When it does, researchers rush in to study the age-old stumps.

Long before it was a sandy patch abutting Cardigan Bay, the beach near Ynyslas, close to Borth, Wales, was grassland—and before that, thousands of years ago, a forest. The proof is right there in the sodden sand, but it’s only fully visible every once in a while. And when it appears, it looks like something out of a fairy tale.

During times of strong wind and surging waves, layers of the wet sediment peel away, and clumps of sulfuric peat and stumps of long-dead trees emerge. They’re waterlogged, so the shin-high crags of ancient birch, pine, and oak look stained—dark brown, almost onyx when they’re wet. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of these stumps are scattered across a few miles of the shore, jutting through the sand in sharp, pointy angles. The size and shape often remind Martin Bates of shark fins.

Bates grew up just a few miles from this sunken forest, and a love of the ancient trees is in his blood. “There’s always been a connection between the forest and the family,” he says. His father worked on the beach as a geologist, and now Bates studies it, too. “When it’s exposed, it’s an awesome sight,” says Bates, who works as a geoarchaeologist at the University of Wales Trinity St. David. “It’s a great, dark-brown mass stretching into the distance.”

Shifting sands are a too-easy metaphor for the passage of time—boulders becoming rocks, rocks becoming beaches, grains tumbling down through an hourglass. But in Borth, a real shift of sand shuffles around time—and helps researchers piece together how this shore has changed over thousands of years. When the stumps are easily observable at low tide—as they are now, following a storm at the end of May 2019—they’re like the past rising up through the sand to the present.

For the most part, anything that we’ve left along a shore, above or below the tide line, will be threatened or altered in some way by climate change. Human remains in low-lying burial grounds may wash out, long-ago trash heaps known as middens may get jostled loose, and historic lighthouses or other seaside attractions may just topple into the water. Archaeologists, for their part, often view climate change as a race against the clock, to save or document whatever they can before our coasts change forever. At the sunken forest, though, the picture is a little different.

“The fact that we’re getting more storms [and] climate instability means we’re getting to see [the forest] more frequently than in the past,” Bates says. That’s helpful, because in Borth, the record of the past is a bit like a book with missing chapters. Researchers know that the area was a reed swamp before it was a forest, and that the trees flourished around 6,000 years ago. Then, roughly 4,500 years ago, Bates says, the trees seem to have died out as water levels rose. Based on what they can see in the pollen record, grasslands appeared some 3,000 years ago. “It would have been a strange place,” Bates says, with dead trees in place amid the tufts of grass, their roots drowned in salt water.

The tree stumps mingle with a layer of peat, about three feet thick, which had dried out before the trees began to grow. Beneath the stumps, there’s a layer of clay and silt some 60 to 100 feet deep. The sediment probably holds information about what came before the forests and grasslands—about salt marshes, mud flats, and brackish waters, as well as whatever life flourished there, but Bates hasn’t been able to get down as far as he'd like to. This sand, which crumbles and tumbles out of borers and gunks up machine parts, “is a driller’s worst nightmare,” he says. Still, he’s hopeful that he’ll eventually enlist some better tools and fill in the blanks.

Each time the waves expose the forest, “You’ve got to be fairly quick off the mark,” Bates says, that is, swift and efficient in combing the shore to catalog new sights before the sediment washes in again. “Often, I find myself walking the beach and thinking, ‘Ugh, why am I here again, what am I going to see that’s new? Forty-nine times out of 50, it’s nothing usual—and then that 50th time, you see something new or something you have seen before in a slightly different light, and then suddenly go, ‘Oh!’”

After a big storm, he says, it’s usually a matter of two or three months before the sand fully covers the stumps again. That has proven to be ample time to make some interesting new discoveries and reexamine a few old ones. A few years ago, for example, storms exposed the remains of large channel that once flowed through the forest. That led researchers to a better understanding of why, exactly, an ancient aurochs—wild, massive, horned cattle that went extinct in the 17th century—wandered in and died there. (Its remains turned up nearby in the 1960s.) The more researchers can glean about these ancient ecosystems, the more the "little observations suddenly make sense in the bigger picture," Bates says.

Bates says that while other sunken forests, such as ones in Jersey, in the Channel Islands, are being splintered and demolished by water, the one at Borth seems pretty safe for now. The local Ceredigion County Council, which manages the sunken forest, pledged £39 million for breakwaters and other coastal defenses to buffet the 450 homes nearby against inundation and erosion. Several thousand tons of sand will also be used to extend the beach farther into the sea.

In the meantime, the sunken forest is open to anyone who wants to wander amid the skeletons of long-dead trees. Portions of it have been designated as “sites of special scientific interest” and protected by national conservation laws, Bates explains, but those regulations don’t limit casual access. The shore appeals to surfers and vacationers, Bates adds, and the local tourism bureau suggests it might be part of the lost world of the legendary Cantre’r Gwaelod, mentioned in The Black Book of Carmarthen, thought to be the oldest surviving text written entirely in Welsh. (There’s even an app visitors to help visitors explore the lost realm.)

Bates understands why the landscape strikes people as wondrous. The changing topography and the occasional intrusion of the distant past into the present make it “a slightly mythical, magical place,” Bates says. “You never quite know what you’re going to see.”

The legend of the Sourtoe Cocktail continues.

In Dawson City, a town on the Yukon River in northwest Canada, one hotel bar serves up a truly unique drink. It’s called the Sourtoe Cocktail, and it contains Yukon Gold Whiskey and a dehydrated human toe. This mixological tradition has been happening at the Downtown Hotel since 1973. Over almost five decades the hotel has served a whopping 86,000 Sourtoe Cocktails, and counting. Recently, a former British Marine sent his big toe, tragically lost to frostbite, to the world-famous hotel by Royal Mail in the hopes of becoming the next in the storied lineage of this unique garnish.

In winter 2018, Nick Griffiths competed in the Yukon Arctic Ultra, an extreme multiday marathon comprised of 100-, 300-, and 430-mile races along Yukon’s dogsled trail. After his left foot succumbed to temperatures that reached 40 below, Griffiths’s big toe was amputated and preserved in a vial of alcohol by the U.K. hospital that treated him. There was only one place it belonged, he figured. He promptly shipped it to the Downtown Hotel’s bar, known as the Sourdough Saloon, where it has joined the hotel’s floating toe collection.

“We have only had two toes arrive on our doorstep since 2013 when we took over the hotel—one of which was a big toe,” says Adam Gerle, general manager of the hotel. The hotel’s “Toe Master,” Terry Lee, is in charge of determining whether donated toes can become part of the tradition. “Unless they are preserved properly in medical grade alcohol right after [the] toe is removed, they aren’t much use to us. And we can’t use them if they have been stored in formaldehyde,” says Gerle. Griffiths’s toe passed this preliminary examination, so Lee is now in the process of mummifying the toe by storing it in rock salt for six weeks, before it’s ready to be submerged in a different type of alcohol. While Yukon Gold Whiskey is the gold standard, “any 40 percent alcohol will work for the Toe,” says Gerle. “We are just partial to local spirits.”

The Downtown Hotel is the only place in the world serving up this wild, gross, historic, daring drink. “This drink has sentimental value in Dawson City as its been here since 1973 and reflects the quirky nature of the town,” says Gerle. The tradition has its origin in the 1920s, when miner and rumrunner Louie Liken stowed his severed toe (lost, like Griffiths’s, to frostbite) in a cabin. Some 50 years later, local riverboat captain Dick Stevenson was rummaging through the abandoned cabin and found the jar. The rest is Dawson City history. The original toe was swallowed, but the have been a number of successors over the years. Once Griffiths’s is ready, it will join the four or five they have on hand.

Those brave enough to order this quirky cocktail must touch the Toe to their lips; it’s the only way to earn a certificate from the hotel. In the busy summer season, the bar serves an astonishing 50 to 100 Sourtoe Cocktails a night. “Most people’s initial reaction is disgust, disbelief, and astonishment,” says Gerle. “[But] the Toe is also very fascinating and we have had people come up to Dawson just to do the Toe.” Later this summer, the hotel plans to fly Griffiths and his wife to the Yukon so that he can take part in the tradition with his very own donated appendage.

Asked if there’s any health hazard associated with toe-tainted alcohol (or swallowing the toe), Gerle says there’s nothing to worry about. “As long as its preserved and stored properly on rock salt and people use 40 percent alcohol to drink it,” he says, “the Chief Medical Officer of the Yukon has given it a green light.

"We would like to receive more to keep the tradition going,” says Gerle. “Big toes are the best.”

Boozed-up intellectuals of the world, unite.

A spectre is haunting Trier, Germany—the spectre of Karl Marx. Today, tourists to the small Rhineland city visit the house where Marx was born and gaze at the armchair he died in. They take selfies in front of a larger-than-life Marx statue, gifted to the city in 2018 by the Chinese government. And if they want a more embodied experience of the revolutionary, who spent the first two decades of his life in Trier, the official tourism outfit offers several guided costume tours, says Dr. Paula Koltz, a historian and marketer at the agency. Visitors can opt to learn about the city from a period-era nightwatchman or Marx’s wife, editor, and fellow revolutionary, Jenny von Westphalen.

While Trier officials don’t have precise figures on how many tourists come specifically for Karl Marx-related attractions, Kolz says that 160,000 visitors attended Marx’s 200th birthday exhibition in 2018. In the same year, 60,000 tourists visited the Marx House, which is now a museum, according to Margret Dietzen, a Museum Educator. Visitors come from all over the world, the two officials say, but there’s a particularly robust Chinese tourism market, ostensibly from groups seeking a connection to Communist history.

One aspect of Trier’s tourism seems unassociated with Marx: the region’s wine industry. The rolling hills of the nearby Mosel River Valley are striated with rows of orderly arbors. But these small vineyards, now known for their fruity white wines, played a larger role in the history of leftist thought than their quaint appearance might suggest. In the early 1840s, the economic struggles of these very vineyards inspired Marx to criticize the draconian Prussian government—and in the process, some historians argue, begin developing the theory of historical materialism for which he is best known.

“It’s the first time he had cared about economic questions at all,” says Jens Baumeister, a Trier tour guide and author who describes himself as “an art historian, archaeologist, wine lecturer, and Marx lecturer.” In 2018, Baumeister published a book whose title features an even bolder claim: How Wine Made Karl Marx a Communist.

In his student days, though, Marx was more interested in drinking wine than in writing about the economics of it. Son of a bourgeois Jewish family that had converted to Chistianity in accordance with the reigning Prussian religion, Marx grew up at a time when wine was a staple beverage, not considered alcohol the way liquor was. Like many of their wealthy contemporaries, who acquired land as an investment and to stock their own cellars, the Marxes owned part of a vineyard. When 17-year-old Marx moved to Bonn as a college student in 1835, he brought these boozy proclivities with him.

“The idea that he was president of the college drinking club is just a legend,” says Baumeister. But it’s an oft-repeated one, and it has some basis. Marx and his friends “spent their time in Bonn’s taverns, drinking heavily, and then brawling with other students,” writes Jonathan Sperber in his biography of Marx. Marx’s drinking inspired letters of consternation from his father, who disparaged his “wild rampaging.”

Yet Marx’s “rampaging” reflected a deeper divide in German politics. The brawls resulted from tensions between mostly untitled, bourgeois students from Trier, who were discontent with Prussian rule, and aristocratic students from eastern Prussia, who were more supportive of the government. When Marx finished his studies and moved to Cologne, some 100 miles north of his native Trier, he turned his attention toward these political and economic issues. This time, however, they were expressed not in wine drinking, but in wine growing. The Mosel Valley vintners were in crisis.

It was a long time in the making. When the Prussians regained control of Germany from Napoleon in 1815, they implemented policies favorable to the winemakers. They imposed tariffs that protected Mosel winemakers from outside competition. That, combined with several good growing years in the early-19th century, meant that by the 1820s, Mosel’s winemakers were on their way up. But according to Sperber, in the 1830s, the Prussians did an about-face, abruptly opening the market. Winemakers who had invested in equipment, growth, and property with the expectation of a protected market found themselves facing uncertainty, and falling prices hit smaller growers especially hard. By the time Marx moved to Cologne in 1842, there was still no relief in site.

While still a devoted drinker, Marx had also become a serious student, a devoted Hegelian who saw history as a forward march propelled by conflict between opposing ideological forces. In 1842, Marx joined a newly established, liberal-leaning newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung, as editor. Inspired by the influence of French socialism and the dire economic straits of the Mosel vintners, he began publishing articles critical of the Prussian government.

