In Argentina, aerial imagery helps researchers get a close look at southern right whales from a distance.

I If you’ve ever seen a humpback whale spouting in the distance, or a blue whale replica swooping over a museum gallery, or you’ve peered into a display case at the long beige bristles that filter plankton out of seawater, you’ve probably surmised that baleen whales—which include right whales, blue whales, humpbacks, and more—are enormous. According to NOAA Fisheries, the southern right whale, Eubalaena australis, can stretch to around 55 feet and weigh as much as 60 tons.

But how gargantuan, exactly, is each individual whale? It’s an important question, but hard to answer. A whale’s mass “tells you about the health of the animal, and in the context of its environment, it gives you a sense of how it’s doing nutritionally,” says Michael J. Moore, a biologist and director of the Marine Mammal Center at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “If the weight is insufficient, then the animal's not going to get pregnant. It’s a critical number in terms of population.”

Scientists can learn a lot from whales that wash up on beaches, but “the sheer size of a deceased whale and the location of the carcass makes physically weighing deceased whales extremely challenging,” says Ashley Barratclough, a conservation medicine veterinarian at the National Marine Mammal Foundation. It can be hard to extrapolate measurements from a whale carcass, because they’re so quick to bloat with gases. Distended or squashed bodies make it hard to accurately gauge girth, and fluid loss can skew mass measurements. (They can also lose large quantities of blubber, Barratclough says, if they starve while entangled in a net.)

Even a precise post-mortem accounting is a one-time-only affair, and that can be misleading, because the animals’ heft varies a lot throughout the year. Southern right whales can bulk up or shrink by up to 25 percent over the course of the year, depending on whether they’re squirreling away fuel reserves in their polar feeding grounds or hauling themselves to more temperature waters to mate or give birth and nurse calves. (Lethal sampling—killing a whale for the sake of scientific study—is now widely considered to be unethical.)

To get a better picture of the animals’ measurements, an international team of nine researchers, including Moore, recently enlisted drones to help them survey a population of southern right whales in Península Valdés, Argentina. “It’s the biggest breeding ground for southern right whales in the world,” says Fredrik Christiansen, an ecophysiologist at Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies in Denmark, and lead author of the team’s new paper in Methods in Ecology and Evolution. “Thousands come to this area into two relatively small gulfs and they stay there, in sheltered and protected waters.”

It was easy to see the whales’ bodies when they surfaced in the clear, calm, shallow water—sometimes within about 150 feet of the beach, Christiansen says. With the giants so close to shore, “it made it possible to fly the drones from land, and that meant we could sample a lot of whales,” he says.

The researchers studied aerial photographs of 86 whales taken between August and November 2018, from an altitude of about 65 to 130 feet (or 20 to 40 meters). The researchers calculated the animals’ approximate length, width, and height, and then modeled their volume and mass by referencing data from eight North Pacific right whales caught in whaling operations decades ago. Together with the historical measurements, the aerial imagery offered a non-invasive way to get up close and personal with the scale of the whales. They found that the smallest weighed around one ton, while the largest weighed more than 46 tons.

Drones are becoming a more common tool in ecologists’ belt (they’ve previously collected whale “snot” to look for viruses, and helped scientists count ducks), and in the paper, the team suggests that the same technique could be used for many kinds of marine life—especially if the water isn’t too murky, the wind isn’t roaring, and there’s some mass data to reference.

Collecting this kind of morphological data on marine species is an “exciting development,” says Jarrod Hodgson, an ecologist at the University of Adelaide who has used drones for population surveys. “It will allow researchers to investigate questions that were previously off-limits or would have required techniques that negatively impacted sampled animals.”

Sarah Fortune, a postdoctoral fellow in the marine mammal research unit at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia, calls it an “important advancement” that will “undoubtedly help answer questions about right whale nutritive health at both the individual and population level.” Fortune says that the new approach allows researchers to continuously monitor an individual’s health and fluctuations over time, and also gather a large sample size that can shed light on how mass differs between calves, juveniles, and adults, and across sexes and reproductive statuses. (Neither Hodgson nor Fortune were involved in the study.)

In Península Valdés, the whales come so close to shore at high tide, Christiansen says, that when the water recedes, you can walk out to the spot where they had floated. The aerial method could help researchers peek in on them again and again, at high tide or low, from a respectful distance.

Some signature dishes changed the culinary world.

Walk into any Applebee’s or Chili’s and the menu will likely include a chocolate lava cake: spongy cake with a molten center that flows freely when pierced with a fork. While it's ubiquitous, the cake has a storied past. When chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten accidentally underbaked 500 chocolate treats, the result earned him a standing ovation. Served at Vongerichten’s restaurants thereafter, it became “the dessert that launched a thousand imitations.”

That’s according to the unusual new cookbook Signature Dishes That Matter, in which eight food writers and critics have curated a list of dishes so influential that it’s hard to imagine any one of them having a single origin. And yet they do. In the case of chocolate lava cake, it even had a predecessor: the high-cuisine coulant au chocolat, a showstopper of a dessert invented by Michel Bras at his eponymous restaurant in 1981.

Such details are the point of Signature Dishes, which Mitchell Davis, in the introduction, calls a “history lesson, travel guide, and cookbook." Another contributor, journalist Diego Salazar, explains that he identified signature dishes by a handful of criteria. Not only does the dish need to have thrived outside its restaurant and country of origin, he writes, but “the dish has to have influenced other cooks: either to make their own version of it” or as inspiration for their own cooking process.

A recent example is chef Roy Choi’s 2008 short-rib taco, which Signature Dishes describes as epitomizing “authentic and heartfelt” fusion cuisine, the rise of the food truck, and the then-innovative use of social media as a hype machine.

While Korean-Mexican tacos are familiar fare, many influential dishes are lesser known. Seven of the eight curators nominated Fergus Henderson's roast bone marrow and parsley salad for inclusion in the book. They credit the dish for kickstarting the nose-to-tail movement in 1996, which pushed cooks to utilize under-appreciated parts of butchered animals in the interest of both flavor and reducing waste. Something as simple as asking eaters to scoop bone marrow onto bread sprinkled with salt and salad, they write, “redefined British cooking within the country and put it on the map as a global influence.”

As for the famous inclusions, many of the dishes have unexpected origin stories. On the occasion of the Alaska Purchase, in 1867, Charles Ranhofer of Delmonico combined ice cream and browned meringue. His "Alaska, Florida" became better known as Baked Alaska. Salsa Golf, a widely used sauce across South America, was invented by an Argentinian teen who mixed together a mess of condiments. That teen, Luis Federico Leloir, went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

The book includes recipes that range from complicated to eclectic. For red grouse, a popular dish from the 18th-century London club Rules, the book asks the reader to first catch a grouse (“good luck, they are very fast”). Many recipes come with tips, such as, “Eat while listening to opera, of course” (Tournedos Rossini) and “If they are allowed to boil dry, the cans will explode, causing a great risk to life, limb, and kitchen ceilings” (Banoffi Pie).

Some dishes lack recipes, as they were “never recorded,” are “closely guarded,” or “went to the grave" with the original creator. Such is the fate of recipes that were never written down. But if future generations want to know what 2013 tasted like, they won't need to wonder how to make a Cronut®. The recipe is on page 422.

Atlas Obscura readers share their favorite vintage and retro amusement rides.

Carousels are the gold standard of vintage and retro amusement rides. What they might lack in thrills they make up for in design, charm, and ornate craftsmanship. From the 143-year-old Flying Horses Carousel in Massachusetts, to the blinding lights of the example at Wisconsin's House on the Rock, to the nightmare creatures of France's Carrousel des Mondes Marins, all over the world, carousels are still inspiring wonder and curiosity with a few simple revolutions. We recently asked the readers in our Community forums to tell us about their favorite carousels, and the responses were about as delightful as the carousels themselves.

Check out a selection of our favorite submissions below, and if you have a favorite carousel of your own that you'd like to share, head over to the forums and keep the conversation going! Take these beauties for a spin!

SeaGlass Carousel

New York, New York

“The SeaGlass Carousel in New York City at Battery Park is spectacular!” — rdejam

Balboa Park Carousel

San Diego, California

“I live in San Diego and have ridden the carousel in Balboa Park for 65 years. It is one of the few that still lets you try to catch the brass ring to get another free ride. The 1910 carousel, adjacent to the San Diego Zoo, has a menagerie of animals and all but two pairs are original, with hand-carved European craftsmanship. Originally built in New York City, and sent to Los Angeles, it was moved to Coronado in 1915, and then to Balboa Park in 1922." — kld123

Carousel at Lighthouse Point Park

New Haven, Connecticut

“A lovely folk art carousel, built in 1916 and painstakingly restored in the 1980s. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places. We lived in New Haven for many years, and brought our kids, and then our grandkids, to it regularly.” — quark613

The Carousel

Geelong, Australia

“There is a wonderful, restored carousel in Geelong, Australia! I have never ridden it but have seen it a few times.” — KatrinaF

B&B Carousell

Brooklyn, New York

“The historic carousel in Coney Island. One of the oldest, and originally it was on Surf Avenue. It was [restored] and came back bright and shiny and no longer the carousel I knew as a child. It now lives in a cage on the boardwalk.” — sharonstepman

Stoomcarrousel

Kaatsheuvel, The Netherlands

“At Efteling, an amusement park in the Netherlands, is an old, indoor steam carousel. It was built in 1895 and later on, it was bought by the park. It’s located in a big hall and is surrounded by a bar decorated in carnival style.” — sprom

Carousel de la Cité Carcassonne

Carcassone, France

“A two-story, beautiful one!” — tawnyah

Albany Carousel

Albany, Oregon

“There is a wonderful carousel in Albany, Oregon, a small town off the Interstate 5 corridor, between Corvallis and Salem. Building the carousel has been a real community-driven project, and all the animals and decorations are hand-carved and hand-painted. It runs on a restored 1909 mechanism. Very neat.” — PembridgeW2

Carrousel des Mondes Marins

Nantes, France

“The Carrousel des Mondes Marins in Nantes. A three-story, steampunk-style carousel themed around marine life.” — Roi_des_Platanes

Carousel at House on the Rock

Spring Green, Wisconsin

“The House on the Rock has a magnificent carousel in one of its galleries, surrounded by angels!” — johnlcole7745

Dentzel Carousel

Meridian, Mississippi

“The Dentzel Carousel in Meridian, Mississippi, is on the National Register of Historic Places. Manufactured in 1896 by Gustav Dentzel, it’s one of the few remaining carousels from its era.” — caj411

The Carousel of Happiness

Nederland, Colorado

“It was constructed using a framework and the running gear of a 1910 carousel from Utah. The animal carvings are all recent, carved by local Vietnam vets. A great place to visit … truly a happy place!” — morrisseyshawn

Broad Ripple Park Carousel

Indianapolis, Indiana

“The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis has an original, restored Dentzel menagerie carousel that still runs daily (except the last three weeks of September), to tunes from a 1919 Wurlitzer organ. Dentzel carved the animals (horses, lions, tigers, giraffes, goats) before 1900, and they were first put in place in 1917, in a Mangels-Illions mechanism in the Broad Ripple Amusement Park in Indianapolis, Indiana. All but one of the animals on the restored ride are original.” — EFK

Kit Carson County Carousel

Burlington, Colorado

“Philadelphia Toboggan Company #6 at the Kit Carson County Fairgrounds in Burlington, Colorado. Originally purchased for Elitch Gardens in Denver, it came to Burlington in the early 1920s. It still has its original paint and the original Wurlitzer Monster Military Band Organ. It is open from Memorial Day to Labor Day and rides are still 25 cents. As a bonus, it is also open on the first Sunday in December when it is decorated for Christmas and they play Christmas music on the organ.” — markc9503

Looff Carousel

Santa Cruz, California

“My favorite ride at the boardwalk. Hand-carved by Danish woodcarver Charles I.D. Looff (who also did the carousel at Coney Island), the Looff Carousel was installed August 1911. One of the most distinctive features of this carousel is its original 342-pipe Ruth & Sohn band organ. The ride also features two other music machines installed in the 2000s.” — cogitoergorel

Lark Toys Carousel

Kellogg, Minnesota

“The handmade carousel at Lark Toys in Kellogg, Minnesota.” — wmoles

Musée des Arts Forains Bicycle Carousel

Paris, France

“The people-powered carousel from the movie Midnight in Paris is located at the Musée des Arts Forains in Paris AND YOU CAN ACTUALLY RIDE IT!” — stevemelzer

Lakeside Park Carousel

St. Catharines, Ontario

“Lakeside Park Carousel in Port Dalhousie, St. Catherines, Ontario, is a great carousel and wait… it’s still only five cents. Canadian. Living in WNY, it’s close by over the border, and I know it because Rush’s song ‘Lakeside Park’ was written by drummer/lyricist Neal Peart, who grew up nearby and worked there as a kid. I wonder if he ever thought that fans of their music would seek out the places mentioned in their lyrics. Atlas Obscura indeed!” — mrowestmiddle

Flying Horses Carousel

Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts

— AnnieL

Rose Carousel

Brentwood Bay, British Columbia

“My husband and I travel to the Butchart Gardens in British Columbia, Canada, for the prime reason of visiting their carousel, called the Rose Carousel. It has two Great Pyrenees dogs and as owners of three Great Pyrenees, we had to make a trip to see it. I believe it's the only carousel out there to feature Great Pyrenees. It was beautiful and so were the gardens.” — darythjo

Responses have been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Lots of legends seem to start underground.

