You could own the busiest watering hole for miles.

If you buy the Jersey Lilly, you’ll own the biggest business in the town of Ingomar, Montana. That’s because it is, in fact, the only business in Ingomar. You’ll also be the town’s 14th resident.

The century-old building has survived two World Wars, the Great Depression, and a fire that nearly wiped Ingomar off the map. Owners June Nygren and Boots Kope will be damned if they have to shutter its doors because no one can pony up the $225,000 for this historic bar. “I’m just hoping somebody will say, ‘You know what, I wanna be away from it all.’ This is a spectacular place to do that,” says Nygren. The nearest town, Forsyth, is “only” 44 miles away. “That’s really close in Montana, trust me.”

The Jersey Lilly was the town’s first brick building, built in 1914 as the first bank of a very different Ingomar. Once a major hub of sheep-shearing, Ingomar exported 2 million pounds of wool annually, employing and housing an unthinkable 600 residents. A lightning fire in 1921 razed every building in the promising yet flammable frontier town, except the brick-built bank. The ensuing Great Depression quickly shuttered the only surviving business, scattering the remainder of Ingomar’s residents to the winds of the Great Plains until only a handful of sheepherders remained.

Perhaps no town needed a drink after Prohibition more than Ingomar. In 1933, the abandoned bank reopened as the Oasis Bar. It still had the original pressed tin ceilings, bank vaults, and cement outlines from the bank-teller windows, but a dazzling new cherry-wood back bar made it a refined watering hole. Shipped up the Missouri River from St. Louis, the fixture was scratched up a bit in the truck bed of a Model T on its way to Ingomar, but it still frames the bar to this day. “I could sit and look at that piece of wood for hours,” says Nygren.

Local rumor has it that a Texas man named Bob Seward won the Oasis Bar in a game of poker. That’s when the only bar in town came into a character all its own.

Seward renamed the bar “Jersey Lilly,” after the famously buxom 19th-century British film star. He brought a bean soup (not chili) recipe from Texas that is still served. “Our beans are very special. Internationally famous, they are,” Bob’s son Bill told David Isay in an interview for Holding On, a photo-book that pays tribute to the unsung heroes of America’s working class. (Photographer Harvey Wang recalls his first impression of Ingomar over the phone: “I’d never seen tumbleweed before, but there was literally tumbleweed blowing all through town.”) When pressed for the secret to the signature bean recipe, Nygren says, “If I told ya, I’d have to kill ya! Just kidding. It’s the secret spices.” Whatever’s in it, the Jersey Lillly today goes through 1,200 pounds of pinto beans annually.

As bar steward, Bill Seward developed a singular snack that met the needs of the town’s sheepherders. Sheepherder’s Hors D’Oeuvres—a pile of saltine crackers, cheddar cheese, orange slices, and raw onion—stay fresh without refrigeration. “You stick it all in your mouth one bite, just like an old hound dog eating hot cakes,” Seward told Isay. “Don’t taste a thing like you thought it would, do it?” The orange takes the edge off of the onion, making for a somehow inimitable flavor profile. “People who go home and try to make it get so angry because they don’t taste the same,” says Nygren. “You have to come in here to eat them. I don’t know what it is.”

The bar slowly amassed mounted game heads and antlers as hunting grew popular in the region. Today, a stuffed jackalope mounts the cherrywood barback, and a moose head hangs with a cigarette in his mouth (“I shot him when he stopped for a smoke,” Bill would famously tell guests). Nygren’s favorite is a buffalo head that keeps watch over the bar’s recently defunct telephone booth. “He was raised by the former owner, but got mean and they had to put him down,” she says. “Now I decorate him for every holiday.” He recently exchanged a Pilgrim top hat for an undersized Santa hat.

As the only social venue in town for nearly a century, the Jersey Lilly has hosted countless birthday parties, graduation parties, weddings, and anniversaries for area residents. (Nygren refers to anyone within 100 miles as a “local.”) The Bill Seward Thanksgiving Day Feast hosts Great Plains sheepherders and cowhands who have nowhere to go for the holiday. They also host an annual British Tea Party, where Montanans flock to the bar to sip tea and eat cucumber sandwiches in Victorian garb.

