A familiar sight, millions of miles away.

Picture a the shallows of a gently flowing stream, or a bathmat meant to evoke one, and you might settle on something that looks a lot like this—a swath of relatively uniform, smooth, round pebbles against smaller grains of sand. Take a closer look at this one, though, and you’ll notice what’s missing. There are no ripples or minnows or strands of algae. That's because this image, recently shared by NASA, was snapped on Mars.

NASA's Curiosity rover landed at the Gale Crater on the red planet in August 2012, and has been rolling around Mount Sharp—which rises 3.4 miles from the depression’s floor—ever since. So far, the rover has covered a little more than 12 miles. Scientists were intrigued by this region, in particular, because the mountain’s thick layers could offer a glimpse into deep time and help reveal what the planet was like several billion years ago—and possibly hold clues about whether it could have sustained life.

Orbiting satellites had detected clay minerals in this part of the mountain, a region known as Glen Torridon. Since Curiosity has been there, researchers have gotten a closer look. The pebbles are tiny mudstones, says Valerie Fox, a postdoctoral researcher in planetary science at the California Institute of Technology, and the co-lead for the Mars Science Laboratory Mission science campaign at Glen Torridon. “All the materials we’ve been seeing, more or less, in Mount Sharp are the products of ancient lake beds,” she says. Many, many, many years ago, the finest material settled out of the water column and gathered on the bottom, she adds. Then, “over eons, it turned to rock.”

Curiosity keeps coming across tiny stones like these. The largest one in the image, all way on the left, is about 3/4 of an inch. The round, blueish one with a hole in it, looking almost like a barnacle shell, is just 1/16 of an inch. Collectively, these tiny bits of evidence (and the giant mountain they reside on) help tell a big story about the planet’s past. “We’re in this clay-bearing lake environment at the moment, but when we start looking uphill, we start seeing more evidence for minerals and salts that form in conditions where it’s drier, and where water is leaving. The very top of the mountain is anhydrous—it doesn’t look like it has minerals that formed with water really at all,” Fox says. The mountain seems to track the evolution of our planetary neighbor, from its infancy three or four billion years ago, when it swam with lakes and rivers possibly similar to early Earth's, through to its arid present. “We’re seeing that progression over millions and billions of years recorded in these rocks,” Fox says.

Researchers aren’t yet sure exactly how the pebbles came to look the way they do, but Fox says that, as on our own planet, water or wind probably played a role. “On Earth, we see really round pebbles in rivers and streams because the water is carrying them down and bashing the angular bits off until you end up with this nice round shape,” she says. Wind smoothes and sculpts sharp edges, too. The scientists are also investigating whether some of the smaller ones could have been impact spherules, formed when a collision melted rock then flung it into the air, vaporized it, and froze it, causing it to fall as “basically raindrops of rock,” Fox says. “It’s possible that in this image we see evidence for a couple of different of these processes, but it’s definitely a work in progress to understand what exactly is going on.”

While researchers continue to investigate the pebbles, it's cool to think about just how familiar they look to us because, all in all, they’re not so different from what we might find underfoot. “There’s nothing terribly alien here,” Fox says. “Except that it’s on Mars.”

Though not much to see, Mount Stromboli is a scientist’s dream.

For certain scientists, Mount Stromboli is the perfect volcano precisely because it is surprisingly milquetoast. Stromboli lacks the more charismatic drama that a volcano evokes—skyscraping plumes of ash, sustained eruptive columns, billowing chutes of lava, all that jazz. Instead, this volcano is mild, with frequent, short-lived gurglings of lava that spew out around every 20 minutes. If a Hawaiian eruption is a sustained scream, a strombolian eruption is unhinged babbling.

A small island off the north coast of Sicily, Stromboli has been erupting continuously for the past 2,000 years. These gentle explosions can be seen from all around the island, granting Stromboli the rather romantic nickname “Lighthouse of the Mediterranean.” It is one of the eight Aeolian Islands, a volcanic archipelago in the Tyrrhenian Sea named after Aeolus, the Greek demigod of the winds. At its summit, Stromboli is a mere 3,031 feet, paling in comparison to some other active volcanoes, such as Hawaii’s Mauna Loa, which reaches 13,679 feet, or Ojos del Salado, which looms in the Andes at an astounding 22,615 feet.

While Stromboli’s modest stature and tiny eruptions offer little grandeur, they make the volcano perfect for scientific study. That’s why Keri Nicoll, a research fellow and meteorologist at the University of Reading, chose Stromboli to study volcanic lightning, the extremely metal phenomenon that occurs when lightning erupts in a volcanic plume. Stromboli’s plumes are “relatively small and benign, which means you can really get quite close to study them without endangering the scientists involved,” Nicoll wrote in an email. Plus, she added, the commute was “only a 900-meter [2,953-foot] climb to work every day”—a nightmare for most but a volcano researcher’s dream. In comparison, dormant Mauna Kea’s 13,796-foot summit is so high that construction crews frequently succumbed to altitude sickness when building the peak's first observatory.

Volcanic lightning only occurs if the volcanic plume is electrified, which can happen in a number of ways. Scientists have long known that when particles of ash rub up against each other, they create electrical imbalances in a process called triboelectrification. It’s the same thing that causes a balloon to stick to your hair after you rub it on your head. This explanation only applies when the plumes contain ash. Stromboli’s plumes don’t contain any ash, just gas, so they don’t produce visible lightning. Yet they’re still electrified, research has shown, so some other mechanism but be working in these gaseous emanations.

To solve the mystery of Stromboli’s phantom charge, Nicolls and her collaborator, Corrado Cimarelli from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, had to measure the charge of the volcano’s ash-free clouds. After lofting balloons carrying electricity-measuring instruments over the volcano, they discovered that another, previously unrecognized mechanism gives these plumes an extra electrical boost. Stromboli’s secret? Radon, the invisible, odorless radioactive gas of basement detector fame. When radon decays, it emits charged “daughter” elements that, in turn, decay and produce their own charged particles. With eruptions happening every 20 minutes, these charges build up over time to create a pretty electrified plume. The researchers’ results were published last week in Geophysical Research Letters, and their work was funded by the National Geographic Society.

Nicolls is actually glad that Stromboli doesn’t even produce its own volcanic lightning; that dearth of excitement makes it such an ideal testing zone. “Had the plumes been more complex and contained ash,” she says, “There would be many more dominant charging mechanisms in operation and their effects would likely have swamped any other mechanisms, such as radon, which might be active.” So give it up for Stromboli, one of the world’s least visually spectacular and most scientifically cooperative active volcanoes.

How Stephen Mallon captured this unusual voyage to the bottom of the ocean.

The photographer Stephen Mallon specializes in documenting man's industrial-scale creations. During his career, he's focused his lens on the recycling industry, the largest floating structure ever built, and the transportation and installation of a new bridge in New York City. So it wasn't surprising when, in 2008, he was drawn to an unusual program spearheaded by the MTA New York City Transit system: a multi-phased artificial reefing project that saw the shells of 2,580 decommissioned subway train cars repurposed and dropped into coastal waters off New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia, between 2001 and 2010.

Mallon arranged to follow the outdated subway cars as they were prepared and cleaned, loaded onto barges, and finally plopped into the sea. As he traveled with a crew in a tugboat to get his shots, the photographer developed his sea legs.

“I was never underwater, so just needed to keep myself steady on the back of the boat. It’s kind of like surfing or skiing—just keep your balance, keep the horizon line straight, bend your knees, and don’t fall overboard,” Mallon says.

With his Canon camera, Mallon shot more than 6,000 frames (only a tiny fraction of which are shown in a new exhibit, Sea Train: Subway Reef Photos by Stephen Mallon, currently on display at the New York Transit Museum) over the course of three years.

Though the subway car reefing project came to a close in 2010, its effects are evident today. “The subway car reefs have created almost 2 million cubic feet of new habitat for fish and invertebrates off South Carolina,” says Robert Martore, artificial reef coordinator with the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources.

Not all of the repurposed subway cars have performed as well as hoped, however. The “Redbird” models have held up well in deep waters (“about 90 percent of them remained intact and upright after 15 years,” Martore says), but the “Brightliner” cars have been a disappointment, with many collapsing after less than a year. Regardless, all of the subway car reefs have attracted attention from fishermen and divers, including Martore himself.

“The subway cars have always been some of my favorite diving off South Carolina. The variety of fish life is usually outstanding,” he says. “Occasionally we see pods of dolphin coming to feed on the tremendous schools of baitfish above the cars, and sea turtles are often found sleeping in and under the cars.”

Coordinates for the artificial reefs in South Carolina are available to the public, so anyone with access to a boat can visit them. For those who can’t make it in person, Mallon’s hard-earned, large-format photos provide an intimate view of how machines that once transported people in the city found new life as homes to sea creatures in nature.

Sea Train: Subway Reef Photos by Stephen Mallon is on exhibit at the New York Transit Museum through June 16, 2019.

The small, ornate tomes were big status symbols.

Several thousand years ago, in Babylonia, someone chiseled columns of text onto a tablet that set down instructions for what people might expect on any given day of the year. Some boded well—the first day of the new year was “completely favorable,” with good luck at every turn—while others called for caution. Twelve days in, it was dicey to barter grain, two days after that was prime time to bring up legal woes, and three days later, according to the inscription, doctors should dodge their patients. Consulting each day’s forecast could be difficult if you were out and about—but eventually, people found a way to take their information and prognostications with them wherever they went.

The Babylonian Almanac is among the earliest texts to lay out such daily prescriptions and predictions. From there, the format took off. By the early modern era, Europeans were eager to know how to carpe the heck out of each diem, and when to evade danger by laying low. In the pages of almanacs, readers found calendars and counsel—everything from reminders about religious feast days to details of the lunar cycle, according to Cambridge historian Lauren Kassell. Readers snapped up these volumes in huge numbers. During the Renaissance, historian Bernard Capp has noted, English almanacs sold some 400,000 copies a year—bested only, perhaps, by the Bible.

Each almanac had a shelf life, though—precisely 365 days. By and large, Kassell has written, they were ephemeral, “discarded in December, used to light a fire or tossed down the privy.” Each January, you’d grab a fresh edition for a new set of forecasts and factoids and everything you needed to know for the months ahead.

Despite this, some of these volumes were made with striking craftsmanship and dazzling details. An untold number were deliciously, ostentatiously, really, really small—made for people with nimble fingers, impeccable eyesight, and deep pockets.

Almanacs of any size had the appeal of putting information right at your fingertips, and the smaller versions—some as tiny as a postage stamp—added the allure of ultimate portability. It’s hard to say exactly when miniature almanacs emerged, but a bibliography of miniature books compiled by former Newberry cataloger Doris Varner Welsh lists a calendar for the year 1475, made in Trent, as an early example. (That one held six leaves and measured roughly three inches by two inches.) Suzanne Karr Schmidt, curator of rare books and manuscripts at the Newberry Library in Chicago, describes these volumes as “showpieces.” Miniature versions with virtuosic details, such as embroidered or painted bindings, “were really meant to be these little jewels of the format,” Schmidt says. They demonstrated care and skill on the part of the printer, who may have had to enlist new tools and smaller type for the format.

The palm-sized guides would also have slaked the period’s thirst for novelty accessories—particularly practical ones. Readers commonly yoked books to their bodies with girdles, and by the 18th century, wealthy women toted little nécessaires stocked with thimbles, thread, and other sewing supplies. An almanac was a go-to tool, and a miniature version, Schmidt says, would have signaled “the cachet of having a different format.” Small and striking as they were, Schmidt says, they really would have gotten some use.

Collector Patricia J. Pistner only has eyes for the little guys—she exclusively looks for small books, ranging from the macro-miniature (smaller than four inches in any dimension) to the ultra-micro-miniature (which can’t exceed 1/4 of an inch in any direction). Some 950 of her tiny treasures are on view at the Grolier Club in New York through May 18, 2019—with several miniature almanacs among them.

“I’m particularly fond of little French almanacs,” Pistner says. “I’ve been collecting these for about 34 years.” These volumes sparked Pistner’s love affair with tiniest tomes when she had set out to stock the library of her miniature, 18th-century French model townhouse. Pistner estimated that the shelves would hold between 500 and 600 of them—but over three decades, she’s only found 95 or so. She continues to comb rare book fairs and work with dealers to find more.

