For those in the Greenlandic town of Ilulissat, it's also an enchanting neighbor.

Visitors to Greenland’s Ilulissat Icefjord are greeted by an unnerving sign. “EXTREME DANGER!” it warns, “Do not walk on the beach. Death and serious injury might occur. Risk of sudden tsunami waves, caused by calving icebergs.” The source of the danger lies over 30 miles away, deep inside the fjord. There, 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, Sermeq Kujalleq hurls icebergs into the sea. Glaciologists suspect the glacier calved the iceberg that sank the Titanic in 1912. Today, Sermeq Kujalleq—which is Greenlandic for “southern glacier”—still slithers along the same rocky fjord, threatening faraway ships and luring onlookers into its icy reaches.

Sermeq Kujalleq, also called Jakobshavn glacier, is known as the world’s fastest glacier. Like rivers, glaciers are constantly flowing, pushed forward by the weight of their own ice. This one travels an average of 130 feet in 24 hours and calves more than 11 cubic miles of icebergs each year into the Ilulissat Icefjord. If melted, those icebergs could provide enough drinking water for everyone in the United States for a year. Sermeq Kujalleq has grown and shrunk for centuries as part of the Greenland ice sheet. Formed over 250,000 years ago, the ice sheet today stretches 1,500 miles long by 680 miles wide and covers 80 percent of Greenland. Most of the ice sheet is ringed by mountains. Glaciers that lie along the coast, including Sermeq Kujalleq, therefore function as outlets through which ice and water from the ice sheet come gushing out.

The Ilulissat Icefjord is crowded with bergs thanks to Sermeq Kujalleq’s prolific calving and a quirk of geography. An underwater mountain, created by the glacier long ago, stands at the mouth of the fjord and traps the icebergs until they melt or break apart into smaller pieces. Some of those bergs are as tall and blocky as skyscrapers. Others look like castles with spires and bridges. In between, small icebergs known as bergy bits and other chunks of floating ice known as growlers churn like packing peanuts.

It takes the eye a minute to perceive that these icy masses are slowly moving. Wilhelm Gemander relocated to Greenland from Germany in 1985 and now operates a tourist boat out of Ilulissat. All these years later, he says, “I am still fascinated [by] the magnificent icebergs, the mountains, and the sea.” And he’s not the only one enchanted by the constantly changing landscape. Spectators hike along the fjord to take in the view. One local named Uffe Bang insists that the trails are not just for tourists. Bang takes time at least twice a month to visit and guessed most locals took advantage of the scenery—certainly the hunters who head into the fjord for days with sled dogs or snowmobiles.

Abundant fish in the fjord have long attracted people to the small meadow that hugs the rugged coast. In the Stone Age, the Saqqaq people lived at the mouth of the fjord at Sermermiut, followed by the Dorset and Thule peoples. European whalers arrived in the 16th century and established a nearby trading post in 1741 in Disko Bay that would become the colony Jakobshavn. Around 1850, the last people moved from Sermermiut to the colony. Jakobshavn, today known as Ilulissat or “icebergs” in Greenlandic, remains dependent on fishing in the icefjord. At 4,500 people (and 3,500 sled dogs), it is the third biggest city in Greenland and the country’s most popular tourist destination—thanks to Sermeq Kujalleq.

For hundreds of years, the bulk of Sermeq Kujalleq sat inland as it narrowly snaked between the dark grey gneiss and granite mountains lining the fjord. From space, the frozen projection looked like a hissing tongue protruding seaward. Glaciologists call such long, narrow ice streams “floating tongues” when they sit above the water, like the one protruding from Sermeq Kujalleq. During the Little Ice Age, when temperatures plummeted and the Vikings vanished from Greenland, Sermeq Kujalleq stretched more than 25 miles toward Disko Bay. Since 1850, it has been receding. From 1902 to 2001, the glacier withdrew eight miles; the following 10 years, it retreated a remarkable nine. Now the glacier lies tongueless on the seabed at the terminus of the fjord.

Even without a tongue, Sermeq Kujalleq is loud. Its front is an enormous ice wall—stretching 300 feet at its peak, or as tall as the Statue of Liberty—that constantly explodes. Icebergs break off the glacier accompanied by blasts and roars akin to a rocket launch. When they hit the sea below, the calved icebergs can create huge waves that threaten to swallow people, boats, and buildings. The icebergs from Sermeq Kujalleq have crashed so violently that they have even caused earthquakes. For nearly a decade, the Ohio State University glaciologist Santiago de la Peña has observed the glacier. Like many who have witnessed a calving event, de la Peña describes the experience as transfixing. Because the glacier is so large, the break seems to occur in “slow motion.” It is almost easier to feel, he explains. The whole glacier “creeps and rumbles,” he says, “you can feel its power, feel that it is enormous.”

After icebergs calve from Sermeq Kujalleq and pass over the submarine mountain, they float into Disko Bay. There, they are pushed north by the West Greenland Current. The icebergs swirl around Baffin Bay then head down the Eastern Coast of Canada. Most get trapped in sea ice or run aground in shallows along the way and never make it through “Iceberg Alley,” the stretch of the North Atlantic between Newfoundland and Greenland. Those that do ride the Labrador Current south into the wider Atlantic Ocean. Some icebergs from Greenland make it all the way to the subtropical Azores, menacing transatlantic shipping lanes.

Although the icebergs it produces can still slice through steel hulls, Sermeq Kujalleq’s greatest threat may be more abstract. Its beauty is attracting more tourists to Ilulissat each year. Vijayanthi Gemander, who runs the popular Inuit Café, initially planned her establishment as a small dessert and coffee shop in 2011. There wasn’t a need for anything else, she says. Now, she is working overtime to feed reindeer, muskox, whale, and halibut to the flood of visitors. Almost everyone in town claims the tourism industry exploded after the icefjord was made a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2004. In 2000, 6,304 overnight guests visited Ilulissat. In 2018, that number grew to 28,499. And while such growth may be a boon to the local economy, it has more complicated consequences for the environment. Besides more crowded hiking trails and additional waste, increased travel to Greenland means greater carbon emissions, which translates to a warmer planet and more vulnerable glaciers.

Glaciers around the world are melting before our eyes. In the latest turn in its long history, Sermeq Kujalleq has actually grown since 2016 thanks to a dip in temperatures in Disko Bay. Glaciologists describe it as an “interruption” in the long-term trajectory of retreat and the latest satellite data from 2019 suggests Sermeq Kujalleq has already lost what it gained. No matter the melt rate, the glacier is so large, de la Peña notes, “it will likely continue calving icebergs for hundreds of years.” It may be best to encounter the glacier in one its glimmering bergs closer to home rather than travel all the way to Ilulissat. But it is hard to resist the lure of Sermeq Kujalleq. “It is a place that is good for the soul,” says Ilulissat resident Casper Malchow. “Alone on the mountain with huge icebergs in the background and the sounds of whale playing in the icy water, it does something to you.”

It was carrying lots of old jugs.

In the classical age, from the eighth century B.C. to the sixth century A.D., Roman ports dominated the coasts along the Mediterranean Sea. The Roman Empire—which was known for trading everything from perfumes to papyrus to purple dye—revolutionized trade routes on both land and water before its infamous fall in the fifth century. Recently, volunteer divers with the University of Cyprus’s underwater archaeological research team came face-to-face with a fragment of Rome’s maritime trading history when they discovered an ancient shipwreck filled with imported cargo near the resort town of Protaras.

"It is the first undisturbed Roman shipwreck ever found in Cyprus, the study of which is expected to shed new light on the breadth and the scale of seaborne trade between Cyprus and the rest of the Roman provinces of the eastern Mediterranean," Cyprus’s Department of Antiquities said in a statement. The shipwreck was spotted off the southern coast of the island and is the second notable wreck from antiquity to be discovered in the region in recent years. One found in 2007, near the village of Mazotos in Cyprus, dates to the mid-fourth century B.C. and revealed intact jugs of (very) aged wine.

After stumbling upon the centuries-old cargo, the divers reported their find to the Department of Antiquities. Given the rarity of the discovery, funding has already been secured for a team of archaeologists to do preliminary research on the wreck in situ. And while a thorough examination of the goods is still forthcoming, experts have already made an initial determination of what lies within the wreckage. "The site is a wreck of a Roman ship, loaded with transport amphorae, most probably from Syria and Cilicia," said the Department. Amphorae were jars commonly used to hold olive oil and wine.

In addition to supporting the archaeological investigation, the Department is also working on securing protections for the site, to ensure the conservation of this important watery wreck.

It's not easy making the big city feel more like the country.

For ravens, isolation is an aphrodisiac. Out in the wild, the birds get busy in the highest, loneliest places they can find, mating and nesting in secluded trees, atop telephone poles, or beneath the rocky overhang of a cliff. “They like to do their business in private,” says Chris Skaife, the ravenmaster at the Tower of London, who tends to the fortress’s resident flock.

When solitary digs are sexy, it’s easy to imagine how the clanging, crowded, pulsing heart of London would kill the mood. So when Skaife recently set out to breed birds at the Tower for the first time in several decades, he had his work cut out for him. Previous attempts under another ravenmaster hadn’t always gone to plan. “Because there was so much noise and so many people, the ravens were discarding the nest and destroying the eggs,” Skaife says. The last bird born at the tower hatched in 1989, and was named Ronald Raven. At the time, the Associated Press reported that Ronald was the first bird to squawk its way into the world inside the fortress since the mid-17th century reign of Charles II.

The ravens are iconic occupants of the Tower, and central figures in the myths that soar through its stone walls. As legend has it, if the birds fly the coop or their ranks dwindle down to nothing, “the Tower itself will crumble into dust and great harm will befall the kingdom,” Skaife explains in his book, The Ravenmaster: My Life With the Ravens at the Tower of London. Since U.K. laws now stipulate that educational displays can only feature captive-bred birds, Skaife explains, the Tower no longer takes in wild-born corvids. But “we were finding less and less people to supply us with legal, captive-bred birds,” Skaife says. It wasn’t an emergency—ravens can live for decades in captivity, and the Tower’s oldest raven is said to have died at the age of 44. But Skaife was thinking about the future: Three or four decades down the line, where would the Tower get its inky, feathered citizens?

Skaife knew that breeding ravens would react poorly to hustle and hubbub, so the challenge was to make the loud, busy Tower of London feel as remote and empty as possible. Then in late 2018, he had a stroke of luck: A friend offered to lend him a pair of prolific breeders, Huginn and Muninn, who mated each year in February, March, or April, like clockwork. These birds had spent their whole lives in Sussex, in Southern England, mating and nesting and enjoying the fresh country air. London doesn’t have much of that to offer, and at first, Skaife worried about how the birds would fare. “They’re neophobic—they don’t like change,” he says. “They like everything done in the same way. If you change something, it throws them off slightly, like, ‘What are you doing that for?’”

Breeding and rearing animals in captivity is often a delicate dance, with choreography that is intricate and sometimes goofy. Scientists trying to persuade confirmed bachelor Lonesome George—a Pinta Island tortoise, or Chelonoidis abingdonii—to mate resorted to gambits including smearing their own bodies with female-tortoise hormones, the Guardian reported. (It was all for naught, and when George died in 2012 at the age of 100 or so, his subspecies vanished with him.) Some researchers famously donned gangly costumes and puppets to prepare captive-bred whooping cranes to eventually leave their environs, and others went to great lengths to rekindle the spark between longtime loves and current enemies Bibi and Poldi, a pair of Galápagos tortoises that are mysteriously on the outs after nearly a century of peaceful cohabitation. Mating and living in captivity simply isn’t the same as doing so in the wild, and when humans try our hand at matchmaking, there are factors we can’t control. The best tactic is sometimes a combination of eagerness and aloofness, Skaife says. “I put the tools in place for them to be in a comfortable environment,” he adds, “and then I let nature take its course.”

Skaife set out to make Huginn and Muninn’s transition from Sussex to London as seamless as possible by essentially making the Tower feel a little more like the countryside. Before the birds left their familiar habitat, Skaife photographed every inch of their enclosure, inside and out, with the aim of faithfully recreating it in London and replacing everything exactly where the birds would expect it to be.

