Atlas Obscura readers nominated their favorite unlikely creatures.

For as many fascinating, downright unbelievable places as there are to explore on our planet, there are just as many, if not far more, mind-blowing animals. Sometimes it can feel like nature is taking its cues from a hyperactive 12-year-old with a big imagination, or that all the alien creatures we need already exist right here on Earth. A deer with long vampire fangs? Sure. A shrimp that punches so hard and fast that the water boils around it? Oh yes, that's real. How about a pudgy little rodent-like creature with a mouth full of sharp teeth and elephants as its closest relative? Hello, rock hyrax. We recently asked Atlas Obscura readers in our Community forums to tell us about the most shocking and unbelievable animals they'd ever heard of, and the responses were both truly insane and delightfully based in reality.

Check out some of our favorite bonkers-but-real animals below, and if you know of an another that seems like it can't even be possible, tell us about it in the forums, and keep the conversation going! No need to look to the shadows for fantastical beasts, the real ones are unbelievable enough as is.

Siphonophores

“Colonial organisms, in general, are amazing. It’s like a bunch of organs with specialized functions, all with their own nervous system, got together and decided to be a bigger creature.” — Sluagh

Immortal Jellyfish

“This jellyfish doesn’t mean to brag, but it’s both beautiful and immortal. If it gets sick, or even stressed, it just reverts into it’s younger self so it can get strong and mature again, bouncing between youth and adulthood forever.” — tralfamadore

Saber-toothed Deer

“Hydropotes inermis more people need to know about these saber-toothed deer. When I first saw them, I totally thought they were photoshopped.” — Monedula

Blobfish

“I just can’t get past these guys.” — jonathancarey

Philippine Tarsiers

“I would not be surprised if it was the inspiration for Gizmo from Gremlins (before the change), the Ewoks, or Gollum.” — AnyaPH

Aardwolf

“The aardwolf (Proteles cristata) is a small, insectivorous mammal, native to East and Southern Africa. Its name means ‘earth-wolf’ in Afrikaans and Dutch.” — Brawler9

Axolotls

“I find all species all fascinating, but to me the one that blows my mind has got to be the axolotl. This critter has a very special place in my heart as I worked in its conservation in Mexico. It is awesome for many reasons. It was worshipped as the manifestation of the Aztec god, Xolotl, it typically spends its whole life in a ‘forever young,’ larval tadpole form, it can regenerate its limbs and organs (heart, lungs, eyes, brain, etc.) if they get damaged, and it’s a model organism for studying treatment and cures for degenerative diseases like cancer, heart disease and injuries such as third degree burns.” — Monsieur_Mictlan

Ocean Sunfish

“Who can help but love the ocean sunfish (Mola mola and its relatives)?! It has no tail! (Though it looks like it’s nothing but head and tail, the ‘tail’ is fused dorsal and anal fins.) It has fewer vertebrae than any other vertebrate! It is the largest bony fish, at four meters or more! It’s related to the pufferfish but matures into this gigantic, weird, harmless beast!” — hhallenadams2

Blue Glaucus

“The Glaucus atlanticus, it’s a sea slug that looks like a tiny dragon!” — sandradewit89

Pangolins

“Pangolins is nuts.” — GmHaint

Sea Sapphires

"OMG, the sea sapphire, hands down. It’s one of the most beautiful animals I’ve ever seen, plus it’s invisible like half the time. They’re a type of crustacean known as a copepod and run just a few millimeters long—squee! Thanks to layers of honeycombed crystal plates inside their cells, they can wink from iridescence to invisibility in a matter of seconds. Sea sapphires often cluster by the surface of the water, making the ocean appear studded with a galaxy of diamonds. Japanese fishermen called these convergences 'tama-mizu,' or jeweled water." — sabrinaimbler

Weaverbirds

“Weaverbirds!” — Ana

Sea Spiders

“They keep most of their organs in their legs. And they’re just the creepiest arachnids ever, which is quite an achievement.” — Svenna

Secretary Birds

“They look like actual dinosaurs. I had to look twice when I came upon one at the San Diego Zoo to be sure it was real. They live in African grasslands.” — digitaldraco

Horror Frogs

“I was deciding between thorny devils which shoot blood out of their eyes; gastric brooding frogs, which swallow their eggs and regurgitate them as babies; and the peacock mantis shrimp which can shatter fish tanks by clamping its inch long claws. But I feel like the hairy frog deserves some loving. The hairy frog gets its name from vascularized, hair-like appendages that sometimes grow on males. In addition to the horrifying appearance the ‘hair’ gives them, when threatened, they can break the bones in their fingers to push out as claws to defend themselves. Pretty metal.” — laurelkastner

Peacock Spiders

“PEACOCK SPIDERS ARE AWESOME. We had an Australian Museum travelling show at our local museum and although I knew about them, I utterly fell in love with them… I came up with a (sort of) simple puppet version for kids to make at an art station, scaled up by 10. Some of the most successful ones even used similar leg colourings as there are so many species. I still have one attached to the rearview mirror in the car and usually it just jiggles about provocatively but if you take a certain corner on the way home, at a certain time of the afternoon, it’s shadow runs sideways along the dashboard, which I find hilarious. The kids’ friends, not so much.” — Persey

Shoebill Storks

“How I lived so long and didn’t, until recently, know such a bird existed is beyond me. Looks like something a child with a big imagination might draw. I really want to see one.” — mbarretdaw

Mantis Shrimp

"As soon as I read the title of this thread I thought of the mantis shrimp. Specifically that piece by The Oatmeal. That creature has so many superpowers, I can’t even get my head wrapped around it. One of which is seeing colors that we humans cannot even imagine that are in existence!” — kmarley38

Rock Hyrax

“How about some love for the rock hyrax? Beyond having an amazing name and brilliantly strange family tree, the rock hyrax looks like a cute and possibly cuddly groundhog. Though sometimes, when challenged for food or territory, he may show you a different side… The rock hyrax is native to Africa and the Middle East and amazingly enough, is most closely related to the elephant. Yes, you read that correctly, this little guy is related to elephants. Rock on rock hyrax!” — Megs0101

Pyrosomes

“It’s technically a colony of microorganisms in the sea, but a pyrosome is a phenomenal groupthink organism. Imagine scuba diving and seeing this thing wriggling in front of you.” — Bowlbasaurus

Aye-Ayes

"These little nocturnal animals look like a panda/mouse/alien hybrid.” — kfidei

Jerboas

“Jerboas are tiny little kangaroo-bunny-mice that use their little pom-pommed tail for balance while they bounce around deserts at speeds of 15 mph. They live in burrows, often have four homes (fancy!) and clean themselves by having dust baths. There are different kinds, but they all absolutely look like a creature I would have made up as a child. Can you get any cuter than this?” — rozanna

Gooseneck Barnacles

“When first I saw these strange creatures writhing on a large piece of driftwood cast upon a desolate beach, I wondered if it were an alien encounter. I survived, and only recently discovered that they’re crustaceans.” — rossau

Platypus

“What, no love for the platypus? Proof that God gets high on occasion? Seriously. It lays eggs. It produces milk for its young. It has a bill loaded with sensors that can pick up a worm’s electrical field under the mud. It has webbed feet and a beaver-like tail. The males have venomous spurs on their rear ankles!” — La_Belle_Gigi

Frigate Birds

“When it comes to birds, it’s definitely the frigate bird. Just looking at pics makes me wonder if these birds try to ‘out-pouch’ each other, I mean how big can that pouch get?” — CDVV86

Geoducks

“For sheer bizarre looks, I’d have to also nominate the geoduck (pronounced more like ‘gooey-duck’ than ‘gee-oh-duck’). It looks like an aroused stallion got dismembered by a big clam.” — alboss

Big hats, big risks, big payoffs.

It was 1911, and the Union of South Africa was awash with rumor and suspicion. It was said that there was a turncoat who had deserted the Ministry of Agriculture to sell secrets to a shadowy syndicate of American capitalists. South Africa had only been autonomous—as a dominion of the British Empire—for about a year. Any disruption to a major industry could be very damaging to the fledgling country.

In response, the parliament authorized a clandestine expedition to the Sahel, the semi-arid region south of the Sahara. The expedition was led by Russell Thornton, a veteran of the Boer War and two other “competent experts.” The alleged traitor? None other than Thornton’s brother, Earnest, a former employee of the Secretary of Agriculture.

Their mission was to secure a flock of ostriches—by any means necessary.

What’s the weirdest bird? The ostrich,” says Arne Moores, professor of biodiversity at Simon Fraser University, “They may be the most [evolutionarily] isolated species in the world.” Massive and flightless, ostriches thrive in arid environments, insulated from both heat and cold by their thick plumage. And they have the biggest bodies and largest eggs of any living avian. According to a 2014 study, ostriches and their closest relatives—the group including emus, cassowaries, and kiwis—diverged when there were still dinosaurs walking the earth. “They are different because they’re a long [evolutionary] branch, with a flowering at the end,“ explains Moores—two species and a couple of subspecies, ranging across central and southern Africa.

There were ostriches around when humans emerged, so we have a long history with the massive birds. Africans had long hunted ostriches for meat and leather. In ancient Egypt, the goddess Maat and divine justice were represented by the ostrich feather, and two of them adorned the crowns of pharaohs as a symbol of authority. Ostrich eggs were carved and given as offerings in ancient Greece, and later they were used to adorn minarets. In the Ottoman Empire, the Arabian ostrich was hunted for sport, and those showy feathers.

But it wasn’t until the last decades of the 19th century that ostriches—their feathers, in particular—became a global commodity.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, exotic plumes, wings, and whole, taxidermied birds (and other animals) were used to trim ever more elaborate women’s hats. By 1911 hats had reached their apex size, and ostrich feathers, due to their volume and versatility, were particularly prized and commanded hefty prices.

At the time, South Africa provided 85 percent of planet’s ostrich feathers. The remainder mostly came from North Africa, through traditional trans-Saharan trade routes, usually by camel. This new status quo was all very good for South Africa. Ostrich feathers were its third most lucrative export, and the government had seized land from indigenous people and Dutch Boer settlers to create ostrich farms. Oudtshoorn became known as a feather town, where thousands of people, largely Jewish refugees from Lithuania, worked in the trade. Oudtshoorn was known as “Little Jerusalem.”

But there was one problem. South Africa didn’t actually have the best feathers on the market. The highest prices were paid for plumage from “Barbary ostriches,” a mysterious variety thought to come from North Africa. The Barbary ostrich (a term now sometimes used to refer to North African ostriches) was said to have thicker, more luxurious feathers than South African birds. But in truth, by the time these feathers reached market, they had passed through so many hands that their European buyers didn’t really know where they had come from. The South African government, to strengthen its grip on the market, wanted to know.

The South Africans got a clue as to the provenance of the Barbary plumage some time around 1910, when a lush, lustrous, full feather—just the kind that fetched the highest prices—reached the hands of the British consul in Tripoli, with a hint as to its origins. The British officials were able to say that it had come from “Southern Soudan,” meaning the colonial holdings in West Africa sometimes known as French Sudan (roughly present-day Mali and Niger). The British passed this information to their close friends in South Africa.

This was the intelligence—a possible location for the near-mythic Barbary ostrich—that South African officials feared Earnest Thornton would leak to the upstart American ostrich industry. If growers in California and Arizona got to the Barbary ostrich first, South Africa could be cut out of the New York hat industry entirely.

Russell Thornton’s mission, on behalf of the government, was to clandestinely make his way into French Sudan, locate the ostriches, and secure a flock for South Africa, before the Americans or local French officials, who had tried and failed to develop their own ostrich farms in Algeria, caught on.

But French Sudan was not a small region. Even with the lead, a daunting task faced Thornton and his conspirators, expert ostrich farmers Frank Smith and J.M.P. Bowker. They needed help. So they made their way to London to secure interpreters and desert gear.

Meanwhile, suspected ostrich spy Earnest, Russell’s brother, was waiting for the expedition in the United Kingdom, having returned from America. Before returning to South Africa, he explained to his brother that he was acting as a double-agent, independently spying on the American ostrich industry. He would later claim that his actions were intended to force the South African government to act on the Barbary ostrich lead. South African officials were not pleased with his behavior. “This was ostrich espionage, if you will,” says biologist Thor Hanson, author of the book Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle, which recounts the story. “It’s unclear who was spying on whom.”

Russell Thornton and his team then made their way to Paris for a secret meeting with a feather trader named “Hassin.” According to Sarah Stein, a scholar of Jewish history at the University of California, Los Angeles, “Hassin” was likely Isach Hassan, a prominent Jewish feather merchant whose family had traded in ostrich plumes for generations.

Merchant families such as Hassan’s had traditionally dominated the ostrich trade through relationships with North African officials. But by the 1880s, due to raids by nomads, the decline of the Ottoman Empire, and the European colonial “Scramble for Africa,” the trans-Saharan caravans carrying feathers and other goods to North African ports had suffered. Tripoli’s feather exports, for example, Stein cites, were down 90 percent compared with 20 years before.

Hassin (or Hassan) likely saw the writing on the wall. The shipments across the desert were dwindling. It was time to cash out. “Hassin’s counsel to Thornton’s crew,” whatever it was, writes Stein in Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews and a Lost World of Global Commerce, “greased the wheels.” It’s likely that Hassin either pointed Thornton directly toward the ostriches or facilitated a meeting with the feather-dealing emir of Katsina, in northern Nigeria, or both.

