure of having so many butterflies in one area is forcing them outward,” says Shepherd. “The mass of host plants that the caterpillars eat is as important to this as the availability of nectar to fuel the adults. The butterflies are not so much leaving something behind, but moving in search of plants and areas that aren’t saturated with other painted ladies!”

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The small insects flitting through California’s vistas are cousins of the larger and more vibrant monarch, which faced critically low population numbers (down 85 percent) in California last year. Both butterflies are similar in color—orange and black with whispers of white—and are essential pollinators of the state’s plants. Tom Merriman, director of the Encinitas-based butterfly nonprofit Butterfly Farms, says that butterflies “can get into flowers bees can't get to,” and that “monarchs are considered an indicator species that help us judge the condition of our environment.”

According to Merriman, the last time Southern California an event like this was in 2005, an El Niño year. (Then, I-5 was closed in Southern California due to the quantity of dead butterflies on the road surface, Shepherd says.) That wet year, there were estimated to be more than a billion painted ladies. Based on the butterflies that flew through Encinitas just yesterday, Merriman ventures that the region is seeing just as many. “They're moving pretty quickly and can travel nearly 30 miles per hour and can cover up to 100 miles a day,” Merriman says. Occasionally, the ladies stop to sip nectar from flowers, and then continue their haste.

“Think cars traveling on the freeway, they're all going the same direction but not really together,” Merriman says. “We think it's going to go on for a few more weeks. They're not going to be as dense—some will run out of energy and stop to feed and breed, some will run into predators, or worse, automobiles.”

The painted ladies are expected to stay, wherever they settle down, throughout the summer. Shepherd’s guess is that they’ll arrive in Oregon sometime in April. They’ll make offspring, and the ones flying north now will almost certainly be grandparents by July. For most of them, the Pacific Northwest will be the end of the road. “Painted ladies mostly die where they are at the end of the season,” Shepherd says, because their average life expectancy is two to four weeks. Then their descendants will travel back to Mexico in the fall.


On the Hunt for Japan's Elaborate, Colorful Manhole Covers

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Dedicated enthusiasts travel the country and scour the ground to see them.

In Japan’s glittering cities, all hustle and light, they can be easy to miss. With all that sensory assault, who thinks to look down and take notice of something as mundane as a manhole cover? But these are no ordinary bits of civic infrastructure. In Japan, many manhole covers are works of urban art—elaborate, curious, distinctive, even colorful. They have become a tourist destination unto themselves, and attract a legion of dedicated manhole enthusiasts who travel the country to visit some of the thousands of unique designs.

Japan’s decorated manhole covers—broadly encompassing storm drain, domestic water supply, electrical and other utility access covers—initially took shape as a public relations campaign for sewers. Beginning in the 1950s, the cast plates featured simple geometric patterns, such as the “Tokyo” and “Nagoya” designs. Japanese civil servant Yasutake Kameda conceived of the intricate, artistic versions in 1985, to help warm a skeptical rural population to the idea of the costly but necessary modernization of the country’s sewer system. From these humble, practical beginnings, manhole covers have become a cultural phenomenon.

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Typically, “local manholes” or "design manholes” feature elements special to a particular location: a town emblem, landmark, event, or official bird or flower. For instance, Takasaki, 60 miles northwest of Tokyo in mountainous Gunma Prefecture, has manhole covers that commemorate the city’s popular summer fireworks festival. Local mascots (known as yurukyara, such as Fukaya City’s adorable rabbit-deer Fukkachan) and cartoon characters also appear. In Tokyo’s Tama ward, home of the Sanrio Puroland amusement park, one can find covers featuring the ever-popular Hello Kitty. Local sports franchises are also represented near the teams’ home arenas and stadiums—such as the well-known colorful depiction of the logo of the Hiroshima Carp baseball team.

While there is some logic to the placement of the covers, particularly those graced with color—usually near a landmark, theme park, or stadium—others appear to have been placed without rhyme or reason. Indeed, it is not unusual to walk down an otherwise unremarkable side street and spot a special one underfoot.

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The ornate manhole covers are initially carved from aluminum, which is used to make sand molds for casting. The majority of the designs are selected by local municipalities, in conjunction with manufacturers. In most cases, the design is just imprinted in the cover, but in some cases the covers get another touch—colored resins flooded into voids like enamel on jewelry.

Today an estimated 95 percent of Japan’s 1,718 municipalities, across all 47 prefectures, now hosting their own unique covers. In Osaka, approximately 10 percent of the city’s 180,000 manhole covers feature ornate designs, of which roughly 1,900 get the color treatment. Typically, a designed manhole cover, which weighs more than 80 pounds, excluding the frame, costs approximately $585—a five percent premium over the cost of a plain cover. The color, however, is applied carefully by hand, and nearly doubles the price of a manhole to more than $900.

Such is the popularity of these little urban treasures that they have a devout, organized following. There is the industry-led Japan Ground Manhole Association, and the fan-based Japanese Society of Manhole Covers, whose website features thousands of photographs submitted by users across Japan, who have snapped everything from large sewer covers to tiny local utility access panels.

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Manholers,” as they’re known, may travel to distant areas of the country just to photograph covers or collect pencil rubbings known as takuhon. Trading cards featuring manhole designs are also popular collectors' items, and can command steep prices in online auctions.

One prominent fan is Kei Takebuchi, a popular Tokyo-based singer-songwriter. Takebuchi traces her fascination with them to the covers of Nagoya, which feature a charming cartoon water strider insect, while she was on tour in 2015. Since then, she has regularly tweeted photos of manhole covers to her nearly 200,000 followers on social media. “Every manhole cover design has [a meaning] … it tells me that we can create art with almost anything,” she says, in an interview for this story.

Like many places, Japan is full of people with unusual hobbies or obsessions, but love for the country’s manhole covers has gone mainstream: a “manhole festival” was held near a major train station in Tokyo last month, featuring trading cards, baked goods, and replica covers from around the country. Retailer Tokyu Hands ran an extended campaign at its central Shinjuku location, with a range of manhole cover–related goods for sale.

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The affinity for manhole covers also seems to tap in to Japan’s fondness for hobbies that involve lots of domestic travel. Stamp rallies—featuring rubber stamps at train stations and other landmarks—encourage hobbyists to travel to overlooked or lesser-visited locales to add one more stamp to their collections. “Rail-fans” similarly scour the country to document or experience a rare train carriage, an unusual station melody, or other rail-related minutia.

It is the same for manholers, with the occasionally far-flung or seemingly random placement of coveted covers—and directions of varying accuracy—adding to the sense of a scavenger hunt. Indeed, Takebuchi recounts once spending three hours on a bitterly cold day in Kawagoe City in Saitama Prefecture to snap a photo of a particular manhole cover, beautifully designed with an images of Toki no Kane, a historic bell tower. Similar stories are common currency in manholing circles.

Easy to overlook, but curious and rewarding, Japan’s unique manhole covers are a charming reminder that the mundane can be exciting, and that you should never forget to look down.

