The state has some strict standards to be named an exceptional tree, and competition is pretty stiff.

According to the state of Hawaiʻi, all trees are important. But some are more than that. Some are exceptional. There are certain requirements to attain this designation, according to the state’s Exceptional Tree Act. Is a tree big, old, or—better yet—rare? Is it located somewhere unusual? Does it have a particular, unique aesthetic quality not seen in other trees? Is it endemic to the state? If it meets enough of these standards, it just might be exceptional.

For Hawaiʻi’s trees, this is no empty title. The state legislature passed the Exceptional Tree Act in 1975, responding to community calls to save the islands’ trees from deliberate damage or destruction. Local environmental groups, including the Mokihana Club of Kauai and The Outdoor Circle, lobbied hard in favor of the act. The program was likely the first of its kind in the nation, according to Myles Ritchie, programs director for The Outdoor Circle. Now the state of Washington has a similar program.

Before a tree can be named exceptional, it must pass a stringent vetting process. Though the act lists seven possible criteria—age, rarity, location, size, aesthetic quality, endemic status, and historical or cultural significance—a tree need only fulfill one for a chance to be named exceptional. But most trees don’t stand a chance. “In order to maintain the high standards set for the program and prevent diluting its reputation, only truly exceptional trees will be added,” Ritchie writes in an email. “The nomination and approval process can last several months.”

You can check out every exceptional tree in the state on The Outdoor Circle’s interactive map and database.

The first exceptional tree in Hawaiʻi became exceptional in 1975, after the Mokihana Club rallied to protect a large banyan tree on Kauai. The Indian banyan planted by the Moana Surfrider resort in Waikiki Beach was another early entrant. Planted as a mere seven-foot sapling in 1904, the banyan’s canopy has grown into a green-crested chandelier that towers over the hotel’s courtyard. Now 75 feet tall and 150 feet wide, its multiple trunks ripple out among the guests.

Trees can be added or removed from the list only once a year, during the annual ordinance change. As expected, new trees regularly join this exclusive club. By the same token, some trees inevitably lose their exalted status if they no longer have the qualities that made them exceptional in the first place, or if they’ve become a significant threat to public safety, Ritchie says. Take the banyans that line Banyan Drive in Hilo, which were planted by celebrities such as Franklin Roosevelt, Babe Ruth, and Amelia Earhart. They’re gone from the list. No one, not even Ritchie, is clear on why these trees lost their status, according to a story in the Honolulu Civil Beat. But Ritchie says they’re currently undergoing another evaluation.

Some trees are celebrities in their own right, beyond the bureaucratic designation. Take the world’s most famous monkeypod, which grows in Moanalua Gardens. It even has a nickname, the Hitachi Tree, because its image and silhouette became corporate symbols of the Japanese electronics titan. The monkeypod’s distinctive umbrella shape shades an enormous swath of the park and sees thousands of visitors a day, including many visitors from Japan, who grew up with Hitachi commercials and their signature jingle.

Some of Hawaiʻi’s exceptional trees earned their designation because they are the largest examples of their respective species in the United States, including the mammee apple, baobab, queen flower tree, cannonball tree, doum palm, nawa, narra, and Queensland kauri, according to the Exceptional Trees of Hawaiʻi site. A Mindanao gum, or Eucalytpus delgupta, growing in the Wahiawa Botanical Garden, holds the title of tallest exceptional tree, towering over 200 feet. And several banyans growing by the International Marketplace in downtown Honolulu likely vie for the title of largest overall.

Hawaiʻi’s oldest exceptional tree is a 227-year-old orange tree that grows in South Kona, planted in 1792 after British captain George Vancouver visited the islands on HMS Discovery, according to the site. The ship’s surgeon and naturalist, Archibald Menzies, distributed citrus seedlings to local chiefs, left over from the ones he kept on board to keep scurvy at bay.

Other trees earned their status due to mystical significance, such as the sacred fig, Ficus religiosa, known as the Bodhi tree. Found in Honolulu’s Foster Botanical Garden, it’s said to be a direct descendant of the tree under which Prince Siddhartha Gautama sat in the sixth century B.C. to reach enlightenment and become the world’s first Buddha, according to Honolulu Magazine. The tree arrived on the island in 1913 after Sri Lankan monk Anagarika Dharmapala befriended Mary Mikahala Foster, a theosophist and royal descendant. Another exceptional tree—in this instance, an entire sacred grove—grows at Pu’u o Hoku Ranch on the island of Molokaʻi. The circular kukui grove spans five acres and is believed to be the burial site of Kahuna Lanikaula, a renowned Hawaiian priest, according to a 1955 story in The Honolulu Advertiser.

And some are much more humble, such as the lychee tree growing in the corner of a parking lot by a strip mall on the corner of Nu’uanu Avenue and School Street. It was the first of its kind in the state, according to The Honolulu Advertiser.

Exceptional trees pepper all the islands except for lightly populated Niʻihau and unpopulated Kahoʻolawe, but Oahu leads the list in terms of sheer quantity—more than 1,000 in total. While Oahu is not inherently more arboreally exceptional than the other islands, Ritchie says, more residents there know about the program than on other islands. On the Big Island, for example, the Arborist Advisory Committee long languished in inactivity, but has just begun to re-form, Ritchie told the Honolulu Civil Beat.

Citizens also have quite an incentive to identify any exceptional trees on their own property—a $3,000 tax credit every three years, intended to subsidize proper arboreal maintenance. If you live in Hawaiʻi and know a tree you think deserves recognition, contact your County Arborist Advisory Committee and fill out an application. A committee will later decide the fate of your tree and, if you’re lucky, adorn its trunk with a small plaque that tells the world—or at least anyone who comes close enough to read it—just how special it is.

Aphids beware.

Something strange was happening. On Tuesday, June 4, 2019, the evening sky over San Diego was fairly free of clouds, but meteorologists saw a thick swirl on their radar.

The culprit was a bloom of ladybird beetles, more commonly known as ladybugs. The little beetles were soaring more than a mile above the ground in a diffuse cluster many miles wide, a meteorologist from the National Weather Service’s San Diego office explained to the Los Angeles Times.

In this case, meteorologists were able to check in with people on the ground, who saw some of the little speckled beetles up close and helped clear up confusion about the blob. Without this ground truthing, though, it’s really hard to tell what's making its mark on radar. The technology measures the shape, reflectivity, and altitude of things in the sky, and can gauge speed of movement. That allows meteorologists to assess, for instance, the size of the hail being dropped by a storm or where plumes of smoke are blowing—but it definitely doesn’t provide enough detail to be able to tell if the sky is awash with particularly charismatic insects. “The radar does not explicitly say ‘bugs or ladybugs,’” explains Alex Tardy, a meteorologist at the NWS San Diego office, via email. “It can tell us by the shape and reflectivity returns if there are birds or bats for example, but not the bug type or amount of bugs.”

The large echo showing up on SoCal radar this evening is not precipitation, but actually a cloud of lady bugs termed a "bloom" #CAwx pic.twitter.com/1C0rt0in6z

— NWS San Diego (@NWSSanDiego) June 5, 2019

To drill down to the species level, you need more than just a blob on a screen. “There needs to be an expert on insect migration to evaluate the science,” Tardy says. California is home to scores of ladybug species, and Cornell University entomologist John Losey told NPR that these were likely convergent lady beetles, which are known to migrate in early summer. Still, it’s not totally clear why so many ladybugs are clustered this way. Tardy suggests that it might have to do with a spell of wet, cool weather, and Losey wondered if they were responding to some consequence of recent wildfires, or a change in the population of their prey, which is mostly aphids.

It’s not so unusual for swarms of small insects to turn up on radar: mayflies over Wisconsin, butterflies above Colorado, and midges moving across Ohio, to name just a few. Radar can detect clusters of any creature—birds, bats, insects—as long as there are enough of them, relatively close together, and flying at the right altitude, Tardy says.

The ladybugs were surprise guest stars—the meteorologists hadn’t set out to find them—but scientists sometimes intentionally tap into existing weather-tracking infrastructure to keep tabs on animals. During the 2017 total solar eclipse, for instance, some researchers from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology compiled data from 143 Doppler stations across the United States to see how flying animals reacted to the midday darkness—such as whether hordes of birds or insects took to the sky en masse at that moment. In this case, “the weather watchers lost sight of the cloud overnight, and the ladybugs’ current location isn’t clear,” NPR reported. They were a fleeting wonder that's since flitted away.

Pioneering criminologist Alphonse Bertillon turned everyone into voyeurs.

In Belle Epoque Paris, a woman half dangles off a polished wooden bed, as an old-fashioned portrait stares sternly from the wall. Yesterday’s clothes lie heaped on a footstool, never meant for the public’s gaze. Are we looking at a Manet painting of a courtesan? No—there has been violence here. Who invited us to see?

At the end of the 19th century, Parisian police officer Alphonse Bertillon devised a new system of crime scene photography, inviting detectives, jurors, and newspaper readers into scenes of violence and private interiors never so starkly revealed before. Previously, detective work had relied on first-person testimony over circumstantial evidence. Crime scenes were recorded in sketches and notes, in whatever manner the police could manage with the materials they had, free of any standard or system.

The camera, used sporadically since the mid-1800s to take portraits of alleged criminals, was, in Bertillon’s new system, meant to usher in a new era of objectivity in forensics. His approach focused on visual documentation using measurements and uniformity. But what Bertillon’s photographs captured went beyond dry, objective depictions. They featured people whose lives had ended in violence and pain, conjuring a sense of drama that was as much a part of aesthetic and cultural shifts of the time as it was a means toward justice. And these photos weren’t just for investigators. They ended up in newspapers, making private demises shockingly public.

Bertillon insisted on two uniform mugshot poses—full-face and profile—for the accused, and he devised a scientific approach to wielding the camera in the aftermath of a crime. His camera was calibrated so that, given a photograph, detectives could recreate the proportions of a crime scene. It was always placed at a distance of 1.65 meters from the ground, with an average reduction of one-fifteenth, and a focal length of 10 centimeters. Victims were photographed from above, requiring Bertillon to assemble his heavy tripod and camera closely around the body.

Bertillon’s methods resulted in images seemingly taken from bird’s and bug’s eye views. In an image labeled “Assassinat de Monsieur Canon, boulevard de Clichy, 9 Decembre 1914,” a distinguished mustache stands out on a plainly dressed corpse, lying splay-legged on a tiled hallway. Often, a “horizontal plane” shot was added, as in the case of a woman noted in the record as Madame Veuve Bol on the rue de Turenne. The elderly victim looks like she’s fallen asleep on her parquet floor next to her neat, richly made bed. Others look less peaceful: for instance, Mademoiselle Ferrari, whose bed lies surrounded by scuffed walls, a broken mirror, her paltry crockery collection, and last night’s dirty plates. The detective’s caption states that she was killed by her lover, a Monsieur Garnier.

Police departments near and far enthusiastically adopted Bertillon’s system, which helped them sentence serial criminals at a drastically higher rate. Arthur Conan Doyle was an admirer; in The Hound of the Baskervilles, a character calls Sherlock Holmes “the second highest expert in Europe” after Bertillon.

Lela Graybill, art historian at the University of Utah, first saw Bertillon-era crime scene photography in a Paris art gallery. “It was jarring,” she says, to see these carefully calibrated snapshots, taken by police, laid out for spectators. Looking at them, she was reminded of more artistic images from the era, particularly a painting by Edgar Degas, now called Interior (formerly known as The Rape). In the artwork a partially dressed woman poses limply, melancholic, in a cluttered and windowless bedroom, as a man stands blocking the door, looking at her with hands stuffed in pockets. From the ornate wallpaper to the slumped, partly bare body, it’s eerily close to a typical Bertillon composition. The viewer is placed in the position of having interrupted something intimate and sinister. Bertillon and Degas were contemporaries. Although there is no evidence they met, a curator at Paris’s Musee d’Orsay has said Degas’s Interior betrays “the scientific gaze of a Bertillon assistant at a crime scene.”

In a Cultural History article, “The Forensic Eye and the Public Mind: The Bertillon System of Crime Scene Photography,” Graybill says that categorizing crime scene photography “as a form of evidence places it in the realm of empirical science.” But Bertillon saw things differently. “Instead, he suggested that crime scene photography was destined for the courtroom, and for the eyes of the jury,” she writes. “There it would not be a vehicle of objective proof but rather an emotional catalyst for conviction, even vengeance.”