“For a long time the desperate state of the vine-growers was doubted in higher quarters, and their cry of distress was regarded as an insolent shrieking,” wrote Marx. “The ruin of the poorer vine-growers is regarded [by Prussian authorities] as a kind of natural phenomenon, to which one must be resigned in advance, seeking only to mitigate the inevitable.” But, Marx went on, the struggles of the growers were not natural or inevitable: They were a direct result of material conditions and Prussian policies, and they could be changed. Friedrich Engels, a wealthy industrialist and Marx’s co-writer, co-revolutionary, and, by all accounts, best friend, summed up the effects of the episode on Marx’s thinking simply: Through his writing on the Mosel wine growers, Engels wrote, Marx “was led from pure politics to economic relationships and so to socialism.”

It also made him an outlaw. The Prussian government, notorious for its deep-seated aversion to criticism and its terrifyingly efficient army, was enraged by Marx’s criticism. In March 1843, they shut down the Rheinische Zeitung entirely. The same year, Marx fled to Paris, inaugurating a pattern of repeated exile that would follow Marx across Europe for decades. Marx and Jenny von Westphalen moved to Paris and eventually to London, where he would author Capital.

Marx’s political and financial woes did not, however, dampen his drinking. Wilhelm Liebknecht, a German socialist and contemporary of Marx and Engels, recalls an evening in London when Marx and an intellectual compatriot went on what can only be described as a bender. They drank “in every saloon between Oxford Street and Hampstead Road,” smashed several street lamps, and narrowly avoided the police.

Marx’s personal habits were similarly free-spirited. “He leads the existence of a real Bohemian intellectual,” wrote a Prussian intelligence agent who had been assigned to trail Marx. “Washing, grooming, and changing his linen are things he does rarely, and he likes to get drunk.” Of course, says Baumeister, besmirching Marx’s reputation was the agent’s job. But decades of correspondence between Marx, Engels, and Marx’s wife, Jenny, in which he thanked Engels for sending the impoverished family wine or requested more, verify at least the last section of the spy’s report. Sometimes, Marx and Engel’s zest for pleasure and politics came together. When asked by an English pollster in 1865 what his idea of happiness was, Engels replied, “Chateau Margaux 1848.” 1848 was the year revolutions swept Europe. It was also a great year for French wine.

A century and a half later, Trier’s residents continue to benefit from tourists’ interest in Marx’s legacy, even while some locals have reservations about celebrating the revolutionary. When the People’s Republic of China gifted the city its Marx statue last year, protestors leery of the government’s long record of human rights abuse demonstrated against its installation. With Cold War trauma running deep in Germany, says Kolz, “We have a very stiff relationship to Karl Marx.” Still, says Margret Dietzen of Karl Marx House, the past few years have seen an uptick in visits to the museum, part of what she calls a “a Marx renaissance” in response to the 2008 financial crisis.

The vintners of Germany’s Mosel Valley remain mostly small-scale, noted for their lemony Rieslings and agrotourism. At least one of these local vintners, however, remembers the wine-lover who went to bat for their industry. In 2008, Erben von Beulwitz Spätburgunder, a small vineyard nearby the erstwhile Marx winery, produced a Karl Marx Pinot Noir—a capitalist enterprise, to be sure, but one the booze-loving revolutionary would likely have appreciated.

An innovative research center dedicated to blood, biting, and beating back malaria.

Somewhere off the main road in the village of Soumousso in Burkina Faso is another village—built entirely for mosquitoes. It doesn’t look quite like the others in the southwest of the country, or anywhere else, for that matter. There are a few huts, but they reside within domes of fine mesh netting that cover an area approximately the size of three tennis courts. In the place of beds, there are small pools of stagnant water. And there are no human residents, just several calves who are well-fed and blithely unaware that they have been offered up as a smorgasbord for the world’s most annoying bug. But it takes a village to raise (and kill) a mosquito.

This quasi-village is the brainchild of researchers from the United States and Burkina Faso, who call it the MosquitoSphere. For several years, they’ve been using it as a lab to test the latest weapon in the country’s ongoing battle with malaria: a transgenic fungus biologically engineered with spider venom to put mosquitoes—and the pathogens they carry—in an early grave. And it seems to have worked, with 99 percent of the mosquitoes trapped with the fungus dying within a month of testing. The researchers, from the University of Maryland and the Research Institute of Health Sciences & Centre Muraz in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso, recently published their results in the journal Science.

Burkina Faso is one of the worst places in the world to be bitten by a mosquito, which helps make it one of the best places in the world to study malaria. With more than 7.9 million cases of the parasitic disease recorded in 2017, Burkina Faso is one of the 10 malaria-ridden countries that is not on track to meet targets for disease control mandated by the World Health Organization, according to the study. In many ways, it was the obvious place to erect the MosquitoSphere, according to Brian Lovett, an entomologist at the University of Maryland and the study’s lead author.

Soumousso has been a hotbed of malaria research since the 1980s. The village hosted out some of the first-ever tests of insecticide-treated bed nets, according to Science. At first, it seemed like these nets were a magic bullet. They saved millions of lives by combining traditional physical protection from mosquitoes with pyrethroid insecticides, which generally pose little threat to mammals and are highly effective against bugs in low doses. Invariably, however, mosquitoes find a way to out-evolve our best efforts to contain them. They grew resistant to the insecticide, and the epidemic raged on. But this history of fighting mosquitoes in Burkina Faso made it an ideal site for state-of-the-art malaria research labs, according to Raymond St. Leger, an entomologist at the University of Maryland and one of the authors of the study. Soumousso in particular is a great place for this, since it knows its mosquitoes so well: what subspecies are present, how their populations are structured, and which are insecticide-resistant, Lovett says.

These labs, along with others in sub-Saharan Africa, have played with fungus as a possible mosquito exterminator for over a decade. In 2005 scientists experimented with a naturally occurring fungus called Metarhizium, a natural enemy of the mosquito. Its spores did manage to kill malaria-transmitting mosquitoes in a trial in Tanzania, but not fast enough to stop them from transmitting malaria, and some mosquitoes didn’t absorb enough spores to kick the bucket. In years of research, no fungus has emerged that could kill swiftly and effectively enough.

The researchers from Maryland and Bobo-Dioulasso decided to try out a genetically engineered, superpowered strain of Metarhizium that combines the spore-specific delivery of a fungus with the stopping power of another order of creatures entirely. “Spiders have been engineered through evolution to create proteins that specifically kill insects,” Lovett says. “So we’re using the fungus as a way to deliver that toxin into the blood of an insect.”

They chose the Blue Mountains funnel-web spider (Hadronyche versuta), from New South Wales, Australia. The critters pack a lot of punch in their venom, and the toxin in it is one of the few insecticidal proteins deemed safe for use around humans, Lovett says. The venom first must be extracted in a process called milking. Glenn King, a biochemist at the University of Queensland, milked many a funnel-web spider (a tricky process that involves placing the spider in a tiny contraption that massages the muscles around their venom glands so they drip directly into a tiny vial) for the malaria research team.

To bioengineer this super-fungus, researchers spliced in a gene that allows the spider to produce its toxin. For good measure, they threw in an extra genetic switch to ensure the fungus only produces the toxin when it comes in contact with a mosquito’s hemolymph (the insect equivalent of blood). Once the venom is in the fungus, the next challenge was to determine where and how to disseminate the spores. The researchers sourced locally available black cotton cloth, soaked it in a solution of sesame oil and spores, and then hung the sheets in the MosquitoSphere.

You may be wondering: Why the domes? Why not, perhaps, a controlled laboratory setting with little threat from the rainy season or a coup? According to guidelines from the World Health Organization, findings in lab-bound mosquito research cannot be extrapolated to the unpredictable, complicated world outside. So a net enclosure is the right kind of controlled setting to simulate a natural environment, where mosquitoes ought to behave more or less like they would anywhere else.

Designed by a Finnish architect, the MosquitoSphere resembles three large, connected greenhouses, subdivided into six smaller compartments, all under a roof of double-layered netting. Four of the compartments contain test huts, native plants, and mosquito breeding sites. “It’s a striking sight when you’re driving up alongside the village,” Lovett says. “The netting started out white, but the soil is very red, so now it’s pinkish brown.”

To acquire their tiny, sacrificial test subjects, the research team had locals from Soumousso collect larvae of the insecticide-resistant Anopheles coluzzii mosquitoes from puddles in town. Larvae don’t carry malaria—adult mosquitoes pick it up from biting an infected host—which guaranteed that the experiment would be parasite-free. The researchers reared these grubs into adults within the enclosure.

The scientists’ first stab at the experiment sounds something like a witch’s spell. At twilight, the researchers released 100 female insecticide-resistant mosquitoes into each hut so the insects could feed on the blood of a calf. (The calves are generally undisturbed by this, since they're not exposed to any more mosquitos in the enclosure than they would be outside.) The bugs were later collected to be monitored for fungal infections. As the work evolved, the researchers hung sesame oil–soaked cloth on the walls of three separate huts, each within its own netted chamber. One piece of cloth was laden with the genetically engineered spores, one with natural spores, and one with no spores at all. The researchers then released 1,000 adult male and 500 adult female mosquitoes into each chamber and monitored them for 45 days. In the spore-less hut, the mosquitoes quickly established a burgeoning society of around 1,400. In the hut with natural spores, 450 survived. In the hut with venomous spores, a mere 13 mosquitoes staggered out.

The MosquitoSphere results, though promising, are preliminary. Deploying the fungus in the real world constitutes releasing a genetically modified species, something that makes many scientists cringe, for good reason. It will require much more testing and many layers of bureaucratic approval, an expensive and time-consuming process. But there’s reason to think it might work. Unlike some other fungal spores, Metarhizium is not airborne; its spores are heavy and sticky. The fungus is also extremely sensitive to light, so it will be difficult for it to spread in some kind of uncontrolled way, should it ever make it outside the dome, by accident or on purpose.

Money and technology conspire to make it difficult to control malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, so the researchers are particularly excited about this project it is relatively lo-fi—just sesame oil, spores, and cloth. From the very beginning of the process, citizens of Soumousso have volunteered to assist, and the scientists have trained them to maintain the enclosure so it will be ready for the next wave of experiments. “It is their sphere,” St. Leger says, adding that scientists in Burkina Faso already have plans to continue using the dome for malaria experimentation.

According to Lovett’s best guess, this technology won’t be ready for practical use for another five to 10 years. “We need to have conversations with regulators on international and local levels, and we have to engage the community to get their permission to use this technology before we try it in the field,” he says. “But it’s a scientific milestone.”

Won't you please spare a thought (and some lawn space) for the rusty patched bumblebee?

The rusty patched bumblebee is in a pickle. Over the past few decades, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), the population of the chunky, fuzzy species has fallen by nearly 90 percent. Bombus affinis once buzzed around 28 states, plus D.C. and two provinces of Canada, but by 2017, the FWS reported that there were only “small, scattered populations” in 13 states and a single province. Some of these clusters are fairly sizable—including ones around Minnesota’s Twin Cities, in particular—but the agency noted that other populations “are so small that it is unclear whether they still exist.” The FWS attributed the bee’s unsteady state to a combination of dwindling grassland habitats, disease, and pesticides, and that same year, B. affinis became the first bumblebee listed under the Endangered Species Act.

Things are starting to look a little less doomy and gloomy for the rust-colored insect. In the Midwest, at least, last year’s observations “were encouraging,” says Tamara Smith, a biologist at the FWS’s Twin Cities field office. The bee was spotted in larger groups than in recent years, and sometimes seen in places where it hadn’t been noticed before. Now, as of May 2019, Minnesota is doing more to boost its ranks.

Officials recently crowned the little creature with the warm-and-fuzzy title of “state bee,” and put financial muscle behind efforts to buoy it. The state budget bills freshly signed by Governor Tim Walz include $900,000 earmarked for bee-friendly spaces. From that coffer, the government will foot the bill for some residents who are game to sow a meadow of plants handpicked to enchant bees.