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Waterfalls Can Just Spontaneously Happen

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A new study suggests that creating these natural wonders doesn't require external forces.

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A new study published in the science journal Nature is forcing scientists to rethink their understanding of waterfalls. Researchers from the University of Nevada, Reno, the California Institute of Technology, and GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, with help from the National Science Foundation, created a river that spontaneously formed a waterfall.

People have long believed that waterfalls originate from some type of external force applied to a river. Earthquakes and volcanoes, for instance, create waterfalls because they alter the shape of the riverbed. Other catalysts for waterfall formation include sea level change and climate change. What makes this study so fascinating is that the waterfall observed by the researchers in the lab was created by the river’s own internal feedback loop of water flow and sediment transfer.

To create a miniature waterfall, the team had to first recreate a river and bedrock. Using polyurethane foam as bedrock, the researchers made a river using a flume about 24 feet long by one foot wide. According to the study, polyurethane foam is resistant to erosion by water and adheres to similar erosion principles as various types of rocks. The foam allowed the team to better scale the experiment to real-world scenarios. “We know how to mathematically scale those erosion rates to what it would be for any other rock type,” says Joel Scheingross, assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, and lead author of the study.

Once they built the river, the researchers began the experiment by running water down the flume. Scheingross says that around 14 liters per second flowed down the incline, which was tilted at a nearly 20 percent grade.

No signs of erosion were found after 24 hours, so the team began feeding half a kilogram of sediment per second down the river. Within minutes, erosion started taking place. The once silky smooth foam of the lab river had become wavy, as various chutes and pools began to form.

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Eventually, one pool got so deep, says Scheingross, that water no longer had the power to move the gravel, allowing the sediments to sink to the bottom of the pool. This collection of rock and sediment is known as an “armor layer,” and it protects the underlying bedrock—or foam, in this case—from additional erosion.

The team then observed that a pool downstream from that area was not as deep and still subject to erosion. The difference in depth and erosion caused the elevation between the two pools to grow over time, creating a waterfall. But the miniature waterfall didn’t last long. According to the study, after about 20 minutes, “erosion near the waterfall brink reduced the waterfall height causing flow reattachment to the riverbed.”

The team isn’t ready to rewrite any of Earth’s history, but Scheingross says he does want to explore this phenomenon in relation to how we understand topography and real waterfalls in nature. As Science notes, the study’s findings may help explain the formation of natural wonders, such as the Seven Teacups in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, that were created with no obvious signs of external force.

Marine Snow Has Cooled the Planet with Dead Plankton for Millions of Years

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The bodies of the tiny organisms lock away enormous amounts of carbon dioxide, and they’re in danger.

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The bottom of the ocean holds one of the world’s largest and most populous graveyards. It’s crammed with organisms too tiny to see, including plankton, protists, and a type of marine algae called coccoliths. The continuous shower of bodies has a surprisingly beautiful name: marine snow. Over the years, this macabre blizzard compacts to a water-rich sludge at the seabed. Over millennia, it compacts to solid rock. England’s White Cliffs of Dover are a prime example of prehistoric marine snow, comprising layers of Cretaceous-era plankton that compacted 70 million years ago when Great Britain was still submerged under the sea.

Marine snow is more than an underwater memorial to the microscopic. It also functions as a carbon sink, absorbing carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere and locking the carbon away for millennia. In this way, marine snow is one of nature’s greatest safeguards against global warming. Today, these sinks produce more than 25 percent of the oxygen we breathe. Scientists have understood marine snow’s role in the carbon cycle for some time now, but had never quantified the significance of its effect over geological time, until now.

In a new study published in Geology, the scientists Adriana Dutkiewicz and R. Dietmar Müller from the University of Sydney have measured marine snow’s immense role in keeping the planet cool for millions of years. Using data from drilled core samples across the global ocean from the past 50 years, the scientists used a computer model to track the growth of the deep-sea carbon sink over the past 120 million years. The study also found that these ocean sinks may not survive the twin evils of global warming and ocean acidification, which have the potential to almost entirely halt marine snow’s ability to bury CO2.

It’s impossible for a lone coccolith, dead or alive, to make it to the seafloor without succumbing to the naturally corrosive metals of seawater—even before acidification. On their own, the critters’ carbonate skeletons would dissolve long before arriving at the seabed. But after coccoliths are eaten and digested by larger zooplankton (a common demise for a coccolith), they make the downward journey concentrated within the protective walls of a fecal pellet. These tiny, dense packages of poo both preserve coccoliths and ensure they sink rapidly, traveling as far as 200 meters a day in a race to join their brethren in a sludge over hundreds of meters thick.

According to Müller, zooplankton may disappear in a warming ocean, which lacks the nitrogen and phosphorous the animals need to survive. And there’s more to this ripple effect: “Without having an intact food chain, this carbon sink also would not work, as the coccoliths would likely all dissolve on the way down of they don’t get eaten first,” Muller writes in an email. At the end of this ripple effect is a deep ocean drastically less equipped to handle our growing carbon emissions.

To save the sink, Müller says we need to start thinking on a grander scale: “Understanding the rhythms of Earth’s geological past and thinking about time like a geologist can give us the perspective we need for a more sustainable future.” Or else we may lose the one graveyard in the world that’s keeping us all alive.

Found: A Lake in Death Valley, the Hottest and Driest of the U.S. National Parks

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It was not a mirage.

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Death Valley National Park, which sprawls across the border of Nevada and California, is well known for its superlatives: It is the hottest, driest, and lowest of the U.S. national parks. So in early March 2019, when a lake suddenly appeared there, people were amazed and perplexed. How did this happen?

Well, it was definitely not a mirage. The estimated 10-mile-long ephemeral lake was the result of heavy rainstorms in the area. As first reported by SFGate, between March 5 and 6, Death Valley received 0.84 inches of rain. The average rainfall for the entire year is around two inches. The dry climate has created soil that can only absorb water at a very slow rate. Those two factors—the unusual volume of the rain and the extreme dryness of the soil—are what allowed the lake to form.

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This wasn’t the first time this has happened, but typically, these bodies of water are merely very shallow ponds. Patrick Taylor, the chief of education and interpretation at the park, told SFGate that this was the largest lake he had seen near that location in six years.

Luckily, the phenomenon was caught on camera by the photographer Elliot McGucken. SFGate reports that McGucken was in the area to take pictures at the Badwater Basin. However, road closures due to the heavy rains blocked the path. That's when McGucken happened upon the lake and there was no need to look for further photographic inspiration.

The results are these dazzling photos, which capture a natural wonder that would’ve remained hidden if not for a photographer and his camera.

How Much of Ireland’s ‘Bog Butter’ Is Actually Buttery?

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The chunks look and smell like rancid dairy, so scientists set out to confirm it.

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Peat bogs harbor all sorts of intriguing, ancient things—well-preserved bodies, knights’ weapons, and, sometimes, a whole lot of butter. Right?