Then, back at the Tower, Skaife started scouting for a quiet cranny where the birds could hunker down. He settled on an area in the moat, beyond visitors’ view. That’s where he placed their enclosure—40 feet long, 15 feet high, and 20 feet wide, covered in wire and, in an effort to insulate the birds from visitors’ noise, topped with a little “roof” made from hard plastic. He reinstalled their breeding boxes exactly where they’d been before, introduced the birds to their new home, and then stepped back to allow them to acclimate to the unfamiliar sounds and smells.

That can take time, so Skaife figured it was safest to keep expectations low. “I said, ‘Look, the chances of them breeding in early 2019 are really slim this time around,’” he says. Even so, soon after Christmas, he started trying to entice them toward amorousness. He began feathering the enclosure with the things they’d need to build a nest—a few twigs here, a little alpaca fur there. For several months, the ravens couldn’t have been less interested; they left everything exactly where Skaife had put it. “So, I was going, ‘Ok, it’s probably not going to happen this year,’” he recalls.

And then, one day, the birds lashed out at him. “They started attacking me when I went into the enclosure,” Skaife says, to the point where he stopped trying to enter it, and just nudged food in from the outside. While the prospect of being pummeled by sharp-beaked birds is a little daunting, Skaife was glad to see that the birds were getting aggressive: He interpreted the behavior as a signal that the pair was getting ready to go into nesting mode, and acting like protective parents.

Which is exactly what they did. They began constructing a nest in the box that “they hadn’t gone anywhere near in about five months,” Skaife says. They kept at it for a few days, drawing on the things he had placed in the enclosure, as well as some grass tufting from the bottom. “They used all the alpaca wool, all the twigs I brought in,” Skaife says. “Every single thing, they used.”

The scene was set for romance, and, from a distance, Skaife watched them in the act. (“It’s a bit weird,” he says, “but I did it.”) Within a few days, a clutch of eggs appeared in the nest. The female raven incubated them for 21 days. Then, toward the end of April, four of the five eggs hatched, and the young chicks began flinging their scrawny necks back, stretching their beaks wide, and cawing like mad.

Skaife’s work wasn’t done. He knew he wanted to keep one of the baby ravens for the Tower’s flock, and because he no longer clips birds’ flight feathers to keep them grounded, it was key to make sure that he imprinted on the fledglings. To build that relationship, Skaife treated them like family: He brought them home with him.

Please don’t poop 💩 pic.twitter.com/WspcreGQev

— Ravenmaster (@ravenmaster1) June 3, 2019

He took a special shine to Georgie, the runt. (“I like the underdog,” Skaife explains.) Skaife determined that three of the four young ravens would live with a raven breeder in Suffolk, who could eventually supply the Tower with their captive-bred offspring, and Georgie would be installed as a permanent resident. (For now, Georgie’s sex is still indeterminate, because, even with a keen eye, even after spending “an unhealthy amount of time around ravens,” it’s hard to distinguish between the species’ male and female members, Skaife says. There are sometimes clues in a bird’s size, fluff of the chest feathers, bill, or middle toe, he adds, but the surest sign is a DNA test, and the Tower won’t know for sure until Georgie’s next visit to the vet.)

Since Georgie would go on to be one of the Tower’s tenants, Skaife decided that the little bird should stick around even longer to continue cementing their bond. That meant that, for several weeks, Skaife was on call for frequent caregiving duties.

Like young humans, young ravens have a busy schedule. “Baby ravens do one of three things—eat, sleep, and poo,” Skaife says. “They poo a lot.” Skaife fed Georgie every few hours, alternating between mice, rats, quail, and biscuits soaked in blood from a local meat market. When Georgie wasn’t snacking or pooping, the bird hopped around Skaife’s bed or played in the dishwasher, which proved to be an exciting avian jungle gym. Georgie scaled Skaife’s shoulders, too—and sometimes pooped there. Ravens “like to climb,” Skaife says. “They like to look out over the world.”

Though the love nest itself is still off-limits to visitors, Yeoman Warders will guide guests past the main raven enclosure on tours throughout July 2019. Meanwhile, Skaife continues to document Georgie’s life—including the bird’s first flight, which he chronicled on Twitter, with a striking black-and-white photo and a smiley-face emoji. For Skaife, it’s the interspecies equivalent of whipping out a cell phone in the office to show off photos of a baby’s first steps. “I’m absolutely as proud as punch,” Skaife said in video birth announcement produced by Historic Royal Palaces. “Happy dad.”

With help from a dedicated panel of pretzel-smelling experts.

Working nine to five is no way to make a living, so why not quit your job and become a professional food smeller? These highly trained sensory savants are regularly hired by food manufacturers and scientists. They analyze the subtle pepper notes in coffee, the juicy, pear-like aroma of fine white wine, and—as in a study recently published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry—the delectable whiffs of sweat and malt in freshly baked soft pretzels.

Researchers Sebastian Schoenauer and Peter Schieberle, both of Technische Universität München, hail from the heartland of the twisty bread, which began its life as a Catholic treat and is now a signature snack of Southern Germany. They began their project with a question many a visitor has wondered while passing a particularly fragrant Bavarian bakery: What makes soft pretzels smell so darn good? To find out, Schoenauer and Schieberle turned to the field of sensomics, the study of how chemical compounds combine to produce a particular scent sensation in the human brain.

After determining that the signature pretzel musk emanates from the brown outer crust, rather than the pale inner crumb, the researchers peeled soft pretzel skins, crushed them to a fine powder, and created an extract from the ground pretzels. Then, they used a process called aroma extract dilution analysis to identify specific odorous compounds within this perfume.

To test how people perceived the chemical components of pretzel-scent, researchers assembled a sensory panel. You don’t have to be a super smeller to join a sensory panel, but you do have to know your stuff. Sensory panels are comprised of trained scent or taste professionals, often recruited for scientific studies or product development. (They have their own professional society, in case you’re contemplating a career change.) In this case, panelists participated in weekly sessions designed to hone their nostrils into finely tuned pretzel-smelling machines.

Once the noses were honed, panelists did a blind sniff test of pretzel powder and wheat and rye bread, in order to test whether that signature pretzel scent is as distinct as researchers believed. All 17 panelists were able to recognize the difference between the scent of pretzel and bread, indicating that, indeed, the fragrant aroma of lye-dipped, salt-topped, fresh-baked twists of dough is truly unique among baked goods. Next, they used reference smells to identify and rank the intensity of different olfactory notes within the overall pretzel fragrance.

The results were wide-ranging. Testers could detect malty, buttery, mushroom-like, carrot-like, honey-like, cooked-potato-like, sweaty, and cheesy notes in the pretzel scent. The strongest of the 28 distinct scent sensations emanating from the pretzel dust were popcorn-like and fatty, followed by buttery, caramel-like, and sweaty, each corresponding to specific chemical compounds.

The researchers also attempted to artificially reproduce this buttery, sweaty scent, by combining key olfactory compounds with ethanol. (Creating, in effect, an eau du pretzel fragrance.) When sprayed in a room, the researchers wrote, this chemical cocktail produced “a very good pretzel aroma impression.” The researchers conjecture that they can eventually use this technology to enhance the aroma of baked goods. If you're willing to undertake some serious nasal training (and relocate to Germany), you, too, could be well on your way to helping pretzel lovers enhance Bavaria's most cherished of bready snacks.

As Havana prepares to celebrate 500 years as the country’s capital, the 109-year-old site is coming back to life.

In the Guanabacoa neighborhood on the east side of Havana, a 109-year-old cemetery lies in ruin. Many of the headstones are cracked, chipped, or falling over. Grass is growing over the concrete. For years the site has been fading into memory.

Until now.

To celebrate the capital city’s 500th anniversary this November, the local government has been working to restore historical sites across Havana. That includes this place—the oldest Jewish cemetery in Cuba.

For years members of Cuba’s Jewish community—a group that currently numbers about 1,500—have been trying to raise the $200,000 needed to repair the entire complex, according to David Prinstein, a prominent member of the community. Jewish groups in the United States have contributed money for the cemetery’s upkeep, but it hasn’t been enough to keep the site from slowly withering away.

Now, however, with support from Havana’s Office of the City Historian, the cemetery is starting to come back to life. Fifty of the 1,100 gravesites have already been restored, with another 150 scheduled for repair by the end of the year. A special room used to perform the Taharah—a ritualistic cleaning of the body in preparation for burial—has also been refurbished, according to the city historian’s office.

The cemetery has always held a special place in the Cuban Jewish community. Adela Dworin, another prominent member, told the Associated Press that the site connotes a sense of peace and calm.

Jewish people have had a presence in Cuba since the 15th century. A popular myth holds that three Jewish men arrived on the island after the Spanish Expulsion of 1492. Some say they traveled there with Christopher Columbus. These men were known as Marranos—Jews forced to convert to Catholicism. Later, during the 16th and 17th centuries, waves of Jewish immigrants arrived in Cuba from Brazil, fleeing persecution from the Portuguese colonialists.

Between World Wars I and II, many Jews fleeing Europe found safe harbor in Cuba. Some of them helped establish Cuba’s first Hebrew Society, and were key in securing land for the cemetery.

In 1947, a 10-foot-tall monument was dedicated to the memory of those killed during the Holocaust. Not far away, half a dozen bars of soap made from human fat are buried to memorialize those who suffered—a memory finally receiving the care it deserves.

No one knows how this piece of history ended up there.

Two English sisters recently discovered a piece of British political history simply sitting in a drawer—a forgotten testament to the suffering endured by British women in their campaigns to secure the right to vote.

On March 4, 1912, the British Women’s Social and Political Union awarded Elsie Wolff Van Sandau a medal “in recognition of a gallant action whereby through endurance to the last extremity of hunger and hardship great principle of political justice was vindicated.” Wolff Van Sandau had been arrested for allegedly smashing a window in London’s Covent Garden area as part of a suffragist protest, and she subsequently undertook the hunger strike which the medal recognizes. More than 100 years later, the medal turned up in its original case inside an ordinary bureau drawer as Anne Alford and Joan Woolman were cleaning out their father’s home. On June 27, 2019, Hansons Auctioneers in Etwall, England, sold the medal for £12,500—or nearly 16,000 U.S. dollars. The price far exceeded Hansons’s estimate of £7,000-10,000.

Before the 1912 Covent Garden incident, Wolff Van Sandau had previously been arrested in November 1910 on what came to be known as Black Friday. On that day, about 300 women marched to the House of Commons to protest the failure of a merely incremental bill, which would have granted voting rights to women who owned property worth more than £10. Many of the women suffered police brutality and sexual violence from police outside the House of Commons. The suffragette Georgiana Margaret Solomon addressed an account of the day to Winston Churchill, who was then the Home Secretary, in which she wrote that the suffragettes faced a “relentless engine of physical force—the Metropolitan Police—an instrument under the control of the Government, presumably in your Department.” Solomon boldly held Churchill directly accountable, writing that the police were “the irresponsible, obedient tools of the Government,” and that blame for the violence therefore “lies upon the shoulders of those who hold this national force at their disposal.”

The British suffragist movement, however, still had a long road ahead of it from Black Friday. In 1918, some women aged 30 and over were granted the right to vote while all men 21 and over were granted suffrage. It wasn’t until 1928 that all women and men aged 21 and over finally shared voting rights in the United Kingdom—nearly a full decade after the United States had adopted the 19th Amendment. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the United States Congress passing the amendment, which officially became law the following year in 1920.

Anne Alford, a 64-year-old retired receptionist, said in a statement that she remembers seeing the medal as a teenager in the 1970s, when two great aunts were living with Alford, her sister, and her parents. Alford and Woolman’s great aunts and parents have since passed away, and the sisters don’t know how Wolff Van Sandau’s medal came into their family’s custody. “I’ve done as much research as I can about Elsie,” said Alford, “but how our family came to own the medal is something of a mystery.” She wonders if her great aunts knew Wolff Van Sandau or were themselves involved with the suffragist movement. The mystery may never be solved, but the medal will always testify to the extraordinary sacrifices of ordinary people making history all around us.