Thornton and company set out for West Africa, and began their trek in the British colony of Nigeria. They chartered a steamboat from Forcados for a 500-mile voyage up the Niger River to Baro. From there they hopped a train to Kano, a major trans-Saharan trading city. In the bazaars there, Thornton inspected the ostrich feathers on offer. “Those from Zinder are the right type … according to all evidence the right type of feathers are from French territory,” he wrote in his journal.

Thornton wired back to South Africa, asking permission to cross into French territory. In the meantime he kept himself occupied with buying ostriches and plumes of the “right type”—the luxurious, expensive ones. Six weeks later he got the go-ahead from South African officials. The government authorized him to spend 7,000 pounds sterling to procure 150 ostriches—but also told him that they would disavow any association with him or his expedition if they were caught.

The party traveled 150 miles north through the desert to Fort Zinder in French Sudan (modern Niger). After a frustrating six weeks of negotiation, Thornton was rebuffed by the French colonial authorities. The export of live ostriches or their eggs was strictly prohibited. “The French were highly suspicious,“ says Hanson. “It doesn’t appear that the French understood the value of the ostriches, but they didn’t trust the South Africans’ motives.”

Thornton was forced to trek back to Kano with his tail between his legs. At this point the historical record becomes murky. We know that Thornton did eventually return to South Africa with a flock of ostriches. But no one really knows how he got it. French and American spies may have chased the expedition across the desert. The emir in Katsina, Hassin’s business partner, almost certainly helped procure some, if not the majority of them, from across the border. Thornton’s collaborators explored all the way to Lake Chad unsuccessfully seeking alternative sources, but the order of these events is unclear. In private correspondence, Thornton’s collaborator, Smith, hints at possible smuggling trips into French territory, with conflicts with nomads and French soldiers. Thornton’s family maintains that nothing of the sort ever happened, according to Hanson.

Whichever way it happened, Thornton’s team had secured a significant flock of ostriches, and marched them several hundred miles from Zaria, in northern Nigeria, to a train bound for Lagos. Thornton, wracked with malaria, was carried in a hammock. The ostriches were loaded into specially modified train cars, and then transferred to a ship bound for Cape Town; 140 survived the voyage. Thornton’s team was given a hero’s welcome. (Earnest, his reputation in tatters, retired from the trade.) The bold gambit had paid off. The future of South Africa’s ostrich feather monopoly was secure.

Two years later the feather market crashed. Hard.

The fate of the trade was sealed well before Thornton even departed for London. The Audubon Society and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds had been organizing against the mass killing of birds for millinery for years. In Massachusetts, Audubon founders Harriet Hemenway and Minna Hall “were not sympathetic with the idea that women needed plumes,” says Chris Leahy of Mass Audubon, and they forbade their members from wearing feathers or even imitation feathers. Bird-watching became a hobby of middle-class suffragettes. Thanks to their efforts, the U.S. government passed the Lacey Act to prevent the interstate trade in wild birds. Though ostriches and domestic birds were excluded from the legislation, the die had been cast. Feathers were on their way out.

Some larger trends truly sealed the market’s fate. The rise of the automobile made large, audacious hats far less practical. World War I austerity promoted simpler, less ornate fashions. The final nail in the coffin was the bob cut, a hairstyle entirely unsuited for supporting massive hats. Thousands worldwide lost their jobs as the feather-and-giant-hat industry collapsed.

The days of high feather prices gone, Thornton’s flock was never bred into South Africa’s domestic stock. The last bird from the flock, a male, was killed by a lightning strike sometime between 1939 and 1944. All the cloak-and-plume-and-dagger games came to nothing.

The ostriches from the region around Kano and Zinder, along the Niger-Nigeria border, met the same fate as the industry that coveted them. The French colonial administration may not have permitted official export of ostriches or feathers, but they weren’t paying enough attention to notice the unofficial trade, much less overhunting or habitat loss. “They didn’t send the brightest bulbs to Zinder,” says Hanson.

This entire incident is rather typical of the European approach to Africa as they split it up for exploitation, replacing long-standing practices, such as sustainable ostrich hunting for meat, with more destructive, extractive ones. According to University of California, Los Angeles historian Aomar Boum, the status of feathers as a commodity led to more ostrich hunting, but less ostrich eating. Instead, the animals were killed, plucked, and left for scavengers. Under those market pressures, it’s little surprise that the population of ostriches that Thornton attempted to raid is simply gone. It’s hard to say whether Thornton’s flock came from the currently endangered North African ostrich subspecies, or if they were something else entirely—now extinct.

It has claws like a mole, eyes that look like poppy seeds, and a great strategy for evading predators and filling up on prey.

How do animals survive in harsh environments? This week, we're celebrating some extreme desert-dwellers.

Wind carries cool Pacific air across the desert on Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. Here, a smattering of cacti and succulents get plump and green in the sun. It’s a pretty scene, but the Mexican worm lizard rarely gets to see it.

That’s because this little creature, technically known as Bipes biporus, has adapted to life underground. Our buddy is an amphisbaenian—a group of generally legless, eyeless squamates. It's one of the few species that does have legs, and B. biporus’s are crowned with claws.

Those claws aren't sharp enough to “tear you up” if you happen to be holding a worm lizard in your hand, says Sara Ruane, a biologist at Rutgers University-Newark who specializes in snakes, but they likely help the creature get around its subterranean bunker. Picture an earthworm crossed with a mole, and you’ll start to get the picture. But the claws aren’t even close to being the wackiest thing about this creature.

The worm lizard looks a bit like stretchy, Pepto-Bismol colored putty, and its body is ribbed with little rings known to herpetologists as annulations. It has tiny, beady little eyes, like ticks or poppy seeds or little dots drawn on with a fine-tipped pen. (These actually aren’t much help in the dark. Former University of Texas at Arlington herpetologist Carl Franklin once told Wired that worm lizards often suss out food by picking up chemosensory cues with their tongues.) All in all, worm lizards are so strange-looking that the paleontologist and science writer Darren Naish has recalled that his first impression of one was something like, “What the hell?”

No matter. Down below—far from the sun, far from swooping predators, far from pretty much everything other than delectable insects or other little morsels—worm lizards have everything they need. If you retrace B. biporus’s family tree, Ruane says, you’d find a legged ancestor that “was a more typical lizard-looking animal that was a surface-dweller.” Over many generations, this species evolved to live underground, where it evades birds, snakes, and other predators, and exploits untapped resources, with access to termites, ants, and other invertebrates that surface-dwelling lizards can’t catch as easily. There, Ruane says, “you can just bust on through with little mole feet and start eating whatever you want.”

The worm lizard burrows through sand and loose soil, and likely varies the depth of its digging based on the time of day and its thermoregulation needs, Ruane says. When mornings are cool, it probably stays closer to the surface, before descending deeper as the sun bakes overhead. They sometimes turn up around plant roots, or just beneath boards or other things lying on the ground. In any case, they’re infrequent visitors to the surface: Reptiles magazine has reported that worm lizards only venture above the ground when rains flush them out.

Researchers are still a bit puzzled by this desert-dweller. It’s not that they’re rare—in fact, it’s thought that they might be the most common lizard in some of the places where they’re found, Ruane says—but just that researchers don’t know exactly what they’re up to. Scientists have a pretty good handle on their diet, Ruane adds, but there’s much to learn about their behaviors around mating, and more. Tagging or genetic research might help illuminate migrations and range. Even from a distance, though, it’s clear that the subterranean lifestyle looks good on B. biporus.

Spoiler alert: Try the Arctic or Sicily instead.

A desperate, thirsty traveler crawls among the dunes in a never-ending desert. Then something miraculous appears in the distance: the unmistakable blue of an oasis pool. You know what happens next. Of all the tropes about deserts—and there are a lot of them—the mirage may be the trope-iest.

But you don’t have to journey into the Sahara to see a mirage. In fact, the most spellbinding and storied example of this phenomenon happens in some of the coldest places on Earth and in the balmy archipelagos of the Mediterranean (probably the ideal place to kick back and get fooled by air and light).

Mirages are one of nature’s cruelest and coolest tricks. They’re not hallucinations, which are all in your mind, nor are they optical illusions, which are perceptual errors in vision in which you see something that isn’t real, according to Andrew T. Young, an astronomer and optical specialist at San Diego State University, in his online introduction to mirages. What you see when you see a mirage is a real, tangible optical phenomenon, even if your brain doesn’t necessarily know what it’s actually perceiving.

When you see light, your brain assumes it is coming to you in a straight line from the object emitting or reflecting it, says Jill Coleman, a professor of geology and atmospheric science at Ball State University. But when light passes through certain boundaries, such as where water meets air, or between air masses of different temperatures (and therefore densities), it gets bent, or refracted. And even when light is refracted, your brain still assumes it is coming to you in a straight line from its source, so refracted light holds the potential to scramble where things appear to be in your field of view. That’s a mirage.

There are two types of true mirages: inferior and superior, though those aren't value judgments. Inferior mirages project the perceived image below the real position of the object. To conjure an inferior mirage, all you need is a flat, hot surface on a windless, sunny day—conditions that are met quite frequently in the desert, according to Coleman. The sun heats the flat surface, which creates a thin layer of warmer air directly above the ground. And when there’s no wind, it stays put. This refracts the light coming to you and seems to transpose a patch of sky and cloud onto the ground. It looks an awful lot like a patch of blue in the sand. That is how light and air trick our eyes into seeing what we most desire in the desert—a shimmering pool.

The mirage isn’t dependent on how hot it is, but rather on the difference in temperature between the air just above the ground and the air above that, Coleman says. Inferior mirages can happen just as easily on bright winter days, or on a slate roof, or above a barbecue grill—anywhere a sharp temperature change turns the air gauzy and rippling. These are everyday mirages, so common and familiar that we hardly notice them.

Then there are superior mirages, which occur when the temperature differential is flipped, and the air near the ground is colder than the air above. In this case the light bends up instead of down, and projects an image above the location of the real object. Superior mirages abound in colder climates, polar regions and oceans, Coleman says. Though much rarer in everyday life, superior mirages can result in an illusion so spectacular and surprising that it challenges most people’s notion of what a mirage can look like.

The most fabulous form of superior mirage is the fata morgana. Named after the Arthurian enchantress Morgan le Fay, who lured sailors to their deaths by summoning visions in the sky, the fata morgana is one of the most complex and impressive mirages. “Morgana, who was King Arthur’s sister, had magical powers and could pull castles into thin air,” Coleman says. “And the name kind of stuck because the fata morgana looks just like castles coming out of thin air.”

According to Young’s detailed explanation of these phenomena, the first person to mention the fata morgana by name was 17th-century Italian philosopher Marc'Antonio Politi, who wrote, “The air magnifies in such a way that it makes small things appear very large, and those far away become near, so that on these shores are seen new cities, infinite buildings, high towers, superb ports, and dense forests; and this vision the local people call the Fata Morgana, which they say shows her greatness.”

Fata morganas are superior mirages by definition, but they belong in a class of their own. In the most spectacular versions, the light passes through what are called atmospheric ducts with additional thermal boundaries, resulting in not just an inverted projection, but also one that is magnified and exaggerated vertically. “So a teeny, teeny island can look like a big scaling tower,” Coleman says. Fata morganas may be responsible for some alleged UFO sightings, when people spot a distant refracted disk of light and assume it must be of extraterrestrial origin.

Fata morganas have a lot of moving parts and are inherently unstable. Within a matter of seconds, the image can morph from a superior to inferior mirage and back again. Traditionally they have been the Rorschach tests of mirages. You can see anything you want in them: ghost ships, floating cities, islands that hang like clouds. In rarer, spookier cases, the fata morgana can project an image from just beyond the horizon, defying the very curvature of the Earth.

Fata morganas appear most often in the Arctic, but they’re most closely associated with the Strait of Messina, between Italy and Sicily. This body of water is ripe for fata morganas, Coleman says, because of the abundance of both ship traffic and tiny islands off the coast of Italy. When paired with the relatively unmoving expanse of the Mediterannean, these large objects have a tendency to ripple upward so often that they confused many a sailor of yore. For example, it’s probable that historical sightings of the Flying Dutchman—a ghost ship cursed to sail the seas for eternity—could be chalked up to fata morganas.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, fata morganas also probably hoodwinked polar explorers who believed they had discovered land masses that don’t exist. The best-known of these phantom islands was first recorded in 1906 by American explorer Robert Peary, the first man to reach the geographic North Pole, according to Mental Floss. In his diary, Peary called the distant shape Crocker Land, but when he returned to America, other explorers who’d traversed the area accused him of lying. In 1913, Donald MacMillan, one of Peary’s former assistants, set off on an expedition of his own to prove the existence of Crocker Land and salvage Peary’s good name. And MacMillan did sight Crocker Land in the distance—or so he thought. Piugaattoq, an Inuit hunter who accompanied the expedition, broke the news that there was nothing out there. Piugaattoq called it poo-jok, the Inuit term for a distant Arctic haze. MacMillan refused to listen, and pressed on for five days, until it became apparent that there is no Crocker Land. The expensive expedition was an abject failure.