In Ireland, several hundred waxy, phlegm-colored chunks have been plucked from peat, where they spent as many as 3,500 years stuffed inside wooden containers, swaddled in bark, or wrapped in animal bladders. Some weigh as much as 50 pounds, and they resemble greasy, anemic soufflés, or sweating cheese balls that have been sitting out all night.

Those chunks looked like dairy, and they had the name to match. They also had a rank smell, which Richard Evershed, a biogeochemist at the University of Bristol, describes as a “not nice” mingling of parmesan cheese, baby vomit, and rancid milk. But despite all that, the actual butter content of Ireland’s bog butters wasn’t a foregone conclusion.

"It was not self-evident," says Emmanuelle Casanova, a postdoctoral researcher in chemistry at University of Bristol. "They could have been fats from animal carcasses, or adipocere, similar to some Scottish bog butters." Evershed and Casanova, along with other members of a team led by Jessica Smyth, an archaeologist at University College Dublin, set out to see what Ireland’s bog butters were really made of.

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The team sampled 32 bog butters in the collection of the National Museum of Ireland, then subjected the slivers to both compound-specific stable isotope analysis—to confirm their ingredients—and radiocarbon measurements, to gauge their age. The findings are published in a new paper in the journal Scientific Reports.

Based on the specific fatty acids they found, the researchers concluded that 91 percent of the samples either definitely or probably derived from a ruminant’s dairy fat. (The remaining nine percent—representing three samples—couldn’t be identified.) The samples stretched across the Bronze Age, Iron Age, and medieval period, as well as the Irish post-medieval period, which spanned 1550 to 1850.

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Researchers can’t say with certainty where the milk came from. “The method we used is not species-specific; you’d get the same isotope values from goats or sheep,” says Evershed, a co-author on the paper. But Evershed suspects that most of these butters were made from cow’s milk, since cattle were among the predominant animals in prehistoric Ireland, and also because some of the chunks are just so enormous that “you’d almost have to have a herd.”

It’s hard to say for sure how many other globs of extremely old butter are still tucked into peat bogs. In the era before refrigeration, these were savvy places to put things with a short shelf-life—Evershed calls the bogs “pretty much the best place on Earth for storing organic matter.” The densely packed places left little room and sparse oxygen to fuel microbes’ work, Evershed says, and the waterlogged environment helped slow degradation, too. (One prevailing theory is that the bogs were places to stash surplus supplies, and some researchers have also suggested that the butter kept there may have been a type of offering.)

Newly recovered examples of bog butter are usually found when companies harvest peat for fuel. But the days of bog-butter sightings may be winding down. In November 2018, the peat harvesting company Bord na Móna announced that operations would cease over the next few years, amid concerns about emissions and the need to transition to more renewable energy sources. When fewer people wade around the bogs, the things inside them may remain hidden from modern eyes and noses. At least we now know they’re truly buttery.

The Swap-a-Fish Program That Traded Tilapia for Seafood Contaminated By Agent Orange

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New Jersey's Passaic River has been unsafe to fish for decades.

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As it glints in the afternoon sunlight, Newark, New Jersey’s Passaic River looks peaceful. But a plaque along the boardwalk has a warning for visitors. “The river remains full of life,” it reads. "Try to spot these creatures, but until the pollution is removed from the river, be careful NEVER to catch or eat any of them.”

There’s been an advisory against eating lower Passaic fish since 1983, when the EPA found they were contaminated with dioxin—chemical waste from local factories, including one that produced Agent Orange, an herbicide the U.S. military used to devastating effect in the Vietnam War. Despite health risks ranging from cancer to developmental issues, people still catch and eat fish from the lower Passaic River.

Researchers don’t know precisely how many people consume fish from the lower Passaic. Elias Rodriguez, an Environmental Protection Agency Public Information Officer, says the EPA hasn’t seen evidence of widespread fishing. According to preliminary results of an ongoing study conducted by the NYU School of Public Health’s Zelikoff Lab, those who do fish the Passaic—including several homeless people who use it as a regular food source—are often food insecure and looking to supplement their diet. Research has shown that low-income anglers are more likely to consume their catches, and Latino anglers are less likely to be informed of the health risk.

Amy Rowe, County Agent at the Rutgers Cooperative Extension of Essex County, says that the vulnerability of populations who fish in the Passaic makes the problem particularly difficult to tackle. But in 2015, Rowe and her team implemented a novel solution: a fish swap.

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At the time, Rowe was co-director of the Rutgers VETS program, which trained unemployed New Jersey veterans in aquaculture and hydroponics, including fish farming. The fish grown through the program, and the communities’ need for affordable protein, seemed like a perfect match. So on Saturdays throughout the summer, Passaic anglers were encouraged to bring their catch to a parking lot by the Nutley boat launch in Lyndhurst, New Jersey. There, they could exchange fish, pound for pound, for tilapia raised by the VETS program’s trainees. Benefitting both veterans and food-insecure locals, the swap seemed like a no-brainer.

“It makes so much sense,” says Rodney Spencer, a VETS program graduate and Newark native who staffed the fish exchange.

But there was a catch. The fish swap was proposed and funded by the Cooperating Parties Group, a coalition of the same companies—including Pfizer, Rubbermaid, and Tiffany and Co.—that had polluted the Passaic River. At the same time the CPG was funding the fish exchange, they were locked in a legal battle with the EPA over the river’s cleanup. While the EPA demanded that the polluters fund a full dredging of the silty bottom of the lower eight miles of the Passaic, the CPG wanted to implement a less-expensive “hotspot” option.

The CPG claimed the fish exchange was a way to reduce harm while the lengthy cleanup got underway. “We are trying to reduce risks to the most vulnerable in our community,” Jonathan Jaffe, the CPG’s spokesperson, told NPR in 2016. Jaffe didn’t respond to multiple interview requests for this article.

Community advocates—and the EPA—disagreed. “The fish swap program was a complete deflection from the issue at hand,” says Ana Baptisa, an environmental science professor and trustee of the Ironbound Community Corporation, who co-chairs the EPA’s Lower Passaic River Community Advisory Group. When polluters first proposed the program in 2013, environmental groups labelled it “ridiculous,” and the EPA said the companies were “panicked and scrambling” to avoid paying for a full cleanup.

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But for Rowe, the fish exchange was an opportunity to support the VETS program while mitigating community health risk. “We did try to work with the community,” says Rowe, who advertised the exchange extensively and gave presentations to community groups. Yet the staff continued to face heavy criticism for working with the polluters. “We were accused of taking their dirty money,” she says.

There were other roadblocks. In 2015, the greenhouse-raised fish weren’t mature enough to swap, so the Rutgers team had to exchange fishermen’s catches for frozen Costco tilapia.

There was a more fundamental problem: The fish exchange didn’t actually swap many fish. Staff scoured the Passaic’s banks for anglers. “We tried all hours of the day, all days of the week, all fishing seasons, we tried weekdays, we tried lunchtimes, we tried weekends,” Rowe says. But in the entire 2015 season, the program exchanged only 157 fish from three fishermen.