Bertillon himself once wrote that when a jury views grisly images of a murder scene, “there is no man who … does not feel awakened in him the feeling of reprisal that our code calls public vindictiveness.” (Women could not legally serve on French juries until 1944.)

Violence as spectacle, and in the name of law and order, was not new to Parisians in 1904. From March to May 1871, a citizen uprising paved the way for the Commune, a short-lived radical socialist government in Paris. The national government regained control through swift, brutal use of force. “There were mass executions across the city,” says Graybill. “The Paris Commune and its aftermath received extensive photographic coverage.” Though intended more for journalistic purposes than solving specific crimes, this set a precedent for Bertillon’s crime scene photographs. The coverage of the Commune made gruesome images a normalized feature of general-interest papers and magazines.

Police matters were, more and more, repackaged as juicy media stories. Press censorship was abolished in France in 1881, and crime reporting rose steadily. The increasing presence of the camera in police work not only captured murder victims, but exposed the intimate settings of their homes. Generally, in French artistic representations of the time, bedrooms tended to feature courtesans, like Manet’s Olympia, in which a disheveled bed is a pedestal for a defiant-eyed nude woman being presented with flowers. As anyone who’s visited a French household can report, house tours are rarely offered and can feel strikingly discreet: Bedroom doors are usually left firmly closed. As the public suddenly gained access to photographs of crime scenes in the morning papers, they were also put in the position of voyeurs.

Photography was meant to be more exact than a sketch artist, more infallible than a detective’s notes, less vulnerable to sensationalization than a reporter’s impressions.

And yet, despite these efforts at taking subjectivity out of the equation, photography proved itself wide open to it. Bertillon’s own words reveal how crime scenes were seen almost as stage sets or canvasses for the viewer’s imagination of what terrible things might have happened:

The shattered windowpane, the half-open window and the abandoned slippers visible in the left foreground allow the reconstruction in the imagination of the path the assassins took to surreptitiously enter the dark room. You see them lighting the candle that was found on the chair; imagine the fury they experience upon discovering their path blocked by the unfortunate Monsieur R., sleeping like a faithful poodle, though not very vigilant, across the doors of which he defended the access.

In a set of photographs from one murder, known as the Steinheil Affair, Graybill noted that the body had been moved between one photo being taken and the next, as had an alpenstock, a metal-tipped hiking stick, originally lying next to it. By the way it had just been slightly repositioned, she concluded the aim was to help the viewer understand the layout of the apartment. “They’re creating some narrative, not necessarily with malicious intent,” she says. “[T]here was much less of a sense of photographs needing to be completely unaltered or untainted by human intervention.”

The legacy of Bertillon is very much with us. In an everyday sense, Bertillon’s hand is felt every time law enforcement gathers mugshots and scans identity papers. We still rely on photographs to bring to life distant current events and crime scenes. The ideal of photography as a purely objective documentary medium has also stayed with us, though the boundaries of the frame should make it clear that this is a misapprehension. Then and now, photographers decide how their subjects are posed, lit, and cropped, with each decision altering how the image is perceived over the course of its life in the public eye. Even as the camera bears witness to what has happened, it sparks as many imagined reconstructions, interpretations, and emotions as there are individual viewers. In Bertillon’s own words: “One can only see what one observes, and one only observes things which are already in the mind.”

The Louisiana mirliton has survived revolution, industrial competition, and floods.

“We normally don’t have a spring crop,” says Paul D’Anna, a home gardener in Metairie, Louisiana. But this year—maybe it’s the weather or, though he’s loathe to talk himself up, maybe it's his green thumb—he got lucky: His backyard vines have already produced around 70 fruits. He’s placed the plump and ridged green gourds in black pots, their tangled tendrils spilling over the sides, and is advertising them online to other backyard gardeners. For many New Orleanians and Gulf Coast residents, the vegetable D’Anna’s selling is as rare, and as precious, as the unexpected spring crop itself: the Louisiana mirliton.

Mirlitons, more commonly known in the United States by their Central American name, chayote, have been a New Orleans neighborhood staple since they entered the region in the early-19th century. At one time, they draped lushly over the chain link fences between neighbors’ houses, their fruit collective property. Their crunchy, zucchini-flavored flesh, which plumps into moist meatiness when cooked, is a versatile player in Cajun and Creole cooking, inspiring salads, pies, and a signature Thanksgiving casserole. Yet in the last decades of the 20th century—driven by garden-unfriendly urban development and competition from less-expensive Latin American imports—Louisiana mirlitons all but disappeared. Following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, many feared the city’s heirlooms were gone for good.

“The flooding killed everything,” says Leo Jones, a life-long New Orleans resident and a home mirliton grower. Louisiana mirlitons are the product of two centuries of selection, and while post-Katrina New Orleanians could still purchase Central American mirlitons, they didn't come with the same sense of community. The mirliton, says Lance Hill, an activist, historian, and co-founder of a Tulane University racial justice center, is “a very sociable vegetable. It makes friends and it makes neighbors." It was this culture that community members feared would be lost.

In the past few years, however, New Orleanians have come together to bring the heirloom mirliton back. Mirliton.org, founded in 2010 by Hill, whose evangelism gained him the moniker “Mirliton man,” is the central clearinghouse for all things heirloom, connecting growers with advice, recipes, classifieds, and seemingly endless lore. Since founding the project, Hill and his collaborators, including D’Anna, have scoured the Gulf Coast for heirlooms, passing along seeds to neighborhood growers. Now, with new mirliton plants in the New Orleans Botanical Garden, and stacks of mirlitons filling fall farmers markets, this passion is beginning to bear fruit.

Hill’s history of activism is a fitting partner to the mirliton. He speculates that free black people first brought the mirliton to New Orleans at the turn of the 19th century, during the Haitian Revolution. The historical record is slim—complicated by both Haitian Creole and Louisiana French being largely oral languages—but it’s telling that, though the fruit has many monikers, from cho-cho in Sierra Leone to iskush in Nepal, Haiti and New Orleans are the only two places where it’s called the “mirliton.” (“It’s mel-eh-tawn,” Hill corrects me on the phone. “Nobody says mir-li-ton unless they’re from the North.”)

The archive does tell us, however, that the squat, pear-shaped gourd is a tiny revolution. A 1967 Haitian stamp features the mirliton in a place of honor near revolutionary Jean-Jacques Dessalines—a demonstration, Hill observes, of an association between the mirliton and freedom. That’s not the only one: On the Indian Ocean island of Réunion, a sugar economy formerly powered by enslaved labor, Hill says fleeing slaves once took mirlitons to the hills with them, the plants’ young shoots, mature fruits, and dried vines providing both food and raw materials. Because of these associations, perhaps, the mirliton—while grown, cooked, and loved in both black and white New Orleans communities—has a special resonance in black New Orleans history.

Mirlitons took to New Orleans quickly. “When I was a kid, they had mirlitons all over the place,” says Jones, who grew up eating them from his neighbors’ vines. They were impossibly abundant, their leaves overflowing the chain link fences between neighbors, filtering the hot Louisiana sun into a cool green light. “A lazy person’s vegetable,” says Hill. “You don’t even have to pick it, you can just set a chair under it, sit there with a basket, have a beer and wait.” One mirliton vine can produce between 50 to 100 fruits a year, enough to stock the entire block. Residents waited for the autumn knock on the door that signified a neighbor with a Schwegmann’s bag—reused from a local grocery store—full of the backyard fruit.

For New Orleanians weaned on Cajun and Creole food, late October was synonymous with stuffed mirliton. Boiled, their flesh scooped out and mixed with shrimp, meat, and breadcrumbs, they were the star of Thanksgiving. “Mirlitons were always on the fall table,” says Poppy Tooker, a food activist, writer, and host of the NPR-affiliated radio show Louisiana Eats! Mirlitons’ abundance inspired reams of recipes, from pickled mirlitons—good in a bloody Mary, says David Hubbell, a Mobile-based backyard grower—to mirliton bread, a sweet counterpart to zucchini bread.

It wasn’t a lack of love for mirlitons that caused heirloom cultivation to decline, says Tooker. It was the food industry. Tooker, who founded Slow Food New Orleans in 1999, says that the rise of industrial agriculture spelled the New Orleans mirlitons’ near-demise. Central-American chayote was cheaper than its local alternative, and the fruits’ smooth, pear-like shape was more palatable to supermarket aesthetics than the deep-ridged, irregularly hairy local heirloom. They flooded the market and disrupted local growing practices. Mirlitons are technically fruits; they have one center seed, and New Orleans growers were accustomed to simply saving a few of their neighbors’ mirlitons to sow for next year. But the supermarket variety, adapted to the high altitudes of Central America, wasn't suited to New Orleans. New Orleanians unwittingly planted supermarket seeds that sprouted for a short while, only to wither before bearing fruit.

The city was changing, too. Residents were moving into ever-expanding suburbs, and gentrifying new construction substituted privacy-minded wooden security fences for the more sociable chain link. “The wooden fence was just part of the compartmentalization of everyday life,” says Hill. The new developments weren’t environmentally suited for gardening. The sandy soil used to form the foundations of new construction couldn't support the vines. As white families pushed out residents of historically black neighborhoods, mirliton growing became a sign of a culture under threat. “Growing mirlitons, having fig trees, a vegetable garden—people stop doing things over time,” Jones says.

Then came the hurricane. “Mirlitons are very sensitive to water. 48 hours underwater will kill the plant,” says Hill. The floodwaters from Katrina lasted far longer than two days, submerging cars and houses, not to mention delicate green vines. When the waters receded, the backyard gardens neighbors had labored over for years were gone.

It was, partly, the hurricane that woke Hill up. The injustice of the government response to the hurricane, which disproportionately displaced and killed elderly and low-income black New Orleanians, clung to Hill’s conscience. He was vocal about what he saw as attempts to bar these same residents from moving back; his outspokenness lost him friends. At the same time, he says, “I saw in much of the community an attempt to reconnect through identifying a common past.” For Hill, a Kansas transplant who had been introduced to the mirliton by a New Orleans neighbor 40 years before, mirlitons embodied that shared history. Growing the squash was a way to enter back into community.

Hill’s initial conversion was sparked by simple home-gardener’s frustration. After the storm, when trying to grow his own mirlitons, he realized that supermarket mirlitons would not thrive in Louisiana. To learn more, he began chasing the ghost of mirlitons through archives and research papers, tracing the fruits’ likely missionary introduction to India, its role in regional food sovereignty movements, and its preparation in cuisines across the world.

He also chased the physical fruit. Hill and Paul D’Anna set off in search of heirlooms on a series of road trips across Louisiana. In far flung corners of the state, they found, nurtured by small-scale farmers who were mostly in their 80s and 90s, what they thought had been lost: ridged and fuzzy mirlitons, their “ugly” skin a telltale sign of their heirloom status. Hill named the cultivars after the farmers who had developed them: the Papa Sylvest, its lobed fruit the color of an avocado’s flesh; the Ishreal Thibodeaux, a rare shell-white variety likely descended from a Puerto Rican import.

Hill’s efforts, in partnership with the Crescent City Farmers Market, grew into the 2008 Adopt-a-Mirliton project. In 2010, Hill founded Mirliton.org. For the first few years, seeds were so precious that growers were loath to eat their fruits. But more recently, the heirlooms have taken root. Their fruit is so plentiful, says Hubbell, who has been collaborating with Hill from Mobile, he gives them away by the dozens, and has to find unique recipes for the rest: blanching and freezing them, macerating them in vinegar to make pickles. The New Orleans Botanical Garden has also managed to replenish its Katrina-devastated mirliton stock, and staff are hoping to have enough to incorporate the squashes into programming at their in-construction kitchen garden.

Hill has long held revolutionary aspirations—as an activist, his personal history is full of them. But his passion for mirlitons, he says, is driven by a humbler ambition: “Sometimes, to not go backwards is to make progress,” he says. Yet when he talks about mirlitons, a utopian streak steals into his speech. It’s hackneyed to claim that food can bridge divides, he says. Still, “I got it into my head that some way or another, mirlitons brought people together. It hasn’t separated them, that’s for sure.”