Some mirage-related phenomena eschew the need for a flat surface, such as rainbow-rimmed haloes in the sky known as “glories.” They’re not true mirages, but operate under the same physics, in this case, when light is refracted by a change in air temperature, with the presence of water droplets. The most bizarre of these is called the Brocken Spectre—the illusion of a tall shadow of a person standing within an enormous rainbow halo of light.

The silhouette or shadow is simply the refracted shadow of the observer, but you can imagine that Brocken Spectres often appear to be otherworldly ghosts. “You only see a Brocken Spectre if the sun is at your back, so it’s more common for mountaineers to report them,” Coleman says. “It looks spooky and heavenly, but if you bounce around you’ll see it’s you.” Like the desert mirage, the Brocken Spectre has made a few cameos in popular culture—in particular, for some reason, in giant tomes of post-modernist literature. The phenomena appears in both David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and (appropriately) Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Yet despite its literary aspirations, the Brocken Spectre boils down—like any other mirage—to the physics of air and light.

“Whenever people report iridescence in the skies, moving light, mirages, or haloes, it all comes down to the composition of the atmosphere at the time,” Coleman says. She recommends taking stories of these phenomena but with a healthy dose of caution. People, like mirages, tend to exaggerate.

Locals are using their phones to document and assess the engravings of Wadi Rum.

If you’ve seen The Martian, then you didn’t just see Matt Damon’s stranded astronaut trying to escape the Red Planet. You also saw the stunning backdrop that stood in for Mars: Wadi Rum, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that’s home to a citizen science experiment like few others.

Located in southernmost Jordan, this area, sometimes known as the Valley of the Moon, contains sweeping sand dunes, burnt-red sandstone arches and canyons, and an abundance of rock art, much of which dates back several millennia. These markings were made by the ancestors of the nomadic Bedouin communities that still populate and traverse the area today.

Those ancient engravings, featuring both images and text, represent the cultural heritage of the Bedouins. Sadly, such rock art has been subjected to extensive damage from a range of antagonists, including climate change, erosion, vandals, tourists, and even treasure hunters who mistakenly suspected such carvings indicated something was buried nearby. There has been no major effort to properly document this art, meaning these rich historical artifacts have been slowly fading from both the landscape and the memories of those living there.

Times, finally, have changed. Today, when a Bedouin stumbles across a piece of rock art, they will instead do something their ancestors never could: Take out a smartphone and capture a geotagged photograph of it. Using a bespoke app, they will also record the quality of the rock art and its level of degradation. After uploading this file to a database full of entries just like it, they’ll carry on moving through the desert.

Although American scholars traveled to Jordan in order to provide training for the app, this was intended to be a project run by the communities living in and around Wadi Rum. That means that the Bedouins have a tool to create a digital atlas of their ancestors’ stories, empowering them to prevent their cultural heritage from disappearing into the sand.

Kaelin Groom, a geographer at Arizona State University, explains that some of the rock art in Wadi Rum is up to 5,000 years old. As well as containing Thamudic descriptions—a blanket term given to ancient regional texts that are poorly understood—these engravings frequently depict animals that no longer live in Jordan, including ostriches, lions, oryxes, ibex, and hyena.

Casey Allen, a lecturer in environmental and earth sciences at the University of the West Indies, visited the area in 2016, and found rock art to be a somewhat understated part of the landscape. He says that local guides didn’t understand why anyone would want to see it compared to ancient buildings or majestic sandstone arches. Allen recalls that tour guides knew a handful of rock art locations, but each gave their own bespoke explanations of what they represented for the delight of their audiences. As in plenty of other places around the world, these fun stories were perhaps not rooted in fact.

Groom notes that archaeological work had certainly been conducted in the area before, but the locals were rarely happy with how it panned out. Although a huge amount of knowledge exists within the local communities, the Bedouins were usually only consulted in order to help non-local researchers locate a given site. Meanwhile, those researchers conducted their work and published in journals that the Bedouins didn’t have access to.

In 2005, Niccole Cerveny, now a professor of geography at Mesa Community College in Arizona, finished her doctoral degree. During her studies, she created the Rock Art Stability Index, or RASI. It was designed to be a simple, quick way to assess how damaged or eroded rock art anywhere in the world was, and thereby help local communities to understand what needed to be protected.

Here’s how it works. You find a rock art panel, and then make a sketch or take a photograph of it while noting its GPS coordinates. You then have a list of 36 different rock-decay forms you have to identify, scoring them between a zero (no damage) and a three (this type of damage dominates the rock panel). Extra detail on the quality of the panel and what it shows is permitted. In order to erase bias, you can get multiple people to judge the same rock art panel and average out their scores.

Taking surface observations and quickly converting them into an overall stability score, Groom explains, “gives you a very detailed view of what’s happening relatively quickly.” Other assessment tools are too slow, too expensive, or too technical for non-specialists. RASI can be used by anyone with basic training in what to look out for, with no specific expertise required beforehand. “That’s why it’s so effective,” Groom says.

RASI’s power was quickly recognized by other researchers, who worked with Cerveny to build on the original model. The powers-that-be also grasped the tool’s potential: Groom explains that it was given a hefty grant by the U.S. government to assess petroglyphs in Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park in 2009. Groom, who apprenticed under Cerveny, used RASI all over, from Grenada to Colorado and New Mexico. In the southwestern U.S., this ever-growing team of rock art hunters worked with Native American communities and trained them to use RASI.

Groom eventually started talking to staff at the Sustainable Cultural Heritage Through Engagement of Local Communities Project, or SCHEP. Funded by USAID, SCHEP aims to promote, preserve, and manage cultural heritage resources in Jordan via a community-led approach. Knowing Groom had worked extensively with rock art before, representatives from SCHEP approached her in 2016 and asked if she could help out in the Wadi Rum Protected Area. Specifically, they weren’t quite sure how to best satiate UNESCO’s demands to better integrate the local community.

RASI, Groom thought, was perfect. She could travel to Wadi Rum with her colleagues and train the Bedouins to use RASI as the Native American communities had.

But as George Bevan, a digital photogrammetry expert at Queen’s University, explains, RASI needed some modifications to succeed in the Valley of the Moon. Bevan had become interested in how photographic techniques and suites of digital cartography tools, known as geographic information systems (GIS), changed how aspects of the environment were being documented.

Bevan noticed that in the world of digital cartography, everything was becoming mobile. From the U.S. to Jordan, companies engaging in any sort of mapping were choosing mobile apps rather than more traditional, analogue methods to visualize everything from water infrastructure to electrical grids. Rather than using stacks of paper, piles of photographs, and separate GPS-recording tech, he wondered if the same technical efficiency available to mapmakers could be applied to RASI in Wadi Rum.

Serendipitously, by 2015, the Bedouins all had smartphones. They “were really unwilling to give up their Nokia phones due to their extensive battery life,” Bevan explains. However, the benefits of smartphones, including social media access, won them over in the end.

This proved to be fundamental to the success of the project. Not only could an app be developed for these phones that could digitize RASI and make it more efficient, but the geotagging ability of the phones’ inbuilt cameras meant no separate GPS tech was required. As a bonus, each RASI entry could be quickly uploaded to a private database that only authorized team members and government officials could see, ensuring the rock art site locations could be kept a secret from both vandals and clumsy tourists.

After this breakthrough, development of the Wadi Rum project escalated quickly. As well as Groom, Allen, and Bevan, staff from the Wadi Rum Protected Area, SCHEP, the Aqaba Special Economic Zone Authority, the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, the American Center for Oriental Research, and two Jordanian scholars in epigraphy, Ibrahim Sadaqa and Zeyad al-Salameen, all signed up to participate.

In the spring of 2017, Bevan, Groom, and Allen headed out into the field, and the Community-Based Rock Art and Epigraphic Recording project began. They coordinated the training sessions, but ultimately, they wanted to enable locals to do the job themselves as the researchers receded into the background.

“Studies have shown that when a community is invested in protected something, it’ll be more protected,” says Groom. “It’s so much easier to provide training to someone who already cares than to try and get someone who has training to get them to care about something.”

In order to make the RASI app more useful, developers made it multilingual so that local communities could refer to and understand things not just in Arabic, but in their own dialect. As Bevan explains, translating geomorphological terms was “quite the endeavor,” but Mohammad Dmeian Al Zalabieh, a Bedouin staff member working in the Wadi Rum Protected Area, was crucial to this effort. Not only did he learn English quickly and help with the translations, but he also proved to be a fantastic recruiter of other Bedouins who were keen to help with the project and become qualified “Rock Art Rangers.”

After working together on around 200 different rock art sites for a couple of months, the scholars left the locals to it. In just a few months after the researchers departed, the Bedouins documented over a thousand different rock art panels across Wadi Rum.

The initial mapping period, from 2017 to 2018, blew through all expectations, not just in terms of the archaeological data gathered, but also in how connected the local communities became to this part of their cultural history. “It raised their awareness about the importance of this place and its history,” explains Al Zalabieh.

Cerveny, who visited Wadi Rum during the project, says that “it’s thrilling to see RASI being used as intended.”

The project has just been awarded a three-year funding extension from USAID, and the team members hope to expand the scope of their work. They want to start educational programs with local schools, and get more Bedouin women involved, as long as they are comfortable doing so.

The team has already established the Stone Heritage Research Alliance LLC, a private company that provides professional certifications in RASI, as well as management and consultation services, to other communities with under-serviced rock art heritage. “We want to make stone heritage research and management accessible to everyone,” says Groom.

As well as showcasing the history of the landscape and the people in it, Allen explains that in the future, he and his colleagues hope to highlight more of the science behind rock art preservation as well.

“What we really need is not just specialized rock art guides, but also natural history guides, too,” says Nizar al Adarbeh, Chief of Party for SCHEP. These guides will ensure that communities understand the geology and the formation of Wadi Rum itself, as well as its biodiversity. “To have the first natural history guides in Wadi Rum, run by the community, would be a huge breakthrough,” says Al Adarbeh.

When enough research has been conducted, Al Adarbeh hopes to bring augmented reality to the project, to showcase the communities’ work to visitors in unprecedented detail. As an example, he suggests tourists being shown the sites can use their phones to reveal hidden information, such as translations of the scripts or how old a specific site is. Al Zalabieh, for now, says he wants to keep boosting his language skills in order to “share this heritage to a wider audience,” while working with everyone that wants to chip in to find the best way to protect the rock art for future generations.

Groom underscores that RASI was never guaranteed to work in Wadi Rum, and communities don’t always want to take part. In this case, she asserts, “the community is the success of the project.”

When the scale of a tragedy dawned.

It was sometime after 3:00 a.m. when Alexander Esaulov was jangled awake by the telephone. Shit!, he thought as he fumbled for the receiver. Another weekend ruined.

With his wife and children off with the in-laws for a few weeks, he’d been looking forward to enjoying a few days to himself: perhaps squeezing in a little fishing. Having the two children at home—a five-year-old daughter and a son about to turn six months—there was always plenty of work to do, even without his job. And as the deputy chairman of the Pripyat city ispolkom—the equivalent of deputy mayor—Esaulov spent his days reeling from one administrative headache to another.

He had come to Pripyat from Kiev, where he had worked in the city’s municipal financial planning department. It was a nice step up for the 33-year-old accountant and his family: out of the rotting communal apartment with a queue for the bathroom every morning, into the clean air of the countryside, and a prestigious job with his own secretary and the use of a car—dilapidated but serviceable—for work. Still, Esaulov found his new responsibilities onerous. He had to manage Pripyat’s city budget, expenses, and income—but also served as the head of the planning commission and oversaw transportation, health care, communication, road and street cleaning, the employment bureau, and the distribution of building materials. There was always something going wrong, and the citizens of Pripyat were never hesitant to complain when it did.

On the phone was Maria Boyarchuk, the secretary from the ispolkom. She’d just been woken by a neighbor who had come from the nuclear power plant. There had been an accident: a fire, maybe an explosion.

By 3:50 a.m., Esaulov was at his desk in the ispolkom offices. The chairman—the city mayor—had left for the plant to find out what was going on. Esaulov telephoned the head of Pripyat’s civil defense, who sprang from his bed and raced over to the office. But neither of them had any idea what to do. The plant had its own civil defense staff, and the city had never been involved in any of its exercises. There had been accidents at the station before, but they had always been cleaned up with a minimum of fuss.

Now they phoned every number they had at the station, but no one would tell them anything. They considered driving there, but didn’t have a car. All they could do was sit and wait. Outside the window, the streetlamps threw pools of amber light across the square; the apartments along Kurchatov Street remained dark and silent.

But as dawn approached, Esaulov watched from behind his desk as a single ambulance raced down Lenina Prospekt from the direction of the plant. Its emergency lights flashed, but the siren remained silent. The driver took a sharp right at the Rainbow department store, tore along the southern side of the square, and then swung away in the direction of the hospital. A few moments later, a second ambulance followed, and it, too, disappeared around the corner.

The blue lights faded into the distance, and the city streets were still once more. But then another ambulance sped past. And another. Esaulov began to suspect that there might be something different about this accident, after all.

As dawn broke, word began to spread among those with friends and relatives on the midnight shift at the plant that there had been some kind of accident. But nobody could say exactly what.