For the most part, sewers are designed to be invisible and easy to ignore—assuming that nothing goes wrong. There is some comfort in believing that the world stops at the ground beneath our feet. What’s down there in a sewer pipe can be hard to imagine at all, beyond the vague impression of something damp, dripping, and foul.

In London, and other cities all over the world, this ignorance is a fairly recent luxury (and in many modern places without sewer systems, it is still not possible at all). That may be why, in 18th- and 19th-century London, tall tales of what might be down there ran amok. It must not have seemed like such a stretch to imagine herds of feral hogs stampeding through the muck.

The city’s nascent sewer system was overtaxed and constantly breached its limits. The network was overhauled and markedly expanded after the Great Stink of 1858, when deposits that the sewers had spit out into the River Thames baked in the summer heat, to the stomach-roiling chagrin of the entire city.

The journalist Henry Mayhew was unfortunately familiar with the contents of the city's subterranean guts. He spent the 1840s documenting the lives of the city’s mudlarkers, rat-catchers, food vendors, and other working folks, and the sewers came up a lot in his series, which was compiled into a multivolume set, London Labour and the London Poor, first published in 1851. During the spring tides, Mayhew wrote, fetid liquid “burst up through the gratings into the streets,” until the low-lying neighborhoods around the Thames “resembled a Dutch town, intersected by a series of muddy canals.” He also spoke to “sewer hunters,” or people who made their livings on other people’s leavings.

To hear Mayhew tell it, they were busy. “Some few years ago, any person desirous of exploring the dark and uninviting recesses,” Mayhew wrote, could walk right in one of the pipes that emptied into the Thames “and wander away, provided he could withstand the combination of villainous stenches which met him at every step, for many miles, in any direction.” The sewer hunters—whom Mayhew also referred to “shore-workers” and “toshers” on account of their habit of scouring the sewers and river shore for “tosh,” or anything made of copper—descended when the tide went out (at least until the pipes were closed off by iron gates or doors). They traveled in groups, he wrote, to defend themselves from rats, strapped lanterns to their chests, and raked the mud with long-handled hoes to find any money, nails, or metal scraps that may have gotten lost and lodged down there.

It’s hard to know what to make of Mayhew’s stories. They’re simultaneously visceral, gritty, spectacular, and specific—far-fetched, certainly, but also full of quotes, measurements, and rich observations. But at least one of them—one that would strike many readers then and now as patently ridiculous—seemed just on the edge of possibility. Mayhew claimed to have heard it from a sewer-hunter, but not any one of them in particular. Mayhew couched it in the language of myth, calling it “a strange tale in existence among the shore workers.”

The gist, as he recounted it, with some measure of doubt, is that a pregnant sow had roamed into the sewer somewhere near Hampstead, and then delivered and raised her offspring in the pipes. Feasting on “the offal and garbage washed into it continuously,” Mayhew wrote, “the breed multiplied exceedingly, and have become almost as ferocious as they are numerous.”

Is Mayhew to be believed at all? “He’s quite a regularly quoted source from that time in London, and I think that might be because there aren’t an awful lot of other similar accounts of working-class people,” says Laurence Ward, head of digital services at the London Metropolitan Archives and lead curator of the institution’s exhibition Under Ground London, which touches on the legend of the sewer swine. “People looking for human voices often go to him.” Mayhew's stories appear rigorously reported, but some things don’t quite add up, Ward says. Some of the illustration captions in his book, for example, note that the images are based on daguerreotypes, which Ward finds suspect. “Think about the process of trying to take a photograph in a dark sewer—by candlelight, presumably,” he says.

Still, it wasn’t the first or last time that a reporter offered a story about underground swine in London. A version of the tale is at least as old as a 1736 account of a boar dodging a butcher’s blade somewhere near Smithfield Bars, and then feasting in the sewer for five months before emerging from Fleet Ditch. In the 2008 book London Lore: The Legends and Traditions of the World’s Most Vibrant City, author Steve Roud cites the legend’s reappearance in a Daily Telegraph article from October 1859. The story dangled the tantalizing possibility of “undiscovered patches of primeval forest in Hyde Park,” and also the idea that “Hampstead sewers shelter a monstrous breed of black swine, which have propagated and run wild among the slimy feculence.” Roud points out that it’s not entirely clear whether the Telegraph writer was just parroting Mayhew, or had heard it afresh from someone else. It has all the spectacle, bombast, fuzziness, and distant possibility of other related legends, such as the one about alligators swimming through New York City’s pipes.

When Mayhew told the story, he hedged his bets: Isn’t it odd, he noted, that the residents never seem to glimpse the hogs’ hides through the grates? That they never hear grunts beneath their feet? Even so, “This story, apocryphal as it seems, has nevertheless its believers,” he wrote.

It’s not hard to see why. At the time, London was lousy with livestock markets, and many sewers were wide open. “If there are so many animals kind of out in the city, and they had access to the ditches and the sewers … it all seems quite plausible in that sense,” Ward says. “Whether they could breed in the sewers and develop a race of sewer pigs is kind of another matter altogether.”

The emergence of the myth could also be a product of frustration with the inadequacy of parts of the city’s infrastructure, and the way that planned improvements were mangling the landscape all around. They were sorely needed and widely welcomed, but they still left scars. In 1859, the British-born writer Richard Rowe, who often wrote for Australian newspapers under the pseudonym Peter Possum, lamented in The Sydney Morning Herald that construction of sewers and railways, necessary as they were, “have played sad havoc with the country around London.” He saw trampled landscapes, and mustered violent language to describe them, complaining of “cannon-like drained pipes” that “crash the nettles in the ditches,” and “raw red entrances to tunnels,” like wounds. Perhaps then a little wild natural revenge from down below made some kind of cosmic sense.

“The reader of course can believe as much of the story as he pleases,” Mayhew wrote, before washing his hands of the sewer pig saga. Maybe there was a kernel of truth to it, maybe there wasn’t. Back then, the line between the underground world and the above-ground one was murky and permeable. Today, unless a fatberg stoppers a pipe and makes news, Londoners are more removed from the sewage moving beneath their city. But subterranean spaces and sewers in particular—with their mysteries, their unfamiliarity, their fascinating grossness—continue to pull our imaginations down below.

In a Ranchi kitchen, local women fight to save indigenous food, one bowl of fish curry at a time.

When Aruna Tirkey, a member of Central India’s Oraon indigenous community, walked into her small town’s glossy new department store almost a decade ago, one product made her stop short: a packet of millet. Known locally among the Oraon as madua, millet was a staple in Tirkey’s family when she was growing up. As the influence of industrial agriculture spread to India’s hinterlands, however, the traditional grain had become increasingly rare. Seeing millet in an upscale store, marketed at a price many indigenous Indians couldn’t afford, Tirkey was shocked. “It was surprising for me to see the product in the store at a premium price, knowing that at the same time it was fast disappearing from our diets,” she wrote.

In 2018, Tirkey put millet back on the menu. That's when she opened Ajam Emba, a restaurant, cooking school, and catering service run by local indigenous women in Ranchi, the capital city of the state of Jharkhand. In contrast to the packaged millet Tirkey stumbled across that day, Ajam Emba, which means “great tasting and healthy food” in the Oraon people’s Kudukh language, is part of a movement to bring indigenous foods back into India’s diet, on indigenous people’s terms.

From a cozy, white, one-story building on a bustling Ranchi street, Tirkey and her staff translate that vision into reality. The space’s exterior is bright with flower pots, while its interior is filled with multicolored lights and cheery murals of village life. The menu features traditional dishes of the Oraon and other tribes from Central India, using ingredients local to the jungles of Jharkhand. Specialties such as marh jhor, a blend of herbs and spices in brown rice starch, and curry made with the rare, local getu fish, provide visitors with a taste of one of India’s fast-disappearing cuisines. Meanwhile, the indigenous women who staff the restaurant undertake culinary and entrepreneurial training.

“Ajam Emba is a concept all about tribal culture and identity through food,” says Tirkey. “It is more about that than only cuisine.” The project’s success has gone beyond filling visitors’ bellies and locals’ pocketbooks: In July 2019, Tirkey cofounded Slow Food Jharkhand, joining a worldwide network that works to preserve local food traditions.

Tirkey is just one of a wave of activists reviving India’s tribal foods as part of a movement fueled by indigenous self-assertion. India’s cuisines incorporate flavors from various religious, geographical, and linguistic communities, with influences from countries as diverse as Portugal, England, and Iran. But the subcontinent’s indigenous cuisines are uniquely connected to regional biodiversity—and they’re uniquely at risk. For food sovereignty activist Raja Rymbai, who is from Northeast India’s Jaintia indigenous community and who helped found Slow Food’s Nagaland chapter, this risk is an opportunity. “Wherever indigenous people are holding the land, there is resistance to corporate agriculture,” he says.

Making up just over 8 percent of the country's population, India’s Adivasi (“first inhabitants”) people, also called “scheduled tribes” by the Indian government, have diverse languages, cultural traditions, and foods, from South India’s tiny Mahamalasar tribe to the uncontacted Sentinelese people of Andaman Island. Traditionally living in rural regions separate from India’s Hindu caste system, they historically practiced nature-based animism and have heritage claims to land. These traditions result in cuisines deeply connected to the local environment. For Tirkey’s Oraon community, this means sourcing seasonal foods from the forests of Central India. “We have 900 varieties of local herbs,” she says. Besides these medicinal and kitchen plants, says Tirkey, Oraon people eat more than 200 varieties of local animals—from chickens to snails—and wild rice and lentils. Unlike many communities within the Hindu caste system, many of whom are vegetarian, indigenous Indians often eat meat, including beef.

But there are mounting challenges to the preservation of Adivasi culture and cuisine. Despite affirmative-action quotas for tribal people in public sector education and jobs, “The Indian government doesn’t recognize us as Adivasi or indigenous,” says Tirkey. As a result, Adivasi people tend to be economically disempowered. Indian government policies often divest indigenous communities of their traditional land rights, limiting heritage agricultural and food practices such as foraging. The recent increase in state-level bans on beef consumption, part of the Indian government’s pivot toward Hindu nationalist policies, have challenged the rights of many communities, including Adivasis and Muslims, to consume food in line with their cultural heritage.

Meanwhile, industrial agriculture has severely challenged indigenous food sovereignty. While the Green Revolution of the 1960 and ’70s vastly boosted India’s food production, it also homogenized crops, replacing diverse regional grains with standardized wheat and rice. Industrial methods led to a decline in food diversity, and severely taxed water resources. The rise of Western-style fast food in India has exacerbated this shift.

Tirkey says these challenges aren’t just a blow to culinary knowledge: They’re a threat to indigenous peoples’ sense of self. “We are forgetting our food,” she says. “Loss of food also means loss of culture and identity.”

For many indigenous people, the stakes are even higher. Since the 1960s, particularly in the states of West Bengal, Jharkhand, and Chhattisgarh, struggles over land, including mining exploitation, have fueled an armed conflict between Maoist militants and the Indian government. Adivasis have borne the brunt of this violence. Similarly, in India’s overwhelmingly indigenous Northeastern states, including Nagaland, acrimony against the Indian government has often taken the form of a secessionist militancy, with an accompanying history of Indian armed forces perpetrating human rights abuses on civilians.

Rymbai, who comes from the Northeast, hopes initiatives such as Slow Food’s recently established Nagaland chapter will add another outlet for young people to channel aspirations for autonomy away from militancy and toward cultural assertion. “We opened a Nagaland chapter in the region because that’s the only way that our youth can put down guns and pick up forks,” he says.

Visitors to Ajam Emba can witness this mission in action. The restaurant’s menu is rooted in the cultural traditions of the women on its staff, and in the flora and fauna of Jharkhand. Cooked in earthen pots and served wrapped in leaves, menu items evoke the tastes and smells of the nearby forests from which they’re sourced: plump little shrimp and snails known as chingdi and ghunghi tien; delicate sanei phool, or jute flowers; and stewed desi chicken, local breeds sourced from rural markets, whose flesh is believed to be more flavorful than industrially farmed chickens. And of course, the menu is filled with traditional grains, from millet roti to wild rice.

Ajam Emba’s mission isn’t just about preserving the past: It’s also about using indigenous food to imagine a more sustainable future. To do that, Tirkey says, Ajam Emba has embraced innovation "without losing core properties of indigenous food." A case in point: One of the restaurant’s most popular dishes is millet momos, a take on the white-flour Himalayan dumplings that are also a popular Indian street snack. Unlike the expensive packaged millet Tirkey saw in the department store nearly a decade ago, however, this innovation is by, and for, indigenous Indians.

