John Edmonstone was a mentor to the budding teenage naturalist.

John Edmonstone was born a slave, died a free man, and somewhere along the way taught Charles Darwin all he knew about skinning and stuffing a bird.

Edmonstone grew up in the late 1770s on a plantation owned by Scottish politician Charles Edmonstone in Demerara, a region of South America in what is now Guyana. There, the politician often entertained his son-in-law, Charles Waterton, who would later become a famed naturalist and conservationist. While in Demerara, Waterton frequently traveled into the rain forest to observe the jungle and collect bird specimens. These journeys could be perilous alone, so he had John Edmonstone accompany him, and taught him to skin and stuff creatures on the spot, before they had a chance to decay in the humidity of the jungle, according to a story on Ozy.com. Waterton had a distinct preservation strategy that he passed on to Edmonstone, to soak his specimens in a sublimate of mercury and hollow them out so they appeared more lifelike. During these expeditions, Edmonstone also gained an expansive working knowledge of the flora and fauna of South America.

John gained his freedom in 1817 after traveling to Glasgow with Charles Edmonstone, as the Slave Trade Act of 1807 made the purchase or ownership of slaves illegal within the British Empire. He took up residence at 37 Lothian Street, just blocks from the University of Edinburgh, and gained employment by teaching students taxidermy and stuffing specimens for the local museum. During his tenure, he stuffed a great many birds—including swallows, water ouzels, and chaffinches—as well as one 15-foot-long boa constrictor.

Eventually, in 1826, the skilled taxidermist found himself saddled with an unusually ambitious apprentice. Just 17 years old, Charles Darwin had enrolled in the university to study medicine, but soon realized he had no interest (or stomach) for tedious lectures and anesthesia-free surgeries. Leaning into his growing interest in ornithology, Darwin decided to study under Edmonstone. Every day for two months, Darwin paid Edmonstone a guinea for an hour-long lesson on stuffing birds of all kinds. The two grew close. As Darwin plucked feathers from swallows, Edmonstone told the teen about the tropical wildlife of his homeland. In his memoir, Darwin later called his mentor “an intimate,” recalling their many hours spent in conversation.

On his 1831 voyage on HMS Beagle, Darwin made his famous observation that finches across the Galapagos Islands had distinct differences in beak shape, suggesting all had evolved from a common ancestor. Darwin preserved the Galapagos finches using the techniques Edmonstone taught him, creating specimens that would become crucial in support of his theory on the evolution of species through natural selection.

Some historians suggested Darwin’s relationship with Edmonstone—along with the abolitionist beliefs of his two grandfathers—contributed to the naturalist’s famous hatred of slavery, writes Clifford B. Frith in Charles Darwin's Life with Birds: His Complete Ornithology. Darwin first came face to face with slavery on HMS Beagle as well, where he saw children whipped and tortured.

Historians know very little about Edmonstone’s personal life—such as whether he married or had children—and his presence in history has been largely relegated to a footnote in Darwin’s biography. Much academic writing about Edmonstone employs racist language, even in stories published as recently as 1978. But certain scientists are making efforts to unearth Edmonstone’s story from the margins of scientific history. As Danielle Lee, a professor of biology at the University of Missouri, wrote in a column for Scientific American: “The next time I teach evolutionary biology, I am definitely including Edmonstone in my lectures. I hope others do as well.”

Atlas Obscura Rule #42: Always read the plaque.

Hoping to make your next trip especially inspiring and informative? Try following this simple rule: Always, always, always, always, always read the plaque.

All over the world, there are modest plaques and humble historical markers that recount often fascinating histories. They're less showy than statues or monuments, but plaques can offer just as much joy and fascination—if you can find them. We recently asked Atlas Obscura readers in our Community forums to tell us about their favorite unsung plaques, and they showed us dozens of incredible little markers.

Check out a selection of some of our favorite overlooked plaques below, and if you know of a terrific unsung plaque that you'd like to share, head over to the Community forums and keep the conversation going! Plaques can be easy to miss, but these are unforgettable.

Triangular Jog Marker

Kentucky-Tennessee Border

“1780s surveying technology had its limits when marking the long, imaginary line separating Tennessee and Kentucky. Combine that with iron ore in the ground affecting compasses, and bad weather, and you get a problem that lasts most of the next century. The issue was destined to come to light as plots of land are surveyed and sold. Imagine finding out that your 100-acre farm is not in the state you thought it was in and trying to resolve that with two different states. Slightly ironic that a parcel that was technically supposed to be in Tennessee is now home to a horse-racing facility with gambling that would be illegal there except for them letting it slide by in 1859.” — KenJ

Fountain of Youth Plaque

The Bronx, New York

“From what I can tell from this garbled newspaper transcription, it was a failed scam by the pipe owner/monument maker to turn the Bronx into a pilgrimage site. In fact, it’s been so overlooked that there doesn’t seem to be much other documentation of the plaque, despite its place inside one of the Bronx’s most famous attractions!” — larissa

Oscar's Old Home Plaque

Los Angeles, California

“This is behind some shrubs at my local Home Depot.” — scott9

Stage Coach Route Marker

Norwalk, California

“On the 11000 Block of Imperial Highway in Norwalk, California, sits this plaque marking the Stage Coach Route between Los Angeles and San Diego. I could not find any other information through the City of Norwalk regarding the plaque. Interestingly, a short time after seeing the plaque, I had visited the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles and was surprised to see a display cabinet with the same type of plaque, which only had the vague description of ‘concrete address milestone.’ I have a feeling the museum description of the plaque misses the mark on the history and purpose of the plaque.” — brockwarwick

Godfather of Bizarre Magick Plaque

Edinburgh, Scotland

“A plaque dedicated to the former location of the Edinburgh Wax Museum and Count Dracula Theatre, located at the entrance to New Assembly Close.” — SEANETTA

Swaggart Plaque

Indio, California

“I stopped at a truck stop in Indio, California, to use the bathroom and found a plaque commemorating Jimmy Swaggart’s 1991 arrest for soliciting a prostitute.”— Vidalia Editor's note: You've got to appreciate the pun here too, since the Coachella Valley is famous for its date farms.

Mrs. Humphrey's House Plaque

Stromness, Orkney

“I always liked this one in Stromness, Orkney!” — clarissal

Karl Malden Plaque

Los Angeles, California

“Because I live in L.A. and things like this happen and it’s kinda funny. (A post office, by the way.)” — tralfamadore

King Eggbert Plaque

Dore, South Yorkshire

“In a quiet suburb of Sheffield called Dore, there is a plaque that shows it is the place where the country England was first established. I am a teacher in Dore and we are going to discuss whether our little village should be a much better-known tourist site!” — richard

Blind Fred Plaque

Hackney, London

“In a hidden corner of St. John’s Church grounds in Hackney, London, hides a brief memorial to Blind Fred. He is said to have been ‘shabbily but neatly dressed in an overcoat and bowler hat, and sat all day long, in all weathers, in the depths of that gloomy churchyard, reading a braille bible and selling matches and bootlaces.’ He died in 1933 and is remembered as ‘a sunny soul.’” — deadnot

End of the Transcontinental Railroad Marker

Alameda, California

“Sitting between two unassuming benches on the sidewalk in front of a gas station in Alameda, California, the end of the Transcontinental Railroad!” — bona2vada

First Mention of Baseball Plaque

Pittsfield, Massachusetts

“First written mention of baseball in the U.S. All over a few broken windows.” — benbee036

Ladies of the Night Plaque

Ukiah, California

“This plaque is located about a foot above the sidewalk on West Church Street, Ukiah, in Mendocino County, California. It’s easily overlooked.” — acard

Kier Refinery Marker

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

“First commercial refinery. How about that?” — anodyne33

Buster Keaton Studios Plaques

Los Angeles, California

“I’m a huge plaque reader. It annoys my wife sometimes. I have to stop and read everything. Here’s one that unsettled me. So, back in the '80s, a plaque was placed at the location of Buster Keaton’s former studios in Hollywood. In perfect Keaton-esque fashion, they got the location wrong. It was actually on the other side of the street. So just a few months ago, a new set of plaques was added, correcting the older plaques (and also noting that Chaplin filmed some significant work there). Across the street from this location is a theater company I’ve done a lot of work with. When we were at a former location, we did a show about Keaton, called Stoneface. My job was to sit at a piano on the corner of the stage and score the play as if it were a silent movie. The show got a lot of notice, and one night Dick Van Dyke censors showed up in our little 80-seat theater and enjoyed the hell out of it. A couple years later, we moved to the new location across from Buster’s old studio. Van Dyke is now a fan of the company and will occasionally show up to other shows. So after one such show, one of our Stoneface cast members approaches him to tell him how much it meant to everyone that he showed up to see our play. He said that he was such a huge Buster Keaton fan that he had wouldn’t have missed it. ‘Have you seen the plaque?’ my friend says. ‘What plaque?’ says Van Dyke. My friend takes him around the corner and shows it to him. Van Dyke had no idea about it, and was a bit awestruck. So my friend had this marvelous little moment of standing in a quiet corner in Hollywood with one of his comedy heroes who himself was dumbfounded to be in the zone of his own comedy hero. How cool is that?” — tralfamadore

Responses have been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

The reasons were both religious and practical.

On February 18, 1872, a group of Japanese Buddhist monks broke into the Imperial Palace to seek an audience with the emperor. In the ensuing fight with the guards, half of them were killed. At issue was something the monks considered an existential spiritual crisis for their country. A few weeks earlier, the emperor had eaten beef, effectively repealing a 1,200-year-old ban on consuming animals. The monks believed the new trend of eating meat was “destroying the soul of the Japanese people.”

For both religious and practical reasons, the Japanese mostly avoided eating meat for more than 12 centuries. Beef was especially taboo, with certain shrines demanding more than 100 days of fasting as penance for consuming it. The story of Japan’s shift away from meat began with the arrival of Buddhism from Korea in the 6th century. At that time, the Japanese were meat eaters. Venison and wild boar (which was sometimes called yama kujira, or “mountain whale") were particularly popular. Aristocrats enjoyed hunting and feasting on deer entrails and wild fowl.

Yet Buddhism teaches that humans can be reincarnated into other living beings, including animals. Meat eaters run the risk of consuming their own reincarnated ancestors: not a very palatable thought. Buddhist principles of respect for life and avoidance of waste, especially in the case of food, slowly began to shape Japanese culture and seep into native Shinto beliefs.

In 675 A.D., Emperor Tenmu issued the first official decree banning consumption of beef, horse, dog, chicken, and monkey during the height of farming season from April to September. As time went on, the practice would be solidified and expanded into a year-round taboo against all meat eating.

But the meat ban also had secular roots. Even before Buddhism, meat wasn’t an essential part of the Japanese diet. As a nation of islands, Japan has always relied on fish and seafood as staples. Additionally, writes historian Naomishi Ishige, “protein was ingested from rice rather than from meat or milk.” Raising animals is resource-intensive, so Japanese farmers working with limited space in their mountainous island nation largely avoided it. It was also in the best interest of the country to discourage the eating of useful farm animals, since there were relatively few of them in Japan.