Rowe doesn’t know whether this is because there were few people fishing, or because those who did fish felt uncomfortable accessing the program. Anglers seemed reluctant to even talk to staff, let alone avail of the swap. Considering they were mostly immigrants, potentially undocumented, in a climate of increasing vulnerability, Rowe says their hesitance to approach clipboard-wielding researchers made sense. Spencer says shame may have also played a part. “People were embarrassed to have people know they were getting their only protein substance from a polluted river,” he says.

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Rowe does fondly recall the enthusiasm of one father-son pair—the son translating for the Spanish-speaking father—who swapped over 80 eels in the 2015 season. Yet Spencer wonders whether they were actually bringing fish caught by others, who were too anxious or ashamed to come themselves. “You don’t want to pry too much,” he says. “You didn’t want to scare them off.”

When the fish swap ran again in summer 2016, not a single angler showed up. With funding drying up, both the fish exchange and VETS program ended shortly afterward.

Spencer says that afterwards, he and other veterans were left wondering whether the program had been a PR stunt for the polluters. “It started to seem like we were kind of bamboozled,” Spencer says.

To understand why a seemingly well-meaning fish swap could prompt such strong distrust, you have to look to the history of Newark—and the reason why, more than three decades since the EPA discovered dioxin in the Passaic, the dream of edible local fish remains distant.

Walk north from Newark’s Riverside Park—past fragrant Portuguese bakeries and through the rubble under the railroad bridge—and the Passaic is less scenic. Near a train station, an acid-orange sign warns visitors not to boat, swim, or fish in the water due to sewage overflows. North of the railway station, toppled benches ring a sign declaring “Newark’s Riverfront"; the text is too weather-worn to read. On the bank below, residents have erected tarp shanties among half-buried wire shopping carts. They have a front-row view of condos springing up among old factories on the opposite bank.

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Today, Newark bears the scars of half a century of disinvestment. But in the 19th century, New Jersey’s cities were booming. Powered by the Passaic and just a stone’s throw from New York City’s rich ports and waves of immigrant labor, Newark’s factories helped drive America’s Industrial Revolution. But by the mid-20th century, industry slowed. During the white flight of the 1950s and 60s, prosperous families left Newark, taking capital with them. Today, the city is majority black and Latino—50% and 36%, as of 2018—and disproportionately poor: 28.3% of Newark residents live in poverty.

Companies took jobs away, but left pollution behind. Between 1951 and 1969, the Diamond Alkali factory in Newark produced Agent Orange. Factory workers were found to have elevated levels of the chemical, which can increase risk of immune disease and cancer. In 1983, dioxin was discovered in the surrounding community, and a year later the old Diamond Alkali factory became a Superfund site. Local residents staged protests upon the discovery of the contamination, and community groups have been pushing the EPA and corporations for a full-fledged cleanup ever since.

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For Baptista, this persistent pollution is part of the broader injustice inflicted on the region’s low-income communities of color. “This really is environmental racism,” she says.

In this context, it’s easy to understand why locals would be cynical of the Cooperating Parties Group, and even of the Rutgers program. Spencer says when he entered the VETs program in 2014, he was unemployed, with three children and an ill parent to support. “I didn’t know which way I was going,” he says. He took to horticulture quickly; it gave him income and purpose. “It had me thinking like a plant. Like the growth of a plant,” he says.

But five years later, he’s still working to piece together enough agricultural consulting work to support his family. He wishes Rutgers and the city had invested more in helping veterans find sustainable employment and in growing Newark’s fledgling horticulture industry. While he’s determined to succeed, a lifetime of witnessing failed development efforts sometimes leaves him feeling cynical. Some of these failures have garnered national attention, like Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation to Newark Public Schools—an effort widely criticized as having ignored parents and teachers while failing to make an impact.

Meanwhile, pollution continues to plague Newark. On a recent Tuesday in March, across from the New Jersey Performing Arts Center where Mayor Ras Baraka is about to give his annual State of the City address, a dozen or so protestors chant “Clean water for Newark!” Levels of lead in Newark’s drinking water are worse than those in Flint, Michigan, the protestors, from the Newark Water Coalition, say: as high as 47.5 parts per billion. Just as with dioxin decades ago, organizer Anthony Diaz says, “Everybody wants to cover it up.”

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In March 2016, the EPA issued a Record of Decision detailing a $1.38 billion cleanup plan for the lower eight miles of the Passaic River, listing more than 100 companies that would be responsible for funding it. The plan, which is currently in the design phase, includes dredging 3.5 million cubic yards of contaminated sediment and capping the riverbed. The EPA estimates it will take about a decade. It will take even longer for the fish to be safe to eat.

Despite it all, Baptista remains optimistic. “In the next generation, can we get this river back to a state where we can actually fish?” she asks. “Don’t give up on it.”

24 Extremely Local Cryptids You've Probably Never Heard Of

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There are monsters seemingly around every corner.

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Full disclosure: I choose to believe in the possible existence of cryptids. Sort of. I like the idea that there are strange, undiscovered creatures hidden in the shadows of our world. I'm well aware of how utterly unlikely it is that cryptids and other folkloric creatures exist, but I'm certainly not alone in my blinding enthusiasm for them. We recently asked the readers in our Community forum to tell us about their favorite local cryptids, and to paraphrase a great (fictional) person, the responses make us want to believe.

From a creature that's more rabbit than human, to a herd of extremely local Bigfoots, to a mad scientist's escaped "Melon Heads," our readers (and staff!) told us about a wide variety of incredible beasties from their regional folklore. You can see some of our favorite responses below. If you want read about more local cryptids, or tell us about a favorite unknown creature of your own, head to the Community forums and join the conversation! The truth is out there... but the myths are a lot more fun.


Old Ned

Lake Utopia, New Brunswick

“Apparently there’s a monster in that lake. 'Old Ned,' they call him, and sightings go back into local indigenous folklore. My grandfather claimed to have seen it as a boy, serpent-like and scaly and swimming very quickly across the lake. You can well imagine that hearing that story, the imagination of six-year-old me latched in to what that must have been like for my grandfather’s 10-year-old self back in the 1920s!” yodaddeo


Big Muddy Monster

Murphysboro, Illinois

“Murphysboro, Illinois, (near Southern Illinois University-Carbondale) has repeated sightings (and smellings) of the Big Muddy Monster. Many believe it may be related to (if not the same as) the Creve Coeur Monster, sighted near the St. Louis suburb. This is an animal often likened to Sasquatch in size and appearance, but with a distinct ‘skunky’ smell. Those who believe the two cryptids are the same surmise that the animal swam down the Big Muddy River in Murphysboro to the Mississippi River and, thence, north to the Missouri River, by which it swam to a bend in the river near Creve Coeur.” — flashgourd


Bunny Man

Northern Virginia

“Virginia, it’s the Bunny Man, but I don’t know if we can consider it a cryptid or a ghost story. One story is that he was a man who escaped a state facility and lived in the forest and wore rabbit pelts to stay warm. The other is the same except, there’s an experiment that goes horribly wrong (like all good cryptid tales) at the facility and he becomes … HALF MAN/HALF BUNNY!” — jonathancarey