At around 7:00 a.m., Andrei Glukhov, who worked in the reactor physics laboratory at the plant, was in his flat on Stroiteley Prospekt when the phone rang. It was a friend from the Instrumentation and Control Department. He, too, was at home and had heard that something had gone wrong at the station, but he didn’t know any details. As a member of the Nuclear Safety Department, Glukhov had the authority to make calls directly to the control rooms of every reactor at the plant. Would he mind making a few enquiries?

Glukhov hung up and phoned his friend Leonid Toptunov, on the senior reactor control engineer’s desk of Unit Four. But nobody answered. Strange, he thought. Maybe he's busy. He tried Control Room Number Two, where the senior reactor control engineer picked up immediately.

“Good morning, Boris,” Glukhov said. “How is everything going?”

“Okay,” the engineer said. “We’re raising power on Unit Two. Parameters are normal. Nothing special to report.”

“Okay. How about Unit Four?”

There was a long silence on the line.

“We’ve been instructed not to talk about it. You’d better look out of the window.”

Glukhov went out to the balcony. The apartment was on the fifth floor, and from his position just behind the city’s new Ferris wheel, he had a decent view of the plant. But he couldn’t see much out of the ordinary. Some smoke hung in the air above Reactor Four. Glukhov had a cup of coffee and told his wife he would head to Kurchatov Street to meet the bus bringing the night shift back from the plant. They’d be able to tell him what was going on.

He waited at the bus stop, but the men from the shift never arrived. Instead, a truck filled with policemen pulled up. Glukhov asked what had happened. “It’s not clear,” the policeman said. “The wall of the reactor hall has collapsed.”

What?

“The wall of the reactor hall has collapsed.”

It was an unbelievable idea. But Toptunov would surely have an explanation.

Perhaps I just missed the bus, Glukhov thought. Leonid might already be at home.

It was less than a 15-minute walk from the bus stop to Toptunov’s apartment building. Glukhov climbed to the top floor, turned right at the head of the stairs, and walked to the door at the end of the hall: number 88, handsomely upholstered in red imitation leather. He pushed the buzzer. He pushed it again. There was no reply.

The Pripyat hospital, Medical-Sanitary Center Number 126, was a small complex of biscuit-colored buildings behind a low iron fence on the eastern edge of the city. It was well equipped to serve the growing town and its young population, with more than 400 beds, 1,200 staff, and a large maternity ward. But it hadn’t been set up to cope with a catastrophic radiation accident, and when the first ambulances began to pull up outside in the early hours of Saturday morning, the staff was quickly overwhelmed. It was the weekend, so it was hard to find doctors, and, at first, no one understood what they were dealing with: The uniformed young men being brought from the station had been fighting a fire and complained of headaches, dry throats, and dizziness. The faces of some were a terrible purple; others, a deathly white. Soon all of them were retching and vomiting, filling wash basins and buckets until they had emptied their stomachs, and even then unable to stop. The triage nurse began to cry.

By 6:00 a.m., the director of the hospital had formally diagnosed radiation sickness and notified the Institute of Biophysics in Moscow. The men and women arriving from the plant were told to strip and surrender their personal effects: watches, money, Party cards. It was all contaminated. Existing patients were sent home, some still in their pajamas, and the nurses broke open emergency packages designed for use in case of a radiation accident, containing drugs and disposable intravenous equipment. By morning, 90 patients had been admitted. Among them were the men from Control Room Number Four: Senior Reactor Control Engineer Leonid Toptunov, Shift Foreman Alexander Akimov, and their dictatorial boss, Deputy Chief Engineer Anatoly Dyatlov.

At first, Dyatlov refused treatment and said he only wanted to sleep. But a nurse insisted on putting in an IV line, and he began to feel better. Others, too, seemed not to have been too badly injured. Senior mechanical engineer Alexander Yuvchenko felt dizzy and excited but soon fell asleep, woken only when a nurse came to attach a drip. He recognized her as a neighbor from his apartment building and asked her to find his wife when she finished her shift, to reassure her that he would be home soon. In the meantime, Yuvchenko and his friends tried to estimate how much radiation they had received: They thought 20 rem, or perhaps 50. But one, a navy veteran once involved in an accident on a nuclear submarine, spoke from experience: “You don’t vomit at 50,” he said.

Vladimir Shashenok, rescued from the wreckage of the flowmeter room by his colleagues, had been one of the first to arrive. Burns and blisters covered his body, his rib cage was caved in, and his back appeared to be broken. And yet, as he was carried in, the nurse could see his lips moving; he was trying to speak. She leaned closer. “Get away from me—I’m from the reactor compartment,” he said.

The nurses cut the shreds of filthy clothing from his skin and found him a bed in intensive care, but there was little they could do. By 6:00 a.m., Shashenok was dead.

At home on Heroes of Stalingrad Street, around 8:00 a.m., Maria Protsenko heard a commotion in the apartment downstairs. Just as she did whenever she wanted to telegraph the neighbors below with important news, or to share something on the stove that was particularly tasty, Protsenko rapped on the kitchen radiator with a spoon. The response came clanging right back: Come down!

Protsenko was a small but formidable 40-year-old who wore her dark, curly hair cropped sensibly short, born in China to Sino-Russian parents, yet forged in the crucible of the USSR. Her grandfather had been arrested and disappeared into the Gulag during Stalin’s purges; when she was a baby, both her older brothers died from diphtheria because they were kept from seeing a doctor by the curfew in the Chinese border town where they lived. After that, her grief-stricken father sank into opium addiction, and her mother fled into Soviet Kazakhstan, where she raised Maria alone. A graduate in architecture from the Institute of Roads and Transport in Ust-Kamenogorsk, Protsenko had been Pripyat’s chief architect for seven years, with her own office on the second floor of the ispolkom. It was from there that she oversaw the execution of Pripyat’s new construction projects, with a profoundly un-Soviet eye for detail. Barred from Party membership by her Chinese birth, she brought an outsider’s zeal to her work. She roamed the streets with a ruler, checking on the quality of the concrete paneling in new apartment buildings. She chastised the construction workers for shoddy sidewalks: “Children will break their legs, and then how will you feel?” When persuasion wouldn’t work, she lashed them with invective. More than a few of the men were afraid of her.

Many of Pripyat’s apartments and major buildings—the Palace of Culture, the hotel, the ispolkom itself—were erected from standardized blueprints produced in Moscow and designed to be reproduced identically in every town in every corner of the USSR. But Protsenko did what she could to make them unique. In spite of the prevailing state doctrine calling for gloomy “proletarian aesthetics”—rejecting decadent Western notions of individuality in the interests of economy—she wanted them to be beautiful. Protsenko worked frugally with small supplies of hardwood, ceramic tiles, or granite to decorate the interiors of Pripyat’s public buildings, designing parquet flooring and wrought-iron screens in a botanical pattern for the restaurant, or inlaying small sections of marble in the walls of the Palace of Culture. She watched as the city grew from just two microdistricts to three, then four. She helped choose the names of the new streets as they were added, and attended to the finer points of each of the city’s new amenities. The library, the swimming pool, the shopping center, the sports stadium—all passed through her hands.

As she left her apartment that morning, Protsenko was still expecting to spend the day at the office, busy with preparations for another expansion of the city. Only the day before, she had received a delegation from the urban design institute in Kiev. Together they were planning the infrastructure of Pripyat’s sixth new district, to be constructed on reclaimed land beside the river to accommodate the workers who would operate the first reactors of plant director Viktor Brukhanov’s massive new Chernobyl Two facility. Dredging was under way, bringing up sand from the river bottom to provide the foundations of the extra neighborhoods. When they were complete, Pripyat would be home to as many as 200,000 people.

By the time Protsenko made her way to the apartment downstairs, it was past 8:00. Her 15-year-old daughter had already left for school; her husband, who worked as an automobile mechanic for the city, was still asleep in bed. She found the neighbors—her close friend Svetlana and her husband, Viktor—sitting at their kitchen table. Despite the early hour, they were drinking shots of moonshine vodka, or samogon. Svetlana explained that her brother had called from the plant. There had been an explosion.

“We’re going to chase away the shitiki!” Viktor said, raising a glass. Like many construction and energy workers at the plant, he believed that radiation created contaminated particles in the blood—shitiki—against which vodka was a useful prophylactic. Just as Protsenko was telling him that she didn’t think she could handle samogon, whatever the need, her own husband appeared in the doorway: “You’ve got a phone call.”

It was the secretary from the ispolkom. “I’m coming over,” Protsenko said.

By 9:00 a.m., hundreds of members of the militsia had been mobilized on the streets of Pripyat, and all roads into the town had been cut off by police roadblocks. But as the city’s leaders—including Protsenko, Deputy Mayor Esaulov, the Pripyat civil defense chief, and the directors of schools and enterprises—gathered for an emergency meeting at the building that housed the ispolkom, elsewhere in Pripyat the day began exactly as it would on any warm Saturday morning.

Across the city’s five schools and in the Goldfish and Little Sunshine kindergartens, thousands of children started their lessons. Beneath the trees outside, mothers walked babies in their strollers. People took to the beach to sunbathe, fish, and swim in the river. In the grocery stores, shoppers stocked up on fresh produce, sausage, beer, and vodka for the May Day holiday. Others headed off to their dachas and vegetable gardens on the outskirts of the city. Outside the cafe beside the river jetty, last-minute preparations were under way for an alfresco party to celebrate a wedding, and at the stadium, the city soccer team was warming up for an afternoon match.

Inside the fourth-floor conference hall, Vladimir Malomuzh, the Party’s second secretary for the Kiev region, took the stage. Malomuzh had arrived from Kiev just an hour or two earlier and, since the Party took precedence over government in emergency situations, was now in charge. Beside him stood the two most powerful men in the city: plant director Viktor Brukhanov and construction boss Vasily Kizima.

“There has been an accident,” Malomuzh said, but offered no further information. “The conditions are being evaluated right now. When we know more details, we’ll let you know.”

In the meantime, he explained, everything in Pripyat should carry on as usual. Children should stay at school; stores should remain open; the weddings planned that day should continue.

Naturally, there were questions. Members of the Young Pioneers of School Number Three—1,500 children in all, part of the Communist equivalent of the Scouts—were due to assemble in the Palace of Culture that day. Could they proceed with the meeting? There was a children’s health run scheduled for the following day through the streets of the city. Should that go ahead, too? Malomuzh assured the school director that there was no need for a change of plans; everything should continue as normal. “And please do not panic,” he said. “Under no circumstances should you panic.”

Adam Higginbotham is the author of the New York Times bestseller Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster. He also writes for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, GQ, and Smithsonian. He lives in New York City. Connect with him @Higginbothama or AdamHigginbotham.com.

The drawing is one of more than 20 original artworks by the Nobel Peace Prize recipient.

Before becoming the first democratically elected president of South Africa, Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison for his efforts to dismantle the brutally oppressive apartheid system. As Mandela sat in his cell, both his mother and his oldest son passed away. He was forbidden from attending either funeral.

But Mandela, it seems, only drew more strength from the injustice he endured at Robben Island, where he was incarcerated for 18 of the 27 years. “Today when I look at Robben Island I see it as a celebration of the struggle and a symbol of the finest qualities of the human spirit,” wrote Mandela in 2002, “rather than as a monument to the brutal tyranny and oppression of apartheid.” These words accompany a collection of original drawings called “My Robben Island,” composed by Mandela after his presidency ended and he took up formal artistic instruction.

One of Mandela’s drawings from this period, “The Cell Door,” was excluded from that collection and another that followed, but is now front and center as part of Bonhams’s upcoming auction of Modern & Contemporary African Art. The wax pastel crayon drawing will be the first of Mandela’s artworks to be auctioned, and it is expected to sell for between $60,000 and $90,000.

The drawing frames Mandela’s Robben Island cell from the outside, emphasizing the artist’s freedom from a space which he was not previously allowed to leave. Giles Peppiatt, Bonhams’s Director of Modern and Contemporary African Art, points out that the drawing’s focal point is “the symbolic key in the lock, showing hope where previously there might have been none…” Some of Mandela’s other drawings provide other views of the prison, including the inside of the cell and the guard tower, shrouded in barbed wire.

In an email, Peppiatt says that Bonhams is selling the piece on behalf of its current owner, Mandela’s eldest daughter Dr. Pumla Makaziwe Mandela. The proceeds, he adds, will go to the Mandela family. Dr. Mandela said that art helped her father “come to terms with his history” after his presidency ended; his work makes clear how determined he was to reclaim that history on his own terms.

“It is true that Robben Island was once a place of darkness, but out of that darkness has come a wonderful brightness, a light so powerful that it could not be hidden behind prison walls, held back by prison bars or hemmed in by the surrounding sea,” wrote Mandela. “I have attempted to colour the island sketches in ways that reflect the positive light in which I view it.” Perhaps that’s why the prison bars depicted in “The Cell Door” are not grey, but a tranquil and even regal purple.

Celebrity chefs served molded jelly dishes to monarchs and royalty.

Marie-Antoine Carême made his name cooking for some of the greatest figures in France at the dawn of the 19th century, including Napoleon Bonaparte. He was arguably the world’s first celebrity chef, and later served Czar Alexander of Russia and King George IV of England, evangelizing the elaborate and expensive haute cuisine he’d helped pioneer. He even invented some of France’s best-known desserts, such as croquembouche and mille-feuille.