While all meat was considered corrupt and unclean, eating wild animals wasn’t completely unheard of. Plus, the Japanese aristocracy never completely gave up the practice. There are records of taxes paid and gifts sent to emperors in the form of pork, beef, and even milk. Meat was still taboo among the upper classes, but it was often treated as a special food with medicinal properties. (Even Buddhist monks could occasionally consume meat on doctor’s orders.) In the 18th century, the Hikone Clan sent their annual gift of beef pickled in sake to the shogun in packages labeled as medicine. Birds were more acceptable as foodstuff than mammals, and dolphin and whale was frequently eaten, as they were considered fish.

Some mammals were more forbidden than others. According to Ishige, “the Buddhist concept of the transmigration of souls and the taboo on mammal meat became linked, and the belief spread that a person who ate the flesh of a four-legged animal would after death be reincarnated as a four-legged animal.” One government decree stated that anyone who’d eaten wild goat, wolf, rabbit, or raccoon dog (tanuki) was required to repent for five days before visiting a shrine. Those who’d eaten pork or venison, however, were required to repent for 60 days. For eaters of beef and horse meat, it was 150 days. On the rare occasions that they did eat meat, Japanese people cooked it on fires outside the home and avoided looking directly at their altars afterwards so as not to contaminate them.

When Portuguese missionaries arrived in Japan in the early 16th century, they had been counseled that the locals considered drinking milk to be like drinking blood and that eating beef was unthinkable. Even the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi supposedly questioned Portuguese missionaries on their practice of eating beef, as cows were so useful as farm animals. Nevertheless, the Portuguese were able to spread some of their cuisine to the locals, including sweets, tempura, and beef, which Kyotoites called waka, from the Portuguese vaca.

Dietary customs began to change faster in the late 19th century. After Emperor Meiji assumed power in 1868, the Japanese government moved to end their two centuries of isolation and adopt Western practices and technology as quickly as possible. Plus, many believed "that one reason why the Japanese had poor physiques compared to Westerners was that they did not eat meat or dairy products,” writes Ishige.

The Meiji government began to chip away at the ancient dietary taboos. They set up companies to produce meat and dairy products. When the emperor himself ate meat to ring in the New Year in 1872, it went a long way toward convincing the Japanese to abandon their meatless customs. It wasn’t an easy transition. Devout Buddhists, such as the monks who attempted to break into the Imperial Palace and rural peasants who relied on their animals for farm work, had long accepted the idea that eating meat was a sin. One prefectural decree from 1872 reads “Although beef is a wonderfully nutritious food, there are still a great number of people barring our attempt at westernization by clinging to conventional customs,” adding, “Such action is contrary to the wishes of the Emperor.”

In the end, the wishes of the Emperor prevailed. As Japan opened up to the world, it began to absorb meat-based dishes from Korea, China, and the West. Soon, expensive Western-style restaurants serving meat popped up in cities, followed by affordable Japanese restaurants serving a medicinal beef stew, which would evolve into the dish sukiyaki. Today, the Japanese eat almost as much meat as they do seafood. While it took a few decades, meat is now as much a part of Japanese cuisine as sushi.

It can help researchers track diet, reconstruct food webs, and identify threats to wildlife.

When a coyote dies after being struck by a car on a Southern California road, Rachel Larson wants to get her hands on it.

Sometimes, she gets a heads up from an official via email. Other times, she'll come upon a dead coyote when an intern loads an animal up and drives it to a lab. Larson has worked on coyote carcass dissections in the bed of a pick-up truck and in gleaming, stainless steel facilities that look like a veterinarian's office. Wherever Larson comes across these unfortunate creatures, she goes for the whiskers.

She yanks the longest whisker from the left side of the coyote’s face. “It’s hard to do with your bare hands, because they’re in there decently well,” Larson says. “But with pliers or tweezers, if you give a good, hard tug, they usually come right out. It’s like plucking out eyebrow hairs.”

It’s not that whiskers sprouting from the left are any better than ones from the right, but Larson, a master’s student in biology at California State University, Northridge, needs to be diligent, to standardize the data she’s collecting.

She’s hardly the first to look to roadside remains for clues about the lives of animals. Roadkill has long been instructive for wildlife managers and engineers, because it can pinpoint where crossings are especially treacherous. The body count also helps researchers gauge seasonal changes, the species involved, and whether animals are using bridges, tunnels, or other structures designed to link habitats fragmented by roads.

But Larson has a different goal in mind. She isn’t trying to figure out where the animals were going. She wants to know what they’ve been eating.

It’s hard to say exactly how many coyotes are roaming Southern California—they are “intelligent, suspicious, and wary,” which makes them notoriously hard to count, Larson says—but they’re pretty ubiquitous. Researchers use all sorts of tactics to figure out what they’re up to, from camera traps to radio collars. But none of those offer much insight into their eating habits over time. Researchers interested in meals are left with dissecting piles of coyote scat. The trouble is that their piles—with bones, tufts of hair, and seeds inside—only reveal a recent feast. Since coyotes tend to stalk the same territory over and over again, the coordinators of the scat study, led by Justin Brown, a National Park Service ecologist, hope that repeat visits to the same sites will let them track the diet of a single coyote over time.

Even under the best circumstances, scat studies provide a series of snapshots. Whiskers, on the other hand, are like a time-lapse film. By cutting them into small segments, Larson can estimate how the animal’s diet changed over a period of several weeks or months. Roadkill whiskers also solve another problem that the National Park Service runs into in its scat-based efforts, especially in urban and suburban areas: How to account for human cuisine. It’s clear that they nosh on stuff made for us—wrappers can show up in the scat—but succulent burgers and pillowy bread go down easy and get digestedquickly, so people food leaves little trace. But it can be observed in whiskers. “With these more elusive mammals that are kind of hard to physically get your hands on to take the samples,” Larson says, “roadkill’s a great way to get a robust data set.” It's a means of making the best out of a bad situation, by learning something along the way.

Depending on how long a whisker been growing, the “longest” could be a little over an inch, or nearly six inches. Larson then soaks the sample in a mix of chloroform and ethanol to dissolve dirt and fats, and then snips it into roughly 200-microgram segments—anywhere from a few to a couple dozen per whisker.

Larson’s data come from stable isotopes—variants of common elements that are lighter or heavier depending on how many neutrons they contain. Different plants have distinct isotopic signatures, and for Larson, the key is a carbon isotope that suggests the presence of corn. The typical American diet is chock-full of it: Corn syrup is an ingredient in scores of processed foods, even ones that aren’t sweet, and corn also shows up in our animal products, because it’s often used as livestock feed. When Larson loads a whisker sample into a mass spectrometer and finds an outsize ratio of heavy carbon isotopes—particularly carbon-13, which is a hallmark of corn, that’s a good clue that a coyote had been eating food made for people.

Another researcher recently tried a similar approach involving roadkill to see if stable isotopes could be used to learn about diets that are even harder for scientists to access—from the Cretaceous period, between 145 and 66 million years ago. Thomas Cullen, a postdoctoral research scientist in ecology and evolution at the Field Museum in Chicago, is curious about prehistoric food webs, and since stable isotopes can stay locked in teeth and bone for ages, he wondered if they could help paleontologists reconstruct dinosaur diets. Specifically, he wanted to know if this idea would work in a waterlogged environment, where creatures live and eat in both dry and damp areas, so he conducted a present-day, proof-of-concept study using roadkill in the most analogous environment he could find—Louisiana’s Atchafalaya River Basin. While “no place on Earth is truly equivalent today to what the Earth was like during the Mesozoic,” Cullen says, the warm, seasonally flooded bayou landscape “is roughly as close as we can get while still being readily accessible.”

In two days of scooping up roadkill, Cullen’s team gathered some 50 specimens, belonging to 15 species, from raccoons to nutria. They also used samples from museum collections and elsewhere to account for fish and other creatures unlikely to end up under wheels. Ultimately, the signal was a little fuzzy, as Cullen and his collaborators detail in a recent paper in Royal Society Open Science. “Everything’s eating a little bit of everything,” Cullen says. This didn’t work as well as they’d hoped, but it doesn’t mean it won’t: Future research could involve other stable isotopes, Cullen says, such as from calcium, magnesium, or zinc.

In the case of coyotes, though, a signal has definitely emerged, and information gleaned from the roadkill can help scientists figure out how these animals live—and how to help them. Future research will involve necropsies of the animals’ intestines to look for parasites, and the team is also looking for evidence of anticoagulants, which are often found in rat poison that they are likely consuming through prey. If they’ve ingested a lot of these chemicals, for example, a cut or bruise could be life-threatening. Sometimes, Larson says, “we’ve opened up coyotes and their body cavities are full of blood because they couldn’t stop internal bleeding.” These impacts might just be creeping along the food web. “Rats eat the poison, and maybe it doesn’t kill them right away, and then the coyotes eat the rats, and become very sick, and then mountain lions eat coyotes,” Larson says. By studying roadkill—of a relatively common variety—the researchers might eventually be able to give an entire ecosystem more of a fighting chance.

A 19th-century style guide displays the diversity of an empire.

At its height in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Ottoman Empire stretched through Central Asia to the Balkans on one axis, and from the Middle East down to North Africa on the other. There, Greeks, Albanians, Armenians, and Bulgarians traded materials and traditions with Turks, Syrians, and Egyptians. Silks from Aleppo and Damascus, muslin from Mosul, and Egyptian cotton were dyed with vibrant plant-based pigments such as saffron and pistachio, or colors derived from insects, such as cochineal and lac. Adornments—fur lining, gold applique, beads, and leather—layered the costumes that members of the imperial court used to draw attention to their status, and that members of the many ethnic groups comprising the empire used to display their heritage.

This sumptuous dress was illustrated—and later photographed—in costume-books that were given to foreign rulers and emissaries by the Ottoman court. One watercolor collection, held by the New York Public Library, was illustrated in Istanbul during the rule of Sultan Mahmud II, and presented to the Russian emperor Alexander III sometime between 1808 and 1826.

“It was basically propaganda—'Look how big we are, look how diverse we are'—without stating the obvious: We’re bigger than you,” says Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood, who is curating an exhibit of costumes from Ottoman-era Syria currently on view at the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles.

A hint of hair edging out from beneath a Turkish woman’s veil communicates that although she’s Muslim, she has progressive fashion sense. An Albanian sports an outfit that would later be adapted by some Greek groups: a pleated skirt, sheep’s-fleece cloak, and jaunty red cap, with a long tassel that differentiates it from an Ottoman fez. A Bulgarian cavalry member’s hairstyle sets him apart, despite his uniform. A janissary leader decked out in a brocaded vest, with medallions festooning his belt (like some premonition of Flavor Flav) lets people know that he’s in charge. “Clothing is a language without words,” says Vogelsang-Eastwood. However, the cloth dialects by which people communicated, illustrated in this collection, would not remain quite so colorful and diverse within the empire’s borders.

In 1826, sensing an impending threat from within, Mahmud II dissolved the elite janissary corps, a standing army that had grown increasingly corrupt and powerful. Three years later, he took on the role of fashion police as well, standardizing his court’s dress in Western style. The ethnic and religious differences so richly depicted in these illustrations were no longer so widely visible.

