This collection of azulejos in Porto isn’t just for conservation and display—it’s also open for withdrawals.

Faced with growing threats to its architectural heritage, the Portuguese city of Porto made an unusual choice: It opened a bank.

The Banco de Materiais, or Bank of Materials, is home to tens of thousands of azulejos—the painted, glazed ceramic tiles that cover the exteriors of buildings across Portugal. In varying shades of blue, maroon, and honey gold, they often depict ornate floral patterns or simple geometric repetition. Sometimes, entire mosaics of intricately painted tiles display scenes from Portuguese history.

The city has been collecting lost and damaged azulejos for more than 25 years. Some were saved from the walls of decaying buildings before they were torn down. Others were stolen from façades but recovered by law enforcement. Over 27,000 of them ended up at the Bank.

In 2010, the city opened the Bank to the public. Visitors might assume it’s just another museum, but it’s also an important public works project. For every azulejo on display, the Bank has thousands of others carefully catalogued in wooden boxes. Entire mosaics are disassembled and stored in order. And as its name suggests, the publicly-funded bank isn’t just for conservation and display—it’s also open for withdrawals.

Building owners who are repairing a damaged façade can search the Bank for missing tiles. If the piece is found, the Bank will give it to the building owner free of charge along with expert advice, so they can perform a proper restoration using the original materials. If an exact match cannot be found, the Bank will help the building owner find a suitable reproduction.

“They all seek our help in advance,” says Paula Lage, a senior technician at the Bank. “This makes all the difference when what matters is minimizing the destruction of materials.”

Amid the challenges of Porto’s rapid redevelopment, ongoing housing shortage, and growth as a tourist destination, the Bank says that it has given away more than 14,000 tiles since 2010, helping developers restore 275 buildings. It has provided additional technical support for 1,300 more. In the process, the institution has helped to preserve the visual identity that makes Porto unique.

Porto’s impressive architecture runs the gamut from a Romaneseque cathedral to Rem Koolhaas’s Casa da Musica. But the look that defines the city is from a distinct period, says Luís Mariz Ferreira, a former academic who now works in architectural preservation. It’s why nearly half a million Instagram users have posted photos tagged with #azulejos.

“The image we have of Porto is the image of the 19th century,” he says. That’s when rapid industrialization and population growth first changed the look and feel of the city. It was also the height of popularity for azulejos, which had existed for centuries. During the 19th century building boom, the tiles covered everything from churches to coffee shops. But that growth stopped after the Second World War, when the Portuguese economy stagnated under an authoritarian regime.

Unfortunately, it was also a particularly bad time to stop maintaining tiles that had been installed a century earlier. The azulejos themselves were strong, but the mortars that held them—and even the buildings they were attached to—began to disintegrate. “The mortars were at the limits of their durability,” Mariz says.

At further issue was a government housing policy that kept rents low but neglected building maintenance. As 19th-century buildings crumbled, Porto’s residents moved to new developments on the outskirts of the city. “The main area of the city was very empty,” Mariz says. To make matters worse, some of the original tiles were stolen and sold to private collectors.

Porto’s trajectory shifted in the late 20th century. Democracy returned, Portugal entered the European Union, low-cost flights turned the city into a must-see vacation destination, and UNESCO declared Porto’s city center a World Heritage Site in 1996. Suddenly, azulejo-covered buildings were a draw, and tourism grew by 128 percent between 2010 and 2017.

At the same time, housing laws changed and investors—many from outside Portugal—began fixing up old buildings at a rapid clip. From 2013 to 2017, Porto’s city council issued 1,170 rehabilitation permits, which accounted for 72 percent of all construction in the city, according to AICCOPN, a construction industry association in Portugal.

In another twist of fate for the azulejos, the Bank of Materials started its work protecting tiles, cataloging artifacts, and studying and teaching traditional techniques just as redevelopment took off. If it hadn’t done so, Porto could have lost part of its unique architectural heritage to developers who valued a quick return on an investment more than the extra effort it took to conserve original materials.

“The Bank of Materials managed to turn a social problem—theft and degradation—into a cultural opportunity,” says Lage.

Mariz praises the Bank’s work, although he says that the vast scale of a tile-covered wall makes it hard to make repairs with authentic tiles. “They only give you the tiles if they match the pattern, the color, and the format,” he says. “The idea is brilliant of course, but the number of the pieces they have are very few.” Sure, an inventory of 27,000 vintage tiles may sound like a lot, but Mariz says it’s not uncommon for him to have to replace hundreds of tiles on a single job. When that happens, the Bank will connect a building owner with a company that makes reproductions.

“It’s sad, but the production of reproductions is increasing very much,” he says. In addition, rapid construction has led to a phenomenon known as façadism, through which developers demolish everything but the parts of a building that face the street, then rebuild the interior using modern methods. “We have the look of the old buildings, but there is new construction under the façade,” Mariz says. “The old city is nowadays very, very new.”

Even if it can’t save tiles that have been lost to time, Lage says the very existence of the Bank helps draw attention to the need for preservation of the tiles that still remain in place.

“The Bank of Materials space is an awareness space,” she says. According to Lage, building owners know they can reach out to the Bank if they want to perform a restoration, or if they own a building whose tiles are at risk.

The Bank also relies on cooperation among different departments in the city. For example, if a building is in danger of imminent collapse, the city’s fire department will use its equipment to secure important materials.

As newer tiles age, the Bank continues to work to preserve them in place so they don’t end up in its collection. “All tiles are important regardless of age,” Lage says. “They are testimony of different times and all marked in some way the history of the architectural heritage of the city.”

There’s plenty of work to do: AICCOPN estimates that 15.5 percent of buildings in Porto still need restoration, with an estimated price tag of $1.3 billion. A walk around the city reveals plenty of construction underway, but abandoned and crumbling buildings are still a common sight.

The Bank’s next steps include creating a preservation curriculum for local schools, and hosting workshops for developers and building owners who wish to carry out conservation or restoration work.

Despite the value of its preservation work, the Bank of Materials hasn’t yet become a major tourist attraction. While a million visitors check out Porto’s historic wine cellars each year, only around 12,000 people venture into the Bank’s building, just off the Praça de Carlos Alberto. Those who do, however, get a chance to witness a modern public works initiative in a city filled with history. They also get a glimpse behind that 19th-century façade.

The remains of the long-extinct, flightless bird from Mauritius are waddling off to a new home.

Like all dodos—tall, long-lost relatives of pigeons, which lived on the island of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, and went extinct by the 17th century—this one was flightless and pudgy, and sported a bulbous beak that looked as though it could crack open into a warbled song or fanciful prose. Unlike most of its once-feathered compatriots, this one was resurrected as an articulated skeleton and recently came up for auction at Christie’s, where it sold for £491,250 (roughly $621,700).

This skeleton is a composite assembled from a smattering of bones, which the Mauritian naturalist Etienne Thirioux plucked from a swamp known as Mare aux Songes, at the southeastern edge of the island. It was fashioned by Paul Carié, an amateur scientist with a knack for constructing skeletons from piecemeal bones and shipping them off to institutions that wanted to add a dead dodo to their ranks.

Most recently, the skeleton lived in the south of France, where it stayed in Carié’s family for generations. Now, it’s headed somewhere new for the first time since it was given a second life.

Its new perch, wherever it is, is sure to be quite different from the landscape that the living, breathing dodo enjoyed. Goofy and charming—once described as waddling around “jaunty and audacious of gait”—the dodo is also a cautionary tale of the way that humans alter the world. The species disappeared just a few decades after Dutch soldiers went ashore on Mauritius and first laid eyes on the bird. Its demise, according to the American Museum of Natural History, was likely due to a combination of factors, including the antics of introduced species running amok, plus hunting and deforestation. (The proportions of blame vary in different tellings: The New York Times has noted that the birds were a little unsavory and maybe even stomach-churning; some research has indicated that forests weren’t razed en masse until after the bird had vanished.) In any event, the turf that the dodos once waddled across has been thoroughly, irreversibly changed—patchworked with sugarcane fields and non-native palm trees, and prowled by critters much different from the ones that once called it home.

That's why, in a video announcing the sale, James Hyslop, the head of the auction house’s science and natural history department, noted that the bird “isn’t just a rare and intriguing curiosity”—a wacky relic to put on a shelf and show off to visitors. “We need to learn from this,” he said.

Julie Simon’s sugar flowers are edible horticultural wonders.

An effusion of pink carnations, bulbs of lavender, roses in radiant hues, yellow tulips, and bright green ferns make up the archetypal sugar flower bouquets that adorn Julie Simon’s cakes. A product of the artist’s wildly fecund creative vision, they make her creations look more like paintings than pastry.

Simon, a “bespoke cake artist” in Los Angeles, crafts prelapsarian visions out of gum paste, fondant, edible modeling paste, and cake. Although she has been a professional cake artist for only a year, her client roster already includes L.A. royalty. For the first birthday of Kylie Jenner’s daughter Stormi, Simon baked a cake that looked like the crowning glory of an Elizabethan princess’s nursery. A tiered cake in pastel pink and blue, with a gilded carousel whose sugar horses actually trotted up and down, it was a literal moveable feast.

Simon’s creations tend toward the fantastical, bringing to life classical paintings, sometimes quite literally. For one client, she made a cake-y rendition of a Gustave Klimt painting. She says her inspiration comes from the early modernist painter Marc Chagall, known for poetic sweeps of imagination and color. “I find him to be the most inspirational artist for flights of magic and fantasy." But her compositions also channel the flower-filled still-lifes of the Dutch golden age, whose record of the impermanence of life—petals turning brown, leaves nibbled by insects, or rotting fruit— Simon echoes in her work. She loves that the Dutch masters painted fantasy flowers, as well as bouquets of flowers that could not possibly have grown together in the same season. “There’s something incredible about creating something colorful and floral that might not realistically be depicted in the natural world,” she says.

Her foray into cakes began in a pre-War apartment on New York's Upper West Side, where seven-year-old Simon beat eggs to just the right stiffness to make a chocolate Charlotte for her aunt. “To this day, when I fold in egg whites, I can still feel myself in that kitchen,” she says.

Simon has taken a circuitous route to her current standing as the Jan Brueghel of confectionery. She had a moment of epiphany when she came upon beautiful, towering cake displays at the Harrods food hall on a trip to London in 1992. A few years later, she made the bridal-shower cake for her brother’s wedding, inspired by one from a powder-blue Martha Stewart bridal catalogue. “It was just so hard, and I kept failing,” Simon laughs.

For years, sugarcraft remained her hobby while she worked in music, an unsurprising path given her lineage. Her mother is the Grammy-award-winning composer Lucy Simon, and her aunt is Carly Simon. When a record deal fell through, she moved into corporate positions and settled in Los Angeles in 2008 with her husband. Two children, the recession, and a divorce waylaid any serious cake-artistry. A second chance at love turned sour, and suddenly Simon was out of a job: She’d gone into business with her former partner. (“He turned out to be a louse.”) At this low point, Gillian Wynn, Simon’s friend since her undergraduate days at Yale, suggested partnering for a bespoke cake atelier. In gratitude, Simon later baked Wynn a surprise birthday cake that is arguably her most magnificent creation: a zen garden, with hummingbirds and orchids, an active waterfall, and an edible Buddha statue.