“You wanna hear the biggest part of its charm, Mr. Big City?” Nygren asks me over the phone. “Our public restrooms are outhouses—last place in the state of Montana that still has them.” Indeed, there’s no indoor plumbing other than the sinks, she tells me, and their spot on the National Register of Historic Places shields the historic latrines, today labelled “Heifer Pen” and “Bull Pen,” respectively.

Deaf to the cacophony of the modern world, the streets of Ingomar remain unpaved, the only bar in town standing idly by. “It’s a step back in time. It’s a place where cowboys still exist,” says Nygren. “They come in and tie their horses up out front just like in the movies.” The bar has been on the market for several years now, and if no one purchases the bar, the story of the Jersey Lilly will sadly come to an end. (Though Nygren and Kope will be able to spend the holidays with their families again.) If someone does buy the bar, however, Nygren promises the bean soup recipe will come free.

These ecosystem engineers have a good track record in helping restore wetlands.

The future residents of the Holnicote Estate, which sprawls across a portion of Exmoor National Park in Somerset, England, are two families with dark eyes, strong teeth, and thick brown fur. As they settle in in early 2020, these new tenants—mums, dads, and probably a couple of kids—will go about making the place their own.

Because they are Eurasian beavers, they won’t fuss over hanging art or the color of the walls. Instead, they’ll head for a tributary of the River Aller or for a spring-fed pond. The two families will live in separate, fenced enclosures, each covering about seven acres of the estate’s 12,000, and then busy themselves with building dams.

The beavers are being moved in by the National Trust as part of an effort to reduce flooding and ramp up biodiversity. They’re one branch of a multiyear river restoration project, which is slated to wrap in 2024 and also includes bioswales (vegetated channels for runoff), ditches, and more.

“It’s a ‘control-alt-delete’ for the river system,” says Ben Eardley, project manager for the National Trust at Holnicote. Over time, as river landscapes are managed by humans, the waterways often become less complex and dynamic as ecosystems, Eardley says, essentially turning into “drainage ditches to move water through the landscape as quickly as possible.” The hope is that the beavers, by doing what beavers do, will decrease flooding, limit erosion, and improve water quality. Drone footage, time-lapse photography, and water-quality monitors will be used to help researchers gauge whether it’s working.

The families are some of the the latest in a smattering of Eurasian beaver reintroductions in the United Kingdom, where their ancestors went extinct several hundred years ago. The Eurasian or European beaver (Castor fiber) once roamed waters all over the continent, and in England they were once so common and beloved that many towns and rivers were said to be named after them—including Beverley in Yorkshire and Beversbrook in Wiltshire. But they found that it’s hard to have humans as neighbors.

The 19th-century naturalist James Edmund Harting recounted the Eurasian beaver’s troubled tale in his 1880 book, British Animals Extinct Within Historic Times. They were hunted and hunted and hunted across the United Kingdom. In 940, Harting writes, Welsh law dictated that the king had first dibs on any beaver, marten, or ermine hunters brought in, so his robes could be decorated with their pelts. Still, wild populations hung on for a while: Harting notes that a 1588 history of Wales reported that the River Teifi was downright lousy with “castors” in the 12th century. The creatures, “all hearie saving the tail, which is like a fish taile, as broad as a man’s hand,” built themselves great wooden “castells,” Harting reported, citing earlier dispatches. The rodents were commonly spotted in Scotland, too. Demand for their pelts and their castoreum (stored in sacs near the animals' anuses, used by beavers to mark territory, and by humans for perfume and in food) finally sent England’s beavers waddling into extinction in the 16th century.

Beavers have long been considered “ecosystem engineers,” capable of tinkering with the order of things, and reintroduction efforts in the United Kingdom have been controversial for several decades. Back in the 1990s, in a paper in the journal Mammal Review, zoologists from the University of Oxford asked whether the efforts to revive the country’s beaver populations were a brilliant conservation tactic or just “nostalgic meddling.” More recently, a team of scientists from the University of Stirling, writing in the journal Freshwater Biology in 2016, examined beaver reintroduction in eastern Scotland and came to the conclusion that things were going pretty well. That team, led by ecologist Alan Law, found that streams with beavers were more biodiverse than others. They also found that beavers could help revive degraded landscapes, partly because their dams helped streams concentrate their nutrients.