He may soon be replaced by another Big Thing, or a small swing.

For over a decade, a 60-foot brontosaurus named Big Kev has stared down all those who drive by the Stuart Highway that runs through Darwin, the capital of Australia’s Northern Territory. He was one of Australia’s many “Big Things,” oversized roadside statues that also include the Big Mango in Queensland and the Big Dead Fish in Victoria. But as of yesterday, Big Kev is no more—at least for now.

Unlike most other dinosaurs, Big Kev is made of plexiglass and just 12 years old. According to NT News, Tom Finlay, the owner of Finlay’s Stone Mason, purchased Big Kev on special order from the Philippines in 2007 for $100,000—a small price to pay for a watchdog of prehistoric proportions. Finlay plopped Big Kev down in Palmerston, a satellite city of Darwin, and took precautions to ensure the dino wouldn’t topple over under inclement weather, hiring a structural engineer to secure his enormous feet into the red soil and cyclone-proof the whole thing.

But when the hardware giant Bunnings announced a $58-million plan to relocate a store to Finlay’s site, Big Kev’s future seemed grim. It’s hard to build a brand spanking new hardware store when there’s a near-to-life-size dinosaur in the way. The community, all big fans of Big Kev, began to fret. “We are considering the future of Big Kev as part of our development application and will update the Palmerston community once a decision has been made,” a Bunnings representative told NT News.

Before Big Kev could be moved, he first had to be disassembled. Per his name, Big Kev is a rather big boy. And like historic Japanese houses and beached whales, Big Kev was simply too big to move in one piece. It’s no easy thing, logistically or emotionally, to dismantle a 60-foot-tall plexiglass dinosaur. So Rory Milner, a site manager, came in specifically to supervise the process and ensure no harm came to Kev.

To dismantle a brontosaurus, you have to start with the neck. The first crane summoned to dismantle the dinosaur proved too small for the job, so Milner called in a cherry picker to lop off Kev’s head, according to ABC Darwin. Milner planned to dissect Big Kev in eight parts: neck, head, body, tail, leg, leg, leg, and leg. The entire process was scheduled to take four hours, during which time ABC Darwin posted a video titled “Inside Big Kev,” a cinematic exposé of the dino’s hollow guts.

But Big Kev shouldn’t be in pieces for too long. Once the new Bunnings hardware store goes up, the dinosaur will emerge from his warehouse hibernation and be reconstructed somewhere on the site, Milner said. Kev isn’t the only one of Finlay’s statues to have survived a brush with death. On January 4, 2019, a white bolt of lightning struck down Finlay’s hand-carved statue of Venus de Milo, according to ABC News. The statue almost entirely disintegrated in the strike, save for its 66-pound breasts.

Australia is also no stranger to the long-distance dinosaur transport. In 1994, when the Australian Reptile Park decided to move to a new location, there was no question that Ploddy the yellow diplodocus would be coming along. The park held a parade for Ploddy two years later, escorting her on a semi-trailer around half a mile down the main street of Gosford. Over 10,000 people were in attendance.

In Big Kev’s absence, the Darwin City Council, which also oversees Palmerston, may make moves to erect a new Big Thing to boost tourism. As luck would have it, the city is currently blessed with $400,000 unspent funds allocated to public art. Councilmember Sherry Cullen said a “tasteful novelty architecture structure” could be the “facelift” the city needs, ABC reports. The council is reportedly split between whether this new landmark should be big, like Kev or the Mango, or small, such as a swing. Lord Mayor of Darwin Kon Vatskalis suggested the construction of a “big D,” which did not attract a response from his fellow council members. At this time, Big Kev could not be reached for comment.

"Vassar chocolates" became emblems of women's education.

In the late-19th century, students tip-toeing around Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, under the cover of darkness usually had a single purpose: illicit snacking. Students at the then all-female school made a game of sneaking food into their rooms, frying oysters on hatpins over gas-jets, and hiding everything from “lynx-eyed” teachers in the dormitory corridors. The chance to eat rich food sent from home and stay up past their strict 10 p.m. curfew was a thrilling adventure for young Victorian ladies. But chief among all their treats was simple fudge.

Legend has it that Emelyn Battersby Hartridge, Vassar College class of 1892, invented fudge. But its origins are more mysterious. Various fudge-like treats have long existed by other names, and in a letter written after her college days, Hartridge claimed to have gotten the recipe from the cousin of a friend in Baltimore. But what is indisputable is that Hartridge introduced it to Vassar College in 1888, and American female college students would soon churn out fudge by the ton, popularizing the treat and indelibly associating it with women’s education.

For this reason, early fudge recipes introduced it as “a college dish.” In 1897, the New York Tribune noted that it was best enjoyed “when a dozen or more girls are congregated in a room, sitting on sofa cushions spread out on the floor in a mystic circle around an alcohol stove, from which the odor of 'fudge' rises like incense.” Even for the modern college student cramming a contraband toaster into their closet ahead of an RA inspection, the idea of making fudge on an alcohol burner in a dorm room might seem perilous. But the young students didn’t care. In fact, an alcohol burner was on the staid side of things. Students often cooked over their wall- and ceiling-mounted gas lamps, and held pans full of molten fudge in the air to cool it. One early mention of fudge, in fact, comes from a 1893 poem in the Vassarion:

What perches us upon a chair

To stir a sauce-pan held in air,

Which, tipping, pours upon our hair —

Fudges.

From Vassar College, fudge spread, becoming a college fad. (For a while, fudge was even known as “Vassar chocolates.”) Vassar students made a classic fudge of chocolate, butter, and sugar; the Wellesley College version was filled with marshmallows, and Smith College students used molasses.

But for all these undergraduates, making fudge was not just an indulgence—it was a form of mild rebellion in an environment that, even as it promised empowerment, still sought to strictly control them.

In the late-19th century, women students led more restricted lives than their male counterparts. (As one article from 1901 noted, “There is no case on record where students from a girls’ college have spent the night in the town lockup, as the result of reckless misbehavior.”) Students would gather secretively to eat fudge, oysters, and Welsh rarebit after their 10 p.m. curfew, and even this provoked a reaction. Compared with other sweets, such as seductive bonbons, fudge was considered morally benign. But health-wise, it was quite another matter. Turn-of-the century health professionals urged bland diets that used meat and spices sparsely.

S.T. Rorer, a prominent food writer known as America’s first dietician, toured the Seven Sisters in 1905 and noted disapprovingly that “the scholastic standing of the students was held in far greater importance than the more practical side of their education” (that is, learning how to be a wife and mother). Not only that, she railed against “the great desire of girls for sweets,” particularly fudge. If a female student wasn’t fed correctly, she mused darkly, they would turn to fudge instead. “In a little while she is in the infirmary, suffering a bilious attack,” she wrote, since “dinners of fudge have overworked her liver.” Improper eating with the addition of fudge, she wrote, had the capacity to “kill the weak and ruin the middling.” On the other end of the spectrum, writes women’s studies researcher Sherrie A. Inness, administrators “worried that 'fudge-fuddled' minds might hinder the academic progress of their students.”

The food at the original home of fudge, Vassar, rated particularly low in Rorer’s estimation. Yet her opinion didn’t seem to have much of an effect. Vassar women mocked anti-fudge opinions, as in a Vassar publication that depicted a fictional alumni scolding a current student for enjoying fudge. (“Can it be that the Vassar girl has fallen so low? In my day we ate our good wholesome mutton-stew without a thought of such proceedings, destructive alike to physical and moral welfare.”) According to Innes, “Welsh rarebit and pans of chocolate-nut fudge or sticky molasses candy at midnight were indicative of a student community that was increasingly unwilling to accept the strict control and regulation that earlier women’s college students had tolerated.”

Some students defended themselves by pointing out that their food shenanigans were mild compared to those of their male counterparts. “We did not at college, like some of the young men, drink whiskey, or steal gates, or shoot pistols at policemen, or club baseball umpires,” wrote one former Vassar student in 1891. And midnight feasts of candy and oysters, after all, are pretty tame. “Certainly not all spreads took place under the cover of darkness,” writes Lynn Peril in College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Co-eds, Then and Now. “But breaking dormitory lights-out rules by meeting at midnight added an extra fillip of excitement and provided a way for well-bred college women to flout authority.”

Eventually, the fudge-student connection became something of a cliche. One fed-up student in 1906 complained that popular novels had tied female scholarship too closely to fudge. “I once asked a man what he thought of particularly in connection with a girl’s college,” she wrote indignantly. The answer, of course, was fudge. Yet over time, fudge spread to beachfronts and boardwalks, while, Peril writes, dorm-room spreads became so staid that advice books informed young women at school how to ask permission to hold them. Peril, to say the least, is not impressed. “Had those turn-of-the-century larking College Girls asked for permission before breaking out the chafing dish and fudge pan? Not on your life!”

Drag kings, queer burlesque, and bathhouses abounded.

When World War II ended, Rusty Brown knew she was fired. She had been working as a machinist at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a job that she liked and felt comfortable doing. But with the war effort winding down, the Navy Yard would soon cut 65,000 workers, with no clear alternative employment for the women who’d been hired to do jobs previously held by men now home from war. So Brown, who identified as a butch lesbian, used her grandfather’s name and ID, disguised herself as a boy, and got another factory job to support herself. Brown passed so well as a boy that she realized she could parlay this talent into something a little more lucrative. So she went to one of the only places in Brooklyn where she knew she could perform as a drag king: Coney Island.

To most, the prevailing narrative of queer history in 20th-century New York exists in Manhattan. Decades of private anger and repression culminated in a tipping point on June 28, 1969, when the explosive Stonewall Riots made a stab at some kind of liberation. Manhattan was known for its thriving populations of urban gay men, documented by the historian George Chauncey in 1994’s Gay New York. This is the limited geography the historian Hugh Ryan had always known as the queer history of New York, until one day, he wondered, what about Brooklyn? “Either there is a history that has not been recorded in a way that I'm able to find it, or gay people are like vampires and we can't cross moving water and therefore we're stuck in Manhattan,” Ryan said in an interview with the New York Public Library. After trying in vain to acquire a book on the queer history of Brooklyn, Ryan realized he needed to write one himself.

Ryan’s five-year research project began as The Pop-Up Museum of Queer History, a traveling museum celebrating the lives of historical queer people in various cities across America. Eventually, the project came to Brooklyn, and in March 2019, Ryan published When Brooklyn Was Queer. In the early 20th century, many residents of Manhattan were seen as sophisticated and urban, whereas Brooklyn abounded with working-class people. While the documented queer life of Manhattan happened in apartments, speakeasies, and at drag balls, Ryan learned the queer history of Brooklyn took place along the borough’s waterfronts, a space where, thanks to a high volume of commercial activity, strangers often came to congregate in relative anonymity for the day before disappearing back to their private homes. One of the most prominent of these spaces was Coney Island.

In the mid-1800s, Coney Island was a place for the wealthy. But in 1920, the MTA lowered the price of a subway ride to Coney Island from ten cents to five, giving the neighborhood its famous nickname, the “nickel empire.” Suddenly, anyone could visit Coney Island. By its very nature—so far removed from the city and brimming with scantily clad adults—Coney Island possessed a distinct atmosphere charged with sex, an ambience that helped many people explore their queer desires, Ryan says. “You have this place steeped in sexuality and gender play, and then you pack a third of the population of New York City in it.”

Coney Island’s early affiliation with the circus also made it somewhat queer by design. The boardwalk hosted a number of freak shows spotlighting people who were born outside the confines of an acceptable heterosexual body. There were gender-nonconforming people, intersex people, and people who explicitly played with gender in their acts, including those who claimed to be half-woman, half-man.