Simon’s cakes start at $25 per serving, but can go over $100 per serving. “They’re expensive because they’re art,” she says, matter-of-factly. She sees her clients as art patrons, and she’s unconcerned that her painstaking cake art—some of which takes hundreds of hours to make—is literally consumed out of existence. “I once read that museum-goers spend 30 seconds on average looking at a famous painting,” she says. People tend to spend more time looking at her work, she feels, perhaps because they know it’s ephemeral. “And then when you consume it, the art becomes part of you.” Her clients typically keep the sugar flowers under cloches as keepsakes.

For a woman whose love of cake manifests itself in monumental works of beauty, Simon’s ideal of a perfect birthday cake is no cake at all. “If someone could put 50 cans of lychee in a big bowl over ice, and told me I could eat it all, that would be my dream.” In the meantime, she’d rather just bake up opulent fantasies for other people.

The insects' trash is one farmer's treasure.

After João Neto stopped using pesticides at his coffee farm, critters that had long been absent started showing up. Birds began singing at his window in the morning, pacas paraded through the woods, and bees appeared to pollinate the flowers.

Like many producers in the interior of the state of São Paulo, one of the main coffee-growing areas in Brazil, Neto had for decades used chemicals to grow a monocrop of coffee at his Fazenda Santo Antônio farm. But his change in approach also attracted the kinds of insects that farmers often fear: beetles, crickets, and ants.

Neto, though, says he isn’t concerned about insects plaguing his crops. “Nature is in charge. If these plants have to stay here, they will resist.” According to him, all the creatures returning to his farm are important for the “natural rebalancing that the monoculture of coffees had extinguished.”

So when ants started appearing by the coffee trees, Neto did not worry or resort to killing them. But one day, on a walk around the plantation, he noticed de-pulped beans scattered around the trees.

While it’s easy to forget when ordering at a café, coffee begins its life as a fruit, and the beans are the fruit’s seed. When Neto took a closer look, he realized the ants were climbing his coffee trees, knocking down the fruits, and carrying them into their anthills. The insects, Neto concluded, must be feeding coffee pulp to ant larvae, and then discarding the beans outside the anthill.

The ants had left enough beans to fill a large coffee grinder, so Neto gathered all of the beans in a bag to study them. When he told his friend, Katsuhiko Hasegawa, a Japanese customer who has been buying his coffee since the 1990s, Hasegawa was eager to taste coffee made with the “ant beans.” What sensory notes could it have?

Ant coffee would not be the first cup of Joe whose production involves animal interaction. Some of the world’s most expensive coffee beans are partially digested and then pooped out by civets, a cat-like creature common in Indonesia, jacu birds, which are indigenous to Brazil, or by elephants in Thailand. The animals’ digestive enzymes can change the structure of the coffee beans’ proteins, which removes some of the acidity and makes a smoother cup of coffee. What Neto and Hasegawa didn’t know is whether a humble ant focused on the fruit was capable of a similar transformation.

To answer that question, Hasegawa decided to roast several kilograms of the ant beans for himself, Neto and his children, and other friends who were at Fazenda Santo Antônio that day. As he couldn't count on a proper roaster machine—like the ones modern coffee shops boast in their entrance areas—he had to manage with a small roaster Neto bought years ago.

The group could barely contain their anxiety, and Hasegawa, says Neto, acted like he was handling a new, rare gemstone. With cups finally in hand, the ritual of moans and murmurs only heightened the expectation. “It was a coffee with different and pleasant acidity,” says Neto. “Although I am not a professional taster, I enjoyed it.”

The group widely agreed that the taste was unique. Some thought the coffee’s acidity had improved, or that the flavor resembled other floral coffees with jasmine notes. To test the commercial potential of the beans, Hasegawa took a few ounces to Japan to roast and taste with a baristas group.

Hasegawa runs a coffee shop in the hip Tokyo neighborhood of Ginza. Called Café Paulista, it was named after the Brazilian state where most of the coffee beans in Japan originally came from. The café was opened in 1911 by Ryo Mizuno, a Japanese entrepreneur who brought the first Japanese immigrants to Brazil to work on coffee plantations. Since Hasegawa inherited Café Paulista from his grandfather, who bought it from Mizuno, he’s retained the legacy of maintaining a close partnership with Brazilian farmers.

So when Neto’s Brazilian ant coffee traveled to Japan, it reflected a century-old relationship. Hasegawa says the Japanese baristas were excited to taste it, and intrigued by the story behind it. When they tried it, some believed the coffee had gained interesting acidity characteristics, while others said that the ants had given it sweeter notes. Overall, they liked it.

Although the baristas' response was positive, Hasegawa couldn’t take any orders, because the farm’s production of the beans has been very limited. With the new organic approach, Neto’s coffee production has dwindled from more than 230 hectares to just 40 (from 570 acres to just 100). In his biggest year, 2015, Neto cataloged less than 60 pounds of these ant beans. He hopes to soon be able to sell tiny amounts to customers. But, for now, he only makes ant coffee samples, and he does not know of anyone selling ant coffee commercially.

Not only is producing the beans a "little ant job," as is said in Brazil, a local expression meaning something that takes a lot of effort. But the relationship between insects and coffee trees can take a very long time to develop.

That’s according to Susanne Renner, a botanist from Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. She notes that the symbiosis between some ants and their Rubiaceae species (the family that includes coffee trees) evolved over about three to five million years. The Phildris nagasau, an ant discovered on the island of Fiji, even plants, fertilizes, and guards its own coffee crops.

“We believe that it started with the nesting behavior of ants who have lost the ability to live in any other nest or build their own nest,” she explains. “We don’t know why Rubiaceae, instead of, for example, other plant species.” This close relationship has been known since about 1880. “Our discovery,” Renner says, “is that the ants actively collect and then plant the seeds of their house-plants by inserting them into cracks in the bark of canopy trees.”

The studies conducted by Renner with PhD student Guillaume Chomicki, whose research called for climbing trees in Fiji for a closer look, shows that this symbiosis happens regularly. It also suggests that ant species around the world may have relationships with coffee trees—Neto’s ants being a good example.

In sharp contrast to the advice of internet posts that suggest spreading coffee grounds to deter ants, new studies suggest that household ants are attracted to coffee odor. Researchers have found that several varieties, particularly Arabica, are attractive to some foragers ants, such as Tapinoma indicum, Monomorium pharaonis, and Solenopsis geminata.

This research is shedding light on the relationship between ants and coffee trees, and similar studies could one day support the production of coffee by the tiny, hard-working creature, and investigate Hasegawa's belief that the ants notably changed the coffee's characteristics. In any event, João Neto will let the ants do their job.

“Who knows if eventually we will have a significant amount to sell in the market?” Neto says. “The quantity of ants is increasing on the farm.” Unlike any other coffee farmer, he seems very happy about it.

And all you'll need to see it is a library card.

In the 1970s and 1980s, New York City was the epicenter of hip-hop music and culture. Fred “Fab 5 Freddy” Brathwaite, Brooklyn-born director, visual artist, and ambassador for the genre, played a significant role in hip-hop’s transition from an outer-borough sound into a mainstream, global phenomenon. The original host of Yo! MTV Raps, the channel’s highest-rated show at the time, Braithwaite must have known something lasting and important was afoot. He documented and collected ephemera from hip-hop’s earliest days in a variety of formats: VHS recordings of rap music videos and shows, photographs, handwritten notebooks, and much, much more. Recently, the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem has acquired Braithwaite’s multimedia archive in full—to the tune of 120 boxes of material.

“His tentacles were everywhere in that early period [of hip-hop], from the late ’70s through the ’80s,” says Shola Lynch, curator of the Center’s Moving Image & Recorded Sound Division. “What’s amazing about the materials in his collection is that he is reflective of the entire community at that time and had some sense of documenting it … pre-cell phone, pre-social media. These photographs are his personal snapshots … he just happened to be hanging out with everybody from Queen Latifah to P. Diddy to Biggie Smalls.” Braithwaite’s collection also includes audio recordings his father made of live speeches and musical events happening throughout New York City during the time, which suggests that the hip-hop pioneer had a strong sense of how important it was to document the development of the genre and community in real time.

While the archive does contain some documents, such as the original screenplays of cult hip-hop films New Jack City, Juice, and Wild Style, the bulk of his collection is all over the place. “Its a medium-heavy collection,” says Lynch. “Museums love paper, but for the hip-hop generation it wasn’t just about the paper, the notes, the scripts. It was also about the media that was created, and that is super-reflected in this collection.”

The historical significance of Braithwaite’s collection is not to be underestimated. For scholars and citizens interested in the origin of many of today’s cultural trends, the history of creative forms of expression such as DJing and graffiti writing, and black culture in general, this archive has something for everyone. “One of the things I was struck by when I was getting the materials selected, is that we think of hip-hop as a guys’ thing … but there are a lot of women involved. [Hip-hop] was more about community, not just the fellas,” says Lynch. “I think that’s going to be something for historians of hip-hop and the ’80s to parse out.” The Schomburg’s Moving Image & Recorded Sound Division contains a lot of “weird formats,” and is roughly 60 percent media materials, which allows visitors to truly experience the sights and sounds of black culture. “That is going to be the trend as we move forward collecting historical archives,” says Lynch. “More digital is the future. We’re not just collecting to keep stuff in back rooms; we really want public access to information.”

The purchase of Braithwaite’s personal collection by the Schomburg ensures that it will be freely available to any New Yorker with a library card, which is fitting, given the fact that the materials are so focused on the city and its history. “To me, that is what’s greatest about this, that this was a reflection of urban culture at that time,” says Lynch. “Just kids [in all the boroughs] creating, mixing, and mingling. For the archive to be at the Public Library and at the Schomburg [is perfect].”

The Center has not yet set a date for when Braithwaite’s collection will be made available, but it is already in the queue to be processed. But it’s going to take some time, given that much of the media formatting needs to be updated to be accessible to a 2019 digital audience. However, the presence of these “vintage” materials, in their old-school formats, is part of the collection’s charm. “I just love that a stack of VHS could get people excited,” says Lynch. “That’s the message to young folks as they go through their parents stuff … just because the format is obsolete doesn’t mean that the content isn’t key.

National Park Seminary had an unconventional approach to education.

An English castle. A Dutch windmill. A Japanese pagoda. Minutes from the Beltway in Silver Spring, Maryland, is a community that looks like it’s straight out of Disney’s Epcot.

It’s all part of National Park Seminary. Once a turn-of-the-century school for young women, it closed in 1942 and became an Army rehabilitation facility. Later it fell into disrepair. Today, it’s in the midst of a revival.