Carol Johnston, a professor emeritus in South Dakota State University’s department of natural resource management and an expert in beavers’ work in wetlands, has found that the creatures naturally help mitigate floods and improve water quality. In the United States, where beavers never quite tottered to oblivion, humans have even installed “beaver dam analogs,” or BDAs, to do some of the same work, according to an article in Science by writer and beaver expert Ben Goldfarb. These interspecies developments, built by humans and colonized by rodents, seem to have some of the same positive effects that were observed in Scotland. In the Western United States, BDAs have buoyed steelhead fish populations and kept streams wet longer, Goldfarb notes, but also sometimes run into permitting snags.

Though tensions have occasionally flared between 21st-century humans and their flat-tailed neighbors—such as when farmers in Scotland groused that the beavers flooded farmland and filled ditches with dam-construction material—the track record of reintroductions in England has been strong. Beavers moved into West Devon in 2011 quickly constructed 13 dams along a narrow stream. “The beavers have transformed this little trickle of a stream into a remarkable, primeval wetland,” Mark Elliott, lead beaver project officer of Devon Wildlife Trust, told The Guardian. When beavers do overstep their bounds, Eardley says, it’s easy enough to nudge them along or discourage them from building dams, rather than resorting to lethal measures.

At the Holnicote Estate, the robust rodents will find hospitable conditions, including plenty of willow, which “is like beaver candy,” Eardley says. The areas will be enclosed by four- or five-foot fences that will allow otters and badgers to pass through, and deer to hop over. Eardley’s team hopes that these furry families will feel right at home—and will leave the woodland a little healthier than they found it.

Don't play in the bubbles.

Stand on a beach and watch the waves roll in, and you’ll notice a front of white, frothy water. After a wave breaks and barrels to land, it hits the swash zone. Before the turbulent water recedes, becoming what’s known as backwash, it looks a little bubbly. Water comes in, it goes out, it comes back in again—it’s cyclical and generally harmless. But once in a while, beaches are inundated with stubborn, turbid foam that sloshes ashore and stays there.

Over the past few days, Marina Beach, which sits on the Bay of Bengal in Chennai, India, has been swallowed by pillowy clouds of foam. It looks white and airy, like fake snow, dollops of whipped cream, or a bubble bath gone awry. Visitors to the urban beach have snapped photos of revelers wading up to their knees in it, smearing it on their shirts, and flinging it into the air.

Some amount of sea foam is common, because ocean water—even if it appears to be crystal-clear—is full of little bits of synthetic and organic debris. The surface might be speckled with a dash of dead algae or microscopic skeletons, or a sprinkling of dissolved fats, salts, or proteins. Swirl a bit of water vigorously, as wind and waves do, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration explains, and bubbles will form on the surface.

But there’s a big difference between a smattering of bubbles and a frenzy of foam that makes the beach vanish. According to researchers from the Vienna Institute of Technology, who surveyed past sea foam research for a 2011 literature review in Water Research, most of it results from natural phenomena, such as phytoplankton blooms, or decaying seaweed or terrestrial plants. But human influence amplifies those factors.

“Humans, when they dump nutrients into the water, can make that much worse,” says Matthew Reidenbach, an environmental scientist at the University of Virginia whose research includes chemical dispersion in coastal oceans, and who has studied the ecology of New Delhi’s Yamuna River. Foam can also be especially meddlesome at certain times of year, corresponding to moments in the life cycle of phytoplankton. (When plankton die and decompose after a big bloom, that’s great fodder for foam.) In the case of Chennai, Reidenbach suspects the foam is fueled by a combination of algal blooms—which gather strength from sewage and nutrient-dense runoff—and detergent or other chemicals in the water. According to the AFP, the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Board will analyze samples of foam.

Sewage runoff is a big problem in cities where the population had grown faster than the infrastructure, like Chennai. Pravakar Mishra, a scientist at the National Centre for Coastal Research in Chennai, told the AFP that only 40 percent of wastewater in Chennai, a city with an estimated population of 10 to 11 million, is sufficiently treated. "The rest flows into the sea and this is what happens,” he said. The surest way to prevent foam is to limit the sewage, detergents, and other anthropogenic runoff entering the water in the first place, Reidenbach says.