A foodie brotherhood launched a world competition dedicated to their favorite meaty pastry.

When four friends in the French culinary capital of Lyon started a brotherhood dedicated to pâté-croûte in 2009, this once-beloved charcuterie had fallen from grace.

In medieval France, cooks baked seasoned loaves of ground meat inside pastry cases. These savory pies were dubbed pâtés, and their tough dough was not meant to be eaten. Instead, the pastry helped keep its contents fresh. Over the 17th and 18th centuries, edible, butter-based crusts came into fashion, often filled with whimsical, rich fillings. The famed 18th-century gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin lovingly described his mother’s 32-kilogram pâté-croûte, containing 15 different meats and flavored with pistachio and truffle. But these days, most French people get their pastry-enveloped terrine from the deli section of the supermarket.

Some see that as a disgrace for the noble pâté-croûte (or en pâté en croûte, for those outside the Rhone Valley). “Industrial producers completely massacred the product,” says Gilles Demange, one of the co-founders of the Brotherhood of Pâté-Croûte. “To such an extent that restaurants refused to serve it anymore.”

Demange first came up with the idea of a brotherhood while enjoying pâté-croûte in a restaurant kitchen, one of the only places the gastronome could get his hands on a good pâté. Then, he invited fellow aficionados Arnaud Bernollin, Audrey Merle, and Christophe Marguin, president of Lyon’s Toques Blanches, an association of top traditional chefs and pâtissiers, to join him in promoting pâté-croûte as a cornerstone of French gastronomy. In 2009, they launched the World Championship of Pâté-Croûte, welcoming charcutiers from around the globe to strut their stuff in front of a jury made up of award-winning and Michelin-starred chefs.

An industrial pâté-croûte contains synthetic aspic, preservatives, and little by way of texture or flavor. But it’s no surprise that most people seek out a shortcut. Pâté-croûte is an endeavor, taking four days and a range of skills to make, from the laminated puff pastry, to the seasoned terrine, to the long-simmering gelatin. The dish exists, explains Demange, “at the intersection of the talents of pastry chefs, charcutiers, and chefs.”

Each year in December, not far from Lyon, the jurors blind-judge the pâtés. They focus on tastes and textures, of course: a crispy dough, a flavorful filling. But aesthetic is also important, and it’s where that many winners stand out from the crowd.

The ideal pâté-croûte should have a crisp puff pastry that is neither too thick nor too thin, encasing a meat filling that is rich and flavorful but never too fatty. Separating the two is a jelly-like aspic, which not only keeps the meat from oxidizing, but also keeps the crust and filling separate during baking. “The aspic is essential,” says Demange. “Because when you cook something in a dough, the filling shrinks. So there’s going to be air in between. If you don’t fill that with something, with aspic, the meat will leak into the dough, and the dough will become soggy.” And since the butter-based pastry and fatty filling are quite rich, the aspic also adds an essential lightness to the finished pâté.

One of Demange’s all-time favorites over a decade of the contest was a 2012 pâté made by Yohan Lastre, owner of Sans Apostrophe, a shop specializing in pâté-croûte. Lastre’s wife Marion, an artisan woodworker, created a special mold that allowed him to decorate the outside of his pork, chicken, Challans duck, veal, rabbit, pigeon, and foie gras pâté with a design of black mushrooms.

The 2018 winner, Daniel Gobet of SoGood, a high-end delicatessen near the Swiss border, believes that his pâté came out on top thanks to his precision. He forewent fancy decorations, focusing instead on achieving a perfect glaze on his crust, a technique that took him a year and a half to perfect. It was the ideal way to finish off the recipe that he spent four years concocting: a combination of Bresse hen, Barbarie duck, foie gras, veal sweetbreads, and a duck jus reduction.

For Gobet, detail was everything. “I dissected each ingredient, one by one,” he says. “I worked with different flours, different butters. I chose a little foie gras producer, a little duck producer.” While his efforts paid off, it wasn’t easy. There’s difficult dishes, he says, “but pâté en croûte is really its own thing.”

Since the World Championship of Pâté-Croûte was first established, the dish has skyrocketed in popularity in France. Pâté-croûte now appears on the menus of Michelin-starred tables such as the Pré Catelan and the Bristol. It was even served by chef Alain Ducasse at a state dinner shared by presidents Emmanuel Macron and Donald Trump in 2017. “That was unimaginable before,” says Demange.

Since 2013, when two Japanese chefs first made it to the final round, the contest has become a true world championship. Selection rounds now take place in both Japan, as of 2015, and the United States, as of 2016. Japan saw 70 entries this year, and three of the top four pâtés in 2018’s contest were made by Japanese chefs.

But pâté-croûte is still evolving in its native land. Gobet now makes ten different kinds, including a bouillabaisse-inspired version for the Martinez Hotel restaurant on the French Riviera. And in Paris, Franco-Vietnamese chef Céline Pham developed a bánh mì-scented pâté-croûte for top charcutier Gilles Verot’s five Parisian shops. Plus, the top recipes from the last ten years of the Brotherhood of Pâté-Croûte’s contest been united in a beautiful book, to be re-released in December.

“We couldn’t have done this with another dish,” says Demange, of the contest and pâté-croûte’s new popularity. “It really has an incredible potential.”

They don't seem to mind the eruptions of Bogoslof Island, as long as there's squid and smoothtongue to eat.

For certain Alaskan seals, home sweet home is a steaming volcano. Northern fur seals were once hunted to the brink of extinction by Russian fur traders, and are currently competing for prey with commercial fishing fleets. Yet they have found a strange sort of oasis on Bogoslof Island, a tiny patch of land that is technically the tip of an undersea volcano, Dan Joling reports for the AP. Bogoslof is riotously active, constantly burping mud and hissing boiling-hot steam. It's a curious choice of breeding grounds for any creature, let alone a fur seal.

Located around 31 miles north of the main Aleutian Islands, Bogoslof is little more than a speck, with a land area of about half a square mile. “Only about a tenth of a percent is sticking out of the water,” says Chris Waythomas, a research geophysicist who works for the U.S. Geological Society at the Alaska Volcano Observatory, and who studied Bogoslof’s activity in two expeditions in 2018. “You could easily walk all over the place, if it weren’t for the seals,” he says. The animals are fiercely territorial, with big bodies and teeth. Waythomas calls them “girthy.”

Bogoslof is a richly studied volcano, with a history of eruptions dating back to the 1700s. The island first landed on a map in 1772, after a Russian expedition surveyed the Aleutian Islands under the command of Empress Catherine II. According to a 2018 USGS report Historical Eruptions and Hazards at Bogoslof Volcano, Alaska, authored by Waythomas and geologist Cheryl E. Cameron, the island also has various indigenous names, including Agashagok, Tanaxsidaagux, and Agasaagux, a name given by the Aleut inhabitants of the Aleutian Islands. In 1778, Captain James Cook spotted the island and described its tower-like outcropping.

The first mention Bogoslof’s seals appeared in an 1817 monograph by the German scientist Heinrich von Langsdorff, but no one dared go near the island, due to a persistent layer of fog that never went away. When a local Aleut man attempted to go to the island to harvest the seals, he returned “in the utmost terror and astonishment,” having discovered that the sea surrounding the rock was literally boiling, von Langsdorff wrote. Some historical reports describe fur seals with their skin scalded off, Waythomas says. “This was probably the result of hot water being expelled without warning and landing on the seals,” he says.

In 1906, a scientist named Robert Dunn managed to visit Bogoslof and climbed on top of the cooling lava, which he wrote “was as stable as chocolate fudge” in a 1908 piece for Outing. Dunn’s purple prose compared the lava dome to “the beak of a parrot with head in air” and described the spire within the lava dome as “almost sheer, and smooth as a billiard ball, as if tempered and polished in its hot excursion up from Hades.”

The center of Bogoslof contains a veritable field of fumaroles, vents that release volcanic gases into the atmosphere. They roar as loudly as jet engines and spurt mud geysers as high as 16 feet, Waythomas says. And each fumarole is around the boiling point of water, 212 degrees Fahrenheit, which can prove deadly to mammals. “What with the small geysers and boiling mud pots, it’s pretty steamy,” he says.

This boisterous environment makes it incredibly difficult to study Bogoslof’s seismic activity. The researchers wanted to place a seismic station on top of solid rock, but the only solid rock on the island is surrounded by fumaroles and steam. So they placed a station on a pile of less-stable pyroclastic deposits, resulting in less-reliable data on Bogoslof’s quakes.

The seals, at least, are easier to study by virtue of being, well, everywhere. Waythomas says Bogoslof has the densest population of seals he’s ever seen in his years surveying Alaskan islands. Their abundance at Bogoslof is significant because—even after commercial harvesting ended in 1988—the seal population never quite bounced back, Tom Gelatt, a fisheries biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, tells the AP. In fact, Gelatt estimates that the population of pups on Bogoslof in 2019 will top 36,000. Gelatt theorizes that the seals come to to hunt in nearby deep waters, which contain such seal delicacies as squid and Northern smoothtongue. Because food is plentiful, nursing mothers can wean larger pups faster than fur seals at other islands, Gelatt says.

The sheer abundance of fur seals also brings about an unwelcome abundance of other species. “That first summer we saw a lot of pups on the beach learning how to swim,” Waythomas says. “At the same time, we saw killer whales in the area teaching their pups how to hunt.” He remembers watching the seals racing back to shore in an attempt to escape the orcas. “The seals’ moms and dads were more than a little stressed out,” he says.

But the colony of seals seems to have a handle on their unstable home. “I get the sense that they’re pretty tuned into their surroundings,” Waythomas says. “When things start to get going, they head into the water.” His team did spot a few dead seals on their two expeditions, but he says it seems unlikely the animals were killed by any kind of volcanic activity.

According to Waythomas, the real danger to Bogoslof’s seals isn’t a future eruption, but the surrounding seas. In 2016 and 2017, eruptions shrank parts of the island with explosions. It also created new real estate with chunks of rock blown from lava vents, but the new land is vulnerable to wave erosion. “A couple of big storms could remove a lot of the island,” Waythomas says. “We don’t know how long it will stay like that.”

And perfectly sized for small, Sri Lankan jungle prey.

Throughout deep human history, as we spread across the world to occupy just about every environment on the planet, we adapted to new sets of challenges—often by adapting our tools. In some places, these tools—almost exclusively made of stone back in the Paleolithic—got teensy, and are known today as microliths. Now, an international team of researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany has announced an analysis of oldest microlithic “toolkit” in Europe or Asia, found in a cave in the tropical heights of Sri Lanka.

“They are seen as being highly flexible toolkits that enabled humans to survive in a variety of different environments, hunting very different animals and using very different plants,” says Patrick Roberts, an archaeologist with the Max Planck Institute and a coauthor of the study.

Microliths offer a slew of benefits compared to chunkier stones. While hefty handaxes might be useful for big projects, microliths could be hafted together to make a wide range of tools from a small amount of stone. Their smaller size also meant using less resources to create them, and made them easier to travel with. It takes a very different toolkit to survive and thrive in a highland jungle than it does on the savanna.

Fa-Hien Lena Cave, also known as Pahiyangala, one of the largest in Asia, originally yielded evidence of prehistoric human activity in 1968, and has continued to be a source for understanding how early humans migrated across Asia. Thousands of stone tools, dating back tens of thousands of years, have been excavated from the cave over the years.

“Homo sapiens arrived in Sri Lanka by at least 45,000 years ago based on our current knowledge,” Roberts says. “As far as we can tell, the microlith technologies are used as soon as they arrived.”

The new finding, published in the journal PLOS One, shows just some of the ways a microlithic toolkit enabled human life in the jungle, including providing the ability to hunt and butcher smaller game, such as monkeys and tree squirrels, that wouldn’t have been well suited to bigger, clunkier tools or weapons.

The adaptability, creativity, and ingenuity that the microliths represent is, in some ways, what makes us human, and carries some spiritual connection with other tiny human technologies, from the integrated circuit to CRISPR.

“Stone tool miniaturization is a central tendency in hominin technologies going back at least 2.6 million years,” says Justin Pargeter, an archaeologist with New York University who specializes in ancient technologies and was unaffiliated with the study. “When other apes used stone tools, they chose to go big and stayed in the forests where they evolved. Hominins chose to go small with their technologies, went everywhere, and transformed otherwise hostile habitats to suit our changing needs.”

These photo-taking, model-making obsessives are documenting the state’s vintage signs before they vanish.

Chris Raley will never make a “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign, so stop asking. “There are entire gift shops in Vegas full of ’em,” he says. And Raley isn’t interested in doing what everyone else is doing.