D’Anna is sometimes cynical about whether mirlitons will make a full recovery. “I want it to come back,” he says, but he worries that poor growing conditions and limited patience will ultimately thwart growers’ efforts. Still, he wakes every morning to check his plants' progress: sometimes they've grown four inches in a day. And when he posts a classified ad for his surprise spring harvest, the listing reads like a prayer. “The vines are still flowering,” he writes of his backyard garden, its arbors spilling Papa Sylvester heirlooms. “God willing, we will have a good fall crop.”

Bovine researchers believe the world needs the only cow adapted to the largest tropical wetlands.

The herd of Pantaneiro cows wade through the flooded plain, before stopping to graze on a patch of lush vegetation. Their coats range from light cream to a deep chocolate. Some have deep claw marks on their flanks, yet their long, curved horns help ensure jaguar attacks result only in scars. These Pantaneiros (sometimes known as tucura or jofreano) form part of the 50-strong herd belonging to Marcus Ruiz, a farmer and breeder in the vast tropical wetland of Pantanal, which stretches over Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay. Despite having perfectly evolved to their harsh surroundings, just 500 Pantaneiro specimens remain, and they’re facing extinction. A number of researchers and ranchers have a plan, though: cheese.

That’s the premise of Dr. Sergio Dani’s work. Since 2013, the geneticist has worked on the Bioma Cheese Project, which aims to promote and commercialize Nicola, the cheese made from the Pantaneiro’s milk. If enough people try and buy the cheese, he believes, this unique and scientifically important breed can be saved.

Local farmers, such as Ruiz, whose land spreads over the south of Pantanal near the border of Paraguay, have been making and enjoying Nicola cheese for centuries. Lasting up to 30 days without refrigeration, Nicola became a staple food source in the Pantanal, which only gained access to electricity in the last couple decades. During the day, while his Pantaneiros roam the swamps, Ruiz takes their milk, creates a curd, heats it again, to around 70 degrees Celsius, and then leaves it in a sack out in the open for at least a week.

The result is a cheese that’s hard on the outside and soft on the inside, with a texture similar to mozzarella. The taste is strong and unique, which Ruiz believes is due to the wild plants on which his Pantaneiro graze. He serves thick slices for breakfast with strong black coffee, and it features in regional dishes such as chipá (cheese bread), sopa Paraguaia (corn bread), and chipa guasu (corn cake).

While Pantaneiros have been raised in Brazil for centuries, they first arrived with Spanish and Portuguese colonizers, who brought several breeds of European cows with them. Over the next 500 years, natural selection allowed them to adapt to their swampy surroundings, evolving unique characteristics such as tolerance to food shortages, immunity against certain diseases and ticks, and the ability to cope with both flood-prone rainy seasons and 40-degree-Celsius summer heat (more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit).

“They are a European cow that’s 100 percent adapted to the Pantanal,” says Professor Marcus Vinicius Morais de Oliveira, a conservationist and researcher who works alongside Dani. “They are the only cow we know that breeds in flooded terrains.” Oliveira is at the forefront of The Pantanal Centre for Conservation of Pantaneiros (Núcleo de conservação do bovino Pantaneiro or Nubopan) of the State University of Mato Grosso do Sul, which aims to protect and preserve this cow.

Both Oliveira and Dani believe that the Pantaneiro's hardy genes could be useful in the face of global warming, helping to enhance other bovine species’ genetics and ultimately provide food source security for the growing human population. While breeding them with other cattle will be beneficial, overbreeding will dilute the Pantaneiro genes. “After four to five generations, [they’re] almost gone,” explains Oliveira. As a result, growing the Pantaneiro population is essential to maintain this valuable gene pool.

Despite their favorable genes, the Pantaneiro’s numbers have dropped dramatically in the last century. In the late 1800s, the hefty Nelore, a type of zebu cow with a characteristic humped neck, arrived in Brazil. Larger than Pantaneiros and ready for slaughter in about half the time, they became the breed of choice in Brazil, which is now the world's largest beef exporter.

“The Pantaneiro doesn’t produce so much meat in a short time, so they are condemned to extinction,” explains Dani. Almost all farmers depend on Nelore cattle as their main trade, and keep just a few Pantaneiro in small herds of up to 50, mostly for cheese and milk to use at home.

Favoring the less-well-adapted Nelore has come with an environmental toll. Since Nelore cows can’t survive on the area’s wild vegetation, Dani explains, farmers have introduced aggressive grasses from Africa that outcompete local vegetation and plants. “It’s a threat to the environment,” he says. “With the Pantaneiro cattle on the other hand, you don’t need to change anything.”

To provide farmers with an economic incentive to grow their Pantaneiro herds, Dani and his peers are trying to grow the market for their Nicola cheese. “Cheese is a very important product, he explains. “It can be preserved without much energy. You can transform 10 litres of milk into one kilo of cheese. It’s a value-adding process.”

Dani and Oliveira spearhead the Bioma Cheese Project, a consortium of researchers and national organizations, including local farmers, several Brazilian universities, and the Brazilian Association of Pantaneiro Bovines, who represent the Pantaneiro cattle ranchers. The project is part of a larger research effort conducted locally at Embrapa Pantanal (The Brazilian Organization of Farming Research), which has a conservation center on the Nhumirim farm in the heart of the Pantanal. They all work together toward one key goal: protecting the Pantaneiro in order to preserve both its genetics and local traditions.

To make Nicola cheese a popular product, a crucial first step is getting the Pantaneiro breed officially recognized by the Brazilian government, which will aid in commercializing the cheese and meeting federal food standards. Due to the Pantaneiro’s melting pot origins, though, distinguishing it as a specific breed involves a long process of genetic testing and mapping, which has been ongoing since Embrapa Pantanal started in 1984. In 2010, the Pantaneiro was declared a cultural and genetic heritage to Mato Grosso do Sul (a state in the Pantanal)—a partial step toward full recognition. Embrapa lodged an appeal with the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock, and Oliveira works on tasks such as registering all Pantaneiro births and deaths. By July of this year, Oliveira hopes that they will have finished the necessary work to gain recognition by 2020.

“Nicola is present in a wide range of traditional food here,” explains Ruiz, who partners with the research consortium by lending his herd for genetic studies and breeding programs. “I grew up with the Pantaneiros, and that created a lot of love for these animals and their milk. I want to maintain this family tradition and pass it on to my children.”

Since it’s made using unpasteurized milk, the Nicola cheese also has to meet tough sanitary standards—all without jeopardizing its unique selling point as an artisanal, niche product from the Pantanal. The cheese partners also hope to secure certificate of origin status that links Nicola to the area. This will require significant investment in cheese-making equipment and cleaning up production practices, which, Dani believes, farmers will be more willing to do once the breed gains federal recognition.

Dani believes the process of recognizing endangered and rare breeds, and finding an economic use for them in cheese production, can be replicated and applied to other species, such as the caracu found in the south of Brazil. “We must do this to protect the way of life of native people, local traditions and local farmers.”

For now though, visitors to the Pantanal can eat Nicola cheese at local bed and breakfasts, hostels, and farms. As for the cows themselves, they can be spotted standing shoulder-high in the water and chewing on reeds, foraging in dense thickets, or grazing in the open plains.

They probably used the Cheerio-like rings in rituals, not the kitchen.

Forty-one years ago in Austria, archaeologists unearthed three charred, fragmented ring-shaped objects with no clear purpose or origin. Last week, researchers announced these mysterious rings were technically ancient breakfast cereal. Fittingly, they bear an uncanny resemblance to Cheerios. These findings, published in PLOS One with the witty title “The Hoard of the Rings,” cast light on how cultures in the Late Bronze Age produced and prepared processed grains.

The archaeologists first excavated the prehistoric cereal from an Austrian site called Stillfried an der March in 1978, unearthing the rings in one of the storage pits that speckle the Stillfried site. After testing the objects with radiocarbon dating and scanning electron microscopy, the researchers realized they were made of a fine dough of hulled barley and wheat. Despite lacking preservatives, the cereal has survived surprisingly well since its burial in 900 to 1,000 B.C., according to the study. But even though they still look appetizing, you probably can’t eat them.

The researchers believe prehistoric people may have shaped the cereal into small rings out of a wet dough mixture and then dried them without baking. The arduous, time-consuming work that went into this process suggests the cereal may not have been made to be eaten, according to the study. Although the researchers can’t say for sure what the rings were used for, they do have one hypothesis. The cereal was excavated alongside a heap of other ring-shaped clay loom weights—a tool for ancient weaving—perhaps indicating that they were created as imitations of the loom weights. Late Bronze Age settlements often used loom weights as grave goods, which were items buried with the dead to ease their passage beyond the grave. In other words, some lucky prehistoric person may have crossed into the afterlife with a tasty, ritually important bag of cereal.

Stillfried an der March, which sits on a prominent knoll between Austria’s Weinviertel hills and the banks of the Morava river, was a major trading post during the Late Bronze Age. It also served as a major grain hub, with around 100 large grain storage pits that archaeologists excavated in the 1970s and 1980s. So if you had a hankering for cereal around 1,000 B.C., Stillfried an der March may have been your best bet. It’s worth noting, however, that certain pits did not contain cereal, according to ScienceAlert. One quite notable pit contained seven dead bodies—not quite as scrumptious as prehistoric Cheerios.

At Alang on the western coast of India, you may find second-hand doors, lifebuoys, and light bulbs.

Rajubhai Kanubhai Baraiya settles into a dark blue leather chair at his furniture store in Alang town on India’s western coast. It's almost lunchtime on a 40-degree day—104 in Fahrenheit—and the air is thick with heat. There are barely any cars or people on the road that leads to the water's edge, where past a security checkpost lies the world's largest shipbreaking yard.

Surrounded by wooden doors, soft sofas, and tall stools, Baraiya points to some of his wares. "That," he says, gesturing at a deep brown settee then cocking his head as his appraises it. "I could maybe sell that for Rs 6,000 [$86]."

The settee he points to isn't new. Neither are most of the other items in Baraiya's Sahajanand Enterprises, a furniture store specializing in second-hand items sourced from old ships after they are ripped up and dismantled in the adjacent graveyard. This is one of dozens of second-hand shops that line the 6-mile market stacked with goods large and small, old and very old, everyday and extraordinary; from doors and tea sets to mattresses, soft-serve ice cream machines, and lifebuoys. To pore through some of these stores is to encounter a bric-a-brac from the banal to the esoteric; light bulbs, speakers, and analog television sets brushing up against world maps, espresso machines, dart boards, and models of ships.

Gujarat’s 1,000-mile coastline is the longest of any Indian state, and Alang’s high tide and gently sloping approach make it perfect for shipbreaking activities. The yard is the resting place for 200 or more ships annually, even as it has faced criticism over hazardous working conditions, accidents, and environmentally damaging practices. This came about after the shipbreaking industry moved out of the United States and Europe in the late ‘70s due to high labor costs and more stringent environmental regulations. Shipyards moved to India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, where looser oversight has prevailed.

When a ship arrives to be broken, workers take every bit apart using blowtorches, gas cutters, and hammers. Steel and iron is recycled, and some of the ship’s parts, including furniture, bedding, and kitchenware from the living quarters, are sold off in bulk. Dealers in the yard who specialize in cabins buy them in their entirety from the breaking companies. Then they call market storekeepers like Baraiya, who take a look at what's on offer, weaving in and out of the cabin, touching and testing furniture, doors, utensils, and conjuring up a reasonable price. At a silent auction the storekeepers write on a piece of paper how much they are willing to pay. The highest bidder wins. If it’s a smaller ship, with fewer rooms and amenities, the auction could be over in a few hours. If it's a cruise liner with hundreds of rooms, it might take days.

"Ship stuff lasts longer [since it’s waterproof and foreign-manufactured] so people like to buy it," says Baraiya. "The local stuff might be cheaper, but those who know prefer to buy from Alang's ships." Set up in 1983, the shipyard has scrapped nearly 8,000 ships, including cargo ships, containers, oil tankers, and cruise liners. The yard has scrapped ships from Japan, Korea, the United Kingdom, United States, Norway, and Singapore, foreign vessels with the patina of glamour, vessels bearing usable and much-coveted foreign-manufactured interiors.