The fact that almanacs were designed to be discarded makes it difficult to estimate how many miniature versions were produced, but “apparently, more of these [almanacs] were printed and attractively bound than any other kind of miniature book,” writes Jan Storm van Leeuwen, an instructor at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School and co-curator of the Grolier Club exhibition, in the accompanying catalog. The pages of almanacs of all sizes brimmed with weather forecasts, timetables for coach routes, tide charts, and “tables for converting money, weights, and distances,” Storm van Leeuwen writes. Buyers of fancy miniature versions could select which sections they wanted to have bound, which meant that many almanacs printed in the same place in the same year could contained different information. In some cases the bindings were designed so that the almanac pages could be replaced each year, and the precious exteriors reused.

Pistner’s collection includes several stunners, including a 15th-century German example with bold astrology and astronomy charts, and some 19th-century versions from London and Paris that probably would have been given as gifts. An 1805 edition from London’s Company of Stationers bears the sign of an urbouros—a snake eating its own tail, symbolizing the infinite—encircling a pair of initials, and an 1818 Parisian version was designed to be worn as a locket, with mother-of-pearl covers engraved with a pair of roses. Many feature painstaking embroidery, such as a long, rectangular hunting almanac produced in Liège, Belgium, in 1745. The cover depicts a rolling green landscape with sparse blue clouds and a spindly tree, where a hunter and two dogs leap at a wolf. Above them a banner reads, somewhat ominously, “LA FIDELITE NOUS DETRUIS” (“loyalty destroys us”).

We still carry versions of handheld almanacs today, of course, one that chime with notifications about the weather and news. They can tell us nearly anything we want to know, and though they don’t last forever, they usually stick around for more than a year, at least. Smartphones are equally as portable, too—but it’s hard to argue that they’re even half as lovely.

Archaeologists in Switzerland unearthed a fragment of a very small shoe.

Sometime in the 14th century in Saint-Ursanne, Switzerland, there lived a very fancy baby. No one knows the baby’s name, but we do know the infant was fancy because of their tiny, beautiful shoes: intricately decorated leather ankle boots with buttons and clasps. Archaeologists uncovered fragments of this well preserved and frankly adorable artifact during an ongoing excavation of an old town in Switzerland’s Canton of Jura, according to a story in The Local Switzerland.

After spending the last seven centuries immersed in the groundwater of a large, wet depression left by the river Doubs, the baby boot surfaced under the cobblestones in the eastern part of Jura’s old town. Archaeologists quickly brought the boots to Marquita and Serge Volken, who work as shoe specialists at the Lausanne Shoe Museum, according to a statement from the Jura Office of Culture. The Volkens identified the boot as an especially rare find, joining the ranks of just five other known shoes of a similar design previously unearthed in Europe.

The Volkens believe the shoe likely belonged to a one-year-old child. The fragment measures around seven by five inches, with a top made of goat leather and a sole made of cow leather. But perhaps the most stunning facet of the boot is its decoration. The boot’s toe sports a delicately etched floral design with leaves sprawling out of the tongue, while the heel features a geometric arrangement of squares. Apparently power-clashing was in vogue in 14th-century Jura.

Today Jura remains a remarkably medieval place, with preserved Romanesque architecture still standing throughout the canton. The town of Saint-Ursanne also hosts a medieval festival every other year in July, during which people dress in period clothing and partake in activities from that era, including blacksmithing and constructing catapults. And the canton Jura has a unique claim to prehistoric fame, as its surrounding mountain range dates back to the time of sauropods and thus lends its name to the Jurassic period.

Organic material such as leather and wood can be well-preserved with waterlogging, the anaerobic process that occurs when an artifact is soaked in groundwater without any access to air, according to a report by Historic England. Waterlogging—which happens most often in bogs—can create eerily perfect preservations. Just imagine the furrowed forehead on from the fourth-century BC Tollund Man or the lingering fragrance of dairy of centuries-old bog butter. Though perfect for topographical details such as leaf carvings or laugh lines, waterlogging cannot preserve the color of the artifact they entomb, obscuring the original colors of this now-brown bootie. Meanwhile in Jura, the excavation continues, leaving hope that this lone bootie might be reunited with its mate.

These ancient forest gardens may be more relevant than ever.

It was 1975 and Geoff Lawton was wintering with friends in Morocco. Camping on beaches north of Agadir, they’d been surfing for weeks when locals told them about Paradise Valley. Located along the Tamraght River in the High Atlas Mountains, it promised 5,200-foot vistas, blue-green waterfalls, and lush, rainforest-like vegetation.

Lawton, then 21, was on his first trip outside the U.K. “Tourists had yet to ‘discover’ the area, so the culture was very much preserved,” he says. “For me, it was like going back to Biblical times.”

The dirt road to the Valley climbed through a barren, arid landscape into rural hills studded with mud brick homes. Twenty kilometers in, the group stopped at the tiny village of Inraren for directions. Lawton went to relieve himself in a roadside wood.

“I remember thinking it was odd that this lush, green forest should be bursting from the desert,” he says.

Stepping inside, things got stranger. The air felt cool, almost misty. Growing in the shade of tall date palms were trees, vines, and shrubs bearing bananas, tamarinds, oranges, figs, guavas, pomegranates, lemons, limes, mulberries, carobs, quince, grapes, and other fruits and nuts. Following a footpath through the grassy understory past groves of olive and argan trees, Lawton discovered a cluster of fenced-in vegetable and herb gardens—most about a quarter-acre in size. Here and there, goats were tethered to posts. Chickens clucked through the underbrush and roosted in trees. Gazing down a leafy corridor, he spotted a man leading a donkey. Its saddlebags brimmed with produce.

“I felt like I’d wandered into some kind of ancient organism,” says Lawton. “I had goosebumps all over.”

Totaling about 65 acres, the food forest was a remnant of one of the world’s oldest sustainable systems of agriculture. While its origins have been lost to history, scientists agree it is at least many centuries old. Some, including Lawton, date its establishment to 2,000 years ago. When asked about the forest’s age, villagers shrug.

“I have no idea how old it is or when our ancestors first began gardening here,” says 45-year-old Abdelmajid Ziyani, a construction worker and member of a local argan and olive oil cooperative. “But I know it has been here for centuries.”

“It is really old,” adds 28-year-old Brahim Jidi, with a laugh. He works as a waiter in a local hotel and gardens in the forest as a hobby. He says he grew up hearing stories about his “grand- grand-grandfather” helping tend the forest.

In the 1970s, the communal space was “farmed” by about 800 villagers. Fed by underground springs and shaped by human hands since time immemorial, it was the image of a true oasis. The system remains in use today.

Now 65, Lawton describes his experience at Inraren as life changing, and he has spent a career growing food forests and advocating for their importance as a solution to climate change and other environmental ills. But back in 1975, his friends were threatening to leave him in the woods. Snagging a few oranges, he split. By the time the group reached Paradise Valley, the forest seemed like ancient news.

Before modernization, food forests were a staple of indigenous communities in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and beyond. Though most have vanished, vestiges have been identified in places as diverse as Tanzania, southern India, Indonesia, the Amazon Rainforest, Central America, and the Caribbean islands.

“This method of agriculture was used throughout the world, but particularly in tropical regions, where multi-species food forests were once the dominant method of production,” says John F. Munsell, Virginia Tech professor of agroforestry and co-author of 2018’s The Community Food Forest Handbook. Though little is known about their early history and adaption, Munsell says forest gardens began with villagers seeking to make their lives easier.

“They settled inside or along forest edges and relied on them for food,” he says. “Naturally, they started managing and altering the environment to their advantage.”

Useful plants were cultivated. Those that weren’t got weaned out. As space opened up, new species were added.

“Say you find bananas growing a mile away,” says Munsell. “That’s great. But it takes time and energy to harvest those resources. Planting them in your backyard is infinitely more convenient.” If you apply that thinking across centuries, “the region’s indigent edible plants became aggregated in one spot.”

Villagers mimicked natural relationships and planted certain species closer to others. Trade introduced non-native plants. Trial-and-error brought horticultural knowledge. Techniques were passed down and steadily improved.

In time, conditions supporting helpful or edible bugs were encouraged. Ditto for mushrooms and medicinal herbs. Gardens came to include plants and nuts that fed livestock such as pigs or goats. Waterways were diverted and rainwater impoundments installed. Domesticated birds including chickens, guineas, and pheasants ate unwanted insects. Restricted to given areas, goats cleared brush. Pigs rooted in the soil, preparing it for planting. The animals’ manure served as fertilizer.

“The goal was effectively to create an agricultural ecosystem that was as self-sustaining as possible,” says Munsell. As a result, advanced region-specific methodologies emerged.

Lawton points to Inraren as an example. Its overstory of date palms has at least four purposes. Thriving in harsh environments, the trees provide bounteous shade and, when planted close together, have a cooling effect. Tall, limbless trunks give other plants space to grow and serve as trellises for epiphytes and vines. Long taproots retrieve water hidden deep in the soil. Fruit provides tasty sustenance.

“The palms shield sensitive species with shorter root systems from the sun and help them access the moisture they need to survive,” says Lawton. Through the process of transpiration, the latter raise interior humidity levels, bringing further cooling effects. Dead leaves and plant matter build the soil, enabling it to retain more moisture. Combined, these factors produce a haven for grassy plants, herbs, and vegetables—all without the help of industrial irrigation, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or mechanization.

“Unlike modern commercial farming practices, the goal isn’t to maximize the output of a single staple crop,” says Lawton. “Instead, farmers focus on the yield of the overall system. The goal is to provide their families with a year-round food supply as rich as it is diverse.”

As the ecosystem matured, it became more and more self-sustaining. Farmers were able to focus their energies on enlargement, additions, or other tasks. In places like the Amazon, Munsell says experts now believe the techniques were so successful that they produced tracts of managed forest spanning thousands of square miles. Unfortunately, colonization, modernization, and rampant logging have left scant traces of their existence.

It’s unlikely indigenous farmers referred to such gardens as food forests. In fact, the term didn’t exist until the early 1980s, when it was coined by English horticulturalist Robert Hart.

In a book titled Forests and Food: Addressing Hunger and Nutrition Across Sustainable Landscapes, Bhaskar Vira, who directs the University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute, identifies a variety of historical appellations. Translated, the names range from simply “home gardens” in Zambia, Nepal, and Kerala, India, to “forest gardens” in Sri Lanka, “the gardens of complete design” in Java, and Mexico’s “family orchards.”

According to Vira, it wasn’t until Western anthropologists began studying indigenous agricultural practices in the early 20th century that scholars took note of the gardens. Even then, reports remained largely obscure.

“In all but the most rural and isolated places, forest gardens were eradicated in favor of commercial, monocultural production techniques,” says Munsell. Before Europeans colonized the Caribbean, for example, food forests were likely the primary method of agriculture. Sugarcane production would have wiped them out entirely, “but a few plantation owners noted the systems’ ability to cheaply feed their workforce and allotted resources to maintain them.”

Agronomists didn’t recognize forest gardening as a viable “technology” until the late 1960s.

Facing global adaptation of Green Revolution farming practices—which advocated monocultures, mass application of artificial fertilizers and pesticides, mechanized production techniques reliant on fossil fuels, and genetically engineered crops—Indian agronomist P.K. Nair helped pioneer a new field of agricultural science: agroforestry. A native of Kerala, he’d grown up tending forest gardens. Studying agronomy in Germany and England, he came to appreciate the method as a means of increasing food security in space-limited locations or developing countries.

“He was the first to conduct serious scientific research with the goal of developing a systemic, adaptable approach for improving forest gardens,” says Munsell. Nair co-founded the World Agroforestry Center in Kenya in 1978. Accepting a position at the University of Florida in the early-1980s, he worked to establish the field as a component of U.S. agricultural programs. For many of today’s agricultural students, agroforestry is required learning. “He’s basically the father of food forests being taught in academia,” says Munsell. “Without him, my title would likely be very different.”

Inspired by Nair, the 1970s OPEC oil embargo, and emerging scientific consensus connecting carbon emissions with climate change, horticulturalists such as Hart began adapting and experimenting with forest gardening techniques. University of Tasmania bio-geography professor Bill Mollison upped the ante when he co-authored a radical treatise on agriculture, Permaculture One: A Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlements in 1978.

Like Nair, Mollison advocated for a system of sustainable, perennial-reliant agriculture that would sequester carbon and offer an eco-conscious alternative to Green Revolution technologies—i.e., forest gardening. As with agroforestry, his methods involved “the intentional combination of agriculture and forestry to create integrated and sustainable land-use systems.”