“We used to have a sign up on the property that said, ‘What is this place?,’” says Bonnie Rosenthal, executive director of Save Our Seminary, the organization dedicated to preserving and sharing the history of National Park Seminary. “That’s what people say when they see a Japanese pagoda along the main street… ‘What is this place?’”

In 1894, the Ohio-born educators John and Vesta Cassedy purchased a struggling Silver Spring luxury resort called Ye Forest Inn and transformed it into an exclusive finishing school. They named it National Park Seminary as sort of a marketing ploy, as the U.S. capital was only a few miles away.

The Cassedys took an out-of-the-box approach to education. They taught their students about the world by bringing the world to them. They built eight sorority houses in architectural styles from across the globe including a Swiss chalet, an Italian villa, and a Spanish-style mission complete with intricate stained glass windows. They wanted the interiors to be authentic, too. They bought furniture at embassy sales and picked up items on their world travels.

The school was exclusive and attracted well-known names. The Kraft family sent their daughters there, as well as the Chryslers. The Spreckel children, daughters of the famous sugar barons, were also students. Irene Castle, a famous turn-of-the-century dancer, also attended National Park Seminary, although she was eventually expelled.

National Park Seminary was a two-year finishing school, meaning that its main objective was to teach young women (usually between the ages of 16 and 20) social graces while preparing them to get married and start a family. But Rosenthal says the school was progressive for its time. It offered students a liberal arts education that included foreign languages, music, theater, and sports.

“It wanted to make them contributing members of society and make them active members of their community,” says Rosenthal, who’s been involved with Save Our Seminary since its inception 30 years ago.

Many of the students treasured attending school at National Park Seminary. Rosenthal met with a group of alumni about a decade ago who told her that it was a highlight for them.

“Oh, they loved it,” she says. “I don’t know how many told me this was the best part of their whole life, coming to this school.”

The school struggled to attract students during the Depression, but numbers came back up in the late 1930s and early 1940s. But the school closed in 1942 when the U.S. Army took over the property through the War Powers Act. The Army used it as a rehabilitation facility for returning soldiers with physical and mental injuries.

The Army owned the property for the next 62 years and, although it was put on the National Register of Historic Places in the 1970s, National Park Seminary fell into disrepair. The Army gave up ownership in the mid-2000s and sold it to a private developer, the Wisconsin-based Alexander Company. It specializes in historic preservation and adaptive reuse. Save Our Seminary worked closely with the company to preserve the historical integrity of the property.

They had their work cut out for them. There was a lot of vandalism, and neglect had taken its toll on the buildings. Representatives from Alexander Company say that many of the structures were near collapse.

It took a few years of constant construction, but soon National Park Seminary became a place where people could live again. The old gymnasium is now condos, and the sorority houses have been transformed into single family homes. Yes, people live in the Japanese pagoda and the Dutch windmill.

Paula Doulaveris and Richard Birdsong, both retired military doctors, bought the Dutch windmill in 2010. Doulaveris remembers the first time they went inside the neglected old house.

“The place was literally falling apart. They had put these panels up so no one could come in to [destroy it] while it was vacant,” says Doulaveris. “I mean, Bonnie literally had to unscrew some of the boards to let us in. There were rocks in here. There was dirt. The place was really deteriorating.”

The couple finished most of their renovations in 2013, mixing modern amenities with the original historic features. Birdsong himself rebuilt the windmill’s sails so that they are safely attached to the house and turn in a strong wind.

“I’ll spin them if I see people who need to be entertained,” says Birdsong. “A windmill house has got to have working sails.”

As a whole, National Park Seminary is improving. But plenty of restoration work is still waiting to be done, particularly in the English castle and Italian villa.

“I didn’t want to see this lost. It was too beautiful and unusual and it needed to be… saved and shared with other people,” says Rosenthal. “It’s just a world different than everything else around us.”

For those interested, currently, there are apartments are available to rent. One of the restored sorority houses is available on the market right now. It’s a three-bedroom, three-and-a-half bath American colonial and, according to Zillow, it’s going for $999,000.

After all, history comes with a price.

How William Faulkner and a small group of provocateurs challenged segregation in ways that resonate today.

Early one summer afternoon in 1906, a crowd marched from downtown Oxford to the campus of the University of Mississippi to watch the dedication of a Confederate monument. At the top of the almost 30-foot-tall marble structure stood a Confederate soldier, facing the university’s main entrance, his left hand shielding his eyes from the sun and his right, at his side, around a rifle. The crowd, including Confederate veterans, huddled around. Ladies laid flowers. “The scene was an inspiring one,” the Oxford Eagle reported.

This past February, another group gathered downtown and walked to the monument, this time to protest the 112-year-old monument’s potential removal. Some waved Confederate battle flags, others the flag of Mississippi (the only remaining state flag to include the Confederate symbol). “This is an event to draw a line in the sand,” organizers wrote on Facebook.

Since the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, 50 Confederate monuments have been removed from public spaces across the United States, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. But this one still stands in the heart of the University of Mississippi campus—for now.

A growing number of people have been speaking out against the statue. Jarvis Benson, president of the Black Student Union, calls it “a stain on the campus” that “only continues to affirm the racist and hurtful ideologies of the past.” Cristen Hemmins, chair of a local Democratic Party, says it is a “rallying point for discord and hatred.” W. Ralph Eubanks, who teaches English and Southern studies there, describes the statue as a “monument to white supremacy,” one that “perpetuates a false narrative ... that the Civil War was a noble cause.”

There are many who agree with opponents of the statue, but on a campus where more than 75 percent of the student population is white, in a state where 58 percent of voters supported Donald Trump in 2016, it is fair to call them a minority. Still they hold protests, conduct marches, occasionally address the administration directly, and write letters to The Daily Mississippian, the campus newspaper. “I cannot be silent,” Eubanks says, “when the truth is being silenced.” Their efforts are what led those Confederate supporters to campus in February.

This cycle of protest and counter-protest was almost unheard of a little more than half a century ago, when Mississippi was almost completely segregated. The 1954 U.S Supreme Court ruling that deemed segregated public schools unconstitutional led people across the state to form White Citizens’ Councils, white supremacy groups that still exist. “The South is armed for revolt,” notable Oxford resident William Faulkner said in a 1956 interview. “I know people who’ve never fired a gun in their lives but who’ve bought rifles and ammunitions.”

In that charged atmosphere, public opposition to white supremacy was rare and dangerous. But in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a small, loosely connected group on and around the University of Mississippi campus—Faulkner among them—raised their voices in opposition. But they could not do so publicly or directly. Instead, they used satire and art: clandestine newspapers that skewered the logic of segregation, oil paintings that put the vulgar language of racists into quiet, staid art galleries. These modest interventions caused a stir, and led to swift censorship and intimidation (including, in one instance, an arrest). The stories of how these artist-activists mocked, confronted, and exposed hypocrisy have faded through the years.

Real progress toward equality has been made at the university, and in Mississippi as a whole, over the last six decades, largely through the determination and sacrifices of African Americans—from the 2,500 who attend the university today to the countless others who are forced to obtain marriage licenses, register to vote, and visit courthouses in the shadow of the Confederate emblem. The white liberals of Faulkner’s day operated from a privileged, safe position, but their efforts reveal something of value: that the rejection of the South’s worst tendencies has roots in some of the darkest days of Jim Crow. These were some of the first homegrown public statements on an all-white campus to confront the intimidation of racists. The current push to have the Confederate monument removed is, in many ways, directly connected to that earlier effort.

“The cracks and fissures,” Eubanks says, “have existed for more than half a century. What we are witnessing now is those cracks getting deeper and some ideas crumbling.”

In spring 1956, about 2,500 students—every last one white—attended the University of Mississippi. (At the time, the schools that would become Alcorn State, Jackson State, and Mississippi Valley State Universities were available to African-American students.) According to a poll conducted by the student newspaper at the time, fewer than a fifth of the students believed African Americans should be allowed to enroll in the state’s flagship university. Among this minority was a tall, bespectacled freshman named Jean Morrison. Though he had grown up in Chicago, Morrison’s family moved to Mississippi when he was a teenager. At 19, he joined the Marines and fought in Korea. He arrived on campus in fall 1955 to study philosophy, a 22-year-old progressive veteran, out of step with most of his classmates. “Believe me,” John Rosenthal, a photographer who knew Morrison, says, “he was nothing like the kids in Mississippi.”

Morrison could be outspoken, and he was itching to make a public statement on race. He decided to create a fictitious, satirical newspaper warning of the dangers of allowing the “Scotch-Irish” into proper society. Of course, many white Mississippians are of Scotch-Irish descent.

Morrison recruited a few like-minded students, including Sylvia Topp, a 20-year-old Canadian liberal arts major. Topp, a writer who lives in Ontario, says that she had “barely seen a black person,” before moving to Mississippi. But after arriving in Oxford, she says, “I instinctively knew things were wrong.” She saw “Whites Only” signs on campus and in town, and black people stepped off of sidewalks when she approached. “Every day there was a new shock for me,” she says.

Morrison wrote many of the fictitious news reports, columns, and letters to the editor that appeared in the paper, all of which advocated for keeping the Scotch-Irish segregated from society. Topp designed the six-page paper, and the university’s chaplain, Will D. Campbell, allowed the group to print it secretly on a mimeograph machine at his church. “We worked all night in the church basement,” Topp says, “then distributed copies on the cafeteria tables very early in the morning.”

When students entered the cafeteria for breakfast that morning in February 1956, they discovered copies of The Nigble Papers. (Morrison came up with the name by combining a racial slur with “Bible.”) A note on the first page from the paper’s “publisher” explained that a member of the “U.S.D.S. (United Sons and Daughters of Segregation)” had recently introduced him “to the full power of the Scotch-Irish menace and its desire to overthrow our present system.” Included was a story about a “young Scotch-Irish boy” charged with calling a white woman a “wee bonny lassie.” A district attorney was quoted in it, saying the trial “may very well cast the dye—either for keeping our blood pure or for monegrelizing [sic] with the Scotch-Irish.” A letter to the editor asked: “I do not believe God wants us to mix with the Scotch-Irish, else why did he put them off on a little island by themselves?”

According to Topp, the paper was meant to “make other students think seriously about segregation.” The humor, however, was lost on most. Soon after the papers appeared, a group of students went to the dorm where Morrison lived and attempted to break in. When that failed, they painted white crosses on the doors.

“They had a near riot in the dormitory because of it,” the chaplain Campbell wrote to a friend.

Two months later, a second edition of The Nigble Papers appeared, touting the formation of a “Campus Conservative Club” because the “Scotch-Irish are getting the upper hand.” It included several fictitious book reviews, including one for Democracy and the Southern Way of Life, of which the anonymous reviewer wrote, “A stunning poignant essay on the difference between the two.”

“I wasn’t afraid at first,” says Topp. Some “football-type” guys began harassing her, laughing and sometimes blocking her way on campus. She wore knee socks then, and later a cartoon prominently depicting her legs appeared on a wall on campus. Soon after, she says, school officials told her to be in her dorm by 7:00 each evening. “I was surprised,” she says, “that the paper made people so angry, and shocked that the powers that be thought I was in physical danger.”