“When he placed the identical fez on all officials and allowed only a select few, such as the grand vizier, to wear headgear with a distinguishing feature, he laid claim to a new kind of sultanic control,” wrote Ottoman historian Donald Quataert in the International Journal of Middle East Studies in 1997. However, that control did not last. The Greeks had already declared an independent state in 1822, and those still under Ottoman rule would continue rebelling. Bulgaria gained independence in 1878, and the end of the empire was in sight.

The illustrations from the costume book below are just a snapshot of the many regions and cultures comprising the Ottoman Empire at this time. No doubt they’ll long serve as a source of sartorial inspiration.

Researchers and a Twitter bot use them today.

As a child in the mid-19th century, Deborah Griscom Passmore would clamber onto the wide stone windowsill of her ancestral home in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, and paint watercolors of flowers and fruit using the juices from her subjects. Little did she know that one day she would be leading the project to create one of the most beautiful botanical archives in existence.

The National Agricultural Library in Beltsville, Maryland has one of the largest collections of agricultural research in the world. Part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Rare and Special Collections houses the USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection. As pomology is the science of growing fruit, the collection consists of 7,500 paintings of fruit and nuts, made between 1886 and 1942. It archives the work of 21 artists: 12 men and nine women. Dozens more created such art for the USDA, but only the works of these 21 are in federal possession, the others being lost to history or held in private collections.

According to Yale historian Daniel Kevles, American horticulturists and nurserymen had long published illustrated prints of their holdings, which included new fruit varieties from experiments with cross-breeding. Identifying and staking ownership over particular fruits was protection against rampant appropriation by competitors, some of whom would sneak into rival nurseries and steal cuttings. At the time, living organisms were considered unpatentable. Without a reliable repository to document specific varietals and store information about provenance, characteristics, and names, fruit innovators were getting cheated out of the rights to their creations, writes Kevles.

Moreover, fruit was big money. In the 19th century, the American fruit industry was growing rapidly, with an annual revenue of between $200 and $300 million dollars. In 1886, the USDA established the Division of Pomology in order to create a national register of plants and fruit. According to one profile of the organization, the mission of the Division was to “document new varieties, publish illustrations, and disseminate research findings to fruit growers and breeders through specialized publications.”

The Division of Pomology issued annual fruit catalogues and bulletins containing the pomological illustrations. Many were depictions of findings from plant explorations and botanical research, as well as artistic records of specimens sent in by growers. The publication of the illustrations empowered growers, as they served as informal trademarks. The Division of Pomology quickly became a resource for orchardists and keepers of nurseries to protect claims to their fruit innovations.

Only two years before the creation of the Division, the future founder of Kodak, George Eastman, had invented the photo film, making photographs easy to produce. At the USDA, though, nobody was taking any chances with this new technology. Still lifes remained the chosen mode of recording and registering fruits. Today, some of these paintings are the only evidence of the existence of lost fruit cultivars, such as hundreds of forgotten apple varieties.

Starting in 1892, Passmore was the principal artist at the Division, a position she held for nearly twenty years. Tables full of strawberries still attached to their vines, luscious grapes, and trays of citrus, mangoes, and sapodillas lay arranged in ornamental display at her desk, ready to be memorialized for eternity on canvas. Passmore earned high praise in the local press (including the Washington Post) for the technical finesse of her works. She painted over 1,500 watercolors during her time at the USDA, making her the artist with the most pieces in the Pomological Watercolors collection. Another artist for the Division was Amanda Almira Newton, granddaughter of Isaac Newton, the first United States Commissioner of Agriculture (not to be confused with the apple-pondering physicist).

Staff at the Division of Pomology also embarked on plant exploration expeditions all over the world, visiting orchards and vineyards to gather specimens. One plant explorer, David Fairchild, traveled the world on behalf of the USDA, introducing fruits and plants from foreign lands to American soil. Famed for helping photographer and geographer Eliza Scidmore bring thousands of flowering cherry trees from Japan to Washington D.C., Fairchild traveled to over 50 countries and brought such modern food staples as the avocado, kale, and quinoa to Americans. At the Division of Pomology, artists illustrated the bael, a quince-like fruit with a hard outer shell and buttery inner flesh that Fairchild brought from India, and mangosteens he carried from Trinidad and Tobago.

Some of the paintings show visibly bruised or even rotting fruit, in captivating depictions of spoilage. As the official scientific documentation of the Division of Pomology’s work, the artists also needed to paint the effects of post-harvest storage on the fruit in order to inform farmers about perishability. “It was important to document the damaged fruit as well as the perfect specimen,” says Susan H. Fugate, Head of Special Collections at the National Agricultural Library.

While the botanical illustrations at the Division of Pomology served as a database of the fruits of America, they didn’t offer the equivalent of an official trademark for fruit innovators. This formal protection of the rights of fruit breeders came after the establishment of the Plant Patent Act in 1930, which accomplished what the illustrated register couldn't. According to the Act, anyone who “invented or discovered and asexually reproduced any distinct and new variety of plant” could receive a patent. The Act finally offered patent coverage to living organisms, writes Kevles.

In addition to being beautiful works of art, the Pomological Watercolors offer an enduring understanding of the agricultural landscape of America. In 2011, the watercolors were digitized with a grant from the Ceres Trust, a nonprofit supporting agricultural research. “Our mission from the very beginning has been to preserve these treasures and to provide access so people can know about the collection and both its scientific and artistic value,” says Fugate. But initially, only low-resolution images were accessible in the public domain, and high-resolution images could be downloaded for a fee.

One champion of the watercolors is Parker Higgins, a director at Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit promoting the constitutional rights of journalists. In 2015, Higgins discovered through a FOIA request that the agency had made less than $600 off the images in the four years since digitization (which had cost $290,000). He wrote to the USDA, which subsequently made high-resolution images publicly available for download. Higgins put them up on Wikimedia, and created a popular Twitter bot, which tweets out a watercolor from the collection every few hours.

In 2016, the lasting research value of the collection was showcased with the publication of the seven-volume Illustrated History of Apples in the United States and Canada, which included over 3,500 images of apples from the Pomological Watercolors. This herculean enterprise on botanical history took its author, Dan Bussey, 30 years to bring to fruition.

For Fugate, the beauty as well as “the science and the power of the illustrations for communication” all contribute to their appeal. But for Sara Lee, an archivist at the Special Collections, the most fascinating part of this collection may not even be the watercolors. Some of the paintings have accompanying wax models, which artists made in the exact weight of the original specimen. “They’re just amazing reproductions, and if, say, there’s an apple with a blemish on the original fruit, the artist will have portrayed that in the wax model as well,” says Lee.

The USDA Pomological Watercolors symbolize a long artistic history of intellectual ownership. They’ve gone from helping to establish the proprietary claims of horticulturists to their current status in the public domain, where they can be the property of anyone with a printer. As both a historical resource and the output of a serene Twitter bot, their charm and beauty endures.

A Byzantine trash heap reveals the slow decline of a desert culture.

For archaeologists there are a few things that indicate an ancient settlement was approaching its end. There can be signs of conflict, or documents describing political upheaval, or evidence of a great fire. In the Byzantine city of Elusa in Israel's Negev Desert, there was one of these signs of impending doom. They stopped picking up their garbage.

While surveying the partially excavated city of Elusa, a team of researchers from the University of Haifa came to realize the mound they had been standing on for a better view was the remains of an ancient trash heap. Beneath their feet were sherds of Byzantine pottery, olive pits, and animal bones. After a few rounds of picking for artifacts, the team turned to carbon dating to see what story the finds told. They discovered that the dump had stopped receiving garbage almost 100 years before the city’s ultimate collapse in the 7th century, according to the study they published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Once the Byzantine empire’s wine center, Elusa was well on its way down the drain before the rise of Islam in the region, widely seen as the reason for its ultimate decline as a population center.

Lead author of the study, Guy Bar-Oz, of the University of Haifa told LiveScience that during Elusa’s decline the rest of the Roman Empire was thriving and expanding. But not Elusa. Garbage collection and disposal was an organized public work in the city and it would have been uncharacteristic to have it end spontaneously. The apparent abrupt stoppage during the mid-6th century also coincides with another well-known, dramatic shift in the world, known as the Late Antique Little Ice Age.

At that time, three major volcanoes erupted—in 536, 540, and 547—bringing on more than a century of climatic disruption. The Northern Hemisphere experienced significantly colder temperatures that prompted waves of migration from the Asian steppe and Arabian Peninsula. Famine and disease spread; it's even believed that the weather shift and attendant mass movement of people helped fuel the Justinian Plague, which killed more than 100 million by the end of 590.

The study doesn’t make a clear correlation between the fall of Elusa and the climate downturn, but it is at least suggestive. There may, however, have been other factors. For example, other settlements in the Negev Desert persisted far longer than Elusa. Maybe another foray into that ancient dump will dig up more answers.

The eternal, ecological, excremental connection between sea, land, and sky.

Every year, Pantone, the world’s premier color company, forecasts what it considers to be the “Color of the Year.” This year, they picked “Living Coral,” which the company defines as “an animating and life-affirming coral hue with a golden undertone that energizes and enlivens with a softer edge.” The irony, of course, is that coral is consistently dying—thanks, in large part, to rising water temperatures that bleach the colonial invertebrates of their vibrant color. The reefs are literally in hot water.

Coral reefs serve as habitats for a quarter of all marine species, despite covering less than one percent of the Earth’s surface. While these ecosystems is indisputably fragile, a recent study has uncovered a surprising potential lifeline for some of them … bird poop.

Candida Savage, a marine scientist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, researched the effect seabird excrement, also known as guano, has on coral growth in Fiji for a year. Her results, as recently published in Scientific Reports, show a positive impact for coral exposed to guano compared with coral that doesn’t receive many droppings. Guano has long been known as a natural fertilizer, but it’s not known just which nutrients it has that can promote growth in reefs. “I suspect it is related to the ratio of the different nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) and trace elements like iron in seabird guano that makes it better for the corals than human fertilizers, which are often unbalanced in their relative ratios of nutrients,” Savage says.

Savage gathered results from two different marine protected sites in Fiji: Namena, a remote island with an intact coastal forest and breeding seabirds, and Cousteau, an island without significant seabird colonies. At Namena, Savage encountered red-footed boobies, frigate birds, tropic birds, and more. “The red-footed boobies had nests in trees overhanging the water in the nearshore area where the study was conducted, so I assume they were particularly important in this particular study,” Savage says. The scientist describes the study areas as “a model ecosystem” because of the remoteness of the islands and negligible human impacts, which might’ve skewed the results. Savage think that the results are broadly applicable to coral reefs around the world; other studies on different yet similarly remote islands have also observed positive impacts from seabird guano on reef ecosystems, as well as manta ray and fish populations.

Of course, guano alone is not going to reverse the decline of reefs. That will require global action on climate change, but smaller-scale, local conservation measures can help ensure “longer term viability of coral reefs in pristine areas,” Savage says. “These areas may be important to seed new coral populations in the future.”

Naturally, this means that in some cases, preserving coral reefs should involve preserving seabird populations as well—maintaining the ecological relationship between sea, land, and sky.

Very, but the story of sea level rise is a lot more complicated than that.