His workshop—a spare room in his tan, two-story Fresno home that’s painted yellow and filled with thrift-store finds—attests to this fact. Standing atop a table are several unique acrylic models of commercial signs, most less than 18 inches tall, that you won’t find in Vegas gift shops—signs advertising the Safari Inn, Western Appliance, the Sun N’ Sand Motel, and more.

Raley, an affable, soft-spoken 48-year-old who favors a T-shirt and jeans, has been building these miniature signs for the past two years. He belongs to a loose fraternity of Californians who are obsessed with vintage signage. Sometimes referred to online as #signhunters or #signspotters, these sign geeks congregate around photo-sharing sites like Instagram (and in the earlier days of the Internet, Flickr) and bond over their love of the big, bold, over-the-top signs of the mid-20th century—the glory days of roadside advertising.

Some of the signs they document are more famous than others—Roy’s Motel, for instance, and the Milk Farm Restaurant, and Circus Liquor (yes, that Circus Liquor). But they’re all quintessentially Californian. Thanks to the state’s world-famous car culture, placards like these once dotted main drags from San Diego to Sacramento.

But that was then. These days there aren’t many neon beacons beckoning to drivers on California thoroughfares. As the state’s population swells, and its once-funky places gentrify, a small community of signhunters (the sign geeks who visit vintage placards in person) are racing to document the signs they love—taking and sharing photos, rendering skillful sketches, making miniature scale models—before they get knocked down to make way for condos and Walmarts.

Growing up in a town about 40 miles north of Fresno, Raley drove past the Astro Motel sign countless times. He didn’t think much of it back then. But in 2015, a realignment of State Highway 99—to accommodate California’s long-time-coming high-speed rail project—put the sign in harm’s way.

“I knew it was getting close [to being removed],” he says. “ And one day I drove down the freeway, and it was gone … I didn’t get choked up, but I came real close.”

For Raley, a stay-at-home dad, that was the turning point. Something changed. The Astro Motel sign became his muse. But how best to memorialize it?

First he tried painting a picture. But “it came out horribly,” he says, pointing to the finished painting—which isn’t as bad as he says—in his sawdust-sprinkled garage (the leftover sawdust is from a previous woodworking hobby). So Raley moved on to making models. Which made sense: A former Air Force mechanic, he’s more comfortable following blueprints than blind intuition. His first work was a three-inch wooden model of the Astro Motel sign, based on photographs and his own memory.

He wasn’t happy with how that one came out. But a little while later he made a miniature drive-in marquee, as a gift for a movie-loving friend. Before long Raley was regularly creating models of his favorite signs—a way to memorialize past ones he’s loved and honor those still standing.

Raley starts a new project by consulting photographs—usually drawn from the vast image libraries that other signhunters have posted on photo-sharing sites—and using them to estimate the sign’s dimensions. Then he plugs the dimensions for some basic shapes into his 3D printer. (Until this year, most of Raley’s signs were made of wood. But since he invested in the 3D printer, his works are usually laser-cut acrylic.)

Next he uses a font-finder program to replicate outdated fonts, which he traces onto vinyl or directly onto the sign-to-be. Then he paints or applies vinyl to the shapes, to match the original colors. Last comes the assembly process. Some signs, like Circus Liquor, can be replicated mostly in one piece. But for signs like Deano's Motel, Raley needs to attach multiple parts together—sometimes motors or lights too. For those he uses wood glue, epoxy, or magnets to keep everything in place.

The result is a veritable Santa’s Village of vintage signs, no more than two feet tall, that live in his workshop at home (or are occasionally available for purchase at the Valley Relics Museum in Van Nuys). Whether still standing or long gone in real life, these signs are now preserved for posterity as miniature models.

Raley and the other signhunters tend to focus on signs from the middle of the 20th century. But the history of commercial signage in the U.S. goes back to at least the 18th century. Some of the earliest signs in America were those on taverns, like the ones that still hang outside pubs in Ireland and the U.K. Proprietors named their establishments after well-known objects or animals, and the sign they hung outside used a combination of words and images to let passersby, of all literacy levels, know they were in the right place.

When electricity began illuminating the U.S., around the turn of the 20th century, signs started lighting up too—first with incandescent bulbs, and later with neon. In the years after World War II, signs were the primary form of advertising for businesses in the United States.

“If you didn’t have a sign, you didn’t exist,” says Heather David, a historian of midcentury architecture and founding member of the San Jose Signs Project, a group that advocates for the protection and preservation of vintage signage and architecture in the city.

By the mid-1960s, California’s highways—and the rest of the nation’s—were fairly screaming with advertisements. But that would soon change. In 1965, Lady Bird Johnson fostered the Highway Beautification Act, which Congress soon passed. The result: Hundreds of roadside signs were torn down, and laws limiting the size and number of signs that could go up were strictly enforced. In the 1970s, environmental concerns led to even more restrictions on where outdoor advertising could and couldn’t go.

As prominent signs became more rare, early signhunters like Jim Heimann, an editor at Taschen and the author of California Crazy, set out to document them. “Much of my original inspiration came from the discovery of the [Farm Security Administration] photographers in the 1930s,” he says. Signage and billboards often served as the backdrop to their work—an aesthetic choice that informed Heimann’s documentation of the signage he found in Southern California.

Later that decade and into the ’80s, as good-old-days nostalgia for the postwar period became fashionable, photographers like John Margolies published coffee-table books and prominent magazine spreads showing America’s wacky, wonderful roadside advertising. Most signhunters today still use photography to document the vanishing treasures they find. But some, like Raley, use other media.

San Jose artist Suhita Shirodkar is another one. A native of Bombay, she moved to San Jose in 2005, and immediately found herself captivated by the city’s extant signage. To document it, she began carrying a sketch pad with her everywhere she went.

“[These signs] seem like they shouldn’t have remained part of the landscape,” she says. “Many of them don’t … match what’s around them. [They] stand randomly in the middle of a parking lot that doesn’t have any vestige of the store that they talk about.”

In 2017, when Shirodkar began posting the sketches she was making of pre-tech Silicon Valley, including its signage, the signhunter community caught wind of her work. “It’s been immensely popular,” she says of her sketches. “And it’s been connecting me to people I don’t come across in my everyday life.”

San Jose is a particular mecca for signhunters. After World War II, it flourished as an airy alternative to cramped, vertical San Francisco. “I don’t remember the exact numbers, but I think San Jose quintupled,” says David. “From ’45 to ’65, we just exploded,” and sign-flecked shopping boulevards sprung up to serve the growing population.

Ironically, the same rapid development that birthed these signs then is contributing to their demise now. As tech workers flock to the Bay Area today for jobs at Google and Apple, making San Francisco prohibitively expensive, San Jose has scrambled to provide housing for them. That’s meant displacing longtime residents, beloved restaurants, and—yes—vintage signs in the process. “At least a third of the book is gone,” says Shirodkar, referring to the San Jose signs she sketched for a book published in 2018.

As rents rise and businesses change hands, signs advertising places like Mel Cotton’s Sporting Goods, the Bold Knight restaurant, and Cambrian Bowl—quirky billboards that have long served as landmarks and cultural touchstones for locals—have come down. Their removal is a blow to many residents, who are watching their hometowns change quickly and drastically.

In 2018, the sign advertising San Jose’s Orchard Supply Hardware—a big arrow that beckoned drivers crossing the San Carlos Street overpass—was taken down after the company folded. (Soon thereafter, its historic sign, which dates to the early 1950s, was stolen. Earlier this year it was recovered.) “Just think about … how many people have gone to Orchard Supply Hardware,” says David. “It’s a company that was founded in San Jose. It’s us.”

But it’s not just them. Fresno, too, is plagued by housing woes, as a construction boom there is imperiling the city’s vintage signs. Much of the rest of California—including Los Angeles and the suburbs that surround it—is in the same boat.

Can work like Raley’s and Shirodkar’s act as a visual bulwark against unchecked corporate expansion? Can it help keep alive the memory of midcentury mom-and-pop individuality? Raley sure hopes so.

“The Astro Motel sign—it no longer exists, except for in this room,” he says. “And so in a way, in a very small way, it’s been brought back to life.”

He captured the Alamo, lost Texas, and helped invent Tutti Frutti.

Two years before he died senile and broke, the disgraced Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna lived in a modest residence in Staten Island. Known variously as the executioner of hundreds at The Alamo, the man who lost Texas, and “His Most Serene Highness” and “The Eagle,” Santa Anna was missing a leg and had recently been conned out of tens of thousands of pesos. He spent his exile moving among high society, plotting to get rich or return to Mexico, and chewing on something called chicle.

Santa Anna hoped that his supply of chicle, a natural latex harvested from trees in the same fashion as rubber, would make him rich. He’d pitched Thomas Adams, a local inventor, on developing this foreign substance into an inexpensive replacement for rubber. It never worked. But after he left for Mexico for the final time, dumping his chicle on Adams, it became something else: the first modern chewing gum.

Santa Anna was born in 1794 to an aristocratic family in Veracruz, Mexico. A conflicted character from as early as his mid-teens, he fought with the Spanish in Mexico’s struggle for independence but had a change of heart a few years later. Santa Anna ultimately became a Mexican general and helped the rebels overthrow his former colonial comrades. Like many revolution-leading generals, his next act was as a populist dictator, becoming Mexico’s eighth president after years of struggling to consolidate the country’s independence and years of infighting for political power.

To boost his image, Santa Anna pulled propaganda stunts that included staging a state funeral for an amputated leg he’d lost in battle. (His wooden prosthetic was later captured by Americans as a war trophy and allegedly displayed by P. T. Barnum—although that may have been one of the showman’s many hoaxes.) Alongside his military victories, they made him immensely popular. His supporters praised him as “Liberator of Veracruz,” “Hero of Tampico,” and “Founder of the Republic.”

His habit of chewing chicle, though, was unremarkable. After all, chewing the waxy sap of the Yucútan Peninsula’s abundant sapodilla tree was common in Santa Anna’s birthplace. Following ancient Maya tradition, chicleros had harvested the sapodilla tree’s resin under the zig-zag slash of a machete for centuries. Chewy, odorless, and tasteless, it was an ancient form of gum.

Santa Anna was president of Mexico no less than 11 times, flip-flopping on issues when it benefited him. To first gain power, he stood for freedom, but once installed, he told a U.S. ambassador, “A hundred years to come my people will not be fit for liberty ... unenlightened as they are.” Increasingly out of touch, Santa Anna began to lose public support.

The fatal blow to his reputation came with the loss of large swaths of territory to Texas and the United States. Still, his grandiose sense of self-importance persisted. Infamously captured at San Jacinto—the battle in which Mexico lost Texas and was considered revenge for Santa Anna’s cruelty at the Alamo—he proudly remarked to his captors “that man may consider himself born to no common destiny who has conquered the Napoleon of the West.”

Forced into exile in the mid 1850s, Santa Anna floated around Cuba, Colombia, and Jamaica. In the Danish West Indies, he met with U.S. Secretary of State William Seward. Misinterpreting this as American support, writes Jennifer P. Mathews in Chicle: The Chewing Gum of the Americas, he was convinced by a Colombian revolutionary that the U.S. intended to back him against the current ruler of Mexico. Blinded by ambition, Santa Anna invested personal funds into the ploy and voyaged to New York City.

Fatefully, he brought his supply of chicle with him.

In New York, he learned that it was a lie. When all was said and done, Santa Anna was caught up in costly litigation, defrauded of tens of thousands of pesos, and forced to lease an unimpressive home on Staten Island, which was then not even within New York City limits.

Living among the Island’s modest agricultural and fishing community, Santa Anna pursued his most far-fetched machination yet: to replace rubber with chicle. Santa Anna’s interpreter had befriended local glass merchant and inventor Thomas Adams, a Civil War photographer who had settled down to raise seven children. Sharing his chicle supply, Santa Anna implored him to develop it into a cheap alternative to the costly rubber used in carriage tires. If it worked, they’d become rich.

Chicle did make Adams rich, but not as a replacement for rubber.

During the late 1850s, Adams and his son Thomas Jr. made many attempts to vulcanize chicle. They yielded nothing, and Santa Anna’s focus drifted. Near the end of his life, penniless, beaten, and sliding down a steep slope of physical decline, he was allowed to return to Mexico City. Two years later, the “Napoleon of the West” died, unaware that his lasting legacy would come from leaving his chicle in Staten Island.

Adams had sunk $30,000 into the rubber project, to no avail. But before he gave up, he noticed a girl buy gum at a drugstore.

In Chicle: The Chewing Gum of the Americas, Mathews explains that at the time, chewing gum was nothing like it is today. Made with a paraffin base, it was brittle after chewing and often contained impurities. In comparison, as Thomas Adams noted in his patent application, chicle gum “contained nothing of an unwholesome character” and it could “be stretched, molded into form, or broken and instantly reunited.”

Inspired, Adams and his sons boiled down some chicle and rolled up a batch of flavorless balls. First put on sale in 1859, they sold so quickly that Adams and his sons went all-in on chicle chewing gum. Together, the family founded Adams Sons and Company and sold “Adams New York Gum - Snapping and Stretching” for a penny a pop. They soon added flavors to their gum, and the company took off.