Among the most common performers were the bearded ladies, both celebrated and exploited. Bearded women of color were often branded by freak shows as “missing links,” in a racist reference to Darwin’s “missing link” between the evolution of humans and apes. According to Ryan, many performers who played with gender, such as the bearded ladies, were not queer and did not see themselves as connected to queer people. But their rejection of traditional gender norms created a space where queerness was made possible, he says.

But Coney Island’s arsenal entertainment was far from confined to the circus. There was also vaudeville and burlesque. As a newly minted drag king, Brown made the most of the new stage on the Coney Island strip. Though Brown performed what we would now call drag, back then it was called male or female impersonation, the latter term strongly implying it was just a costume, not a latent expression of another gender identity. Brown performed a show that parodied Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, with Brown playing the part of Astaire. In the midst of this particularly queer line of work, she happened to spot her soulmate. Brown was sitting in the front row of Madam Tirza’s Wine Bath, a burlesque show where a performer took a shower in 40 gallons of what appeared to be wine, when she spotted a dancer named Terry, who Brown assumed must have been straight. But Terry noticed Brown, too. The two would remain together for 28 years, until Terry died.

Madam Tirza—the stage name of one Leona Duval—was another local queer celebrity on Coney Island. Tirza’s burlesque act consisted of her dancing in pasties under a fountain of water dyed red to look like wine, before a panel of mirrors that multiplied her form. To maintain her custom wine-showering contraption and take it on the road, Tirza got her license as a union plumber and a trucker. She was a known bisexual. Dancers in her show frequently referred to her as a “he-she,” a term that was then often used to describe someone who dated both men and women.

In 1906, a doctor met with a 24-year-old sex worker named Loop-the-Loop, who arrived clad in petticoats and a wide hat fastened with gaudy red flowers, according to an issue of the American Journal of Urology and Sexology. Loop, who was assigned male at birth, called themselves a “fairy” (the word “transgender” would not appear until the last quarter of the 20th century). Loop named themselves after the popular ride at Coney Island, a dual-tracked steel roller coaster that operated from 1901 to 1910.

In his research, Ryan found little public record of queer women living in Brooklyn—though they certainly did—until the writer and illustrator Mary Hallock Foote moved to Brooklyn Heights in the 1860s. Similarly, queer people of color do not enter the historical record until the 1890s. From the mid-1800s until around 1940, Brooklyn was over 97 percent white. So while Coney Island was a queer space, it was a decidedly white queer space.

But some queer people of color managed to make a name for themselves on the beachfront. In the early 1920s, a lesbian named Mabel Hampton began her career as a Coney Island performer in an all-black female ensemble. Only in this troupe did Hampton learn of the word “lesbian,” Ryan writes. “There was one woman in Coney Island — I can’t right now recall her name — but she was the beginning of me being a lesbian,” Hampton said in an interview in 1979. Hampton soon left the stages of Coney Island to grander theaters in Harlem, where she performed with prominent black queer women, including the entertainer Gladys Bentley, the singer Ethel Waters, and the heiress A’Lelia Walker. In 1985, Hampton was named Grand Marshall of the city’s pride parade. She would go on to become a founding member of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, a mini-museum in a home on the Upper West Side that can still be visited today.

Another of Coney Island’s queer hotspots were its bathhouses, particularly the Washington Baths and Stauch's. At the time, it was illegal to wear a bathing suit on the streets of New York, and most people rented their suits from the bathhouses. So everyone changed clothes in the same place. “There were men naked with other men and women naked with other women,” Ryan says. “And anywhere you create those spaces, you see queer sex.” In 1929, Coney Island held an all-male beauty pageant. “The bathhouse and the judges were shocked when only gay guys showed up,” Ryan says. “But the people who came to watch the pageant were pleasantly surprised.”

There are some clear reasons why Brooklyn’s waterfront accommodated certain kinds of queer life. As Ryan discovered, queer life during this time could flourish only where queer people could have jobs. Life around the docks ran on the shipping business, which ran on sailors who, in turn, relied on the services of sex workers and entertainers, jobs accessible to queer people.

In 1942, Brooklyn Navy Yard began hiring women to work in industrial jobs, such as the one held by Brown before her stint in drag. Anne Moses was the first woman hired to work as a welder by the Todd Shipyards in Red Hook, where she welded twenty-two-gauge galvanized steel to repair aircraft carriers weighing over 20,000 tons. Moses kept a scrapbook of her years working during the war that document a tight-knit group of butch-appearing women, hair shorn short with high-cut trousers and collared shirts. On their days off, the women would go to Coney Island.

But at the end of World War II, Coney Island and the rest of Brooklyn’s waterfront lost the value they once held for the American military. Butch welders like Anne Moses lost their jobs to the many male soldiers returning from war, and the already motley queer communities splintered as these neighborhoods sunk into economic instability.

Coney Island’s queer culture ultimately crumbled in the hands of Robert Moses (not related to Anne). The public official who became well-known as the “master builder” of much of 20th-century New York City, Moses had a very different vision for Coney Island, one with far less amusement. “Such beaches as the Rockaways and those on Long Island and Coney Island lend themselves to summer exploitation, to honky-tonk catchpenny amusement resorts, shacks built without reference to health, sanitation, safety and decent living,” Moses once wrote in a report to the Rockaway Chamber of Commerce, as recounted in Lawrence and Carol P. Kaplan’s Between Ocean and City: The Transformation of Rockaway, New York.

Moses took advantage of slum-clearance laws to seize shops and land at Coney Island, and then kept them empty, effectively driving people away from the boardwalk. He also rezoned the surrounding land for residential public housing and built overpasses too low for city buses to trespass, ensuring only people who owned cars could make their way to these spaces. In the first half of 1946, over 6,000 people were ticketed for crimes that included “ball-playing,” “peddling,” and “undressing on the beach.” Inspectors shut down the bathhouses on sanitary citations. “There was one free municipal bathhouse, used by 150,000 people,” Ryan says, referring to McLochlin’s baths. “And Moses turned it into equipment storage for the parks.” As businesses disappeared and visitors came less often, crime skyrocketed. Soon, the “nickel empire” became the “Devil’s playpen.”

Coney Island’s stalwart but scrappy queer communities buckled under this new municipal pressure. In 1952, the License Commission shut down Madame Tirza’s show. Too afraid to reopen, Tirza married a man from Coney Island named Joe Boston and they struck out on the road. In 1949, someone with the pen name Swasarnt Nerf published “The Gay Girl’s Guide” to New York and only included two places in Brooklyn, noting Coney Island as a place of last resort for a beach party. “All the queer narratives in the 1950s said the same thing: ‘Coney Island is dead. You can no longer be queer and go there,’” Ryan said.

In the 21st century, Brooklyn has reclaimed its past and is queerer than ever, with queens defining the future of drag and LGBTQ+ chefs cooking soup to foster community. Each June, the Coney Island Mermaid Parade pays homage to the neighborhood’s queer, kitschy, and costumed past. But Ryan hopes his work will help 21st-century queer people living in Brooklyn, on the waterfront or elsewhere, reconnect with their forebearers who hooked up in bathhouses and welded airplanes before Stonewall. The next time you’re in Coney Island, pour some wine—or wine-colored water—out for Madam Tirza.

It can take a lot of time—and some heavy bureaucratic lifting—to tell an honest story about a state's past.

As a kid growing up in Michigan, Renée “Wasson” Dillard spent long days in the back seat of her family's station wagon, watching the world blur by.

Back then, before the American Indian Religious Freedom Act passed in 1978, powwows and other Native American ceremonies and gatherings were often conducted in private—in basements or back rooms, or far out in farmers' fields. So Dillard's family—members of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians—would travel to these events, crisscrossing the state, driving south, or roving west.

Their literal journey was also a symbolic one. "We were on this journey as family to reclaim our traditional culture," says Dillard, whose father and grandmother, born in 1898, had been in enrolled in Indian Residential Schools—part of a legacy of whitewashing Native communities and history. As a result, "there was [an] interruption in traditional cultural knowledge."

On the road, Dillard's family often pulled over at lookouts or rest stops to read the historic markers that dot the state. “Mom was kind of a history buff,” Dillard says. “And someone took the time to put them up, so we took the time to read them.”

When they studied the roadside signs, Dillard’s family hoped the text might help them weave together more threads of their history, which often received only a passing mention in textbooks. In the tribe’s territory around Harbor Springs, at least, “we pretty well understood the overall history,” says Dillard. “But we hoped the signs would carry some detail.”

Often, though, the opposite was true. In a roadside park on Highway 2—near the narrow Straits of Mackinac, where you can stand on the Upper Peninsula and gaze out at the lower, mitten-shaped one—they saw a plaque describing Lake Michigan. The sign was tall and wide, easy to see from a distance, and its tidy serif font accurately described the lake’s shape (elongated) and size (one of the largest in the world). But it also got a lot of things wrong.

According to the plaque, the lake was “discovered in 1634 by Jean Nicolet,” implying that no one had seen it before the French-born coureur des bois came across it in the 17th century. Then, as the sign tells it, it took another few decades before other European explorers gauged the “general size and outline” of the lake. Seventy-seven words marched across the plaque, and not one of them made reference to the Native communities that had navigated and fished the lake for centuries before Nicolet set sail.

That didn’t sit well with Dillard. “We were here,” she says. “We didn’t need it discovered. ‘Thank goodness for this French asshole [who] showed up to tell us that it was a lake.’ It’s just so ridiculous.” The sign had offended her since she was a kid. Even when she got older, she often thought, "‘Man, I’d like to take a war party up there and just cut it down.’”

Dillard, now in her mid-50s, never demolished the sign, but she did post a photo of it on social media this spring, pointing out the flawed, sparse, and offensive account and wondering how to amend it.

That’s what the state of Michigan is now grappling with on a broad scale. History is past, but it isn’t fixed: Descriptions are always products of their time, and when historians revisit old accounts and foreground voices and perspectives that had been muted, contemporary understandings shift. But while understanding of history are sometimes fluid, the metal markers that describe it are not.

Michigan is speckled with more than 17,000 gold-and-green historical plaques. Like their counterparts across the country, these signs make history plainly visible—but only to the extent that a single paragraph can encompass centuries of nuance, acknowledge several different perspectives, and hold up over time. It’s a tall order.

So now the state is taking up the task of telling its own story in a contemporary manner, rewriting the way its historic markers recount the past.

Custodians of historic sites grapple with complicated histories in various ways. They might topple a structure interpreted as a monument to racism, for example, as was the case when a mission bell was recently removed from the University of California, Santa Cruz campus at the behest of tribal leaders, who argued that it valorized the legacy of forcibly converting indigenous people to Christianity.

In other instances, site custodians—or even an entire town— might reckon with a thorny history that they hadn’t previously confronted at all. That’s the tack that a small town in Ontario, Canada, recently took when it planted Japanese cherry trees and installed plaques recounting the experiences of more than 150 Japanese-Canadian men who had been exiled from British Columbia during World War II and interned on farms to the east, in the agricultural community now known as Chatham-Kent. Though one of the buildings that had held the relocated men is still standing at an intersection in the town, locals rarely acknowledged the uncomfortable history it represents.

"I don't think it's very well-known," Jeff Bray, a local manager of parks and open spaces who worked with the National Association of Japanese-Canadians on the historic markers, told the CBC just before the new placards were placed in the ground. "I never learned it in school, and I know my kids didn’t either."

Rewriting the account of an event that previously relied on a single narrative might involve amplifying voices that weren’t originally quoted. It might also mean striking offensive, imprecise, or outdated language. In recent months, several U.S. cities have done exactly that. Memphis, Tennessee, and Savannah, Georgia, for example, recently unveiled new markers celebrating their regions’ diverse history by putting up markers to commemorate a community center founded in the 1920s by Chinese immigrants and Chinese-Americans, and 19th-century African-Americans who built lives for themselves along Savannah’s southeastern marshes. Meanwhile, Yarmouth, Maine, recently removed a plaque that referred to Native Americans as “savage enemies.”

In Michigan, the edit will be sweeping, and time-consuming.

Placards have been going up around the state since 1955, and “our concept of history and what should be on the markers has changed since then,” says Sandra Clark, director of the Michigan History Center, which oversees the process.