Plenty of experts are already waging campaigns against patches of uninterrupted and highly manicured grass. These swaths aren’t particularly enticing to bees and other pollinators—plus, they’re fussy. Lawns demand to be mowed and fertilized, and they’re thirsty, hankering for regular soakings even when a community is in the midst of a drought and urged to use as little water as possible. Instead, some apian enthusiasts champion yards brimming with small flowers, trees, and shrubs. In the Midwest, the FWS service encourages people to plant anemones and wild lupine, bee balm and purple prairie clover, and goldenrod and New England aster for a smattering of blooms that will welcome pollinators throughout spring, summer, and fall.

Under the funding program, the state will reimburse homeowners for 75 to 90 percent of the cost of installing bee-friendly gardens, according to the Star Tribune—but the paper reports that the state Board of Water and Soil Resources, which will administer the initiative, is still hashing out specifics about how to apply and what fits the bill. State Representative Kelly Morrison told the Star Tribune that she hopes that project will be up and running by spring 2020. When it’s a go, “we think that abundant and diverse floral resources will translate to larger and healthier rusty patched bumblebee colonies,” Smith says. And the landscape will look pretty, to boot.

And scientists are making new discoveries about them using satellite imagery.

Along the Chinese coast of the East China Sea and around Taiwan’s Matsu Islands, depending on the time of the year, fluorescent blue sparkles dance across the ocean’s surface. It sounds—and looks—like something dreamed up by Pixar, but China’s “blue tears,” as they’re known, are a naturally occurring phenomenon. New research is bringing scientists a step closer to understanding just how they work.

The blue tears are, surprisingly, caused by red Noctiluca scintillans, balloon-shaped, single-celled microorganisms known as dinoflagellates. These tiny creatures give off a bioluminescent glow when they are disturbed, and the larger the collection of them, the more spectacular the light show. However, red N. scintillans is associated with red tides, blooms of algae and other microorganisms that can sap water of its oxygen and produce conditions toxic to other forms of marine life. Tracking blooms of these dinoflagellates is no easy task, since they’re not entirely predictable. A study just published in Geophysical Research Letters offers a new approach to studying these red tides.

In 2000, a Belgian research team found that red N. scintillans (as opposed to the green variety) scatter more red light than any other microorganism in the ocean, so in addition to the light they emit, their formation and movement can change the overall color of ocean water. Scientists from the National Taiwan Ocean University, the University of South Florida, and several universities in China searched for these changes using special sensors on two NASA satellites and the International Space Station. Almost 1,000 images covering 17 years were painstakingly investigated for color patterns. The research team was able to identify the color patterns of red N. scintillans blooms, and found that they can occur farther away from the shore and in warmer water than previously observed.

According to Chuanmin Hu, from the University of South Florida and coauthor of the study, this gap in knowledge could be because, to date, researchers have only been able to study the creatures from ships, which restricts where and when they can get out to them. “In contrast, satellite images can show algae features in more extensive regions and in different months,” says Hu, via email.

The satellite imagery also revealed that these blooms are becoming more abundant in the region. Hu believes this may be a direct result of development along China’s coast, expanded use of aquaculture, and heavy agricultural runoff. “Coastal eutrophication is speculated to be a major reason of the observed increases,” says Hu. The nutrients from increased use of fertilizer in China, according to the study, could be causing the dinoflagellates to become more abundant, says Hu.

The new, wide-ranging data are going to be useful, but there’s still a lot we don’t know about this striking phenomenon. “The bluish bioluminescence of [red N. scintillans] is fascinating and beautiful. At the same time, it plays a role in ocean ecology, so more research is required to go beyond the beautiful phenomenon to better understand this role.”

The magnificent moa is no more.

When one thinks about iconic New Zealand birds, the one that comes to mind is invariably the fuzzy brown kiwi. But lost to time is another bird, one that long ago loomed over the chicken-sized kiwi. Enter the moa: nine species of flightless bird that once sprinted around New Zealand. While the smallest, such as the turkey-sized bush moa, were fairly petite, the South Island giant moa clocked in at two meters (6.5 feet) tall. In its time, it was the tallest bird to walk the earth; larger females weighed more than 500 pounds. With their long necks, rotund bodies, and total lack of wings, they must have been an imposing sight. And for the Polynesians who arrived in canoes on the shores of New Zealand in the 13th century, they were a delicious one.

Before the arrival of humans, New Zealand was the land of the birds. In place of large carnivores, of which it had none, an avian hierarchy flourished, from the burrowing mutton birds to the gigantic but now extinct Haast’s eagle, which perched at the top of the food chain. Despite being prey for the Haast’s eagle, moa proliferated across New Zealand, inhabiting different ecosystems suited to their size and diets. The South Island giant moa could reach high branches, and the heavy-footed moa stuck to “open herb fields.”

This hierarchy was upended with the arrival of the people now called the Māori. Starting in Asia, most likely Taiwan, Polynesians traveled across the Pacific for thousands of years, populating islands along the way. New Zealand was the last stop, and the last major, uninhabited landmass to be settled by humans. For food, the new settlers brought taro and yams, some of the traditional canoe plants of the Polynesians, along with rats and dogs for meat. But New Zealand proved to be fertile hunting grounds.

Lacking any wing bones, moa couldn’t fly away from their new foes. But, considering their large leg bones, much speculation has been made over their speed, not to mention the power of their kicks. (Mark Twain, on seeing a moa skeleton, wrote, “It must have been a convincing kind of kick. If a person had his back to the bird and did not see who it was that did it, he would think he had been kicked by a wind-mill.”) Since newly arrived Māori hadn’t yet developed bows, hunting these large birds took some creativity.

For researchers, piecing together how moa were hunted has been an equally creative process, combining archeological and anthropological findings. To avoid contact with the larger moa, some researchers believe the Māori used snares to tangle up their prey, which was considered the traditional "Māori fowling method.” One prehistorian points to the Māori dog’s “strong neck, forequarters, and jaw” to conjecture they were bred to seize large game, including moa. Another historian, skeptical that dogs could handle these massive birds, has speculated that dogs helped drive moa to inescapable locations where they could be cornered and killed.

Hunts started from base camps that served as butchering sites. The enormous quantity of left-over bones buried in middens reveal key facts about how the Māori dealt with up to 500 pounds of dead moa. While smaller moa could be carried away whole, hunters dealt with larger ones, which were harder to heft, by cutting and carrying away only their meat-heavy legs. "It is tempting to imagine a line of successful hunters with giant drumsticks over their shoulders," writes James Belich in Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders.

In a recent study, three New Zealand scholars examined Māori sayings, or whakataukī, for clues about their relationship to moa, including cooking techniques. One, He koromiko te wahie i taona ai te moa, or “Koromiko is the wood with which the moa was cooked,” likely meant that koromiko branches were used to cover moa meat cooking in underground ovens. Researchers and scholars, who can only contemplate the moa’s formidable skeletons, have long speculated on how the bird tasted—their fattiness and their flavor. Most recently, researchers have conjectured that moa tasted similar to their closest relatives, the flightless tinamous of South America. Ironically, many species are over hunted because of their tasty meat.

When Polynesians first arrived in the 13th century, an estimated 160,000 moa roamed New Zealand. But they were annihilated within 150 years, in a process one study calls “the most rapid, human-facilitated megafauna extinction documented to date.” After all, moa had few natural predators (other than the giant eagles) and may not have been very afraid of humans. They lay few eggs—only one or two every breeding season—and took a long time to reach maturity. The Māori hunted them faster than they could reproduce, until they were gone.

While their demise was unusually fast, the disappearance of the moa was par for the course for human history. As early humans spread across the earth, they persistently hunted down the largest beasts around. Along with climate changes and human-caused ecosystem change, many researchers implicate hunting as a death knell for creatures from the giant ground sloth to the wooly mammoth. From this perspective, humanity's late arrival to New Zealand simply delayed the moa's execution date. By 1769, when Captain James Cook arrived on the shores of what is now New Zealand, the birds were long gone.

When British naturalist Richard Owen confirmed the existence of the moa in 1839 from a single bone, it created something of a moa craze. After all, moa were as unique as the kiwi, as extinct as the dodo, and more monumental than any other bird. Twenty years later, a workman unearthed the largest moa egg ever known: the Kaikoura egg, which had been nestled next to a body in a grave. It likely weighed almost nine pounds when fresh, and is now on display at the Te Papa museum in Wellington. From perfectly preserved feet to their very footsteps, remnants of the moa continue to be discovered. While they live no more, it’s hard to erase the existence of such an epic avian.

Years of drought have left them tragically empty.

Across Kiriwina, dense rainforest gives way to wide, open clearings studded with ornate wooden houses. Arranged in concentric rings, the innermost structures tend to be taller, brighter, and palpably more important, with carefully-stacked logs bearing intricate designs painted in red, white, and black. But the residents of these stately structures, at first glance, aren’t so dazzling—nor are they human. For a few months each year, these bwema, or yam houses, will be filled with piles of brown, bulbous tubers.

Kiriwina is part of the Trobriands, a cluster of small, coral islands off the coast of Papua New Guinea that have long captured the minds and loins of Western anthropologists and travel writers. In the early 1900s, Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski spent several years studying the islands and wrote an ethnographic collection that gained widespread popularity across the West. His observations of the islanders’ seemingly sexually explicit dances and relaxed attitude toward extramarital affairs put the Trobriands on the map as “The Islands of Love.” Since then, travel publications and news outlets have depicted the islands as a place where affairs are encouraged, dances are suggestive, and sex is pervasive. But, for most Trobrianders, what lies at the heart of family and community—the very reason for dancing—is yams.

“They are, in many ways, more important than money,” says Dr. Michelle MacCarthy, an anthropologist and assistant professor at Saint Mary’s University who has spent several years on the Trobriand Islands studying cultural representation, notions of authenticity, and exchange. Nearly every family has a separate kaymata garden exclusively for yams, grown for someone else in the community, often a sister, mother, or village headman. No matter who receives them, the tubers, MacCarthy says, touch everyone from a bride-to-be to the Paramount Chief. They inspire annual celebrations, enable proper grieving, and even structure the calendar year, which aligns with the yam-harvesting cycle. The Kilivila word for “year” is teytu—also the word for the esteemed Dioscorea esculenta, or lesser yam.

But, in the very soil that carpets each kaymata, a change is underway. According to Dr. MacCarthy, recent years have seen greater food insecurity across the islands, and a scarcity of yams. Harvest after harvest, towering bwema have stood achingly empty. Heaping piles of bulbous yams, once a key feature of every kaymata garden, have grown smaller or disappeared. As yam yields dwindle, the very tastes, sounds, customs, and beliefs integral to life on the Trobriands are beginning to change.

While no one has pinpointed how yams first gained such high regard across the islands, it’s not difficult to make a case for their contemporary adoration. Relative to other root vegetables grown in the Pacific, they’re exceedingly nutritious—high in fiber, vitamins A and C, and protein. According to Dr. MacCarthy, they’re also trickier to grow than most other crops on the islands, and, unlike root vegetables such as sweet potato and cassava, they can only be grown once a year.

“Any fool can stick some [sweet potato] seedlings in the ground,” she says, recalling her own planting endeavors. “It doesn't take any particular skill.” But this kind of yam, she notes, require deep knowledge of soil composition, frequent thinning, staking of the vines, and an expert assessment of ripeness. A bit of magic helps, too. Malinowski recorded countless spells performed by a towosi, or professional gardening magician—although McCarthy says most gardeners now engage in garden magic on their own accord.

Why go to such great lengths to plant yams? Traditionally, the tubers have been a kind of social currency. Although land ownership in the Trobriand Islands follows the matriline, married women often live with their husbands—meaning few people live on land that belongs to them. Rather, they obtain the right to live on, and cultivate, someone else’s land, as long as they’re on decent terms with the village elder. But this can all change on a whim. To remain in the good graces of the village elder, says Dr. MacCarthy, villagers must pay their dues in yams—or else get kicked out.

“The headman felt that [my host father] wasn't producing enough tribute in yams,” she says. Meanwhile, her host father, Mata, couldn’t claim any official right to the land. His mother was not originally from the hamlet he was born into, as she had moved out of her natal hamlet after marrying his father. So one year, after coming up short in yams, Mata was booted out.

“There's an expectation for each household to produce yams so that it can meet social obligations,” says Dr. MacCarthy, “and no amount of money will substitute for that.”