By the late 1800s, Adams Sons and Co. had turned into a conglomerate called American Chicle Company that employed more than 300 workers at the largest chewing-gum plant in the world, near the Brooklyn Bridge. Chewing gum became so popular that, in an article arguing against Prohibition, Nikola Tesla claimed excessive gum chewing was more dangerous than alcohol abuse.

Adams continued innovating. Under his direction, pharmacies received chewing-gum machines and New York subway platforms saw the installation of America’s first vending machines, which sold Adams’s popular Tutti Frutti flavor. Chicle became the base of gum the world over, giving birth to the $19 billion industry we know today.

Eventually chicle was overfarmed, leading to the use of alternatives. While Adams and Santa Anna sought to replace rubber with chicle, in the end it was the other way around, when synthetic polymers (a kind of rubber) developed by a Staten Island chemist in 1909 became the base of choice for gum manufacturers.

The same machine that popularized "The Oregon Trail" was secretly imported just a few years before the USSR collapsed.

The versatility of the Apple II made it one of the most widespread personal computers of the 1970s and 80s. In schools, labs, and even command centers, these classic American computers kept a foothold even after the advent of more advanced machines. But of all the places you’d expect to find the computer that popularized The Oregon Trail, the mournful museum of a Communist leader is one of the most unlikely.

Lenin Museum in Gorki Leninskiye, located 20 miles south of Moscow, doesn’t look hi-tech even by 1980s standards. But among black marble interiors, gilded display cases, and Soviet historical documents, there is an elaborate audiovisual show about the last years of Vladimir Lenin’s life. Opened in 1987, it’s still powered by vintage Apple technology.

“Originally, they were called ‘ideologico-emotional centers,’” says Boris Vlasov, Deputy Director of Research at Gorki Leninskiye Museum-Reserve, standing in front of a large cube of cranberry-red glass. As he presses a button on a bulky remote, the cube lights up from the inside, revealing moving images surrounded by elaborate props and scenery. Each of the museum’s five cubes, which look almost like monoliths from 2001: Space Odyssey, houses a short three-dimensional presentation. Moving mirrors and Pepper’s ghost projectors—the same technology that helped Tupac perform a posthumous concert—make them look like a theatrical play.

There was a reason for the spectacle. By 1972, when the idea of the museum was outlined by a Soviet government, the public image of Vladimir Lenin was in decline. “There was nothing new to be said about Lenin: his course of life was documented minute by minute, and it was impossible to find any new material,” Vlasov says. “It wasn’t enough to tell about the life of Lenin—one had to impress and surprise.” Lenin was known for his revolutionary politics and massive infrastructure projects, but also for authoritarian policies, mass executions, and concentration camps that he oversaw as the leader of the USSR.

The Soviets were well-versed in the construction of impressive buildings, and the museum was designed by Leonid Pavlov, a constructivist architect who had already built several research and computing centers in a similar cuboid fashion. But creating machinery for a smaller-scale visual spectacle turned out to be a challenge. Lights, motors, and reel-to-reel players had to be synced to each other, each following a script to the second.

Fortunately, there was worldwide demand for equipment that could control such devices. In 1981, the British audiovisual company Electrosonic launched the ES4000. It was a set of computer accessories and software that helped technicians program the building blocks of multimedia exhibitions. The system was built into a computer Electrosonic was already using internally—the Apple II. (A 1987 copy of Apple User magazine spotlighted the ES4000.) The choice of an Apple machine simplified the distribution in many parts of the world. By sticking to a popular, off-the-shelf computer, the company could buy Apple computers locally and extend them with the ES4000 hardware later.

But the creators of the Lenin Museum had a problem. Soviet law barred them from trading directly with foreign companies, and Agat-7, a Soviet Apple II clone, was unlikely to do the job. It required an external card to run software made in the West, and its 60-pin slots would not fit the 50-pin cards used by the ES4000. “All our programs depend on these add-on cards to provide the time code and high-speed communications facilities,” Bob Simmons, Electrosonic's Managing Director, told Apple User at the time. That meant the company would need to bring their own Apple computers to the Soviet Union.

To get around Soviet regulations, the deal was signed with a specialized economic body, Technointorg, and carried over through Beech Compix, a British front for the Soviet Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Foreign staff traveled to the USSR, too—but Cascade, a Russian company, took credit for their job, seemingly to preserve the impression that Soviet technology could not be beat.

“Officially, Electrosonic did not bring any computer equipment, and the software was formally developed by Cascade,” Vlasov says. But internal documents tell a different story: “General control algorithms and local programs are written by ES personnel.” Vlasov adds, “There were Russian specialists overseeing them, but they were from Leningrad Pictorial and Decoration Art Combine—producers of the exhibition.” The Electrosonic logo is still visible on the museum’s bulky remote controls.

Electrosonic supplied the equipment, but it was up to local engineers to keep it working. This task was delegated to various state enterprises, with most of them originally established for military purposes. In the turbulent time after the dissolution of the USSR, many Russian agencies changed their purpose or went defunct. This period was not kind to the most technically impressive of the cubes, which depicted a historic Soviet plan to electrify the nation. It used a laser projector to beam Lenin’s signature onto a simulated waterfall, and was even featured in Electrosonic’s corporate publication. “The humidity was too high for 1980s lasers,” Vlasov says.

Still, as if frozen in time, Lenin Museum outlived the fall of state-enforced communism with virtually no changes. Nothing was dismantled, altered, or even substantially upgraded, and the same piece of technology installed in the 1980s is still serviced twice a year. Repairing 40-year-old computers is no small task; according to Vlasov, it falls to former staff, who come out of retirement just to provide upkeep to the machines.

In 1985, while the museum was going to get its hands on 8-bit computers, Apple itself was trying to supply the USSR with more powerful Macintoshes. The company sent none other than Steve Jobs to sell Apple computers to the Soviet National Academy of Sciences—and through it, to schools throughout the Soviet Union. (Just a year later, US export restrictions would make such deals impossible.)

The deal never went through, reportedly because of Jobs’ eccentric remarks and public support of Leon Trotsky. In Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple by John Sculley, Al Eisenstat, who accompanied Jobs, recalled him talking about creating AI simulations of Soviet revolutionaries: “The one thing we can’t do is to ask them a question and get their current thinking. Ahh, but in the future you are going to have artificial intelligence and you’ll be able to ask Mr. Lenin a question or Mr. Trotsky a question.”

Just a few years later, Apple officially entered the country through Intermicro, a Soviet-Austrian joint venture that adopted foreign desktop publishing systems to Russian specifications. Anatoly Karachinsky, head of Intermicro and a current president of IBS Group, was also at the forefront of the publications Burda Moden and Kommersant, making Macs a de facto standard of the Russian publishing industry.

Still, Apple technology made very few inroads into Russian government institutions—with the notable exception of the Lenin Museum. Intermicro and other Apple distributors had little luck in pushing Macs to schools or agencies. “There was a major supply of Macintoshes to Bashkortostan's tax office,” says Andrey Antonov of the Moscow Apple Museum. “It was arguably the most global effort.” More recently, Russia has even tried to deter government workers from using iPhones, pushing them to use a homegrown mobile OS instead. In this context, the Lenin Museum is both a technological time capsule and a national outlier.

For the most part, the Lenin Museum was left untouched by the change around it. Just as it did in the waning years of the USSR, it focuses on Lenin’s achievements only, omitting stories about the violence of his regime. The addition of information on the anti-communist White movement, which fought the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War, did not make it less biased.

There are no plans to update the museum. Instead, it aims to preserve its technological attraction in the way it was first set up. “The cubes were to be replaced in 10 to 15 years,” says Vlasov. They have now lasted more than 30 years. His colleagues even hope to repair the broken one without altering the original artistic work. “It’s going to be the exact same presentation, recreated with modern technology,” he says.

The "flash" language reflected the makeup of the British penal colony at the time.

On February 25, 1832, the Sydney Monitor reported an arrest for illegal gambling, but not in so many words.

Four men—Thomas Cheesman, John Drew, Michael Reardon, and John Webster—were apprehended on Bathurst Street for tossing halfpence coins from a wooden plank, and placing bets on which would land on heads and which on tails. They were “spinning the mags,” the arresting officer, one Constable Sutland, told those assembled in the courtroom later, according to the unusually detailed newspaper account. “What do you say?” asked Captain Rossi, understandably puzzled. “I don’t understand you.”

Constable Sutland then explained, “in a manner truly impressive and edifying to both Bench and bye standers, and with much historical tact” that “spinning the mags, your worship, is slang for toss-half penny,” a more common name for the game of chance they were playing. The details of the crime sufficiently clear, the men were jailed for a week.

There’s no way of knowing whether Constable Sutland had his own copy, but a special dictionary had, in fact, been published some years earlier for just this kind of scenario. James Hardy Vaux’s Vocabulary of the Flash Language, typically regarded as the very first dictionary produced in Australia, translated into plain English some 700 slang terms regularly used by people engaged in illegal activity. Vaux translated this “flash” language while himself imprisoned at Newcastle, in southeastern Australia. He even dedicated the book to his supervising commandant.

Between 1788 and 1868, more than 160,000 people were transported from England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland to the opposite side of the world to serve their time in Australia, help establish a new outpost of the British Empire, and generally no longer be in the British Isles anymore. It was an anxious time, with the disruption of the Industrial Revolution driving a rise in petty theft. The state managed the turmoil, in part, by instituting forced transportation to the colonies—often for minor infractions, if there were infractions at all. Many of those transported, in fact, were political prisoners.

Once the American Revolution put an end to transportation there, Australia became the primary destination. Those put on the ships ended up in places such as the Port Arthur Penal Station in Tasmania, the Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney, and Fremantle Prison near Perth, among many others. Once notorious for their awful conditions and hard labor, a number of these sites are now museums of Australia’s “convict period.” Visitors can glimpse that past in relics ranging from a gallery of prisoners’ tattoos to an unconsecrated “Convict Church.”

The influx of incarcerated persons not only brought more European people to Australian shores, but also variations on the English language. What Vaux called “flash” language was also known as “thieves’ cant,” an extensive set of code words that had flourished on the margins of English society for centuries. (“Flash,” in other words, is flash for “cant.”) Scholars agree that the cant itself did not really evolve into a specifically Australian version, and Vaux’s publication followed centuries of older cant dictionaries produced in England. What set Vaux’s apart, however, was its unique utility in the Australian setting.

Nineteenth-century Australia was a flash paradise teeming with accused outlaws, former outlaws, and people who knew outlaws—so it follows that officials, policemen, and others would want to be familiar with the argot all around them. According to a paper by A.L. Beier, a scholar of cant and retired historian from Illinois State University, 75 percent of New South Wales’s population in 1819 (when the dictionary was published) was “either current or former convicts or their descendants. By 1828, the proportion had risen to 87 percent, and while it declined thereafter because of free immigration, it still stood at 59 percent in 1851.” And that was just New South Wales, the region of the Australian mainland that includes Sydney and Newcastle. Population data for the island of Tasmania, meanwhile, distinguished between recent arrivals and the Aboriginal people who had lived there for millennia (and tended to stay away from colonial settlements). In 1822, Beier writes, 58 percent of Tasmania’s non-Aboriginal population had criminal convictions. Vaux himself had been transported to Australia on three different occasions, and served some of his time in the Hyde Park Barracks.

Recently, to mark the dictionary’s 200th anniversary, the Australian writer and illustrator Simon Barnard published an updated version of Vaux’s text, featuring historical examples of the terms’ usage in court and criminal records, and, eventually, the assimilation of certain words into the mainstream. Barnard says that one of the most striking patterns in his research is the degree to which criminal justice officials could not understand any of what they were told by defendants. According to Beier, special cant interpreters were called into the courts of New South Wales beginning in the 1790s.

Barnard found documented examples of words that had to be translated in court, such as “buzzman” (“Buz-Cove” or “Buz-Gloak” in Vaux’s dictionary), meaning, simply, a pickpocket. That was general, while other terms were maddeningly specific. Consider “cat and kitten rig,” for the practice of “stealing pewter quart and pint pots from public-houses.” Cant was so important—and so elusive—to the justice system that some defendants used their fluency to lighten their sentences. After John Farrell, Thomas Hopkins, and George Lyons robbed a “panny” (a house, per Vaux) in 1786, Farrell explained to the judge that “panney is the meaning of the house,” and was spared the death sentence issued to his codefendants.

Today, Farrell would probably be called a “snitch”—but only because the word has moved from thieves’ cant into our common parlance. “To impeach, or betray your accomplices,” writes Vaux, “is termed snitching upon them. A person who becomes king’s evidence on such an occasion, is said to have turned snitch …” It’s hardly the only word from Vaux’s dictionary to have escaped the argot over time. A January 28, 1833, crime report in the Sydney Herald referred to the arresting officer as “the Charley” (a watchman in Vaux), and then stated that the arrested, one Mary Malone, tried “bonnetting” the officer (making false excuses to him) before ultimately “bolting” (well, you get it).