Every so often—more often lately—comes news of islands just up and disappearing. Eight in Micronesia. Five in the Solomon Islands. One off the coast of Hokkaido, Japan. Yet there’s also been a crop of studies and researchers, led by coastal geomorphologist Paul Kench from Simon Fraser University, saying that island nations such as Tuvalu (long a poster child for the existential threat of sea level rise) not only aren’t disappearing—they’re actually growing. So how do we make sense of this? Are the low-lying islands we know today doomed? Or are we seeing some other process at work? The answer is that a million complicated things are happening all at once, and it provides a window into how hard it is to talk about what’s currently happening to the planet.

When we speak of islands that can disappear beneath the waves, it’s almost exclusively the small, low-lying ones, which form in a couple of different ways. Some are volcanic in origin, created when an undersea volcano bursts up through the sea surface, forming a small island. Sometimes those islands can stick around, but often, especially in the South Pacific, they don’t. But while they’re above the surface, coral polyps colonize the slopes of these new islands—they like to be fairly near, but not too near, the surface—and build up in a ring shape around the cone of the volcano. If the volcanic landmass gradually erodes or subsides, what’s left is just the coral and the material it accumulates, usually in a ring shape known as an atoll, with a shallow lagoon in the middle. In the case of bigger islands, when more geological activity forces them up higher, there may be a more substantial flat area rather than a lagoon.

Most other low-lying islands are barrier islands, which are generally created when tides, waves, and wind push sand and sediment to one specific place, impacted by the shape and profile of the adjacent coast. Unlike atolls, which are only found in the tropics, where shallow-water corals thrive, barrier islands can be found pretty much anywhere.

Coastal encroachment can impact larger, higher islands, but disappearing? Only the low-lyers are at risk of that. Despite the fact that barrier islands are everywhere, from the Canadian Maritimes to the Frisian Islands in northwestern Europe to all up and down the American East Coast to … well, everywhere, they’re not usually the focus of disappearing-island concerns. Barrier islands can come and go, but the islands that get the bulk of the attention for disappearing are atolls in the South Pacific. And there’s a reason for that.

“The Pacific as a basin just has a lot more variability,” says Andrew Ashton, a coastal geomorphologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. El Niño and La Niña oscillations, in which cycles of warm and cold water change the climate, hit the South Pacific hard, especially in the form of storms such as tropical cyclones. Many of the region’s islands—and it is a massive region—lie in what’s called the South Pacific Convergence Zone. A convergence zone is where winds from two separate regions, usually one cold and one hot, collide, causing a lot of rain and wind. (There’s a little one over Seattle.) The one in the South Pacific is huge and powerful, and when combined with an El Niño event, creates more with rain and wind than anywhere else on the planet. Current changes to global climate have only made this more acute. “Storms have always happened, but you're getting a lot more of them and they're a lot more frequent now,” says James Russell, an associate professor at the University of Auckland who studies endemic species on South Pacific islands (and how to save them).

Sandy, low-lying islands aren’t particularly fixed, like a continent. They’re incredibly dynamic, and move around a lot. Barrier islands are basically perpetually rolling over, and sometimes disappear and reappear, or split in two, or migrate up a coast. This happens with atolls, too—waves and storms and wind move sand and sediment around. Sometimes that’ll mean what was once a sandbar will breach the surface of the water, or an existing island will grow a new spit or just expand. And sometimes that means islands simply disappear. And all of this doesn’t even account for tectonic shifts, which can bring islands up and drop them down based on the level of the sea floor, or, for that matter, islands that spend part of their lives above water and part of them below, based on the tides. These aren’t really islands in the sense we’re talking about, since they can’t really support resident terrestrial life, but they will be relevant, for reasons we’ll see in a moment.

One big culprit that comes up when we talk about disappearing islands is sea level rise, of course. The seas as a whole, how this nearly global mass of interconnected water behaves, is insanely, insanely complicated and probably not very well understood by most people—many scientists included. Sea level was, for a few thousand years up to around the late 19th century, pretty constant, on average. Since the late 1800s, it’s been steadily rising. On average.

We keep saying “on average” because sea level changes are not the same in all places. In fact, in a lot of places, the sea level is dropping, and there are dozens of reasons for this inconstancy: some local, some regional, some global. Some operate on a decades-long cycle, or seasonally, or on a rhythm measured on a scale of millennia. Some are purely natural in cause, others can be pegged with near certainty to the influence of humans.

The period we’re in now is especially interesting and important with regard to disappearing land. The islands, they’re just a preview. The single largest cause of global sea level rise, right now, isn’t melting glaciers, but the phenomenon called thermal expansion. And it’s not particularly close. But that’s not going to be the case very much longer.

Thermal expansion is the tendency of matter, including sea water, to change its volume in response to a change in temperature. When temperatures rise, water molecules absorb that extra energy and bounce around more. This takes up more space—not a lot of space, but some, and when you’re talking about something as massive as the global ocean, any small amount of expansion translates to a massive volume of water. Global temperatures have risen by about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880, with most of that in the last half-century. And that means the water already in the ocean is getting bigger.

Researchers expect that this is just sort of the opening act for sea level rise. Widespread melting of glaciers and ice caps is next, which will have way crazier impacts on the ocean than just adding water to it. More water is the obvious one, but glaciers, as objects of great mass, actually have gravity, too—they pull water toward them. As they melt, they will lose mass, and in turn lose some of that pull. So coasts elsewhere will have to deal with expanding water, glacial meltwater, and normal sea water that isn’t as attracted to glaciers as it was before.

Yes, all of this is going to have a major impact on any low-lying land the world over. But the researchers I talked to for this story don’t necessarily think that islands are disappearing right now at a higher rate than they were in past centuries. Of the independent island nations most at risk of disappearing, Tuvalu is near the top of the list. But a 2018 Paul Kench study of all 101 islands—all small and low-lying—that make up Tuvalu reported that there’s no consistency in what is happening there at all. About three quarters of the islands actually grew in size, to one quarter that shrank, over the past 40 years. Overall, during this time period, Tuvalu grew almost three percent. This is not to say that Tuvalu isn’t in a period of intense crisis right now, because the country certainly is. But disappearing—which is a very specific thing—might not be the cause of that crisis, at least not today.

In general, the South Pacific is enduring sea level rise of about a fifth of an inch per year, according to a study from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. So is there simply too much going on to be able to tell a clear story about the fate of these places? Ultimately, understanding what is happening now is about separating signal from noise, and realizing that the impacts of the direction that global climate is headed in are simply not going to be the same everywhere. It’s about understanding that a single, highly visible phenomenon is an inadequate proxy for changing climate. That doesn’t make the outlook—especially in the South Pacific—any less dire. What makes the South Pacific so worthy of study for basically any scientist concerned with the ocean is that, because these islands are so small and barely above sea level, small changes will make an oversize impact there. And an island doesn’t need to be actually underwater to become uninhabitable.

Remember the South Pacific Convergence Zone? All the typhoons and lashing storms? What’s clearly happening now are bigger, more frequent, and more destructive waves and storms. Couple that with what is to come, and the uncertainty starts to vanish. “Anthropogenic sea level rise is starting to kick in, but it's not a big deal,” says Ashton. This means thermal expansion is already happening, but its impact isn’t severe. But when glacial melt really starts? “By mid-century, and especially end of century, [that] will be the dominant signal.” That’s a scientific way of seeing that we ain’t seen nothing yet.

Paul Kench’s work—which ran counter to the narrative that the days of the low-lying, habitable islands that we know are gone—angered some, who see it as unhelpful to the very real plight of Tuvalu and other South Pacific island nations. But Kench notes that the mere disappearance of some islands shouldn’t be the whole story. Those harsher and more frequent storms send waves of salt water inland—sometimes over entire islands, sometimes into fields, or into fragile island freshwater sources. Homes and infrastructure are at risk, as are the unusual plant, insect, and bird species found on small islands and nowhere else. Scientists are already exploring simply moving endemic species to more stable islands.

Whether these islands are, in the short term, growing or shrinking is immaterial to their residents if they can no longer trust the ground beneath their feet. The more the islands themselves move, the more they become volatile, unreliable, resource-poor—potentially uninhabitable. “Some island nations, there's no high land, really,” says Ashton. “Their only prospects are to live on these shallow islands that are going to start moving around more and more rapidly as sea level rises.”

What’s happening in the South Pacific isn’t normal, and it isn’t good. Islands disappearing just isn’t the most useful metric to understand where the region is going. Focusing on that does the people of Tuvalu, of Micronesia or Kiribati, or the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, a disservice. The bigger problem is what is actually disappearing, and that is any sense of stability, security, even hope that the cultures on these islands aren’t simply playing out the clock on the ability to exist as they have for hundreds of years. It’s something that people who live on continents, buffered from the whims of the sea, don’t understand just yet. It probably won’t be long before we do, though.

Is there nothing that libraries can't do?

On March 26, 1200, more than 800 years ago, the court of King John issued a charter granting new ownerships of two hamlets in County Durham—a routine, even mundane piece of business for a king who would later grant something called the "Great Charter," also known as the Magna Carta. The original Durham document, however, had eluded historians for nearly a millennium, before finally turning up out of nowhere in the archives of Durham University’s Residential Research Library (RRL).

The charter was discovered purely by chance, as Benjamin Pohl—a medievalist at the University of Bristol on a visiting fellowship—perused the archives of Ushaw College Library, part of the RRL system. The contents of the charter had long been known thanks to a “charter roll,” a kind of record of all charters issued by a particular court or office. But no one really expected it to turn up. After all, just a handful of original King John charters from the year 1200 survive, according to the University of East Anglia’s Magna Carta Project.

Several prominent visual details, however, meant that there was no mistaking this find for anything but the real deal. One giveaway was the “court hand” in which the document was written: a striking, intricate style of penmanship often employed by professional scribes for this kind of official business. Perhaps even more telling was King John’s royal seal, no matter how fragmented it was after centuries in a box.

The business it covers doesn’t necessarily shed too much light on King John’s reign, which lasted from 1199 until his death in 1216. According to the University of Bristol, the charter grants the hamlets of Cornsay and Hedley Hill to two characters known as Walter of Caen and Robert FitzRoger, the nephews of a county chamberlain named Simon. Simon had held the hamlets for more than 15 years before transferring them to his relatives, as documented by another original charter from Simon’s bishop, issued before 1183 and also held in the RRL.

More intriguing are the clerical differences between the newfound original and its replica on the charter roll. That copy names three witnesses: the Archbishop of York, the Chief Justiciar of England, and the Sheriff of Yorkshire and Northumberland. The original, meanwhile, names a full nine witnesses, providing a much more complete picture of what was happening in York, where the charter had actually been issued, on March 26, 1200.

In a University of Bristol press release, Pohl said that a medieval charter’s “issuing authorities, beneficiaries, and witnesses provide a cross-section of medieval England’s ruling elites.” This one is less valuable, then, as a record of a real estate transaction than it is as a “‘who’s who’ of Northern England (and beyond) at the turn of the thirteenth century.” Even more than that, it’s a testament to the never-ending gifts that emerge from libraries the world over.

The women in this century-old photo weren't visitors—they were probably scientists.

Archaeological excavations often attract rubberneckers, lookie-loos, and inquiring minds, and who can blame them? It’s exciting to see something old and fragile come out of the ground and get dusted off. These digs are reminders that there are countless stories under our feet.