He was also a fan of gelatin. As food historian Christina Ward has noted, he was especially renowned for the massive, architecturally inspired molded gelatin dishes that often served as showstopper edible centerpieces for his feasts. In modern terms, this would be like a master chef placing towering Jell-O concoctions at a royal wedding or the French Laundry.

That may surprise American readers, since their gelatin desserts are now decidedly lowbrow. Gelatin is the cheap, boring convenience food Baby Boomers stuffed down their kids’ maws and dieters turned to in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Mid-20th century dishes such as avocado and grapefruit encased in lime Jell-O and topped with mayo are widely viewed as the nadir of American cooking—symbols of the era when everything got the gelatin treatment and the borders between salad and dessert courses blurred. Gelatin is, to many today, so childish or distasteful that a slew of articles reported, several years ago, on a free fall of sales of Jell-O and similar brands.

But Carême’s love for gelatin and use of it in high-end cuisine was hardly a culinary aberration. From the early Renaissance through the early-20th century, gelatin “salads” and desserts were prestigious dishes and the provenance of master chefs. “Today, people who want to parade their wealth buy a Porsche,” argues Carolyn Wyman, author of Jell-O: A Biography. “In pre-industrial days, they would instead serve their guests fancy molded ice cream or gelatin desserts.”

The contrast between modern American and historic views of gelatin is striking. So why exactly was it such a valued food for so long? And how did it fall from grace?

Gelatin proper, as opposed to starch-based “gelatin,” is basically meat or fish jelly, produced by heating and breaking down the collagen proteins found in animal tissue and bones—especially joints. This thick, cloudy jelly is quite effective at blocking air or bacteria. So as long as humans have been cooking meat and fish, we’ve likely been using gelatin to preserve it. These simple gelatins-as-preservative were seemingly, for most of history, common utility foods, and this is still the case. As Ward points out, the headcheese found in supermarket deli cases “are off bits suspended in pork jelly.”

But by the early-14th century, recipes cropped up in elite literature for increasingly complex gelatin-based dishes, such as Milanese physician Maino de Maineri’s concoction of fish boiled in wine, thickened with roasted bread soaked in vinegar and cut with cinnamon, cloves, and galingale. Ward argues that these elaborate takes on an older staple flowed naturally from the growth of wealth and international trade and travel in Europe. The urge to build a reputation as a chef or wealthy family resulted in increasingly complex and pricey dishes.

Over the coming decades, chefs seemingly realized that they could make entirely clear gelatins. This allowed them to showcase intricately layered ingredients—such as expensive fruits and spices—or color the base for vibrant edible decor. Food historian Barbara Santich once referred to medieval gelatin specialties as “the glamor dish offered at the end of a banquet, bejeweled with sparkling crimson pomegranate seeds or golden spices.”

Gelatin primarily rose to become a status symbol, though, because of the wealth implied by the time and effort required to make it regularly. Rounds of boiling and straining out impurities took more than a day to complete. The 14th-century French chef Guillaume Tirel, a.k.a. Taillevent, explained in his Le Viandier that, “He who would make a gelatin is not allowed to sleep.” Gelatin wasn’t expensive or hard to make on its own, argues medieval food historian Ken Albala. Russian families of all classes, for example, have long prepared kholodets, savory meat cuts suspended in gelatin, as a winter holiday treat. But serving gelatins, especially elaborate ones, often, rather than as a special holiday dish, was a clear sign of wealth. It showed you could hire a dedicated cooking staff to go through the arduous and (frankly) stinky process of making it.

According to historian Laura Shapiro, Americans in the mid-to-late-19th century were enamored with visually stunning foods and motivated by class aspirations. So many homemakers were eager (or socially pressured) to explore gelatin desserts, and to find easier ways to make them.

Industrialists seemingly recognized this demand. Dried and powdered gelatin cropped up in the 1840s, developed by tanners and glue makers with literal tons of animal byproduct to monetize. But tastemakers off the era seemingly took a dim view of their quality, and their inventors didn’t do much to promote them. Then, in 1890, Charles and Rose Knox of Johnstown, New York, set up the Knox Company to sell granulated “gelatine,” which cooks finally found palatable and convenient. (Their unflavored gelatin is still available today.) And in 1897, a cough syrup maker from near Rochester, New York, patented Jell-O, another granulated easy-use gelatin mix. (That brand has changed ownership several times.)

The public didn’t take to these new products right away, explains Wyman, because they were some of America’s first “convenience products” and “women didn’t understand a food that didn’t require recipes.” So both companies advertised the hell out of easy gelatin in the early 1900s.

Early Jell-O advertising campaigns leaned into the idea that the product allowed any family to easily attain what once belonged primarily to elites. Shapiro has one such ad from the 1920s hanging in her house. Its text enthuses, in part: “Land of romance. Proud and haughty Dons. Brave matadors. Lovely señoritas. The gaiety of lurid color everywhere. Spain. How the old grandees, the epicures of good food, would have enjoyed Jell-O.”

But Jell-O didn’t just zero in on this class aspiration advertising angle, explains Shapiro. At the same time, the company released ads stressing this industrialized form of gelatin was so easy to make that even a child could prepare it. Yet more ads focused on how it could be used economically as a means of food preservation. And Jell-O’s makers targeted every possible demographic, even distributing free Jell-O molds to immigrants at Ellis Island.

Gradually, the image of gelatin as cheap and easy eroded its rarified status. The Great Depression may have sped up this shift as recipe books and ads leaned into the depiction of Jell-O as an affordable way to preserve and stretch food. During World War II, too, recipes touted Jell-O as a tool for jerry rigging wartime rations into presentable meals. In the ‘50s, this association stuck as convenience food titans used it as a vehicle to showcase ration-like products. That is how we got some of our most notorious gelatin dishes. “There was a time when General Foods owned the Jell-O, Hellmann’s Mayonnaise, and Libby Canned Fruit brands,” explains Ward. The recipes they promoted to advertise their products used ingredients from each of those brands.

Gelatin dishes just got too cheap, practical, and common to be haute—at one point, a third of the average American recipe book was devoted to gelatin. (Granted, some recipes used gelatin less as a central ingredient and more as an inconspicuous thickening or volumizing agent—a use that persists today even in high-end desserts and edible decorations.) By the 1950s, Shapiro says, they no longer appeared at fancy dinner parties as a centerpiece dessert. Gelatin’s association shifted to leftovers and kids’ palates. “The innovation of the 1990s pre-packaged, ready-to-eat Jell-O cups was the final blow to gelatin’s place in culinary history,” says Ward, since the move positioned it entirely as convenient children’s food.

That doesn’t mean the prestige of gelatin vanished entirely. Elaborate gelatin salads remain popular in certain corners of America: Mormon areas in the Southwest are known jokingly as the Jell-O Belt, and cloudy tomato aspics are beloved in parts of the South. For some, they remain show-stopping visual presentations and proof of culinary prowess. As Shapiro points out, it really does take a degree of skill to perfectly layer and then unmold a towering gelatin creation. And outside the United States, gelatin dishes did not go through the same process of cultural degradation. In Mexico, for example, gelatin desserts are still widely loved, and serve as canvasses for admired edible artistry.

Gelatin could rise up the social ladder in America again. Chefs have started to experiment with unflavored gelatin as a tool in molecular gastronomy, notes Ward. And some suspect the social media era’s focus on presentation could revive interest in the visual potential of Carême-style gelatin desserts. Albala speculates that homemade gelatin could have a hipster-ish appeal, riding the pre-industrial prestige of making something laborious and elaborate. Because in the end, he argues, intricate gelatin dishes are still “pretty cool” and “stunningly beautiful.”

In the Namib Desert, slaking thirst is a slow process.

How do animals survive in harsh environments? This week, we're celebrating some extreme desert-dwellers. Previously: the worm lizard that beats the heat by never coming to the surface.

As night gives way to morning, portions of southern Africa’s Namib Desert—one of the most rain-starved places in the world—are enveloped by fog. It blows in and beads on tufts of grasses, and hangs low around the dunes, making their tops look like mountains peeking above clouds. It stamps out visibility such that it sometimes appears that you’re glimpsing a scene through a lens smeared with vaseline.

In a place where rain is so rare, the fog can help sustain life. It’s a crucial companion for the Stenocara gracilipes, also known as the fogstand beetle.

On soupy mornings, the beetle scampers up damp dunes and prepares to harvest the fog. It sticks its rear end up in the air at about a 45-degree angle, and then it waits. This behavior is charmingly known as “fog basking.” A dune might be covered with scores of the little beetles, all standing perfectly still as they wait for a glug.

The beetle’s skin is equipped with all of the things that it needs to slake its thirst. The key is a mix of hydrophilic and hydrophobic bumps and valleys on the skin. These prevent droplets from being dispersed in the wind, and when they get large enough, they roll down the beetle’s body and straight into its mouthparts. It’s not as quick and easy as taking a swig from a glass (though the little beetles have inspired designs for self-filling water bottles), but hey—it gets the job done.

It was precious enough for King Tut’s tomb.

Let’s go back in time roughly, oh, 20 million years. It’s the Miocene era, which formally began 3.03 million years prior, and India and Asia are just beginning to collide and form the impressive mountain ranges we know today. Kelp forests and brown algae are appearing and diversifying oceans at rapid rates; in Europe and Africa, around 100 different species of early apes are monkeying around.

With this as the backdrop, let’s zoom in on North Africa specifically. Libya, bordered by the Mediterranean Sea on the north and Egypt to the east, is about to experience a geological miracle. Unbeknown to the colliding mountains and swinging apes of the Miocene, the 420,000 square miles that make up the Libyan desert (which is part of the Sahara) would soon be caramelized into shards of foggy green glass. This rare and precious material, known as Libyan Desert Glass, was found in King Tutankhamun’s burial tomb millions of years later.

Libyan Desert Glass’ value comes from the miraculousness of its origin story. As Dr. Jane Cook, chief scientist at The Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, explains, “glass happens when just the right ingredients are heated up and cooled down quickly.” But in the case of Libyan Desert Glass, the series of events was much more elaborate. “About 20 million years ago, either a meteor impact or atmospheric explosion got to the desert part of the lower atmosphere, heated it up and fragmented and exploded,” she says. “It dumped a huge amount of heat, like in thousands of Fahrenheit degrees, into that portion of the desert, which was a relatively pure deposit of quartz sand. And it brought it up hot enough that it was able to liquefy for a short period of time.” When this liquefied quartz cooled down, desert glass was formed. Cook adds: “Because it was almost pure silica it was able to solidify without crystallizing,” making it glass instead of geological crystal structures.

When British archaeologist Howard Carter began searching through King Tut’s treasure chests in 1922, he found a decorative breastplate depicting the Sun God Ra. Housed in the center of this armor sits a chartreuse scarab: a beetle symbol, usually cut from gemstones, that ancient Egyptians held sacred. This particular 18th-Dynasty scarab was carved from the rare and precious Libyan Desert Glass, as confirmed by Italian mineralogist Vincenzo de Michele in 1998.

Though other meteor impact glasses do exist, in contrast to the more common man-made glass, Libyan Desert Glass is widely regarded as being “the most spectacular,” says Cook. Considering glass was formally “invented” in 1500 B.C., it’s no surprise that the 20-million-year-old translucent matter was considered precious enough to be placed at the center of King Tut’s breastplate.

Dr. Katherine Larson, assistant curator of ancient glass at Corning, studies the cultural importance of the material. “We identify Libyan Desert Glass as glass based on the material properties of it, but in the Ancient Egyptian mind, the glass and the stone are really closely linked,” she says. “In fact, the Ancient Egyptian word we have for glass, that’s preserved in hieroglyphic texts of this period, actually means ‘stone that pours.’ ”

At the time King Tut’s breastplate was made, Libyan Desert Glass was probably not seen as that different from other naturally occurring semi-precious stones, like amethyst, lapis lazuli, or quartz. What we now understand to be an impactite (glass formed from impact), would have been a generally beautiful and valuable stone from the ancient point of view—but still with a high prestige factor. “The general index we use for preciousness is that we equate it with rarity, and that’s probably true in the ancient world as well,” Larson says. “So the more resources that it takes to acquire something, the further it comes from, [or] the more exotic it is, those are all things that can contribute to [the material] being considered precious or rare.” Though unidentified at the time, this milky yellow-green glass birthed from the “Great Sand Sea” would have had an even higher value rating because it wasn’t harvested or used as a trade good, whereas most man-made glasses were. Plus, Larson says, “in this case, it is a pretty rare type of stone, and it would’ve come from relatively far away, so that certainly contributed to its preciousness. And then there’s the aesthetic properties of it as well. There’s an attractiveness to it.”

When that fateful meteor crashed into the Libyan desert all those millions of years ago, whatever contaminants dissolved into the silica’s liquid state ended up affecting the color and opacity of the solid Libyan Desert Glass. Specimens range from a cloudy dark brown to a stunningly luminous lemon yellow, and are still being found today. “[The Libyan desert is] a large area, hundreds of square miles perhaps, so that explosion was gigantic,” Cook says. “And it glassified—vitrified would be the technical term—a huge area in a relatively remote and underpopulated part of the [country].” All these years later, people are still digging up fragments of the glass that graced the most famous Egyptian pharaoh’s tomb.