Once foam has come ashore, it’s smart to keep your distance. “Like a balloon, when the bubbles pop, they release gas,” Reidenbach says. “Mostly it’s just air, but if the bubbles are combined with nasty chemicals, it creates an aerosol that gets into the air.” Industrial runoff and toxic algae can cause problems ranging from skin irritation to respiratory trouble.

Theoretically, it might be possible to limit the foam by tweaking the pH of the water: Basic water is more prone to foaming than acidic water. But that’s not feasible on a big scale. “It could work for hot tubs,” Reidenbach says, “but not oceans.” In the absence of a chemical solution, sea foam eventually deflates. Wait long enough and the foam will bake in the sun, the bubbles will pop, and the sand will return to view. In the meantime, don’t frolic in the froth.

Meat is the secret ingredient in this take on the traditional Mexican spirit.

Sergio Salas’s neighbor hunted a deer last night, and now, he is using it to make mezcal de pechuga. Salas, a third-generation maestro mezcalero (master mezcal maker) in Puebla, Mexico loves to experiment with non-traditional methods. Making mezcal de pechuga, or “mezcal of breast,” usually starts out with two distillations of the roasted and fermented hearts of the maguey, or agave plant. Then, mezcaleros hang chicken or turkey breast, local fruits and herbs, or even mole sauce inside of the still during a third distillation. The result? A savory, spiced mezcal. But instead of poultry, Salas is bent on using his windfall of venison.

Chef Carlos Guillén of Banneton, a restaurant in Mexico City, is visiting the Salases in Puebla for the day, along with Orlando Estrada and Patricia Bellaton of the mezcal-focused event company Casa Tobalá. They all want to take part in this experiment. Once Guillén finishes cutting the leg of venison, Salas’s wife, Jazmín, marinates it in an adobo poblano sauce she has made. After that, Salas hangs it in the still over the mezcal. In about two hours, the mezcal will be ready to taste, and the venison will be eaten as a snack by everyone present.

The next step after distillation is to test the alcohol content. To do this, Salas sucks the mezcal up into a straw and lets it stream back into the cup, where it forms bubbles, or perlas (pearls). The amount of time the perlas last in the liquid indicates the mezcal’s ABV. The target ABV for most mezcaleros is between 47 and 52 percent. Too low of an ABV, and the flavors of the mezcal dissipate. Too high, and the alcohol becomes far too harsh. If the ABV isn’t right, the mezcalero will blend different batches of their mezcal to reach the desired alcohol content before bottling.

At the end of the process, everyone samples the mezcal. No one has ever tasted anything quite like it. The mezcal itself doesn’t taste distinctly of meat. Instead, there’s an umami richness, and hints of mole spice. Estrada calls it “a rare and beautiful distillate full of green notes,” which he speculates came from the plants once eaten by the deer.

Estrada explains that for many, mezcal-making is more than just a business. In the case of the Salases, it’s both meaningful and a way to make a sustainable living in a region that’s seen many move north in search of work. “Mezcal is their culture, their way of life,” he says. And, he adds, it’s “a good opportunity to work in their community, in an effort to not migrate.”

Toads, orchids, bats, and hundreds of millions of unexploded shells.

Today, the Verdun forest in France teems with so much charming life that it seems straight out of a storybook. Wild marsh orchids and white swallow-wort sprout. Pear and plum trees pop up every now and then among the pines. Small, furry bats take up residence in the many underground hollows, which are perfect for hibernation. And tiny toads with mottled yellow bellies stay cool in the little pools that dot the forest floor.

But on February 21, 1916, beginning with a two-day barrage of German artillery, Verdun became the site of one of the longest and bloodiest battles in World War I, and indeed in all of human history. Some 10 months later, the German army pulled back, and the conflict left the forest a scarred, muddy wasteland. Many traces of the conflict remained: the bodies of as many as 100,000 soldiers and hundreds of millions of unexploded shells. But something surprising happened in the aftermath of the battle, as the orchids, bats, and toads—species that did not live there before the battle—moved in and thrived. This all happened precisely because the land had been irreparably changed by the battle. “Verdun was always a sacred place because of its history,” says Rémi de Matos Machado, a geomorphologist who wrote his doctoral thesis on Verdun’s thriving afterlife. “But now it is a sacred place because of biodiversity. It is a newborn landscape.”