The idea was to capitalize on the benefits of integrating useful trees, shrubs and, vines with crops and livestock. In the process, problems like mass erosion, desertification, deforestation, irrigation-induced water shortages, pollution from unchecked storm runoff, and rampant carbon emissions could be curbed dramatically.

Warning of impending environmental catastrophe, Mollison called for permaculture to be adapted en masse. Toward that end, he established a central non-profit credentialing institution to train agronomist-farmers. In turn, he hoped they would disseminate practical techniques throughout the world and found regional sister institutions.

“Bill wanted to shift the paradigm of food-production away from clearing forests to make room for fields of artificially supported corn and soybeans, or boundless pastures for cattle,” says Lawton. In short, he wanted to use the techniques that built Inraren’s food forest centuries or even millennia ago to help address climate change and other environmental ills. In 1981, his efforts netted Mollison a Right Livelihood Award, also known as The Swedish Nobel.

Combined, Nair and Mollison paved the way for a global food forest revival. But it was Geoff Lawton that succeeded in bringing the idea to the mainstream.

By 1979, Lawton was running a contract cleaning business in Australia. A girlfriend told him about Mollison, who was then launching the first Permaculture Institute. Struck by the book’s name, Lawton read Permaculture One. With a degree in engineering, he was impressed by its scientific approach.

“And when I realized he was writing about what I’d seen in Morocco, man, that hit me like a bolt of lightning,” says Lawton. The forest had stayed in the back of his mind for years. “It felt kind of, well, fated.”

Within a year, Lawton was attending classes at Mollison’s institute. By 1985, he was a certified instructor of permaculture buying 30 acres of land in rural Australia. There, he made history.

“Everyone was talking about establishing these food forests, but nobody had done anything really substantial,” says Lawton. As he worked as a consultant on permaculture design projects—essentially a more food-oriented and eco-sensitive approach to landscaping—the lack of visual examples was problematic. Clients were interested, but wanted to see a precedent. “I needed photos showing step-by-step implementation and how these things would look one, five, 10 years in,” says Lawton. “So, I decided to transform my farm into a working model.”

The strategy worked. By the early 1990s, food forest designs began to sell. In 1997, Mollison retired and asked Lawton to assume directorship of the Permaculture Institute. The designation led to worldwide notoriety. Lawton used it to push the envelope and put food forests on the map.

“I thought, ‘What’s the craziest thing we could do with this technology?’” he says. Again, his thoughts returned to Inraren. “The answer was: Establish a food forest in the desert.”

The result was a precursor to Lawton’s ongoing Greening the Desert initiative. Beginning in 1999, the project aimed to establish a food forest demonstration site in Jordan, about two kilometers north of the Dead Sea.

“This was the toughest project I’ve ever worked on,” says Lawton. The site was 400 meters below sea level. Mid-summer temperatures rose to 122 degrees Fahrenheit. Soils were salty. Rainfall averaged less than six inches per year. “Nothing of this nature had ever been attempted,” says Lawton. “The only model I had was Inraren. And what we created basically mirrors that site.”

The before-photos of the area resemble a landscape from Mars. Follow them through the years, though, and you’ll witness the blossoming of an oasis. The resulting media coverage helped reintroduce food forests to the world. More importantly, it proved their viability.

“What Geoff did was take this fantastical, abstract concept and transform it into an achievable reality,” says Jacqueline Cramer, who helped found Seattle’s Beacon Food Forest in 2009. The 1.75-acre plot is open to the public and supported by a partnership with the city. Inside, there are more than 40 species of fruit and nut trees, and, depending on the season, upward of 100 varieties of herbs and vegetables. An additional 5.25 acres are slated for development. Gardening meetings routinely feature more than 100 attendees from surrounding neighborhoods.

Cramer says Lawton’s work made it possible to provide city planners with well-established examples of food forests. “Then there’s the perspective brought by Greening the Desert,” she adds. Screening Lawton’s documentary made “installing an edible forest ecosystem here seem like a piece of cake.”

A tragic irony of food forests is that at the same time that advocates are promoting them as the future of agriculture, historic examples, such as Inraren, are endangered.

In Morocco, increased tourism has brought paved roads, running water, electricity, and better access to produce markets. A taste for costly new amenities and goods has been introduced. Uninterested in a self-subsistent lifestyle, youths are drawn to cities for education and better work. Those who stay have focused on argan oil production and supplementing their income through tourism or other jobs. The shift toward monoculture has disrupted the sensitive forest ecosystem and is beginning to deplete the soil.

“Our ancestors had a deep connection with [this forest]—they used to live from it; they were united,” says Jidi. “But now it’s different. People have other options. They can be doctors or go work in [modern] fields. And we have more expenses. Now, we want expensive shoes, and phones, and internet. Before, [about $20] a month was enough. Now, my kids alone spend [more than $30] each week. You cannot make that much from the forest.”

Still, older residents continue to rely on the forest for much of their food. Nearly everyone sells forest products for extra cash. And gardening plays a central role in village life.

“All of us work here,” says 68-year-old Inraren native Mohamed Ait Dakha, a former tourism director. “It provides almost all of my family’s food. For us, it is sacred … I only hope our [young people] leave, study, make something of themselves, then come back. My wish is that they will be capable of watching over this land.”

Unfortunately, that might be easier said than done. In various documentaries, Lawton has urged governments to recognize and preserve indigenous forest gardens as natural historical landmarks. Inraren’s story is common: Youths are migrating to cities, and the passing of village elders means the loss of management practices. In time, logging or development may erase old food forests entirely.

Today, food forests are being created throughout the developed world at breakneck pace—as of 2018, more than 70 have been installed in public spaces throughout the U.S. alone. After helping install a food forest in Seattle, Cramer served as a consultant for large-scale food forest projects in cities such as Oakland, Los Angeles, Atlanta, New York, and Philadelphia. Many are in low-income neighborhoods, or amid food deserts, and can provide community programming, urban greenways, and access to better nutrition.

While proponents are enthusiastic about their benefits, those hoping for agroforestry to reform global agriculture are looking beyond the model of Inraren. “The point was never that home forest gardens and small-scale community food forests would somehow magically eradicate world hunger or solve climate change,” says Munsell. Instead, the goal of urban food forests is to cultivate public awareness and change how we think about agriculture.

“To understand the truly limitless potential of these traditional technologies, we need to look deep into the past,” says Lawton. He points to an era when the indigenous techniques that gave rise to permaculture and agroforestry fed some of the world’s largest societies.

During the decades that Lawton and other advocates spent honing permaculture techniques to create new food forests, historians and geographers looked to old food forests to re-write our understanding of human development and geography.

Today, it is a known fact that “people living in and near forests have, for millennia, been altering forests ... to meet their food and nutrition needs,” writes Bhaskar Vira, the Cambridge professor of geography and environmental economics. A prominent example came in the mid-2000s, when paleobotanical research in New Guinea revealed “that people as early as the late Pleistocene (30,000-40,000 years ago) were manipulating the forest by trimming, thinning, and ring-barking in order to increase the natural stands of taro, bananas and yams.”

According to Munsell, early academic advocates of food forests tended to see them as a way to solve food shortages among small or isolated populations in developing countries. In the West, some of the first adopters were homesteaders and communalists who, influenced by the dreams of the Sixties, considered them a means of dropping out of society, being self sufficient, and reforesting small tracts of land. “But now, you have findings that imply forest gardening techniques once supported populations of tens of thousands of people or more,” he says. “And that changes everything.”

The most jaw-dropping example of this revisionist history is the Amazon Rainforest. For decades, the region had been considered a kind of false paradise: Its rich biodiversity obscured the fact that its poor soil could only support small villages. But as Charles C. Mann writes in 1491, anthropologists have more recently argued that the rainforest was home to large, impressive societies. Rather than plant European-style fields of crops, they cultivated orchards, which fed them until the disease and destruction brought by colonization. Eventually the jungle hid these decimated settlements, and Europeans assumed the landscape was pristine wilderness. But as Mann writes, drawing on the work of academics such as William Balée, Amazonians may have modified the environment to the extent that the rainforest is “largely a human artifact.”

This thesis is bitterly contested by the old and new guard. But it is increasingly accepted, and not just by those studying the Amazon. A theme of Vira’s work is that global agriculture has not just meant cutting down trees to plant fields; it’s equally meant modifying forests—by transplanting seedlings, burning understories, and changing watercourses—so that they evolve into better food systems. Put another way, nearly all of the world’s “pristine” forests show signs of being shaped by the techniques now encapsulated by agroforestry and permaculture.

Munsell, Lawton, and Vira envision a future that, in many ways, emulates this past. In it, agriculture has integrated forest gardening techniques advanced by agroforestry and permaculture.

“On the simplest level, you’re doing things like planting nut trees between rows of corn,” says Munsell. This runs counter to the monocrop perspective, which gauges success by the output of a single crop such as corn. But the trees provide shade and groundcover, lessen inputs such as irrigation and pesticides, and prevent erosion—thereby reducing costs. Meanwhile, they produce salable nuts and provide habitat for beneficial birds and insects. “When you look at these systems as a whole, they’re going to be more productive, more efficient. And that’s before you consider environmental impact, or certifications that could increase crop values.”

“Once upon a time, American farmers planted [nutrient-intensive] cash crops like cotton year in and year out,” says Munsell. “They went on doing that until they depleted the soil and nothing would grow at all. Of course, we now know crop rotation would have maintained the soil. Today, that’s the dominant model.”

Fifty to 100 years from now, he hopes the same will be true for agroforestry. The question is: Will it be too late?

Abdellah Azizi contributed reporting to this article.

It took several weeks, protective masks, and elbow grease. Oh, and also pickaxes.

It looked and sounded a bit like the inside of a cave—dark, damp, dripping—but it smelled to high heaven. When flashlight beams fell across gray-brown mounds rising from the floor, the light wasn’t striking stalagmites, but waterlogged heaps of gloopy, congealed wipes, oil, and grease that snagged and languished in the pipes.

The sewer in the seaside town of Sidmouth, England, was clogged by a fatberg. It was squishy, rank, and hefty: When it was discovered back in December, the local utility company South West Water estimated that it snaked 210 feet underground, making it the largest they’d ever encountered, and among the closest to the shore. “Thankfully it has been identified in good time with no risk to bathing waters,” Andrew Roantree, the utility’s director of wastewater, said in a statement at the time. Roantree forecasted that it would take about eight weeks to clean up the mess, but officials noted that the combination of heavy rains “and the sheer volume of fat in a confined space could cause delays to the removal timeline.”

Over the past several weeks, “workers have braved exceptionally challenging conditions to break up the beast,” officials from the water company said in a release. They pulled on masks and descended down through the manhole via a winch, except when the water levels were dangerously, disgustingly high. Wielding pickaxes or jets, BBC reported, the crew chipped or blasted away at the chunks until the slurry could be funneled into tanker trucks waiting above ground and enjoying a much more enviable view.

It took 36 truckloads—each of which carried 3,000 gallons of gunk—but the team has finally slain the beast. Its fatty innards traveled to an aerobic digester, where they were used to produce energy, the Sidmouth Herald reported. At local libraries, pools, and pop-ups, the utility’s Love Your Loo campaign continues to preach a gospel of flushing only the “three P’s”—that’s pee, poop, and toilet paper—down the pipes. Meanwhile, other cities are also arming themselves for battles against various clogging culprits. New York City debuted an anti-fatberg PSA, and the English town of Ipswich recently beseeched residents and business owners to please stop shoving Yorkshire puddings into pipes.

Above and below ground in Sidmouth, at least, things are back to normal. This summer, beachgoers who hadn’t seen the headlines or overheard the spiels might only see the water and the shore and the red cliffs behind. It might be easy to forget that, beneath a nearby manhole cover, something truly gross was afoot.

No matter where you grew up, odds are there's a TV spot that defined your metro area.

Anyone who grew up in the '70s, '80s, '90s, or even the '00s can attest to the weird staying power of televised local ads. Before entertainment and advertising went online, everyone in a given area was subjected to the same TV ads, all the time. It's little wonder that the wild characters, catchy jingles, and odd comedy bits put together by furniture warehouses and used car dealers had a way of worming their way into the local culture. Over in the Atlas Obscura Community forums, we asked our readers to tell us about the most unforgettable local ads from their area, and after reviewing them all, we've never wanted to buy a sofa set more in our lives.

From New York's infamous consumer electronics madman Crazy Eddie, to British Columbia's Dodd Furniture Company and their low-budget pop culture riffs, all of these old-school ads ultimately became part of the local social fabric. Many of the businesses behind them have long since disappeared, but the impact of their TV spots live on.