There are two native species of yams grown in the Trobriands, the long kuvi yam and the lesser teytu yam. True to its name, the long yam can grow up to 4 feet in length, and is used almost exclusively for decoration, while the more bulbous teytu yam is exchanged and eaten. After the harvest, both varieties enter someone’s yam house, stacked meticulously and kept on display until they’re needed for a feast or social function. Carefully constructed to allow for proper circulation, yam houses keep these lesser yams from spoiling for up to eight months. Most teytu yams will be eaten throughout the year, but if any remain long enough to rot, it’s a celebrated sign of an abundant crop.

While some teytu are given as tribute, others are saved for funeral feasts. These funerary ceremonies typically take place several months following a family member’s death to allow relatives to amass sufficient goods, including yams, which are doled out raw or cooked (most often, roasted). Yam exchanges during these feasts are elaborate, and follow a complex set of rules. “You give yams, you receive yams … It wouldn't be the same to just eat the yams that you made yourself,” Dr. MacCarthy says. “The act of exchange is what matters.”

For a long time, Milamala, the months-long harvest period during which these mortuary feasts take place, has been marked by celebration. Kicked off by gogebila, the ceremonial carrying of yams from individual gardens to the yam-houses, it’s a period of recreation, tradition, and play. In his book Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Malinowski elaborated in great detail on these multi-village festivities that lasted from a few days to more than a month. “During such a time of festivities, the inhabitants of a village will dance day after day,” he wrote, “in full dress … with facial painting, floral decorations, valuable ornaments, and a head-dress of white cockatoo feathers.”

Milamala is contingent upon a bumper crop of yams, and traditionally has entailed rich, tuber-heavy feasts and fierce dancing competitions funded by the chief. It’s during this period that the islands burst to life with color, sound, and kalibom, a celebratory nighttime dance featuring mweki, the pelvic-thrusting move that shocked 20th-century Western travelers and Christian missionaries.

But, according to Dr. MacCarthy, this hasn’t happened in over a decade. A marker of a fruitful harvest, traditional Milamala has recently become obsolete. In the hopes of drawing tourism, an entrepreneurial Trobriander running a lodge threw her own iteration in 2009. But for most Trobrianders, it was blasphemous. There was nothing to celebrate, and nothing to celebrate with.

Particularly bad droughts hit in 2009, 2010, and 2016, and, amidst these poor growing conditions, the islands’ population has spiked. More hamlets have sprung up, leaving less arable land to go around. Over-farming has drained the soil of important nutrients. Yams, once harvested in surplus, are growing scarce—threatening to unravel the social and political fabric of the islands.

“Chiefs are expected to have full yam houses—that’s how they materially demonstrate their wealth, their power, and their ability to receive tribute,” says Dr. MacCarthy. “For a chief to have an empty yam house is ultimately to say that he's not a worthwhile leader, because he can't compel people to grow yams for him.”

Due to these modest harvests, the current Paramount Chief has fewer wives, fewer people expected to produce yams for him, and ultimately, fewer yams to offer, threatening his public image. And as food insecurity has increased the need for intervention from the national government, traditional village leaders are beginning to lose some of their political power. “It shifts the governance even further toward a Western style,” she says, “with the chief having an ever-less important role.”

Poor yam yields have also increased most families’ reliance on store-bought goods, purchased with cash brought home by Trobrianders working in urban centers. It’s also pushed people to cling to resources and develop a nuclear-family-centered focus, says Dr. MacCarthy. “If you diminish the importance of those extended kinship networks, you diminish the need for yams, and vice versa.”

But the most dramatic social change, Dr. MacCarthy says, is that yam theft—once considered the ultimate taboo—has become a daily occurrence during droughts. Yams were once carefully stacked in a conical heap and left out for display in the kaymata for months before being ceremoniously transported by young men and women to the recipient’s yam house. But people have stopped displaying their yams. Those who can afford it pay for a truck to lug the tubers to the village.

“In the past, stealing was seen as the most shameful thing you could possibly do—but it happens all the time now,” says MacCarthy. “People are hungry, and they're desperate, and they'll take what they can find.”

Outside of the Trobriands, this hasn’t widely been recognized as an issue of climate change. But it’s difficult to avoid seeing it as one. The islands—small, coral atolls barely above sea level—are highly vulnerable.

Subjected to the whims of El Niño, the Trobriands are no strangers to wild weather, aberrant growing conditions, and occasional scarcity. But researchers have linked warmer temperatures to intensifying impacts of El Niño, which doesn’t bode well for an increasingly hot Papua New Guinea. Rising sea levels, which have been surging locally by around 7mm per year since 1993—twice the global average—will cause flooding, and eventually, a dwindling availability of land. Across the board, agriculture in the Trobriands is projected to soon begin to flail, impacted by heat stress on crops, changes in precipitation, and extreme weather events.

The immediate fate of the Trobriands’ yams is uncertain. With any luck, next year will bring heavier rainfalls and a proper Milamala, with feasts, elated nights of kalibom, and yam houses full to the brim with ripe teytu and colossal kuvi. But, as weather patterns become increasingly erratic, it’s difficult to imagine a sustained future of abundance. Already, Trobrianders are beginning to grapple with what the future will look like.

Dr. MacCarthy hasn’t been back since 2016, but she recalls, in her last year, a sweeping sentiment of unsettlement. “Most Trobrianders recognize that there are climatic conditions that are beyond their control,” she says. “But there was a growing anxiety around the future. Like, ‘What are we supposed to do? Growing yams is part of who we are.’”

In the recording, she likens Diego Rivera to a toad.

Somewhere along the winding cobblestone streets of the historic center in Coyoacán, Mexico City, there is a library devoted entirely to sound. The archives of the National Sound Library of Mexico—or Fonoteca Nacional—contain the obvious sorts of sounds: musical scores, concert performances, and sound art. But the library also preserves the voices of famous figures from Mexican history, people who may have died long ago but still speak through the reedy tape of a recorder. On June 12, 2019, the library announced it may have uncovered the only known recording of one of Mexico’s most beloved, iconoclastic residents, Frida Kahlo, according the AP.

The 90-second recording, which can be heard here, captures an unidentified woman with a soft, melodious voice describing Diego Rivera, the Mexican painter and Kahlo’s husband. The woman reads from Kahlo’s essay “Portrait of Diego,” published in a catalogue of a 1949 exhibition at the Palace of Fine Arts celebrating Rivera’s lifetime of work. “He is a huge, immense child, with a friendly face and a sad gaze,” the woman in the recording says. “His high, dark, extremely intelligent and big eyes rarely hold still. They almost pop out of their sockets because of their swollen and protuberant eyelids—like a toad’s.” The voice continues to characterize Rivera in a ruthless kind of fondness, noting his “meaty lips” and likening his “childish, narrow, rounded shoulders” to “an inscrutable monster,” according to The New York Times.

The recording, taken on open reel tape, was unearthed in a private collection of the late Mexican radio personality Alvaro “El Bachiller” Galvez y Fuentes, taken from a pilot episode of his 1955 radio show El Bachiller. The clip introduces the speaker as a female painter “who no longer exists,” which the library’s researchers believe could be a nod to the fact that Kahlo died in 1954. They estimate the recording was made in the last years of Kahlo’s life.

Meanwhile, the library’s researchers will investigate the recording to say for certain whether it is of Kahlo. They plan to listen to the remaining 1,300 tapes in the El Bachiller collection, speak to living sources, and consult audio experts, according to the AP. A recent analysis of the sound waves in the recording prove the speaker was not a professional announcer, as she audibly lisps and you can hear when she takes a breath, Pável Granados, the director of the library, told NBC News. He added that Guadalupe Rivera Marín, the granddaughter of Diego Rivera, says she recognizes the recording as Kahlo. But Esteban Volkov, the grandson of León Trotsky, who carried on a tumultuous affair with Kahlo, isn’t convinced, according to NBC News.

The National Sound Library is housed in the historic Casa Alvarado, built in the 18th century under Andalusian and Moorish influence. In 2005, the house and its historic gardens were restored to their original colors and conditions, according to the Mexican government. For years, the two most requested voices at the library were Kahlo’s and that of Mexican Independence Hero Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, according to El País. If you’re interested and happen to be in Mexico City, you can wander in the museum and hear Kahlo (probably) speak for herself.

In arcades across the land, at all hours of the day, people vie for both novel and practical prizes.

The tropical cities of Taiwan do not know the absolute stillness of late-night quiet. In a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant, people chat and dine. Light from the abundant 24/7 convenience stores leaks onto the darkened streets. And over the past few years, all-night arcades full of claw machines, in residential and entertainment districts alike, have drawn enthusiasts in the early hours. Hundreds of times every night, a coin is pushed into the slot, the plastic joystick maneuvered, a button pressed, and the claw drops onto plushies, Apple earphones, keychains, or...hair dryers.

The claw machine game is a straightforward one. For 10 Taiwanese Dollars (NT), or about 33 cents, a player uses a joystick to position the claw over a prize, then lowers it to pick up the object and drop it into a chute for retrieval. In other places around the world, it’s most commonly used for stuffed animals and sometimes candy.

In Taiwan, though, it isn’t uncommon for claw machine renters to stock their machines with anything from stuffed animals to vegetables, hairdryers, and lingerie. Arcades may have around 30 machines, each one sublet to a renter who is responsible for supplying the prizes and maintaining the machine. Most renters personalize their claw machines to target their desired customers. A machine might have bungee cord flooring and walls, its prize an oddly-shaped block that you trade in for a more expensive prize. Another common modification uses chopsticks to dangle prizes temptingly over the chute.

“The weirdest [claw machine I’ve seen] had to be some kind of naked model dolls,” Besu Yumin, a 26-year-old Taipei schoolteacher says. “Which I don’t think is appropriate, since kids go there.”

A whole culture has built up around the claw machine craze. Even in the middle of the night, players hone their prize-grabbing techniques. Enthusiasts are often found online, creating tutorials on tips and tricks, like wiggling the machine’s joystick in certain patterns to swing the claw. Claw machine renters also learn about what it means to run a business. They choose and place their prizes strategically, keeping their desired target market in mind. They adjust the settings of their machine to allow enough prizes to be won that players will return.

“You start out renting these claw machines with stuffed animals because it's easier,” says Dennis Zhao, who rents several claw machines near the Gongguan night market, “and then you can move into more difficult items when you learn your audience.”

If you ask Taiwanese residents, they aren’t sure when the machines started becoming so popular, but the number of companies running the country’s claw-game arcades has nearly tripled over the past two years, according to data from the Ministry of Finance. During a meeting held by the Finance Committee of the Legislative Yuan, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Chiang Yung-Chang said that over 100,000 people derive an income from the more than 10,000 claw machine arcades. According to the ministry, one arcade exists for every two convenience stores in Taiwan. (And if you’ve ever been to Taiwan, you know how ubiquitous convenience stores are, with three or four on nearly every block.) The number of arcades more than doubled from 2017 to 2018, and they are currently the Taiwanese entertainment industry’s largest tax income source. Taiwan's Central Bank had to raise its budget for 2019 to issue more NT$10 coins because of the claw machines.

But why have these games become so popular and stayed popular? Some Taiwanese news outlets have taken guesses. As already-low wages in Taiwan stagnate, young people and some office workers see the claw machines as a smart investment, since they generate a source of steady cash flow with minimal risk. “With salaries failing to keep up with the cost of living in Taiwan,” writes the South China Morning Post, “players see the machines as inexpensive entertainment while operators consider them an effective investment.”

An owner of an arcade generally rents out each of their 30 or so machines at NT$5,000 ($159) a month, turning a profit of about NT$150,000 ($4,765) a month, meaning they could break even in less than a year. In turn, a renter can make a profit of NT$5,000 ($159) per machine per month—without startup costs, without overhead fees, and without much risk. To put this in context, the average hourly wage in Taiwan is NT$150 ($4.77).

For the players, the machines can be an economically enticing option for restocking household supplies. With some machines containing prizes like toilet paper, hair dryers, and portable chargers, it’s often much cheaper to win them than buy them in the stores, even after several tries. Still, it’s the addictive nature of the game that makes it viable.

“I would play when I pass by, thinking it won’t cost much money anyway,” says Besu. “After giving it a try, you just have to get the thing you suddenly ‘want’ to have.”

The claw machine craze has not been without controversy. In November 2018, police charged a New Taipei man for selling live crabs and crayfish in a machine. In December 2017, the managers of a claw machine arcade, also in New Taipei, placed bikini-clad women inside the game, sparking fury and outrage about objectification.