During the stalemate at Verdun, French and German forces lobbed artillery at one another, often indiscriminately, in an attempt to break morale, writes American military historian Robert Cowley in a paper in MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. New craters appeared almost constantly, sometimes filling trenches that had been dug just hours before, Cowley writes. When pilots flew over the battlefield, they described it as “the surface of the moon.”

But the extreme devastation of Verdun is what preserved its future as a forest, says Joseph Hupy, an aerial systems expert at Purdue University who also wrote his doctoral thesis on Verdun. After the battle, the site was considered a huge mass grave, and was also bedeviled by all that unexploded ordnance. “People were forcibly ordered not to return, not to rebuild,” Hupy says. “Throughout France there was this attitude of not giving up, but they looked at Verdun and how trashed it was and thought, ‘What’s the point?’” So the officials simply gave the land over to forest, sure that the area would be forever devastated.

Before he came to study Verdun, Hupy was into drumlins, or small mounds created by the movement of glaciers. Realizing he lacked the fervent mound passion of other drumlin researchers, Hupy pivoted and took a class on how environments can impact the outcomes of battles. He couldn’t help but wonder about the inverse: How battles impact the environment. So he went to Verdun in 2003, where he slept at a dairy farm by night and traipsed into the dangerous forest by day.

Unsurprisingly, Hupy encountered many unexploded chemical weapon shells. “With time, the gas never gets less dangerous,” he says. “But the really thin metal skin wears away, so much that you could kick it with your foot, crack it open, and die on the spot.” These shells were relatively easy to identify, as each bears a distinctive stripe. Hupy knew he was supposed to report any unexploded shells to French forestry officials, but back then he just moved the shells around himself. In one memorable instance, he remembers swinging a pickaxe in a crater in an attempt to locate the bedrock. He hit something that gave off a metallic ping, and kept right on swinging away until he realized he was whacking away at a 155-millimeter shell.

Explosives aside, the Verdun forest today looks nothing like it did in the years leading up to World War I. Before it was a battlefield, Verdun was a farming region of nine villages. There were fields of wheat, oat, barley, rye, and potatoes, with cows wandering the nearby slopes. After the war, it was clear the land could not be replowed, so the government designated nearly 23,000 acres of Verdun a “Red Zone,” too dangerous for public access, and began clearing some—but not all—of the corpses and ordnance. Anywhere from 200 to 300 million shells remain, according to an estimate from Daniel Hubé, a researcher at the French geological survey. “In 2014, one guy was harvesting and hit one on his tractor,” Hupy says. “Luckily, he just got a concussion from the blast.”

Part of the Red Zone plan involved replanting the area with pine and Norway spruce, trees that can thrive in nutrient-poor soil. By 1935, the department of forestry had placed 36 million seedlings—the beginnings of what has now grown into the Verdun forest. Once the spruce began to mature, orchids followed. In the 1960s, some of these spruce trees were logged and replaced with swaths of European beech trees, which are native to the region. And some of Verdun’s agrarian past still pushes through. “Sometimes you’ll wander through the forest and see an apple tree,” Hupy says, referring to the descendents of 19th-century orchards that once sprawled across the land.

Now, more than 100 years after the battle, Verdun is a biological hotspot, even if much of the wildlife there today wasn’t in residence before the battle. De Matos Machado is careful not to call these newcomers invasive species; he prefers the term “obsidional,” which means related to a siege or war.

The most colorful of these creatures—and the hardest to spot—are the yellow-bellied toads, which occupy seasonally flooded craters that remain in the forest floor. De Matos Machado first encountered a yellow-bellied toad in March 2016. “I was so happy to meet him,” he says. “It was fantastic. He was very small. He was staying cool in the water.” Other species live in these unusual puddles, including palmate and smooth newts.

The ecosystem of Verdun is an interesting pastiche that reflects its unusual history. Patches of the forest bloom with Sisyrinchium montanum, or American blue-eyed grass, which stowed away as seeds on the hooves of U.S. Army horses that came through Verdun. Many other nonnative flowers bloom around the official Verdun cemetery, from the bouquets that mourners laid on graves, de Matos Machado says. Still others were introduced intentionally. On the German side, for example, small whorls of intense blue pop up, flowers of the gentian plant, which German soldiers used to make spirits.