Take a look at some of our favorite reader (and staff!) submissions below, and if you have an unforgettable local advertisement of your own that you'd like to share, head over to our Community forums and tell us about it!

Becky's Carpet & Tile

St. Louis, Missouri

"I think anyone who spent time near St. Louis in the '80s and '90s will remember Becky, the Queen of Carpets and Wanda, the Princess of Tile." — tyler

Crazy Gideon's

Los Angeles, California

"Crazy Gideon commercials were such an assault on the senses that they lapse into punk rock video art. Between the accent of unknown origin and the crappy sound mixing, it’s just an incomprehensible man screaming at you for 30 seconds. When Crazy Gideon’s closed, I stopped watching TV." — tralfamadore

Easterns Automotive Group

Maryland & D.C.

"Numerous people from Baltimore have told me about this." — tipareth2003

The House of Guitars

Rochester, New York

"Late night weekend commercials featured lots of fast cuts, fan participation, and repetitive catch phrases (at Easter, 'I’m the real Easter Bunny… hop hop,' at Christmas, 'Don’t give baby an ugly sweater'). Brothers Bruce and Armand Schaubroeck started selling records in the mi-1960s, but opened their huge, disorganized store full of guitars, music, albums, CDs, posters, and all things rock & roll in 1974. They are still there to this day." — asaucygal

Kemp Mill Records

Temple Hills, Maryland

'"Kemp Mill Records breaks its own records!' Everyone I grew up with in the Maryland suburbs of D.C. in the 1970s and ‘80s remembers these ads. Also, remember… records?" — Philip_Shane

Gallery Furniture

Atlanta, Georgia

"Donna and the Wolfman were a father/daughter duo in the Atlanta area with really memorable commercials in the '80s. Their furniture stores are still around!" — mmstrick

Worthington Dealership Group

California & Alaska

"Does anyone remember Cal Worthington and 'his dog Spot?' Each ad featured Mr. Worthington in a white cowboy hat walking through his car dealership with a different animal that was very definitely not a dog. I remember ones where he was riding a cow, carrying a parrot, I think one with a cheetah or a tiger or some other kind of big cat." — ArkyTrojan

Piel's Beer

New York City

"Long before digital anything, color TV, or computer graphics, perhaps one of the most iconic TV ad campaigns of all time burst forth in the 1950s on small screen black and white VHF sets all over the five boroughs of New York City. At least three of the seven then available TV networks showed them. I speak of course of Burt and Harry Piels. Simple black-and-white line-drawing animation for Piels Beer, written by and voiced by Bob and Ray, stars of radio comedy, and famous for their deadpan, quirky, and totally hilarious skits. Piels was a local NY beer brewed in Staten Island with nothing to recommend it, and a small market share. With the introduction of Burt and Harry circa 1952, sales took off. The brewery eventually folded and is unremembered, but Burt and Harry went into the record books." — wilkeskennedy

Eat 'n Park

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

"It’s not Christmas season here until this starts playing." — thomasharper

Dodd's Furniture and Mattress

British Columbia, Canada

"The ones that immediately came to mind are Dodd’s Furniture and Mattress ads with Gordy Dodd (catchphrase, 'I won’t be undersold'). He dressed up like various movie characters and often involved his staff as well." — LeighE

Newmark & Lewis

New York City

"Kinda creepy looking back at this, LOL!" — MarilynR

Jhoon Rhee Tae Kwon Do

Washington D.C.

"Anyone who grew up in the D.C. metro area in the '80s will remember the Jhoon Rhee ad and that damn jingle." — vgwatson

BC Clark Jewelers

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

"Oklahomans everywhere know that the Christmas season has really begun when they hear/see this ad. Just start singing it in Oklahoma. I promise people will sing along." — Kmmokc

Master Fabricators

Augusta, Georgia

"Everyone who grew up in the Augusta, Georgia area in the '80s is forever haunted by the Master Fabricators jingle, with the monkey riding in one of those quarter machine cars. 'You’ll always get the shaft–the drive shaft–at Master Fabricators!'” — offwithyourtv

Frankie & Johnnie's Furniture

New Orleans, Louisiana

"New Orleans has a million of these. [...] Possibly the best was the Frankie and Johnny’s 'special man.'" — kermitforg

Fugazy Continental Limousine

New York City

"New Yorkers will no doubt remember the Fugazy Continental Limousine company, which was so successful at one point that it got Bob Hope to do the voiceover for its ads. After the company imploded amidst fraud allegations, its name became a local slang term for anything scammy or fraudulent." — lindacantoni

Crazy Eddie's

New York City

"Does anyone remember Crazy Eddie in New York City? He was loud and obnoxious and he sold more goods that anyone else. His ads really made him sales and he was a subject in classes at NYU." — photoken7

Schweig-Engel Furniture and Appliances

St. Louis, Missouri

"So many good local St. Louis commercials." — Caviglia

Norton Furniture

Cleveland, Ohio

"Cleveland, Ohio, has a couple gems, but I think my favorites are the Marc Norton furniture commercials. You can look at any number of them and they are consistently weird, played at night, and always feature the tagline: 'If you can’t get credit in my store, you can’t get credit anywhere. My name is Marc, and you can count on it!'" — mathias787

Gallery Furniture

Houston, Texas

"My choice was for Gallery Furniture, out of Houston, Texas. Jim McIngvale has been an institution in this city since the 1980s." — cearared

Roll N Roaster

Brooklyn, New York

"Atlas Obscura’s HQ is in Brooklyn and no one’s mentioned Roll ‘n Roaster?! I always show people this ad whenever I’m trying to convince them why it’s the greatest trash food temple. They sell roast beef sandwiches, creamed corn fritters and champagne, yo." — lampbane

Responses have been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

If you know of another Nathan-Melech, this is your chance to speak up.

In 586 BC, King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylonia ordered the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem. The siege may have precipitated the exile of Jews to Babylonia and the creation of a Jewish diaspora (the exile may have also begun earlier), but the Babylonians failed to destroy all traces of Temple-era life. One such artifact has just turned up in an excavation, and it may have belonged to a royal courtier personally named in the Bible.

The bulla, a piece of clay impressed with a seal and used to sign letters, was found in the Givati Parking Lot, which since 2007 has been Jerusalem’s largest active excavation site. According to Anat Mendel-Geberovich, a scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who deciphered the bulla, its seal bears the words “(belonging) to Nathan-Melech, Servant of the King” (or LeNathan-Melech Eved HaMelech, in Hebrew transliteration), and the script dates back to sometime between the middle of the seventh century and the beginning of the sixth century BC. That lines up fairly well with the reign of King Josiah (circa 640-609 BC), whose servant Nathan-Melech is mentioned once in the Bible, at 2 Kings 23:11.

The passage, as provided by Haaretz, tells us that King Josiah “took away the horses that the kings of Judah had given to the sun,” and that “by the chamber of Nathan-Melech the chamberlain” he “burned the chariots of the sun with fire.” It refers, in other words, to Josiah’s efforts to crack down on idol worship and re-emphasize Judaism’s monotheistic tenets. This was only part of Josiah’s religious reform campaign, which also closed down local sanctuaries and thus established the Jerusalem Temple as the definitive center of Jewish religious life.

The timing is only one indication that the Nathan-Melech of the bulla and of the Bible are one and the same. It’s also telling that the bulla was found in what was a large public building built from finely carved ashlar stones, and bearing remnants of a polished plaster floor fit for a place of official prominence. In a press release, Mendel-Geberovich also pointed out that the seal only features Nathan-Melech’s first name, suggesting that he was sufficiently well known to render further details unnecessary.

While the details seem to point that way, Mendel-Geberovich acknowledged that it’s ultimately impossible to prove beyond all doubt that the two texts refer to the same figure. Whatever the case, surely none of the Nathan-Melechs hanging out in Jerusalem 2,600 years ago expected to be making headlines after nearly three millennia.

Felicia had a job to do.

In February 1971, physicists at the National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, began testing the biggest machine in the world: a ring-shaped, 200-billion-electron-volt (BeV) proton synchrotron particle accelerator. The stakes were high. NAL director Bob Wilson had told the U.S. Department of Energy that he could get it running within five years for $250 million, and they were four years in. They soon ran into a perplexing problem: Magnets that were essential to its operation kept failing.

The low-tech solution proposed for this high-tech trouble? A ferret named Felicia.

But first, a bit background. The NAL—today known as Fermilab, after the physicist Enrico Fermi—has a chain of accelerators: a linear accelerator (linac), a booster, a recycler ring, and a main injector ring. The linac provides the proton beam and the initial jolt of energy; the booster accelerates it; the recycler “batches it” into groups of protons for a more intense beam; and the main injector ring zips the beam around tens of thousands of times to nearly the speed of light. The particles are then sent to various testing facilities, where they’re smashed together or against a fixed target. The resulting collision, observed by a particle detector, reveals their interiors and sometimes creates exotic particles. These are the most fundamental elements of the universe.

Back in 1971, the design was a little different; for one thing, the injector and recycler rings didn’t exist. What did was an accelerator four miles around called the main ring. It was outfitted with magnets, which guide the beam through the accelerators: “774 dipole magnets—which steer the particle beam—and 240 quadrupole magnets—which focus the beam,” as the physicist Ryuji Yamada, who designed the dipole magnet, recalled.

These aren’t fridge magnets: Each is 20 feet long and weighs nearly 13 tons. At first, just two magnets failed when the glass fiber insulation around their coils broke. That soon became two a day. Over the next several months, the team replaced 350 magnets.

Yet on June 30, 1971, they managed to send a beam of particles all the way around the ring for the first time. By August, they sent one around 10,000 times. But when they tried to accelerate the particles above seven BeV, the magnets shorted out.

Yamada finally realized the cause: metal slivers left behind when they cut into the vacuum tubes. “So when the magnets were excited to a higher field,” he wrote, “they were pulled inside the magnet gap, stood up and stopped the beam, because they were slightly magnetic material.”

They had to get the slivers out. But how?

Robert Sheldon, a British engineer who’d been brought on to NAL to find “shortcuts and money-saving ideas,” suggested a ferret, equipped with a cleaning tool, could do the job, scampering through the vacuum tubes as if flushing rabbits out of a warren. “In his part of Yorkshire, hunters used ferrets,” Frank Beck, a former head of research services at Fermilab, wrote. “A ferret would not hesitate to run down the inside of the stainless steel tube, even if that involved a long journey into the unknown.”

The ferret arrived by special delivery from the Wild Game and Fur Farm in Gaylord, Minnesota. At 15 inches long, she was the smallest ferret they’d had. Her fur was brown and black except for white patches on her face. They called her Felicia. She cost $35.

They placed a custom collar around Felicia's neck and a diaper around her rear; ferret poop in a tube would stop a proton, too. They attached a string to the collar. Felicia was to bring the string from one end of a tube to the other. Then they’d attach a cleanser-dipped swab to the string and pull it through.

But Felicia refused to enter the main ring vacuum tube. Perhaps she was daunted by the narrow, lightless black loop—it was four miles around.

Faced with a recalcitrant ferret, the scientists reassigned her to a section of 12-inch-wide tubes in the Meson Lab, a testing facility that was still under construction. “She was taught to scamper through progressively longer tunnels until she was ready to try one of the 300-foot sections that will be joined together to make the Meson Lab's tubes,” Time noted.

After her first run, she emerged “looking a little tired and bemused but otherwise quite healthy,” according to Beck. She’d pulled the string all the way through. As planned, workmen pulled the swab through the tubes. It came out covered with specks of dust and steel.

The media soon caught wind of her escapades. After she made seven successful runs, Time wondered whether she should be rewarded with mate. An unnamed official responded, "If Felicia became pregnant, she might not fit through the tubes."

Felicia likely wasn’t in any danger during her runs, says Valerie Higgins, Fermilab’s archivist and historian. “The sections she ran through were still under construction, so I would think they wouldn’t have any power running to them at that stage,” she says. “As far as getting stuck or suffocated goes: I think they were just relying on a ferret’s instinct to explore tunnels, so I don’t think she would have gone down a tunnel too small for her.”

The NAL staff doted on Felicia, feeding her chicken, liver, fish heads, and raw hamburger—her favorite. Some employees even took Felicia to their home for the night when the mink farm she generally bunked at had no room for her.