In the introduction to his updated text, Barnard lists several other words from the dictionary that have persisted, specifically in Australian English: “Danna” (excrement) helped give way to “dunny” (toilet), “togs” (clothing) has become slang for swimwear, “ridge” (gold) is preserved in “ridgy-didge” (Aussie for good or genuine, according to the Oxford English Dictionary). And there was at least one cant term unique to the Australian variety, and inextricably tied to the landscape itself. “Bush’d,” defined by Vaux as “poor; without money,” comes from escapees and formerly incarcerated people who fought to survive in the wilderness—what Australians call the "bush,” according to Therese-Marie Meyer, a scholar of Australian convict history at Germany’s Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. If you look closely, you might even find some cant on walls surviving from colonial Australia: According to Barnard, the words “Grog for Me”—“Liquor for Me”—are still visible, etched onto a wall in Bothwell, Tasmania, near the name of the likely scribe, William Bray. Once a prison, that Bothwell building is now a private residence, and Barnard says that most convict-era graffiti consists of pictures rather than words.

To be sure, many cant terms have also been lost to time, and encountering them today in Vaux’s dictionary suggests a kind of subversive poetry too rich to have ever been real. While compiling his updates to Vaux’s text, Barnard came across a few particularly beguiling examples; his favorites include “resurrection-cove,” or someone who stole bodies from graves, and “morning-sneak,” an early-day act of thievery executed “by slipping in at the door unperceived, while the servant or shopman is employed cleaning the steps, windows, etc.”

Simply uttering these words—really anything the police couldn’t understand—could put one at risk of arrest. Barnard details an 1845 case, for example, in which a pair of suspects would have evaded the police had a passerby not heard the men using flash language, prompting the cops to take another look and, ultimately, re-incarcerate the men at Hyde Park Barracks. Likewise, when James Gavaghan was overheard muttering about a “chiv” (now a common term for a makeshift knife), he got himself two years at Port Arthur. A January 16, 1832, listing of police incidents in the Sydney Herald was explicit, reporting that one Mary Connor was institutionalized for a month after “throwing all the hard words in Hardy Vaux’s dictionary at her mistress’ head …”

According to Meyer, cant is a “sociolect”—a variety of a language spoken by a particular social class—rather than a dialect tied to a specific region or location. One of Vaux’s terms, in fact, is “family,” a title he gave to all “who get their living upon the cross,” or through illegal activity. These examples illustrate the fear that authorities and the non-flash speaking public had of flash or cant—that it not only facilitated crime, but also inspired it. The policies of some Australian prisons, says Barnard, addressed this fear by condemning the incarcerated to total silence. (That carceral method wasn’t pioneered in Australia, he adds; it had previously been practiced in Philadelphia.)

At the same time, that perception may be part of what gave cant or flash such currency among those who spoke it. Beier cites people who complained at the time that cant “played a role in fostering solidarity among convicts,” and who noted that incarcerated laborers “‘have a strong esprit de corps, which is kept up by their speaking a language so full of cant expressions as to become a separate dialect.’” It was, in its way, an instrument of resistance—an expression of identity and self-determination among those who had lost their freedom, often for little or no offense, and been forced across the world.

Imagine the roar.

If you’ve been to a big waterfall, then you know the experience of standing close to one varies greatly. On a sweltering day, the spray feels like a free sprinkler, gentle and invigorating. On a cooler, windier one, it’s more like an unwelcome, soaking rain. (Little wonder that the boats that have ferried visitors past Niagara Falls since 1846 supply hooded ponchos.) The sound of the tumbling water changes, too, from a pleasant muffling to a rib-rattling roar.

A single waterfall can be an overwhelming sensory experience, so imagine the sight and sound and feel of more than 40 thundering at once. In the 19th century, several mapmakers and geographers conjured this by stacking some of the world’s tallest, most forceful, or otherwise notable waterfalls on a single chart.

A handful of these are compiled in An Atlas of Geographical Wonders, From Mountaintops to Riverbeds, the first English edition of a French-language book by a quartet of cartography enthusiasts. The maps were part of a larger 19th-century cartographic trend, which coauthors Gilles Palsky and Jean-Marc Besse describe as “comparative fervor.” (The book, first published in 2014 as Le Monde Sur Une Feuille, is written by Palsky, Besse, Philippe Grand, and Jean-Christophe Bailly, whose professional bonafides range from landscape architecture to poetry.) Inspired, in part, by the earlier work of the roving Prussian naturalist, geographer, and chronicler Alexander von Humboldt, some 19th-century cartographers made sense of the world by relying on measurables and scale, and then comparing the world’s biggest and most spectacular features on a single tableau. They plotted imaginary vistas where the world’s tallest peaks became a single mountain range, or unusual bar graphs in which the longest rivers ribboned down a single chart in parallel squiggles.

The “great measuring of the world,” as Bailly calls it, fulfilled several aims, both individual and political. Printed in atlases that would have lined the bookshelves in a relatively wealthy, curious person's home, the maps fed a fascination with remote places that few would ever see firsthand. They were also a way to mark, market, and celebrate colonial expeditions and explorers. “Altitudes and lengths invariably functioned as evidence of new discoveries,” Bailly writes, “providing a breeding ground for the fever of comparison and its accompanying tendency to produce visual records.”

Bailly and his coauthors reproduce an 1836 example by the London outfit of C. Smith & Son, on which the 19th-century printer rounded up more than three dozen waterfalls, from the majestic Cascade de Gavarnie (which they spelled “Gavarny”) in the Pyrenees, to one of the cataracts of the Nile River, where shallow rapids course over jagged rocks. The mapmakers organized the waterfalls by height, calculated “from the point of departure to the level of the basin into which they fall.” The chart includes singular falls and cascades from Norway, Colombia, Wales, Switzerland, Canada, Dalmatia, and more.

But as most any scientist will tell you, measurements are constantly reconsidered and refined, and map- and chart-making is as much art as science. A decade later, James Reynolds, another London publisher, produced a map that trod much of the same territory, but with a different cast of characters and new measurements for some of the recurring ones. The tallest and squattest waterfalls are the same on both charts, but their heights vary: The C. Smith & Son map places Gavarnie in the Pyrenees at 1,160 feet, compared to 1,280 in Reynolds. One of the Nile’s cataracts either falls at 35 feet, per C. Smith & Son, or 40, if you buy Reynolds’s account. Neither cites sources (at least not on the fronts of the charts, which are all that’s reproduced in the volume). Scale comes from the minuscule humans and animals in the foreground of each chart—dwarfed by nature’s majesty.

Many people don’t need convincing of the charm and spectacle of waterfalls, but Reynolds’s chart sets out to convince you anyway. Text at the bottom parses the differences between rapids, cataracts, and cascades and extols waterfalls as “among the most interesting and beautiful … works of nature.”

Comparative charts largely fell out of vogue by the end of the 19th century. In one of the book’s essays, Palsky and Besse suggest that the waning popularity had something to do with advances in mapmaking and printing. Maybe there was less need for comparison when you could print maps with sophisticated shading techniques—and then came photographs, which offered a new way to see the distant world.

But for a while, at least, the tableaux flattened the world and gave viewers a passport to its wonders. “The reader whose finger traces the line of a river or climbs a mountain peak—and in this way covers enormous distances in only a few centimeters—will discover the vastness of an immense and unknown world,” Bailly writes. “This world has been wholly compiled, and thus made wholly visible and readable on a single page.” That isn’t quite true, of course—people keep climbing mountains, measuring again and again, and seeing the world in ever greater detail. The charts never encompassed humanity’s emerging ecological and geological understanding of the world, but that hardly impedes the pleasure of viewing a simple, artistic chart of the planet’s marvels, and letting your eyes do the roaming.

Their wide-reaching wetland agriculture helped support the civilization.

In recent years, talk of “draining the swamp” has gotten awful popular in the United States. Swamps and wetlands are a lot of things—critical wildlife habitat, buffers against storms, and natural filtration systems, as well as places to hide, barriers to agriculture and development, and refuges for disease-spreading mosquitoes. In short, our modern relationship with wetlands can be complicated. The ancient Maya of Central America were pretty clear about their wetlands: They were a resource, a place to cultivate crops for nearly 1,000 years through a system of wetland agriculture. A new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is showing just how complex and massive Maya wetland agriculture was.

“When Europeans came to America they had a very negative view of wetlands,” says Timothy Beach, a geoarchaeologist at the University of Texas at Austin and coauthor of the study, “but to most Americans, they were like our refrigerators today. They were filled with all kinds of goods.”

The fact that the Maya employed irrigation agriculture has been known for some time. Many of their ruins had been systematically explored and documented—going back to the 19th century—but uncovering the extent of their elaborate landscape engineering has taken a little more time. As more and more major Maya population centers were uncovered, there was great speculation about how many people they held, and how those populations maintained a steady supply of maize, avocado, squash, and other foods. As far back as 1981, it was reported that their agricultural systems were large and complex—suggesting big populations throughout the Maya world.

But there has been skepticism about the scale of it all, and some scholars even doubted that Maya populations were all that big. Estimates of the size of the civilization, its population, and its footprint have varied over the years, and it seems like every time scholars look, the picture gets more complex. The question hinges both on the extent of Maya fields and how efficient their agricultural practices were. This latest research suggests that what we know of Maya wetland agriculture could just be the tip of the iceberg.

Beach’s team focused its efforts on the Rio Bravo watershed in northwestern Belize to get a sense of Maya agricultural sprawl. They conducted excavations in fields and canals, looked at pollen residue in the soil layers to learn what crops were grown, and applied radiocarbon dating. Perhaps the most helpful technology in their toolkit was lidar, aerial radar that provides a clear look at what is hidden under the forest canopy that now covers the entire area.

The lidar showed vast stretches of Maya canal and field systems throughout the area the researchers studied. One of the four complexes examined in the paper, the Birds of Paradise wetland complex, was found to be five times larger than previously known.

“It did surprise us, to tell you the truth,” Beach says. “I had an inkling the fields were larger, but I had no idea we’d find new areas up the valley.”

“With the lidar it’s becoming clear that we need to swing back to the viewpoints of 30 to 40 years ago,” adds Stephen Houston, an archaeologist at Brown University, when it was thought that Maya populations were, in a word, huge. “Now we’re getting the full body blow of how extensive these systems were. You might say this has a ripple effect outward on the ancient Maya, and tells us there were a ton of people.”

The Maya had cleared densely forested areas for the canals and fields by cutting down and burning much of the swamp forest, beginning 1,300 years ago. Canals were then dug in a pattern that resembles rectangular veins, to drain and distribute water through the fields.

“We know where they did it and we know how they did it,” he says. The next step will be developing a better understanding of the hydrology of the system. “We’re still trying to figure that part out,” he adds.

Two 90-year-old albums document what a 12-year-old photographer did on her summer vacation.

It’s the summer of 1929. In a few months, the New York Stock Exchange will collapse, and a new generation of American photographers—Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, among others—will soon capture the pain and uncertainty of those displaced by the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.

But in Rye, New Hampshire, a young girl is crouching on the shoreline, gathering flowers for a series of photographs inspired by some of the medium’s earliest explorers. She is working with photography at its most elemental—capturing sunlight on a sheet of paper washed with salts and fixed in water.

Helen Chase Gage was born in Bronxville, New York, in 1917. She studied art history and fashion at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, and later worked as an executive at the Westchester branch of Lord & Taylor.

Gage was also an active member of the Bronxville League for Service, a philanthropic organization that founded and staffed a dental clinic for low-income patients and once purchased an ambulance for the local hospital. As a volunteer, Gage hosted sewing circles, organized fundraising galas, and worked as the league’s archivist.

But her buzzing professional and social lives belie her earliest self-expression, as a photographer.

In that summer of 1929, Gage, then 12 years old, created the first of two albums of botanical cyanotypes. Using plants she found on her family’s summer estate, Gage prepared a stunning series of photograms. These unique images trace the buds of a larkspur, the curl of a leaf, and a blob of nasturtium, seemingly floating in a pool of the deepest Prussian blue.

Gage came up with the idea for the project just before her summer holidays, when she watched Anna Greve, head of life sciences at Bronxville Elementary School, turn a sheet of blueprint paper into a light-sensitive canvas. So inspired, Gage wrote, “I asked Daddy to get me some blue print paper. One week end when he came up to the country he brought me a yard square.”

Gage’s project flourished over two summers at Sagamore Farm, the holiday home on Odiorne Point that her mother bought in 1918. The gardens there were full of summer-blooming plants for Gage to gather—poppies, pinks, and the aptly named Helen’s flower. A grove of sugar maples stood on either side of the road leading to Sagamore Farm, which Gage used to make a constellation of leaf prints.