In Michigan, a historic marker is born when a community member or group nominates a site and submits an application form—along with primary-source documentation, maps, photographs, and a $250 application fee—to the Michigan Historical Commission, a governor-appointed body. If a site passes muster with its historic bonafides, the commission works with the nominator to hash out the text, then the nominator ponies up money to pay for it. (Prices range from $1,900 for a small marker to $3,750 for one that stands four-and-a-half feet tall, with double-sided text.)

It hasn’t been a secret that at least some of these historic markers—especially the oldest ones—contain slurs, or only detail a small sliver of history.

“There’s little to no Native voice, female voice, or African-American voice,” says Eric Hemenway, director of archives and records for the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, and a frequent collaborator on Historical Commission projects. The text on the markers often reflects “history told through a very specific lens.”

That lens, of course, has usually been white and male. But until now, there hasn’t been a mechanism for assessing whether the markers, installed decades earlier, need a closer look.

They got one after Dillard sent her snapshot of the Lake Michigan marker to a friend who works at the state Department of Transportation (DoT), which manages the property the marker is on. That friend passed the image along, and the soon donated money to redo it and three other signs about the Great Lakes on DoT land, Clark says. (One marker celebrating Lake Huron, installed in the 1950s and also slated for revision, notes that the lake was “the first of the Great Lakes seen by white men.”) Clark hopes that the new signs will be in place by 2020.

Meanwhile, the conversation about the Lake Michigan marker is part of a larger movement: a more holistic accounting of the story the markers tell about the state. “If you start changing one or two, you’ve got to look at all of them,” Hemenway says. That might start by “finding out which are the worst of the worst, so to speak, and which we need to change right away.” But each and every marker will eventually have to be scrutinized. There’s no shortcut for that, Hemenway says: “You just have to grunt through and read the text.”

The statewide reassessment will also involve revisiting stories that may have been previously overlooked. It’s still in the very early stages, but as the work progresses, Clark plans to seek private funding to host events in local libraries and historical societies, where residents will be invited to tell the commission “what isn’t here, and what might offend some people about what is here.” In service of this goal, the commission is also reconsidering what constitutes a usable primary source.

“Not all groups were privileged to have folks writing down what they were doing, what they were thinking,” Clark says. Church programs and other ephemera likewise hold a wealth of information about communities and events that weren’t necessarily covered in newspapers or formal reports.

For precedents, teams drafting new text might look to Mackinac Island, a landmass between the state’s upper and lower peninsulas. A few years back, Hemenway worked with Phil Porter, director of the Mackinac State Historic Parks, on a series of signs scattered across half a dozen turnouts along an eight-mile trail.

“The purpose was for us to do a more accurate job of telling the story of Native Americans’ centuries-old connection to Mackinac,” says Porter. This entailed grappling with old conflicts, treaties, and water issues, and bringing the story up to the present day, with photographs of tribal people fishing on the land of their ancestors. “I didn’t want to leave us in the past,” Hemenway says. “In the U.S., Native people tend to drift out of the [mainstream] story in the mid-1800s, and we’re gone.”

Beyond Hemenway and Porter’s sign project, there’s also an effort to revisit the stories told about the Biddle House, an 18th-century home on the island. The house, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is named for former owner Edward Biddle, a prosperous fur trader. Key to his professional success were the relationships and acumen of his wife, Agatha Biddle, a woman of Odawa and French descent. The marker references Edward by name, but Agatha is only invoked indirectly, as “his Indian wife.”

“In my opinion, Agatha was more important,” Hemenway says. She was a chief of her tribe, and known for her philanthropy and caretaking of ailing kids—acts for which she was posthumously inducted into the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame in 2018. “From reading the marker today,” Hemenway adds, “you wouldn’t even know her name.”

That will soon change.

“We have been working with our own staff and other researchers to try and flesh that story out,” says Porter. Clark says she hopes “a new marker will give Agatha her due,” and the House will be turned into a Native American history museum, scheduled to open in 2020. The Historical Commission has also begun evaluating other markers on the island that need a red pen, prioritized which should come first in the editing queue, and recommended that a group of historians and other experts work together to draft and review any new text.

As the statewide project gains speed, Dillard and Hemenway note, it will be crucial to connect with members of the communities that the markers describe. “Reach out to the people that you’re telling the story about,” Hemenway says. “If you have a story about Natives, you talk to Natives.” In history books, Native stories are “portrayed as [they were] observed, rather than how [they were] experienced,” says Dillard, who teaches traditional weaving and other fiber arts that help indigenous people reconnect with their heritage.

Hemenway believes that this failure to learn from firsthand knowledge contributed to the text’s inaccuracies and omissions. “There was no reaching out to these groups in the '50s and '60s whatsoever,” he says. “If there would have been, the narrative would have been completely different.”

From 1896 until the 1930s, showmen would travel the country staging wrecks at state fairs.

On September 15, 1896, two locomotives crashed head on 14 miles north of Waco, Texas. The locomotives’ boilers exploded on impact, sending debris flying through the air for hundreds of yards, killing at least two spectators and maiming countless others. One man even lost an eye to a flying bolt.

But no one ran from the calamity. In fact, after the crash, thousands of bystanders ran toward the destroyed locomotives hoping to claim a piece of the wreckage. That’s because the 40,000 or so people scattered along the tracks that September day knew the locomotives were going to crash and had paid to be there.

From 1896 until the 1930s, staged train wrecks were a popular—albeit destructive—event at fairs and festivals across the U.S., long before anyone ever thought of wrecking old automobiles at a demolition derby or monster truck rally.

One of the first staged train wrecks was done in 1895 by a railroad equipment salesman named A.L. Streeter in Ohio. The wreck used the same formula that nearly all other staged train wrecks would follow for the next 40 years. Organizers would lay a stretch of track, usually anywhere from 1,800 feet to a mile-long, and then get two old steam locomotives and put them at either end of the track facing each other. They would then hire two brave locomotive engineers to wait for a signal from the organizer. When they got the go-ahead, the engineers would pull the throttles back as far as they could to get the locomotives up to speed. They would then jump from the locomotive before the two trains crashed in front of a crowd who had paid a few dollars to see the spectacle.

According to the historian James J. Reisdorff’s book The Man Who Wrecked 146 Locomotives, Streeter’s wreck was so successful that there were at least six staged train collisions the following year, including the most infamous one north of Waco, Texas, known as the “Crash at Crush.”

The wreck near Waco was the brainchild of William George Crush, a passenger agent for the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad, better known as the “Katy Railroad.” The Katy had been struggling to regain its financial footing following the Panic of 1893 and the appropriately named Crush was tasked with finding a way to attract new passengers to the railroad. Crush offered a deal where people could pay two dollars to ride the Katy to the wreck from anywhere in Texas.

Crush secured two old steam locomotives, Nos. 999 and 1001, and painted them red and green. Railroad employees then built a stretch of track between three hillsides that formed a natural amphitheater, perfect for viewing the wreck. Crush expected a crowd of 20,000 people to come to the event, so he built a temporary town and called it “Crush.” To support the thousands of spectators he drilled water wells, set up a borrowed circus tent to house a restaurant, and built a wooden jail in case people got out of hand. He even hired 200 constables to keep the peace.

On September 15, people began to arrive at Crush aboard trains that would steam into town every few minutes. By 4 p.m., more than 40,000 people had arrived, far more than Crush’s original estimate, making Crush the second-largest city in Texas, at least for a few hours.

At approximately 5:10 p.m., Crush climbed on his horse and rode to a spot between the two locomotives. At the wave of Crush’s hat, the two trains began to barrel toward each other. The locomotives reached 50 miles per hour before they collided, crunching into a mass of bent steel and shattered wood before exploding. One witness described the terror: “There was a swift instance of silence, and then, as if controlled by a single impulse, both boilers exploded simultaneously and the air was filled with flying missiles of iron and steel varying in size from a postage stamp to half a driving wheel.” A Civil War veteran who was there said it was more terrifying than the Battle of Gettysburg.

Prior to the event, Crush had asked a number of Katy engineers about the dangers of crashing two locomotives. All of them but one said it was safe. The engineer who said the locomotives would explode was quickly dismissed as a negative naysayer.

Crush was fired immediately after the crash, but after realizing that most people in attendance had a great time, the railroad rehired Crush the next day and he worked for the Katy until he retired.

While Crush was perhaps the most well-known train wrecker, one man turned it into a career. Joe Connolly staged more than 70 wrecks and destroyed at least 146 locomotives between 1896 and 1932. He even earned the nickname “Head-On Joe.”

Connolly grew up in Iowa along the tracks and as a boy often wondered what would happen if two trains ran into each other. “I believed that somewhere in the makeup of every normal person there lurks the suppressed desire to smash things up,” Connolly wrote in an article in 1933. “So I was convinced that thousands of others would be just as curious as I was to see what actually would take place when two speeding locomotives came together.”

Besides wanting to satisfy his boyhood wonder, Connolly worked in theater and knew a good show when he saw it. For his first collision, Reisdorff writes, he teamed up with a veteran locomotive engineer, J.H. Bancroft, in order to safely carry out the event. Connolly went to the state fair board in Des Moines and offered to put on a crash for $5,000. That initial price was a bit too steep for the board but he came back with a more acceptable offer: $3,000 plus a cut of the ticket sales. The board agreed and on September 9, 1896—a week before the infamous Crash at Crush—Connolly held his first staged wreck. About 5,000 people paid 50 cents each to sit in the grandstand to watch the show and thousands more stood along the fence outside. The wreck was a success and both Connolly and the fair made a profit.

Connolly began to criss-cross the country putting on wrecks from Boston to Los Angeles, Tampa to Salt Lake City. According to Reisdorff, he also found ways to add to the spectacle, including strapping dynamite to the front of the locomotives and filling freight cars behind the engines with gasoline and hot coals so the vehicles would be engulfed in flames after they derailed. Connolly and other train wreckers also liked to paint names and phrases on the sides of the trains for different political candidates or causes so that spectators could cheer for their respective locomotive. One wreck in 1932 featured “Hoover” versus “Roosevelt.” Connolly got so proficient at putting on train wrecks that he allegedly even tried copyrighting it, although Reisdorff was unable to find proof that he ever actually filed the paperwork to do so.

By the 1930s, staged train wrecks were starting to lose their popularity because wrecking old but otherwise useful locomotives was seen as wasteful at the height of the Great Depression. Connolly put on his final wreck at the Iowa State Fair in 1932. According to Reisdorff’s book, after the destructive display, Connolly said, “Well that’s that,” and walked away.

The last staged train wreck for public viewing was in 1935, but that was not the last time people crashed two locomotives on purpose. In 1951, two steam locomotives were wrecked in Colorado in front of the cameras for the movie Denver and Rio Grande, a western-themed film about the construction of the railroad of the same name.

Even today, train wrecks still offer grim appeal for the public. One only needs to look at the 2010 disaster movie Unstoppable to see an example of a modern audience waiting with bated breath for a train wreck. But the trend of destroying trains in front of a live audience is one that died out long ago, along with Connolly and Crush, the masters of the bizarre craft.

Decades of work have led to a breakthrough.

The goats scuffling across Israel’s Negev desert manage to eke out an occasional grassy nibble from the undulations of dusty sand and sunbaked rock that comprise much of the country. But where a human can find sustenance in the vast region is not immediately apparent. Of course, it helps to know where and how to look.

Bedouins have long extracted truffles from this otherwise inhospitable ground, tracking them by their proximity to certain desert plants and the telltale spidery cracks that form in the earth above them after a storm. For one or two months of the year, some Bedouins consume these truffles as staple foods, using them as replacements for potatoes in stews or roasting them over a fire. They also forage them to sell in urban markets.

But increasingly rare rains, mounting temperatures, and overexploitation have greatly reduced the number of desert truffles in the wild. Which is why, for the last 13 years, plant and fungus physiologist Yaron Sitrit has been working to turn one species of desert truffle, Terfezia boudieri, into a farmable crop.