Meanwhile, the engineer Hans Kautzky created a “magnetic ferret” to deal with the debris in the main ring. He attached a dozen Mylar disks to a stainless steel rod, along with a flexible, 700-meter stainless steel cable—the equivalent of Felicia’s string—and a metal-attracting permanent magnet—the counterpart to the cleaning swab. He shot the device through a section of the main ring with compressed air. “With 12 operations, we could make it around the entire ring,” Yamada wrote. “This way we could clean the whole vacuum pipe, though not perfectly.”

But it worked well enough, because over the next several months, the team steadily turned up the energy levels without shorting out the system, and on March 1, 1972, they got the accelerator to reach the target energy of 200 BeV.

After a dozen runs through the Meson Lab tubes—which, when joined, grew too long for her comfort—Felicia went into semi-retirement, and spent most of her time as a pet on the mink farm. One night the following spring, she was at the home of Charles Crose, a NAL employee, when she fell ill. Crose took her to a vet the next day. Under medical care, she briefly rallied, but within a couple of days she died, on May 9, 1972. A necropsy revealed a ruptured abscess in her intestinal tract. The Village Crier noted, “It is planned that Felicia's body will be stuffed and mounted to be displayed permanently as a symbol of early NAL development.”

But if Felicia was taxidermied, there’s no record of it. “I've never found any evidence that that happened, and nobody remembers that ever happening,” says Higgins, who tried to track down people who worked with Felicia or might have more information about her fate after death. She had no luck. Many have since died.

Most historical artifacts associated with Fermilab are in a storage space Higgins manages. Is there any chance she’s hiding in the back somewhere, deep on a shelf?

“It seems very unlikely,” Higgins says. “I would love if I found that, but there's not too many corners at this point that somebody hasn't been into.”

Today Fermilab is one of 17 national labs and has multiple particle accelerators. Of the 13 known subatomic particles in the Standard Model of the universe—six quarks, six leptons, and the Higgs-Boson—three have been discovered there: the bottom quark in 1977, the top quark in 1995, and the tau neutrino in 2000.

The accelerator complex operates 24 hours a day, year-round, except for a couple of planned periods when it’s shut down for any maintenance, according to Andre Salles, a Fermilab spokesperson. It’s then that the tubes may be cleaned. For shorter sections, the accelerator operators attach a rag to a long stick and run it through. If it’s a long tunnel, they use the method Felicia made famous: “They usually use some kind of string,” Salles says, “and just pull the swab through.”

A prescient relic of the Islamic Golden Age.

Imagine leafing through an old book and discovering some blueprints, in the form of a clearly labeled diagram. They depict a rudimentary face covering, attached to a pipe with a set of bellows at the end. And there’s a simple but effective flap valve there to ensure that the mask is only supplied with fresh air. Anyone wearing the mask would be able to breathe safely in a toxic environment, provided someone else could work the bellows. Around the 19th century, European firefighters were beginning to make use of such things. But this book is far older than that. The gas mask is just one of a hundred amazing inventions laid out all the way back in A.D. 850 in the Book of Ingenious Devices, written in Baghdad by three scholars known as the Banū Mūsā brothers.

Practically every page of the book contains something just as impressive as the gas mask. There are designs for a self-filling lamp, a set of hot and cold water taps, and even entertaining automata. The plans are brief, each one a page of text alongside a diagram or two, but their simplicity belies the extraordinary prescience of the Banū Mūsā. The book represents an early high point in medieval engineering—compiling both inventions from ancient Greece, India, Syria, and Persia with the brothers’ original creations. It was truly a document representing the open approach to learning and the pursuit of knowledge that characterized the era in which it was written—the Islamic Golden Age.

This era, spanning the 8th to 14th centuries, was marked by the rule of the caliphates, vast Middle Eastern empires that became world powers. They also proved to be prosperous ground for human knowledge, as science, mathematics, and the humanities flourished.

The Banū Mūsā brothers were active near the start of the Golden Age, under the Abbasid Caliphate, specifically the rule of al-Ma'mun, a caliph noted for his love of poetry, philosophy, and science. Al-Ma’mun invested significant resources in establishing the recently founded city of Baghdad as a center of development, including the construction of a great library called the House of Wisdom and the support of a range of scholars and scientists.

Al-Ma'mun was close to the Banū Mūsā, and it is said that he had taken them into his care during their childhood, after they had been left impoverished and alone following the death of their father, a highwayman-turned-astronomer who also happened to be a friend of the caliph. Each of the brothers specialized in a different realm of knowledge: Muhammad exceled in astronomy, al-Hasan focused on geometry, and Ahmad was the engineer. The caliph commissioned them to write this book in order to demonstrate the many scientific principles they had mastered.

Salim al-Hassani, chairman of the Foundation of Science, Technology and Civilization, a nonprofit based in Manchester, England, says al-Ma'mun had a religious incentive to pursue technological innovation. “As prescribed by the Quran and the sayings of Muhammad,” he says, “Muslims should strive to seek knowledge and perform useful deeds that improve quality of life.”

Access to such advanced technologies may have given al-Ma'mun and other rulers a political advantage, too, granting him an almost supernatural aura when he met with foreign leaders. Under the previous caliphate, for example, a delegation had traveled to the Holy Roman Empire, bearing gifts for its leader, Charlemagne. Alongside an elephant and a silk tent was a state-of-the-art water clock, complete with mechanical horseman that would emerge when the hour was struck. Charlemagne and his court were so amazed that they reportedly believed the clock to be possessed by a djinn.

The crankshaft detailed in the book is a particular example of the brothers’ foresight. The device is used to turn pistons, providing power for engines and other mechanisms. A primitive crankshaft appears twice in the book, a full five centuries before the first known European description of a similar device.

Other designs were so successful that they are still used today. The clamshell grab was designed by the brothers as a sort of long mechanical arm, useful for scooping items from the bottoms of rivers or lakes. Consisting of two fragments of a metal sphere, with chains attached to a handle to open and close the device, it is easily recognized today on a variety of mechanical digging devices, with few variations from the original design.

Many of the devices listed in the book demonstrate a pioneering understanding and use of water, specifically hydraulics as a force. And while some of these inventions appear whimsical, such as trick cups that refill from secret compartments and fountains that spray water into a series of elaborate shapes, the devices demonstrate specific engineering principles. The fountain employs several revolutionary techniques to achieve its effect, including a system of weights that function as an automatic switch, changing the shape of the fountain at intervals as the water pressure changes. Timing devices such as these distinguished the Banū Mūsā from their successors for centuries to come, with similar concepts not entering widespread use until the 15th century.

Many prominent scientists working in the ensuing centuries failed to reach the technical standards achieved by the Banū Mūsā. Islamic engineers developing trick vessels and water dispensers in the 13th century were unable to match the advanced use of hydrostatics and aerostatics achieved in the Book of Ingenious Devices, resorting instead to simple siphons to achieve certain effects.

After the Banū Mūsā’s work was published, the brothers remained at the forefront of public life. Their later achievements included accurately calculating the circumference of the Earth and the length of the solar year. Their abilities came to be so well regarded that the brothers were called upon to design new canals and cities, or to assess the size of an invading army.

Around 300 years after the Book of Ingenious Devices was completed, a Mongol army led by Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghis, arrived at the gates of Baghdad. The House of Wisdom, along with much of the rest of the city, was destroyed. So many books were hurled into the Tigris that it was said the river ran black with ink.

But the sack of Baghdad was not the end for the the Banū Mūsā’s masterpiece. Ever since its publication, the book had been copied and widely distributed, and had been used as an academic source by other Golden Age scholars. By the time the caliphate fell, the book had also reached Europe through Islamic Spain.

A handful of manuscripts are now housed in prestigious locations worldwide, with the three most complete examples being held in libraries in the Vatican, Berlin, and Istanbul.

Perhaps the vision of the Banū Mūsā is best demonstrated in the form of their mechanical flute player. Thought to be a novelty intended to astound foreign dignitaries, the automaton played an instrument according to a set of instructions set via a method similar to what we would later, at the dawn of the Information Age, call the punch card. In simple terms, that means that three brothers from 9th-century Baghdad invented the world’s first programmable machine, over a millennium before scientists in the Western world would begin the development of the modern computer.

A deep, cosmopolitan archive appears online for the first time.

In the weeks leading up to the vernal equinox, it's common to see people across Iran busily clearing their homes of clutter. Rugs hang outside in preparation for a good beating, to rid them of a year of dust. This is all done in preparation for Nowruz, also known as the Iranian or Persian New Year. The holiday typically falls around March 20 but is celebrated for weeks with a variety of celebrations, ceremonies, and traditions. So who says the Library of Congress can’t get in on the festivities?

To wish you a Nowruz Pirouz, the library has made 155 rare Persian manuscripts, lithographs, and books dating back to the 13th century available online for the first time. The collection of illuminated manuscripts includes texts such as the Shahnameh, an epic poem about pre-Islamic Persia likened to the Iliad or the Odyssey, along with written accounts of the life of Shah Jahan, the 17th-century Mughal emperor who oversaw construction of the Taj Mahal. Other manuscripts focus on religion, philosophy, and science. Some are written in multiple languages, with passages in Arabic and Turkish. This wide range highlights just how cosmopolitan the collection is.

“We nowadays are programmed to think Persia equates with Iran, but when you look at this it is a multiregional collection,” says Hirad Dinavari, reference specialist for the collection at the library’s African and Middle Eastern Division. “It’s not homogenous, many contributed to it. Some were Indian, some were Turkic, Central Asian. Various people of various ethnic groups contributed to this tradition.”

One example of the mashed-up diversity with the collection is History of the Origin and Distinguishing Marks of the Different Castes of India, by James Skinner, an Anglo-Indian lieutenant-colonel in the British military in the early 19th century. The book is a true “cultural fusion,” says Dinavari. About two-thirds of the manuscript focuses on the tribes, traditions, and professions unique to Hindu India—yet the book is written in Persian, but with terminology popular in languages used in India. It addresses the lives of everyday people, who weren't often featured in such exquisitely assembled and illustrated books.

Most of the collection was acquired by the library during the 1930s, from Kirkor Minassian, an art dealer. Around 40 items were showcased in 2014, just before the digitization process began, with a special focus on materials that are too fragile for display. The project is almost entirely done; there are just 15 or so manuscripts left to get the digital treatment. The idea is that putting all of these materials up together will help connect past and present.

“What we are trying to do is show a writing tradition of the Persian world, essentially going back to look at the ancient manuscript, but also bringing it into the modern world,” says Dinavari, “We are trying to show continuity, we don’t want it to seem like it’s some antique relic."

Assemble and enjoy bug burgers, mealworm meatballs, and algae hot dogs.

In a blue-and-white building in the trendy Meatpacking District of Copenhagen, next to Neo-Nordic seafood bars, fika-forward cafés, and a former Noma chef’s taqueria, lies Space10, a research and innovation laboratory. Inside, scientists, architects, designers, and culinary professionals collaborate on vertical farming domes, open-sourced designs for sustainable micro-homes, and burgers made with worms and beetroot. Housed in a former fish market, this is IKEA’s laboratory of futuristic invention.

Space10 was co-founded in 2015 by Carla Cammilla Hjort, a former professional dancer, DJ, and designer, and Simon Caspersen, a former documentary filmmaker. In 2014, IKEA invited Hjort to do a presentation attended by Inter IKEA’s CEO, Torbjörn Lööf. Hjort’s talk led to a successful collaboration between her design studio, ArtRebels, and IKEA. Together they launched Bråkig (Swedish for brat), a limited-release furniture collection for young urbanites. According to Hjort, in an interview with Startup Guide, Lööf was so impressed that he asked her to start a project to “create a better IKEA for the future.”

“The fact that the CEO of one of the biggest retailers asked me if I wanted to make the world a better place … I was so happy,” she said. She got Caspersen on board, and the duo brainstormed what they now call a “future-living lab.” After a six-hour pitch to Lööf, Space10 was born. Hjort and Caspersen asked for (and received) three years of initial funding to conduct market research and trend analysis before having to come up with a deliverable.

IKEA’s stated mission is to improve people’s everyday lives. If affordable furniture is a small step in that direction, Space10 aims for the giant leap. The lab’s projects include SolarVille, a working prototype of a miniature neighborhood powered entirely by solar energy, open-sourced furniture designs that would allow anyone to furnish a workplace by using reclaimed materials and local production, and surveys that explore the future of co-living. But just as IKEA is invested in expanding their food business, and known for their Swedish meatballs, Space10 has prioritized projects that explore the future of food.