Working on the shores of the Gulf of Maine, Gage experimented with a photographic technique that dates back to 1842. While Sir John Herschel, a British chemist and astronomer, created the cyanotype process, it was Herschel’s friend, Anna Atkins, who established the medium as an essential tool for scientific illustration. In 1843, Atkins published the first of eight volumes of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, thought to be the first book primarily illustrated with photographs.

Gage’s 1929 album includes a charming, handwritten introduction that describes her process to the viewer. “I will answer the question that will probaly [sic] come to your mind,” writes Gage:

How do you use it? You put the leaf or whatever you want to print on the glass and then put the blue print paper on top. Put it in the sun untill [sic] it turns white. Take it out of the case and put it in a pan of water untill [sic] it turns blue. Then take it out of the water and let it dry and your blue print is all done.

When the family returned to Sagamore Farm the following summer, Gage prepared another album. Decorated in a handmade, block-printed fabric, the album functions as an herbarium and a photo collection in one. It also demonstrates Gage’s technical and conceptual growth from one year to the next, creating an unusual botanical and photographic record in the process.

Of course, those bucolic summer days couldn’t last. As the Second World War loomed, the U.S. government expropriated Odiorne Point, driving a dozen families—including the Gages—from their land. The site is now Odiorne Point State Park, where the stone foundations of Sagamore Farm lie alongside the decommissioned remnants of wartime fortification. Tansy, a wildflower Gage once collected in the area, still grows along the salty shoreline.

Gage lived with her parents for most of her life, but married in 1970, at age 52. In their wedding portrait, Gage—haloed by a short, white veil—beams happily as she stands with her husband, a Bronxville man named Arthur W. Miller. The couple was married for nearly 12 years before Gage died, in 1982, at the age of 64.

Thirty-six years later, in 2018, a collector named David Spencer bought Gage’s cyanotype albums—previously owned by her younger brother, Edward Augustus Gage—from a New Hampshire dealer.

Gage’s pastoral summers are immortalized by these albums she made as a girl. Referencing some of the earliest experiments in botanical photography, she breathed new life into the genre while establishing a creative voice that would serve her well throughout her relatively short life.

This is what Helen Chase Gage did on her summer vacation.

A fiercely unusual musical style from a fiercely independent island.

On an island in the Mediterranean, there is an incredible musical style unknown to the vast majority of the world. Because describing music often ends up as a series of references to other music, here’s what that style, cantu a tenòre, evokes: one part barbershop quartet, one part traditional Mongolian drone, one part political punk, and one part bar band. It’s also one example of an unusual vocal strategy, one that almost doubles as a wild anatomical experiment, that appears in scattered places around the globe.

Cantu a tenòre is Sardinian throat singing, and it’s very, very cool.

To talk about cantu a tenòre, we first have to talk about the human voice—a truly amazing musical instrument, capable of an astonishing range of sounds. But it has the same weakness as all breath-powered instruments (including woodwinds and brass): You can only play one note at a time. Except sometimes your voice can play two.

The human vocal apparatus is made up of two vocal cords, which is sort of a misleading name. They’re not strings, really, but more like flat, folded, mucous-covered membranes, which can be constricted and vibrate at varying speeds as air pass between them to produce sound, either spoken or sung. This is the only vibrating tissue for most speakers and singers, but among the group of people who have learned how to throat sing, there’s another option.

A little lower down, there are two vestibular folds, sometimes called “false vocal cords.” These are, like the regular vocal cords, mucous-covered infoldings, but they aren’t ordinarily used for making sound. Instead, they’re kind of like guard membranes that keep food and water out of the airway while you're eating and drinking. Throat singers have figured out how to control the muscles in these folds, and can constrict or relax them to produce noise as air passes by them. It’s almost a body hack that creates harmonies out of some internal bits that few know can even produce sound.

Vibration of the vestibular folds can be done either with or without vibration of the regular vocal cords. “You can sing with only the false folds but it will not become throat singing any more,” says Giovanni Bortoluzzi, who, along with Ilaria Orefice, runs the Sherden Overtone Singing School, the first and probably the only school for Sardinian throat singing in the world. You end up instead with a growl, which may be familiar from certain varieties of heavy metal. It’s particularly common in death metal, and is sometimes referred to as “monster voice.” But if you can sing or speak—using your regular vocal cords—while vibrating your vestibular folds, you end up, incredibly, harmonizing with yourself. The vestibular folds will vibrate at one octave lower than whatever tone you sing. That specific difference in pitch is consistent, and even the most experienced throat singers can’t change it.

There are multiple ways of manipulating these false folds. That harmony is called a subtone—bassu, in Sardinian—but there’s also something called contra, which is made by tensing the false cords. You don’t end up with two simultaneous tones, but anything sung is … changed. Bortoluzzi calls it “metallic voice,” and it’s kind of hard to describe. It’s a sound that can’t be produced in any other way, but it’s immediately noticeable as something unusual.

Throat singing shows up in various musical traditions, the most famous of which is probably Tuvan, or from a remote Russian republic bordering Mongolia. For some reason, it seems to appear most often in the native music of cold-weather communities: the Sami people of Scandinavia, the Inuits in Canada, and among Buddhists in Tibet. Sardinia seems to be an exception to this rule; its climate is as Mediterranean as you can get. This makes the Sardinian tradition a rarity among rarities.

Anyone can learn throat singing, says Bortoluzzi, though it takes a keen ear, both for external and internal sounds—those you hear with your ears and those your body makes. He says it usually takes about a week to teach the technique, though some find it easier than others. “The Sardinians, they have it in their blood, so it's very easy to teach Sardinians,” he says. (Bortoluzzi, unlike Orefice, is not Sardinian, though he has spent a great deal of time in Sardinia.)

It’s not known when cantu a tenòre first emerged. It’s first attested, says Orefice (as translated by Bortoluzzi), in the 15th century, though it’s likely much older than that, possibly thousands of years older. Even though Sardinia is so unlike many of the other places that are home to throat singing it seems unlikely that it came there from somewhere else. Sardinia, like much of the Mediterranean, was conquered and reconquered throughout history—by the Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, and more. But Sardinia has always been a little bit separate from those empires, with a little bit more autonomy than its history might suggest. Even today it is a little bit separate from the rest of Italy.

For example: All of the various languages of the Italian kingdoms—including Neapolitan and Venetian—were shunted to the side in favor of standard Italian during the unification of the country. Of those languages, Sardinian—a romance language, but not comprehensible to Italian speakers—is the most widely spoken today. And a majority of Sardinians can speak it, even though the Italian government does not allow it to be taught in schools.

Bortoluzzi says that given how fiercely independent Sardinia is, it is all the more unlikely that throat singing, something so fundamental to Sardinian culture, could have been introduced. Instead it might have just been independently discovered or evolved, the same way it was in Canada or Tibet. One thing Sardinia does have in common with all of those other places, from Scandinavia to Tuva: wide open spaces. Throat singing, says Bortoluzzi, is associated with herders and shepherds, possibly as a way to communicate over long distances, because the sound carries very far.

Cantu a tenòre is a fairly rigid form. It is exclusively a capella. It is almost always sung with four members. And it is always, always sung in Sardinian—never Italian. This came in handy in the past, given that Sardinia was often under the control of some far-off power. “During the Inquisition they used to sing revolutionary lyrics in Sardinian cantu a tenòre in a way that the Inquisitors would not understand,” says Bortoluzzi. Rebellious or otherwise forbidden political messages could be inserted cleverly into songs that might appear religious—a way for Sardinians to thumb their noses at their oppressors.

If not political in nature, cantu a tenòre lyrics tend toward the hyper-local—often poems about townspeople. “There are many many poets in Sardinia, and the poems become music,” says Bortoluzzi. That local element is important, and cantu a tenòre groups are traditionally named after their hometowns.

The name cantu a tenòre translates as something like “singer and accompaniment.” Of the four singers in a cantu a tenòre group, three harmonize as an accompaniment (in lieu of, say, a guitar or drum or piano) and one sings over that. The bassu sings with that subtone, producing the lowest sound and, an octave above that, the third-lowest. The contra, using that “metallic voice,” sings the second-lowest tone, in between the two bassu tones. The mesu boche sings one octave above the contra. If you know your music theory, these tones are either the tonic—the base note—or a fifth above that. The three singers together are the tenòre, and they are basically singing power chords, like in punk music.

The boche, the last of the four, is the lead vocalist, and the only one to actually sing lyrics; the tenòre are all singing the same nonsense syllables, like “bing bong.” The boche’s melodies are often improvised, feathery and vaguely Semitic-sounding. The harmonies are fairly restricted, and they are always, says Bortoluzzi, in a major key, which leaves them sounding a little bit like Tuvan barbershop.

The group tends to sing very close together physically, often with their arms wrapped over each other’s shoulders. There is a real intimacy there. Bortoluzzi says that there is often debate about what makes a good or authentic group, but some things are unassailable. “They all agree on one thing, and that is that to perform cantu a tenòre, you must be very close friends,” he says. Most cantu a tenòre groups are all-male, and none are all-female, but women are not discouraged from singing, even the bassu part. Mixed-gender groups are not unheard of, though it can be difficult to find a female throat-singing teacher.

Over the past few centuries, cantu a tenòre has become drinking and dancing music. In the recent past, you would often, says Bortoluzzi, find a cantu a tenòre group in a local bar, singing for friends. (This is not so common anymore.) To many older Sardinians, this is the true form of cantu a tenòre, in the same way that punk really ought to be played in a low-ceilinged venue that smells defiantly of old beer.

The stubbornness of Sardinians about their musical form is not unusual for Italy in general; just try asking a Roman how to make a cacio e pepe. But that rigidity and a lack of global visibility for Sardinia has meant that, even as Tuvan throat singing became somehow famous in the 1990s, cantu a tenòre has stayed local. Bortoluzzi mentions a concert for which Tuvan throat singers came to collaborate with Sardinian throat singers, only to run into a brick wall of tradition. “The Tuvan group accommodated a lot in terms of pitch and the choosing of the rhythm and stuff like that,” he says, “but the cantu a tenòre group was very stubborn. ‘Oh, we always sing like that, you should follow us, this is the Sardinian way.’”

Bortoluzzi and Ortefice’s school started in 2016, and teaches workshops in addition to putting on performances. They have, says Bortoluzzi, more than 100 students, most of whom are in their 30s and 40s. “Not so many young people are interested, for now,” he says. But there are some signs of change. Young groups, such as Tenore Su Remediu de Orosei, are stretching the form, sometimes adding instrumentation and influences from outside Sardinia. (This song has a distinctly Southern-sounding slide guitar.)

As with any other very old tradition, there’s a balance to be struck between remembering the way it’s been done for centuries and exploring new ground. Either way, cantu a tenòre feels ripe for global discovery.

They dry in the sun every autumn in China's Uyghur Autonomous Region.

In Northwest China's Gobi Desert, autumn tints the landscape a flaming scarlet. The fields of red aren’t deciduous leaves blushing with the season. They’re chili peppers, spread out to dry under the hot desert sun following the late-summer harvest. Each September and October, farmers across the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, which produces a fifth of China’s world-leading pepper harvest, let the harsh sun and 100-plus degree temperatures do the work that most American producers leave to industrial dehydrators.

The result is a red sea of chilies stretching to the horizon. From the ground, the mounds of glossy, fat peppers look like tempting seasoning for a future dinner. From above, the two hundred-plus ton harvest transforms the landscape, staining the khaki-colored desert like blood cells under a microscope.

Blanketing the arid sand of the Uyghur Autonomous Region, the chilies are part of a spice economy that stretches back to the heyday of the Silk Road. Until the 16th century, native spices such as cumin dominated Central Asia's spice trade, and they continue to flavor the cuisine of the Turkic-speaking, majority-Muslim Uyghur people who call this region home. Chilies reached China sometime in the 1500s, one of the many New World foods to spread in Asia as a result of European conquest in the Americas. Chilies took root both in the dry desert soil and the local cuisine.

While the food of southwest China’s Sichuan Province is popularly associated with hot peppers, Xinjiang’s Uyghur food doesn’t neglect the spice. Fitting the region’s status as a cultural crossroad, Uyghur food contains culinary traces of South, Central, and East Asia. Manta, which are beef-and-pumpkin stuffed dumplings, evoke Turkish or Afghani mantu. Goshnan (“meat bread”), a stuffed flatbread, has consonance with South Asian keema parantha. Lagman, a bell-pepper-and-onion studded dish sometimes made of one impressively long noodle, resembles Chinese lamian. While many of these dishes are oily and aromatic rather than spicy-hot, kawaplar, chili powder-dusted lamb kebabs, and dapanji, often translated as “big plate” chicken stew, make mouth-numbing use of the region’s chili harvest.

Particularly in light of the Chinese government's ongoing persecution of Uyghur people, which has forced community members into “re-education” camps and prohibited them from practicing their faith, many Uyghurs are proud of what makes their culture and cuisine distinct. “Uyghur is Uyghur and Chinese is Chinese,” Ilshat Hassan Kokbore, president of the Uyghur American Association, said in an interview with the Washington Post. “Culturally, food is part of the Uyghur identity.”