No one is quite clear when the market beside Alang’s shipyard sprung up, but it was likely in the mid- to late-’80s. Everyone agrees on one thing: What was once a small bunch of shops has burgeoned into a miles-long shopping boulevard. "The market became well-established by 2000," says Nitin Kanakiya, honorary secretary of the Ships Recycling Industry Association, which has 140 members. "It has been constantly growing and people come from all over to shop here. It is unique."

Most shops in Alang's market have their own niche: furniture, bedding, scrap metal, kitchen equipment, laundry devices. Shopping is an act of serendipity—you may show up not knowing exactly what is available, or find something quirky and unusual.

Ramesh Joshi is one of the market’s elders. His store opened in 1990, and when he arrived, the market spanned a mile or so. Now it’s over 6 miles long. “In the first few years we sold different things,” says Joshi. “Then we studied and understood the market and decided to specialize." A smorgasbord of tools hangs behind him: ropes and devices of all colors and girths, lifebuoys blanketing the entrance, and heavy chains dangling from the roof.

Many of these storekeepers are locals from nearby villages who sensed an opportunity and dived in. Now the market is so well-known that even outsiders come to sell goods here.

"The brands are all different, it depends on the country of the ship,” says Arvind Baraiya, who has been in the business for about 26 years. His warehouse stretches deep inside, packed with a jumble of dryers, washing machines, and other laundry equipment. "Of course there is bargaining," he says. "That is natural. This is not a fixed-price showroom." Here, prices start as low as Rs 5,000 ($72) and may approach $1,500.

Down the road, Kapil Pandya is stretched out on the ground, hammering away at a wooden door, working on the rough edges and trying to get it into shape for sale. "You have to renovate the stuff before you can sell it," he says. "People love original ship stuff. New material you can get anywhere." Toward the front of the store lie dusty signs that say "STAIRWAY," "SMOKING ROOM," and "SAFETY FIRST." There are whiteboards with ballast water calculations, a first aid cabinet, and large framed photographs. Their resale value is unclear but they add heaps of character to an otherwise unremarkable warehouse.

The last time Pandya was successful at an auction was two months ago, when he bought about seven metric tons of furniture for Rs 20,000 to Rs 30,000 ($288 to $432) including transport costs. "It's not the case that you get something each time at an auction, it depends,” he says.

Many of those who shop here regularly are dealers or business owners who need specialty equipment in bulk. Six months ago, Kamlesh Parmar came on an elaborate shopping expedition to furnish his nearby restaurant and returned a happy customer. He bought 25 tables and chairs for approximately Rs 35,000 ($500)—a bargain, he claims. "It's not new," he concedes. "But it seems new. Besides, even if it comes into contact with water, the goods don't get damaged."

Beyond the bustle of the market, deep in the yard, Jignesh Dave sits behind his sturdy second-hand desk and unspools his business plan. Thin, bespectacled Dave has been in the computer business here for 10 years, and now hopes to take the ad-hoc, unorganized market online, a kind of Flipkart or Amazon, but just for Alang. "Outside, even a small shop has an app and website," he says. "This is such a big market but nothing is digital."

In early April, along with his cousin Chintan Dave, he launched Alang SGold, an app that aims to help buyers and sellers find each other online. Over several months he went about the task of speaking to shopkeepers and trying to convince them of the benefits of going digital. "Most people here are rural," he says. "They don’t understand these things. It's difficult to explain." The app saw 267 downloads in the first 10 days, and showcases about 525 products from stores across the market. It's still in "start-up" mode but they hope to expand slowly.

Meanwhile, overall business at the market has been slow lately, most shop owners say, attributing this to a jumble of factors: the continuing after-effects of demonetization in 2016 when the government withdrew and later reissued high-value banknotes, the introduction of a new goods and services tax, and the decline in the number of ships being broken. (The number of ships scrapped peaked in 2011—12 at 414, compared to 253 in 2017—18.)

Some stores have resorted to selling new goods in addition to ship-sourced goods, or in the local parlance, "Indian" or "Chinese" as opposed to "ship goods." "There is more competition now," says Pareshbhai Baraiya, a furniture dealer who only sells new goods. "There are more shops, things are expensive, so not everyone can buy ship goods.”

Given all the vagaries, even Sahajanand’s Baraiya stocks some local goods. This morning, he could not get anything for his furniture shop at the auction. But in the evening, there is likely to be another auction. He can only hope that the second run will be better.

The 1930s depiction of Lone Rock Point has finally resurfaced.

Layers of rock generally stay fixed in place, like a hard, stratified parfait. Along fault lines, though, things may be different. In some places where the Earth’s crust is fractured, older layers of rock sometimes jut up and over younger ones. This is what’s known as a thrust fault.

One prime example of a thrust fault is Lone Rock Point, in Burlington, Vermont. There, on the eastern shore of Lake Champlain, pale limestone from the Cambrian Period sits above younger, slate-gray shale from the Ordovician Period. Researchers have suggested that the limestone is around 500 million years old, give or take, and the shale is a spry 460 million. Now, an old painting of the topsy-turvy geological formation has itself been excavated from beneath the sheetrock that obscured it for nearly 30 years.

Back in the 1930s, as part of a New Deal program to put artists to work, the painter Raymond Pease was commissioned to paint a picture of Lone Rock Point. Measuring six-and-a-half feet by nine feet, it didn’t capture all the particular detail that geologists zero in on, but it was a grand, sweeping scene—jagged rock face; swirling, sorbet-colored clouds; a bunch of handsome evergreens.

The painting—and two other panels, which have since been lost—entered the collection of the Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont before the institution winnowed its focus to fine arts and anthropology. By the mid-1960s, the painting moved to Perkins Hall, which was then the home of the school’s geology department and its own collection. At some point, somebody glued the canvas right to the wall.

When it came time to renovate the building in the 1990s, staffers had a decision to make: What should they do with the painting? They weighed their options in a letter. Ripping the painting down would surely leave the canvas in tatters, they reasoned, but wriggling it free with the help of a professional would be expensive. It could survive if the whole wall was removed, but that might compromise the surrounding supports. In the end, they opted to build another wall around the canvas, sealing it for the future. “I forgot about it,” Barry Doolan, a former chairman of the school’s geology department, recently explained to local news channel WCAX 3.

The painting resurfaced in June 2019, when construction workers peeled away a portion of the wall. Inside, they found the canvas, and the note left behind by the curator who had decided to save it. The wall was a way of “preserving the painting for someone in the future (i.e. You) to find as a sort of time capsule,” wrote Jeff Howe, then the curator of the Perkins Museum of Geology, in the note, dated August 27, 1992. “As geologists, we would all love to be able to see the changing the landscape and the peoplescape in the future,” Howe continued. “We would love to know your time as you are able to know ours, but alas, you have the advantage of hindsight over us.”

Since construction need to march along, time was of the essence. If the painting was going to survive, it had to come off. The paintings conservator Emily Phillips applied a layer of tissue paper and starch adhesive to keep the paint from flaking off as she worked, and used a spatula to carefully help break the adhesive bond of the hide glue that held the work to the wall. "It detached pretty easily and pretty uniformly," Phillips says, and she wound it onto a roller as she worked on a bit at a time.

The long stint in hiding doesn't seem to have been bad for the painting. "I don’t think it did any damage having it covered up," Phillips says. "It probably prevented people from rubbing up against it." But before it goes on view at the Perkins Geology Museum in Delehanty Hall, where the institution has been located since 2004, it will need conservation, and to be mounted to a new stretcher support. After that, the painting will weather the coming decades in plain sight, while the prehistoric rock formation it depicts continues bearing witness to the world outside.

But giving them those crazy names isn't always fun and games.

In the shallow tropical waters of Indonesia and the Philippines lives a species of octopus with reddish skin, beautifully marked with brilliant white stripes and spots. Each individual has a unique pattern, like a snowflake. A darling of divers and underwater photographers, the cephalopod with the dramatic looks has an equally dramatic scientific name: Wunderpus photogenicus.

This and other critters with amusing-sounding monikers, both scientific and common, are the subject of a new, fancifully illustrated children's book Encyclopedia of Strangely Named Animals, Volume One. Authors Fredrik Colting and Melissa Medina say they were fascinated by “how each animal has a specialized feature or habit that carries through in their names.”

But putting these official labels on the natural world isn’t always quite as much fun. “People give all sorts of whimsical names to animals, but remember that there is the common name—American robin— and the scientific name—Turdus migratorius,” says Brian Brown, curator of entomology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. All scientific names must be in Latin and follow a general set of rules for a new species. Scientists get to name the species they identify, but each name needs to be unique, so sometimes the novelty wears off.

“Choosing names is fun in small doses, but when you have 100 new species of Apocephalus [a genus of ant-hunting flies] to describe, it starts becoming a chore,” says Brown. “Eventually, you just try to think of something to attach to that species concept.”

That means, for example, giving a species name that references a defining feature, a place, maybe a person—or sometimes a pun or something more whimsical. “Within the taxonomic process, there is some latitude for humor,” Brown adds, “like Terry Erwin's beetles of the genus Agra ... he called one Agra vation, for example.” Entomologist Erwin has an entry in Strangely Named Animals as well: an elegant canopy beetle he dubbed Agra cadabra.

The book also finds the joy and humor of less official but more widely used common names: the tasselled wobbegong (a near-threatened species of shark in northern Australia with masterful camouflage skills), or the pink fairy armadillo (the small, Argentinian species with big claws and a fair complexion), or the sparklemuffin (a colorful and hairy spider with a leg-shaking mating dance, also from Australia). Brown says scientists don’t usually bother to propose common names, except for extremely popular animals. “I have never given a fly a common name, for instance,” he says, “even though I have described more than 500 of them.”

Choosing animals with amusing common or scientific names for their children's book, the writers also, not accidentally, put together a menagerie reflecting the weird and wonderful in nature. From the gaping maw of the Californian sarcastic fringehead to the delicate colors of the moustached puffbird from Colombia and Venezuela, the creatures in this whimsical zoo are charmingly rendered by artist Vlad Stankovic.

Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from the Encyclopedia of Strangely Named Animals, Volume One.

The designer Khor Ean Ghee helped define the appearance of the city-state's leisure spaces.

Decades ago, the Singapore River was teeming with small wooden rowboats known as sampans that carried fishermen and cargo. It can be easy to forget this former way of life, considering the city’s cosmopolitan reputation, but a delightful ode to this history resides in the town of Pasir Ris, where a playground is shaped like this traditional vessel. Rising out of the sandpit as if bobbing on a gentle current, it features tires on its sides, perfect for scrambling up. Built in the early 1990s, shortly after sampans began disappearing from local waters, the mosaic structure is a relic of Singapore’s urban planning history. It is also one of the last designs of Khor Ean Ghee, the country’s first playground designer.

Over 15 years, Khor helped define the appearance of citywide leisure spaces. In envisioning sites that referenced local culture and popular imagery, he contributed to broader efforts to build a strong sense of self and nationhood.

When Khor, now 84 years old, was hired by the Housing and Development Board (HDB) in 1969, the Republic of Singapore was not yet five years old. It declared independence on August 9, 1965, after having endured brutal massacres under Japanese occupation, civil unrest and political struggles under British colonial rule, and ethnic violence during a failed merger with Malaysia—all in the previous two decades. The challenges, as the first finance minister Goh Keng Swee bemoaned, “loomed in awesome and intimidating proportions.” Aside from dealing with its economy and infrastructure, young Singapore faced a crisis of national identity.

The government had various solutions to bring together the population of predominantly Chinese, Malay, and Indian residents. Officials designated English as the common tongue (although they recognized four official languages), and introduced daily flag-raising and pledge-taking ceremonies in schools. They also continued efforts to build public housing, each apartment complex envisioned as a harmonious community.

Transitioning to this new lifestyle wasn’t easy. “By 1975, the government’s resettlement of residents from kampongs, slums, and shantytowns into modern HDB estates was fully underway, generating anxiety and excitement in equal measure,” writes the historian Mark R. Frost in Singapore: A Biography. “Many rituals of rural life were disrupted or discarded.”

Playgrounds, often strategically built at the heart of each estate, became one way to foster a new sense of belonging, as sites where neighbors, regardless of race and age, could congregate. Khor’s brief from HDB’s chief architect was to create “something unique that couldn't be found anywhere else in the world,” says Rachel Eng, an assistant curator at the National Museum of Singapore. In 2018, aiming to underscore the cultural importance of this built landscape, the museum hosted an exhibition that explored one century of local playground development, from 1930 into the future.