Most of the concern, however, comes from the nature of the claw machines themselves. Common knowledge dictates that these claw games are rigged: The claws are too loose to even pick the prize up, or they let go just ever so slightly when the prize has been held, or fling the prize away from the chute. In the United States, claw vending machines are specifically exempted from statutes that regulate gambling devices—but only if they comply with certain rules.

Taiwanese news outlets have reported that people have been known to spend NT$4,000 to NT$5,000 ($127 to $159) per month on claw machines, which is often around half of a family’s food budget. In February 2018, after reports of children spending their breakfast money on the claw machines, Taiwanese legislators discussed requiring claw machine arcades to follow the regulations for video game arcades, stating that they cannot be built within 50 meters of junior-high or elementary schools, high schools, vocational schools or hospitals. A recent investigation performed by the Executive Yuan’s Consumer Protection Committee and the Consumers’ Foundation found that 70 percent of Taipei claw machine arcades sold illegal goods and violated at least seven laws and regulations. Many are within 100 meters of schools.

Tainan Municipal An-Nan Hospital psychiatrist Chang Chun-hung has warned the Taiwanese news outlet United Daily News about the addictive nature of claw machine games, saying that many Taiwanese have suffered disruptions to their professional and private lives because of claw machines.

Initially thought to be just a fad, claw machines are becoming a more permanent fixture of Taiwanese life. As Besu says, “I feel like it’s just like grabbing a cup of tea with potentially losing some money.”

Researchers nudged the construction date of some these landmasses, known as crannogs, back to the Neolithic period.

Lochs across Scotland are speckled with small, flat islets, known as crannogs. These may be rocky, or peaty, or studded with trees, and at first glance, “some people would think they are natural,” says Duncan Garrow, an associate professor of archaeology at the University of Reading. “However, in some cases they have obvious walls and causeways, which show they are man-made.” These little bits of land have long intrigued archaeologists, because in addition to being surrounded by water, they’re immersed in mystery. Researchers are still working to pinpoint precisely when humans lugged stones to build them, and why.

While the vast majority of Scotland's several hundred crannogs haven’t yet been studied in great detail, researchers once believed that the first examples dated back to the Iron Age. Now, in a new paper published in the journal Antiquity, Garrow and his co-author, the University of Southampton archaeologist Fraser Sturt, report that some of these crannogs in the Outer Hebrides—islands beyond the west coast of mainland Scotland—are several thousand years older. Some of these islets seem to have been built during the Neolithic era—even before Stonehenge’s rocks were nudged into place over in England.

As Garrow and Sturt tell it, the notion that Neolithic crannogs might exist in Scotland first took shape during the 1980s, when researchers excavating Eilean Domhnuill came across some Neolithic pottery. For a while, that site seemed to be an anomaly. Then, in 2012, Chris Murray, a former Royal Navy diver, descended into the water near Lewis, the largest landmass in the Outer Hebrides, and came across some Neolithic pottery strewn nearby. He looped in local conservation officials, and, using Google Earth, they identified other islets where they could go see what they could rustle up. Several of these subsequent dives also turned up other well-preserved fragments of similarly prehistoric pottery—sometimes just a single vessel, other times, several dozen.

In 2016 and 2017, with Murray’s help, Garrow and Sturt set out to learn more about the islets around Lewis. They used combinations of sonar, underwater diver surveys, aerial photography, GPS, coring, and excavation to learn more about what the places were made out of, and when they were built. To approximate the age of the crannogs, the team radiocarbon dated some of the objects found nearby. Fragments from the islets of Arnish, Bhorgastail, Duna (Ranish), and Langabhat all point to people first building and visiting them during the Neolithic period, between 3640–3360 B.C.

Many crannog mysteries remain, and the largest of those is pretty fundamental: What the heck were they used for? Garrow and Sturt aren’t the only ones wondering.

The team behind the Living on Water project—a collaborative effort funded by Historic Environment Scotland to document an Iron Age crannog in Loch Tay—has noted that the reason people built and used these places “remains stubbornly unclear.” Chances are good that they varied across time and place. “We now have people building and doing things on artificial islands in Lewis in the Neolithic, and then there is a 2,000-year gap and people begin doing it again, and this time across all of Scotland, in the Early Iron Age, sometime between 800-400 B.C." writes Michael Stratigos, a maritime archaeologist who studies crannogs and is working on the Living on Water project at Loch Tay, via email. "I am very wary to suggest Neolithic crannogs and Iron Age and later crannogs are part of the same tradition," Stratigos adds. "We call them all crannogs, which is fine, but they are no doubt built by very different communities for very different purposes."

Hauling and heaping 500-pound stones was no small feat, and Garrow and Sturt suggest that “such islets may well have represented substantial symbols for, and of, the communities that constructed them.” The authors note that each of the sites, isolated and monumental, “could also have been perceived as special places, their watery surroundings creating separation from everyday life."

To pin down more details about what was going on at the Neolithic sites, and how they differ from later crannogs, Garrow and Sturt hope to find more examples. Stratigos isn't so sure that they'll turn up beyond Lewis, especially where researchers have already radiocarbon dated other sites to confirm that they sprung up during the Iron Age. But "it is definitely worth still looking," Stratigos adds, and he suggests combing other places with similar geographies in the Outer Hebrides, as well as the Shetland Islands, farther north. For now, at least, we know that whatever Neolithic Scots were up to on some of those islets, it started much earlier than we thought.

Now there's nothing left of its whimsical crown.

Over the years, trees have had a special place in children’s literature. Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree is a story of growth, dedication, sacrifice, and loss. In The Story of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf, a Spanish bull escapes a bullfight and finds refuge under his favorite cork tree. And in The Lorax by Theodore Geisel (that’s Dr. Seuss to you and me), the titular creature is an early advocate for environmental preservation (the book was first published in 1971). As it turns out, the Truffula trees the Lorax so valiantly defends may have been based on a real life Monterey cypress (Cupressus macrocarpa) in La Jolla, California’s Ellen Browning Scripps Park. The literary icon fatally fell over on Thursday, June 13.

The Monterey cypress is native to central California, and has been recognized for its whimsical, irregular trunk and flat-topped evergreen leaves. Some have been known to reach 140 years of age, while others only reach 40. The Seussian cypress in La Jolla had a good run. “Based on review of the tree, the arborist estimates the tree to be approximately 100 years old,” says Tim Graham, a spokesman for the San Diego Parks and Recreation Department. While the city is still determining what exactly caused the tree’s (possibly premature) fall, Graham says, “We have had a very wet winter and that may have impacted the tree.”

Geisel lived in La Jolla, a small seaside community enveloped by the city of San Diego, for 43 years until his death in 1991. His home, high up above the coast, overlooked Ellen Browning Scripps Park and the inspirational cypress. And though the story of inspiration is a bit of local lore and has never been officially confirmed, the trees he illustrated in The Lorax certainly bear an uncanny resemblance to the recently departed cypress. (Similarly, researchers found a connection between the fictional Lorax character and the real-life patas monkey in 2018.)

The city of San Diego is exploring ways to memorialize the tree and its large trunk. “The City doesn’t have any definitive plans at this time, but finding ways to use the wood and repurpose it in some way is planned,” says Graham. “There is also initial discussion related to potentially planting another tree near the location of the original tree.” Most of the century old-tree was removed the day after it fell, but the trunk remains there for now. It remains to be seen who will speak for it.

Dallol can teach us a lot about Mars, and it needs to be protected.

The area around the Dallol volcano in Ethiopia is like nowhere else on Earth. Toxic chlorine and sulfur vapors clog the air and giant “mushrooms” made of iron-rich salt cover the landscape. The groundwater is near boiling when it bubbles up through the Earth’s crust, creating springs you absolutely would not want to bathe in.

The British explorer Wilfred Thesiger described the place as “a land of death.” But for scientists figuring out what life might look like on Mars and other distant worlds, the area’s particular combination of extremes is invaluable.

Extreme environments—whether an incredibly dry desert, an acidic river system, or an extremely hot hydrothermal vent—host some of the hardiest life on Earth. Organisms that can survive in these places are called extremophiles, and they’re pretty much the closest we can get to alien life without leaving our planet. So instead of packing their bags for a trip to Mars, scientists on the hunt for alien life can head to locations on Earth that resemble the Red Planet to figure out what they should be looking for when they finally get their hands on some Mars rock.

The Dallol volcano sits within the Danakil Depression in the Afar region of northern Ethiopia. It’s been called the hottest place on Earth, with winter temperatures consistently above 93 degrees Fahrenheit and summer temperatures that hit 122 degrees Fahrenheit. It is also one of the lowest places on Earth, with much of it lying hundreds of feet below sea level. The volcano itself only formed in 1926 when groundwater heated up and expanded enough to cause steam to erupt from the earth. The colorful hydrothermal system around it is made up of small, temporary geysers, hot and highly acidic springs, and mounds of salt that spit water, steam, and sulfurous gases. All of this is surrounded by an incredibly dry salt plain that is still mined by hand by the Afar people, who then transport salt blocks across the desert by camel caravan.

The Danakil depression is a shining example of a Mars analog, with a unique combination of extremities all wrapped up in one ecosystem. “Compared to other big hydrothermal systems, this one was completely different and totally unique,” says Barbara Cavalazzi, a geobiologist at the University of Bologna in Italy, who has been visiting the region since 2015. Because it ticks multiple boxes, any life that can survive there would be classed as a polyextremophile.

“The first time I saw it, and I walked through, I thought, ‘This is what I think Mars would look like,’” says Kennda Lynch, an astrobiologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, who first visited Dallol in early 2019. “It gives us everything. It's hydrothermal. It's wet, it's acidic, it's salty, and it has iron and it has sulfur in it. It's all these things together that would make sense for this type of habitable environment on Mars.”

Mars is rich in iron and sulfur, and billions of years ago was a hotbed of volcanic activity. The hydrothermal systems that existed on ancient Mars would have been much like those at Dallol today. Scientists trying to pin down how the earliest life on Earth formed think that the chemical disequilibrium found in hydrothermal systems should make them ideal places for life to start. But if we’re ever going to be able to sift through what’s left on the Red Planet in search of evidence of life, we need to know exactly what to look for.

As a microbial paleontologist, Cavalazzi is interested in the traces that ancient Martian organisms might have left behind in rocks. “The best approach is to understand the modern environment and translate the information to the fossil record,” she says. That means looking at how life is modifying its environment now in places like Dallol, and how those traces might persist throughout time in rocks.

Studying polyextremophiles in Dallol could also help us think about what life might look like in dramatically different but potentially inhabited worlds, such as Saturn’s moon Enceladus or Jupiter’s moon Europa. “The more work we do to understand life here, and the different ways that life could run, it forces us to really expand our view of what habitable is,” says Lynch.

In a study recently published in the journal Scientific Reports, Cavalazzi and her colleagues announced that they have found DNA evidence of incredibly small microbes inside “chimneys” made of salt and minerals in Dallol, but need to do more work to understand how they survive there.

Meanwhile, Lynch plans to analyze some initial samples from her first trip soon, but in the meantime, she is already planning another visit in 2020, when she’ll look at the Dallol hydrothermal system though the same kinds of instruments we use on Mars.

But just as scientists are discovering how useful the area could be in the search for alien life, its scientific sanctity is being put at risk.

In the last few years, the region has become much more accessible than it once was. When Cavalazzi first visited in 2015, it took a full day’s driving to get from the nearest city of Mekelle to Hamed’Ela, the village she and her colleagues use as a base camp when doing fieldwork. But she says a new road means the trip now takes just three hours.

A 2018 peace treaty between Ethiopia and Eritrea also means the area, which is close to the border, has become safer for tourists, and many now visit to see the distinctive scenery. Cavalazzi fears that the lack of protections for the site coupled with the increase in tourism she’s witnessed will mean that the environment’s microbiology could soon become contaminated. “You already can go there and see a lot of plastic bottles everywhere,” she says.

Tourists are not the only visitors that threaten the area: Danakil is rich in potash and industrial mining operations could also wreak havoc. Exploration of the area’s mining potential has been going on for over a decade, says Asfawossen Asrat, a geologist from Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, and at least two companies are still actively exploring, but have yet to begin exploiting the potash.

And while mining and tourism might be good for Ethiopia’s economy—the country made nearly 50 percent more money from the travel sector in 2018 than it did in 2017—anything that harms the unique landscape around Dallol could jeopardize the country’s scientific potential. “Ethiopia wants to be science leader, they want to be a science innovator,” says Lynch. “So we have to work with [local scientists] to help them work with their government to say, look, we need to protect the site a little bit more.”