If breaking down and building is at the core of IKEA, at Space10, this driving force was unleashed in a reconception of the meatball. In a 2015 project titled “Tomorrow’s Meatball,” Space10 envisioned a lab-grown artificial meatball, a 3D-printed meatball, and a crispy bug ball, among others. Key environmental statistics spurred the re-vision. A third of the food the world produces goes to waste, and the UN reports that we need to produce 70 percent more food by 2050. In 2016, Space10’s Chief Innovation Officer, Guillaume Cherny-Brunet, unveiled the meatballs at a pop-up exhibit in a fashionable, low-lit event space in New York City.

While projects such as "Tomorrow’s Meatball" remain experimental, IKEA is actively launching new food products that aim to reduce carbon footprint and recognize public health and animal welfare as interlinked concerns. The company has pushed for better animal welfare standards, introduced plant-based prepared foods (including veggie meatballs and hot dogs), and, this month, launched a line of vegan strawberry soft serve for the European market. The vegan ices, made with fruit purees, have half the carbon footprint of ice cream containing dairy, IKEA says.

Other projects at Space10 follow this decarbonizing agenda. There’s the Growroom, an open-source, food-producing architectural dome that functions as an urban farm—a bid to grow food closer to the point of consumption. The Growroom has a Creative Commons license, and within weeks of its launch, urban farmers were setting up growrooms in Helsinki, Moscow, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco, Seoul, and Sydney. Another dome, which looks like it belongs in a children’s playground, is devoted to fast-growing algae that could serve as livestock feed or address malnutrition. Conveniently, protein-rich microalgae reduce greenhouse gases by absorbing carbon dioxide and converting it into oxygen.

In the lab’s test kitchen, chef Simón Perez has turned to spirulina, a microalgae that was common in Aztec cooking, to make algae chips, bouillon, and a meat-less hot dog topped with pickled mustard seeds and chives, a beetroot-black currant ketchup, curried mayo, and a garnish of crispy onions and microgreens. Other creations include a bug burger made of beets, mealworm, parsnips, and potatoes, and a “Holy Mole Taco” made with perch, a fish the lab staff raised using aquaponics, an indoor-farming system in which the fishes’ waste fertilizes herbs and vegetables in a separate but connected tank.

Is this a culinary moonshot, or a prescient look at the future of food? Space10’s redesigns have precedents in the form of, say, Soylent—the meal-replacement drink. But the Space10 concept of fast food seems more accessible and certainly more marketable than a sludgy, beige liquid. Trust IKEA to make eating worms feel woke. As for Space10’s algae domes and urban-farming infrastructure, there remain technical concerns (a fear of waterborne infections wiping out an entire harvest) and the question of whether they can scale to feed entire cities.

In the meantime, though, Space10 test kitchen inventions are being documented in a cookbook, Future Food Today, which will be released in Europe in May, and internationally in June.

A book of bovine beauty shots seeks to revive the human-cattle bond.

While Werner Lampert was living on an alpine pasture, he discovered that cows have an insatiable appetite for, among many things, poetry. Each morning, he’d clamber up a small hill to the pasture where his bovine neighbors were grazing. There, he’d read aloud the works of the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin. The cows would gather around him, listening attentively until he finished delivering the poem at hand. “When I stopped … they would soon scatter,” writes Lampert. “But the next morning they would be there waiting for me again.”

According to Lampert, cows and humans share a special relationship—one that goes way deeper than impromptu poetry readings. That’s why he partnered with a team of photographers to journey around the globe documenting the many breeds of cattle that populate the planet, as well as the humans who look after them, work with them, worship them, and eat them. His forthcoming book, The Cow: A Tribute, is an epic ode to the stunning diversity of cows and the many ways in which they’ve helped humans thrive over the past 10,000 years. From the skyward-pointing horns of Ethiopian Raya-Azebo cattle to the spellbinding eyes of Austrian Montafons, The Cow offers a comprehensive, striking mosaic of the global bovine body and soul. (Yes, Lampert asserts, cows have souls.)

With the help of cows, writes Lampert, humans have been able to successfully inhabit even the most extreme environments. In parts of northeast Siberia, temperatures can dip as low as -90 degrees Fahrenheit. But, with thick, white hair covering its compact body and udder, the gritty Sakha Ynaga can still produce plenty of milk. The Sakha people rely on this high-fat beverage for nourishment and medicinal purposes, and use the Sakha Ynaga’s dung as insulation to keep their homes warm throughout the harsh winter.

Lampert celebrates not only the resilience, strength, and utility of these age-old beasts of burden, but also the way they’ve shaped human communities, culture, and religion for thousands of years. Cows are spiritually revered within many religious communities, and have been since ancient times. “Sacrificial cattle were the link between man and the gods, a channel for sacred communication between them,” writes Lampert. “Cows were possibly the first sacred animals in human history.”

It’s with a similar tone of reverence that Lampert describes each breed of cow he profiles. He readily admits that an image of Tiroler Grauvieh, the silvery-grey, graceful cows that roam about the eastern Alps, currently features as the background image on his phone. “Of course!” he writes, “so I am reminded of their sheer beauty every day.”

The Ankole, found in Uganda, as well as parts of the Congo, Burundi, Rwanda, and Tanzania, is characterized by its majestic gait and giant, twisting horns. Warm to the touch, the powerful, bony structures are believed to be crucial tools for keeping cool. Filled with supportive tissue, the horns usher in warm, circulating blood, which cools as it flows to the tip of the horn.

Lauded for its striking beauty, the Ankole is also integral to community structure and affairs. According to Lampert, these cows are never sold, but rather included in dowries, offered up as appeasement if someone has broken community rules, or gifted to those who have suffered some kind of misfortune. “Ankoles help maintain equilibrium between people,” writes Lampert.

But while some communities have embraced cattle and bolstered populations, others have essentially destroyed them. This is the history of the North American bison, which once numbered more than 30 million by some estimates, stretching in vast herds across the Great Plains. European colonization and decades of habitat destruction, reckless hunting, and mass killing of the creatures (intended to deprive Native American communities of a food supply), shrunk that number to nearly 1,000 by 1890.

In a way, Lampert’s tribute to the diversity of the world’s cows is also a eulogy. He searches desperately for the Kouprey, a beautiful, elusive, endangered ox believed to be living in the Cambodian jungle. But the team couldn’t find a single one. According to Lampert, they’ve likely fallen victim to poaching and habitat destruction. This is part of a larger trend, he says. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, of about 1,408 breeds of cattle, 184 are listed as extinct and 490 as at risk.

There was, perhaps, a time when these utterly mystifying ungulates were more than just cash cows to most of us. But, Lampert points out, something in this special human-bovine bond has been broken. We’ve begun to take without giving—or even really appreciating—our bovine companions. We view them as products, not as the fascinating, resourceful, stunning creatures they are.

Luckily, there might just be a fix. Don’t simply eat cow meat; meet a cow. Pick up a poetry book and take it to the pasture. Gaze into the mesmerizing eyes of a Montafon, or set the background image on your phone to a particularly glamorous Grauvieh.

“Cows have a hold over us,” writes Lampert, “and once you develop a passion for them, it will never leave you.”

"The most important experience of my life in terms of shaping who I am."

To celebrate our 10th anniversary, Atlas Obscura is launching First Journey, a chance for one of our readers to win $15,000 toward a meaningful, once-in-a-lifetime experience. The competition is inspired by our co-founders, Dylan Thuras and Josh Foer, who both went on transformative journeys in their early adult years.

Though Josh and Dylan's trips were very different, their approaches were the same: a clear mission, unrestricted time to explore, and deep, purposeful examination of a place and its cultures. Without these experiences, there would not be an Atlas Obscura. Below, I chat with Josh about his own First Journey, and you can also read my interview with Dylan about his First Journey.

Josh, we've been talking a lot about what constitutes a journey, and why the experience of taking one is fundamentally different than other kinds of travel. In your mind, what’s the first real journey that you took?

So when I was 19 years old, I was staring down a two-month summer vacation from college. I ended up getting my hands on a beat-up old minivan, and decided to drive all over the country for seven weeks. And I set myself this goal of trying to have an adventure of some kind every day, and then writing about it.

At that point in my life, I'd been to California once or twice, been all over the East Coast, but I didn’t really know the country in between. So, my goal was to really see America. And that was the frame for the journey. It was the first great journey of my life and it was the most important experience of my life in terms of shaping who I am. Certainly, in terms of shaping the ideas that would become Atlas Obscura, that trip was absolutely seminal.

Did you have a friend with you, or were you doing this by yourself?

I had a friend with me for the first three weeks of the trip, and then the last four weeks I was traveling by myself.

How did you go about executing on this goal to try to have an adventure every single day?

I spent a lot of time preparing. Plotting out places that I wanted to see, or experiences, or where I thought I’d be able to get myself into some useful trouble. So, for example, I started with a map of the United States and imagined that I was going to spend the first half of the trip just in the South, and I said okay: I want to go to Bob Jones University, the flagship evangelical college, where I hoped I’d encounter people who really looked at the world differently than I did. At that point in time, I think they had just eliminated their ban on interracial dating. And so, I wrote them a letter and said, "Hey! I'm interested in transferring to Bob Jones, do you think that I could get a tour of the campus?”

Really?

And they said, "of course!" In fact, they really rolled out the red carpet for me. I spent a day and a half on the Bob Jones campus, really getting a sense of how the students thought and how the faculty thought, and what this place was like. And then I went to a roadside motel the next evening, and wrote about that experience.

I also knew that I really wanted to make it to the National Hollerin’ Contest in Spivey’s Corner, North Carolina. It’s a competition—I actually didn't know this at the time, I subsequently learned it—where you compete in practicing this ancient form of communication that was used in the lowlands of North Carolina to communicate between farms and send messages. And that yodel was being kept alive in the form of this competition. I knew I wanted to see that. I entered the contest, and that was another one of my experiences.

The real thing that shaped the whole experience for me was having a mindset that, every day, my job is to find an adventure. So I also left myself a wide amount of room. If I saw a sign on the side of the road for a gun show in western Colorado, I would pull over and decide, "all right, today, I go to a gun show." And then I would go to a gun show. Then I would find out that there was a shooting club that used only 19th-century weaponry. “Oh, they're meeting tomorrow? Okay, I'm going to go to that.”

By letting my curiosity lead the way, and giving myself a lot of leeway in terms of time and freedom, I think what I developed over the course of that summer was a good nose for interesting experiences. I realized that I loved that chase, and I loved telling people the stories that came out of that chase, and that was the summer that realized that I wanted to become a journalist.

Not to get too far on a tangent, but I have to ask you about the night you spent at Bob Jones University. What was that like?

It got a little bit frightening when the RA in the dorm started to wonder why this very Jewish-looking kid from New England was asking all these questions, like what people really thought about the pope. He took me aside and sat me down and sort of started interrogating me about what church I went to, and my family's religious beliefs. I was able to fake my way through that, but when I woke up at six a.m. the next morning, my bunkmate was already hard at work at bible study, and I decided I was going to jet. I shot out the door and I was happy to get away from that place as fast as possible.

Did you tell them you were Jewish?

Heck no!

So when you were writing about your experiences on this trip, were you doing it for an audience? Were you posting it online, or did you have a notion of what you wanted to do with this writing?

Yes, so I had what at that time, what I believe was still called a weblog.

Indeed.

I don't think they were calling them blogs yet. And I was posting these things mostly for family and a few friends, I don’t even think it was a public URL. Really, it was an exercise for me and a means of developing self discipline. To observe, experience, and share, and to do it on a very tight timeframe. Because when you're driving around the country, you're having your experiences and then you have to go crank something out at night. It was a real exercise in writing on a deadline.

Did you find it challenging to set aside the time to do that writing every night?

Yeah, and also the other piece of this was—I was doing this on a 19-year-old’s budget, which meant that we weren't staying in nice hotels. In fact, often not staying in a hotel at all. The whole point of having a minivan was that it's possible to sleep in the back. Or in a tent. I think I stayed in a $19-a-night motel room a couple times. I don't even think you can find those anymore.

And that's an important variable not to forget. This was in 2002. Gas was like $1 a gallon. This trip would cost three times as much to do it today. That was a moment when it was very easy to really explore on the road without breaking the bank.

What about how you framed this journey for yourself, and the goals that you set for it, made it different from other trips that you'd taken before?

One of the things I did in preparation for this trip is read all of the great American road trip literature. You know, Steinbeck, Kerouac. It’s a very American idea, that one discovers not just the country but oneself on the road, and I believed in that romantic notion at 19.