At first glance, many viewers figured that an old photo of archaeological work being done at the Neolithic settlement of Skara Brae, in Scotland's remote Orkney Islands, showed exactly that—onlookers hanging around to catch a peek. Nope. It turns out that, beyond the artifacts, another story was hiding in plain sight—the contributions of female archaeologists, who were later mistaken for visitors.

Hints of this settlement first appeared to modern eyes in 1850, when a storm raged over the Bay of Skaill. The tempest revealed the shape of several small structures on Mainland, a confusingly named island in the Orkney archipelago. Over the course of several excavations spanning decades, archaeologists uncovered a stand of domed, stacked-stone homes, and dated them to somewhere between 3100 and 2500 B.C.

Much of the archaeological work was performed by V. Gordon Childe, during his tenure as an archaeologist at the University of Edinburgh. Childe’s work at Skara Brae began in earnest in the late 1920s, and he is the star of a series of photographs snapped at the site and held by the Orkney Library and Archives. But he’s not alone in the images—a few women are present, too. One perches her foot on a rock, and another wears a jaunty cloche. In some images, they're down in the thick of things in the excavation pit. In others, they smile down at Childe, who clings to a ladder, half-concealed within the dig.

A caption in a decades-old book about the dig identified some of these figures as "visitors," and that was the general thought until last year, when an article in Current Archaeology identified one of the women as a pioneer in the field. As BBC reported, when Oxford professor Dan Hicks recently shared some of the images on Twitter, other archaeologists jumped in to try and puzzle out the identities of the whole group. What followed next was a collective awakening, followed by a "D'oh!" It wasn't just one—several of the women were probably scientists.

Mairi Davies, an archaeologist at Historic Environment Scotland, had been curious about the images for a few years—ever since she noticed that the woman in the cap is clutching a trowel. And their sensible shoes are caked with sand or dirt. As the images made the rounds on social media, a clearer picture began to emerge.

The trowel-wielding figure is likely Margaret Simpson, who studied under Childe, wrote guidebooks, worked as an assistant Inspector of Ancient Monuments, and became one of Scotland’s first professional female archaeologists. She also received thanks in Childe’s report about the site, and “multiple sources point to her being the lady in the hat with the trowel,” Davies says. The other identities aren't quite so easily confirmed. BBC reports that they are Margaret Mitchell—another graduate of Edinburgh’s archaeology department—and possibly Mary Kennedy and Margaret Cole, who did not go on to work in the field.

“We shouldn’t actually be surprised that there are female archaeologists at this site,” Davies says. “If you look into the wider context of what’s going on at this time, there were a lot of women active in field of archaeology, including in director roles in field excavations.” She told BBC that some of Childe’s classes had more female students than male ones, and the mid-20th century saw female archaeologists such as Kathleen Kenyon, Tessa Verney Wheeler, and many more actively involved in fieldwork. “There is a tendency in archaeology for things to focus on a heroic male figure,” Davies says. “You can see how that’s translated into popular culture, even with Indiana Jones, this white male who goes out on adventures and excavates and finds treasure.” The composition of this photo is a great example of the effort to center the work of the male archaeologist, says Antonia Thomas, an archaeologist at the University of the Highlands and Islands: “All angles lead to Childe.”

Davies wonders whether some confusion about the images is a product of contemporary viewers “projecting our own prejudices into the past”—particularly when it comes to the women’s outfits. On Twitter, Rachel Pope, a director of fieldwork and lecturer in European prehistory at the University of Liverpool, observed that the women’s getups were de rigueur for middle-class ladies at the time. “Posh clothes do not a tourist make,” Pope wrote. “I can think of my own family photographs of my grandmothers from not much later," Davies says, "doing quite adventurous things in very similar outfits." When it comes to uncovering the legacies of women in archaeology, Davies says, researchers have "a lot more digging" to do—in archives, that is.

For centuries, miniature ivory women helped real women seek medical help.

Often when a woman saw a doctor in 18th-century China, she wasn’t allowed to actually see him. Instead, she sat behind a curtain or bamboo screen, where she had to map out her pain on a body that wasn’t her own. Her hand, or that of a close female attendant, would poke through the drapes or screen, and gesture toward the naked body of an ivory doll. If the patient had difficulty breathing, she might run a finger along the doll’s curved chest. For menstrual pain, the smooth abdomen. For a headache, the bump of a bun. After studying these cryptic communications, the doctor would issue his diagnosis.

In the final centuries of China’s Qing Dynasty, these intricately carved medicine dolls were an ailing woman’s only option, writes medical historian Howard Dittrick in his 1952 paper in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, “Chinese Medicine Dolls.” From the 1300s to the late 19th century, China’s Ming and Qing Dynasties had ushered in a cult of chastity that made it impossible for a doctor to physically examine a female patient, or for her to undress before him. And at the time, China only allowed men to be doctors. In 1879, the Canton Missionary Hospital became the first medical institution to admit women to their medical class, according to a Columbia University dissertation on Chinese medical care for women in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, by Shing-ting Lin. This decision was made not out of some feminist ideal, but rather in reaction to the belief that male physicians should not be touching female patients.

Chinese diagnostic dolls depict a reclining woman, usually naked save for a pair of bangles around her wrists and the occasional fan. Though most dolls were carved out of ivory, they could also be sculpted of jade, amber, bronze, wood, or even lapis lazuli. Dittrick notes the dolls all strike the same pose: propped up on the left arm, with the other draped across the body. Carvers did distinguish adult women, with hair tied up in a bun, from girls with braids or twin ponytails. Early carvings also often depict Chinese women with shrunken lotus feet, a pretty term for the painful and eroticized practice of footbinding. To retain a degree of modesty, the dolls’ feet were always shod in shoes or constricting bandages.

Upper-class women might bring their own beautiful, customized dolls to doctors, whereas poorer women had to make do with the doctor’s own, more rudimentary, model. The more luxurious dolls—such as the intricate Ming Dynasty doll shown above on a blue blanket—reclined on miniature couches, some of which even featured silk cushions or embroidered throws. To remove the final layer of interpersonal contact, wealthier ladies simply marked the afflicted parts of the doll with India ink or charcoal, and then sent the doll to the doctor via messenger.

The physicians of late imperial China saw no issue with diagnosing and treating patients on the basis of pointing and words alone (or even less). In fact, it was close to the primary practice at the time for male patients as well (though men had no issues with disrobing before a doctor), as scholarly doctors found physical contact to be beneath them, writes Shing-ting Lin. Unsurprisingly, the smooth, polished surfaces of an ivory doll proved insufficient for certain female medical concerns. Midwives and other lower-class female workers would have had to take charge of anything gynecological or obstetric, such as period management or childbirth.

Medium-size bugs beware.

In the late 19th century, Charles Darwin had a colleague in North Carolina send him Venus flytraps in the mail. When he received the carnivorous plants, he pried them open to see what was inside (insects and a centipede), and tested their trigger and digestive mechanisms. He asked, “Can you use a hair? Can you use boiling water? Can you chop up a trap?” says Christopher Martin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who led a study with undergraduates to examine flytraps’ fierce, fangy, floral maws. Darwin didn’t have the traps for long—they soon died—but through the tests, he was able to prove to himself and the world that these plants really do eat meat. But since then, surprisingly little research has explored what makes the plants effective ambush hunters. The new study by Martin takes a closer look at the spiky trichomes that form the bars of what Darwin termed a “horrid prison.”

While they can be purchased for a few bucks from Walmart, wild Venus flytraps are only found in a sliver of the Carolinas, a 75-mile radius around the coastal city of Wilmington, North Carolina, home to the only public carnivorous plant garden in the world. The longleaf pine savannas to which they are endemic are “an acidic swampy marsh environment,” Martin says, where the tall trees allow lots of light to stream down to the forest floor. The soils there aren’t particularly nutrient-rich, so insects’ fluids, soft flesh, and exoskeletons provide the flytraps with what they need to survive—nitrogen in particular. “It’s a cost-benefit ratio,” says Martin. “Nitrogen is so rare in this habitat that it’s better to have traps than not.” In the wild, though, the plants are at risk of extinction, due to the encroachment of suburban developments and golf courses.

Martin and his students conducted their study at the Green Swamp Preserve, in the semi-natural North Carolina Botanical Garden in Durham, and in a lab so that they could compare their results across different environments. In the lab, Martin and his undergraduate research team placed crickets on makeshift ramps—for easy delivery to their doom. Surprisingly, the plants there had a relatively low success rate for capturing prey once they had been triggered to close, around 16 percent. While the traps snap shut in milliseconds, it is the teeth—what the biologists call “marginal spikes”—that seal off an insect’s escape route, closing tighter over the course of a couple hours as enzymes liquify the insect into a digestible meal. For the second round of the lab study, the researchers gave the flytraps “haircuts,” meticulously snipping their hair-spike-teeth to deprive them of the prison bars that locked crickets inside. “You’d think the trap would hate that and just drop dead, but they regrow,” Martin says. Without their teeth, the traps were unsurprisingly even less successful—less than six percent of traps caught a meal. These results from the lab were slightly different in the botanical garden, where spiky plants caught prey about 13 percent of the time, while shorn ones caught around nine percent.

The results show that the spikes really do help to ensnare prey, but their effectiveness depends on insect size. Small insects such as flies can simply squeeze out before the teeth close tight enough to head off their escape route. Larger crickets could grab onto a tooth and use it to haul themselves out. In fact, the shorn plants were just as good at catching large prey than the unshorn ones were. So the trap and teeth are really only suited to medium-sized insects, such as regular crickets, who are too large to climb out from between them, and not strong enough to fight their way out. Evolution has given Venus flytraps an appetite, but it’s also made them unintentionally picky eaters.

It takes a lot to go from the bayou to the deep sea.

Craig McClain knows all about falls. He’s seen whale falls, shark falls, manta ray falls, even, on one occasion, a sea lion fall. In the nutritional wasteland of the deep sea, a fall—any big hunk of organic material that manages to sink—creates a temporary feast for nearby scavengers. In his work as executive director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, McClain regularly creates wood falls, by deliberately dropping deciduous chunks to the bottom of the seafloor, just to see what bites and learn more about deep sea ecosystems. So it was almost surprising that it took McClain years of working in a Louisiana lab to consider one, rather obvious, question: What about a gator fall?

The state reptile of Louisiana, Florida, and Mississippi, alligators are perhaps the most charismatic animal of the deep South: the toothy maw, the tail swish, the rows of prehistoric scutes. So when Chase Landry, a bayou-born undergraduate at Nicholls State University, floated the idea of gator falls to McClain’s lab, the team erupted in curiosity. They wanted to know how often alligator remains actually do wind up in the deep sea, and how organisms on the seafloor might utilize their precious carbon. They wondered if they could trace carbon from the alligator to help map the deep sea food web of the Gulf of Mexico. They even speculated that an alligator could be a modern-day stand-in for a prehistoric ichthyosaur fall. With all these burning questions, McClain’s path forward became abundantly clear. He had to sink an alligator.