The chili harvest is just one of the annual rituals that make the Uyghur’s homeland unique. Locals take advantage of the same hot weather that desiccates chilies to sweat in “sand baths,” burying themselves in burning sand as part of a traditional therapy. Like the health-seekers sweating for longer life, chili peppers in nearby fields dry as a means of preservation. The image of their glossy skin vibrates in the heat-iridescent air, while their smoky scent drifts through a desert region that continues to be one of the world’s crossroads of spice.

In the murky waters of Bocas del Toro, you can't see the manatees, but you can hear them.

In the waterways of western Florida, manatees are incredibly easy to count. They waddle their way down the aptly-named Crystal River, easily spotted from above in waters never cloudier than quartz. For Florida biologists, monitoring manatee populations is as simple as photographing the mammals by helicopter or drone. “It’s a piece of cake,” says marine ecologist Héctor Guzmán, with a twinge of jealousy in his voice.

Panama, where Guzmán works, is a different story. He monitors manatees in what could be considered, ecologically speaking, the opposite of the Crystal River. In the Bocas del Toro region of Panama, Antillean manatees swim in turbid, weedy waters so murky that one can barely see them, let alone count them. So to count Bocas del Toro’s manatee population, which has been decreasing for a decade, Guzmán and other researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute had to get creative. Instead of looking for the manatees, they’re listening to them, according to a study in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America published in September, 2019.

Like bats and whales, manatees are very chatty. They communicate underwater to find mates, warn each other of imminent danger, or call to their offspring. They speak in a language of whistles, squeaks, and chirps that are tonally distinct for each individual. “That’s the cute part of it,” Guzmán says, shortly after demonstrating, in his own voice, what an adult manatee sounds like over the phone. “Ah-ah-ah-ah,” he repeats. “They’re just like us, how we have different tones in our voices.”

The researchers listened to all the audible manatees in two rivers in the Bocas del Toro region, the San San and the Changuinola, and then ran the recordings through an algorithm that isolated distinct manatee voices. This method is similar to a traditional capture-recapture population survey—but instead of capturing the actual animal, or even its picture, scientists are simply recording its voice. The process is far less invasive than cages, nets, or physical tags.

The researchers deployed four listening stations, consisting of hydrophones (underwater microphones) attached to PVC piping, to the bottom of rivers where manatees live. They recorded the sounds of the river every 10 or 15 minutes, listening for two minutes at a time, Guzmán says. While both rivers serve as major breeding grounds for the manatees, the San San contains far fewer aquatic plants, making it easier to navigate. The Changuinola, on the other hand, is densely covered in 12 to 15 species of aquatic plants, including weeds and lilies. “It’s beautiful, but also like a carpet,” Guzmán says.

This is not the first time that scientists have attempted to count manatees by their vocalizations, but it is the most ambitious. In 2017, Jorge Castro, a former student of Guzmán, conducted a much smaller manatee count in the San San River, examining more than 300 recorded tonal vocalizations. Fernando Merchán, a signal-processing specialist from Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá, even attempted to use Castro’s algorithms in this newer study. That didn’t quite work, so Merchán developed a new algorithm, Guzmán says.

Merchán’s algorithm took four months to analyze 300,000 two-minute audio clips of the rivers, which frequently picked up more buzzing boat engines and croaking frogs than manatee chatter. “It’s like being in the room with several people, but picking out just one voice,” Merchán says. The program suppressed background noise, isolated individual vocalizations, and then determined whether the squeaks and clicks had come from an identified or new manatee. Merchán ran images of vocalizations through a program often used for face recognition, which grouped of vocalizations that seemed to come from a single manatee. The final population estimate was 33 to 34 manatees in the San San and 45 to 48 manatees in the Changuinola.

The researchers hope to refine their methods to be able to detect a manatee’s age, sex, and weight using only their voice. The more information the researchers compile, the better they can advocate for manatee protection, Guzmán says. He says that existing protections, which cover parts of the Bocas del Toro wetlands, practically exist only on paper. “Nobody cares what’s going on here, and that’s why we’re trying to call attention to the manatees,” he says. “Calves keep dying each year.”

The San San and Changuinola run alongside Panama’s sprawling, century-old banana plantations. In fact, many of the channels where manatees swim were originally built for agriculture. “Every toxic thing they use for the plantation goes into the water,” Guzmán says. “It’s perhaps the most polluted water in Panama.” When the researchers first started monitoring the manatees, they would dive down to anchor the listening stations, but soon realized they felt sick after leaving the water, even after wearing full-face masks.

While the researchers have little power over what chemicals are used on the banana plantations, they hope to save manatee lives through alternate methods, such as developing a real-time detection and alert system that would notify passing boats to slow down when there’s a manatee nearby. “We want people to know there are manatees in Panama,” Guzmán says, adding that some the Panamanian engineering students who developed the algorithm didn’t know what a manatee was before the project. “We’re crying out to protect them, and their habitat.”

The rosy-hued house in Louisville, Kentucky could be yours.

The Pink Palace, in the St. James–Belgravia Historic District of Old Louisville, is a bubblegum-colored, six-bedroom mansion, complete with a turret, elaborate decorative glass, and more fireplaces than you can shake a log at. It’s up for auction through the Harritt Group until October 15, 2019—at press time, online bidding had reached $125,000—and whomever moves into the stately place will inherit a legacy of both virtue and alleged vice.

Local legend has it that the building began its life as a turn-of-the-century gentleman’s club in the ritzy southern reaches of town, where a residential community was just beginning to sprout around the grounds that had been host to the Southern Exposition. In 2017, the Louisville Courier-Journal newspaper colorfully described the building, in its early days, as “a 19th-century Animal House for rich old white dudes who drank, played cards, bedded prostitutes, and complained incessantly about Grover Cleveland’s apparent lack of moxie.” By the first few decades of the 20th century, the newspaper continued, “the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union took it over and painted it pink as a statement that the property was no longer a home to fun of any kind.” Louisville-based author David Dominé elaborates on that tale in the book Old Louisville: Exuberant, Elegant, and Alive, writing that the rosy hue was “a defiant attempt to erase its sordid past and start anew.”

But Jana Meyer, associate curator of collections at The Filson Historical Society in Louisville, wonders if the story about cigar-puffing, women-chasing men was little more than a swirling rumor. An old newspaper blurb about an 1891 building permit refers to the “St. James Court Casino,” but Meyer says that if the structure ever did serve a stint as shady hangout spot, “it would have been real brief.” By 1893, a married couple—George Avery and his wife, Kate, who was active in the Louisville Equal Rights Association, which campaigned for suffrage, among other causes—had moved in. Still, the “Casino” moniker stuck around: An 1893 dispatch from the Courier-Journal reported that “Mr. and Mrs. George Avery are now occupying their new residence, the Casino, out in St. James Court.” A few years later, another couple put down roots in the home. Tales of liquor-soaked, debauched nights, Meyer says, “might be more of an urban legend than anything else.”

According to local news reports, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) moved in sometime in the first few decades of the 20th century. Founded in 1874, the national WCTU had a myriad of missions, from promoting temperance to pushing against unemployment and child abuse to agitating for better education and cleaner water. (Across the South, WCTU chapters were often racially segregated.) Representatives for the organization, which still exists today, did not respond to a request for comment.

In Kentucky, the WCTU held meetings, masses, and elections in all sorts of spaces, from churches and school auditoriums to public libraries and private homes, but the group also had a habit of setting up shop in buildings of their own. This made sense, given the limited political power that women could flex at the time. “If you think of the WCTU as a group of women organizing for social change, you can see why they'd want a building where they could have a business office, hold meetings, and host speakers,” says Alice Campbell, the digital outreach and special projects librarian at Virginia Commonwealth University, who has researched the history of social reform and welfare movements in America. The WCTU wasn’t alone in its property ambitions, Campbell adds: “Equal Suffrage League/Woman Suffrage groups are known to have purchased buildings to serve as their headquarters. There's a Woman's National Democratic Club in Washington, D.C. that's been in the same building since 1927!”

Beyond allocating meeting space to huddle up about their own projects, the WCTU commonly owned buildings “to provide rental space for other nonprofit groups with which they were allied, or to provide ongoing income,” explains William Rorabaugh, an emeritus historian at the University of Washington who studies alcohol consumption and the temperance movement. These buildings were sometimes bought or donated, and sometimes purpose-built. When Frances Willard, the first national president of the WCTU, commissioned a skyscraper in Chicago, known as the Woman’s Temple, “the office rents paid for a lot of of the expenses of the national organization,” Rorabaugh says.

The future residents of the Pink Palace will live alongside the ghosts of historic fact, and perhaps a bit of fiction, too. And, hey, even if the sordid soirees of the past are apocryphal, it’s not too late to pop a cork and toast to a more boisterous future.

Once a brilliant green, the pigment verdigris is now mostly brown.

The Italian late-Renaissance painter Angelo Bronzino spent two years on his 1591 painting "Noli me tangere," or "Christ the gardener." The oil-on-wood painting, which was commissioned by a man who wanted to adorn his father’s funeral chapel, would make any dead father proud, depicting a beefy Christ and Mary Magdalene dressed in vivid blues and greens. But if Bronzino saw the painting now, he would probably be sorely disappointed. Over the past four centuries, the once-brilliant green paint has faded into a mucky, unrecognizable brown.

"Noli me tangere," which hangs today in a gallery of the Louvre, is one of many Renaissance paintings that features a copper-based pigment called verdigris. When fresh, its shade of bluish green is rare and luminous. But like many pigments popular in the 15th through 17th centuries, verdigris is toxic and unstable, Arthur DiFuria, an art historian at the Savannah College of Art and Design, explained in an interview with Copper.org, the website of a trade group that represents the copper industry. By the 19th century, verdigris had fallen out of fashion—mostly due to its poisonous nature—but no one ever figured out why the brilliant green pigment darkened so severely. Now, researchers in France have sleuthed the chemistry behind verdigris’s shadowy tendencies in a study in Inorganic Chemistry published in September, 2019.

To anyone living in the 21st century, it might not be obvious that Renaissance paintings were once much colorful than they look now. “If you look at the paintings of, say, Leonardo da Vinci, they are very, very dark,” says Didier Gourier, a chemist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and an author of the study. “But they didn’t always look this way.”

Gourier knew that past researchers had speculated that light exposure and oxygen may have contributed to the darkening process, and he decided to analyze the chemical changes that took place in the verdigris. Though they had a plethora of paintings to choose from, the researchers selected two Renaissance paintings from the Louvre: Bronzino’s "Noli me tangere" and Jean Fouquet’s "Pietà." Both works used plenty of verdigris that had sallowed over the years. Gourier took several samples, each smaller than a millimeter, and ran them through an electron microscope.

Presented with incredibly high-resolution images of the paint chips, they contrasted the color changes in verdigris sampled from the center of Bronzino’s painting against verdigris sampled right next to the frame, a shaded area that would have offered protection from light. Their suspicions were proven right when they found the frame-protected paint was far less deteriorated. When Gourier magnified a cracked paint sample from "Pietà," he found that each crack had darkened, likely due to the diffusion of oxygen in the cracks. “The darkening is not systematic,” Gourier says. This inconsistency helps researchers pick out now-brown verdigris from originally brown paint, he says.

To chemically confirm their theories, the researchers decided to recreate verdigris according to a medieval formula and see how they darkened over an accelerated time scale. “We had to speed up the darkening, because a painting in the Renaissance period would have taken several hundreds of years to darken,” Gourier says. “We calculated that 16 hours of LED illumination corresponds with several hundreds of years of illumination by museum light.”

Verdigris, technically known as copper acetate, has a simple recipe. Simply place metallic copper in vinegar and wait three or four weeks for the metal to react with the acid, producing blue-green copper acetate on its surface. (The Statue of Liberty appears blue-green for the same reason.) The researchers mixed the pigment with boiled linseed oil to make paint, as was the custom in the Renaissance. Gourier then placed the recreated verdigris on a thin sheet of glass to allow (simulated) centuries of light to pass through the sample. As if on cue, the gaudy verdigris darkened into muddled brown, just as the researchers expected.

Though Gourier intentionally selected two paintings with poorly-aged verdigris, the pigment can be detected a little more clearly on other famous works of Renaissance art. Chemical analysis is required to know for sure that a particular painting used verdigris (and it goes without saying that a permit to sample a 15th-century masterpiece is not easily acquired), but the charismatic green can be spotted in several works by Sandro Botticelli, such as the resplendently verdant "The Mystical Nativity," which depicts—you guessed it—Christ and the Virgin Mary. DiFuria also suspects that Jan van Eyck’s green-sheened "Ghent Altarpiece" uses verdigris. The greens in these paintings are presumably less prismatic than they would have been several centuries ago, but they still, somehow, seem to glow.