I also understood that this trip was part of my becoming a grown-up human being, and that I needed to challenge myself and put myself into uncomfortable positions for the sake of growing up. To this day, I can't drive with the windows down without picturing myself with a cigarette dangling from my mouth on the open road in Utah, remembering how free and alive and full of potential I felt on that trip. In a way, the rest of my life since then has been trying to recover some of the things that I felt and experienced on that journey. And Atlas Obscura is, as an enterprise… part of the reason that I wanted to create this thing, originally, was to help give other people a taste of what I had experienced on that journey.

You’ve already told me a couple, but is there a particular adventure that you had on the trip that you always tell people about?

I remember I ended up in New Orleans, just walking around, and ended up getting sucked into a conference for a pyramid scheme. I was inside this annual convention for a bunch of pyramid schemers, and ended up trying to figure out how these people operate, how they understood what they were doing.

I went to a Hare Krishna commune in, I think it was Mississippi, which is an interesting place to be a Hare Krishna. I went to a UFO convention, and ended up befriending and really spending a lot of time with this true believer in UFOs. And I remember in Denver, I went to this day laborer center and tried to get myself hired for the day.

Did you?

Not successfully! But I got to spend a lot of time with day laborers and find out what their lives were like. In Chicago, I went to a goth night at a club and spent the evening with all these goths.

I wanted to know as much and experience as much of what there was, the diversity of this country as I possibly could, in the short time that I had. So, it took me down some very unlikely, strange alleys.

I should probably point out, knowing you, that I find it fun to picture you at a goth night. But plenty of people our age had a goth phase, I don't know if you—

I definitely did not have a goth phase. [Laughing]

As you think about this competition Atlas Obscura is launching, First Journey, what comes up for you? Why do you think it’s important for more people to have the opportunity to take a meaningful journey like the one that you took?

A really great journey, like the one I had when I was 19, it was as much about finding myself as it was about finding other people or other places. And that was a really unique opportunity that I had that I wish everyone could have. But doing something like that requires—there's a financial component to it, it is expensive to travel. And it is expensive in time to travel, not everybody can find the time.

But there's something else that I think we can give people that is also a difficult thing to come by. And that is the permission to go. I was very fortunate that my parents were like, "great! That sounds like a wonderful idea. You should go do that.” I want Atlas Obscura to give people the permission to go and have an incredible experience. To find, and discover, and to know that not only is it a good thing, that it’s something they should embrace.

Right, if you never did this, and you're realizing it’s something you regret, how do you give yourself that permission? It’s not an easy thing.

Well, I think part of the permission comes from the mission. Why am I doing this? Why am I going to spend time and money and not do something else in order to have this set of experiences that I hope to have? One of the things that hopefully we'll do with this contest is help people define for themselves what that mission is, that gives them the permission to go and take this journey.

You know, I can’t believe I didn’t remember this sooner, but I actually got a grant from my college to take that road trip. I got a $1,000 travel grant.

Wait, really? So that was part of it, you got $1,000.

Yes, somebody made it possible for me. And it wasn't the $1,000—$1,000 wasn't the thing separating me from doing this. It was having the blessing of somebody else, you know?

You could have done it without the thousand bucks but—

But I couldn't have done it without the sanction. It would have been much nicer to have the—

The $15,000 we’re offering with First Journey.

Yeah, maybe I wouldn't have had to sleep in the back of the minivan.

Win $15,000 for your First Journey. Enter now.

"That context, that deeper understanding, it stays with you."

To celebrate our 10th anniversary, Atlas Obscura is launching First Journey, a chance for one of our readers to win $15,000 toward a meaningful, once-in-a-lifetime experience. The competition is inspired by our co-founders, Dylan Thuras and Josh Foer, who both went on transformative journeys in their early adult years.

Though Josh and Dylan's trips were very different, their approaches were the same: a clear mission, unrestricted time to explore, and deep, purposeful examination of a place and its cultures. Without these experiences, there would not be an Atlas Obscura. Below, I talk with Dylan about his First Journey, and you can also read my full interview with Josh about his journey.

So Dylan, what was the first real journey that you took in your life? Tell me about it.

My first really transformative travel experience was more like a move. When we were in our early 20s, my wife and I moved to Hungary to live in Budapest for a year. Ostensibly, we were going to teach English as a second language, but what we really ended up doing was spending most of our time exploring Eastern Europe and teaching ourselves how to be photographers and writers. And kind of coming to understand what this sort of travel could be. It was a really formative experience.

How long did you end up staying in Hungary?

It was just about a year. It was over 2007 and 2008.

And the initial idea was that you were going to use these teaching positions as an excuse to really explore the region?

It was, that was the idea. Initially we thought we’d do it with video—that was our background, we were both video editors. At a certain point it proved more sensible to shift to photography and writing. But yes, we knew when we left, that this was going to be a chance to do something totally different, to explore.

And you guys started a blog during this time, right? What was it called?

It was called Curious Expeditions. I believe the tagline was, “Traveling and exhuming the world’s extraordinary history.”

Did you have a sense that that act of documenting and sharing what you found—that it propelled you both to explore in a particular way?

I had traveled before, as had Michelle, we both liked to travel and were excited to just see new things. But the thing that made it really different is that we had set up this framework of telling stories, of finding these places and pulling out some historical story or some detail to focus on, and then sharing that with a public audience. And through having that responsibility and having the framework, we had to research, we had to really understand context, to dig in.

If we saw some detail that we didn’t understand, we had to spend time going back over that after the trip to try to understand what that placard was saying, or translating things that were in another language to really get the context. And it just started to transform the entire experience from one of passive viewership to really active engagement with all these places we were visiting, with their history, with the way all of these things interconnected.

We started to form a more cohesive picture over the year, for example, how the Austro-Hungarian Empire shaped the entire region in which we were living. And that emergence of greater context made each trip, each next story we were working on, that much more revealing. It was a of sense of peeling back layers and not just seeing the thing, but developing a deeper understanding of it.

I’ve heard you describe Curious Expeditions as a kind of proto-Atlas Obscura.

It’s funny, we were sort of operating in parallel to Atlas Obscura. Atlas Obscura didn’t exist yet, it was just an idea—we had worked to build a prototype but then we'd scrapped it and had to start again after I got back from Hungary. But essentially I was working on the first few hundred Atlas Obscura entries while I was living in Hungary. I was able to kind of practice what we were hoping to preach with Atlas Obscura. I honestly think if we hadn’t been doing that, hadn’t been working on Curious Expeditions, hadn’t done all that travel and had those real "ah ha!" moments of stumbling across something incredible… Like I remember coming across Galileo’s middle finger, which is still a good Atlas entry.

A classic.

That’s one that is almost identical to the entry we wrote up for Curious Expeditions. I remember coming across it and being like, "what the heck—what have we just found? Why is everyone not shouting about this? Why is this not more of a thing?" And that feeling, it really animated me coming back and gave me the energy to understand what Atlas Obscura could be.

How did you organize your trips outside of Budapest, or even your days exploring the city? What was your approach?

We brought with us a surprising amount of books. We had some travel guides that had a sort of weird bent to them, and we had an out-of-print book called Weird Europe that we used. We had a few other general country and Eastern European travel books. So, we would do this kind of cross referencing. We would look at everything, come up with a list, and try to find more information, from the books along with what was available online at the time, which was, as I recall, not a lot. And then we'd make a plan based on the country. So, we’d say, "Okay, we're going to try to make a Romanian trip, where do we want to go? What are some things that we think we really want to try to see?”

Sometimes we’d find, in a Lonely Planet or something, or a traditional guidebook, we’d find a one-sentence note in the additional material where it’s like, "there’s also a natural history museum in this university." And I suspect the writer had never been there, but just knew that it was there. And we’d say, "Okay, we know we’re interested in kinds of all natural history museums in this region, we’ve had good luck when we’ve gone looking for these things before.” And then we’d take the trip.

Is there a particular moment or story from that time that you always tell, that was one of those "ah ha” moments?

One of my favorites was in Bologna. We had developed, over time, certain beats. So medical museums became like a beat. Natural history museums became a beat. And saint relics became a beat. And so, when we were in Bologna, we had heard that there was a saint relic there for St. Catherine of Bologna, and we went out to find it. We went in this church and there was like a little grill, a little circle opening with grating on it, and we realized that if you squinted through it you could see, in the distance, this face, this saint relic. And we thought, "well, there it is, sort of disappointing, there’s not much information here.”

We were getting ready to leave, and we saw that there was a little door with a doorbell next to it. So we rang the bell, the door slid open seemingly magically, by some sort of rope system, and no one was there. It just opened and you walked into this room. And it was sort of an antechamber, and then in the room, sitting in this golden throne, is St. Catherine of Bologna, who has been there for over 500 years and been taken care of by the same order of nuns for this entire time. She was obviously really cared for, and there were other saint bones around. And we sat on the floor and hung out with this saint relic, which was a moving experience. It was a quiet moment of communion. And there was another little door—I don’t know how to describe it—like a little sliding slot came open, and there was a nun back there who handed us a pamphlet. That was the whole thing, and then we left.

It was one of these experiences, with a series of reveals, and then at the end of it was this kind of quiet, contemplative moment where you thought about death and religion and belief and all this kind of stuff. And that for me was definitely one of the times that I really remember from the travels.

It sounds like the door with the doorbell was something you could have ended up easily overlooking.

Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, we were a little hesitant to even ring it because we weren’t sure. You know, we didn’t want to make anyone angry. But I think we’d also learned over time, that it’s worth taking small risks of that sort of order to figure out if it’s worth it. But yeah, you could easily walk by it. I think most people probably did.

So, always ring the bell.

You’ve got to ring the bell! You’ve got find the weird little door!

It sounds like the fact that you had the opportunity to set up your life in this way for almost a year, to really devote yourself to exploring an entire region in a particular way, had a really profound influence on you.

Absolutely. Both Michelle and I describe it as kind of—I mean there are different formative experiences in your life, but I think of it as the single most formative at the time. It established a sort of worldview.

I think I’ve just intuited this from you after working with you for a couple of years, but I get the sense that you also have a life-long connection to that region, and it’s pretty personal for you. You really had an experience that will stay with you forever.

Definitely, that context, that deeper understanding, it stays with you. I do feel connected to Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

When you two travel now—obviously, you have kids now and your life is different than when you were 24—but are there rituals, or ways you organize or approach going someplace new, that you still take with you from what you learned during that time?

Totally. We just did this two-day road trip up to Maine. We had to come up here anyway, and so we said, "all right, what are we going to try to see?" And we went up to Vermont and we had a list of a bunch of places that are already in the Atlas, but I hadn’t been to them. And the trip reminded me of—there’s just no substitute for actually going to these places. We went to this one place called the Museum of Everyday Life in Vermont, and it’s this delightfully quirky museum.

There’s no one there, you’re on an honor system, so you turn on the lights and there’s a sign that says "please turn them off when you leave." And you go in and look around and it’s a kind of meta-museum where a lot of regular stuff has been curated in very clever and funny ways, and it’s just a wonderful art project.

We also went to a natural history museum called the Fairbanks which is incredibly beautiful. But the one that really jumped got me was the Dog Chapel, also in Vermont. I knew about it, I’d read about it, I might have even written or edited the Atlas Obscura entry for it at some point. So, I felt like I was familiar with the story. But when I got there I was struck by how incredibly beautiful this place is. It’s a tiny church made by illustrator, painter, and sculptor, Stephen Huneck, who was obsessed with dogs. He wrote children’s books that featured dogs, and then he built a chapel that was for people and their dogs to come. He’s since passed away, and the chapel has become a pilgrimage site where people go to post notes and pictures to their deceased dogs and cats.

The walls are papered from ceiling to floor, in every room, with layers and layers of love notes to deceased pets. At first, I was just looking around like, "oh, this is a really interesting place, it’s beautiful.” And then I stopped and read these notes. The place became this overwhelming, absolutely beautiful testament to this pure love that people have for their pets, for their dogs, for their cats. So, being there transformed this place. I left with such a deeper affection and interest in it.

Traveling as a family is always going to be a push-pull of like, “how much can we fit in? When do we need to get the kids out?” But I still think the quest to get to the place, to understand it more deeply, is hardwired into both Michelle and I now. And you know, hopefully we don’t slowly teach the kids to hate travel.

That would be kind of perfect though, right? They’ve got to rebel against something.

It would be, exactly. [Laughing]

So Atlas Obscura is launching First Journey, a competition where we’re going to help somebody who’s got a great idea to go and take their own first journey. Why do you think it’s important for more people to have the opportunity to take a meaningful journey like you did?