But first he had to get his hands on one—preferably one that was already dead. Despite the reptile’s relative abundance in the region, it’s surprisingly difficult to acquire an alligator in Louisiana. The state instituted strict regulations after wild populations faced several extinction scares in the 1950s due to demand for their skins. Key features of the state’s conservation program include annual surveys of coastal nests, a booming industry of gator ranches, and seasonal, permit-driven gator harvesting, or culling. “I can’t just go out and capture an alligator on my own,” McClain says. So he submitted an official proposal to the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries for three dead adult gators, each around five to six feet long. McClain figured that a bigger gator might not fit in their benthic elevator, the mechanical basket that allows researchers to drop and hoist heavy loads into and out of the deep sea.

This past November, McClain got a call. The department got his gators. The team wasn’t planning on executing the drop until February, so they had to clear out some space in the lab’s walk-in freezer. The alligators, culled just that morning, were still warm from the sun when they arrived. Clifton Nunnally, a research associate on the team, even remembers seeing the reptile’s limbs shudder, a posthumous nerve reaction common in cold-blooded creatures such as reptiles. The researchers wrapped the twitching gators in plastic and shoved them in the freezer. When asked, perhaps naively, if the freezer held any food, McClain laughs. “Oh no,” he says. “Just scientific specimens, samples, and sediment cores.”

When time came for February’s 12-day research cruise, McClain and Nunnally rewrapped the frozen alligators in plastic and moved them to the ship, where a much smaller freezer could only accommodate the gators if they were stood on their heads and leaned against the wall. (And this freezer actually held food, including salmon, ramen, and andouille sausage. But Nunnally says the alligators were so “nice and wrapped up” that the ship’s cook didn’t raise a stink.) Because the cruise lasted through Mardis Gras, they dined one night on a gator-shaped King Cake.

McClain’s team decided to sink the gators in three separate sites, each approximately 60 miles apart and more than a mile deep. The whole experiment—from sinking to the moment every inch of a gator has been consumed—needed to be completed within the lab’s three-year funding cycle. Sinking them any deeper would slow down the process, and any shallower would risk disturbance from the oil or fishing industries.

It’s easy to drop a gator to the bottom of the sea—but you do need the right equipment. Deep sea research vessels are equipped with cranes and benthic elevators, and most are armed with a remotely operated vehicle (ROV). On this cruise, the ROV had the singularly important job of opening the basket and pulling out the alligator. After unwrapping the first, still-frozen gator from its plastic cocoon, Nunnally and a few crew members tied ropes around the animal to ensure the ROV would have a secure grip. They also attached an old railroad wheel to keep it in one place. Then they lugged the reptile into the basket and launched it overboard. It was a rather clinical burial at sea.

Their original plan was to deploy the alligators and leave, but deep sea research depends on good weather. With over $3 million in robotic equipment weighing over 3,000 pounds dangling off the side of the ship, rough weather can not only jeopardize the experiment, but also the safety of the crew. Weeks of choppy weather delayed the schedule, though they did manage to sink two out of three gators. The third will go out in another research cruise in April, when McClain will return to check on the first two gator falls.

Due to a weather-related malfunction, McClain and his team had to return to the first drop site just 18 hours later. To their surprise, they found the gator already covered in at least a dozen giant isopods—football-sized crustaceans that resemble evil lilac pill bugs. “Giant isopods are like deep sea vultures,” Nunnally says. “They’re just hanging around, waiting for something big to fall down.” While there was never a question of whether isopods would be drawn to the gator, McClain’s team was surprised by their speed. Scavengers generally make their way to a food fall within a few days, so 18 hours seemed fast. The purple sea bugs were also joined by other scavengers, including amphipods, grenadiers, and a couple of unidentifiable black fish.

An alligator is definitely a weird thing for a scientist to intentionally sink into the deep sea, but the gulf’s isopods are no strangers to strange snacks. Nunnally says he’s heard reports of the creatures gnawing away at renegade bales of alfalfa or reams of printer paper, spilled from cargo ships like breadcrumbs at a duck pond.

Not only did they find the gator in what appeared to be record speed, the isopods tore into its flesh much faster than McClain expected. Alligator skin ripples in armor-like scutes that make the skin much more difficult to penetrate than the mammalian skin of a whale or dolphin. But the isopods easily broke through, particularly at its weaker armpits, underbelly, and eye sockets. By the time McClain’s team left the gator for the second time, some isopods had actually crawled inside the abdominal cavity and were eating the carcass from the inside out.

There’s more to learn from dropping an alligator into the deep sea than who shows up for dinner. Terrestrial carbon, such as alligator flesh, has a different stable isotope ratio than marine carbon, scientists should be able to track its journey through the ecosystem. When they revisit the gators, McClain’s team will use the ROV to slurp up nearby creatures to see who got a bite of them. Nunnally believes the findings will clarify the importance of large carbon inputs like whale falls, such as whether they comprise a majority of most deep sea diets, or are just occasional, lucky feasts. He also wants to know the geographical footprint of large food falls. “Will you benefit only if you live within a meter of this alligator? Or 10 meters, or even 100 meters?” he asks.

Before the sinking, Nunnally chopped off two of the gator’s toes to preserve a representative sample of its isotope. “A little bit of flesh, a little bit of skin, and a little bit of bone,” Nunnally says. “All you need.” When it comes time to test, he’ll dry the toes, grind them into a powder with a mortar and pestle (a coffee grinder works, too), and run the results through a mass spectrometer to measure the isotopic ratio of carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur.

McClain also believes gator falls may help understand a greater, more prehistoric mystery. Before the ascendancy of whales, enormous carnivorous marine reptiles such as mosasaurs and ichthyosaurs ruled the oceans, and would likely have supported a deep sea community of their own. American alligators first popped up 200 million years ago, and they’ve looked virtually the same for an impressive eight million years. In McClain’s eyes, Alligator mississippiensis is the closest thing the 21st century has to an ichthyosaur. “If we put an alligator out there, will we capture the last refuge of a species we didn’t even know existed?” McClain wonders, pointing to evidence from the fossil record indicating that ancient ichthyosaurs had some species of bone worm or mollusk that primarily lived on their carcasses.

Nunnally suspects that by the time they revisit the two original gators, the remains will have been skeletonized, and supporting a society of bone-eating worms. After that, they’re not sure when they’ll be back again—it’s no mean feat to check in on something under more than a mile of water. “The experiment will be over when everything is consumed,” McClain says. “I just don’t know if I’ll be there to see it.”

A storm, a secret cave, and an ocean full of plastic.

For decades, a singularly strange thing has been washing up on a particular stretch of the Brittany coast in France. Bright orange pieces of plastic—telephones in the shape of Garfield the cat.

“I have friends who tell me their memories of when they were little kids, they were already finding telephones,” says Claire Simonin-Le Meur, the 40-year-old president of the volunteer association Ar Viltansoù. The group, whose name means “the kids” in the regional language Breton, clears trash from the beaches once a month.

Mostly they find fishing debris, with markings that show that it comes from as far away as Florida. But every time they go out, the volunteers find pieces of these telephones. They had started to appear some 30 years ago, and still, in 2018 alone, the volunteers counted more than 200 fragments. They appear remarkably intact after presumably decades in the water, retaining the cartoon lines and stripes, and sometimes attached bits of internal wiring and electronics. The association keeps all of them and they have become a local symbol of the global problem of plastic pollution.

The model was sold by the American toy company Tyco. Garfield’s eyes opened when the receivers were lifted and shut when the phone was hung up. Presumably they love lasagna and hate Mondays.

Contradictory rumors about their origin had always circulated locally, mostly that the phones came from a shipping container that had been lost overboard in the 1980s. Earlier this year, the French news outlet FranceInfo ran a story about the mysterious telephone parts. Shortly afterward, Simonin-Le Meur ran into a man, René Morvan, while they were removing a group of dolphins beached on the coast.

He told her he knew where the phones were coming from. And he could show it to her.

“I didn’t really understand,” she says, “because I was thinking the container was underwater and this gentleman didn’t look like a diver.”

But Morvan, a 57-year-old farmer who owns the land adjoining the public beach, told her about a bad storm that occurred around the time he was around 20. That was when the Garfield telephones first washed up all over the beach, and he and his brother went to investigate. They found the remains of a shipping container lodged in a cave in the cliffs, one that was often submerged, but sometimes revealed at low tide.

Along with the Garfield-shaped phones, the container had also held televisions and a quantity of red wood. After several weeks of bad weather, Simonin-Le Meur and a half-dozen other volunteers were able to access the cave’s entrance at low tide, on March 22.

Up against the algae-covered rocks at the cave entrance, “We found pieces of metal, which were pieces of the container,” she says, with signs of rust. The group also found “lots of fragments of telephone. So, we knew we were in the right spot.”

There were hundreds of pieces, including dozens of handsets, their buttons intact and many still clearly showing their numbers. Finally, Ar Viltansoù had solved the mystery, though some members speculate about the existence of a second container, that might account for the different locations where the phones have come ashore.

The somewhat charming mystery of the cartoon phones appears to be solved, but the tale takes on a darker note in the context of an increasingly visible crisis of plastic in the world’s oceans—microplastics in particular. Too small to see with the naked eye, these remnants, which the unrecovered phones will eventually break down into, will long be a part of the marine food chain.

“They say in 400 years the plastic will degrade,” says Simonin-Le Meur, “which is to say instead of big, visible pieces of plastic, it will be present in small quantities everywhere, in the water, in the air, in the sand.”

And that’s not to mention the toxins that may be leaching into the water from their electronic components.

Imagine, she says, the state of the planet, with thousands of containers going overboard each year. FranceInfo, which accompanied the group’s expedition to locate the source of the telephone parts, reported that somewhere between 1,500 and 15,000 containers are lost at sea each year. Off the coast of France, these included a 1993 release of pesticides, sulfur, and nitrocellulose, a highly flammable component of gunpowder.

Though toxic, such spills are quickly forgotten. But the Garfield phones, Simonin-Le Meur notes, optimistically, “speak to people, because it’s Garfield, a cartoon character, it seems nice.”

She hopes “they’ll open their hearts to this subject that doesn’t usually interest them and that will really make them hear what we’re telling them.”

Everything is bigger in Pangaea.

The Triassic Boreal Ocean Delta sounds like something cooked up in the mind of John Hammond—in the version of Jurassic Park where no one gets eaten. But it was a very real place, and a very, very big place. According to a recent study published in the journal Geology, researchers have discovered evidence of the largest river delta ever known to have formed on the Earth’s surface—equivalent in size to a full one percent of our modern land area.

This colossal discovery was made near the Barents Sea, off the northern coasts of Norway and Russia. The delta originally formed on the supercontinent of Pangaea, more than 200 million years ago. Researchers at the University of Bergen in Norway examined rock samples, seismic reflection data, and well logs to get a picture of the massive hydrological and geological feature. The delta plain that began to come into focus appeared to cover the entire basin of the Barents Sea.

The feature would have been the product of numerous rivers and intense monsoons, all carrying sediments to the coast from the Variscan Orogeny and Uralian Orogeny—mountain-building events, still ongoing in what is now Europe. “The drainage for the Triassic deltas could have been twice that of what feeds Mississippi today,” says Tore Grane Klausen, lead author of the study, via email. Overall, the delta plain grew to more than 600,000 square miles. That is more than 10 times the size of the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta, the largest in the world today, and it dwarfs the Nile River Delta’s measly 9,650 square miles. We’re talking about a river delta nearly the size of the entire state of Alaska. There may have been larger ones, lost to a variety of geologic processes over the ages, but according to known evidence, this one is the champ.