It hasn’t been easy. “I want to finish the work, then retire,” Sitrit says. This particular work has already seen the retirement of at least two other researchers at Ben-Gurion University in Be’er Sheva, where Sitrit’s lab is located. They passed their project on to Sitrit after 20-odd years of toil, at a point where all three of them imagined that a breakthrough was nigh. “I did think that we were quite close” to figuring out how to grow the truffles, Sitrit says. But, “frustration is part of the business.”

A truffle is the fruiting body of a fungus that releases spores to create more fungus. Although some species of truffle—Périgord’s coveted Tuber melanosporum among them—are cultivated in woody tracts in France, Italy, and other parts of Europe, a Middle Eastern desert truffle is another thing entirely. With its texture like a chestnut and a mild flavor Sitrit compares to bacon, the desert truffle is an everyman’s food that, in abundant years past, might have cost only 50 shekels, or about $14 a kilo in the market.

European truffles grow in what’s called a mycorrhizal partnership between the mycelium of the fungus, which is its vegetative part, and trees such as oak and hazelnut. Underground, the mycelium spreads via threadlike strands called hyphae. These attach to a tree’s roots to create a mutually beneficial system of coexistence. The hyphae expand the reach of the roots, giving them access to more distant water, minerals, and nutrients than they might be able to reach otherwise; in return, the roots pump the hyphae full of sugars.

The same sort of symbiosis exists for desert truffles, too. Only, their partners are scrubby shrubs in the rock rose family. Terfezia boudieri’s particular host plant is Helianthemum sessiliflorum, which has slim, dark leaves and twigs studded with small yellow flowers.

Sitrit calls it “spoiled.” “You’d think it would be hardy because it lives in the desert, but it needs shade, and not too much irrigation,” he says. Plus, both plant and fungi enter into dormancy in the summer rather than in the winter; and, due to the very short rainy season, they have a very short time to interact.

It doesn’t help that the extensive knowledge European truffle growers have in cultivating their fungi is pretty much useless in the Negev. When Sitrit took on the desert truffle project 13 years ago, there were some known quantities: how to grow the persnickety Helianthemum, and how to grow the truffle fungus in a petri dish. But putting the two together was a stumbling block. This was complicated by the fact that it had barely rained in the Negev for the previous five years. Sitrit had no luck finding the truffles in the wild, and the few for sale were incredibly expensive. So, Sitrit fiddled with inoculating the plants with mycelia rather than spores from the truffles. “It was hell,” he says. A small experimental plot eventually yielded only two truffles from hundreds of plants.

Sitrit moved his dirt-bound experiments to a farm south of Be’Er Sheva, in Ramat Negev. There, he and his colleagues tinkered with irrigation, the genotype of the host plants they were using, and even the spacing between plants. “How many plants per hectare? How many centimeters between the plants? Simple questions,” he says. His truffle yields did increase, but they still weren’t abundant enough to give to farmers as a commercial crop. First, “we needed to increase the yields.”

Just when and how much to inoculate the young plants with the spores took some trial and error. So did understanding how to arrange the plants in the field: rows worked okay. But tight blocks worked much better. “Blocks let the plants and the fungi form a coalition, with several plants supporting three or four fruit bodies,” he says. He also played around with dried truffle spores instead of mycelia, scouring them with sandpaper before incubating them in petri dishes.

Finally, Sitrit took what he felt was a much improved process out to the field. Last February, when he dug up his truffles, he found he’d gotten 170 kilos of truffles per hectare, with the largest weighing in at around half a kilo, or more than a pound. A black winter Périgord truffle that size could fetch an easy $2,000. But Sitrit points out that the humble Terfezia boudieri doesn’t possess any of the prized, sulfurous aromas of Tuber melanosporum. “It’s different,” says Sitrit. “But it’s ours, so it’s the best.”

Sitrit is so close to success he can almost taste it. He just wants to double those yields, “to be sure,” he says. And he’s still fiddling. Next year he plans to let any new Helianthemum plants that pop up in the field on their own grow to maturity, to see if they’ll form their own mycorrhizal partnerships with the fungi that’s already down in the dirt. That could mean that inoculated plants might only have to be stuck in the ground every 6 or 7 years in order to yield a regular crop of truffles each winter.

Sitrit hopes that in a year or two he can approach farmers—Jewish, Druze, Bedouin, whoever’s interested—and get them to farm truffles on a much larger scale before taking the whole thing commercial. “I’m getting older; I hope we do it,” he says. He mentions retiring again.

Still, a while back Sitrit collected some samples of another desert truffle called Tirmania nivea, a slightly more pungent fungus than Terfezia boudieri, a cousin of which researchers in Spain have been working to cultivate. Sitrit’s noodled around with Tirmania and stuck some inoculated plants in the ground, just to see what happens. “It’s not a crop. I wish it would be,” he says. With those words, the prospect of his retirement seems a little further away.

Warming winters may be responsible.

Around 13 years ago, Charles Ray got a call about a mattress in Macon County, Alabama, that he would never forget. It was early June, and a woman told him she had seen little black bugs flying around a mattress in the loft of her barn. “I was sure it was just honeybees,” says Ray, an entomologist working with the Alabama Cooperative Extension System, a state university outreach organization. He often goes on house calls to check out suspect bugs, so the request was nothing unusual. But what he found was so much worse than he expected.

When Ray got a glimpse of the mattress, he realized it wasn’t just honeybees, but yellow jackets, living in the biggest nest he’d ever seen. It was what is known as a perennial yellow jacket nest, meaning it had survived for over a year and hadn’t been beaten back by winter. Perennial nests aren’t common; Alabama recorded more than 90 that year, in 2006, but very few since then. But by Ray’s best estimate, 2019 is shaping up to be another year plagued by these super-nests. He’s seen two possible nests so far in person, and at least 10 others in pictures people have sent him.

While yellow jacket queens boast an antifreeze-like compound in their blood, their workers are far less hardy. They typically die off in a cold snap, leaving their queen to begin a new nest as a “single mom,” Ray says. But a mild winter combined with an abundant food supply can allow a colony not just to live, but also to thrive and reproduce well into spring. The result? Enormous, sprawling nests that can contain much larger populations than you’d find in an average nest, which tops off at around 5,000 workers. By contrast, one perennial nest found in South Carolina contained a quarter million wasps, Ray says.

To contain the perennial nest in the barn, Ray covered the mattress with a tent and sprayed the inside with an insecticidal smoke. “I killed every one of them,” Ray says. “I was very proud of myself.” When Ray and colleagues later cut open the mattress, they counted around 15,000 yellow jackets winding their way into the frame.

Typically yellow jackets make their homes in a cavity or void, such as an abandoned rodent burrow, Ray says, “but really any cavity will do.” These small burrows are ample real estate for an infant colony, but perennial nests will rapidly outgrow their initial locales. “The nest will grow into whatever space is available,” Ray says. “They just fill whatever void they’re in and build outward.” Subsequently, perennial nests pop up in much stranger places than normal ones, a testament to their horrifying mystique. Aside from mattresses, Ray has spotted these nests trickling out of homes and cars—a far cry from the confines of a vole hole. Ray recalls one perennial nest he found in a ’57 Chevy Blazer sitting on some cinder blocks. The yellow jackets swarmed out and stung a young couple who opened the car door despite multiple warnings from its owner.

As they learned, it’s dangerous to disturb or attempt to dismantle a nest. In 2006, one person railed against a perennial nest with 26 cans of wasp spray before passing out, breaking an orbital bone, and waking up in the hospital. Even ordinary exterminators aren’t trained to handle such large settlements, and they tend to charge exorbitant sums that lower-income people can’t afford, Ray says. Instead, the cheapest and most effective extermination strategy is winter. The 90 perennial nests of 2006 were easily felled by November, when temperatures in the Southeast dipped. “I can’t say that 17 degrees is a magic number, but it’s close to it,” Ray says. “All those nests disappeared.”

Though he can’t say for sure what’s causing the resurgence of these nightmarish nests, Ray has a guess: “The last 13 or 14 years, we’ve seen the warmest temperatures we’ve ever seen and nests we’ve never seen before.” Though he’d first heard of perennial nests in the 1970s, Ray never saw one in person until the fateful barn mattress. Now he sees them more than he’d like.

So if you happen to notice a perennial hive on your property, Ray says your best bet is to leave it alone and wait until winter. “Whatever you do,” he cautions, “don’t hit it with a rake.”

Stone structures beneath Bradgate House may be the real birthplace of Lady Jane Grey.

Lady Jane Grey was England’s “Nine-Day Queen.” Best known for her brief rise and tragic fall in the 16th century, she’s thought to have spent her earliest years in the Bradgate House, one of the best-known ruins in Britain. But new archaeological research shows that the brick house sits atop what may have been Jane's real childhood home.

A team from the University of Leicester recently excavated several buildings on the property—stone structures that predate the Bradgate House—leading the researchers to believe that an early version of the home was demolished to make way for the famous one we know today.

"While Bradgate House is such an iconic site, very little is known about the standing structure and how it changed over time,” says Richard Thomas, a lecturer at the University of Leicester, speaking with Leicester Live.

The Bradgate House was modified about 20 years after it was built, then again as the 17th century drew to a close. But little is known about its its history during the 16th century.

Located in the village of Newtown Linford, the Bradgate House is one of England’s first brick buildings, and one of its great unfortified houses, lacking any enclosing walls or bridges. Its construction began in 1499 under Thomas Grey, the 1st Marquess of Dorset, but the nobleman didn’t live to see its completion. His son Thomas Grey, the 2nd Marquess of Dorset, finished the task in 1520, and the Grey family and their descendants lived in the house for more than 200 years.

Perhaps its most famous resident was Jane Grey, the great-granddaughter of King Henry VII, the first monarch in the House of Tudor. In 1553, King Edward VI—the first English king to be raised a Protestant—named his pious 16-year-old cousin Jane his successor, as a way to block the Catholic Queen Mary I from assuming the throne.

The Privy Council initially backed Jane’s ascent, despite the fact that she was fifth in the line of succession. It’s said that she fainted when she learned about her new role, but accepted her duties when she awoke. On July 10, 1553, she was proclaimed the queen of England.

Within days, however, public support for Mary swelled, and the Council changed course. Jane was deposed after just nine days and, with her husband, Lord Guildford Dudley, charged with high treason and imprisoned in the Tower of London. Deemed a threat to the crown after her father joined Wyatt's Rebellion against Mary, Jane was beheaded on February 12, 1554.

The archaeological work under way at the Bradgate House is part of the Bradgate Park Fieldschool, a five-year research program. Thomas says the next step is to date the stone structures under the brick house and determine when they were destroyed—facts that will help researchers gain a better understanding of both the Bradgate House itself and, more generally, how families in Tudor England lived.

Live from space, it’s a grand celestial phenomenon!

The on-air commentators for the NBA Finals in June had plenty of high-stakes gristle to chew on. The Raptors and Warriors each have legions of passionate fans with a seemingly insatiable appetite for analysis, and commentators fed them everything they could: injuries, stats, free agency, Drake’s sideline antics. Unlike Game 6, the total solar eclipse on Tuesday, July 2, isn’t a competition—but experts from NASA and the Exploratorium, a museum in San Francisco, will be delivering online commentary to viewers tuning in around the world.

For eclipse fans, there are a few excellent viewing options. The first is aboard the Parker Solar Probe, a car-sized spacecraft that NASA launched in 2018 to take a closer look at the Sun’s atmosphere. The second is here on Earth, from tall, cold, remote mountain observatories along the path of totality—the band where the Moon will fully blot out the Sun. This narrow swath between La Serena, Chile, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, will be plunged into daytime darkness for a few minutes between 4:38 p.m. and 4:44 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. (The band of totality will make landfall in Chile and then continue over the Andes, but a partial eclipse will be visible across the rest Chile and Argentina as well as Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, plus portions of Colombia, Brazil, Venezuela, and Panama.)