For the most part, Verdun’s new fauna is thriving, the researcher says. But increasing numbers of tourists—seeking both memorials and nature—can pose certain threats. People have traveled to Verdun since 1918, when hostilities on the Western Front ended. During the centenary celebrations of World War I, more than 500,000 may have come to the site, Hupy and de Matos Machado write in a chapter of Collateral Values: The Natural Capital Created by Landscapes of War. Today the forest also offers leisure, recreation, and equestrian paths (all in areas declared safe and clear of ordnance).

Places that are still dangerous attract visitors, too, often for the wrong reasons. “There are lots of artifacts in the Verdun forest, both shells and other materials from war,” de Matos Machado says. “Some looters try to dig inside the forest to sell this material on eBay or Amazon.” Aside from disturbing human remains and endangering the looters themselves, this activity also troubles bats nesting in abandoned bunkers and safehouses. In 2013, researchers mapped Verdun with lidar to see the ground surface below the vegetation. Hupy cautioned de Matos Machado not to share it, as it provides a perfect target list for would-be artifact-hunters.

Verdun is also under siege by an entirely oblivious enemy: the spruce beetle, the biggest killer of mature spruce trees, which still make up a third of the forest. With warming winters as a result of climate change, the beetles are not dying off in the cooler months, and are therefore wrecking the remaining spruce groves, Hupy says. The best way to stop the outbreak would be to remove the spruce trees, de Matos Machado says. But that’s not an easy solution, logistically or spiritually. “It comes down to the question, is this a war memorial or a treated [managed] forest?” Hupy says.

Still, Verdun remains a remarkable refuge for its motley crew—wildlife that turned an abandoned battlefield into an opportunity. Hupy likens Verdun’s afterlife to the Ray Bradbury story “A Sound of Thunder,” which examines the “butterfly effect”—the conjecture that a minor event in the past can drastically change the future. “The way I look at Verdun, you have these environments that have entirely diverged from what they were meant to be,” Hupy says. “But still, there is life.”

It certainly beats walking.

The history of dogs in the Arctic is almost impossible to separate from the history of humans there—the two species have been long been best friends and relied on each other for survival in a challenging environment. Now, an extensive study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B has examined what dogs meant to the people who first populated North America’s Arctic reaches, from Alaska to Greenland.

Dogs first arrived on the continent with humans around 10,000 years ago, and the new study found that when Inuit culture took root in Alaska around 2,000 years ago, the Inuit people did not simply adopt local strays—they brought their own dogs with them across the Bering Strait. The lineage of these hearty dogs lives on in the sled-pulling breeds in Greenland.

“It wasn’t like you arrive in this new world and just pick up new dogs,” says Carly Ameen, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter and lead author of the study. “You arrive as Inuit in Alaska with a specific toolkit that allows you to survive in the Arctic: kayaks, umiaks for sea mammal hunting, harpoon points—they also included dogs.”

Ameen’s team—actually three teams of archaeologists, paleogeneticists, zoologists, and more—examined the skulls and genetics of nearly 1,000 ancient and modern dogs and wolves. Looking into the canine past can prove difficult, as the later arrival of Europeans—with dogs of their own—largely erased the earlier dog populations from the genetic map.

To collect their study subjects, both dead and alive, researchers looked to the United States, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark. They also visited sled dogs in Greenland, the last remaining direct descendants of pre-European dog populations in North America. “We took ‘origins of dog domestication’ to mean any dog we could get our hands on,” says Ameen. Ancient samples from museums were supplemented with the archaeological record, because the institutions don’t always keep enough material for a full analysis.

“Not many museums keep postcranial material. They’ll keep the skulls,” says Ameen. “In the early 20th century, they took the things that looked pretty, that had this ‘wow’ factor. So we can’t directly say based on the material we studied that these dogs were one hundred percent sled dogs, but we can say they were different from the earlier dogs.”

The researchers found that the Inuit dogs more closely resembled wolves than did the shorter-faced dogs that were already present in North America. As the Inuit spread from Alaska to Greenland about 1,000 years ago, the dogs were likely critical, pulling sleds to aid the long-distance migration.

“Dogs weren’t just this replaceable feature,” Ameen says. “They were a necessary tool, and [the Inuit] moved all the way to Greenland with them.”