I think there’s just tremendous value in giving yourself the space and time—and in some sense giving yourself permission—to not just travel, but to quest for understanding. Because it does take time and it’s slow, and it’s not about covering ground. In fact, it’s really about doing the opposite—to travel slow enough to let the deeper stuff bubble to the surface.

That might be kind of a convoluted answer, but I guess what I’m getting at is that a real journey is both external, going somewhere and seeing, but also an internal experience too. It’s a personal experience. And everyone comes from a different place. Everyone comes from a distinct set of experiences, and each person is going to bring that to their journey. And if it really is a journey, I think it can both result in wonderful storytelling but also a personal transformation, personal discovery. And I think that’s important for everyone. It’s necessary, for having wonder in the world.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I don’t think I’ve ever really done it myself. I’ve taken trips, and I feel like I’m relatively well traveled, but I don’t know—I don’t think I ever really gave myself permission to have that kind of slower experience that you're describing. Whether it’s that I didn’t feel comfortable taking the risk, or just didn’t have the resources, or I ended up on a career track, I’m not sure. But I think there's something to that, about giving yourself the permission.

I think that’s absolutely right and it is really hard, no matter who you are, what age you are, you do have to really actively create the opportunity to have an experience like that. And in a way, I think it’s even harder now, because social media is such performative work. So people get stuck performing and kind of feeling like they’ve got to produce even in their leisure time. Giving yourself permission—I don’t know if we’ve done it again honestly, except in short little bursts, since then.

Totally, well, it’s hard. Everybody’s got to pay rent and, you know, have food.

We were incredibly lucky. We graduated right before the big recession, and we just happened to find ourselves in this position as young people with a little money in the bank and kind of a plan. But that’s not an easy place.

What are your feelings about the possibility that we might be able to help one of our readers have this type of life-changing experience?

I think it’s about as a good an outcome as one could hope for. It’s wonderful—and I think in a lot of ways the whole point of Atlas Obscura is to function as permission to take some of these journeys and explore things that you might not otherwise explore.

So to have the ability to expand that and say, “Okay, take a bigger journey, take a real deep dive into something, that maybe only you can do, maybe you're the only person.” And that is beautiful not just for the person and the change that might come to their life, but also everyone else on the receiving end of the story that they tell. That is the beauty of giving someone a chance to step out of the locked-in paths that everyone ends up on and truly pursue something based on a sense of wonder, of curiosity. And see what comes of it.

Win $15,000 for your First Journey. Enter now.

The fields offer insights into historic trade routes.

If you set Google Maps to satellite view and mosey over to the Laguna de Términos, a bay and biological gold mine along the Gulf Coast of Mexico, zoom in and head inland along the northeast of the lagoon. You’ll start noticing a terrestrial patchwork quilt north of the city of Pital. The patterns make the land look like it’s covered in agricultural fields, but those fields are now covered in mangrove forests and haven’t been farmed in hundreds of years. Researchers at the University of Cincinnati have been unearthing evidence showing that this swath of land was once a massive Maya agricultural development.

Nicholas Dunning, a geographer and Mesoamericanist, began studying this area about seven years ago, when a Mexican forester alerted him that he had spotted features on the ground—a distinctive, dense network of canals with fields in between them—that suggested the land had once been blanketed by agricultural fields. Dunning examined the area from afar on Google Earth and was stunned. Additional comparison with lidar images obtained from the Mexican government confirmed that the contours of the land resembled other known Maya agricultural fields.

“What makes this particular area novel is the size”—it spans about 75 square miles, compared to previous patches which tend to be no larger than a dozen square miles in size—"and the fact that it was undetected until the last seven years,” says Dunning. Based on the evidence, researchers believe that the field system grew incrementally over a long period of time, beginning as early as 800 BC through to the 1500s, when the conquistadors arrived.

Previously, archaeologists theorized that ancient Maya cities were subsistence-based, growing most agricultural products in close proximity to, and sometimes even within, city limits. But the canals cutting through the land north of Pital and the fact that several large rivers, including the Río Candelaria, connect with the Laguna de Términos suggests that rather than moving goods by foot, those fortuitous enough to be located near rivers or on the coast could ship and receive goods by water. These ancient Maya fields were located in an area called Acalan, potentially derived from acalli, the Nahuatl word for canoe, so Acalan may have meant “place of the canoes,” according to a recent presentation Dunning and his University of Cincinnati colleagues gave at the Midwest Conference on Mesoamerican Archaeology and Ethnohistory.

Sixteenth-century accounts from Spanish conquistadors place settlements in the Acalan along rivers and other bodies of water, but “don’t make any mention of the fields … initially they just lopped off the top of the social and economic hierarchy and placed themselves there. They demanded tribute, but weren’t initially interested in how that was being produced.” The fields were relatively distant from the densely populated coastal towns that initially interested the conquistadors, so although they were undetected by the Spanish at the time, those chunks of land were likely providing the fuel for the cities they conquered.

“We’ve known for a long time that the Maya were avid traders, but that part of their economy has not been well articulated within archaeology and we are sometimes blinded by what we’re expecting to see,” Dunning says.

The new evidence suggests that foodstuffs and cotton were shipped along the Río Candelaria and up and down the Gulf Coast to more populous ancient Maya cities. Researchers speculate that these cities included Itzamkanac (“which means place of the crocodile, more or less—and there are healthy populations of crocodile swamp in that area”) and Chunchucmil further up the coast. For both of these cities, there is evidence that populations far outweighed production. Until the fields are excavated, though, researchers won’t be able to say anything more concrete about the timeline over which the fields developed or what was grown there.

Space agencies are looking for 12 female participants for a microgravity study that’s every couch potato’s dream.

For approximately $207 a day, the job doesn’t sound very hard. All you have to do is lie down in a precisely angled bed in a private room for a breezy 60 days (plus 29 extra days to transition and rehabilitate). Two months of absolute, compulsory rest and relaxation, all in the name of space exploration. For couch potatoes, it’s a highly regulated dream.

To better understand how to counteract the effects of microgravity on the human body, scientists from the German Aerospace Center, the European Space Agency, and NASA are recruiting women for an upcoming bed rest study in fall 2019. The study will observe people reclining for 60 days on beds that angle their head to rest six degrees below their bodies. Microgravity breaks down muscles and bones in space and shift body fluids toward the head, resulting in what NASA calls "puffy-head, bird-legs" syndrome. It's also one of the most difficult space-based challenges to simulate in a lab. So NASA researchers devised the head-down tilt as a way to mimic this sensation of weightlessness.

A lucky two-thirds of the participants will also take part in a “short-arm human centrifuge” that will spin them around for 30 minutes a day, according to the German agency’s site. The machine generates artificial gravity that helps redistribute fluids evenly throughout the body, a possible counterbalance to microgravity. To combat these effects in the past, astronauts have needed to spend most of their day exercising, which results in precious flight time spent strapped on a treadmill. In comparison, 30 minutes in a centrifuge would free up a huge hunk of the day to do, you know, astronaut stuff.

One of the downsides of a bed-rest study is that participants actually cannot get up. All activities, such as eating and showering and peeing, must happen while they are lying down and tilted. Another downside? In order to maintain as controlled an experiment as possible, the researchers do not want participants to gain or lose weight and will feed everyone a standardized diet without additives or artificial sweeteners. But the researchers do promise the occasional pancake.

The study pays $16,500 euros (around $18,500) and the space agencies even outline a few other incentives to convince people to join the study, such as ample time to binge-watch a show (or 20) or make a five-year plan. Per the website: “During the study, you'll be able to work out which goals you want to achieve in the future.” The only requirements are to be a nonsmoking German-speaking woman between the ages of 24 and 55 who is willing to give up several weeks to seriously lie down.

This study is far from the first time space agencies have paid people to lie down. In 2013, NASA hired volunteers to lie in bed for 70 days, and in 2017, France’s Institute for Space Medicine and Physiology hired 24 “fit and sporty males” to lie down for 60 days. This current project will study 12 men and 12 women but is only recruiting women (ideally fit but no need to be sporty) right now.

The National Library of Scotland isn’t afraid of heights.

Mapmakers of yore worked hard to remind viewers that a given landscape was much less flat than the paper they were holding. Cartographers employed contours, hachures, and other shading techniques to indicate slopes and varied terrain, and while these abstractions conveyed the general gist, if you had little else to go on, it could still be hard to glean the “reality of the landscape,” writes Chris Fleet, map curator at the National Library of Scotland, in an email. That nuance mattered, though: “The development of canals, roads, and railways, the location and growth of settlements, and patterns of population density, were often all influenced by relief,” Fleet says.

These days, of course, much of the planet has been mapped by satellites, and viewers can parachute in and survey jagged ranges and humped hills the way birds see them. Meanwhile, a number of historic map collections have rolled out tools for engaging with old maps in new ways, through swooping, zooming, and more. The National Library of Scotland is among them, and recently revamped its 3D tool by dialing up the vertical exaggeration.

When the library’s 3D viewer, which uses open-source Cesium ion data, launched in 2016, cartographic explorers could tweak altitude, tilt, and orientation. Verticality was fixed, though, meaning that any landscape you soared above didn’t look as rugged as it does in real life.

Now that the tool has been refined for verticality, draping old maps over elevation data can help viewers picture gradations more easily. “Not just where the real heights of the mountains are, or where the valleys are,” Fleet writes, “but all the more subtle variations in terrain, too.”

Which maps are the best candidates for this treatment? “It needs to be [one] that can be geo-referenced fairly well, so it locates accurately in the right place and combines with the right elevations,” Fleet says. Beyond that, Fleet notes, maps that used various colors to represent relief are often striking. Take, for instance, this one by the Edinburgh outfit John Bartholomew & Son, depicting scores of brown mountains flanking the green-blue Loch Lomond, or the detail above, which focuses on Loch Tay.

Soil maps—like this one, surveyed on the Island of Mull in 1972—are also good contenders, because the hues, which represent different types of soil, tend to correspond to bands of altitude. Rocky crags and summits are blue and purple, while steep swaths of scree are light brown. Lower knolls are lighter greens and browns, Fleet says, freckled with moraine from the last Ice Age. Damp, rain-logged expanses of peat are various shades of purple. While soil doesn’t boil down to elevation alone, Fleet adds—rocks and land use play a role, too—“the significant elements of altitude and slope can be easily brought out by draping the map over 3D elevations.”

For me, at least, playing around with the maps made the past feel vivid and tangible. It was as though I was shadowing a surveyor tromping along a few hundred years ago—and we clambered across the landscape together.

It eluded even bottle treasure-hunters, until now.

More than 100 years ago, designers and engineers went back and forth quite a bit coming up with the perfect design for the glass Coca-Cola bottle. The only known, intact model of one of those discarded prototypes is now on the block, at Morphy Auctions in Las Vegas, Nevada, where it is expected to sell this month for at least 100,000 dollars.

The story goes all the way back to 1915, when the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Atlanta, Georgia, solicited proposals for a bottle design, requiring all entries to include not only a description, but an actual sample bottle. According to Morphy, a “committee of several bottlers” joined Coca-Cola’s lawyers in Atlanta, in August 1915, to evaluate the eight submissions the company had received. The winning entry was by Earl R. Dean, of the Root Glass Company—but it still needed some work. Dean’s design was incompatible with the machinery that the company would use to bottle its soda, so Mr. Root himself helped slim the design down to a version sized appropriately for the machines.

Coca-Cola proceeded to conduct a round of testing on the refined design, producing test bottles from plants in Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee. Though the tests were successful, the company destroyed its test bottles—all of them, apparently, except for this one. The bottle is embossed with the date November 15, 1915; the test-proof design was patented the following day.

Why just this bottle survived may forever remain a mystery of the bottling arts and sciences. People, after all, had tried to find others. In preparing this lot for auction, Morphy consulted the bottle scholar Dennis Smith, who “conducted a bottle dig” more than 40 years ago in a Birmingham, Alabama, dump where the local test plant had disposed of its samples. Despite his noble efforts, Smith came up with nothing but fragments. This bottle—along with a 1933 model—was discovered in a retired Coca-Cola employee’s collection of company paraphernalia. It is the only known, unbroken survivor from that original test run.

It is not, however, the oldest of all surviving Coca-Cola bottles. Two of Earl Dean’s original, winning, pre-test prototypes are still around, according to JustCollecting News. One of them is kept in the company’s archives, while the other was auctioned for $240,000 in 2011.