Meanwhile, university officials tried to figure out a way to deal with the paper. Morrison, in a letter to the student newspaper, accused a university employee of breaking into his dorm room and “capturing and destroying copies of ‘Nigble Papers.’”

He was referring to assistant registrar W.M. “Chubby” Ellis, who later wrote a “letter of concern” to the state’s college board, referring to the students behind the papers as a “Communist cell.” Of Morrison, Ellis wrote, “the editor of the paper publicly boasted before a group of students that he had dated negro girls in California, and that they were better than Mississippi girls.”

The board responded by writing that “every member of the university staff was concerned” after the first edition, but no rules had been violated. “After the second edition appeared,” the response read, “a regulation controlling such matters was drawn up at the university and approved by the Board of Trustees.”

That was the end of The Nigble Papers, but the fact that this tiny act of protest drew attention and action from the university’s highest levels represented an early crack in the facade of segregation. A few years ago, David Cox, another student involved, wrote on a blog that the underground publications did not accomplish much in the short term. “But I’d like to believe,” he added, “they helped in the long run.”

If nothing else, Oxford’s most famous resident noticed.

William Faulkner had spent that spring fitfully writing the novel that would become The Town. He was also concerned about the growing racial crisis in his home state. Faulkner, 58 at the time, supported integration, but he also feared that violence would follow if federal authorities tried to enforce it. Several times that year, he met with a small group of like-minded Mississippi residents. One was James Silver, a historian at the university with whom he sometimes played poker. Another was P.D. East, owner of The Petal Paper, a small, progressive newspaper in southern Mississippi.

One hot June weekend in 1956, at Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s Oxford home, they kicked around the idea of starting a moderate political party. Faulkner talked himself out of the idea, but when someone brought up The Nigble Papers, his interest was piqued, and the group decided to create something similar. If anyone was up for this type of humor, it was East, who routinely placed fake ads in his own paper poking fun at racists. One advertised two-by-fours that came presoaked in gasoline for Ku Klux Klan cross-burnings. He needled racists in more subtle ways, too. The name of James O. Eastland, the longtime U.S. Senator devoted to segregation, appeared in The Petal Paper as: “james o. eastland.”

East said he would take the lead on the paper, which the group named The Southern Reposure. Because Faulkner suggested they conceal their involvement, East dreamed up a fictitious publisher named Nathan Bedford Cooclose who, in a publisher’s note, described how he laid around in hammocks sipping mint juleps before dinner on his plantation. Faulkner seems to have contributed very little writing to the project, though East later confirmed that the Nobel Prize–winner came up with the paper’s lead headline: “Eastland Elected by NAACP As Outstanding Man Of The Year.” Most of the rest of the four-page paper consisted of edited versions of material from The Nigble Papers.

The publisher of a Gulf Coast newspaper agreed to print 10,000 copies of The Southern Reposure. In late July 1956, several hundred were mailed to specific people and the rest were sent to the state’s college campuses. East said he was told a faculty member at a private Baptist college ordered “that trash be gathered and burned.” Silver hid a mailbag full of copies in his basement, beneath a coal pile. Faulkner mailed copies to literary friends in New York, and at least one found its way to Harvard historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, who sent a check to help with the costs.

The plan was to publish The Southern Reposure twice a year, but no other edition ever appeared. Faulkner moved on, East had spent more than $300 that he could not afford, and Silver feared for his job at the university. (In fact, a few years later, when East published a memoir, he gave Silver an alias—“Joel Brass.”) “The fact that no second issue ever saw the light of day,” Silver later wrote, “convinced me that amateurs cannot sustain even the best of campaigns for long.”

By the fall of 1962, most of the people involved in making The Nigble Papers and The Southern Reposure were gone. Faulkner died that July. Campbell was in Nashville. East, tired of attempting to run a progressive paper in a conservative place, was preparing to leave Mississippi. Morrison was at Tulane University studying German literature and Topp had settled in New York. Only Silver remained.

The progressive historian had a new secretary that fall, Sarah Kerciu, whose then-husband was G. Ray Kerciu, an assistant professor of art from Michigan. The couple moved to Oxford in September. A few weeks later federal marshals escorted James Meredith, an African-American man, onto the university campus so he could enroll the next day.

“That,” G. Ray Kerciu says, “was when all hell broke loose.”

A group of 2,000 whites, many of them students, converged on the campus to block Meredith’s enrollment. Some gathered near the Confederate statue. Riots followed. Tear gas was deployed. Shots were fired. Two people—Paul Guihard, a French journalist, and Ray Gunter, a local—were killed. (Their murders remain unsolved.) Kerciu watched all of this from his office inside the Fine Arts Center.

“It was a bloody mess,” the 85-year-old says. “Every redneck from the state was there to fight the Yankee troublemakers, which I was one of them, I can proudly say.”

Troubled and inspired by the scene, Kerciu spent the rest of the semester producing a series of graffiti-style paintings that featured the Confederate battle emblem. He called one America the Beautiful, and on its canvas Kerciu painted some of the phrases he had heard or seen written on signs during the riots.

"Go home Marxist monster n*****."

“A good n***** is a dead n*****.”

“Would you want your sister to marry one?”

Another painting, White Only, features those words superimposed atop several symmetrically arranged Confederate battle emblems. The following April, some of Kerciu’s work, including the Confederate paintings, was displayed in the Fine Arts Center.

“I hoped the paintings would make everyone on both sides think about the situation,” he explained at the time. “That was what they were intended to do.”

The majority of viewers, however, were not in a reflective mood. Several days after the exhibit opened, the university had five of the works removed. “Certain paintings have been taken by many viewers as indicating a slighting attitude toward the Confederate flag itself and all that it may mean to Southerners,” the administration said in a statement. Meanwhile, a law student filed state charges against Kerciu for “desecration of the Confederate flag.”

In an interview with the student paper, Kerciu pointed out that he did not make the offensive phrases up, he only presented what he had seen and heard. “As for the Rebel flag,” he said, “it was part of the atmosphere—part of all the statements that have come out. Now all the people seem unwilling to admit that they made these statements. It’s not my statements, it’s theirs.”

The next day, on April 10, 1963, a Lafayette County deputy arrested Kerciu on campus. He posted $500 bond and was released. He faced six months in jail. Over the next several days national media, including Time Magazine and The New York Times, reported on the situation. Novelist John Steinbeck sent the artist a letter of support. Malcolm X sent postcards that referred to segregationists as “Dixie rats.” Roughly a week later, the student who filed the charges withdrew them on the condition that the paintings never be displayed in the state again.

“I pulled out of Mississippi as fast as I could get out of there,” Kerciu says.

He moved to California, where he taught at California State University-Fullerton until his retirement in 2002. He figured the paintings would have lost their relevance by now. Then, in 2015, he says, “the Confederate flag reared its ugly ass again.” He was referring to images that surfaced of Dylann Roof following the mass shooting that claimed nine African-American lives in a South Carolina church. In the wake of that tragedy, Kerciu’s paintings were exhibited at the Laguna Art Museum in California.

“I never thought racism would still be around,” he says. “This new administration is bringing them all out.”

It is near impossible to find a copy of The Nigble Papers or The Southern Reposure today. The university’s Department of Archives and Special Collections has copies that can be viewed, but they are mostly collectors’ items. (A rare book dealer in New Jersey offers an original edition of The Southern Reposure for $1,250.) In 2004, Kerciu donated White Only to the University of Mississippi Museum. He does not expect it to be shown. He may be right: The collections manager says it is kept in storage and denies requests to view it.

Meanwhile, the days of a marble Confederate soldier standing armed in front of the university’s administration building appear to be numbered. In March, a few weeks after those Confederate supporters marched onto campus, the student body government voted unanimously in support of having the monument moved. The resolution, co-authored by undergrads, including Benson of the Black Student Union, calls for the statue to be placed in a nearby Confederate cemetery. “It detracts from the values of diversity and inclusion that are said to be so important to our community,” Benson says. “With that statue, those values are nothing more than talk.”

The university’s interim chancellor soon thereafter issued a statement saying the school would begin the legal process of having the monument moved.

Topp, now 83, says she does not remember the statue at all.

“I’m sure the idea of moving it would never have occurred to us, when segregation was a much bigger problem to object to,” she says. “I believe it’s up to the young people today to make this kind of decision. Kind of surprising that the vote was unanimous, though. Things have certainly changed from the ’50s.”

New research suggests that Black River's gnarled conifers are even more ancient than we thought.

Black River, which meanders several dozen miles through North Carolina before flowing into the Cape Fear River, near Wilmington, feels ancient, even prehistoric. The water is the color of steeped tea, and it laps against the thick buttresses of bald cypress trees. It looks as though the leafy, stumpy background of a natural history museum diorama has shaken off its paint and jolted to life.

Some of those trees have stood along the banks for thousands of years—and in a new paper in Environmental Research Communications, a team of researchers uses core samples to suggest that they have been around even longer than previously documented.

It was no secret that the swamp was home to very old trees: As a species, bald cypresses are the longest-living wetland trees, the authors write, and at Black River in particular, one dubbed BLK69 and affectionately called Methuselah had been dated to the year 364. But the team suspected that they could find even-more-ancient ones. Because they were hunting for the most senior of the leafy citizens, the researchers selectively sampled specimens that seemed likely to be old. There’s no single visual litmus test for a tree’s age, but in addition to diameter, the team put some stock in “gnarl factor”—the burls and the buttresses, the hollow slits, heavy limbs, and broken branches that all point to advanced years. “People don’t hide their age well, usually, and neither do super old trees,” says David Stahle, a geoscientist at the University of Arkansas and lead author of the paper.

A core sample of the bald cypress called BLK227 pushed the timeline back even further. The team dated the innermost ring to 605 BC. (Radiocarbon dating on a core fragment placed the age between 548-600 BC.) Either dating method places the tree in this environment hundreds of years before Cleopatra ruled Egypt. The inner ring of another of the area's ancient trees, dubbed BLK232, dates to 70 BC, one year before the pharaoh’s birth.

The scientists aren’t just scouting old trees for the fun of it: They’re championing dendrochronology, treating trees’ rings as a library holding records of the distant past. The striated samples hold proof of historic precipitation and temperature swings—and so the more rings, the longer the potential record, and the deeper the glimpse into the past, says Stahle. “The older, the better.”

These oldest trees tend to cluster in pockets, Stahle says, but it’s likely that the team still hasn’t pinpointed the most senior of them. For one thing, the watershed is a sprawling place, and they haven’t explored it all. They’ve cored 110 living trees, out of tens of thousands in the wetlands, and choosing which to sample can be tricky. “The easiest thing is to start upstream and float downstream,” Stahle says, “but the channel’s narrow and the floodplains are broad, and there’s stuff you can’t see.” Sometimes the landscape is too inundated to navigate; other times, researchers spy trees that look good and gnarled—promisingly old—but when they clamber on the buttresses or scale a little ladder and knock on the trunk with a hammer to determine where to bore, they find that the giants are too hollow to offer a full core sample.