Of particular interest to researchers were the modern Greenland sled dogs, which face an uncertain future as snowmobiles take their jobs, various canine diseases exact a toll, and both traditions and climate change.

“Snakes are just fancy lizards,” says one evolutionary biologist.

Last month, followers of scientific news were agog to look at a newly excavated and pristine fossilized skull, which came from a Mesozoic snake with legs. This discovery presumably gave many readers pause. Um, what even is a snake with legs? Is that like a worm with wings? According to scientists, the discovery will help solve the mystery of when snakes evolved into their modern form. According to everyone else, the discovery deepened the mystery of whether a snake with legs can still be called a snake.

Sara Ruane, a herpetologist and evolutionary biologist at Rutgers University who studies living snakes, has some answers. “Snakes are just fancy lizards,” she says. More precisely, she explains, snakes represent a distinct branch of the lizard evolutionary tree. Both types of animals are squamates, the largest order of reptiles, and snakes belong to the suborder Serpentes. In other words, all snakes are technically lizards, but not all lizards are snakes.

It’s also true, Ruane says, that early species of snake once sported gams. But all these legged snakes are extinct today, meaning that you’d be unlikely to confuse a snake for a lizard in the wild.

The taxonomical rabbit hole deepens, however, when one considers the existence of legless lizards that are not snakes. These creatures slither on the ground like snakes, but a few subtle traits differentiate them from their serpentine cousins. The most telling distinction lies under the creature’s skin, in its very bones. The skeleton of a snake consists mostly of trunk vertebrae; other legless lizards are mostly made up of tail vertebrae. “That’s one of the real biggies, snakes are a lot of body and not nearly enough tail,” Ruane says.

Without actually dissecting the creature, there are also a few visual cues that can help differentiate. Snakes, unlike other legless lizards, lack moveable eyelids. “They can’t blink,” Ruane says. “It’s like wearing a very hard protective goggle at all time, which allows their eyes to scrape the ground or a tree branch.” Snakes also lack external ears, which most lizards have—except for the earless monitor lizard, which roams the island of Borneo in blissful silence. “There are always exceptions,” she says. “Every now and then there’s a weirdo lizard.” (Lizard ears are hard to spot, as they resemble tiny holes in the head.)

Snakes are not known to chew their meals, and so they tend to have larger, wider heads that allow them to swallow their prey in one great gulp. (This rule, of course, has an exception too: The crab-eating water snake, which roams mangrove swamps in Australia and Southeast Asia, tears its prey of crabs limb from limb.) “Your average snake is going to have more of a neck, or at least a neck indentation,” Ruane says. “Most legless lizards don’t have much of a neck. It just immediately turns into body.” And if you get really close up, there's another way to tell the difference. “Snakes almost always try to bite you,” she says, adding that she is bitten by non-venomous snakes “all the time.”

Without staring a mysteriously legless reptile in the face, distinguishing snakes from other legless lizards comes down to an overall feeling. Ruane relies on what she calls the reptile’s gestalt, the psychological term for perceiving a whole thing as the sum of its parts. “The essence of the animal has a very different look,” she says. “If you look at enough of these things, you’d be able to tell which is a lizard and which is a snake, even if none of them have legs.”

As if you weren’t already confused, there is one more distinction to make: There is such a thing as a legless lizard with legs. Legless lizards in the family Pygopodidae (technically a type of gecko) have no fore limbs but small, flat flaps where hind legs used to be. And some snakes today, such as boas and pythons, still do have the hint of a leg that now functions as a spur, used to clasp onto another snake in coitus.

All these distinctions may seem persnickety, but they actually get at the heart of one of the biggest unresolved questions in herpetology: What type of lizards did snakes evolve from? “It’s a very contentious topic,” Ruane says. “There are two leading theories.” One school believes snakes descended from a group of lizards living underground; the other argues that snakes originated from a group of lizards living in the sea. In 2015, researchers in England described what they believed to be the first four-legged snake in Science. But the paper ignited venomous controversy, as another group of herpetologists argued that the fossil was a different kind of ancient lizard. The newly discovered fossilized skull of the legged snake Najash, while beautifully complete, does not solve that mystery, Ruane says.