“Singapore's playgrounds occupy a unique position in both our physical landscape and collective memory,” Eng adds. “They have come to represent Singaporean shared heritage, neighborhoods, and even national identity.” Less than 300 square miles large, the country is reportedly one of the top cities with the world’s highest density of playgrounds.

Khor trained as a watercolorist in Taiwan and studied interior design at London’s School of Architecture. But when HDB hired him, he had never designed a playground before. Initially, he drew prototypes shaped like common animals, including a giraffe, a rabbit, and a tortoise. But then he thought of creating playscapes imbued with more meaning for locals.

With pencil in hand, he found inspiration in the auspicious Chinese dragon, sketching blueprints for a beast with a curving spine of coils for kids to crawl through. Khor’s ideas all went into a catalog that architects could consult as they planned HDB estates, and the dragon became his most popular design. The first one was built out of metal in 1975, at Toa Payoh Town Park; more dragons soon popped up at other playgrounds, including smaller versions. The more petite creatures were made of colorful glass tiles, which require little maintenance.

“His two motivations were marrying art and function,” says Eng. “Because of his fine art background, he saw the playground as something of a sculpture or art piece. He was very insistent on making sure that the playgrounds were fun for children to play on and would check with his children whether they liked the design before proceeding.”

Khor didn’t introduce Singapore’s first playgrounds, but he helped set them on a new design path. The earliest known one, according to Eng, was built in 1928 at the now-bustling district of Dhoby Ghaut. Donated by Chinese businessmen, the early playscape featured swings, seesaws, and a merry-go-round—efficient, but nondescript, much like what was to come.

“Early playgrounds were generally the result of philanthropic efforts and were meant to relieve overcrowding in the city area,” says Eng. “Play equipment was manufactured according to American specifications, so all of it was quite standardized.”

Under Khor’s direction, however, the playgrounds from the 1970s onward became unique. In addition to dragons and a sampan, he introduced a rickshaw, bending the “handles” of the cart to form a slide. He also designed a playground based on a Malay fable, The Kanchil, or The Intelligent Mousedeer. A slide took the form of a mouse deer, the swings approximated a tiger, and a crawling area looked a lot like a crocodile.

Khor retired in 1984, after producing more than 30 designs. His successors Maria Boey, Chew Chek Peng, and Lee-Loy Kwee Wah—who have since moved on from this position—stayed true to his ethos. Many of their visions reflect the specific histories of towns, such as the playgrounds at Tampines, formerly home to rural orchards. Ladders, slides, and hidey-holes were built into forms that mimicked tropical fruit, like mangosteens, watermelons, and pineapples. “I thought of durian, but it has too many thorns and might not be very safe,” Lee-Loy told The Straits Times in 2014. “I came up with a giant watermelon slice sinking into the sand. It is a common fruit that children can relate to. The same went for the mangosteens.”

But the designers could be playful for only a few years. In the 1990s, HDB began importing playgrounds from overseas suppliers—standard plastic recreational equipment rooted in rubber mats. “This was generally because of maintenance and cost issues, but also because the old playgrounds didn't fit with safety standards introduced in 1999,” Eng says.

The department even razed some of these dynamic structures, including the pineapples and the rickshaw. Eng estimates that at least six of Khor’s playgrounds still exist. Children, fortunately, can still run along the backs of dragons at Toa Payoh and Ang Mo Kio, as their parents once did.

While many of these playground structures aren’t uniquely Singaporean symbols, these designs have become meaningful markers of an old era, when the nation, young and tenacious, was undergoing sweeping transformation. In 2012, as part of a project to capture local memories, the writer Justin Zhuang interviewed locals, including Khor, about their relationship to playgrounds; he also compiled a Google Map of extant ones. During Singapore’s 50th anniversary celebrations, Khor’s dragon was selected as one of 50 essential Singaporean icons—alongside laksa, the Merlion, and “hanging clothes on bamboo poles.” Artists have also been swept up by this wave of nostalgia, creating tributes to the playgrounds of yesteryear like toys, enamel pins, temporary tattoos, and tote bags.

Construction in Singapore is notoriously never-ending, and with new HDB flats comes the need for more playgrounds. In 2018, the government announced that it will build a new generation of thematic playgrounds, each intended to reflect its town’s identity. HDB also has a Build-a-PlayGround initiative that invites residents of a housing estate to come together and design their own playground. The first finished project in the northern town of Sembawang honors its site’s origins as a fishing village, complete with netted climbing structures and posts that evoke the stilts that supported homes. Not yet two years old, it is already an emblem of community and anchor of identity, much like Khor’s climbable dragons and sampans.

Only friends and family can visit Chateau Latif.

Latif Jiji crouches slightly and points through a huddle of tendrils to the neighboring chimneys, air conditioners, and looming hulk of tall condominiums around us. “From here you can really establish that we are in an urban area,” he says, as I peer through the scrim of young grape leaves at the gridded chaos of Manhattan.

We are standing on Jiji’s roof, where a network of metallic poles and beams, fitted to make a trellis, are holding up Manhattan’s only vineyard. Born of a single grape vine (and a second one grown from a cutting of that original vine), this vertical vineyard sprawls up the four storeys of the Upper East Side brownstone that Jiji and his wife, Vera, have called home since 1967. “If you look at satellite images of the house, you’ll see it’s the only one with a green roof,” he says, a bubble of prideful effervescence escaping from his otherwise academic demeanor. This is Chateau Latif, a family-run winery, in operation since 1985, but open only to friends and family.

Jiji, who is 91, has just climbed four floors without pause, nimbly hoofing up a final flight of what can at best be described as a spiral step-ladder, to a hatch-door leading to the roof. I follow gingerly behind, squeezing and contorting myself while clinging to a flimsy pole he has helpfully affixed for me.

Before climbing to the roof, we toured the garden of the Jijis’ brownstone, a rare luxury of open space amid the asphalt jungle of a breathless city. The creaking splendor of the house—oriental rugs on dark wood floors, walls of books and framed black-and-white portraits, a piano in the living room—gives way to this fertile patch of green. There's a cherry tree and a Japanese maple, but it's the vine that's a show-stopper, spindling out of the ground and along the perimeter of the yard, scrambling slowly but surely up the back wall of the house on its 50-foot journey up to the roof, where it extends a further 50 feet on the trellis.

The backyard was going to be Mrs. Jiji’s kingdom, but in 1977, when his wife wasn’t looking, Jiji planted a vine in one little corner that he bought from the local nursery. “By the time she noticed it, it had already taken over,” he says. The vine first bore fruit in 1984, a healthy 24 pounds of Niagara grapes that were not enough to make wine. But since 1985, Chateau Latif—a coinage by Vera Jiji that is a clever play on Jiji’s first name and the famous French wine estate Château Lafite—has been fully operational.

Jiji has maintained a notebook recording the annual harvest and the makeup of the harvest crew over the years. That first year it was just him and one of his daughters. But the whole family usually pitches in for harvest day, typically on a weekend in late August or early September.

Picking the date for harvest is a precise science. Beginning in August, Jiji monitors the sugar content in the grapes by taking a sample from different parts of the vine. The grapes vary in sweetness depending on their location, he says, and he finds that the ones farthest from the roots are the sweetest. Every few days, he plots the average sugar content on a graph, extrapolating a date by extending the curve charting the steady progression of sweetness.

Harvest day is a frenzy of activity at Chateau Latif. Jiji’s children bring their friends, other family friends join, and excited children bound about the house. “When it got to be too much, I had one person be the crew chief,” says Jiji. The crew chief assigns responsibilities: picking the grapes, weighing and washing the bunches, and standing on call to sweep away fallen fruit. Sometime in the nearly 35-year run of the winemaking operation, Jiji installed a pulley system on the roof to lower baskets of grapes to the backyard. “My daughter’s usually in charge of the pulley,” says Jiji, “So she’ll be on the phone telling the person in the backyard that the basket’s coming down.” The largest harvest on record was a staggering 712 pounds of grapes.

The littlest crew members—the Jiji grandchildren and other young guests—love cranking the wheel of the shiny red crusher and destemmer in the basement, which separates the stems from the fruit. The pulpy grape mush—pits, skin, and some stray stems—is then run through a wine press. Some family members love the resulting clear, pressed grape juice more than the wine.

The team then pours the juice into five-gallon glass jugs for fermentation, which will soon cause the basement to smell of wine. After a few weeks, “sometimes you’ll be smelling the wine upstairs,” Jiji says. “It’s very nice.” Once the juice has fermented and turned to alcohol, the jugs, stoppered with airlocks that prevent oxidation, are left to age in a Jiji-designed, climate-controlled wine closet, alongside bottles of previous Chateau Latif vintages.

People from all over the world have participated in the Chateau Latif winemaking, and there are names on the harvest record book that Jiji no longer recognizes. After the day’s work, participants celebrate over glasses of last year’s vintage and a catered dinner. Everyone goes home with a bottle of Chateau Latif’s finest.

“I like to do things that are unusual,” says Jiji, who then clarifies that he never intended to create the only vertical vineyard in Manhattan. He was born to an Iraqi Jewish family in Basra, the youngest of five siblings, and the first in the family to study beyond high school. He came alone to the United States, in 1947, and enrolled in Hope College in Michigan. “Things really turned bad after that,” he says, about the status of the Jewish community in Iraq, which suffered the fallout of the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine. The UN plan recommended breaking Palestine into independent Arab and Jewish States, a move vehemently opposed by Arab nations. “One of my sisters escaped through the border to Iran with her baby,” Jiji says. “Two of my brothers were stripped of their citizenship, and left for Israel.”

Already in the U.S., Jiji later transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He graduated with a doctoral degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan, and retired in 2014, after 60 years as a professor, 50 of them spent teaching at The City College of New York. Jiji’s parents left Basra for Israel in 1956. “It’s rare that Jews are buried where their grandparents are,” he says. His grandparents are buried in Baghdad, where his parents were born. Jiji never returned to Iraq.

“Not a day goes by without me thinking about the house that I was born in, grew up in, and the house that I left,” he says, of his ancestral home in Basra. It was a two-storey structure, and had the characteristic mashrabiya, the oriel window with carved wood lattices that is found on the second floor of traditional homes in Basra. The central courtyard had a vine just like the one we are sitting beside in his Manhattan backyard. The vine in Basra climbed straight up, onto the roof, supported by a pole Jiji had constructed for it. It had no grapes, but Jiji’s father would make wine from store-bought grapes. The Basra house was demolished soon after Jiji’s parents left, as part of a government-implemented urban development program.

Jiji freely admits to not being a wine aficionado. He can only describe his own wines as “fruity, but not too sweet.” It’s the story that thrills him, the intergenerational tale of a Jewish family, with roots in Iraq and now in America, all coming together under one roof to reap the fruit of a plant that gives unceasingly. “I’m not competing for quality,” he says. “It’s the story I’m selling.”

One researcher is recommending a zero-tolerance policy.

The sight of creeping vines, crawling roots, or clinging weeds on an ancient structure—ruins, old walls, a temple hemmed in by jungle—can be a photographer’s dream. Take a place like Istanbul’s old city walls and gates. These fortifications protected the city from sieges and invaders for 800 years. Today, visually appealing tufts of green accent some sections of the miles of walls, but they also represent an invasion that the fortifications might not be able to shrug off without some help.

The walls, a major tourist destination in and around Istanbul’s historic core, present a serious, large-scale preservation and restoration challenge. Recently, forestry researchers from Istanbul University have raised alarms about the plant life next to, around, and on top of the walls. Hüseyin Dirik, a silviculturalist at the university told the Demirören News Agency that non-native plants, such as nettle trees, acacias, willows, and poplars, are having a particularly damaging effect on the walls. Ailanthus altissima, for example, also known as the tree of heaven, is one of the most widespread invasive urban trees in the world. The roots of this tree, native to East Asia, can grow quickly across a wide area, cracking walls apart dozens of feet from the trunk. This process takes time, but roots aren’t the only ways that overgrowth damages old structures. “When plants colonize, they also create habitat and can collect soil, facilitation colonization by additional species, including molds and mosses,” says Laura Meyerson, professor at the University of Rhode Island specializing in invasion biology and restoration ecology.