Part of the problem, says Asrat, is that the government doesn't have existing laws that can be used to protect places specifically for their geology. "They can identify a park. They can identify a wildlife protection area or biodiversity area, but not a geological site," he says. Asrat and his colleagues are doing what they can to raise awareness and help convince the government of the long-term benefits of protecting the area, but he says it feels like they are swimming against the tide.

Ultimately protecting the Dallol hydrothermal system and the surrounding area will benefit more than just scientists who want to study it to learn about potential life on Mars. “It's a national resource for the country,” says Lynch. “We want to help them do what they can do to protect it, value it, and benefit from it.”

In 1948, Memphis channel WDIA became a community voice and a rock 'n' roll star-maker.

Although nearly 10 percent of the United States’s population was African-American following World War II, you wouldn’t know it by listening to the radio, the main form of entertainment at the time. White voices—almost exclusively male—dominated the airwaves. Even the actors portraying the African-American leads in the popular Amos and Andy radio program, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, were white.

White men owned the nation’s radio stations, too, and they programmed for white audiences. As a result, mainstream radio stations sounded very similar, which is why WDIA struggled to find an audience when it became Memphis’ sixth radio station in June 1947.

Like its competitors, WDIA initially featured white male radio personalities playing country and pop hits that appealed to white listeners, like “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)” by Tex Williams and “Time After Time” by Frank Sinatra. Similarly, its news and commentary reflected the interests of white Memphians even though roughly 40 percent of the city’s population was African-American.

Facing bankruptcy in October 1948, WDIA’s white owners, Bert Ferguson and John R. Pepper, realized they had to take a risk if they wanted to save their station. Instead of focusing their entire programming on white listeners, they decided to introduce a half-hour show aimed at “a big segment of the population that had musical tastes and community needs that were not being answered,” according to Ferguson in a recorded interview 20 years later.

Tan Town Jubilee premiered that October with Nat D. Williams, an African-American syndicated columnist, high school teacher, and local talent show host, playing blues records from his own collection. Aside from a few initial bomb threats from whites, it was well received. In fact, so many African Americans tuned in to listen to “Nat D.” that WDIA rapidly rose to the number two spot in the market.

In an interview with the Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum, singer and WDIA personality Rufus Thomas likened the program’s debut to when Jackie Robinson broke the racial barrier to become the first African American to play in Major League Baseball. For the first time, what African Americans in Memphis heard on the radio, in that half hour, was a reflection of their community.

Toni Bell, who grew up listening to WDIA and worked at the station in the 1980s, says hearing Williams, Thomas, and other African-American personalities on the radio meant so much because no one on the air before spoke directly to their community or addressed the issues that concerned them.

“WDIA was the only place we could get someone black talking to us,” she says.

Realizing they had tapped into something, Ferguson and Pepper expanded the station’s African-American content. One new blues and R&B program in the line-up, Hoot and Holler, opened with Thomas saying, "I'm young and loose and full of juice. I got the goose, so what's the use?" Within a year, WDIA had entirely converted to African-American programming and quickly became the number one station and the first to gross a million dollars annually in Memphis.

Bell explains it wasn’t just the music or even the personalities that made WDIA such a hit in Memphis and throughout the Mississippi Delta region when the station increased to 50,000 watts in 1954. It was the “shout outs.”

“People tuned in to hear if the DJ would mention seeing them on Friday night,” Bell says. “Or, the DJ might say, ‘I went to so-and-so barbecue in town last night.’ That was better than any advertising they could purchase.”

“Goodwill announcements”—service announcements for lost people and personal items—were extremely popular, too. Ferguson said in the recorded interview he initially thought they were a waste of time because only the person who lost the item and the person who found it would be interested. But he discovered that people throughout the Mississippi Delta felt a vested interested in seeing that person get their item back.

At one point, though, he admitted he thought the announcements had gotten out of control, and he chided the person handling them for broadcasting about “all the umbrellas that were lost in Memphis.”

“She reminded me that a five-dollar umbrella is a pretty important item to someone with a low income,” he said.

Even though white management didn’t always relate, WDIA was committed to helping the community financially. It fundraised for little league teams, college scholarships, and other needs. In 1972, when Chuck Scruggs became the station’s first black general manager and vice president, WDIA even helped raise money to create the National Civil Rights Museum, revitalize Beale Street, and preserve the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

The “Starmaker Station” also launched careers and influenced American culture at large. Riley B. King told WDIA in an on-air interview that when he heard about WDIA, he boarded a bus to Memphis and walked 20 blocks in the rain to cut a record at the station. He was met by Ferguson who told him the station didn’t make records but asked if he could write a jingle for a new medicinal product, Pep-Ti-Kon.

King started singing, “Pep-Ti-Kon sure is good. Pep-Ti-Kon sure is good. Pep-Ti-Kon sure is good. You can get it in your neighborhood.”

Ferguson hired him on the spot, and King adopted the on-air persona of the “Beale Street Blues Boy,” which, over time, was shortened to B.B. King. The legendary musician credits WDIA with helping to make him a star.

Other stars got their start thanks to WDIA. Thomas recorded Sun Records’ first hit, “Bear Cat,” while working at the station, and both his daughter, Carla Thomas, and Isaac Hayes, known for the Shaft soundtrack, were both discovered by WDIA’s Teen-Town singer program. Even Ike Turner performed at WDIA-sponsored talent shows and benefited from on-air promotion.

The station’s influence spread in other ways. Radio stations from other parts of the country came to Memphis to learn how they might be able to duplicate its success in their cities. Some even hired away their talent. Maurice “Hot Rod” Hulbert Jr. became the first full-time African-American on-air personality in Baltimore, and Martha Jean “The Queen” Steinberg, who moved to Detroit, became the first African-American woman to own a radio station.

While WDIA targeted the African-American community, white America listened, too, and some of those white listeners, like Elvis Presley, began to emulate, or appropriate, the sound they heard on WDIA. Many traveled to Memphis to cut records, popularizing rock ‘n’ roll and leading to its take over of the airwaves.

“When black people started listening to WDIA, other people started listening to it, too,” Bell says. “White people listened. They may not have listened in front of other white people, but they listened.”

As society became more integrated in the 1970s, the station lost some of its uniqueness, but if you’re in Memphis today, you’ll still hear WDIA on the air, playing classic R&B and soul.

The station is also still active in the community, says Pat Mitchell-Worley, who listened to WDIA with her grandmother and now serves as executive director of the renowned Stax Music Academy. On-air personalities today promote the world-renowned school, and Mitchell-Worley holds the station up as an example to the students of how they can make a difference in their community through music and social responsibility.

“The fact that WDIA is still around, broadcasting, speaks volumes to their influence,” Mitchell-Worley says. “I can’t imagine a time without WDIA.”

Revitalization evangelist Chris Hawley shares his "what once was old" agenda for Three Obscure Days in Buffalo.

From his penchant for talking about grain elevators to the Buffalo pin on his lapel, Chris Hawley is one of the city’s most passionate ambassadors.

“As a city planner, I like being one of the many participants in the gradual reclamation of our city,” he says. “With this gradual reclamation that Buffalonians are now very familiar with, we’re telling a new story to the world.”

That story involves an explosion of art, hand-built bars hidden among former industrial hubs, and a wave of immigrants and refugees bringing new blood to neglected neighborhoods. Basically, it’s a world away from the tired old perception that the city “isn’t worth much beyond chicken wings, the Buffalo Bills, and snow.”

Hawley’s three-day itinerary features spots that have been “vacant for a generation or more and are now becoming special places again.” It honors classic Buffalo destinations alongside more recent spots that have added a whole new layer of character to the city.

Day One Agenda

• Get the lay of the land from the top of City Hall.
• Fuel up on carbs and coffee at Five Points Bakery.
• Explore the tranquil grounds and colorful mausoleums of Forest Lawn Cemetery.
• Drop in on a jam session at the Colored Musicians Club.

City Hall Observation Deck

What better way to get to know a new city than from a budget-friendly observation deck? You can access a free one via the 25th floor of Buffalo’s City Hall, a grand Art Deco building dedicated in 1932. But don’t rush straight to the elevator. Take a few moments to appreciate the friezes on the facade and the murals in the lobby, all of which provide an artistic time capsule of 1930s Buffalo’s grand industries, culture, and values. The murals also have delightful titles: One portraying the bonds between the United States and Canada reads, “Frontiers Unfettered by Any Frowning Fortress.”

After taking the elevator to floor 25, climb three flights of stairs, and you’ll get a grand view of the city’s layout. On a clear day, you may even spot some mist rising from Niagara Falls. Within the downtown skyline, look out for the twin Statues of Liberty that stand guard on the roof of the Liberty Building. One points to Chicago and one to New York, paying tribute to the might of both cities.

Five Points Bakery

From downtown, head north to Five Points Bakery, the heart of the revived neighborhood for which it’s named. There you’ll find an array of delicious organic breads, toast-based breakfasts, and coffee iced with frozen coffee cubes instead of plain old water.

Tucked in a corner spot beneath the stairs is a space for kids, with games, a mini library, and a puppet theater. The tables beside the front windows are designated laptop- and tablet-free, but upstairs, among calming greenery, creative types peck at their keyboards between sips of coffee.

Forest Lawn Cemetery

Forest Lawn unites peaceful, beautifully landscaped cemetery grounds with brightly lit, carpeted 1970s mausoleums. Walking into one such community mausoleum, Birchwood, you’ll see stained-glass feature windows, leather couches, ornate wrought-iron gates, and glassed-in shelves holding urns. Toward the top of one wall is the vault of the Honorable Shirley Chisholm, who was the first African American in Congress, as well as the first woman and first African American to run for president. The inscription on her headstone states her Congressional campaign slogan and the title of one of her books, “Unbought and Unbossed.”

Back outside, a stroll away, is a black headstone with a ghostly white portrait of an instantly recognizable funk star. It marks the grave of James Ambrose Johnson Jr., better known as Rick James. Other famed residents of Forest Lawn include U.S. President Millard Fillmore and notable civil rights activist, Mary Burnett Talbert.

Colored Musicians Club

At the corner of Broadway and Michigan Avenue are two sites integral to the African-American history of Buffalo. Black Americans built the red-brick Michigan Street Baptist Church in 1845 as a safe place for their community to worship. In the slavery era, the church served as a stop along the Underground Railroad—often the last stop for escaped slaves before they could cross to freedom in Canada.

Around the corner on Broadway is the Colored Musicians Club. Its story began in 1918, when a group of African-American musicians formed a social club after having their membership rejected at the white-only musicians’ union. By 1934, the club had found a permanent spot at 145 Broadway. To this day, it hosts Sunday night jazz concerts and jam sessions, as well as big bands every Monday and Thursday. A mural over the door pays tribute to the greats who have graced the place, including Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Miles Davis, and Nat King Cole.

Day Two Agenda

• Wander around Frank Lloyd Wright’s Darwin House.

• Visit Hotel Henry, located in a former psychiatric hospital.

• Dine inside an artist’s fever dream at the Tabernacle.

• Catch a movie at the grand Art Deco North Park Theatre.

Darwin Martin House Complex

Frank Lloyd Wright’s famed Prairie School stylings live on in Buffalo—at 125 Jewett Parkway, more precisely, where the Martin House Complex was built as a private residence in 1905. The low cantilevered roofs, horizontal orientation, and hundreds of panes of art glass make this a prime pilgrimage site for Frank Lloyd Wright fans. Businessman Darwin Martin and his family moved into the Martin House as soon as it was built, but they abandoned the complex following Martin’s death in 1935. The property deteriorated, changed hands a few times, got subdivided, and was partially demolished. Following a massive restoration and reconstruction effort that began in the late 1990s, the house opened to the public as a historic site and museum.

A guided tour will lead you through highlights of the home, weaving among Wright-designed furniture. Alone, you can walk through the long pergola that connects the main house to the conservatory. There, an indoor garden is watched over by Nike, winged goddess of victory. Or at least a stone statue of her, with impressively detailed folds sculpted into her diaphanous dress.