The research, partly funded by the Nature Conservancy, is also a call for conservation. “If the true antiquity of bald cypress can be documented then the very presence of exceptionally old living trees could help promote public and private conservation efforts in the Black River watershed,” the authors write. In 2018, the North Carolina Division of Parks and Recreation concluded that “the conservation and protection of other large tracts along the Black River would be beneficial,” because the cypress swamps and other wildlife passed muster as “state and federally significant features.” The department recommended that residents of a few local counties continue to mull over the idea of designating a portion of the river as a state park.

Meanwhile, Stahle thinks the place with the chomped-looking trunks and old branches—green in the summer, when the landscape is dotted with spider lilies, rust-colored come autumn, and bare in the winter—is worth a visit. “Midsummer can get a little oppressively hot and humid, but shoulder seasons can be delightful,” Stahle says. “It’s a reverential experience to be in an undisturbed old growth forest. These things are precious.”

By distilling their harvest of pink roses, locals make a fragrant ingredient.

The soft, pink color of dawn still lingers in the sky, and the first golden rays of the sun are just starting to touch the tips of the surrounding mountains. Yet in the rose fields of Qamsar, a small town in the highlands of central Iran, work is already underway. Amid the chirping of nightingales, locals make their way into the fields, where the crisp morning air is heady with the thick aroma of Damask roses.

In a rose field on the outskirts of town, I watch as Javad Jafari picks rose after rose. His calloused, nimble fingers break each stem right below the petals with almost reverential delicacy, before he drops them into a length of cloth tied around his waist and neck. Like many of the other rose pickers who are busy in the fields around us, 66-year-old Jafari has been picking flowers since he was a young boy, helping his father in their family farm, or harvesting the flowers of neighbors. During the rose season, he wakes up at 5 a.m., says his morning prayers, and heads to the fields.

From late May to the middle of June, idyllic Qamsar becomes a dazzling canvas of pink roses. Rows upon rows of the plants, known in Iran as Mohammadi roses, bloom over the course of 25 days. Every year, hordes of tourists from all over the country and abroad come to watch as workers, farmers, and entire families pick roses and distill them into rose water.

The result is a culinary and therapeutic extract that has been used in Iran and the Middle East since ancient times. Qamsar is one of Iran’s main producers of rose water, an ingredient that flavors and aromatizes ice cream, baklava, rice pudding, and many other dishes in the Persian kitchen. Persians also use rose water to treat everything from headaches to heartache, as the fresh graves of the newly deceased are washed with rose water.

Rose water has religious purposes as well. Before the political rifts of recent years between Iran and Saudi Arabia, rose water from Qamsar anointed the Kaaba, the holiest site in Islam, twice a year. “This is the rose of the prophet, you know,” Jafari says, referring to the belief that the prophet Mohammad used the essence of Damask rose for both its fragrance and its therapeutic benefits. While the local name reflects this connection, abroad the rose often goes by Damask. One tale has it that the rose was brought to Europe by a crusader, who picked up the flower in the Syrian city of Damascus.

Yet research done by Dr. Ali Nikbakht, associate professor of horticulture at Isfahan University, postulates that the Damask rose was first grown and used in the Qamsar area 2,500 years ago. “The unique combination of strong sunlight and cool mountain air makes Qamsar ideal for the Mohammadi rose, with the roses grown there having the highest quality in all of Iran,” he says. At the time, rose petals were placed in oil to extract their essence. The first evidence of the steam distillation used today is found in the writings of Avicenna, the 11th-century Persian polymath who used rose water extract for medical purposes.

Jafari finishes picking the last of the roses just as the sun edges over the mountains, filling the valley with unwanted light and heat. “It’s best to finish picking them before the sun comes up over the mountains,” he says, explaining how direct sunlight and heat cause the delicate fragrance of the roses to evaporate, resulting in lower-quality rose water.

Jafari then swings a plastic bag containing over 15 kilograms of rose petals over his shoulder, and we make our way to a distillery owned by Haj Reza Aghayee, a relative of Jafari and a second-generation rose water maker. Like many other rose water makers, Aghayee has turned what used to be a seasonal job done by farmers into a full-time business that uses one ton of roses per season. Aghayee attributes the increase in sales to local transportation improvements and the recent popularity of herbal remedies in Iran. 20 years ago, he only sold rose water and a handful of other extracts, such as mint. “But now we sell over a hundred types,” Aghayee says.

Despite this prolific production, his distillery, like most in Qamsar, still employs traditional methods. In the distillery, Aghayee’s son Alireza adds Jafari’s roses, along with petals from other rose pickers, into a round copper still containing 70 liters of water. The amount of rose varies, depending on whether you want a “heavy or light extract,” Alireza explains. Their “two-fire” rose water, an exceptionally potent variety, is only made in small quantities due to its price and the huge amount of roses needed to make it.

Next, Alizera takes a metal lid, called a toghar, and places it on top of the still. Latching it shut, he turns on the flame below the still. Once the mix of petals and water has begun to steam, Alireza connects aluminum tubes to outlet valves on the still, guiding the fragrant steam along the tubes to large flasks submerged in a pool of cold, flowing water. For the next four hours, the steam will condensate and collect in the flask, producing about 40 liters of rose water.

With the process underway, Alireza turns his attention to a previous batch left to distill overnight. After removing the tubes and the lid, Alireza first removes the precious rose oil that has collected at the surface of the flask. He carefully lifts the jelly-like oils with a spoon and collects them in a jar. Later, it will be used to make perfume.

Then, after lifting the filled 40-liter flask from the pool of water with a small ceiling-mounted crane, Alireza pours the freshly distilled rose water into 20-liter tanks for storage. But first, each tank itself is rinsed with rose water to wash out any contamination. Rose water is very sensitive, he notes, and any droplets of water could cause it to prematurely lose its fragrance. Like the making of a unique wine, there are many subtleties to the distillation process. “They may seem like small things, but they make a difference in the final product,” he says.

In addition, the stills are strictly made out of copper, since copper catalyzes certain reactions that remove unwanted flavors. In other parts of the country, straight distillation tubes are traditionally used, yet distilleries in this region have always utilized two upside-down, V-shaped tubes to ensure that any impurities in the vapor are stopped in the upward slope of the pipe. After distillation, rose water is traditionally stored in tinted glass to prevent any loss of the precious scent that occurs with a plastic container. However, these days rose water is predominantly stored in plastic bottles, due to costs and breakage concerns.

Despite the harsh economic times in Iran, the rose water business is thriving as domestic and international demand continuously grows. It’s still only mid-morning, but Alireza has four stills simmering, and he is awaiting the next delivery of flowers. “Business is good,” he says. “We have five stills and we refill them three to four times a day.” His father agrees. “If you’d come here 50 years ago, you’d only find five rose water producers; now there are maybe over 200,” Aghayee says. While Bulgaria and Turkey produce more rose water than Iran, Aghayee sees change coming. “The industry is growing every year,” he says. “And that is great, because rose water is a Persian tradition.”

Alexander von Humboldt might have been using the wrong mountain.

In 1807, explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt published Tableau Physique, a diagram that depicts Chimborazo and Cotopaxi, two volcanoes of the Andes, and, in a sort of cross-section, the vegetation that grows on them at different elevations. The illustration was based on Humboldt’s first major scientific expedition to South America, at just 29, with friend and fellow botanist Aimé Bonpland. The Tableau Physique helped establish the concepts of vegetation belts and biogeography, and has been used by countless scientists to understand how plant ranges shift due to climate change. However, an error in the Tableau Physique has gone unnoticed until now. Humboldt may have based part of it on the wrong mountain.

Despite its historical significance, little scrutiny has been given to the data used to create Tableau Physique. A team of researchers, led by geographical historian Pierre Moret of Toulouse University in France, conducted an investigation into Humboldt’s research, including a resurvey of sites he visited. The team first compared information in Tableau to two subsequent publications by Humboldt, a comparison that revealed science in a constant state of revision. They discovered that Humboldt increased the number of taxa in the region above 3,900 meters with each publication. Also, many of the alpine plants he listed were recorded at incorrect elevations. According to the team’s research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for the high-altitude sections, “This diagram was an intuitive construct based on unverified, incorrectly recorded field data.”

For the resurvey, the researchers used Humboldt’s travel diary to retrace his route. “Not all the documents he published present the level of accuracy we needed for our resurvey. So we preferred to return to primary data of his field diaries,” says Moret, via email. The team found around 31 high-altitude plant species with “unambiguous locality data and verifiable elevation information registered by Humboldt and Bonpland on Mt. Antisana,” another volcano in the Andes—notably not Chimborazo.

The team believes Humboldt and Bonpland spent four days on Antisana and made many of their discoveries there. The research team also located the cave where the two men camped in 1802 and conducted fieldwork. It’s not entirely clear how Humboldt got things so mixed up. He could have simply been confused about his location or the elevations he was working at, or perhaps he just mislabeled everything. But there is another theory.

While many of his discoveries were made on other mountains, Humboldt gave Chimborazo pride of place in his work. During the 17th century, Chimborazo (in Ecuador, like Cotopaxi and Antisana) was considered the tallest mountain in the world (at least when measured from the center of the Earth). According to the study, Humboldt featured the mountain to “satisfy the continuous questions about reaching the highest altitude by man.” The climb had already garnered Humboldt international fame, and he was described as the most famous man in the world after Napoleon. He was not about to let the climb be forgotten, despite his other burgeoning research, so he could have ascribed some of his observations to the mountain that represented his greatest public achievement, whether they had been recorded there or not. “It does change our image of Humboldt: a giant in the history of science, far ahead of his time for the wideness and accuracy of his observations,” says Moret. The findings of the study are also a cautionary tale in using historical data as an infallible baseline for modern environmental change.

It was stored inside limestone beneath the seafloor.

You may have heard that 20,000 years ago, our planet was experiencing an ice age that froze much of its surface and, in tandem, shrunk many of its bodies of water. Scientists studying the period’s seas have historically been limited to looking at things such as fossilized coral, or sediment cores found on the seafloor—useful, but ultimately circumstantial evidence of the Last Glacial Maximum’s marine environment.

Finally, Live Science reports, a team of researchers will go straight to the source after discovering what appears to be 20,000-year-old water inside a sediment core from the Maldives archipelago, in the Indian Ocean. They will publish their findings in a forthcoming issue of the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta.

The scientists were in the Maldives not to study the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), but the relationship between regional monsoons and the formation of sediments. Using their research ship’s specially outfitted drill, the team extracted cores from limestone deposits hidden beneath the seafloor and then dried them out with a hydraulic press. The water that soaked out of these cores was noticeably saltier than anything you’d expect to find in seawater, and the researchers were compelled to ask why. “That was the first indication we had something unusual on our hands,” said the lead author Clara Blättler, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago, in a statement.