Dirik suggests that invasive plants should be removed immediately from around any historic site, at the “first sight of germination,” and that smaller weeds should be removed yearly. Potentially damaging plants nearby, he suggests, can be replaced with less damaging local species. Meyerson echoed those sentiments, saying, “The most prudent course is to remove invasive plants from the structures as soon as they are noticed.” Meyerson is working on research, to be published later this year, that shows that old structures like Istanbul’s walls can actually help spread invasive species within a city and its green spaces.

This is all, of course, natural. Plants colonize exposed rock faces in the same way. So how do you stop nature from taking its course?

“Natural succession can be manipulated by humans, it can be accelerated or set back,” says Bill Cook, a forester and ecologist at Michigan State University, via email. “That’s a fundamental tenet of forest management. In the case of a historic site, vegetation management would need to be a perennial effort. Not necessarily every year, but regular.”

Maybe, thanks to the magic of fungus.

Bread has a lot of uses: the platform for a sandwich, the precursor to a meal, a filling staple on its own. But one laboratory at the University of Borås in Sweden is thinking outside the bread box. In response to the volume of bread products wasted by Swedish supermarkets each year, scientists are exploring the possibility of converting old pieces of glutinous waste into yarn.

“Bread waste is among the biggest fraction of food wastes, which has the highest environmental footprint of big supermarkets in Sweden,” says Akram Zamani, senior lecturer in resource recycling at the university. “On the other hand, the global textile production keeps growing as a result of increasing the global collective purchasing power.” Zamani and her team are trying to address both issues—the overproduction of bread and non-sustainable fabrics—by combining them.

“We get the bread waste from a local supermarket in Borås,” she says. “This is the bread which is sold fresh without plastic packaging.”

The process starts by mixing all types of excess bread together—sourdough and pumpernickel work just as well—and then placing it all in a bioreactor and using it to grow a special kind of fungus. “Bread is a very good substrate for cultivation of filamentous fungi. The fungus grows on bread waste and we get fungal biomass,” says Zamani. The researchers then separate the fibrous fungal cell walls from the proteins. The proteins can go into animal feed, and the biopolymers in the cell walls can be spun into a textile. In the future, the researchers believe, these threads will be most successful for making non-woven fabrics, such as felt. And when the fabric reaches the end of its life-cycle, it can be composted. Now they’re working on improving the quality of the waste bread–filamentous fungus yarn.

“The textile industry uses a lot of resources and hazardous chemicals,” says Zamani, and relies on both plastics and cotton (one of the world’s thirstiest crops). “Generally, textiles are difficult to recycle; therefore, renewable fibers which can undergo biological recycling are highly demanded.”

In more demand than a great breakfast of French toast or some wonderfully seasoned croutons? Yeah, probably.

By handling bees with his bare hands, Michael Joshin Thiele seeks to better understand them.

In recent years, the mysterious disappearance of bees has puzzled experts from across the world. In the United States alone, the honeybee population has dropped by 50 percent from midcentury levels, and 700 species of bees are now at risk of extinction. Scientists can’t really pin down the cause of the “bee apocalypse,” but point to the interplay of toxic pesticides, biodiversity loss, and climate change.

Michael Joshin Thiele, a German apiculturist based in California, thinks a solution may lie in returning bees to the wild. Since their appearance on our planet more than 100 million years ago, bees have been a keystone species for forest environments, where 90 percent of plant life depends on pollination. But with the onset of commercial beekeeping, bees have increasingly lived in settings that are not in line with their natural habitats.

Since 2006, Thiele has worked with a team of biologists, apiculturists, and botanists to run bee rewilding projects, from workshops on how to install log hives in backyards to courses on building bee sanctuaries inside organic farms. In 2017, he founded Apis Arborea, a platform to share apiculture knowledge and information about the essential role of bees. The project’s name encapsulates his philosophy. Apis Arborea means “bee of the tree” in Latin, a twist on the scientific name of honeybees, Apis mellifera, literally the “bee that carries honey.” “We always only looked at bees for what they do for humans,” Thiele says. “It’s time to see them for what they do for our wider ecosystem.”

For Thiele, it all started with a dream. “In February of 2002, I had this incredibly vivid dream about bees,” Thiele says. “I saw a swarm appear suddenly in the wild.” Far from generating fear or dread, this vision left him with a sense of awe for apian life. Other vivid bee dreams followed throughout winter. By springtime, Thiele, who was studying to become a lay-ordained monk at the San Francisco Zen Center, asked a local beekeeper if he could borrow some equipment. The next day, a swarm of bees appeared right outside his home inside Green Gulch, an organic farm run by the San Francisco Zen Center. “I was doing some work in the garden,” he says, “when suddenly my wife calls me and I see a swarm of bees covering my gear.”

Since then, Thiele, a 54-year-old man with a broad smile and intense blue eyes, has dedicated his professional life to bees. After a self-directed training through books and chats with local experts, he served as the official beekeeper of San Francisco Zen Center from 2002 to 2005.

But a few months in, something about conventional beekeeping started to feel off. At the time, Thiele was practicing with different meditation techniques, from silent retreats to one-on-one sessions with Zen masters, and he began developing an almost spiritual connection to his bees. By trying to “perceive their needs,” he says, “it was almost like realizing I had a new sense that I did not know before.” Soon, he feared his bees were not living in a way that matched their instincts.

But when he turned to scientific literature to learn more about how honey bees live in the wild, he realized that it is an almost non-existent field of knowledge. “Most of our studies are conducted on captive bees,” he says. “It’s like if all we know about lions was based on studies of lions living in zoos.”

In the 1990s, when the notorious Varroa destructor parasitic mite first started devastating hives throughout North America, Thomas D. Seeley, a professor of biology at Cornell University, did a study on the wild honeybees of North America. Surprisingly, the wild honey bees living in Arnot Forest, a 4,200-acre patch of pristine forest near Ithaca, New York, had adapted to the mite much better than their human-held cousins. Like Thiele, Seeley also found that there was a huge lack of wild bee knowledge. In his recently published book, The Lives of Bees: The Untold Story of the Honey Bee in the Wild, Seeley has helped fill in this gap. Many of his findings, based on observation of wild bee colonies in Arnot Forest, echo Thiele’s thoughts.

For example, one of the first things that Thiele questioned about conventional beekeeping was hive location. “Many hives are kept at ground level,” he says. “But bees’ instinctual preference is to live 20 feet off the ground.” Seeley reported the same observation in his book, explaining that wild bees build nests far from the ground, probably to prevent attacks from bears and other predators, and to avoid being covered in snow during winter.

Next, Thiele started to question beehive density. “In the woods, hives have a capacity of around 40 liters and have at least 350 yards of space between each other,” he says. Most beekeepers host many more bees in more cramped spaces, with man-made hives designed with a capacity of around 160 liters and nests placed next to each other. As Seeley points out, the high density and large size of man-made colonies are designed to boost honey production, but perform poorly at containing disease. That’s partly why wild colonies proved more resilient to Varroa infestations, since mites can’t disperse as easily in roomier environments.

Most beekeepers in North America keep bees in Langstroth hives, a sort of bee condo made of piled-up boxes with removable frames. Thiele thinks that many aspects of its design are not suited to bees. Bees communicate key information about nectar locations with a 'waggle dance' which sends out vibrations across the hive. Such vibrations travel best at a frequency of 250 Hertz. But according to Jurgen Tautz, a biology professor at Julius-Maximilian University in Wurzburg, Germany, in order for such internal radio to operate smoothly, hives need to contain cells with a five-millimeter diameter. Thiele notes that most commercial beekeepers use frames with far larger cells to increase honey production, thus hampering internal communication. Plus, plastic materials can also slow down communication inside the hive, as plastic vibrates at a different frequency than organic material. “Bees send frequencies through the top part of comb cells,” Tautz says. “If this part is made of plastic, it has disastrous consequences for bees’ communication.”

Over the past 20 years, Thiele has interacted with bees as much as possible to observe them, even working without the traditional protective gear. “It’s easier for us to understand mammals because they have eyes,” he says. “But you can get bees the same way if you let go of the fear of being stung.” When talking about his bare-handed work with swarms, which has attracted many admiring comments on YouTube, his voice becomes emotional, like he’s talking about a loved one. "It’s like feeling someone’s hand,” he says. "It's such an intimate touch."

On top of being a deeply enriching experience, his connection to bees helps him understand how to improve their lives. When setting up log hives high up in trees, he only uses organic materials such as ropes and wax. He models their entrances on natural nests, placing a small piece of comb by the opening and coating it with a tincture made of propolis, an antibacterial resin produced by bees to seal openings in the hive. "For them, it smells like home," he says. Thiele estimates that his rewilding projects usually lead to a 50 percent increase in colony population. By comparison, Seeley notes in his book that thousands of commercial honeybee colonies report mortality rates of around 40 percent.

With urban beekeeping on the rise, Thiele thinks it’s crucial to inform the wider public about the importance of creating healthy bee habitats. “Some urban beekeepers act from a good place,” he says. “But they do more harm than good.” He gives the example of what he calls “packaged bees,” cheap and easy-to-assemble hives that are trending among amateur beekeepers. “They are built with toxic materials and with too much density,” he says. “Often bees get sick and end up spreading disease to local wild bees.”

Indeed, much of the problem with bee repopulation comes from systemic threats at the local level. Bees fly in an estimated range of one to two miles from their hive in search of nectar, so everything that they encounter on the way is potentially damaging. “All it takes is one farmer using pesticides one mile down the road and they are at risk,” Thiele says.

That’s why he advocates for the creation of protected local landscapes where bees can flourish, or “locapiaries,” where everyone would commit to practices that protect bees. That means creating hives with natural materials, avoiding pesticides that are harmful for bees, and preventing unhealthy proximity between hives. Going forward, Thiele hopes that this approach will become standard. He cites a recent case in Utah where lawmakers discussed a bill that would prohibit commercial beekeepers from installing an operation within a two-mile radius to another colony. “That gives me a lot of hope for the future,” he says. “But we need to act now.”

Some scientists believe this is how we'll know what to look for.

In 2021, a NASA rover will touch down on Mars in search of signs of life, past or present. It will investigate the surface of the red planet and collect samples from areas that seem particularly promising. But traces of life on Mars—if they exist—aren’t going to be apparent to the naked eye: Obviously there’s no remains of mammoths or goldfish or snails. Any record of life on Mars would likely take the form of organic compounds, which have already been identified up there but aren’t definitive, or actual fossils of microorganisms. Such fossils exist here on Earth, but they’re very tricky to spot—even in places we know they’ll be. The best strategy for finding these miniscule traces, according to a group of Scandinavian scientists, is to study the denizens of the deep sea. This team now plans to create an atlas of fossilized microbes from Earth’s oceans—an extraterrestrial field guide of sorts—to help the rover and its human partners identify definitive proof of life on Mars, according to their recent article in Frontiers in Earth Science.

From his lab in Stockholm, Magnus Ivarsson, a paleobiologist at the University of Southern Denmark and the Swedish Museum of Natural History, studies fossilized microbes locked in deep-sea volcanic rock. It’s a specialized area of study with little fanfare. “We’d been working on these type of fossils for 15 years but had never really thought of them as being interesting beyond Earth,” he says. But after attending a conference with researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Ivarsson realized the space agency had a glaring lack of knowledge about fossils found in volcanic rock—the exact things they ought to be looking for off-world. “That’s when I started to realize how important our fossils are for the exploration of potential life on Mars,” he says.

On Earth, most fossils that scientists study are immortalized in sedimentary rock, which forms by the accumulation of small particles over time and encompasses 75 percent of the planet’s surface. Sedimentary rock is almost casual, with none of the heat and pressure that form metamorphic or igneous rocks, which is one thing that makes it particularly adept at preserving fossils. But Mars is home almost exclusively to volcanic rock. “Mars is a huge volcano, so to speak,” Ivarsson says. “It’s not as complex as Earth, from a geological point of view.”