An avid fan of the flying disc is now slinging Frisbie pies.

When Dan O’Connor picked up an old Frisbie Pie Company tin at a tag sale over thirty years ago, he knew he had a piece of history in his hands. After all, the long-gone Connecticut bakery was the namesake of the wildly popular Frisbee flying disc.

The find made O’Connor, an avid Ultimate Frisbee and disc golf player, hungry for anything Frisbie. “I started collecting as many pie tins as I could,” he says, amassing close to 100 Frisbie tins from tag sales, antique shops, and flea markets. Then, after decades of buying old Frisbie pencils, coin holders, and other knick-knacks, O’Connor hit the jackpot.

Ten years ago, at an estate sale auction in Hartford, Connecticut, O’Connor won a bidding war on recipes and photographs that once belonged to a Frisbie Pie Company plant manager. Even before his purchase, O’Connor had dreamed about owning a bigger piece of the Frisbie pie legacy: the company trademark. He discovered it still existed, but the owner, another pie company, wasn’t using it.

So he licensed it. “I believe it was my destiny,” he says. Now in his fifties, he’d already had a long career in the consumer packaged goods industry, working as a trade marketing manager at Pepperidge Farm and a sales manager with Campbell Soup Company. It turned out to be good preparation for restarting an iconic Connecticut pie business.

The Frisbie Pie Company got its name from William Russell Frisbie, a Civil War veteran who moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1871 to manage a new branch of the Olds Baking Company. Soon, Frisbie purchased the bakery and renamed it after himself. After his death in 1903, his son, Joseph Peter Frisbie, took over. Along with opening bakeries in Hartford, Poughkeepsie, and Providence, Joseph created a pie rimmer modeled after a potter’s wheel, and a cruster that could process 80 pies in a minute.

Business in those pie-loving days flourished. By 1940, the Frisbie Pie Company churned out sugar cookies and 200,000 pies daily, and employed close to 800 workers. According to O’Connor, their pie varieties included such delights as apricot prune whip and cherry cream, along with the local favorites of custard and lemon.

The company’s huge pie production was an important step on the road to the Frisbee. In the 1920s, Frisbie Pie Company workers flung around the pie tins during breaks at the Bridgeport headquarters on Kossuth Street. But it was the company’s customers that truly sent the humble Frisbie pie tin to new heights–in particular, college students.

The company sold Frisbie pies throughout the Northeast, to restaurants, grocery stores, and schools. One major customer was Yale University in nearby New Haven. Apparently, Yale students caught on quickly to the high-flying potential of empty Frisbie pie tins, tossing them to each other around campus. O’Connor noted that earlier versions of the tin came embossed with only an F, but would later spell out “Frisbie.” Legend has it that students shouted “Frisbie!” as a warning to those standing in the path of a fast-moving pie tin. Soon, “Frisbie-ing” spread across the Ivy League.

However, the credit for inventing the future Frisbee toy goes to a Californian named Walter Frederick Morrison. From tossing around a large popcorn can lid with his future wife Lucille at a party in 1937, the couple soon switched to cake pans. While playing with a such a pan on a Santa Monica beach, a passerby offered to buy it, kickstarting their “Flyin’ Cake Pan” business. After Morrison returned home from serving in the U.S. Air Force during World War II, he tinkered around with different disc designs.

Over the next decade, Morrison and his then-partner Warren Franscioni began producing plastic versions. In 1955, Morrison came up with a new disc, and in 1957 sold the rights to his “Pluto Platter” to the toy company Wham-O. The same year, one of Wham-O co-founders, Richard Knerr, heard about New England’s Frisbie-flinging tradition. To capitalize on the name without inviting a lawsuit, the toy company swapped out a single letter. The Pluto Platter became the Frisbee, and sales soared.

While the Frisbee flourished, the same couldn’t be said for Frisbie pies. After Joseph Peter Frisbie passed away in 1940, his widow, Marian Rose Frisbie, and plant manager Joseph J. Vaughn kept the company going. But operations ceased in 1958, largely due to the difficulty of keeping up with rapid technological advances and the widespread consolidation of bakeries. It was Vaughn’s documents that O’Connor bought at that fateful auction 10 years ago, sparking his desire to revive the company for the 21st century.

While O’Connor had the old recipes, replicating Frisbie pies took some trial-and-error. One thing that helped, O’Connor says, was seeking out feedback from people who consumed the original Frisbie pies during the 1950s (though he’s adapted the recipes to include more fruit and fruit juice). After contracting with a regional baker in Connecticut for pie-making, O’Connor made his first delivery to a deli in December 2016. Currently, he sells four-inch apple, blueberry, and cherry pies, distributing them online and to delis, restaurants, and stores in Connecticut and New York. For maximum nostalgia, he also had a 1936 Chevy panel truck restored in the style of the Frisbie Pie Company’s once-vast fleet of delivery vehicles.

O’Connor even met surviving members of the Frisbie clan to get their blessing, through the Frisbie-Frisbee Family Association of America. Diane Davis, a Frisbie descendant and FFFAA member living in California, noted that fellow Frisbies are quite pleased about the company’s return. “I think everyone is excited,” she says. That doesn’t surprise O’Connor. In his opinion, bringing back the Frisbie Pie Company is a way of “keeping the story alive,” for both aficionados of flying discs and flaky pastry.

Turns out, dry, clean air is the secret to a vivid landscape.

There’s that small window of time, every day before night falls, when the sun hangs in the balance between daylight and darkness. In astronomical terms, sunsets are the daily disappearance of the sun’s upper limb below the horizon. And though their warm beauty is expected, not all sunsets are created equal. In deserts, sunsets are decidedly more colorful.

While it may not visibly appear that way, sunlight is actually made up of the full spectrum of colors. “The atmosphere acts as a filter for incoming sunlight, just like a filter you would put on a camera to filter out certain colors,” says Stephen F. Corfidi, Research Associate at the NOAA/NWS Storm Prediction Center. “The longer the pathway through the atmosphere, the more that filtering effect becomes noticeable to humans.” Each color represented in the rainbow has its own unique wavelength. Colors with longer wavelengths, such as oranges and reds, are more visible, while purples and blues (which have shorter wavelengths) get left out.

When we are in cities plagued by pollution, the boundary layer of air that separates land from sky is cluttered with little particles. “You’re seeing the sunset through a screen of particles and pollution [in a city]... so it doesn’t seem that stunning,” Corfidi says. In a more pristine environment such as a desert, the boundary layer is less interrupted by these particles, so the vividness of a sunset is more apparent.

Part of the reason desert air can be cleaner is simply because fewer people live there. And thanks to wind coming off the Pacific Ocean being relatively uncompromised by particles, the air that sweeps up dust in the deserts of the Southwestern U.S. in particular tends to make for better sunsets. “The air in the Pacific, on average, tends to be cleaner,” says Corfidi. “So the recent history of air that arrived in Arizona is going to have fewer particles, all things considered, than, say, some point along the East Coast.”

In case you can’t already tell, there’s a lot going on in the atmosphere during that penultimate moment before twilight. According to Corfidi, the “hygroscopic aspect” of these particles (which means that they grab onto moisture molecules floating in the air) causes the particles to grow because there’s moisture added to them. “When they grow they become large enough such that they're no longer acting as selective filters for the light, and they basically become like tiny little objects... but when sunlight hits them, the sunlight isn’t being filtered anymore,” he says.

In environments with more water vapor in the air, this results in sunsets that are more watered down, or pastel-colored. But in the desert, drier air means more vivid color wavelengths are able to shine through. “You have less of a swelling of these ambient particles that are always floating around out there,” says Corfidi. “They stay smaller and therefore they don’t tend to mute the filtering effect that results in a beautiful sunset.”

All of this filtering happens in the mid- and upper-levels of the atmosphere, and changes our perception of incoming sunlight so that we see brilliant oranges and reds. While particle-heavy air diminishes the vividness of non-desert sunsets, the desert environment’s unencumbered skies create sunsets with greater spectral purity in contrast. “The scattering effect of those very thinly dispersed air molecules leave a very spectrally pure orange color,” says Corfidi. “That orange that you might see in a patch of cloud is as orange as a Crayola crayon.” Of course, if we were to put an official spectrometer up to a sunset, it would probably show that the “spectrally pure orange” is really a mix of reds and greens, too. But sunsets are inherently subjective and perceptive, so what we see matters as much as what we don’t.

Desserted at the altar.

Cleo Gakshteyn had not planned to get married in a kiddie pool whose contents reached her shins. But thanks to one restaurant's penchant for pageantry, her wedding, literally dipped in chocolate, became the prelude to a 20-year union made all the sweeter for its unique backstory.

In 1999, Gakshteyn (née Londoño) was running a tiny two-room spa in Manhattan with her boyfriend, David. One chilly February day, Joe Calderone came in for a facial. On the spa table, Calderone mentioned a wedding he was planning in order to promote Serendipity 3, the Upper East Side restaurant where he worked as creative chef and public relations manager. He was looking for a couple, he said, who’d get a free, Valentine’s Day wedding as long as they agreed to marry in front of New York press in a tub of the restaurant’s iconic Frrrozen Hot Chocolate.

“You don’t feel like getting married?” Calderone asked Gakshteyn. “Hold on, let me ask David,” she replied, half-seriously. As Calderone lay waiting for his facial mask to dry, Gakshteyn proposed marriage to her boyfriend. David said yes. (He actually said, “Okay,” recalls Gakshteyn.)

Within two weeks, Cleo and David Gakshteyn were wed. “The thing that I remember the most is the flashing lights,” Cleo Gakshteyn says, of the many photographers present. The house of Vera Wang made her a chocolate-colored wedding dress. The groom wore a top hat and a jacket previously seen on Mick Jagger. The jeweler, Harry Winston, loaned a two-million dollar, chocolate-brown solitaire diamond pendant that came with two accompanying bodyguards. There was champagne, a wedding cake, and a chocolate-inspired menu featuring chocolate pancakes and chicken breasts in mole sauce. The pornographic model Robin Byrd walked the future Mrs. Gakshteyn down the aisle. (The original choice, Fabio, the romance-novel cover model, was in an accident involving a goose and a roller coaster.) A judge officiated, and the wading pool of chocolate was mercifully not frozen.

The restaurant industry is a tough business, and according a 2016 New York Times article, it's harder for an independent restaurant to thrive in New York City than, say, Los Angeles or San Francisco. In 2018, the city lost 6,000 restaurant jobs as restaurateurs cut labor costs to stay afloat. That Serendipity 3 has survived since 1954, steadily seating Frrrozen Hot Chocolate fans under its canopy of Tiffany lamps, is a witchcraft as preternatural as its larger-than-life desserts. In a cutthroat industry, where not even excellent reviews and Michelin Stars will keep you in business, Serendipity’s operating model prioritizes conspicuous consumption. Its management has collected Guinness Book records for the world’s most expensive sandwich, sundae, burger, and milkshake. They’ve also organized other stunts, such as hosting a couple who got married (to each other) 109 times, including once at the restaurant. It’s a novel way to remain in public memory, and given the establishment’s longevity, an effective one.

If Serendipity 3 is a church of spectacle, then Joe Calderone is its presiding god of excess. The chocolate-pool nuptials were his idea. “The weddings were crazy, fascinating, and very opulent at the time,” he says. He’s responsible for the restaurant’s most outlandish publicity stunts, including the Golden Opulence Sundae: scoops of vanilla ice cream with edible gold leaf and dots of Madagascar vanilla straight from the bean, topped with a gold-plated sugar flower and sauce from the world’s most expensive chocolate, all served in a Baccarat crystal goblet. A Saudi royal, Calderone says, once ordered Golden Opulence Sundaes for his table. “He had his servant pay in cash for six $1,000 sundaes.”

Today, Serendipity 3 may have lost the limelight, but it continues to enjoy a following among the rich and famous, locals, and tourists alike. In its heyday, Andy Warhol was a regular, paying his tab in drawings, before he’d achieved celebrity. Jacqueline Kennedy visited, as did Marilyn Monroe. The Rockettes have swung shapely legs over the table, enjoying dessert in crystal coupes. The Kardashian-Wests sometimes walk in. Parents and grandparents bring their children for indulgent milkshakes and a moment of nostalgia.

There’s still occasionally a line for a table. Servers, balancing trays full of Frrrozen Hot Chocolate, maneuver their way past selfie-takers admiring the décor. There’s a fuchsia wall bedazzled with circular convex mirrors of various sizes. A disco ball radiates light from an explosion of Tiffany lamps blooming from the ceiling. There’s no escaping your reflection, there are mirrors everywhere—vintage, beveled, golden-edged, antique wooden. The vibe is a bit like walking into a posh funhouse. This is New York as the Empire State: sybaritic showiness masquerading as quirky and fun.

Over the years, six couples have married in a tub or pool of frozen hot chocolate at Serendipity 3. Only the Gakshteyns have done so twice. In 2014, the couple celebrated their 15th anniversary by renewing their vows in a slightly muted, but similar ceremony at Serendipity 3. The tub of chocolate was there, but the couple chose their own attire. No pornstars this time, just some family and friends, including the couple's two sons.