Rougarou

Louisiana

“Here in Louisiana, the local cryptid is the rougarou, which has many spellings, and derives from the French loup-garou, which literally means ‘werewolf.’ Although relatively common across the French-speaking world, like so many things, it appears to have gained particular prominence in the swamps of Louisiana.” — theinsomniac4life


Lake Worth Monster

Lake Worth, Texas

“In the wilds on north Tarrant County roamed the Lake Worth Monster, supposedly caught on camera in 1969. Never saw it myself, but it caused a big scare in the area.” — bubbahargo


Grassman

Ohio

“Cuyahoga Valley National Park has a giant hominid called the ‘Grassman’ and he has three toes for some reason. I really hope he’s more Swamp Thing than Bigfoot.” Samir Patel


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Goatman

Prince George’s County, Maryland

"A ‘lovers lane’–type of cryptid that reportedly attacks parked cars with an axe. An escaped experiment from the local USDA or University of Maryland laboratories?” mafisc


White River Monster

Newport, Arkansas

“In Arkansas, there is what is known as the ‘White River Monster,’ a large creature reportedly first spotted off the banks of the White River as far back as the Civil War. It’s a big, scaly, fish-type thing, about 12 feet long, with a single horn on its head, that supposedly sank a riverboat or two. — second8d


Hopkinsville Goblins

Christian County, Kentucky

“I grew up in Kentucky and heard stories about the Kelly Green Men, aka Hopkinsville Goblins. In 1955 two families were terrorized by aliens or goblins or something. They were assumed to be aliens and while they are called the Kelly Green Men, their skin was actually gray. There’s now a festival held in Kelly, Kentucky.”ohthesunshinesbright


Oklahoma Octopus

Oklahoma

“We’re all about some Bigfoot here in Oklahoma what with a festival and all, but my personal favorite is … the terrifying menace that is the Oklahoma Octopus (extra points for being alliterative)!” shatomica


Melon Heads

Kirtland, Ohio

“Growing up, we always heard stories about the Melon Heads that lived in the woods between Kirtland and Chardon, Ohio. The story was that there was a doctor who lived in the woods who somehow acquired a bunch of children, possibly from a mental hospital, and performed experiments on them that caused their heads to become bulbous and misshapen. One night, the children revolted and burned down the doctor’s house and they now roam the woods looking for human contact.” davekoen


Lizard Man

Lee County, South Carolina

“I’ve got an unusual one for you. As a child back in the mid-80s in South Carolina, I lived around the Lee County–Florence County border. This story erupted on the scene and stuck around for years. The report centered around a 7-foot-tall ‘Lizard Man.’ It was a huge thing. TV crews from all over the country showed up, people were selling merchandise on the side of the road, etc. [...] Everything from ‘The Lizard Man ate my dog’ to reports of the Lizard Man running across I-20 carrying a deer. After one of the initial reports was proven false, chatter began to die down, but for years afterward it would fire up again if an unexplained event occurred. There was even a televised resurgence as recently as 2008 when CNN did a bit on. Crazy!” Bacon_McBeardy


Honey Island Swamp Monster

Louisiana

“The Honey Island Swamp Monster is basically a swamp Bigfoot from the area around Honey Island Swamp in southeast Louisiana.” HaleyJo


Dire Wolf

Uintah County, Utah

“Not sure what it was called, but I listened to a podcast about cryptids and it talked about basically a modern day, dire wolf/human combo that lived on a ranch somewhere in Utah. A family moved into an old ranch and noticed that all the windows and doors were tightly secured and that there had been wolf sightings years ago in that area. The new owner didn’t think much of it until they found some dead cows with holes in them. No blood. Then the owner saw what looked like a wolf from far away. The wolf creature basically ends up running up to him and he shoots it. The gun does no visible harm even though it made a hole in its shoulder. Then the wolf creature casually walks away. The guy ends up looking for one of his missing cows and finds it dead. He also finds a calf getting attacked by the thing and being carried off. If I remember correctly he tries chasing it down and it outruns him on his horse. The guy doesn’t know what he’s up against so he tells a local wildlife expert who shows him different species of wolves. They pass a picture of the creature and the wildlife expert tells him that it’s a dire wolf and it hasn’t been alive for thousands of years. This one freaked me out because bulletproof giant wolves that were supposed to be dead is something that would definitely take advantage of my mild fear of dogs.” AloiPokie


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Loveland Frogman

Loveland, Ohio

“The Loveland Frogman, from Loveland, Ohio, is one of my local favorites. [...] I love how they have been reported to wield sticks as tools, and somehow make them emit sparks, meaning they must have some kind of magic! Such a quirky and random cryptid.” TThom2007


Michigan Dogman

Wexford County, Michigan

“In the woods of Northwest Lower Michigan there is said to be a bipedal dog creature that has a howl that (conveniently) sounds of a human shriek. It’s so entrenched in local folklore that there is actually a song about it that is played on the radio every year. Also a local filmmaker made a movie about it starring Larry Joe Campbell! It even appeared in episodes of the shows Monster Quest and Monsters and Mysteries in America.” TD24601


Bullebak

Amsterdam, Netherlands

“The Bullebak lives under a bridge across one of the many canals in Amsterdam. Children are told that the Bullebak might come out of its hiding [place] and grab them, so they better behave. The Amsterdam Council, not to be outdone, actually named two bridges after the infamous Bullebak. So a visitor might try out the bridge in the Marnixstraat crossing the picturesque Brouwersgracht canal. Or [they] can choose to admire the view from the bridge to the equally enjoyable Bloemgracht canal, just a bit farther up the same street. Take care though, since the Bullebak seems to have an equally voracious appetite for unwary travelers.” Ben_Bugter


Mogollon Monster

Arizona

“In the mountains of central Arizona we have the Mogollon Monster, a Southwestern variant of Bigfoot. First sighting seems to have been by Boy Scouts in the Payson, Arizona, area in the early 1940s. Other tales involve attacks on prospectors in remote cabins, harassment of campers in the Sierra Ancha, etc. When I was a Scout in the early 1960s, tales of these encounters were told around the campfire to mutually scare the bejeezus out of one another. Good luck getting to sleep in your tent!” — Joe_Schallan


Beast of Bray Road

Elkhorn, Wisconsin

“There are several encounter stories about it, ranging from a dog-like humanoid running across a road to three of the creatures hunched over a watering hole, observed in secret from a distance. The beast seems to be a human-canine hybrid, not a werewolf. It was first reported in 1935 but I don’t know that there has been any activity lately.” Rugglesby


Taniwha

New Zealand

“In New Zealand we have many taniwha. They are beings that live in deep pools in rivers, dark caves, or in the sea, especially in places with dangerous currents or deceptive breakers (giant waves). They may be considered highly respected kaitiaki (protective guardians) of people and places, or in some places as dangerous, predatory beings. They often have a row of spines along their back. Many Pacific peoples from around the South Pacific also have taniwha. I have never seen one but they are taken very seriously here. Even the government takes it seriously. If they are building a new road and a known taniwha is present they will build around it.” — maxbrownnz