It’s impossible to actually hitch a ride on the Parker Solar Probe, but even if you could, you wouldn’t want to—the craft whips around at speeds of up to 430,000 miles per hour, and at its closest approach, roughly 3.8 million miles from the surface of the Sun, a 4.5-inch-thick carbon-composite shield is the only thing insulating it against temperatures of 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. (It’s currently zipping along at 84,585,600 miles from the scorching surface.) And those lonely peaks in Vicuña, Chile—thousands of feet up—are more accessible, at least if you're already there. They offer ideal conditions to study black holes and far-away galaxies, and “it turns out that the same weather and being up high away from the atmospheric stuff is good for [looking at] the Sun, as well,” says Rob Semper, of the Exploratorium. Up there, at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, Semper and his team have set up four telescopes with various filters to help them peer at the solar show—and beam it to onlookers around the world.

From 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, the Exploratorium and NASA will broadcast live feeds from these telescopes with commentary in English and Spanish from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m., courtesy of the Exploratorium’s Sam Sharkland, astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi, and many more. (Watch it here.) The program will include science demonstrations and updates from the Parker Solar Probe, which is seizing the opportunity to peek at the corona, the outermost portion of the Sun’s atmosphere. A solar eclipse is the best time to study it, because it’s usually outshined by the bright surface of the Sun, which is 10 million times denser. The probe will gather more information about the structure of the corona to investigate what drives the outflow of solar wind, and determine why the corona is hotter than the Sun’s surface—which remains a bit of mystery, because “when you walk away from a heat source, it usually gets colder, not hotter,” explains Karen Fox, NASA’s heliophysics communications lead. (Separately, the Virtual Telescope Project will be running a feed of its own, too.)

Since totality only lasts a precious few minutes, the NASA/Exploratorium team will prime viewers by explaining what they expect to see—including streamers and other things erupting from the surface—so that onlookers can enjoy the show once it begins. “The idea was, if you can’t travel to an eclipse, you can have some of the experience of really seeing totality,” Semper says. “You have to maximize those two minutes, [because] totality is completely different than partial. It’s an emotional experience, actually.” It can be profoundly visceral: “When I look up,” Semper says, “it looks like someone punched a black hole into the sky where the Sun used to be.” No matter where you are in the world, the online show means you can settle into a courtside seat to the solar action.

Chlamydia is a threat to the marsupials, so an island without it is a good sign.

At long last, koala scientists stumbled upon the holy grail of their research. Around 70 miles southwest of Adelaide, on Kangaroo Island, there is a population of very, very special koalas. These isolated marsupials possess no unique skills or traits, but unlike every other population of wild koalas in Australia, the ones on Kangaroo Island do not have chlamydia. And while we don’t mean to STI-shame, that makes them pretty important.

Some researchers believe the Kangaroo Island koalas could hold the key to the survival of the species, according to a study recently published in Scientific Reports. “This is a very important finding because Chlamydial disease is so prevalent and efforts to fight it have so far been unsuccessful,” Natasha Speight, a veterinary scientist from the University of Adelaide, said in a statement.

The researchers captured and released 75 wild koalas from sprawling populations living in the Mount Lofty Ranges east of Adelaide, and 170 koalas from the population of 50,000 on Kangaroo Island. Each koala underwent a thorough examination by a vet, including tests for chlamydia and koala retrovirus. They found that 46.7 percent of the Mount Lofty koalas definitely have the bacterial infection. By contrast, every Kangaroo Island koala tested was free of it.

If heart disease is the leading cause of death for American humans, chlamydia is the leading cause of death for Australian koalas, according to the study. In case you were wondering—and you probably were—koala chlamydia isn’t quite the same as the human version; it’s a slightly different strain (which can actually infect humans, too, through contact with the marsupial’s urine). Though koalas can contract chlamydia through sexual contact, as humans do, they can also catch it through other forms of close interaction, such as between mothers and joeys. And full-blown koala chlamydia is a serious condition that can lead to blindness and urinary tract infections that may result in infertility or death.

Though researchers can technically cure diseased koalas with antibiotics—just like humans—many of the marsupials die after treatment, according to LiveScience. The marsupials’ diet of eucalyptus leaves contains a compound called tannin that can be toxic if not broken down by gut bacteria, which disappear in the presence of antibiotics. But maintaining a healthy population of wild koalas could help researchers develop a vaccine, Speight told ABC News.

As koalas succumb to the infection across northeastern Australia, the researchers hope to keep Kangaroo Island chlamydia-free. The island is also a haven for another isolated population: the world’s last remaining purebred Ligurian bees. Thankfully, they also appear to be chlamydia-free.

The ancient resin, used for everything from aromatherapy to Catholic ceremonies, is being overtapped.

In parts of Africa and India, wild Boswellia sacra trees produce frankincense, an ancient, aromatic resin extracted from the sap of their trunks. Known for its biblical significance—frankincense was one of the three gifts of the Magi (along with myrrh and gold)—the fragrant material is used in perfumes and incense for cooking and religious ceremonies.

For millennia, frankincense foragers have stripped the papery bark of Boswellia trees several times each year to get tears of the hardened resin to appear. Now, the population of trees responsible for this sweet, woody scent are steadily declining as a result of exploitative tapping practices. Two other factors—agricultural clearing in the woodlands where these deciduous trees thrive, and disturbances by longhorn beetles (which lay their eggs within the bark)—are compounding the problem.

A new study by Dutch and Ethiopian ecologists, recently published in the journal Nature Sustainability, asserts that over the next 20 years, frankincense production worldwide could be cut in half. The researchers predict that 90 percent of the world’s Boswellia trees will disappear by 2070.

“Current management of Boswellia populations is clearly unsustainable,” lead researcher Frans Bongers of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, said in a statement. “Our models show that within 50 years, populations of Boswellia will be decimated, and the declining populations mean frankincense production is doomed.”

The team of scientists studied an area in northwest Ethiopia, which kisses the Blue Nile and contains a smattering of both tapped and untapped Boswellia trees. In their study, they detailed their method for predicting the lifespan of viable frankincense resin in the coming decades. After analyzing the growth-ring data of more than 20,000 trees, the ecologists found that over 75 percent of the populations they studied lacked small (read: young and untapped) trees, and that these specimens have not regenerated naturally for decades.

Measuring growth and seed production revealed that those trees consistently tapped for their fragrant resin “produce seeds that germinate at only 16 percent while seeds of trees that had not been tapped germinate at more than 80 percent,” according to Environmental News Network.

Moving forward, ecologists suggest that these trees and the gummy, amber-colored sap they generate can be protected by regulating how often they’re tapped, and by better land management generally. It takes Boswellia saplings up to 10 years to mature, so preventing insects, wildfires—and humans—from impeding their growth is paramount.

Mary Toft staged an elaborate hoax, but the pain was real.

In 1726, London was hoodwinked by a poor, illiterate woman named Mary Toft. She had fooled the city’s finest doctors, scientists, and even the King. She, apparently, could give birth to rabbits. It was not a skill anyone had been clamoring for, but it understandably had everyone fascinated. Toft delivered on that promise—17 times over, leading to a spectacle that mesmerized the nation for several months. At least until she was inevitably exposed.

Today, Toft has been relegated to a footnote in the “weird” archives of history. She has become an entry in a listicle, a cocktail fact, a curiosity, proof that people in the 18th century had to have been different from us in some crucial, preposterous way. But Karen Harvey, a historian at the University of Birmingham, thinks we should take Toft more seriously, as a poor woman caught up in a power struggle between powerful men, a woman who lost authority over her body in the process—a story that says a great deal about its time and place. “The idea is absurd, and we know it’s absurd,” Harvey says. “But when you think about it, it’s quite a ghastly story.”

Harvey began teaching Toft’s case to her undergraduate history students, and soon realized that historians had left out a great deal of what she saw as crucial to it. “Nobody had asked very many questions about her and her life,” she says. So Harvey dug into Toft’s confessions, which can be found today in the University of Glasgow’s special collections. The scholar was struck by how much distress Toft appeared to be in, and how explicitly she articulated the pain of the whole process. Rather than a master manipulator, Toft appeared to have been exploited herself. “‘But all along, she says, ‘It wasn’t me, it wasn’t my idea, there are women who put me up to it,’” Harvey says. “I’m not sure she had any power at all.”

Toft was born Mary Denyer in 1903 in Godalming, Surrey, just about 40 miles from London. Godalming was one of the poorest areas in the county, according to Harvey’s paper “Rabbits, Whigs and Hunters: Women and Protest in Mary Toft’s Monstrous Births of 1726.” At 17, she married the wool textile worker Joshua Toft, 18, and soon had two children. Every morning, Mary Toft walked two hours to labor in a hop field, another grueling day in a relatively grueling life.

Toft was just 25 when she delivered her first monster. The ruse began on September 27, 1726. She’d miscarried the month before—a common outcome for pregnant peasants in the 18th century, who were required to continue working in the fields while pregnant—and reportedly delivered several lumps of flesh, which may have been a malformed placenta. But this latest “birth” did not appear to have been human. Toft’s family called upon local obstetrician John Howard, who help her deliver what he described as “three legs of a Cat of a Tabby Colour, and one leg of a Rabbet: the guts were as a Cat’s and in them were three pieces of the Back-Bone of an Eel,” according to Fiona Haslam’s From Hogarth to Rowlandson: Medicine in Art in Eighteenth-Century Britain. In one particularly productive day, according to the Russell, Toft allegedly gave birth to a nine dead baby rabbits.

Entranced by what seemed to be a supernatural occurrence, Howard wrote to England’s most revered doctors and scientists, as well as the secretary of King George I. The monarch sent two men to investigate: Nathaniel St. André, his Swiss surgeon-anatomist, and Samuel Molyneux, the Prince of Wales’s secretary. Toft had already become a local celebrity, and she was moved from Godalming to a larger town of Guildford, where Howard worked. Whenever Toft delivered a rabbit, Howard promptly pickled it and placed it in a jar on a shelf in his study.

The noblemen arrived on November 15 to learn, rather conveniently, that Toft had just gone into labor with her fifteenth dead rabbit. St. André and Molyneux then witnessed the births of a couple more. Examination of the bunnies suggested, as one might expect, they could not have originated in Toft’s body; one’s stomach contained remnants of hay and grass. Some appeared to be fetuses, while others were maybe three months old. But St. André was just thrilled by the possibility, and he explained things away, reasoning that the rabbits were delivered dead and, in some cases, in pieces because of the contractions of labor, British historian Edward White wrote in The Paris Review. And so St. André took one of the pickled rabbits back to the king.

By way of explanation, Toft said that she had been startled by a rabbit while working in the field. This notion complied with a theory, quite popular at the time, called “maternal impression,” which attempted to explain birth defects and other congenital disorders, according to Niki Russell, who works in the University of Glasgow’s special collections. Joseph Merrick, known as the “Elephant Man,” explained his own condition along these lines, claiming that his mother was startled by an elephant while pregnant with him. St. André was thoroughly convinced that Toft’s case was a stunning example of this theory. Other doctors, such as the respected midwives James Douglas and Sir Richard Manningham, not so much.

On November 29, Toft was taken to a bath house in London to be observed further. There, she was examined frequently, by as many as 10 doctors at a time, all of whom were men, Harvey writes in her paper, “What Mary Toft Felt: Women’s Voices, Pain, Power and the Body.” She gave birth to no more rabbits, and also seems to have taken quite ill. But it was during this time that a porter was caught sneaking a rabbit into Toft’s room. He explained to Douglas that Toft’s sister-in-law, Margaret Toft, had asked him to obtain the smallest rabbit he could find. Toft refused to confess until Manningham threatened to perform surgery to determine if she had strange reproductive organs. On December 7, she came clean. The confession surprised very few, but was unfortunately timed for St. André, who had just published his thrilling, “true-to-life” exposé, “A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbets,” just four days prior. Needless to say, his career was never quite the same.