Despite having once been, you know, molten, volcanic rock can indeed contain fossils. But identifying them is not as simple as spotting the whorl of a shell, the veins of a leaf, or the familiar knobs of a prehistoric bone. These rocks are porous, riddled with tiny bubbles that create a network traversable by microbial life. When seawater and other fluids sweep through these channels, they bring microbes with them, which build colonies and self-sustaining food webs around the boundaries of the rock and in open pore space. After death, the microbes can be mineralized and fossilized in place. These are the creatures that Ivarsson studies, and the ones he believes may be most analogous to what scientists could find on Mars.

Ivarsson’s work identifying Earth’s microfossils, and the distinguishing traits that might help planetary scientists, is no easy feat. For one, they’re mostly found in the deep seafloor and must be collected by a specialized drill rig. These rigs can extend thousands of feet down and then pull a core back up to the surface—well, whatever portion doesn’t immediately fall back to the bottom. “We recover 30 to 40 percent, if we’re lucky,” Ivarsson says. His lab sources its cores from around the world, usually ordering them from repositories in Texas, Germany, and Japan. Most come from the Hawaiian–Emperor seamount chain, a vast underwater trail of volcanic islands and underwater mountains that extends from Hawaiʻi to the Russian coast.

Once the cores arrive at the lab, the researchers store them in long boxes and study their stratigraphy, the accumulated layers, which can go back to around 80 or 90 million years ago. Then comes actually finding fossils. First, they examine the cores to identify interesting spots, such as fractures, veins, or, if they’re lucky, fossilized microbial communities large enough to be seen by the naked eye. Then they scan these promising spots with an electron microscope or X-ray for a closer look. It’s impossible to look over an entire core at that level of detail, just as one can’t examine an entire field of Martian rocks, so knowing what evidence of life can come from a targeted search is likely to be most helpful on the surface of Mars as well.

The microbes themselves are often just a couple of micrometers in length, a little smaller than a single strand of spider silk. But while a lone microbe is too tiny to be seen by the human eye, colonies of accumulated microbes can be much easier to spot. Take the bacteria Sulfurihydrogenibium yellowstonense, commonly known as Sulfuri, which grows up to three micrometers long. Colonies of Sulfuri can span an entire centimeter, Ivarsson says. Aside from their relatively large size, colonies of Sulfuri also have unusual, distinctive, noodle-like forms, as broad as fettucini or as fine as capellini. Sulfuri do not dwell in volcanic rocks like the microbes Ivarsson studies and plans to include in the atlas, but rather are found in hot springs such as those in Yellowstone National Park. But they also represent a good analogue for possible Martian life, since ancient volcanoes there could also have produced something like those geothermal features, according to a research team from the University of Illinois.

Right now the atlas is a plan, not a reality. “We’re trying to compile as much data as we can, going through the microfossils we see and making illustrations of them,” Ivarsson says, adding that he hopes the atlas will offer NASA researchers guidelines for how to identify promising spots and know what to look for in samples. He believes it will take the form of an enormous database, accessible to anyone, as well as a review in a scientific journal.

The timeline is somewhat tight, however, as NASA will launch its rover into space in July 2020, for a landing on the Jezero Crater on February 18, 2021. That will be a big year for the red planet. ExoMars, a rover from Europe and Russia, will also attempt the interplanetary trek. But Ivarsson believes his atlas will be useful for missions beyond, as well, such as when NASA attempts, someday, to bring Martian cores back to Earth for up-close examination. He doesn’t know which labs will have access to this material when it arrives, but he hopes to get at least a peek.

Eventually, these records will be made available online.

In 1580 in the British diocese of Ely, an Englishman named William Sturns went down in history for an unusual crime. His alleged malfeasance? Stealing not one, not two, but three cheeses. Ultimately, he was found not guilty, but this alleged felony was dutifully recorded in an archive spanning 200 years of crimes in Ely.

“Unfortunately we don’t know what type of cheese it was but cheesemaking was fairly common in the area at the time,” the archivist Sian Collins writes in an email. Collins works at the Cambridge University Library, where archivists have begun cataloguing the nearly 270 files and rolls for the first time, according to The Guardian. These documents encompass a rich record of everyday transgressions in Ely, from tiny (cheese theft) to big (murder), and everywhere in between, including highway robbery, forgery, trespass, vagrancy, and, rather notably, witchcraft.

The archives contain an unusual bounty of detail because local bishops possessed fiscal and judicial privileges over the county of Cambridgeshire, of which Ely is a part, until 1836. Collins says these one-of-a-kind records offer insight into the ordinary life of the people living in Ely during the 1500s and 1600s, as well as the quirkiness of the diocese’s court system and how it delivered justice. “It is both fascinating and touching to see the names and words of people who have no other memorial,” she says. “They got into debt, they had arguments and fights, they suffered tragedies, just like us.”

The project is still at an early stage, but so far Collins has noticed that many cases concern debt or petty theft. The same year Sturns stole the cheese, Henry Greene stole a bowl of mill (a kind of cereal) that cost three pence. “We’ve been told by a researcher that juries were sometimes sympathetic to people who stole low value food or drink because they regarded it as someone trying to survive if they were hungry,” Collins says. Like Sturns, Greene was found not guilty of his very tiny (and perhaps existentially necessary) crime.

Many of the crimes etched upon these rolls, however, are considerably more tragic than a mistaken case of cheese-napping. In 1642, Joanne Tylney of Newton was accused of cutting the throat of her 18-week-old baby because it would not stop crying. Cecilia Samuel was found guilty of a similar crime: drowning her newborn son in a ditch. Samuel pleaded not guilty but was sentenced to death by hanging following a jury trial.

The archivists plan to finish cataloguing the archive by September 2020 and make its contents accessible online. At that point, you’ll be able to read more about the heartbreaking cases of Tylney and Samuel and the significantly pettier case of Sturns—a man who was either falsely accused or who got away with a truly lactic caper.

Atlas Obscura readers connected us with their favorite spans on the planet.

Let's be thankful that the world (and life, amirite?) is full of valleys, chasms, rivers, and streams that need to be crossed, because otherwise we wouldn't have so many incredible bridges. From towering railway spans to crumbling historic foot crossings, bridges manage to be both awe-inspiring monuments to human ingenuity and essential geographic connections. We recently asked Atlas Obscura readers over in our Community forums to tell us about the most incredible and memorable bridges they've ever encountered, and the response was staggering.

Take a look at some of our favorite submissions below, and if you have a beloved bridge of your own that you'd like to recommend, head over to the forums and keep the conversation going. Bridges make it easier to get from here to there, and they also make it hard not to stop and stare.

Smolen-Gulf Bridge

Ashtabula, Ohio

“If you’re after bridges, you need to check out Ohio. There’s the Zanesville Y-bridge, the Ashtabula, Ohio bridge, which is the longest covered bridge in the U.S., and the Germantown covered bridge, possibly the only one of its type still standing in the world.” — sontaron

Arthur J. Ravenel Bridge

South Carolina

“I’m going to pass on the more popular targets and go with a semi-local one for me. The Arthur J. Ravenel Bridge opened in 2005 in Charleston, South Carolina, and is the third longest cable-stayed bridge in the Western Hemisphere. It replaced two old bridges that were well past their respective expiration dates. In addition to its eight lanes of traffic, it also has pedestrian and bike lanes. She’s also quite photogenic. We’re all very proud of her here in South Carolina.” — Bacon_McBeardy

Sydney Harbor Bridge

Sydney, Australia

“I did the BridgeClimb eight years ago. Remember it like yesterday! They don’t let you bring anything loose with you up there, in case you drop it on the road below. But they do take a group picture standing at the very top. I still have the ball cap that you get with a lanyard at the back that attaches to your special jumpsuit. But I do have a few pictures from the bridge pylon which you can also go up to get a great view. You can see the groups climbing up and all the ladders and catwalks from pretty close.” — Fly_Ted

Centennial Bridge

Panama

“Here’s Panama’s Centennial Bridge crossing the Panama Canal. Opened in 2004, it is one of only two permanent spans across the canal, the other being the Bridge of the Americas, which opened in 1962. The Centennial is a cable-stayed bridge with 128 cables stretching over a span of 430 meters (1,400 feet).” — NJK

Lions Gate Bridge

Vancouver, British Columbia

“Well, you’ve hit on my unabridged passion. I could nerd out on bridges for hours (and often do…). I even have a reputation in my family: my brother once biked the West Coast to California and on the way he sent me a postcard of the bridge in Newport, Oregon, having written on it, ‘for my bridge-lovin’ bro.’ I’ve always had an interest in engineering and big civil projects. It’s fun to learn about these structures and figure out how they were built. Bridges in particular are usually so iconic and impressive, not to mention crucial. I’ll always go out of my way to check out a cool bridge. [I like the] Lions Gate Bridge in Vancouver. It’s one of those bridges that ends up seeming a lot smaller and kind of dinky once you’re there in person. But fortunately that doesn’t take away from the beauty.” — Fly_Ted

Swarkestone Bridge

Derbyshire, England

“Swarkestone Bridge in Derbyshire, England is nearly a mile long, made of crumbly sandstone and is 700 years old. It’s an impressive sight, winding its way across a marshy flood plain on the River Trent, and still carrying two lanes of heavy traffic!” — Capemarsh

Malleco Viaduct

Chile

“I also love the Malleco Viaduct Railway in Chile’s Araucania Region, it looks like a giant, bright yellow Meccano set, and was once the world’s highest railway bridge. The fact that it has withstood some of the world’s largest earthquakes in its 125-year history is pretty impressive!” — Capemarsh

Punakha Suspension Bridge

Punakha, Bhutan

“[This] suspension bridge in Punakha, Bhutan.” — Max_Cortesi

Puente del Rey

Madrid, Spain

“At the opposite end of the spectrum, here’s Puente del Rey (the King’s Bridge), built between 1617 and 1634 to replace a previous wooden structure, in the historical site of Old Panama.” — La_Belle_Gigi

New River Gorge Bridge

Fayetteville, West Virginia

“I have been awed by the New River Gorge Bridge near Fayetteville, West Virginia. It replaced a long, switchbacked descent down one side of the gorge, a short, low bridge crossing, then a switchbacked ascent up the other side. It replaced what probably took 15-20 minutes with a few seconds crossing at highway speeds.” — pnorloff

Bixby Creek Bridge

Big Sur, California

“The Bixby Creek Bridge in Big Sur, California, is the closest notable bridge to me at about 15 miles (24km) south of where I live. I gained a new appreciation for it a few months ago when, by pure chance, I met a man whose grandfather was the construction superintendent on the bridge when it was built in 1932.” — Martin

Lake Pontchartrain Causeway

Louisiana

“How could I have forgotten my own city’s Lake Pontchartrain Causeway? It is the longest bridge over water in the world. There’s a point in the middle when you can’t see land on either side that always make me feel a little weird.” — kermitforg

Puente Nuevo

Ronda, Spain

“Undisputed king of all bridges (or queen?) is in my mind the Puente Nuevo in Ronda, Spain. Aside from its striking scale, the height of the striking white walls of the buildings in the city compared to the countryside full of olive trees and sunflower fields is breathtaking. Bonus waterfall.” — aliceweintraut

Millau Viaduct

Creissels, France

“How about the most beautiful bridge in the world? Viaduc de Millau!” — nancysid1225

Royal Gorge Bridge

Cañon City, Colorado

“I haven’t been here since I was a kid, but it’s one amazing bridge with one amazing view.” — jennifer303030

Juscelino Kubitschek Bridge

Brasília, Brazil

“Check out the Juscelino Kubitschek Bridge in Brasília/Brazil. — esthergf

Vizcaya Bridge

Biscay, Spain

“Probably my favorite bridge ever is the Puente de Vizcaya/Puente Colgante/Bizkaiko Zubia that spans the Ibaizabal River/Nervión Estuary in the Basque Country of Spain. It’s actually the oldest transporter bridge in the world, and one of the few that’s still functioning and transporting passengers to the other side of the river. It opened in 1893, designed by Alberto Palacio, along with Ferdinand Amodin, both of whom studied under Gustave Eiffel, in order to connect the baths that were on both sides of the river so that the bourgeois who lived in the Getxo side of the river could also visit the baths on the working-class side. It was built with the transporter cables in the style it is so that ships and boats could pass through, as Bilbao was a capital of the European shipbuilding and iron working industry up until the 1970s or so. It’s really an incredible monument, and it fascinates me every single time I go back to visit.” — spanishevenstar