Further tests of the water’s chemical composition only provided more evidence that this was not contemporary seawater: It was not only saltier, but also colder and more chlorinated—all features consistent with hypotheses regarding water quality during the LGM, according to Live Science. “[F]rom all indications,” said Blättler, “it looks pretty clear we now have an actual piece of this 20,000-year-old ocean.”

The finding is more than just a lucky coup for Blättler and her colleagues, who, based on their tests, would be the very first to recover water from the LGM. First, it may inspire other teams to use similar techniques to seek out ancient water stored in other environments and further expand the dataset. Moreover, gathering that data is directly related to the study of climate changes past, present, and future. Understanding, for example, how salinity and circulation interacted in the past can better inform researchers’ projections of how those patterns will interact in the future. “Any model you build of the climate,” said Blättler, “has to be able to accurately predict the past.”

Scientists discovered that large cities produce enough heat to change the atmosphere.

If you type in “why is london” into Google search, the second suggested search—after an inquiry about the dish called a London broil—is “why is London always cloudy.” The sagging clouds that frequently hang over the British city have become as much a landmark as Big Ben or the Queen’s corgis. In April 2018, Londoners lasted a whole, depressing week without seeing a single hour of sunshine. Now, scientists have come closer to cracking the code of why London has such gloomy weather forecasts. Apparently the size and architecture of megacities allow them to produce their own clouds, according to a new study published in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science.

The researchers studied satellite imagery of London and Paris and found a notable expansion of cumulus cloud coverage during the late afternoon and evening compared to more rural surroundings. This observation surprised researchers, as cities’ lack of significant vegetation should make them drier, theoretically resulting in less evaporation and, ultimately, less clouds.

But according to the study’s findings, it all comes down to the energy of a bustling metropolis. Large cities produce much more heat than less developed areas, such as a meadow or farm. This energy comes from buildings and traffic, writes the study’s lead author Natalie Theeuwes, a research assistant at the University of Reading, in an email. As this hot air rises and eventually cools, the moisture inside the air condensates and forms clouds. This excess production of heat allows cities to form larger, bigger patches of cloud coverage that also last longer than clouds over rural areas. So clouds tend to linger in afternoons and evenings, times when they would have otherwise dissipated.“While the rural surroundings start to cool and there is no more energy for these updrafts, clouds die out,” Theeuwes says. “But over the city there is still heat and energy available at the surface to maintain these clouds.”

Cities interact with the atmosphere in numerous ways. Perhaps the best-studied, Theeuwes says, is the urban heat island effect, the phenomenon where cities have a higher air temperature at street level around twilight than surrounding areas. But researchers had never before looked into how cities influenced other forms of weather, Theeuwes says, adding that these city-made clouds likely exacerbate the urban heat island effect by making it more difficult for cities to cool off. Though the study focused just on London and Paris, Theeuwes says these persistent clouds have been observed in other cities with an abundance of extra heat, such as Sacramento, California, and Łódź, Poland.

It may still be safe to drink.

In 2010, a team of underwater salvagers toasted a deep-sea discovery with a rare vintage. Their discovery? The very wine they were about to drink: 350-year-old bottles they had fished out of a decrepit shipwreck off the coast of Hamburg, Germany. While the ship had deteriorated past the point of recognition, 14 bottles of exceptionally well-aged red, packed lovingly in a rattan basket, survived the 130-foot plunge and had been resting on the seafloor for centuries. Now, two of the bottles are up for auction by Christie’s London, and the auction house estimates they’ll fetch between $32,942 and $38,010.

After the salvagers plucked the case from the sea, scientists got to work interpreting the bottles’ contents. Professor Régis Gougeon, of the University of Burgundy’s Institut Universitaire de la Vigne et du Vin, used the presence of resveratrol, a substance that comes from grape skins, and tannin degradation to determine that the drink had in fact been a strong, red wine. Judging by its location and age, it was possibly a Bordeaux, though we can’t know for certain, says Charles Foley, Christie’s London Wine Specialist. An inspection of the bottle and cork further suggested that the wine was bottled between 1670 and 1690.

That advanced age makes these two bottles the oldest ever offered for sale by Christie’s, though they’re still far from the oldest unopened bottles of wine in the world. That honor goes to the Speyer wine bottle, a jug of wine that, before its disinterment in contemporary Germany, sat in a Roman tomb for more than 1500 years. The Speyer wine is probably still safe to drink, though scientists say it likely wouldn’t taste good. More drinkable, though still quite aged, are the Thomas Jefferson wines sold by Christie’s in 1985. While they may not have actually belonged to the president, who was a notorious wine snob, former Christie’s authority and certified Master of Wine Michael Broadbent sampled one 1784 bottle and dubbed it “perfect in every sense.”

If you’re tempted to replicate this taste test with the shipwreck wine, Christie’s cautions that its “drinkability is questionable.” “It’s offered more as an antiquity,” says Foley. If you are interested in trying an underwater wine, but lack the bravery (or budget) for a three-centuries-old vintage, there are several contemporary vineyards aging their wines in the ocean, minus the shipwreck. Foley says that one maker lowers white wine in cages to the bottom of the Baltic Sea, all for that aquatic je na sais quoi.

In fact, wine aged underwater is downright commonplace. “You imagine Laura Croft, but it’s a bit more mundane than that,” Foley says. Still, none of those bottles can boast quite as dramatic an origin story, or as long an underwater tenure, as the Christie’s specimens. While acquiring the bottles may not require any tomb raiding, 300-year-old shipwreck wine is sure to be the most badass beverage in your liquor cabinet.

To learn whether these giant, goofy fish are good or bad for beleaguered coral reefs.

Stalking bumphead parrotfish for science is a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, it involves hours of snorkeling in the crystalline waters around the Palmyra Atoll, several dozen islets freckling the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and American Samoa. The water is turquoise and rich with coral—all the better for the hungry parrotfish, who eat it—and the land is lush, managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as a refuge for red-footed boobies and bristle-thighed curlews.

On the other hand, the fish are huge—Bolbometopon muricatum can reach up to 4.5 feet long, and 165 pounds or so—and fairly funky-looking. Their foreheads are almost comically bulbous, like they’ve just been clonked on the head. Their mouths, with 1,000 strong, sharp teeth that demolish coral, algae, and squishy polyps, make them look like perpetually startled horses. And then there’s the reason scientists were in the water to begin with: to collect their prodigious amounts of poop.

These fish are grazers, and like grazers on land, their dietary habits have an wide-ranging impact on their ecosystem. Each bumphead parrotfish consumes up to 5.69 tons of reef material annually, ranging from live corals to coral pavement, rubble, and other chunks. Nearly everything that goes in one end comes out the other. So any given bumphead parrotfish expels about 4.8 tons of feces a year—and some of that material washes ashore, where blissfully unaware beachgoers bury their toes in it. The distinctive white sands along the Caribbean Sea and ringing islands in the South Pacific? It doesn’t come from years of erosion, but from the workings of a parrotfish’s pharyngeal mill, which crushes calcium carbonate coral skeletons like a rock grinder.

“It’s this plume that spreads out larger than their body size, and a lot settles,” says Grace Goldberg, a member of the McClintock Lab at the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A single hefty individual fish can expel 1,000 pounds of sand each year, according to the Smithsonian Institution, and the University of Hawaiʻi has estimated that as much of 70 percent of the pretty stuff on those white-sand shores was once in a parrotfish’s gut.

This is just one of the many ways that coral reefs are connected to other ecosystems, but reefs are complicated, fragile places that are under increasing duress—from bleaching, garbage, fishing, and acidifying oceans. That’s why a team of marine scientists led by Goldberg took a closer look at the parrotfish’s ecosystem-shaping feces. How does it hurt or benefit a reef, or change the the water around it?

“What we were curious about is, wouldn’t it be cool if, because these fish are grinding up calcium carbonate and putting sand dust into the water, it kind of protected the reef from acidification locally, and allowed corals and other calcifying organisms to continue going about its life?” Goldberg says. At the same time they were also interested in whether the waste is rich in nitrogen and phosphorus, and could potentially function as a kind of fertilizer, especially for the algae and other plants that could overrun reefs and outcompete coral for nutrients and light.

To determine the nutrient makeup of parrotfish poop, and how a dusting of it impacts the pH of the ecosystem, the team first had to collect it. As they describe in a recent paper in the journal Coral Reefs, that involved kicking toward “the densest portion of the cloud of feces,” and collecting a mix of feces, fresh sand, and seawater in a glass bottle. For comparison, they gathered normal seawater samples nearby. They also sucked up fresh excrement samples in a syringe.

When they got the samples back to the lab, they showed … not a whole lot, at least as far as nitrogen and phosphorus are concerned. The samples contained very little of either. And the water samples didn’t show a significant difference in pH, either. The authors concluded that there was “no evidence that excreted calcium carbonate has a significant buffering effect on localized areas.”

With their craving for coral, it might be tempting to cast bumphead parrotfish as potential threats to at-risk reefs—but that would be too simple. In the reef environment—and many other ones—any given species can do both harm and good. Even though bumphead parrotfish do seem to have a particular hankering for live corals, Goldberg doesn’t view them as a problem: Despite basically eating coral all the time, evolution has shaped a multifaceted role for parrotfish. Previous research, published in Conservation Biology, showed that while bumpheads, whose own ranks have dwindled, do decrease coral colony size and abundance, they also open up space for new coral settlement and helped control the algae that can monopolize light and sustenance. In that way, they’re a little like the goats that park staff might enlist to oust invasive species. Except goats don’t keep us up to our ankles in warm, gleaming beach sand.

Public health officials hope the success can be replicated.

It was 1951 before the United States declared itself malaria-free, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And since 1955, the World Health Organization (WHO) has had the worldwide eradication of the parasitic disease as a stated goal. There has been great progress—more than 60 countries or territories with at least some malaria risk have now been declared free of the deadly mosquito-borne disease. While risk remains high in many of the world’s warmest latitudes, two countries have now joined the ranks of those that have wiped it out.

The WHO has officially declared Algeria and Argentina are completely free of malaria, following three consecutive years with no new cases. It is an exciting example for health officials about the future possibilities for countries with more stubborn malaria problems, in part because the effort didn’t require the recently tested malaria vaccine.

Algeria plays a special role in the history of our understanding of the disease, since that’s where the malaria parasite was first identified by physicians in 1880, and because Africa remains the place where the disease claims the most lives. Algeria and Argentina were able to rid themselves of malaria with tested techniques that other countries have used: insecticide-treated mosquito nets, surveillance measures designed to identify new cases of malaria quickly, and universal malaria diagnosis and treatment. Argentina also closely monitored its border with Bolivia to ensure that the parasite wasn't exchanged either direction; together, the countries sprayed more than 22,000 homes along their border. The disease remains pervasive in sub-Saharan Africa, where a pilot program recently distributed 360,000 doses of a newly approved vaccine to children in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi. The treatment has a low success rate by vaccine standards, but may help protect vulnerable populations and lead to more lasting disease control.