Though the rabbit births weren’t real, the pain was. According to Toft’s confessions, the ruse relied on an accomplice placing parts of dead animals into Toft’s vagina—painful, difficult, and dangerous. Per St. André’s early reports, Toft’s rabbits were often delivered with their sharp nails intact. Because these animal remains were likely hidden in Toft’s body for several weeks, Harvey says, “It’s astonishing she didn’t die of a bacterial infection.”

Rabbits were widely available at the time, and they also symbolized the carelessness of nobility, Harvey adds. In medieval Britain, rabbits lived in warrens, built by local lords who sold their meat and fur as elite goods. These rabbits frequently escaped to munch on commoners’ grasslands and gardens. “Landowners’ rabbits were seen as a pest for lower status people in rural areas,” Harvey says. “So I think there might be something quite political about that choice.”

It’s impossible to say why Toft executed this dangerous, strange ruse, but Harvey doesn’t believe Toft to have been primarily responsible. “She was a young, extremely poor woman from a small town who was taken to London, all the time escorted and watched by titled, landed, aristocratic men,” Harvey says. “I think she was just playing the lead role in a performance orchestrated by other people.” In her confessions, Toft repeatedly blamed other people: her husband, her mother-in-law, even the wife of a local organ-grinder.

When the hoax was revealed, the papers had a field day—ridiculing the venerated medical professionals in particular. “It was the media sensation of 1726 to 1727,” Russell says. “It certainly helped to tarnish the reputation of doctors as a profession.” But Toft did not escape opprobrium. On December 9, she was charged as a “Notorious and Vile Cheat” and incarcerated at Bridewell prison for four months. Crowds of people came to gawk into her public-facing cell. Eventually, she was released without charge, and disappeared back into some kind of obscurity. But her place in history had been established. When she died in 1763 at the age of 60, the parish noted her as “Mary Toft, Widow, the Impostress Rabbitt.”

Toft’s case still fascinates. Russell receives many inquiries about it from people visiting the Glasgow library. She is also a rather popular subject at London’s Wellcome Library, which recently held an art installation inspired by her. “It could have been seen as a way out of grinding poverty or a desire just to be noticed or important for a short while,” Russell says. “But she seemed completely overwhelmed and scared, fearful of what would happen to her for making fools out of so many prominent people in society.”

The most famous image of Mary Toft is a print by the great satirist William Hogarth. In Cunicularii—a pun on the Latin words for “rabbit” (cuniculus) and “vulva” (cunnus)—Hogarth depicts Toft’s body wrenched in labor, surrounded by doctors. It is dramatic, but not flattering. Hogarth wanted to satirize the gullibility of medical professionals of the day, many of whom sought to gain fame through such strange cases. Harvey, who will soon publish a book that aims to humanize Toft, first encountered the case through the print. She immediately noticed how Toft was surrounded by so many men, including her husband and a doctor with his arm up her skirt. “You could see her in agony, but it almost looks like she’s experiencing ecstasy,” she says. “Either way, she’s in a very vulnerable position.”

A 1963 book purported to prove that the siblings were murderous bakers.

Few fairy tales are as popular and beloved as the Brothers Grimm’s "Hansel and Gretel." First published in 1812, the tale has been interpreted, revised, and parodied in myriad ways through the years. So one can imagine the furor in 1963 when a German writer claimed to have uncovered the real story behind the fairy tale.

According to Die Wahrheit über Hänsel und Gretel (The Truth About Hansel and Gretel), the two siblings were, in fact, adult brother and sister bakers, living in Germany during the mid-17th century. They murdered the witch, an ingenious confectioner in her own right, to steal her secret recipe for lebkuchen, a gingerbread-like traditional treat. The book published a facsimile of the recipe in question, as well as sensational photos of archeological evidence.

The Truth About Hansel and Gretel caused an uproar. The media picked up the story and turned it into national news. “Book of the week? No, it’s the book of the year, and maybe the century!” proclaimed the West German tabloid Abendzeitung in November 1963. The state-owned East German Berliner Zeitung came out with the headline “Hansel and Gretel—a duo of murderers?” and asked whether this could be "a criminal case from the early capitalist era." The news spread like wildfire not only in Germany, but abroad too. Foreign publishers, smelling a profit, began negotiating for the translation rights. School groups, some from neighboring Denmark, traveled to the Spessart woods in the states of Bavaria and Hesse to see the newly discovered foundations of the witch's house.

As intriguing as The Truth About Hansel and Gretel might sound, however, none of it proved to be true. In fact, the book turned out to be a literary forgery concocted by Hans Traxler, a German children’s book writer and cartoonist, known for his sardonic sense of humor. “1963 marked the 100th anniversary of Jacob Grimm's death,” says the now 90-year-old Traxler, who lives in Frankfurt, Germany. “So it was natural to dig into [the] Brothers Grimm treasure chest of fairy tales, and pick their most famous one, 'Hansel and Gretel.'"

According to Dr. Claudia Schwabe, a fairy-tale researcher at Utah State University, the hoax was "one of the bigger ones out there, one that was done at a very sophisticated level, fooling even a lot of academics and scholars in the field.” In early 1963, Traxler read C. W. Ceram’s Gods, Graves, and Scholars: The Story of Archaeology. Published in 1949, it ignited a passion for archaeology in the imagination of the post-war world. Inspired, Traxler wrote the first draft of his own book in about a week. Then, he spent a couple of more days on additional research at the Brothers Grimm Museum in Kassel, Germany. The museum’s director, Dr. Ludwig Denecke, kept bringing library carts with history literature to Traxler, completely oblivious to his true intentions.

Traxler’s fictional protagonist, Georg Ossegg, was a teacher and an amateur archeologist. Like the famous German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who searched for the city of Troy in an effort to prove the historical accuracy of Homer's Iliad, Ossegg was obsessed with finding the witch’s house from "Hansel and Gretel."

In January 1945, Traxler wrote, Ossegg evacuated together with his students to the small village of Steinau an der Straße in the German state of Hesse. There, Ossegg met a local farmer who referred to the nearby Spessart woods as the Hexenwald, or “witch’s forest,” and whose grandfather had allegedly seen a witch’s house inside. Ossegg wanted to investigate further, but with World War II over, he returned to his hometown of Prague.

In 1962, Ossegg moved to the Spessart woods once more and renewed his investigation. This time, he decided to read the text of "Hansel and Gretel" as a factual report. He set out to find the clearing where the children were abandoned by their parents. He did this by filling an eight-year-old boy’s pockets with pebbles and having him walk into the woods, dropping them along the way. (In the fairy tale, Hansel dropped pebbles to find his way back out of the forest.) But no clearing was found. When Ossegg repeated the experiment himself, he found himself in a meadow. Based on the results of the experiment, Ossegg concluded that Hansel and Gretel weren’t children, but rather adults.

Next, Ossegg decided to locate was the house of the witch. After two month’s search, he found the ruins of the witch’s house and the well-preserved foundations of four baking ovens. Inside one of them, he discovered a partially charred female skeleton. Ossegg also searched for the little stable where Hansel was imprisoned by the witch, but didn’t find it. He found door hinges from the witch’s house, though, and one was forcefully broken. So Ossegg concluded that Hansel and Gretel broke into the house of the witch, killed her, and tried to burn her body.

Ossegg made his most important discovery near one of the walls of the house, where he unearthed a small tin box which contained charred lebkuchen, a bunch of baking tools, and a crumpled piece of paper, which turned out to be a recipe for lebkuchen.

Ossegg then did some linguistic analysis of the witch’s dialogue in the Grimm's tale, and discovered that her dialect was typical for Wernigerode, a town in the state of Saxony-Anhalt. He dug into the local archives and found the so-called Wernigerode Manuscript, a parchment-bound volume describing the 1647 trial of one Katharina Schraderin, “the baker witch."

Schraderin had invented her famous gingerbread while working in the kitchen of Quedlinburg Abbey. Another baker, named Hans Metzler, tried to marry Schraderin in order to get the recipe, but she turned him down. The rejected Metzler in turn accused Schraderin of witchcraft. After being acquitted, Schraderin fled to the woods and built a small house there. But Metzler, accompanied by his younger sister Grete, tracked Schraderin down and killed her. The siblings looked for the secret gingerbread recipe but found only a couple of lebkuchen. Metzler took them with him and tried to bake his own. He was later tried for murder, but acquitted after the judge believed his story about the cannibalistic witch. He then moved to Nuremberg, where he popularized the city’s famous lebkuchen.

Of course, none of it was true. But the 120-page book contained more than 40 photos, drawings, and models, which made the convoluted tale look quite convincing. Traxler himself posed for Ossegg, clad in a Colombo-like raincoat, a leather hat, sunglasses, fake beard, and mustache. “Photographer Peter von Tresckow and I had so much fun taking those photos that sometimes we would find ourselves lying on the ground laughing,” Traxler recalls.

Traxler admits that falsifying the so-called Wernigerode manuscript took some serious effort, but he got in the right mood by reading the 17th-century German author Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen. “Apparently, I wrote the text of the Wernigerode manuscript so well that not a single journalist or reader ever doubted it. I'm a bit proud of that today,” he says.

The truth about Hans Traxler’s literary trick came out early 1964. (One tip-off was that Traxler copied Schraderin’s lebkuchen recipe from a Dr. Oetker cookbook.) But some people refused to accept that the book was an elaborate hoax. In the months following the publication, the publisher’s office received thousands of letters from readers demanding to know the truth: so many that they had to employ three people to answer them. Traxler and his accomplices were delighted at the reactions, but not everyone was amused. According to Der Spiegel, one indignant reader filed a complaint of fraud. The police interrogated Traxler, but didn’t press charges.

Reprinted numerous times over the years, The Truth About Hansel and Gretel has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. In 1987, it spawned a film adaptation of the same name, starring French actor Jean-Pierre Léaud as Georg Ossegg and West Berlin singer, performer, and club owner Romy Haag as the witch. While The Truth About Hansel and Gretel is still celebrated for mimicking the intellectual fashions of its time, some people still take Traxler’s tale as truth. According to Schwabe, the fervent reaction to the book says a lot. “People just love a good story,” she says. “Any discovery that promises to reveal a hidden truth or secret or mystery is enticing.”

The lack of water ran very, very deep.

The great drought in California that lasted from 2012 to 2015 technically began on October 1, 2011, the first day of what hydrologists consider the new water year. Things got warmer and drier from there, with 2014 as the warmest and driest since record-keeping began in 1895. The drought affected just about everyone and everything in the state, especially its trees. Now two California researchers have found that the problem went deeper than previously thought.

Their new study, published in the journal Nature Geosciences, posits that in the Sierra Nevada range that spans much of central California, the drought—unlike previous ones—resulted in deep soil drying, when the forest uses up the water from the deepest reaches of its root system.

“We knew the Sierra Nevada was changing. We happened to be in the right place at the right time,” says Roger Bales, coauthor of the study and director of the Sierra Nevada Research Institute. “Geez, we could’ve predicted this because we had all the data right in front of us.”

The root systems of the mixed-conifer forest of the Sierra Nevada can extend nearly 50 feet below the surface. In previous droughts, Bales says, trees have been able to endure by pulling water from those deep levels, far beneath the parched, drought-affected surface soil. It's their drought safety net. But because the recent rain-less years were warmer than previous ones, trees across the Sierra Nevada needed even more water—taxing and eventually exhausting those critical reserves. The result was more than 100 million individual trees dead by 2016, Bales says.

“When temperature goes up and water is quickly evaporated, nutrients can’t be taken up and plant production goes down,” says Kenneth Anyomi, a tree researcher at the University of Quebec who was unaffiliated with the study. “When it goes on for longer periods, the trees die.”

Bales and his colleague, Mike Goulden of the University of California Irvine, say that as climate continues to warm, droughts are going to hit harder and harder—and the only solution is simply to have fewer roots to feed—meaning sparser forests overall. It's a process that appears to be underway, though now all the dead, dried-out trees have the potential to worsen the already serious problem of wildfires in the region.

“We need fewer trees in the forest,” says Bales. “The job of land managers is to suppress fire. We have a massive job now to bring the forest back down to a sustainable level.”