The delta would have been as rich in flora and fauna as today’s vibrant ecosystems; “lush deltaic wetlands with ferns and ginkgophytes,” Klausen says, would have dotted the region, teeming with labyrinthodonts (relatives of some of the earliest land animals), as well as pliosaurus and ichthyosaurs in the surrounding sea.

The team hasn't decided on a name for their find, but according to New Scientist, they are considering the Snadd Delta, for the sedimentary sequence it was identified in. Snadd-sized has a nice, large ring to it.

Native American farming was more sophisticated than your history textbook told you.

Just outside St. Louis, visitors can witness the monumental earthen mounds that mark Cahokia, the largest indigenous city north of Mexico. There’s a persistent myth that the original inhabitants of what is now the United States were all hunter-gatherers living in small communities. Yet these mounds—likely used for ceremonial and housing purposes by people of the Mississippian Culture—reveal an often-neglected history: an organized, socially diverse, Pre-Columbian city.

Experts disagree about Cahokia’s exact population—and most other aspects of its society. Yet many archaeologists estimate that at its peak around the year 1100, Cahokia housed 10,000 to 20,000 people, with up to 50,000 inhabitants living in the surrounding area—a population size rivalling or surpassing concurrent European cities. Yet conventional theories of Native American agriculture, which is depicted as relatively non-productive and reliant on a classic trio of corn, squash, and beans, fail to account for a fundamental question: How did the Cahokians feed so many people?

Gayle Fritz has an answer. Archaeologists have long argued that Cahokians, like other indigenous North American cultures, relied heavily on corn. That’s true, says Fritz, a paleoethnobotanist and emeritus professor at Washington University in St. Louis. But in her new book, Feeding Cahokia, Fritz uses data from more recent seed flotation studies to argue that Cahokian crops were much more diverse than previously believed. This supports interpretations of Cahokia as a densely populated, prosperous city—and challenges older assumptions about the simplicity of Native American farming.

For hundreds of years, scholars argued that pre-Columbian North Americans did little to reshape the environment. In the past decades, however, more recent scholarship has argued that pre-Columbian American societies were not only equally or more sophisticated than those of the so-called Old World—but that indigenous people used large-scale agriculture to reshape the Americas into what Charles C. Mann, author of 1491, calls “the world’s largest garden.”

For most of the United States’ history, scholars found this difficult to believe. When 19th-century traveller Henry Breckenridge stumbled upon the Cahokian mounds in 1810, he was "struck with a degree of astonishment” by indigenous Americans’ monumental accomplishments. Yet his contemporaries were so steeped in the era’s racist notions of ability that they found it easier to believe the mounds were built by Vikings, ancient Greeks, or bands of marauding Welshmen. (Variations of this disbelief persist today.) Observers were similarly skeptical of Native American agriculture, doubting that their predominantly hoe-based, slash-and-burn methods could be as productive as plow-based European models.

Reflecting this disregard, many of the mounds were leveled during the construction of St. Louis, and their earth used to build the city. As late as the 1970s, the government built a highway between the historic mounds. By the time UNESCO declared Cahokia a World Heritage Site in 1982, however, archaeologists were beginning to take the implications of Cahokia’s massive infrastructure and rich artifacts seriously: The city was larger and more complex than previously imagined.

Yet, Fritz argues, they continued to underestimate the complexity of Cahokian agriculture. This is partly due to limitations in archaeological methods. Traditional fieldwork relies on sifting dirt through a mesh sieve in order to sort artifacts from sediment. These sieves are the perfect size to catch pot shards and errant kernels of corn, but they’re too large to separate out smaller grains. As a result, says Fritz, the archaeological picture of Cahokians’ diet was skewed toward maize.

By using flotation—allowing water to bubble up through sediment and examining the tiny particles that float to the top—archaeologists have found evidence of a much more varied agricultural system, including domesticated plants such as Chenopodium valendiary, a North American relative of quinoa, and Iva annua var. macrocarpa, a domesticated variety of marsh elder. Fritz theorizes that this complex agricultural system was run by highly knowledgeable, respected women. Cahokian cooks likely combined these grains with maize and vegetables, such as squash, to make stews, porridges, and bread, as well as the still-popular corn-based hominy.

Cahokian agriculture was so successful that the city’s prosperity may have attracted migrants from across the region. Using an isotopic analysis of human bones at Cahokian gravesites, archaeologists have found that up to 30% of the population weren’t native to the area. Pottery made in the artistic style of non-Mississippian cultural groups using Cahokian clay adds weight to the argument that people were migrating to Cahokia from as far as the Ohio River Valley. While the idea of a culturally diverse, even cosmopolitan, Native North American city may be surprising to some, Fritz says, “I wasn’t surprised at all. I thought, man, this place had to be multilingual, multiethnic.”

Venture into the swampy grasslands around Cahokia today, and you’ll see the distant cousins of domesticated Cahokian Chenopodium and marsh elder. The Cahokian cultivars have been lost—wild varieties yield much smaller, less nutritious seeds than those that fed the city. Yet ghosts of indigenous agriculture remain. Cucurbita pepo gourds, likely domesticated by early Native Americans, continue to grow wild in the river valleys near the site. Meanwhile, some local patches of Chenopodium flower and fruit simultaneously—an unusual synchrony that may indicate these plants are more closely related to domesticated ancestors.

For Fritz, these traces of Cahokian agriculture are laden with opportunity. While efforts to revive lost indigenous strains are still in their infancy, Fritz says Cahokian cultivars like Chenopodium, a relative of the popular (but environmentally and socially fraught) South American quinoa, could provide both economic and environmental benefits to local communities. In this sense, the story of Cahokian farming isn’t just one of loss—of people, cultures, and cultivars—but also of possibility.

A revolution in the use of filters, way before Instagram.

Photography is an art form with deep scientific roots. In ancient Greece, Aristotle and Euclid both described early pinhole cameras. Renaissance painters, Leonardo da Vinci among them, also used these camera obscura (Latin for “dark chamber”) to understand light and color in their work. And Hasan Ibn al-Haytham, an Arab mathematician, astronomer, and physicist, defined techniques in his Book of Optics that became the precursor for early approaches to photography.

Innovations beyond optics came over the years, especially in the 19th century—daguerreotypes in 1837, dry plates in the 1870s, rollable film in the 1880s. But all, as we know, in black and white. Prints could be hand-colored, and it would take another leap before true-to-life color photography became possible. In early-20th-century Russia, one premier photographer helped pave the way for colored images as we know them, and the Library of Congress has dedicated serious efforts to digitizing and restoring his photo negatives, which contain a detailed portrayal of his country at the time.

Sergey Prokudin-Gorskii was a chemist and photographer, first known for presenting papers on the science of photography as a member of the Imperial Russian Technical Society, the country’s oldest photographic society. After establishing a studio and lab in St. Petersburg, his interest in the limits and freedoms of color photography deepened. This fascination brought him to Berlin in 1902, when he studied color sensitization and three-color photography with Adolf Miethe, a photochemistry professor and practitioner. In 1907, the French Lumière brothers introduced the Autochrome color process, but it remained expensive and difficult, and Prokudin-Gorskii stuck with Miethe’s more familiar process. It involved black-and-white negatives shot and then reassembled with colored filters to produce a full-color image.

A few years later, Prokudin-Gorskii presented a portrait of revered Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, along with color images of the country’s culture and monuments, to Tsar Nicholas II. So the Tsar funded him and provided special access for him to document daily life using his innovative color photography techniques. Prokudin-Gorskii used a specially designed railroad-car darkroom (outfitted by the Tsar) to produce 10,000 images of the Russian Empire from roughly 1909 to 1915—in particular its farther reaches.

In 1948, the Library of Congress purchased a portion of this historically significant collection of images from the photographer’s sons. “There are 1,902 [images] from black-and-white glass negatives,” says Phil Michel, digital project coordinator in the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress. “We digitized the entire collection of negatives in the year 2000.” Prokudin-Gorskii’s photographs come from an important time in Russian history: before World War I, and before the Revolution. His renderings of medieval churches and monasteries offer insight to “old world” Russia, in contrast to photographs of the technologically advanced factories of the era. His portraits of the Russian people are vivid and wide-ranging.

“In the early 20th century, when Prokudin-Gorskii photographed his visual survey, the Russian Empire included not only modern-day Russia, but also substantial territory in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and beyond,” according to the curators in the Prints and Photographs Division. “The survey greatly interests both the many people living in this vast region and people elsewhere in the world trying to learn about its history.” In 1922, Prokudin-Gorskii left Russia for Paris, taking his personal inventory—about 3,500 negatives—with him. Half of them were confiscated by authorities who deemed their subject matter too sensitive to leave Russia.

Prokudin-Gorskii’s particular method for color photography, building on the work of Miethe, is known as the “three-color principle,” and simulates the way the human eye deciphers color. Starting with a black-and-white image, “he exposed a glass plate through separate blue, green, and red filters, then used a triple lens magic lantern to project a full-color image,” the curators say. “It took a lot of technical as well as creative expertise in its use of color filters to create on a glass plate three exposures that could later be aligned (registered) into a single color image.” Essentially, Prokudin-Gorskii used a camera that exposed a single glass plate to the three different color filters in succession. Then, by layering the filters, he could produce a single color image. It worked, but it was time-consuming. “In the 1930s, the preferred method became color film with all the color information held in a single frame,” say the curators. “Although modern color photography would evolve using alternative techniques, the imagery created by Prokudin-Gorskii demonstrated the value of color photography for documenting society and culture.”

The process for digitizing the remaining glass negatives was as labor-intensive as it was for Prokudin-Gorskii to produce them. It took the curators nearly six months to complete the initial scanning process of the 1,902 glass plates. The Library then commissioned 122 color prints based on these digital files, with Walter Frankhauser of WalterStudio in Monrovia, Maryland. The digital process, in that instance and in later digitization efforts, was essentially the same as the analog one—superimposition of the three filtered images, with the artifacts of that visible at the edges.

Today, thousands of Prokudin-Gorskii’s photographs of 20th century Russia are available online—the final pivot from analog to digital.

Bigwala was once illegal, and only two master practitioners remained.

James Lugulole, age 81, arrives at a house surrounded by coffee trees in the Ugandan village of Mawanga. On a papyrus mat, he aligns and assembles the trumpets he carries inside a basket. More men arrive on motorbikes, carrying drums and more trumpets. As they prepare to play, men and women of all ages gather under the shade in anticipation.

“Everytime there is a Bigwala performance, people will stop to listen,” says James Isabirye, a Lecturer at the Department of Performing Arts of Kyambogo University in Kampala, who has been working with local communities to preserve musical traditions since 2012.

Although it had been illegal for decades, James Isabirye first heard Bigwala when he was young. Growing up in a village in the Busoga kingdom, one of five traditional monarchies of Uganda, he was exposed to music from an early age. “Each kingdom had its own musical traditions,” he says. “When I was a child, one of our neighbors who was a trumpet player died and all his teammates came to play for his funeral. The trumpets were called Bigwala.”