Forth Bridge

Edinburgh, Scotland

“I’m surprised nobody has mentioned the Forth Rail Bridge crossing the Firth of Forth just outside Edinburgh in Scotland. One of the most iconic bridges in the world, so I’ll let the pictures do the talking…” — andrewcraven

Erasmus Bridge

Rotterdam, The Netherlands

“I didn’t see anything about the Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam. It is an impressive structure across the New Meuse and designed by Ben van Berkel.” — feathrd1

Evergreen Point Floating Bridge

Seattle, Washington

“In Washington state , we have three floating bridges; the Governor Albert D. Rossellini Bridge (also called the Evergreen Point Bridge) is the longest in the world. It and another one go across Lake Washington from Seattle to Bellevue and other former bedroom communities. The third spans the Hood Canal northwest of Seattle, bridging the Kitsap and Olympic Peninsula. On the other end of the successful bridge spectrum is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge just south of Seattle. It’s now a beautiful double span, but many of you know it as ‘Galloping Gertie’ from the footage of it collapsing in 1940. I cross it twice a day from Gig Harbor to Tacoma, and the galloping part is never far from my thoughts.” — SMRichmond

Vulci Bridge

Montalto di Castro, Italy

“Northwest of Rome, but still in Lazio is the stunning medieval bridge at Vulci, with Etruscan stonework at the base of the supports. A small castle overlooks the bridge and houses an Etruscan museum, since Vulci was originally the site of the ancient Etruscan city of Velzna.” — Velthur

Seven Mile Bridge

Florida

“Seven Mile Bridge, from Miami to Key West. Not famous for soaring heights or impressive trestles, Seven Mile Bridge is just that… just miles and miles of tropical paradise.” — kfidei

San Diego–Coronado Bridge

California

“I love driving over the Coronado Bridge from San Diego to Coronado (not as good driving in the other direction). It is also beautiful to see from the left seats of an airplane when landing at nearby Lindbergh Field airport.” — kld123

Victoria Falls Bridge

Zambia

“My favourite, and you can call me biased if you like, is still the Victoria Falls Bridge straddling between Zimbabwe and Zambia. An engineering marvel, especially in 1905 when it was completed. Large pieces were built in the U.K. and brought in to be assembled from both sides of a 100 meter gorge (with the Zambezi River roaring below— known for class 5 rapids). The story of its construction and the little town is fascinating. Oh, and the view from the bridge is of the deep gorge below on the one side, and then part of the Victoria Falls on the other side. Not bad. And if you feel like a little adrenaline rush, you can bungee jump from the middle of the bridge.” — fanichido

Python Bridge

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

“The Python Bridge in Amsterdam is my favorite for the moment, but there are many awesome bridges around, judging from the photos I’ve seen of others. I managed to cross this bridge! As I have vertigo, that is a major accomplishment, even if I do say so myself…” — bee9

Øresund Bridge

Sweden

“The most amazing bridge I’ve been on is half bridge, half tunnel, between Denmark and Sweden. An exhilarating experience, to be sure.” — bertshetler

Mackinac Bridge

Michigan

“The marvelous Mighty Mac… The longest, and most beautiful suspension bridge in this hemisphere.” — gericar

Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

The "5 pm chime" has taken on many meanings over the years.

While it is a modern and safe country by most objective measures, Japan nonetheless faces the persistent threat of natural disaster. The nation is entirely located in the seismically active Ring of Fire, making earthquakes an obvious hazard, in addition to the typhoons that have wrought havoc in recent years. As a result, Japan is a country that takes pains to be ready for the worst. Accordingly, dotted throughout most municipalities in the country are banks of loudspeakers mounted on poles, part of a broadcast system that stands ready to alert residents to impending natural disasters or other large-scale civil emergencies.

This network of local warning systems is known as shichouson bousai gyousei musen housou—or bosai musen (“disaster wireless”) for short. Similar to the American Emergency Alert System, the bosai musen network can raise advance warning of earthquakes or provide other vital information in an emergency, allowing residents valuable seconds to find a safe place.

The system is dutifully tested, nationwide, every weekday at 5:00 pm. If you’re imagining a nerve-shredding Klaxon, think again. Rather, the speakers play a collection of Japanese folk tunes or other melodies known informally as the “5 pm chime.” It is part of Japan’s practice of turning otherwise humdrum infrastructure into whimsical works of civic art.

Many municipalities have upgraded to advanced digital systems that allow two-way communication from within homes or designated evacuation points, but the cornerstone of the bosai musen network remains the ubiquitous loudspeakers. Resembling classic air-raid sirens, they’re not much to look at, but Japanese authorities have nonetheless managed to bestow them with a little flash of personality.

For the tests, to avoid unduly jangling nerves, most towns play soothing 30- to 60-second melodies from Japanese folk tunes. A common choice of melody is “Yuyake Koyake,” a folk song popular among schoolchildren. One town, the mountain hamlet of Kanna-machi in Japan’s central Gunma Prefecture, has adopted the “Colonel Bogey March” from The Bridge on the River Kwai as its chime—a curious choice considering the film largely takes place in a Japanese forced labor camp for British POWs. Other municipalities, such as Tokigawa-machi in Saitama Prefecture, play versions of their towns’ peppy, distinctive anthems.

The timing of the tests, which is sometimes adjusted in the warmer months, also serves as punctuation for the day. For some, it signals the end of work. For children, it is an unofficial “go home” announcement. It also reminds drivers to exercise extra caution during and after sunset. Many jurisdictions also append local announcements to the chime. These can include reports on upcoming town events, local news, and reminders for responsible citizenship. In smaller communities, birth and death announcements are also made.

While the tests are designed to be friendly and perhaps a little twee, the network has definitely proven invaluable in emergency situations. In many cell phone videos shot by citizens following the Great Tohoku Earthquake in March 2011, announcements from the disaster wireless system are clearly audible in the background, directing citizens seek higher ground ahead of the approaching tsunami. Piped through the loudspeakers and other devices, warnings from Japan’s sophisticated earthquake warning detection system can provide up to notice before a temblor hits, often the difference between life and death.

The system is not without its flaws and detractors, however. After the 2011 earthquake, there were reports of citizens simply shrugging off the warnings, perhaps out of familiarity or complacency or the belief that the situation was not so serious. The bosai musen system has also been criticized as noise pollution with systems broadcasting at 85dB at a distance of 50 meters (comparable to the noise of a freight train passing by at 15 meters). Indeed, unsuccessful lawsuits have been launched over issues with the volume of the daily tests.

Others take issue with the frequency of the tests, especially since it is not uncommon for municipalities to play the town song and make announcements at 7:00 am and noon, in addition to the usual early evening chime. Still others dislike the length and content of some announcements—it is, after all, largely irrelevant to many and entirely un-mutable.

A search of municipal governments’ FAQ pages reveals the bousai musen system to be a common source of complaints. “There was a tax-payment reminder broadcast recently,” complained one resident of Kadoma City, “Is this the purpose of the system?”

“Can you reduce the number of public relations announcements?” asked another in Yamagata Prefecture.

There are those, however, that take a cue from other fans of Japan's civic infrastructure, and dutifully catalogue examples of the wide range of bosai musen melodies from across the country.

Detractors and enthusiasts aside, the bosai musen network remains an important piece of the country’s civil infrastructure and an unavoidable facet of Japanese life. Tiring or not, it is another clever way that Japanese insert a little whimsy into the typical architecture of daily routine.

Researchers just got a closer look.

During austral winter, which stretches from June to September, Antarctica is carpeted with nearly seven million square miles of ice. For several decades, scientists looking at satellite imagery of those frozen swaths have noticed blue-black cavities where the water and ice open up to the air and sky. These jagged holes are known as polynyas, and they can be huge—in 2016 and 2017, gashes in the Weddell Sea were more than 13,000 square miles wide. They persist even in the freezing, windy darkness, when temperatures plummet to a relentless -58 degrees Fahrenheit.

There’s a lot we still don’t know about these pits: We’re not yet sure, for instance, how they affect the atmosphere—they may release carbon dioxide that had been stagnant and stored in the deep ocean—and it’s unclear what they mean for creatures swimming inside them. (Analogs in the Arctic, for instance, become food-rich oases.) In Antarctica, scientists are still chipping away at an even more fundamental question: How the heck do these holes get there?

To answer that, a team led by researchers at the University of Washington took a creative approach that wedded several different perspectives, from diving deep to soaring far overhead. The research, recently published in Nature, was co-authored by scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and assisted by satellite imagery, free-floating sensors, and brigade of elephant seals with instruments strapped to their heads.

The researchers caught a lucky break when some of those floats—deployed by the Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling project—turned up near Maud Rise, an underwater mountain where satellites had captured images of polynyas in recent years. When the researchers took a closer look at what was happening in the water, they concluded that polynyas appear because of “a combination of factors that have to happen at the same time,” says Ethan Campbell, a graduate student in oceanography at the University of Washington, and lead author of the study.

The team found that, around the mountain, warmer, saltier water from deeper depths is pushed to the surface. Then, when storms blow in, a “deep, violent, vertical” mixing begins, Campbell says, which causes the water column to keep churning. All this kicks off a pattern that loops again and again, according to the NASA Earth Observatory, until the surrounding air warms a little come springtime or lighter, fresher water appears on top. The research echoes some aspects of previous findings: Like a separate recent study that attributed the 2017 Maud Rise polynya to polar cyclones, which chew up ice, this team found that “storms are essential,” Campbell adds.

Campbell and his collaborators found that it’s all these elements working in conjunction—winds, plus warm, salty water rushing to the surface and then cooling and sinking in a constant churn—that give rise to polynyas. “In any given year you could have several of these things happen, but unless you get them all, then you don't get a polynya,” said co-author Stephen Riser, a University of Washington oceanographer, in a statement.

Scientific American reported that there’s a lot left to learn about what will happen to the holes as the climate continues to change—melting glaciers could add an influx of fresh water, for instance, which might make the water less likely to churn, but increasingly wild wind could exacerbate the flux. For now, at least, researchers are closer to understanding exactly how Antarctic polynyas crop up in the first place.

At least it gave him lots of material.

Ernest Hemingway had a lot going for him when he sat down in a Paris cafe on September 3, 1924 to write a letter to his father. He was fawning over his infant son, hanging out with the literati, and thinking up The Sun Also Rises: his first major novel and a modernist milestone still read widely today. But he just couldn’t get over how awful he was at bullfighting.

That’s one of the key points made by the writer in this letter home, which was auctioned today in Bonhams’s New York sale of Fine Books and Manuscripts. Never before published, it sold for more than $25,000.

Writing of his time in Pamplona, Spain with his friend and fellow writer Don Stewart, Hemingway tells his father that he “was in the bull ring 5 different days and was tossed 3 times, once as the bull was about to hit me I went in between his horns and hung on, and was carried...for about two full minutes…” Even for a notorious bruiser like Hemingway, it was a bit too much to take. “I am too old to take up bull fighting seriously,” he continues, “as the great ones all start when they are about six years old...a man’s courage needs exercise just as much as his legs do…” At least it wasn’t all for naught. “I have some great bull fight stories to write,” he deftly humblebrags. Those stories would indeed help him craft the breakthrough novel on his horizon.

The rest of the letter’s eight pages deal with the more tranquil, domestic sides of life, especially those involving Hemingway’s infant son John Hadley Nicanor “Jack” Hemingway, otherwise known as “Bumbie.” Hemingway assures his father that Bumbie “is very healthy and happy and,” moreover, “everybody says he is the best looking and strongest baby they have ever seen…” Of all people, the credit for Bumbie’s good health may belong to the Imagist poet William Carlos Williams, who was also a physician. Williams was friends with Hemingway, who praised the poet in the letter as “a very good baby doctor” who even “made out a diet schedule” for the child while visiting Hemingway in Paris.

According to Bonhams, the letter comes straight from descendants of its original recipient, Hemingway’s father Clarence. It’s been so hidden away that it wasn’t even included in the 1923-1925 volume of Hemingway’s collected letters. The 1932-34 set is due out soon, and it may contain yet more tales of Hemingway’s bullfighting fails: In 1932, the author published Death in the Afternoon—a nonfiction book about the sport he loved so well yet played so poorly.