"It is very good news for Algeria and Argentina, but also for the two continents and globally also," WHO spokeswoman Fadela Chaib said in a statement. "It means that malaria can be beaten. But the efforts should continue because we need also to enhance surveillance to be able to detect if any cases of malaria are still present in the country." Algeria’s last reported native malaria transmission was in 2013 and Argentina’s in 2010. According to WHO, both countries are the second on their respective continents to beat the disease.

Besides saving lives, the designation will have ancillary benefits. According to Abdourahmane Diallo, head of the Roll Back Malaria (RBM) Partnership to End Malaria, “Malaria-free status provides external economic benefits … enabling them to free up resources to address other health and development priorities and improve worker productivity and school attendance.” It’s a benefit that officials and others want to be able to extend to more and more countries in Africa and South America.

One scientist argues that we should reconsider the Bobbit worm.

In 1993, invertebrate zoologist Terry Gosliner found himself with the monumental task of naming a thousand new species of spineless animals as he compiled his latest book, Coral Reef Animals of the Indo-Pacific. It was perhaps an unfortunate coincidence that it was the same year that the trial of a woman who had cut off her husband’s penis after years of abuse made headlines around the world. So when Gosliner came to a menacing predatory worm—bestowed with both a phallic shape and scissor-like jaws—in need of a name, one came to mind: Bobbitt.

That trial 25 years ago was sensationalized and the subject of many a late-night television joke, but the situation that allegedly drove Lorena Gallo (then Bobbitt) to the infamous act was no laughing matter. The recent release of a new documentary, Lorena, which details the domestic and sexual abuse she suffered, has brought renewed attention to the case, and has one scientist campaigning to rename what’s been known as the Bobbit worm (Eunice aphroditois). In theory, it makes perfect sense to change the common name of an animal when the name has grown increasingly problematic with time. In practice, however, it’s a little more complicated.

Kim Martini isn’t a marine biologist—she’s a physical oceanographer—but she had known about the predatory worm in question for quite some time. It’s a little notorious among ocean life enthusiasts for its fierce ambushes, the fact that it can grow up to ten feet long, and a memorably scary appearance in BBC’s Blue Planet II series. “I grew up in a time when Lorena was all over the news,” Martini says. “I never really understood the entire story, and so I used to joke about it.” When she read a 2019 profile of Gallo in The New York Times, Martini immediately made the connection between woman and worm. “In retrospect, it’s totally messed up,” that they should be associated with one another through the name of her abuser, Martini says.

So Martini decided to post a call to rename the worm on the blog Deep Sea News. “Bobbitt is the last name of a rapist and domestic abuser that should not be immortalized anywhere, not the least being scientific literature,” she wrote. At the end of her post, Martini linked to an organization that works to support survivors of domestic violence and suggested an alternative name: the sand striker. “By the time this article is to be published, I will have gone through all posts with the words ‘Bobbitt Worm’[sic] and replace [that] name with Sand Striker, and linking back to this article. I encourage others to do the same,” she continued. (Martini did not come up with “sand striker;” it is a less commonly used name for the same worm.) She emailed her call to every scientist she could find who had published work on the worm. “You can’t just send somebody a link,” she says. “You have to lay out the story as to why it’s wrong.” She received a few responses to her email, all positive. She also reached out to Gosliner, who did not respond.

Gosliner says he saw Martini’s post but decided to comment because he disagrees that the name carries any offense, as he originally named the naming as a way to vindicate Gallo, who had been found not guilty at trial. “I think that it’s celebrating that she took matters into her own hands, so to speak, and delivered what some people felt was justice,” he says. “And it’s reflective of the fact that the worm has the ability to deliver this lethal blow.” Gosliner also explains that he chose to spell the worm’s name with just one “t” so it would be less closely linked to the trial, and that the name nods to the worm’s tendency to bob up and down from its burrow. Martini, however, is more concerned with impact than intent. “It’s not [Gallo’s] responsibility to be involved in this,” she says, adding that she didn’t reach out to Gallo in case the subject would be triggering. “That would be putting the onus on the victim.”

Scientifically speaking, Gosliner says “Bobbit” is a more apt name for the creature than Martini’s alternative: “It’s not striking the sand. It’s grasping things.” Martini counters that the name Bobbit is just as biologically imprecise. Sand strikers are polychaete worms, which means they lack external reproductive organs. Rather, they reproduce via the remarkably passive strategy of broadcast fertilization, in which males shoot their sperm into the open water to comingle with the jettisoned eggs of nearby females. Associating them with human reproduction, she suggests, even in a roundabout way, seems to make even less sense.

If you’ve ever gone diving in tropical waters, you may have passed over a sand striker or two without knowing it. The worms spend their lives burrowed in the seafloor, their long bodies coiled like a spring, poised to attack. Though their segmented bodies shine with iridescence, they’re exceptionally hard to spot when hidden, which is more or less all the time, with only their five camouflaged antennae poking out. When a fish happens to pass overhead, the striker lunges out and drags its prey down in the blink of an eye, for a death that is no doubt as gruesome as it is sudden.

Gosliner first spotted the species on a research dive in the Philippines, when one erupted from the sand to ambush its prey. It turns out sand strikers are found on almost every Indo-Pacific reef, among some of the highest marine biodiversity anywhere on the planet. The region is home to the Coral Triangle, a kaleidoscopically diverse network of coral reefs on the western periphery of the Pacific: the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Timor-Leste, according to Live Science. The region is so crucial to marine biodiversity that it’s been called the “Amazon of the ocean.” There are, of course, thousands of common names for the creatures that live there, and just about all of them are generally inoffensive.

There’s no official system for renaming species with problematic namesakes, and this is not the first time the matter has been raised. Currently, species receive Latin names when they’re officially identified—using Carl Linnaeus’s system of binomial nomenclature—and some get a common name, though there’s no official system for which ones do. Binomial names are granted under the strict governance of several bodies, including the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature and the International Code of Nomenclature for Algae, Fungi, and Plants. As a result, scientific names that are potentially offensive are rather difficult to expunge for reasons beyond taxonomy, according to an op-ed published by writer Melvin Hunter in The Scientist. Consider Talinum caffrum, a succulent found in Africa’s Kalahari Desert. Its name is derived “caffer” or “kaffir,” a racist South African slur. The name remains.

The realm of common names is considerably murkier. Common names can vary from one part of a country to another and sometimes exist only in vernacular, which makes them harder to track and use in a scientific context, according to a post from the University of Florida’s entomology department. Many species, such as E. aphroditois, complicate this even further by having more than one common name. The only way to excise a common name is for everyone to just stop using it, which is a difficult thing to do once people are used to it. For example, the field of horticulture is particularly riddled with offensive common names that stick around. Consider Tradescantia fluminensis, or the wandering jew, or the more incontrovertibly racist common name of Carex secta.

But common names are often non-scientists’ only reference point for certain creatures. They make species identification far more accessible than the official genus and species. In this way, common names are partially responsible for the way we see the world and interpret life around us. A run-in with a Bobbit worm carries a very different connotation than an encounter with a sand striker—though neither sounds particularly pleasant.

Historically (and perhaps unsurprisingly) the most successful efforts to give a species a new common name have been motivated by capitalism, not conservation or anti-racism. Commercial fish companies, for example, successfully rebranded the spiny dogfish and the Patagonian toothfish as rock salmon and Chilean sea bass, respectively, to make them more appealing at the fish counter, according to a post on nomenclature from the University of Miami’s shark research blog.

But there is some precedent for the kind of change that Martini is advocating for. In 2015, Sweden’s Ornithological Society stopped using several common, often internationally used, names for birds in its first Swedish-language guide, according to The Guardian. It banished names such as “Hottentott,” an archaic, derogatory term for the indigenous Khoikhoi people of South Africa, once the name of a species of dabbling duck. The guide changed any bird names that used the Swedish word neger (“negro”) to svart (“black”), and replaced zigenarfågel (gypsy bird) with hoatzin (pheasant).

Martini says she’ll continue emailing her post to anyone she notices using the term “Bobbit” to describe the disgusting, terrifying, strangely beautiful predatory worm. “It’s a small thing that we can change to make right,” she says. “But now we have to change it and move on.”

St. Michael’s Mount requires a horticulturalist with the agility of a mountain goat.

Located around 500 yards off the coast of Cornwall, England, St. Michael’s Mount isn’t like most islands. For starters, it has an enormous medieval castle, garnished with a verdant and precarious garden—a garden in need of a new caretaker. It’s a dream gig for anyone with a distaste for staid office jobs, as well as an excellent grasp of plantsmanship and the ability to abseil the battlements of a castle. You know, typical castle-gardening skills.

To be fair, it’s not easy to grow a garden on a rocky island beset by salty gales. And the job listing is appropriately honest about the physical prowess the position requires. "Gardening on a rock in the middle of the sea isn't for the faint-hearted,” the listing reads, adding that the island’s terrain “would challenge the most agile mountain goat.”

The position involves tending to the menagerie of plants grown on St. Michael’s Mount, a collection carefully honed since the 1780s. The gardener will be also expected to work closely with Lord and Lady St Levan, the current custodians of the island, and live in harmony alongside the island’s approximately 30 permanent residents. Luckily, whoever fills the position will be settled quite grandly in a Victorian terraced house with wonderful views of the castle, according to the job pack.

The rocks of the island act as a giant radiator, absorbing heat by day and releasing it at night, according to the castle’s website. So the castle’s garden teems with plants you wouldn’t otherwise find in Cornwall, such as puya, agave, and aloe. Many of its signature plants literally sprout out of the bedrock of the castle, making the simple act of watering an extravagantly precarious task. The gardens are also connected by beautiful Victorian stairways with very steep steps, making for a beautiful but somewhat dangerous garden-viewing experience.

St. Michael’s Mount has a rich history, riddled with sieges and various occupations. The island once held monasteries, chapels, and even Britain’s last functionally operational four-foot-six-inch railway, which used to carry luggage up to the castle.

If your abseiling skills aren’t quite up to par, St. Michael’s Mount is also hiring an island manager and castle steward. Alternatively, you can always visit. A ferry runs to the island from the nearby town of Marazion, a mode of transport that requires none of the agility of a mountain goat.

Spoiler alert: They were probably peccaries.

Richard Ligon’s 17th-century map of Barbados shows an island surrounded by sea monsters. Their tails are like mermaids; their faces like dogs. On the island’s interior, camels, part of a short-lived pack-animal importation scheme, raise their proud heads. Europeans on horseback shoot at an escaping slave. A lone Native American stands in the middle of the island. But the most mysterious inhabitants of Richard Ligon’s Barbados are also the most banal: five curly tailed pigs. Half of them are hairy and feral; the other half are smooth.

According to Ligon’s accompanying treatise, these pigs were dropped on Barbados by 16th-century Portuguese sailors, who counted on them as a food source for future expeditions. This was a common practice of early European sailors, who ensured themselves a decent meal by unleashing livestock in the most far flung of places, often harming ecosystems in the process. When the British arrived on Barbados in the 17th century, they described an island devoid of human inhabitants, but overrun with pigs.