Hotel Henry/Richardson Olmsted Campus

The happy hour is hopping at the institution once known as the Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane. After the hospital’s patients were transferred out in the 1970s, the grounds fell into disrepair. But a bold approach to adaptive reuse has brought the place back to life as the art-filled Hotel Henry and its 100 Acres restaurant. Hotel guests stay in revamped versions of the patient rooms, which line extra-wide hallways filled with local artists’ creations.

The stunning building, constructed in 1870, was designed by Henry Hobson Richardson. It housed a psychiatric hospital that followed the Kirkbride Plan, a layout that aimed to improve patients’ mental health by grouping them according to severity and ensuring they had access to nature. The idea was that the longer patients stayed, the healthier they became, and the closer they got to walking out the front doors and back to their families.

To stroll the floors of Hotel Henry is to get a sense of how patients spent their lives. Much of the original architecture and design has been preserved, and the hotel’s fearless embrace of its history is both unusual and admirable.

The Tabernacle

To get to the Tabernacle, walk past the black-and-white-striped columns, through the blue door, and into the old phone booth. That’s if you can manage not to get distracted by the artwork covering the interior walls and ceiling, which includes angels, symbols of peace, and a more gender-balanced take on Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam.”

The Tabernacle is a bar and restaurant that manages to be both relaxing and visually chaotic. The hand-painted murals, all done by line cook turned artist Jeremy Twiss, vary wildly in color, style, and concept, showing influences from ancient Egypt, the Renaissance, and Eastern spirituality. They’ll certainly spark conversation over drinks and dinner.

North Park Theatre and Pastry by Camille

A recent renovation has brought back the glory days of North Park Theatre. The movie house opened in 1920, welcoming visitors with stained-glass windows and mythology-themed Art Nouveau murals. The illuminated marquee, a striking sight after dark, was added in 1941. Over the decades, these decorative elements receded, a result of being either worn down or covered up. But a 21st-century revamp brightened the place again, making it the top spot in town to see a film.

For movie-time treats, head next door to Pastry by Camille to pick up a rainbow of macarons and some decadent chocolate truffles. You might see Camille, the young Frenchman who runs the joint and its sister spot downtown.

Day Three Agenda

• See the once-bustling, now-quiet Buffalo Central Terminal.

• Tuck into Ethiopian injera at West Side Bazaar.

• Score a Buffalo souvenir at Oxford Pennant.

• Watch the sunset amid grain elevators at Silo City.

Buffalo Central Terminal

In the 1930s and ’40s, passengers poured forth at Buffalo Central Terminal, arriving on trains from places like New York, Toronto, and Chicago. They filled up the lunch counters at the glamorous concourse restaurant and got their shoes shined beneath the soaring arches at the northern end. The station acted as a bookend to Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal and had the same lead architect in Alfred T. Fellheimer.

By the 1950s, cars and planes had made a serious dent in train passenger numbers. Services were scaled back until 1979, when the last train departed and Buffalo Central Terminal closed for good. Since 1997, the Central Terminal Restoration Corporation has been raising funds and fixing up the building, little by little. Now, the concourse is open to the public a few times a month for concerts, tours, and train shows. The annual highlight is Dyngus Day, a traditional Polish fertility festival on Easter Monday. But if you’re not there on one of those days, the building itself is still worth the trip.

The terminal is on the eastern side of the Broadway-Fillmore neighborhood, which bears the most visible scars of Buffalo’s population drop. It lost 87 percent of its residents after 1950. But in the past 10 years, an influx of immigrants, particularly Bangladeshi and Burmese families, has had a revitalizing effect. “If it weren’t for immigrants and refugees, Buffalo would still be sinking fast,” Hawley says. “Instead, our population has stabilized. We are not growing yet, as a city or as a region. But the precipitous fall that we’ve seen since 1950 due to suburbanization and deindustrialization has stopped. And the only reason for that is the immigrant and refugee population.”

West Side Bazaar

To get a fuller—and tastier—sense of how immigrants and refugees are enhancing Buffalo, plan to have lunch at West Side Bazaar, a small-business incubator that unites individual food and craft stalls under one roof. The owners hail from such countries as South Sudan, Burma, and Rwanda. Once there, you can feast on dishes like Zelalem Gemmeda’s Ethiopian injera with cabbage, spicy lentils, potatoes, and beets. Originally from Ethiopia, Gemmeda came to Buffalo via Yemen, where she lived in a refugee camp, then spent a dozen years working at a restaurant. Her sister back in Ethiopia still sends her spices to incorporate into her West Side Bazaar recipes.

On the craft side, there are stallholders from Rwanda, South Sudan, Iraq, and Burma. One is run by Nadeen Youssef, who has fled two wars: one in Iraq, the other in Syria. Youssef makes macrame wall hangings, jewelry, and plant holders, and teaches macrame classes regularly.

Oxford Pennant

For a sunny souvenir of your time in Buffalo, head to Oxford Pennant on Main Street. Inspired by the aesthetics of sleepaway camp and sports memorabilia stores, owners Dave Horesh and Brett Mikoll opened the store in 2013. Its colorful, vintage-inspired pennants, camp flags, patches, and pins are fun and cheerful without tipping over into twee.

The wares’ slogans cover American hometown pride (“Let’s go Buffalo”), motivation (“You’ll think of something”), and sentiments (“It’s cool to be kind”). Just walking into the place is a mood-enhancing experience—a jumbo-sized pennant on the wall reads, “It’s good to have you with us even if it’s just for the day.”

Silo City and Duende

Silo City bills itself as “just your average, everyday historic grain elevator complex that doubles as a music venue, theater backdrop, poetry site, and industrial film location.” And that it is. Located on a southern bank of the Buffalo River, Silo City offers a second skyline of towering grain elevators—the largest collection of them anywhere in the world.

Standing at the center of these silent industrial giants is Duende, a bar that stealthily occupies the complex’s former administration building. Duende is a Spanish word favored by poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. It’s a bit tricky to translate, but it is essentially the state of heightened emotion, expression, and buoyancy of spirit that accompanies soulful art and performance. It’s a fitting word. There’s something special about taking a seat at Duende’s bar, which was hand built entirely out of materials salvaged from the surrounding silos, or having a sunset drink in the back garden, in the shadow of a grain elevator. This is where old Buffalo meets new Buffalo.

And the mammoth book he wrote about it.

“I wrote it out of frustration!” says Dan Bussey, of his 3,500-page magnum opus. In the time it takes an apple scion to grow into a fruit-bearing tree (around 10 years), multiplied by three, Bussey has been scouring the archives of every library and horticultural resource in the United States, poring over fruit bulletins, nursery catalogues, and pomological books. The outcome of diving head-first into this information avalanche is a book of such staggering breadth and scale that, all volumes combined, it weighs 32 pounds (equivalent to roughly 100 apples).

In 2017, Bussey published the product of his decades-long archival trudge: The Illustrated History of Apples in the United States and Canada. An illustrated hardcover set of seven volumes, each between 500 and 600 pages long, Illustrated History is a compendium of every apple variety that has appeared in print in any North American publication in the last two centuries. It lists more than 16,000 apple varieties, with names, origins, brief descriptions, and, on occasion, accompanying illustrations, all lifelike watercolors that come from a database maintained by the Department of Agriculture from 1886 to 1942. Bussey also included 9,700 found synonyms for the apples in the volumes, making it easier for enthusiasts to accurately identify different samples of the fruit. The book has been heralded as “a publishing marvel in the field of horticulture,” and flipping through the green, cloth-bound volumes, laden with exquisite watercolors and charming anecdotes about apples named Cox’s Orange Pippin and Pitmaston Pineapple, feels like a jaunt through the orchard of Time.

Bussey, 64, began his pomme-ological quest in 1989, while setting up an orchard in his hometown of Edgerton, Wisconsin. He’d grown interested in heirlooms in 1980, soon after reading the newly released book Apples and Man by Fred Lape, which bemoaned the loss of heirlooms and the poor quality of chemically treated supermarket apples. An aspiring homesteader, Bussey started with about a dozen heirloom apple trees on the four-acre grounds where he also hoped to build a house. When the trees bore fruit, yielding Golden Sweets and Spitzenbergs (rumored to be Thomas Jefferson’s favorite apple), their rich flavors were epiphanic. “Oh my god, it was phenomenal!” Bussey says, of the aromatic Spitzenberg’s sweet-tart taste. Soon, he was growing over 350 varieties in the orchard. In a lively example of his impetus for botanical acquisitions, Bussey says the orchard was well under way before he had even started construction on his house. “Priorities!” he says, chuckling.

At the time, he found little consolidated information about the heirlooms in his orchard, so he began keeping a record of his own findings, gathered during archival dives at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He bought a computer with a 40-megabyte hard drive, solely to compile his data. “My watch probably has more information in it than that,” he says. He still types his notes on WordPerfect, an early edition word-processing software, the continued use of which feels almost like an act of defiance.

Bussey struggles to explain his apple-centric pursuits. “I just really loved the names,” he offers. “Some have interesting stories,” he says, a little later. His mother taught him to plant and care for fruit trees, and his childhood home was built in the middle of the family orchard. “I’ve always been surrounded by apples,” he says, recalling the smell of fresh cider in his family’s kitchen. Later, in an email, he writes that it was probably the “little joys a researcher finds” coupled with “a certain degree of ‘mania.”

In addition to being an orchardist, Bussey made cider professionally for 24 years for the commercial orchards and amateur apple-growers of Edgerton. He even did a brief stint as a restaurant-supply salesman. Whenever time allowed, he traveled thousands of miles, “from New York state to Washington state,” to look at materials in archives across the country. “I made it a point to keep doing this because I kept finding new things,” he says, simply. As just one example of his extensive research, Bussey has pored over every report that he could find published by every horticultural society in every state in the U.S. “Just as I was beginning to convince myself I had enough material to work with, well, just then I discovered internet libraries.”

Only about 20 percent of the apples documented in Illustrated History are still grown today, a phenomenon Bussey attributes to market forces driving up demand for certain varieties and pushing others out of existence. In 2012, he joined the Seed Savers Exchange, which preserves heirloom fruits, vegetables, and crops, as their orchard manager and apple historian. But when Seed Savers, along with university and commercial presses, passed on his book, Kent Whealy stepped in. A Macarthur Fellow and co-founder of Seed Savers Exchange, who had left the organization acrimoniously, and is widely believed to have been forced out, Whealy set up his own publishing house with the express purpose of getting Bussey’s apple volumes to print.

“I’m so thrilled and just very grateful,” Bussey says. It was Whealy who arranged the inclusion of the 1,400 illustrations from the USDA Pomological Watercolors database that make the volumes come alive. (The database is publicly available now, but at the time, Whealy paid his own money to access them.) Kent Whealy died in March 2018.

Illustrated History won the 2018 Annual Literature Award for “a significant work in botanical or horticultural literature,” given by the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries. John Bunker, an apple historian in Maine, called it “the most important book ever published in North America about apples. There has been nothing like it and there will never again be something like it.”

Having spent the majority of his life documenting apples, Bussey is still biting of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. His next book project will feature the stories of the people who brought these apples to North America. He’s consulting with plant geneticists who apply DNA technology to identify apple varieties, and who have used DNA tests to build a genetic map charting the lineage of apples. The significance of identifying apple pedigree goes beyond its value within botanical or horticultural research. It tells a story of immigration, of the sorts of things people brought with them when they traveled to build a new life in a new country. Bussey hopes to tell the stories of some of these settlers, approaching the narrative through “the genetics of apple varieties that have traveled around in this country.”

Bussey has discovered a couple of thousand more varieties since The Illustrated History of Apples was published. His favorite apple story is about the Southern Shockley, named after its originator Gideon Shockley, who spotted a lone apple tree while attending a friend’s funeral. He took a bite of an apple that had fallen beneath the tree, found it good, and snapped off a branch that he planted back home. “And so he kept the Shockley apple alive, which was one of the classic Southern apples for many years,” says Bussey.

In a career spent discovering 18,000 varieties of apples, one might think he’d have a more compelling tale. But that he chose to tell this one perhaps says more about Bussey than about the Shockley. The story of a man who happened upon a disappearing fragment of nature and nurtured it, who took a fruit that might have become extinct, and helped it flourish, echoes Bussey’s own mission: to resurrect the past, to celebrate the bounty of nature, to tell the stories of apples and men.

And its flowers bloom only a week later.