Serendipity, a word that means happy accident, has defined the Gakshteyns’ lives. A chance encounter with Calderone sparked the decision to get married, leading to a lifelong union. “I had no expectations, because I wasn’t expecting to get married when I did,” says Cleo Gakshteyn. Although the couple had a traditional wedding in a synagogue a month later, she has no regrets about getting married for a publicity stunt. “It was so gorgeous and beautiful," she says.

They return to the same sunken vessels over and over again, and researchers are trying to figure out why.

Off the North Carolina coast, the rusty coral-ridden hollows of sunken vessels have become an important habitat for a certain underwater predator, one who can’t seem to get enough of the camera. Underwater photos dating back to 2007 revealed that six female sand tiger sharks had returned to the same shipwrecks months and sometimes even more than five years apart, according to new research published in the journal Ecology.

This phenomenon, when an animal returns to a habitat with some regularity, is known as site fidelity. The discovery may prove invaluable for scientists attempting to understand the conservation status of sand tiger sharks, categorized by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as a globally vulnerable species.

Current sand tiger shark population numbers are unknown as the last IUCN assessment was conducted in 2005. According to a press release, it is believed that their numbers have been spiraling downward since the early 1990s. The discovery of these sunken habitats could help scientists understand where to monitor for sand tiger sharks.

“Our finding that female sand tiger sharks return to the same or nearby shipwrecks adds to a growing body of evidence that these wrecks are very special and important habitats for a diversity of marine life, including top predators like the sand tiger shark,” says Avery B. Paxton, a marine ecologist and lead author of the study, via email. The coast of North Carolina’s Outer Banks is often referred to as the “Graveyard of the Atlantic,” due to the shipwrecks that populate the waters. This salty cemetery could now become a prime location to study the vulnerable species—and take more photos.

A set of images, which were taken by scuba divers, were crucial to the team’s research. The photographs allowed researchers to identify individual sharks through their unique spot patterns and to fully understand who was returning, when, and how often. By uploading photos to citizen scientist databases, such as the Spot A Shark USA program led by the North Carolina Aquariums, divers can provide researchers with the opportunity to study an ecosystem without having to venture out the lab.

It’s not yet known why female sand tiger sharks haunt the submerged ships. It’s also unknown if males exhibit similar behavior as none were found in matching photos. “Further research will better determine how valuable these shipwrecks are,” says Hap Fatzinger, co-author of the study. “We feel they are providing a critical habitat for this species to rest from long seasonal migrations, provide opportunities for overwintering, and also create an oasis for mating and reproduction.”

And if you live in Britain, you might be able to help.

Back in 17th-century Britain, certain small containers had a big job. “Witch bottles” were ceramic jugs filled with a cocktail of curious ingredients, thought to protect against bewitchment. Today, a team of historians and archaeologists are on a witch hunt of their own to find more of these mysterious bottles.

The three-year project, Bottles Concealed and Revealed, centers around the phenomenon of bottle magic, which gained notoriety through texts such as Astrological Practice of Physick, published in 1671. The book offered a how-to guide for preparing a bottle that might protect its owner from the forces of witchcraft. Over the years, researchers have unearthed objects that appear to be witch bottles in all sorts of places—after a bit of digging.

“These items were deliberately concealed,” says Nigel Jeffries, a finds specialist at the Museum of London Archaeology. “Whilst they have been largely found in hearths or chimneys, [or] built under walls or floors, they have also been located close to watercourses and a host of other contexts.” Most of the bottles already known to researchers were dug up starting in the 1950s, usually during renovations of historic buildings and homes from the late medieval period. According to Jeffries, “they are always found alone.”

The stoneware vessels are generally recognized for their brown glaze and round, applied medallions. And their existence also indicates a specific era in global trade. “They were made in large quantities in Frechen, close to the city of Cologne in the Rhineland,” says Jeffries. Researchers have found various ingredients inside these jugs: pins and nails (“which are bent as part of the preparation”), nail clippings, cloth hearts, thorns, and urine. Such items would have been added as a “prepared cure” to the bottle before its ceremonial burial in a churchyard or riverbank, and are “thought to have been instruments of counter magic,” says Jeffries.

While most historians have chalked all this potion-making and bottle-hiding up to standard superstitious practices (particularly in response to witch trials that were happening in London at the time), the Bottles Concealed and Revealed project is more concerned with tracking down bottles to explore the history of the rituals behind them. “We need to try and understand these bottles as they would have been viewed at the time: as legitimate medically and scientifically grounded cures for particular manifestations of witchcraft,” explains Jeffries. “The role that traveling cunning folk, physicians, astrologers, and the healers of the day played in how the practice was administered, spread, and communicated needs to be better emphasized.”

In 2008, MOLA excavated a witch bottle found hidden beneath the brick floor of Holywell Priory, an 18th-century home near Shoreditch High Street in London (this style of witch bottle is generally found in South and East London, though colonial-era American variations made of glass have been uncovered as well.) So far, Jeffries, along with two collaborators from the University of Hertfordshire, have collected 120 examples of these 17th-century stonewares with help from the public. As the team continues their search, they are encouraging citizens who discover witch bottles to report them, but leave them exactly as they are found, since the careful placement of these charms played such a large role in their application.

The Crested Saguaro Society is on a quest to document the Sonoran Desert's strangest succulents.

A gnarled, sage-colored cactus is propped along a road in Tucson, Arizona. It’s a botanical kraken, tentacles sprouting from a core ribbed like dry lava. Cars whiz past. Phil Kozol stands beneath the figure, gazing at its claw-like arms. “It’s like staring at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,” he says, “looking at all these crests.”

Pat Hammes stands nearby, her face creased. This monstrous beauty of a plant looks ill. And she would know. She’s spent years documenting malformed cacti such as this. Though their exact numbers are unknown, thousands of these crested saguaros, or cristates, speckle the Sonoran Desert.

Kozol and Hammes are members of the Crested Saguaro Society, a group of amateur naturalists bound by one mission: to find and document all of Arizona’s fasciated saguaros. Hammes and Bob Cardell founded the society back in 2006. The crest quest takes members across the northern patch of the Sonoran Desert, where they’ve logged everything from specimens that split like a whale tale to ones that resemble gangly candelabras.

Recently, the society has slowed a bit. Many of its roughly 20 or so members are now in their 80s. They used to get together for meals and hikes, but now it’s more of an online community. Despite the general slowdown, individuals in the CSS continue the search that drew them together.

On a normal saguaro, accordion-like pleats run vertically up its base, tracing the ribs like mountain ranges. But on a cristate, things get funky. Its “growing tip”—the apical meristem, in technical terms—flattens and elongates. The saguaro’s pleats split chaotically, forcing them closer together until they crimp, at times warping the trunk so it spirals. As the pleats smush together, they cause the plant’s growing tip to fan. The final result is a rippled crest as unique as a fingerprint.

Sometimes the crest forms at the top of the trunk, turning the saguaro into what resembles an oversized stalk of smushed broccoli. Other times it sprouts near an arm, or regular limbs may emerge around the crest. Regardless of where the fasciation occurs, the malformed limb always has a seam around its edges, stitching its two sides together.

No one knows why a saguaro, or any plant, crests. The most common theory is that a mutation in the meristem causes the cells in the growing tip to go awry. Others propose fungus on the roots, and still more suspect lightning strikes, freeze damage, insects, or infection.

Frans Tax, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at the University of Arizona, compares it to a benign tumor. As Tax and CSS members note, in most cases, fasciation won’t harm the cactus, and the plant may still flower and sprout seeds. Yet like a benign tumor, the unregulated growth can nevertheless pose a threat. If a heavy crest forms at the top of a saguaro, its weight could make the plant too top-heavy, leaving it vulnerable to strong winds.

There’s also a human risk. Saguaros, icons of the American Southwest, are protected by the Arizona government. But poachers still manage to snatch the cacti from public lands. The slow-growing plants—it takes upwards of 75 years for an arm to form—can go for about $100 per foot on the black market. Crested saguaros, because of their alienness, are particularly enticing.

This anthropogenic danger makes members of the CSS protective of the plants. Though they log the GPS coordinates of each cristate they find, they won’t publish that information online. A few members even keep their own databases, which they won’t share with their colleagues.

The secrecy can lead to confusion. Joe Orman, who joined the society about seven or eight years ago, recalls having spotted what he thought were new specimens only to find that Cardell, who has documented more than 2,000 crested saguaros, discovered them years ago.

But repeat visits like this have their benefits, as they let society members check a crest’s progress. Monitoring a crest is, as Kozol says, “like watching corn grow in Iowa.” It’s a long, slow process, where even the first hint of a seam may take years to fully crest, if at all. Orman photographs each cristate he revists, looking for signs of growth or damage.

Just outside Scottsdale, Arizona, standing at the base of one of the earliest crested saguaros he discovered, Orman begins snapping photos, knowing this may be the last time he’ll see the cactus upright. He spotted it while mountain biking about a decade ago, before the real estate developments popped up along the dirt road. The saguaro’s top splits into two Y-shaped growths, one capped by a distinct crest. Now, it’s starting to gray and shrivel, chunks of flesh stripped from its trunk, perhaps gnawed by rodents.

But even when death comes for the CSS’s beloved cristates, the quest will continue, as there are still unknown crested saguaros sprinkled throughout the Sonoran Desert. Some are shuttered within gated communities, while others may have been spotted before, but were mistaken for normal saguaros because they hadn’t yet crested. More hide in plain sight—Hammes found one just off a busy road she’d driven down for years; another she spotted in someone’s front yard after taking a detour to escape traffic.

The best way to find a new crest is to ditch the well-trekked trails. CSS members will look at a map and choose an area they’ve never seen and set out, armed with their hiking gear, snacks, and plenty of water. Once at a given location, they’ll head to a high point and, binoculars or scope in hand, scour their surroundings for a hint of the unusual. Perhaps they’ll see the start of a seam or a swatch of wonky pleating. They spend hours, even days, exploring where the trails end and the desert sprawls. “No trespassing” signs and barbed wire fences don’t deter them, though some have encountered angry ranchers and hostile homeowners.

For Orman, searching online is also part of the adventure. He's the society’s acting webmaster, and also fields tips from the public that come in via his own website. He’ll compare photos of the cristates, making sure the tips don’t belong to known specimens, and uses objects within the images—a hill, a building, powerlines—to piece together clues about a saguaro’s location. He’ll peruse Google Earth to verify locations; sometimes, the satellites will capture the shadow of a crest. When he’s compiled a batch of tips in one area, Orman will take his digital sleuthing out into nature.

After so much research, scouting trips are often a success. Crested saguaros are rare enough that they’re a challenge to locate, but not so rare that spotting a new one is impossible, once you’ve learned to seek the signs. “When you spend every weekend, every holiday, out crest hunting, your eyes train to look at the saguaros instead of the rivers and other scenic things,” Hammes says. “I can’t be around saguaros and not look for crests.” Even when in a car, CSS members scan the cacti dotting the sides of the roads, searching for a whisper of weirdness.

Finding the fasciated plants is a botanical scavenger hunt, and the prize is a chance to photograph one of these uncommon beauties. The first CSS member to find a cristate gets to name it, too, but not everyone opts to do so. Orman dubbed one in a Scottsdale nature preserve "Wichita Lineman," after the James Taylor song, because the power lines behind it were a clue he used to track its location after seeing an image of the cactus online. Kozol named one he and his wife found after their grandson, and they’re on the lookout for a new discovery to christen after themselves.

Only 58 years old, Orman is likely the group’s youngest member and one of its most active. Some of the original CSS members have died, and others have slowed their searches. But Orman still spends many weekends chasing tips. He emails dispatches, full of new discoveries and updates on known cristates, to the society members. He’ll also include images of other things he finds, such as a cluster of wildflowers or animal skull, to show those no longer able to hike.

In Orman’s emails, he mentions if a cactus is in danger. Wichita Lineman, he says, is at a moderate risk. The armless cactus, crowned by a swirling crest that looks more like an abstract oil painting than a plant, towers near a trail and a neighborhood, meaning it’s easy to find and may wind up on social media, which could draw larger crowds. If groups of people start tromping around its base, they could stress the root system that hides inches below the sun-baked surface. More attention means there’s a risk of intentional threats, too, including poachers or shooters keen to fire a bullet through a fleshy target.

CSS members aren’t the only ones keeping an eye on the unusual cacti. There’s a Facebook group dedicated to posting photographs of crested saguaros with more than 1,200 members (a CSS person is one of its moderators). On Instagram, the #crestedsaguaro hashtag reveals a flood of images. And Saguaro National Park’s upcoming 2020 Saguaro Census will include data on its cristates for the first time.

Though the society’s membership has lulled, there are still people out there seeking beauty in the bizarre, venturing into the desert or snapping photos of crested saguaros alongside the roads. One weekend in March 2019, Orman went crest hunting and found four new crested saguaros. He has a spreadsheet full of more tips to pursue, hundreds of cristates yet to be found.

They need 'em in order to weather the coldest desert on Earth.

How do animals survive in harsh environments? This week, we're celebrating some extreme desert-dwellers. Previously: the worm lizard that beats the heat by never coming to the surface, and the beetles that capture the fog in the Namib.

Picture a desert, and your brain probably leaps to sun-splattered sand. In those landscapes, plants and animals face intense heat and limited water, and often go to great lengths or depths to suss out food and avoid the sun. But not all deserts are sweltering or parched: Some are frozen.