Bigwala were considered royal instruments, and performers danced and played during coronations and other important events for centuries. Their joyous notes were once the sound of Busoga’s monarch and the kingdom. But in 1966, Prime Minister Milton Obote imposed a new constitution in Uganda that, in an effort to unify the country, abolished the kingdoms and banned performances of Bigwala and other cultural practices associated with them.

“The people who were performing royal music had to go into hiding,” says Isabirye, “and the music stopped being practiced.” Kingdoms were demonized, and playing the king’s music would lead to their arrest. The Bigwala music Isabirye heard in his village was an illicit performance. By the time President Yoweri Museveni restored the kingdoms in the 1990s, royal musical traditions were on the brink of extinction. In 2005, when Isabirye helped organize a national cultural festival, he noticed with alarm that only old people attended to play and listen to Bigwala. As of 2012, only two master practitioners of Bigwala remained alive.

In response, Isabirye made it his mission to revive the tradition. “This music is part of the cultural heritage of the Basoga people,” he says. “If these traditions are lost, the people are lost as well.”

He started by applying to add Bigwala to UNESCO’s List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding—a status that would also aid in securing funding. “Many people didn't even know what Bigwala was,” says Isabirye, referring to Ugandans. The application was successful, and the elderly musicians Isabirye had met were eager to pass on Bigwala skills. There was just one problem, which everyone had overlooked. “The seeds for growing the gourds were lost,” says Isabirye, a recollection that he laughs about today.

One of the reasons that Bigwala has such a long history is that the trumpets are made from a long-necked type of gourd. “The tone of the trumpets is pleasant to anyone, and yet the simplicity of making them is surprising,” says Isabirye. “They are just rustic gourds assembled together.” In the local Lusoga language, the term “Bigwala” refers to the gourds (a set of five differently sized trumpets), the accompanying dance, and the music itself. Gourds had everyday uses in the community—drinking water, carrying beer, preserving cereals—but they were also a royal symbol.

Similarly, Bigwala is simultaneously elite and democratic. While associated with the king, the music provided a unifying sense of identity for the Basoga, and ordinary people would also hire performers for weddings and housewarmings. Bigwala does not require a trained group of dancers, and the trumpet players do not have designed costumes. “Everybody dances the way it pleases them,” says Isabirye. “Bigwala is for all people and does not limit anybody from entering the performance.”

To make Bigwala trumpets, Ugandans collect mature gourds and keep them in a reserve above the fireplace for about a month. Gourds dried in the sun do not produce the desired, rich sound, and they can crack. But a fireplace’s mild warmth provides ideal conditions for the gourds to dry slowly. Unfortunately, no one could find the seeds they needed to grow new instruments.

“I used to travel on a motorbike as far as five hours from my home looking for the seeds,” says Irene Nabirye, a women's leader in the village of Mawanga, and one of many community leaders Isabirye mobilized to search for the gourd seeds. None of the musicians had any, so they traveled farther and farther until, Isabirye says, they found one old woman who had kept a gourd in her fireplace. Cutting it open, they found 36 seeds. Nabirye became part of the group that grew the first new generation of trumpets with those seeds.

To Isabirye’s delight, it was not just elderly Ugandans who became interested in the restoration project. Children helped cut mature gourds, glue pieces together to form trumpets of varying lengths (starting with the lead and lowest-pitched “Enhana” trumpet), and fasten the new instruments with rubber bands while the glue dried.

Since 2015, with support from UNESCO, more than 100 youths from different villages in Busoga have been trained in making gourd trumpets and performing Bigwala music. Isabirye says that Bigwala is now part of the curriculum for Uganda’s Certificate of Education.

In March of this year, I witnessed the results at a performance in Nabirye’s village. As the soothing melody from the five trumpets rose above the treetops, accompanied by drumming, women joined a moving circle, swaying their bodies and raising their hands to the rhythm. Eight Bigwala groups have been formed so far, and each can fully perform the music and dance for their communities. The new generation of Bigwala players have played at three coronation anniversaries and two events to mark Kyabazinga (King) Day. Against all odds, young Ugandans are taking up a tradition that was once on the verge of extinction.

A hatching system devised 2,000 years ago is still in use in rural Egypt.

Many aspects of Egyptian culture impressed the ancient Greeks, including their mathematics, papyrus-making, art, and egg-hatching. Aristotle was the first to mention that last innovation, writing that in Egypt, eggs “are hatched spontaneously in the ground, by being buried in dung heaps.” But 200 years later, the historian Diodorus Siculus cast Egyptian egg-hatching as wondrous. In his forty-book-long historical compendium Library of History, he wrote:

The most astonishing fact is that, by reason of their unusual application to such matters, the men [in Egypt] who have charge of poultry and geese, in addition to producing them in the natural way known to all mankind, raise them by their own hands, by virtue of a skill peculiar to them, in numbers beyond telling.

Aristotle and Diodorus were referring to Egyptian egg incubators, an ingenious system of mud ovens designed to replicate the conditions under a broody hen. With lots of heat, moisture, and periodical egg-turning, an egg oven could hatch as many as 4,500 fertilized eggs in two to three weeks, a volume that impressed foreigners for centuries. Western travelers mentioned the wondrous structures constantly in their writings about Egypt. In 1750, French entomologist René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur visited an egg incubator and declared that "Egypt ought to be prouder of them than her pyramids."

Egg incubators were quite a late invention, considering Egypt’s long history. According to Salima Ikram, a professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, chickens were not a native bird of the Nile valley. They probably came from Asia—where they were domesticated from wild fowls 10,000 years ago—through Mesopotamia, or perhaps via trade ships that sailed to East Africa. It was only during the Ptolemaic dynasty, which lasted from 323 to 30 B.C. that chicken became a staple feature of Egyptian diet, says Ikram. In order to have a regular supply of chicken meat, Egyptians developed the first egg incubators.

From the outside, many incubators looked like smaller, more rounded versions of the pyramids. They sat upon rectangular brick foundations, and had conic-shaped chimneys with a circular opening at the top. That thousands of eggs could be hatched in a single oven was impressive feat, considering that a broody hen can only hatch up to 15 eggs at a time. Incubator hatching also meant that hens could spend more time laying eggs.

Exactly how workers operated the ovens is much less clear. According to some scholars, Egyptians were very secretive of egg ovens. Travelers may have relied more on their imagination than factual observation when explaining their workings. The Irish friar Simon Fitzsimons framed the ovens as supernatural. Fitzsimons visited Egypt as part of an epic pilgrimage that took him from Ireland to the Holy Land in the early 14th century. This is how he described the wondrous egg ovens:

“Also in Cairo, outside the Gate and almost immediately to the right . . . there is a long narrow house in which chickens are generated by fire from hen eggs, without cocks and hens, and in such numbers that they cannot be numbered.”

By failing to mention that eggs were fertilized by roosters, Fitzsimons led readers to imagine that chickens could be “generated by fire.” Descriptions of “furnaces” that would “produce” chicks were later included in one of the most popular travelogues of the Middle Ages, “The Travels of Sir John Mandeville,” further adding to their mythical allure. As noted by Cynthia Resor, a professor of social studies education at Eastern Kentucky University who has studied accounts on Egyptian egg ovens, Western authors projected their own worldviews to make sense of the incubators. “A medieval friar in the Middle Ages was looking for miracles and he found one,” she says.

It wasn’t until the Enlightenment that Europeans produced the first reliable description of Egyptian egg ovens. In 1750, Réaumur traveled to Egypt and was allowed inside the “mythical” ovens. He wrote a detailed description of what he saw. According to Réaumur, the ovens were structured in two symmetrical wings separated by a central corridor. Each wing contained up to five sets of two-tiered chambers. Fertilized eggs were placed in the lower tier, and kept warm with heat from a smoldering fire in the upper tier. Aristotle wrote that the eggs hatched after being buried in dung. In fact, dung was indeed key in the hatching process, but it wasn’t used the way the Greek philosopher thought. In the semi-arid Nile valley, manure was easier to source than wood, so sun-dried dung was burned as fuel to keep eggs warm.

A few rooms were used as accommodation for hatchery workers. Their main job was to monitor the fire and to turn eggs regularly—a crucial aspect of hatching. According to Phillip J. Clauer, an assistant teaching professor of animal science at Pennsylvania State University, egg-turning prevents embryo membrane from getting attached to the shell, which can lead to chicks hatching with deformities.

Knowing when to stop brooding is also key. In the final days of egg incubation, chicken embryos develop enough internal heat to hatch. Too much external heat can cause an early birth. Hens can figure this out instinctively by feeling the temperature of their eggs with their bodies. So did Egyptian egg hatchers. Réaumur described how workers would carefully hold an egg between their fingers and gently press it on their eyelids—one of the most sensitive parts of the human body.

By mimicking the behavior of a broody hen, Egyptians could hatch eggs year-round. In contrast, European farmers could only hatch chicks in the spring and summer, as most hens could not warm eggs successfully during cooler months. Réaumur tried to replicate the ingenious Egyptian method back home in France. But due to the colder European climate, egg ovens required much stronger heat and more fuel to effectively hatch eggs. The scientist failed to find a cost-effective solution. After his death, other scientists took on the challenge. But it was not until 1897 that Canadian farmer Lyman Byce came up with the coal lamp incubator, using an electric regulator to keep temperature constant. Byce’s invention was soon widely commercialized and eventually turned the city of Petaluma, California, into the “chicken capital of the world.”

With the invention of the electric incubator, fascination with Egyptian egg ovens faded further. Most contemporary poultry experts believed that the ovens were long gone. But in 2006, a team of experts from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) found that Egyptian egg ovens are still hatching chicks today. Workers follow the same methods developed 2,000 years ago. “We were mapping rural farms to check for avian flu risks,” says Olaf Thieme, a livestock expert who co-led the FAO survey. “We found that locals in three governorates still use the ancient system.”

As detailed in their FAO survey report, contemporary egg ovens look a lot like their predecessors. They still have main wings that are separated by a corridor. Each wing has the same two-tiered system described by Réaumur. Despite the availability of thermometers, workers still rest eggs against their eyelids to check egg temperature. The main difference is that petrol lamps have replaced animal dung as a source of heat. But despite that change, “that the ovens still existed and at such a big scale was a big surprise for me,” Thieme says.

In his 1750 account, Réaumur specified that hatchery workers mostly came from the town of Brene, on the Nile delta. That’s exactly where FAO documented the highest concentration of traditional egg ovens, although it is now called Berma. Indeed, the Arabic word for hatchery workers, bermawy, means “man from Berma village.” The FAO experts concluded that “the system was basically passed on from one generation to the next without formal training,” Thieme says. That means that oral knowledge of egg incubation survived 2,000 years of linguistic evolution, from ancient Egyptian to Coptic, and finally Arabic.

According to Ali Abdelhakim, who co-authored the FAO report and now serves as the Chairman of the General Organization for Veterinary Services in Egypt, an estimated 200 ovens are still managed according to ancient technique. But most hatchery workers are gradually shifting to more contemporary methods. Many have already incorporated modern features like metal trolleys, automatic egg turning, and thermostats. As demand for poultry keeps rising, this trend is likely to continue. But as Clauer points out, even the most advanced incubator still runs on the same ingenious principle first devised 2,000 years ago: replicating the ministrations of a broody hen. Maybe Réaumur was right. That might be even cooler than the pyramids.