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Tokoloshe

South Africa

“In South Africa, the Tokoloshi is an evil creature, about a foot high, resembling an evil monkey. Locals believe that raising the bed above the ground will keep you safe. As a kid, I loved climbing onto the beds raised up on bricks or empty paint tins.” martin_9cb0ad49


Bunyip

Australia

“The Bunyip is a First Peoples legend, a creature who generally lives around waterholes and billabongs. Traditionally, they are scary creatures, often translated as “evil spirit,” but there are also stories of friendly bunyips, and almost all kids who grew up here are familiar with the children’s book Alexander Bunyip. There are some theories that it may be based on one of the many megafauna that populated Australia for thousands of years, but it is also likely that it is completely fictional, and related to the many well known Dreamtime stories of our First Peoples that explain the world and its wonders.” — xenchik


Snallygaster

Maryland

“Even though I had grown up in Maryland (Baltimore County), I first learned of the legend of the Snallygaster just a few years ago as its latest incarnation, as a D.C. beer jamboree of the same name. A snallygaster is dragon-like beast that was known to inhabit Central Maryland and the Middletown area of Frederick County out on the Maryland panhandle. It would fly around, quietly snatch people, and was also reputed to use its sharp teeth to suck the blood of its victims. Seven pointed stars—still seen on barns to this day—were thought to keep the beast at bay. There were local newspaper articles about it in 1909, which were later revealed to be a hoax used to drum up subscriptions for the publishing newspaper. The snallygaster even makes an appearance in Fallout 76. [...] I’m just glad I never saw it.” — Theomurgy


Bête du Gévaudan

Lozère, France

“In France we had the ‘Bête du Gévaudan,’ the Gevaudan beast. Half-real, half-myth, we are not sure yet of what it was, but learning this story at school in history class got me a bit frightened.” — Enzo_RhodeHagen


The Very Real Search for the Bible's Mythical Manna

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Scholars, soldiers, and scientists have long puzzled over the supernatural substance.

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When the Israelites escape the pharaoh’s army in the Book of Exodus, they are left to wander the desert, half-starving. What is the point of leaving Egypt, they ask themselves, only to perish from hunger in the wilderness? Could dying in freedom really be preferable to living in chains? According to the text, God addresses Moses during this discord, telling him, “Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you.” The next day, “upon the face of the wilderness there lay a small round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground.”

Manna, the heaven-sent food said to have sustained the Israelites for forty years, has long captured the imagination of scholars, soldiers, and scientists alike. Many have mined biblical verses for clues about the Old Testament substance. Adding to the puzzle are the other descriptions of the food in the Bible: on hot days, manna melted in the sun. If not gathered quickly enough, it rotted and bred worms. In Exodus, it’s referred to as “like coriander seed, white,” with a taste “like wafers made with honey.” Numbers, on the other hand, likens the flavor to “fresh oil” and describes how the Israelites “ground it in mills, or beat it in a mortar, and baked it in pans, and made cakes of it.”

In addition to this list of traits and possible culinary applications, manna also had seemingly supernatural qualities as well. It spontaneously regenerated each morning, even in convenient double quantities on the day before the sabbath. According to the Jewish mystical treatise known as the Zohar, the consumption of manna imparted sacred knowledge of the divine. Another Jewish text, The Book of Wisdom, even claims that the flavor of manna magically changed according to the tastes of the person who ate it.

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Commentary on manna is not exclusive to the Jewish tradition. In the New Testament, manna is mentioned in both the Gospel of John and the Book of Revelation. In a sermon delivered shortly after the Feeding of the Five Thousand, Jesus compares God’s gift of body-nourishing manna to his own ability to eternally nourish the soul: “I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever.” References to manna are also present in Islamic texts: one Hadith passage has the prophet Muhammad likening desert truffles to manna.

Moses and his followers were apparently befuddled by their strange foodstuff. Exodus relates that they “wist [knew] not what it was” that they were eating. As for what the Israelites said upon first beholding their heavenly sustenance, translators and scholars are deeply divided. The King James Bible renders the phrase "man hu" as “this is manna.” Others parse the Israelites’ words as “This is a gift.” Still others have the Israelites reacting with a quizzical “What is this?”—a confusion that would be shared by those who later endeavored to figure out what manna could be.

Over the years, a number of scientists have also attempted to pin down a real-world analogue for manna. For some, like Israeli entomologist Shimon Fritz Bodenheimer, such an activity was an opportunity to use ancient sources to glean information about little-studied natural phenomena. Biologist Roger S. Wotton, whose study “What Was Manna?” runs through the varied theories surrounding the supernatural substance, believed that the exercise could lead to a more skeptical reading of the Bible.

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The ideas advanced by scholars over the years vary as widely as their motivations. In their book Plants of the Bible, botanists Harold and Alma Moldenke argue that there were several kinds of food collectively known as manna. One of these, they posit, is a swift-growing algae (from the genus Nostoc) known to carpet the desert floor in Sinai when enough dew on the ground allowed it to grow. The Moldenkes also make the case that a number of lichen species (Lecanora affinus, L. esculenta, and L. fruticulosa) native to the Middle East have been known to shrivel up and travel tumbleweed-like on the wind, or even “rain down” when dry. Nomadic pastoralists, they report, use the lichen to make a type of bread.

The lichen theory, the Moldenkes argue, would explain both how the Israelites prepared their manna and why they might have spoken of it as having fallen from heaven. A multi-decade diet exclusively of algae or lichen would certainly explain why the Israelites complain bitterly that the lack of normal food had left them feeling like their very souls had dried away. Cambridge historian R.A. Donkin also notes that L. esculenta was used in the Arab world as a medicine, an additive to honey wine, and a fermentation agent.

The idea of a desert-growing food also had a military application. According to Donkin, the troops of Alexander the Great might have staved off starvation by eating L. esculenta while on campaign. French forces stationed in Algeria in the 19th century experimented with lichen, their candidate for biblical manna. They hoped that a readily available desert foodstuff as a source of nutrition for soldiers and horses in arid areas could allow for the consolidation of colonial power.

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Poking a hole in the lichen theory, however, is the fact that L. esculenta, one of the most commonly cited possibilities for a “manna lichen,” doesn’t grow in Sinai. Instead, the current frontrunner in the manna quest is not lichen or algae but a type of sticky secretion found on common desert plants. Insects that rest on the bark of certain shrubs leave behind a substance that can solidify into pearl-like, sweet-tasting globules. Often referred to as manna, this secretion has both culinary and medicinal uses. In Iranian traditional medicine, one variety is used as a treatment for neonatal jaundice. In his 1947 article “The Manna of Sinai,” Bodenheimer floats the theory that this substance have been what the ancient Israelites ate as well. He also identifies the species of scale insects and plant lice whose larvae and females produce the so-called “honeydew.”