For instance, NASA characterizes Antarctica—home to the coldest place on the planet—as a desert. The continent fits the bill because it sees so little precipitation (just a few inches a year), and because much of the water is locked up in ice sheets. To hack it there, animals don’t need to cool down, but warm up. And no one knows this better than the emperor penguin.

In Antarctica, these birds reign supreme. The heftiest of the penguin species, emperors have no trouble weathering the fiercest conditions Earth can throw at them. Average temperatures regularly dip down to -76 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the Australian Antarctic Division, and can crawl even lower. When wind whips across the landscape, it sometimes lifts snow from the ground and flings it into a blinding blizzard. The birds have nowhere to hide, so they just get on with it. They breed in winds that howl nearly 125 miles per hour, the British Antarctic Survey notes, so that offspring will emerge into slightly less hostile conditions.

How do they hang in there? They huddle together a communal cuddle, for one thing. Many ornithologists also like to point out that birds that are accustomed to cold weather are basically wrapped up in warm, puffy coats. Plumage and fat make for good insulation. That’s certainly the case for the penguins, but until fairly recently, there were some misconceptions about exactly what emperor penguins’ coats had going for them.

For a while, many scientists figured that the emperors’ feathers must be really densely packed. Back in 2015, a team of researchers led by the comparative physiologist Cassondra L. Williams, who was then at University of California, Irvine, took a closer look, and found that wasn’t the case.

By examining a small handful of penguins found dead on the ice, Williams and her team learned that the birds had no more than nine feathers per square meter—nowhere close to the maximum seen in bird species. They also discovered that the penguins had various types of feathers that they hadn’t expected to find. In addition to the stiff outer feathers, known as contour feathers, and the little gossamer-like after-feathers that tuft off them, the team also found ones called downy plumules and filoplumes.

While most other researchers hadn’t described plumules at all, Williams and her collaborators found that they were plentiful, and likely “the main source of insulation, as these feathers form a dense mat beneath the contour feathers and are four times as numerous as other body feathers,” the researchers wrote in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Filoplumes, which are spindly with barbed tips, are most commonly seen in flying birds, the Los Angeles Times reported, and are thought to help birds sense when their feathers are ruffled so that they can smooth them back into a slick shape. There’s still more to learn about exactly how the filoplumes are serving the penguins, and how the feathers are working in tandem to keep the birds warm. For now, though, it's clear that these emperors' clothes are working hard.

At this pudding-themed hotel, a Pudding Master presides over dessert feasts.

From the outside, the Three Ways House Hotel looks like a typical bed and breakfast in Britain’s Cotswolds region. Made out of the local golden stone and engulfed in ivy, it was built in the late 19th century as a doctor’s house. Nothing about its distinguished exterior hints at the pudding extravaganza that happens here every Friday night.

The Three Ways House, after all, is home to the Pudding Club, an institution with a self-proclaimed mission of preserving the “great British pudding.” Since 1985, dozens of dessert-lovers from around the world gather weekly to gorge on a feast of traditional British sweets, presented with pomp by the hotel’s resident Pudding Master. On one recent night, the event began with 60 people piled into the lounge, clutching glasses of mimosa-like buck’s fizz. A blackboard displayed the order of service: one necessarily light main course, followed by seven different puddings.

Pudding is a word with many definitions. In North America, pudding refers to a thick, smooth, custard-like dessert. But in Britain, a pudding is a dish traditionally usually made with suet, or hardened animal fat, along with flour and fruit for sweetness. Then, it’s steamed for several hours. This type of pudding can be sweet or savory, and thanks to their inexpensiveness and simplicity, they’ve been a British favorite for centuries. But the word can also apply to dessert in general, and there’s more than steamed pudding on the menu at the Pudding Club.

The Cotswolds area is known for eccentric activities, such as Morris dancing and the perilous custom of cheese-rolling. The Pudding Club fits right in. But its origins are relatively recent. In 1985, fed up with the sad dessert trolleys so common in hotel restaurants at the time, the then-owners of Three Ways House eschewed the typical black forest cake and fruit salads. Instead, they got a group of friends together to eat inordinate amounts of pudding. These Friday night feasts became tradition, and so the Club was born.

These days, the role of Pudding Master belongs to Lucy Williams. The assistant manager of the Three Ways House, she’s a tall, slight woman with the booming voice of a town crier. She doesn’t look like she eats a lot of pudding, “but my dental bill tells another tale,” she says. Her job was to brief us on the rules of the Pudding Club. Each pudding course would be paraded out of the kitchen and arranged at a central table. Their entrance required plenty of encouraging applause and cheering. After all, “puddings have feelings,” Williams says, before adding that anyone leaping up to serve themselves before their table was called would be shooed back to their seat.

Thoroughly briefed, we filed into the dining room, where couples of all ages sat opposite one another. Entire families settled behind the long tables covered in white tablecloths. Many guests informed me that they heard about the Pudding Club from friends and family who graduated, with the certificate to prove it, from the seven-course feast. These days, not many locals attend regularly. Otherwise, the surrounding village of Mickleton would face some serious health issues. (All aspiring attendees, the website notes, are required to call the Three Ways House in advance to book a spot.)

As the puddings came out to much fanfare, I sat next to the woman who had made the whole evening possible. For someone who’s made more 20,000 puddings over 25 years, Sheila Vincent, the Three Ways House pudding chef, isn’t the biggest fan. “I prefer cheesecake,” she told me as we tucked into our fourth dessert. Nevertheless, she’s been dubbed the “Pudding Queen” by her colleagues at the hotel.

It’s Williams who decides what puddings are served every Friday. Positively obsessed by pudding, she’s protective of its place at the Three Ways House. She’s also a purist, often consulting the definite tome on the subject, Regula Ysewjin’s Pride and Pudding: The History of British Puddings, Savoury and Sweet. “Are you even British?” she barks when I confess that I'd never heard of summer pudding, a dessert made from sliced bread layered with berries and soaked in fruit juice.

Over the years, each owner of the Three Ways House has recognized the value of the Pudding Club, both financially and as an institution, Williams says. The last owners, Jill and Simon Coombe, trademarked the name, and even decorated seven of the hotel’s rooms around a dessert theme. There’s a Spotted Dick room and Summer Pudding room, but I checked into the Chocolate Suite, where everything from the bathroom tiles to the cushions on the bed look like chocolates.

But to Williams, the Three Ways House’s pudding theme is about more than overindulgence. It’s about celebrating dishes that have fallen out of favor with the modern palate. While you’re more likely to see brownies and sundaes on menus across Britain, the Pudding Club features old classics, such as spotted dick and sticky toffee date pudding, always served with runny Bird’s brand custard. In fact, sticky toffee pudding features on the menu most weeks, and it’s usually the favorite pudding of the night.

I feasted on said sticky toffee pudding, then a chocolate and orange sponge, followed by apple and rhubarb crumble. It soon felt like a sweet-based test of endurance. By then, the entire room was struggling to finish. After I got through the passion fruit roulade, rice pudding, and syrup sponge, I was faced with a jam roly-poly. While it resembled the log-like roulade in shape, instead of light meringue, it was made from wonderfully stodgy suet and filled with jam. Vincent stopped after course five, unable to take the sugar, but I soldiered on until I tried each and every pudding.

At the end of the night, each guest filled out a score sheet, voting for the top dessert of the evening. The sticky toffee came a surprising second to the jam roly-poly, a childhood favorite of many in the room. In fact, all of these puddings tasted of my own childhood, conjuring memories of school dinners and Sunday meals with my family. Puddings don’t only appeal to the British, either. The Club has even been invited to bring their puddings to New York and Tokyo, says Williams. As for myself, I only staggered as far as the Chocolate Suite afterwards, with the certificate proving my achievement in hand. Then, I fell asleep under a ceiling patterned to look like a box of chocolates.

"We know that the person must have lived to the point of defecation."

About 1,500 years ago, a hunter-gatherer in present-day Texas ate an entire venomous snake. This isn’t presumptive, an inference based on the knowledge that our ancestors’ painful trials and errors have informed our modern dietary preferences and precautions. It comes straight from the source: the individual’s fossilized poop, replete with one of the snake’s preserved, poison-pumping fangs.

The fossilized poop, or coprolite—discussed in a recent study in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports—was mined by the researchers while they were working on a group project in graduate school. The final project for the semester, explains Crystal Dozier, now an assistant professor of anthropology at Wichita State University, was simply to analyze a coprolite; neither the researchers nor their professor had any idea that this one would be so special.

It certainly didn’t look like much, after all: just “like a really skinny cow patty,” says Morgan Smith, an incoming assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

After the team chemically reconstituted the specimen and revealed the snake's bones, scales, and fang, however, the researchers realized they didn’t have their hands on just any really old poop. Smith compared the fang to others in Texas A&M University’s biodiversity collection, and concluded that it likely belonged to a rattlesnake. That makes this coprolite the first known fecal record of a human eating an entire venomous snake. (When asked about her favorite coprolites from throughout history, Dozier pointed to one bearing evidence of Chagas disease as particularly notable.)

We can’t know with total certainty why this person went for the serpentine snack. Maybe it was just the munchies: Dozier, after all, says that she has eaten a snake, too, even if she didn’t particularly enjoy it. But there’s some circumstantial evidence to suggest that the snake was eaten in a ritual act. First, explains Smith, some contemporary cultures viewed snakes as water carriers, and it seems that this snake was eaten during a draught—in possible hopes of restoring some rainfall. Moreover, Dozier says that the coprolite contained traces of a pollen associated with religious traditions (not to mention an entire rodent, even if that has less spiritual significance).

The evidence also suggests that the individual did okay during the meal’s direct aftermath. “We know,” at the very least, “that the person must have lived to the point of defecation,” which can take up to 48 hours, according to Dozier. Plus, she says, the poop seems to have been, well, sufficiently solid to appear normal and healthy. That doesn’t mean we should now feel free to eat venomous snakes like they’re candy bars. “All we have is the poop,” says Dozier, “so it’s hard to say what happened before or after.”

For her, the most exciting aspect of this discovery is that it gives us “a view of a particular person at a particular time”—a time that predates, by roughly 1,000 years, other records of people in the Americas eating snakes. Smith, meanwhile, says that the find attests to the importance of investigating samples just sitting in existing archaeological collections, and not only searching for undiscovered items out in the field.

Perhaps someone else will find the missing fang in another coprolite currently stashed away, awaiting future lab work. Dozier suspects that it may have been digested at a different time, as “an entire meal does not translate to one poop,” no matter how meaningful a single poop can turn out to be.

These light blue rings can be seen from space.

Elizabeth Madin first fell into the rabbit hole of reef halos while stranded on Heron Island in Australia in 2010. She had come there with her husband, child, and mother-in-law to conduct research on a field site off the island, but dangerously strong winds cancelled her plans. So Madin walked out to the only protected part of the island, a shallow lagoon speckled with light-blue rings known as reef “halos.” Though they have been observed for decades, scientists never entirely understood why these ethereal rings appeared with such frequency in coral reefs. Madin wanted to answer that question.

Almost a decade later, two new studies from Madin’s team at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where she works as an assistant research professor, offer fresh insight as to how and why these mysterious phenomenon form.

When a coral reef is healthy, its halos can be seen from the heavens. These light-blue halos indicate patches of bare sand that encircle coral reefs, eventually giving way to greener meadows of seagrass or algae. In her previous research, Madin explained reef halos as a kind of “landscape of fear,” a distinct topography created when predators affect the distribution of plants by threatening their prey. In this case, fish and sea urchins would venture out from the safety of the reef to chow down on seagrass until they felt in danger from predators. The resulting radius of safety creates these patches of grazed-down sand. Under this assumption, reef halos at a no-take marine reserve—where fishing is prohibited—would be much smaller, as more populous predators would lead to more cautious fish.

But after comparing satellite imagery of halos inside and outside no-take reserves, the researchers found no difference in halo size, proving their initial hypothesis wrong. What they did find, however, was that reef halos were significantly more prevalent in no-take reserves, and most likely to form in protected areas where predators and herbivore populations have had time to recover from previous periods of fishing, Madin says. In other words, the presence of reef halos could indicate the health of predator-prey populations, and, by extension, the health of the reef. Their research is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Scientists previously believed plant-eating fish played the primary role in creating reef halos, but Madin’s team found that a much more complex ecological interaction between species was at play, according to research published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. “It was funny because we never saw seaweed-eating fish go to the full boundary of the halo,” Madin says. “We thought something else had to be going on.” After setting up GoPros and infrared dive lights alongside halos at Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the researchers observed that fish, such as sweetlips and emperor breams, that forage for subterranean invertebrates often disrupted the algae at the outer rim, thus enlarging the halo itself. “These fish have long and pointy snouts and nose around like a pig in the sand,” Madin says.

Halos are one of the few features of coral reefs that can be seen from space, making them a crucial tool in monitoring the health of large areas of coral reefs. “Once we fully understand the mechanisms behind these halos, they can tell us something valuable about how the reef ecosystem is functioning,” Madin says, adding that she does not believe satellite observation will ever replace traditional monitoring with divers. “But it can give us a broad, first-cut idea of how these ecosystems are changing over time.”