The vastest savanna in South America, the Cerrado, is a tree-heavy, neotropical biome known for its remarkable biodiversity. This ecoregion—made up of both wet and dry grasslands and their deep root system—is primarily located in Brazil, and boasts more than 12,000 different plant species. One of these species, Bulbostylis paradoxa, stands out from the rest. Scientists in Brazil recently found that this plant, a grass-like sedge, has adapted to bloom—and bloom fast—just after a wildfire scorches past.

In all sorts of environments, from mountain ranges to canyons, wildfires have been known to lead to superblooms, which result when seeds in the soil are warmed and promptly nourished. Natural wildfires are part of the lifecycle of these natural settings, but more devastating anthropogenic fires (created by accident or to clear pastures and other areas) have become more common in recent years. To study the impacts of fires—natural and human-made—scientists from the University of São Paulo created fires in controlled areas of the biodiverse hotspot. And that’s when B. paradoxa’s special attributes emerged. “We’ve had experimental fire plots in central Brazil since 2013, because we want to understand how fire season and frequency will affect the Cerrado vegetation. And we used our plots to study this amazing species,” says Alessandra Fidelis of the University of São Paulo, lead author of the article in the journal Ecology.

After burning an open clearing where this perennial herb thrives, Fidelis and her team were stunned by what happened next. “After being charred, burned, the first thing you can see in this plant are the inflorescences starting to develop. You see new leaves rerouting from the caudex-like [stem-like] structure. After some days, when it is already fully flowering, leaves started to regenerate,” says Fidelis. Those inflorescences actually appeared the very next day, and flowers were in bloom only a week later, while the rest of the landscape was still charred. “This plant responds very quickly to fire. Usually, when there is no fire, they do not flower,” she adds. “And you have to think that our fires happen usually during the dry season, when there is no rain, which makes this plant more impressive—it can flower very quickly when there is no water in the system, no rains.”

Now researchers are trying to understand the physiology of the plant to find just what causes it to react to heat this way. “We think that this plant accumulates resources in the caudex and these resources are very quickly allocated for the production of flowers as soon as fire happens in the area,” says Fidelis. “We cut the leaves to mimic fire, with no flames, no high temperatures, and we could observe it flowering, but not as fast and not as intense as the individuals that were really burned.”

For all its apparent resilience to flames, the Cerrado as a whole is in hot water. Exotic, non-native monocultures (such as soybeans) are changing the land’s natural makeup, and pushing out the plants who have called this South American savanna home for centuries or longer. “We hope that his research will bring more attention to the importance of tropical savannas and the herbaceous vegetation as well,” says Fidelis. “Our study shows the importance of fire for a particular plant, which will also influence the rest of the plant community and some ecosystem services, such as pollination and carbon allocation.” Ideally, the miraculously rapid rebound of B. paradoxa will encourage more people to understand the role that fire plays in the management of this expansive, ecologically critical grassland.

To attract them, though, it helps to have forest nearby.

Across the Southeast United States, rabbiteye blueberry farming is big business. A staple of Southern agriculture, these firm, frosty blue orbs are relatively easy to grow and have few natural pests, making them ideal for commercial purposes. The key to big, fast-maturing berries is in the pollination—when they’re amply pollinated, the burst improves. One creature is an expert at creating these most desirable berries, and their love for blueberry flowers runs so deep it’s in their name: southeastern blueberry bees.

Rabbiteye blueberries get their name from their ripening process, as they turn pink before they go blue, and recall the eyes of white rabbits. Various types of these berries are grown commercially in a number of Southern states, but the ones from Mississippi and Louisiana really stand out. There, more than 70 percent of flowers bear fruit, compared with 10 to 30 percent in some other places. When researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture set out to investigate why berries grow so well there, they looked to the pollinators. Their findings were published recently in the Journal of Economic Entomology.

“We looked at multiple species of bees to see which did the best job of pollinating rabbiteye blueberries,” says Robert Danka, coauthor of the study, in a statement. The researchers tested managed honeybees, native bumblebees, southeastern blueberry bees (also native), and carpenter bees over a three-year period. It turns out, as you might expect, that southeastern blueberry bees really, really love rabbiteye bushes. The team found that only southeastern blueberry bees and honeybees resulted in an increase of flowering fruits, with blueberry bees as the best pollinators by far.

When native southeastern blueberry bees land on a flowering blueberry bush, they attach themselves to the flower and begin vibrating their flight muscles rapidly, shaking pollen free from the flower’s anther. This process is known as buzz pollination, and it is extremely useful on rabbiteye blueberry flowers because of their shape. This process also causes pollen to cling to the bee’s body, and on to the next flower. Bumblebees are capable of buzz pollination, too, but there aren’t enough of them around in the key period of early spring.

Many large-scale producers have honeybees brought in to supplement the natural pollination, they aren’t all that reliable. They have a tendency to leave fields for other plants, according to the research. Southeastern blueberry bees, however, have a clear preference for their namesake. These insects are ground-nesting solitary bees, meaning they don't form colonies or hives, and they are particularly fond of shade and leaf litter. Blair Sampson, another coauthor of the study, says that growers wishing to increase their output should consider cultivating blueberry bee–friendly woodlands near their fields.

Such changes won’t improve yields overnight. According to the study, southeastern blueberry bees had variable populations each year, depending on weather conditions. So for now, researchers suggest that large commercial operations will still need to add non-native honeybees to their crops. But perhaps, over time, the lure of producing the juiciest rabbiteye blueberries money can buy will lead to an increase in forest cover as well.

At Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, these hungry herds serve an additional purpose beyond simple gardening.

A long, verdant field runs along the northern edge of Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, overlooking one of its seven runways. This is the workplace of some of the facility’s most unusual employees, who spend their shifts eating as much as they want. They also don’t have to worry about commuting, because they sleep here.

These seasonal workers are farm animals—goats, sheep, and one donkey who help maintain the landscape of one of America’s busiest airports by chomping on overgrown vegetation. Goats, in particular, are increasingly being hired to graze at cemeteries, parks, and other green spaces in urban areas from Paris to New York City. But at an airport, these hungry herds serve an additional purpose beyond simple gardening. As planes takeoff nearby, this shaggy gang clears long grasses, invasive species, and weeds such as poison oak and poison ivy. Their dedicated munching helps make habitats less attractive to wildlife critters that can interrupt airport operations, like, say, a raccoon on a runway, or an unfortunate flock of birds caught in a flightpath.

“This area was becoming overgrown and there was a larger bird population,” says Craig Pullins, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture who works with O’Hare to mitigate wildlife hazards. “Tall grass provides harbor for small mammals like mice that are then food for coyotes and hawks and other creatures. We recommend short manicured grass.”

Jamie Rhee, commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Aviation, has a no-nonsense name for the farm animals’ work: “target grazing.” The four-legged employees, importantly, enable O’Hare to look after green space on its airfield in a cost-effective and sustainable way. “We use them on hilly areas in the airport where the property is really difficult to maintain with traditional mowing equipment,” she says. That means less fuel and fewer carbon emissions; there’s also little need for toxic herbicides.

CDA has recruited different grazing herds to its landscaping team since 2013, although it isn’t the sole player in its industry to do so: San Francisco International Airport and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport have previously brought in goats and sheep to tend to their land. So has Seattle-Tacoma International, which sacked the lot after just one week because they were too effective (read: they overate). But, if we’re talking just airports, O’Hare’s grazing herd program is the longest-running of its kind in the United States.

To find the best landscapers for the job, the airport issues requests for vendor proposals every year or two. This latest crew belongs to Andrew Tokarz, who raised them on his farm in Lemont, Illinois. Typically, his animals are either slaughtered for meat or milked to produce artisanal cheeses; this is the second year that these 30 individuals are spending a summer away from the farm. They arrived, some wearing necklaces of jangly bells, in early June 2019 and will stay for two or three months. During this time, they are estimated to eat their way across 11.5 acres of land, which is separated from the dangerous runway by a tall fence, and the road, by a creek and electric fencing.

The ruminants are playful youngsters—between nine months and two years old—and do not have names (Tokarz calls them “animal units”). The donkey, around age five, goes by Jackson, a trace of his former life at a petting zoo. The big-eyed equine has an extra important job: He protects his pals from coyotes, which see the field as a site for their own potential buffet. “He will scare them off,” Tokarz says. “It’s a combination of his bell and his ability to kick and bite.”

Speaking of noise, one might think that the roar of planes might frighten these tame residents. According to Tokarz, his animals did initially pause when they heard the foreign sound, but they quickly realized that the source wasn’t threatening. “By the time the third jet came by, they didn’t even bother to raise their heads anymore,” he says. “So they acclimated within a minute-and-a-half, two minutes.”

Goats are known for their ironclad guts, but also for their inquisitive nature. So it seems incredible that only one member of Tokarz’s herd has followed its curiosity to the point of running away: The billy goat dashed off when the electric fence fizzled out during a rainstorm, but the flockmaster was on site and caught the escape artist.

Goats are also famous for their love of standing on things. So Tokarz built them a ramp they can scamper on to reach the roof of one of their sheds. “Once they figured that out, they were in seventh heaven,” he says.

As the herd settles into their luxurious life, the area becomes less welcoming to hazardous wildlife—which, in the end, is for the good of skunks, deer, coyotes, and other unsuspecting creatures. Without tall grass, for instance, human workers can more easily spot geese and ducks who gather by the creek, and scare them away before they take off into dangerous zones.

“You don’t want a large congregation of anything flying in and out or around the airport,” Pullins says. “An airport is a terrible place for birds.” But it’s a perfect place, it turns out, for hooved herbivores.

For computer-graphics researchers, it's both a tool and a meme.

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California is home to many artifacts from Silicon Valley history. Amidst the ephemera of the Information Age, though, a humble white teapot sits on display.

Although it's decidedly analog, the teapot is something of a sacred relic: It's the original Utah teapot. Perhaps you've seen it before. It had a cameo in the first installment of the Toy Story tetralogy. It could be glimpsed, for years, atop a snaking pipe in a classic Windows screensaver. Sculptures of it can be found in parks from Texas to Poland.

The Utah teapot earned this place of honor by becoming indispensable to the development of the digital graphics that are a cornerstone of movies and video games today. Long before it belonged to the Museum, it was simply the teapot owned by British computer scientist Martin Newell. In the mid-1970s, Newell was a PhD student at the University of Utah, a leader in computer graphics research. In 1972, their Graphics Lab was the first to scan and render a real object: a VW Beetle.

During his student years, Newell faced a problem. He needed a new 3D model, but many existing mathematical models were too simplistic to test the techniques he was working with. According to several interviews, his wife, Sandra, suggested that he use their tea set, which included a white teapot. Inspired, Newell sketched out the dimensions of the teapot on graph paper, then entered its coordinates on a Tektronix storage tube, an early computer graphics terminal.

As the science magazine Nautilus notes, a teapot is an ideal canvas for 3D design. Teapots tend to be smooth and textureless, so even a simple render didn't look too artificial. With its curvy shape, jutting handle, and spout, a teapot can also cast shadows on itself—making it the perfect self-contained object to test the creation of three-dimensional images.

According to a University of Utah newsletter, the teapot became "one of the first widely available and photogenic curved-surface 3D models." The data set Newell released for the computer-science community soon took on a life of its own. Soon, the standard rendition wasn't even an exact representation of his Melitta teapot—a fellow researcher flattened the model by 33 percent. Since 3D models were fairly complex to make, computer-graphics researchers embraced the teapot with open arms. Over the years, the graphics community churned out computer-generated teapot images of every color, shape, and size. Due to its simple but distinct silhouette, the slightly squashed teapot model became a "crash test dummy" for 3D graphics learning, research, and experimentation.

It wasn't long before the teapot turned into something of a meme. One 1987 paper jokingly proposed the addition of a sixth Platonic solid: the "Teapotahedron." Pixar has handed out tiny, walking teapots to promote its RenderMan software, and even released an animated short featuring them. For animators, graphic designers, and artists, the teapot became both a classic tool and a beloved emblem. (On social media, pictures of real-life replicas are often met with joking wonder for their realism.)

As for Newell himself, he went on to an illustrious career in 3D imaging software. In light of his teapot's digital immortality, he told the Salt Lake Tribune that he wished he had modeled it more carefully the first time around. Regardless, he donated his original teapot to the Computer History Museum. For years, the teapot's legacy lived on in Utah, too, as the University of Utah held regular teapot-rendering competitions until 2017. Some of the eerily realistic scenes show how far 3D graphics have come from graph paper and a conversation over tea.