In recent times, some have gone past trying to pinpoint what manna might be and attempted to taste the biblical food for themselves. Last summer, the Washington Post reported on D.C. chef Todd Gray’s quest to make manna the next big trend in haute cuisine. The manna that Gray and other chefs such as Wylie Dufresne use is a sweet resin imported from Iran that sells for $35 an ounce. But stringent trade sanctions placed upon Iran in recent years have forced Gray to improvise his own ersatz versions (one substitute manna blended sumac, sesame seeds and fennel pollen.) Such legal hurdles add yet another layer of inaccessibility to a substance wondered over and quested after for millennia.

For Sale: A Historical Map of the Imagination

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Bernard Sleigh's dreamland mashes up myths, fairy tales, and nursery rhymes.

The journey begins with a stormy sea. There, waves lash the shore and tritons ride piscine steeds, while a wooden ship and an unfortunate soul are half-sunk nearby, in a white whirlpool.

At first glance, things aren’t much better on land. The shore is rocky and steep. A note beneath a darkened castle cautions: “No landing here.” Werewolves snarl from a cliff, and a pair of dragons claw toward Castle Warlock, a fortress bordered by the yellow-orange Valley of Fire and the inky-black Witch Woods, where a quartet with pointy hats soars on broomsticks. Nearby, three terrible, unknowable creatures—claws extended and mouths open—poke out of holes in a mountain. “Here dwelle horned Monsters,” a warning reads, in case it wasn’t obvious.

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But this nightmarish menagerie is just one corner of a map by Bernard Sleigh, a British author and illustrator. Printed in 1917, An Ancient Mappe of Fairyland, Newly Discovered and Set Forth beckons viewers to tromp through an imagined landscape populated by creatures and characters from ancient myths, Arthurian legends, folklore, and more contemporary nursery rhymes. It’s a whimsical scene, produced at a time when wonder was sorely needed.

As viewers wander toward the middle of the six-foot-long map, they encounter Peter Piper wading into placid water, while Puss in Boots strikes a pose on shore. Humpty Dumpty sits safe atop a brick wall (for the moment), and Rock-a-Bye Baby dozes on a leafy treetop. Old Mother Hubbard and Miss Muffet are neighbors in a block of row houses, while Red Riding Hood and Cinderella live farther afield. Continuing on to the right, figures from classical myths appear in battle or repose—centaurs and nymphs, Hercules and Perseus, Andromeda and sirens. Sometimes, the characters mingle in surprising ways: Narcissus gazes at his reflection just outside the entrance to Merlin’s woods.

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It is said that Sleigh initially sketched a prototype of the map several years earlier, to entertain his kids. The large panorama was later published and marketed as nursery decor. A version soon traveled to New York, where it was displayed in the children’s division of the New York Public Library. Then, two decades later, the fantastical illustration reemerged as decorative fabric. Across the dense landscape, “everything is very familiar,” says Lauren Chen, reference and cataloguing librarian at the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library, who included the map in a 2015 exhibition about literary landscapes. The figures who populated the map—and imaginations—a century ago are still hanging around. Now, a print of the epic tableau is for sale at Geographicus Rare Antique Maps.

Though the map is whimsical, it appeared on the tail end of a boom in allegorical maps that had a political cast. These were intended to be persuasive or propagandistic, and “utilized symbols of nationality and unity or highlighted differences between other nations comically,” says Philippa (Pip) Gregory, a historian at the University of Kent who specializes in cartoons. One might show countries as animals rushing to feast on the same prey, for instance, as a metaphor for feuding over resources. “This attitude continued into the First World War, where nations aimed to highlight the differences between themselves and their enemies,” Gregory says.

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While Sleigh’s map isn’t propaganda, some have read its storybook quality as a reaction to the tumultuous political climate that had plunged so many nations into the war. Chen says that the map is escapist, and it’s likely that resonated with viewers—and maybe was a balm for Sleigh himself. As Britain experienced national challenges, Sleigh was rattled by personal ones, including the dissolution of his marriage and a bicycling accident that nearly severed his thumb, threatening his livelihood as an artist. (He eventually mastered the art of gripping a paintbrush or pencil without that digit.) The public was eager to be enchanted—even by charming hoaxes, such as the Cottingley Fairies, photographic “proof” of fairies that was also produced in 1917. “Could the map constitute a yearning for a return to pre-1914 Edwardian innocence?” antiquarian cartography scholars Tim Bryars and Tom Harper ask in A History of the Twentieth Century in 100 Maps.

“Compared with the devastated, bomb-blasted landscape of northern France, this vision of a make-believe land may have seemed a seductive escape for a European society bearing the psychological and physical scars of mass conflict,” they write. The landscape rewards close, careful looking. “Each time you look at it, there’s some new thing that you didn’t notice was there last time,” Chen says. Despite the wild seas, foreboding castles, and forest of flames, the landscape overall is beautiful and welcoming. In 1917, that may have made it an appealing destination—however impossible.

Neighbors Have Escalated Their War on the Eccentric ‘Flintstone House’

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Astroturf, dinosaurs, and the Great Gazoo pushed them over the edge.

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A small Bay Area town just renewed an ongoing conflict with one of its strangest landmarks. Nestled in the shrubbery along the California’s I-280, the orange and purple bulges of the Flintstone House at 45 Berryessa Avenue are a beloved milestone to commuters and a dreadful blight to neighbors. This week, the town of Hillsborough sued the house’s owner, Florence Fang, for code violations, according to a report by the Mercury News. The complaint does not mince words, calling the structure “a highly visible eyesore” that is “out of keeping with community standards,” which seems as close to a declaration of war as municipal language allows.

Despite the resemblance, the building wasn’t originally meant to evoke the iconic 1960s cartoon show. Bay Area architect William Nicholson designed the house in 1976 with a simple concept: a home made entirely out of curves. He was inspired by the technique known as monolithic dome construction, which involves plaster applied to wire mesh and inflated aeronautical balloons. Nicholson painted the resulting globular building off-white, cementing the house’s likeness to Fred Flintstone’s sweet Stone Age pad.

After changing hands several times and getting a new—perhaps even less municipally acceptable—paint job, which makes it look like the architectural equivalent of a Tide Pod, the house landed on the market in 2015 and languished without a buyer for two years. Desperate to sell, the owners slashed their original asking price of $4.2 million and even listed the place on Airbnb for $750 a night, until someone as iconoclastic as the house swooped in to buy it.

Florence Fang, noted media mogul and matriarch of one of the Bay Area’s most powerful and vituperated dynasties, bought the Flintstone House in 2017 for $2.8 million. Fang told the Mercury News that she had always wondered who lived in the house when she saw it while driving up I-280. As soon as she got a close look, she said, she fell in love. Fang leaned into the dwelling’s nickname and began making improvements to the landscape that seem straight out of Bedrock. Fang’s installations include, but are not limited to, several 15-foot-tall dinosaurs; an enormous metal woolly mammoth and giraffe; life-size models of Fred Flintstone, Dino, the Great Gazoo, and his saucer; and an enormous sign reading “Yabba Dabba Doo,” as well as a retaining wall, deck, parking strip, and steps. Oh, and an expansive astroturf lawn.