For more than 300 years, most scholars accepted Ligon’s explanation of the pigs’ origins. (The Americas had no pigs prior to the arrival of Europeans.) But absent archaeological evidence, the story couldn’t be proven. Who really introduced the pigs to the island? Were they the same animals depicted in Ligon’s map? Could it be that, as one 19th-century scholar wondered, the animals weren’t pigs at all, but physiologically similar, though evolutionarily distinct, New World peccaries?

This debate over long-dead livestock may sound quaint. But in the contentious field of early American archaeology, these details flesh out an elusive history. The European colonization of the Americas was, perhaps, the most momentous event in human history, catalyzing unimaginable movements of people, animals, and cultures—and the deaths of 90% of America’s indigenous inhabitants, who were wiped out by war and disease. That's an estimated 56 million people, or a tenth of the world's population.

In the course of this cataclysmic transformation, European colonists drastically altered the American landscape, introducing horses, wheat, rats, sugar cane, and pigs. Once let loose, these pigs multiplied across North America and the Caribbean, disrupting local ecosystems and devastating entire indigenous communities with disease. By the time Ligon’s map was published in England in 1657, more than 150 years had passed from the moment of first contact, making it difficult for contemporary researchers to tell how colonization had altered these sometimes fanciful landscapes. The mystery of the Barbadian pigs, then, is part of a longstanding effort to understand the transformation of an entire world.

When Christina Giovas sifted through the Barbados Museum and Historical Society collection in 2014, she wasn’t thinking about pigs at all. An Assistant Professor of Archaeology at Simon Fraser University, Giovas studies Caribbean prehistory, tracing the species indigenous people introduced to the Caribbean long before Europeans arrived. While the British claimed to encounter no indigenous Barbadians—some scholars argue they had already fled or been captured in 16th-century Portuguese slave raids—Giovas says Barbados was first settled as far back as 2400 B.C. She was searching for traces of these early people’s ecological impact in the mammal bone collections of the Barbados Museum.

But Giovas found something surprising: a single, sharp-toothed fragment of a peccary jawbone. “That’s completely unexpected because we didn’t have any records of peccary introduction,” Giovas says. Giovas took the bone to her collaborators, George D. Kamenov and John Krigbaum, both of the University of Florida. By comparing the concentration of strontium isotopes in the peccary’s tooth to levels characteristic of Barbadian geology, Krigbaum found that, indeed, the peccary had lived on the island, most likely from 1645 to 1670. It looked like the mysterious Barbadian pigs weren’t all pigs—many were peccaries.

Giovas's team suggests that, in accordance with the hairy and smooth specimens illustrated on Ligon’s map, there were actually two kinds of pig-like creatures on Barbados in the 17th century: smooth-skinned, domesticated pigs, and hairy, wild peccaries. While the peccaries could have been introduced by earlier Native Americans or by the British themselves, she says the time frame suggests that Portuguese or Spanish sailors let them loose, possibly while sailing by Barbados en route from their South American colonies.

There are no longer peccaries in Barbados. Like the brief, failed introduction of camels illustrated on Ligon’s map, their short-lived stint on the island is just one of the many strange, and often disastrous, ways in which Europeans shaped the ecosystems of the lands they colonized. For Krigbaum, these livestock histories don’t just tell us about people’s farming practices, but about their relationships to culture and the natural world. “Animals have as much to say about humans as do humans themselves,” he says.

While Giovas’s team found flaws in Ligon’s account, his map of the Barbadian pigs reveals much more than literal, factual history: It illustrates the desires that Europeans brought to the New World. It’s an imagined land brimming with violence and possibility, where sea monsters could mix with camels and psuedo-pigs—a land that Europeans, tragically, exploited as their own.

Earthquakes are just plain inscrutable.

It’s not something you’re likely to hear in the morning weather forecast: partly sunny, with a 50 percent chance of earthquakes. Earthquakes are among the most unpredictable natural events; according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), neither they nor any other scientists have ever accurately predicted a major one. In fact, they are so unpredictable that recently Yellowstone National Park experienced aftershocks—from an earthquake that occurred 60 years ago.

Between June 2017 and June 2018 more than 3,000 mini-earthquakes, collectively known as a seismic swarm, occurred near Maple Creek in the park. At first glance, that’s not an unusual occurrence there, and they’re usually related to the movement of magma under this geological hotspot. “In fact, seismic swarms are the most common seismic activities in Yellowstone and there were three large earthquake swarms that happened in the past,” says Guanning Pang, a graduate research assistant and seismologist at the University of Utah. However, this recent event happened outside of Yellowstone’s volcanic caldera, where the other swarms took place. Pang and his colleagues investigated and found that almost half of the mini-earthquakes in the swarm were clustered in the northern region of the park and weren’t caused by magma movement at all. According to their findings, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the seismic activity followed the same fault and direction as another, much larger, earthquake. Known as the Hebgen Lake event, that 7.2-magnitude temblor struck in 1959, causing a landslide that claimed dozens of lives. The geological similarities between the Hebgen Lake earthquake and the northern cluster of the recent swarm led the team to conclude that this was actually an aftershock, 60 years in the making. In 2017, Pang had investigated another swarm of 1,000 mini-earthquakes between 2014 and 2017 near the town of Challis, Idaho, that also had their source in a prior seismic event—in that case the Borah Peak earthquake of 1983.

According to Pang, these episodes usually take place in the middle of tectonic plates, where there are slower loading rates for geological stress. “Unlike California or Japan, sitting upon the boundary between two tectonic plates, it would take more time for the middle region of the tectonic plate to heal and go back to the background stress,” he says. Slow-moving faults can extend the effects of a major earthquake for hundreds of years, including aftershocks. Keith Koper, director of the University of Utah Seismograph Stations and coauthor of the study, said in a statement that there are formulas that help geologists know that something is coming, even if they can’t really say when. “For Hebgen Lake,” he said, “there looked like a deficit in the number of aftershocks. Now that we’ve had these, it has evened things out back up to the original expectations.”

The researchers noted that the seismic activity likely had no bearing on the world’s largest supervolcano itself, though it has been theorized by some scientists that the Yellowstone region is “overdue” for an eruption. Michael Poland, head scientist of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, thinks we still have 100,000 years to go before, on average, an eruption could be due. But then again, volcanic eruptions are pretty unpredictable, too.

A photographer captured Bern's eclectic and charming feline structures.

Imagine, if you will, what it’s like to be an average cat. You live with your owner on the fourth floor of an apartment building and, like so many of your fellow felines with exposure to the outside world, you have a fierce case of wanderlust. But until your owner gets home, you can do little more than sit on a sunlit windowsill, press your nose against the glass, and peer wantingly at the neighborhood below. You are beholden to someone who chooses to spend most of the day separated from you. No wonder your species is so notoriously moody.

In most parts of the world, you’d be stuck at home until someone comes and lets you out. But in certain European countries, human residents have built outdoor climbing aids, called cat ladders, to help their feline friends come and go as they please.

Homemade cat ladders are as architecturally eclectic as they are charming. Many are simple and economical: a teetering plank between balconies; spindly pegs ascending a vertical drain pipe; a slatted wooden bridge laid diagonally from the branch of a climbable tree to a higher windowsill. Some are precarious, scaffolding-like structures of wood and metal that zigzag up multiple stories. Still others span intimidatingly wide gaps between roofs and apartment buildings, dozens of feet off the ground. At least one lucky cat has its own spiral staircase with a small perching platform on top.

Despite their whimsical photogeneity, cat ladders haven’t yet been thoroughly documented. The graphic designer and writer Brigitte Schuster aims to change that. She had spotted the occasional cat ladder in her native Germany, but it wasn’t until she moved to Bern, Switzerland, six years ago that she realized how popular they were. She’s since taken hundreds of photographs of cat ladders around the Swiss capital, compiling them in a book analyzing the structures from sociological, architectural, and aesthetic perspectives. Swiss Cat Ladders will be published by Schuster’s book imprint, Brigitte Schuster Éditeur, in German and English in fall 2019.

Cats are the most common household pet in Switzerland, and also in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands—all countries, Schuster says, where cat ladders are staples of urban and suburban environments. But a country that loves cats isn’t necessarily one that embraces cat ladders.

There aren’t cat ladders in the United States, where many states have so-called leash laws that forbid the animals from being off-leash outdoors, and where city dwellers have built screened-in “catios.” Russia, which ranks highest in Europe in both cat ownership and household cat population, doesn’t have cat ladders. In Istanbul, hundreds of thousands of stray cats—some feral, some cuddly, all ownerless—roam and scale the city without the help of ladders designed specifically for them. A recent documentary, Kedi, tells the story of seven such cats, for whom every climbable structure is a “cat ladder.”

“I was questioning if cats really need these cat ladders, or if humans impose the cat ladders on their cats because they find them practical,” Schuster says. Her question appears backed up by traditional feline lore: If cats always land on their feet (and have nine lives), why do they need cat ladders? Couldn’t someone just open the window for their dearest feline and let her find her way to the ground, even if doing so requires an acrobatic leap?

“Cats do need them!” says Dennis C. Turner, a veteran cat behaviorist who’s considered, by his estimate, one of the world’s “four or five foremost cat experts.” “They’re very important. But they’re rarely mentioned in books about how to properly house cats.”

Turner points to two reasons why cats need cat ladders: their physical safety and their mental well-being. Contrary to popular belief, cats don’t always land on their feet—the innate “cat-righting reflex” only works up to 30 meters, Turner says—and even when they do, their daredevil leaps can result in injuries as severe as torn ligaments, ruptured tendons, and broken legs.

There’s a saying Turner often repeats during interviews and public lectures: “Once an outdoor cat, always an outdoor cat.” That is, if a kitten was born outside and spent its first weeks outdoors, it should be kept as a cat with outdoor access for the rest of its life. Outdoor cats held “captive” indoors, Turner says, will invariably develop behavioral problems, including urine marking and scratching furniture and drapes. For people in urban areas who live in apartments, or even in two-story houses, cat ladders (plus cat doors) are the easiest way to let cats come and go.

For those who might find the notion of an outdoor cat objectionable, Turner isn’t against keeping cats exclusively indoors—“I wouldn’t do it myself,” he says, “but that’s personal”—as long as two rules are fulfilled: They’ve never been outside and their home indoors is physically and mentally stimulating, with scratching posts, elevated perches, sunny views, and so on.

Not all cats immediately take to their ladders like catnip. There’s a learning curve. Schuster says that some cat owners will put food on different steps to lure their pets out, in a form of positive reinforcement. “Cats only learn when they want to learn,” Turner says. “Punishment never works with them, but positive reinforcement does.”

In the preface of Schuster’s book, Turner writes, “I personally think that all ladders indicate a willingness to house the cats properly and respect the animals’ needs.” A home with a cat ladder is a home that knows and respects the needs of the cats who live there.

“If it fits, I sits” is an oft-memed saying associated with images of cats sitting snugly inside boxes, baskets, bowls, and other containers. Cats’ relationship with cat ladders might be described thusly: “If it’s mine, I climb.”