The local community wasn’t high on the house to begin with, but Fang’s improvements were several steps too far. Beyond the question of taste, the suit with the San Mateo Superior Court boils down to permits—or the lack thereof. According to the filing, the nearly life-size dinosaurs count as unenclosed structures that require prior approval and a building permit. Hillsborough issued stop work orders, it continues, that Fang ignored. It also singles out the astroturf and Flintstone figurines as landscape improvements that must to be removed immediately unless Fang can provide proof of prior approval by city officials, reports The East Bay Times. Atlas Obscura could not reach the reclusive Fang for comment, but her grandson Sean Fang told a CBS News affiliate that his grandmother “will fight to save the Flintstone House.”

It’s no surprise that the ultra-rich residents of Hillsborough—which made headlines after three residents were implicated in the recent college bribery scandal—have an extensive and mandatory review process for any home construction or landscaping projects. The town’s municipal code gives neighbors and community standards great sway over any one resident’s particular desires. Outside of the lawsuit, readers of the Mercury News seem divided over the status of the house. “What a wonderful escape from the mundane,” wrote commenter Creighton Sneetly. “Glad I don’t live within eye sight of that pile of dung,” countered commenter Old Time Hockey Fan. Good thing it’s not painted brown. Yet.

It's Official, This Is the Oldest Known Astrolabe in the World

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More than 500 years old, it was found with the oldest ship's bell.

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In 1503, on the way back from a violent escapade in India, part of Vasco da Gama’s 4th Portuguese India Armada went down in a storm off the coast of what is now Oman. The wreck was discovered more than 20 years ago, but is now being newly recognized for its exceptional assets. Guinness World Records, ever the archaeological authority, has now confirmed that the wreck’s astrolabe and bell—retrieved in 2013 and 2014—are the oldest known examples of either nautical device, after research published yesterday in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology explained the science behind the analysis.

Though astrolabes are known from written sources to date to the 6th century—predating da Gama’s Armada by roughly a millenium—few have ultimately survived. “It’s a dream” to recover an astrolabe, especially the oldest ever found, says David L. Mearns, one of the study’s authors and the project director for the wreck’s recovery. The rare artifacts went out of production in the 18th century, he says, and those that were not lost to shipwrecks were likely melted down and repurposed.

Astrolabes are used to measure the altitude of an object with respect to the horizon. With a chart of bright stars, it can be used to calculate latitude, or it can be used to measure the height of a mountain. This oldest astrolabe was likely made between 1496 and 1501. The portion recovered from the wreck measures less than seven inches in diameter and weighs less than one pound, and carries Portugal’s royal coat of arms. In a press release, the researchers explained that the object dates to a transitional moment in the tool’s history, and that it combines aspects of the older “planispheric” astrolabes with features of the “open-wheel” astrolabes that were not yet in use.

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Astrolabes are neat, but you'd be hard-pressed to find one on a boat today. Bells, such as the example found on the da Gama ship, on the other hand, are still common nautical equipment—though mostly decorative today, says Mearns. They’re neither technical marvels nor rare, but bells have also played important roles on ships since the late 15th century, according to the U.S. Navy. That makes this one, cast in 1498, particularly significant.

Their primary historical function has been to help sailors on watch duty keep time. Within every four-hour shift, for example, the bell would be rung every 30 minutes to indicate how many half-hours had elapsed. (At the end of a shift, in other words, a bell would be rung eight times.) The Brits, however, had to introduce a seemingly convoluted twist to this exercise after the 1797 Nore Mutiny. The ringing of five bells at 6:30 p.m. had been the sailors’ signal to begin the mutiny, so from then on, British ships rang their bells just once at that point in the watch.

Bells also played vital safety roles, as fire and fog alarms, for instance. And they could lead to trouble: In July 1779, during the American Revolution, an American unit was caught in a Newfoundland fog and overheard enemy bells. Once the fog lifted, the prepared Americans proceeded to capture 10 British ships worth more than a million dollars. Both bells and astrolabes had their limitations, even when they were state-of-the-art.

Scientists Are Fighting Fire (Ants) With Wasabi

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What’s good for the sushi is not good for the Solenopsis invicta.

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Fire ants certainly live up to their name. It can take up to a week to recover from their fierce stings, which cause large, hot welts, intense itching, and just a very unhappy outlook toward life. But relief may be close at hand, in the form of a team of Japanese and Taiwanese entomologists wielding science and wasabi.

In a paper published in the journal Applied Entomology and Zoology, a group of researchers led by the myrmecologist Yoshiaki Hashimoto, who teaches at the University of Hyogo in Kobe, Japan, found that lacing ant traps with a microencapsulated form of allyl isothiocyanate (AITC), an organic compound that causes the pungency in wasabi, horseradish, and mustard, kept fire ants away. Microencapsulation (read: making tiny capsules) preserves the AITC within a protective shell. Ants that came into contact with the AITC eventually died.

Global trade has accidentally exported fire ants (Solenopsis invicta) from their native South America in shipping containers. The ants have found their way into the United States, Australia and New Zealand, China, Taiwan, and Japan. The cost of eradicating these venomous marauders, which multiply rapidly and cause damage to agriculture, local fauna, and public health, is as high as $6 billion for the U.S. alone. The paper reports that migrating fire ants were first discovered in Japan at a sea port in Kobe in 2017.

To keep the ants at bay, the team of entomologists from the University of Hyogo, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, and National Taiwan University devised a way to use AITC extracted from the wasabi plant to fend off the ants. In microencapsulated form, the AITC compound releases slowly (a “controlled vapor release”), negating any irritation that might be caused by their excessive pungency. Microencapsulated AITC is also sensitive to moisture, and releases faster in more humid climes. “Because the regions infested heavily by S. invicta in China are located in the humid subtropical zones, the moisture sensitive property of the microencapsulated AITC could be particularly useful as S. invicta repellent,” writes Hashimoto, in an email. This microencapsulated AITC can be applied to plastic packing materials to prevent fire ants from getting into packages, including perishables, as AITC is a naturally occurring, non-toxic, and colorless oil.

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To test their theory, the scientists devised three scenarios in an experiment site next to a fire ant mound. They put out 10 traps, each with a microencapsulated AITC-laced polyethylene film wrapped around the bait (a fried snack of corn grits). Then, in a control test, they put out 10 ant traps containing a regular plastic film and oily corn grits. In the final test case, they put the bait out first, caught the red ants, and then put them inside a trap with the AITC-laced film. All the ant traps were small, transparent plastic tubes with a five millimeter hole cut into the screw top to provide a point of entry.

The results proved conclusively that fire ants fear wasabi. Only the trap with the regular plastic film caught ants. The one with the AITC film repelled the ants—the researchers recorded a video of ants getting to the top of the bait tube and recoiling from the tiny hole marking the point of entry. In the final instance, ants placed inside the small tube containing AITC film died within 40 minutes of exposure.

The use of wasabi-infused plastic film to repel invading fire ants offers a sharp new research direction for the disparate fields of food science and entomology.

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