Ultimately, all snakes can be traced back to the same mysterious divergence from the rest of the evolutionary tree. That’s part of what makes them special. “Snakes aren’t snakes just because they don’t have legs,” Ruane says. “That’s just one part of what makes a snake a snake.”

Brevity is the soul of wit, but volume is what really gets you noticed. 

Ein Gedi Nature Reserve in Israel covers a lot of ground, from the upper reaches of the Judeaen plateau to the banks of the Dead Sea, the lowest land point on Earth. Its sun-baked topography seems inhospitable, but it makes a lovely home for the rock hyrax, a small mammal that intermittently pierces the region’s usually cloudless sky with a suite of squawks, chirps, and barks. Long a source of bemusement to tourists, the small mammal’s communiques have been the subject of a 20-year scientific study. Researchers have been looking at the hyrax’s calls through a linguistic lens, and are now checking to see whether a particular rule of human language applies beyond our species.

The research, published in the journal Evolution Letters, set out to discover whether hyraxes abide by the “Law of Brevity,” which holds that words used more frequently in communications will generally be shorter than the less common ones, and explains why we often shorten words in common parlance, such as “TV” for “television” and “uni” for “university.” This is essentially an optimization strategy, with the most commonly used words requiring less effort to produce.

“You’re basically trying to save energy,” says Vlad Demartsev, a biologist now at the University of Konstanz in Germany, who led the research in Ein Gedi while he was at Tel Aviv University. “You need to use energy to produce those longer words. Humans are slightly lazy so they have a tendency to shorten those words, and find some different code.”

We already know that hyraxes—guinea pig–shaped cousins of the elephant—have syntax and dialects. Demartsev and his team wanted to see if they had a sense of brevity, too, just like thousands of human languages. Specifically, they wanted to know if the most common calls among hyraxes were energy-efficient. So they hooked some hyraxes up to a surveillance network.

“We basically fitted tiny recorders, the size of a one euro coin, on each animal, and recorded them for a week,” says Demartsev. “Any call they made was recorded. Their whole routine, all interactions, we had the audio.”

There are two ways for a common call to be considered optimized for energy efficiency—it can be short, or it can be soft. The results paint a complicated picture of hyrax interactions. Among females, who live in tight-knit groups (maybe with one male), calls that are longer but softer are more common. And males, most of whom live alone, in general go loud—the better to reach distant females with a come-on. As anyone who has hiked Ein Gedi knows, males sing long-winded, complex love songs.

“We can’t say for sure, but we think that for humans the length of the word or informational unit is the cost-determining factor,” Demartsev says, “while for animals volume is much more crucial.

“It’s wasteful, because you’re basically trying to show off and advertise your quality, how rich and strong you are,” he adds of the male repertoire. “You cannot show off by being very economical. You have to brag a bit.”

The often-insulted confection was once featured at weddings as well as Christmas.

On February 10, 1840, Queen Victoria married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. The sumptuous wedding breakfast included a 300-pound fruitcake. Her wedding was widely influential, and is said to have inspired traditions ranging from the exchange of engagement rings to brides wearing white. The couple also served fruitcake, which, although typical at the time, now seems reserved only for Christmas. Nevertheless, future British royals followed in Victoria's footsteps and served fruitcake on their big day.

Today, the choice has a lingering effect: Thanks to fruitcake's longevity—along with a longstanding tradition of guests and dignitaries receiving slices of royal wedding cake in elegant boxes as souvenirs—pieces of Victoria's cake still exist. And hers are not the only slices of centuries-old cake floating around today as collectibles.

The main cake at the wedding breakfast of Queen Victoria was three meters tall and decorated with a massive sugar figure symbolizing the nation of Britain blessing the couple. Fruitcake for big occasions had long been a British custom, as their rich fruits, sugar, and liquor were costly. Victoria and Albert's cake fit the bill: According to a report at the time, it was made of "the most exquisite compounds of all the rich things with which the most expensive cakes can be composed, mingled and mixed together into delightful harmony."

The association between fruitcakes and weddings even gave rise to a number of customs. When tiered wedding cakes became the fashion, along with less-heavy cake recipes, the top tier remained fruitcake. New couples still occasionally set it aside to eat on their first anniversary or the baptism of their first child. (Fruitcake's dense texture and traditional soaking in alcohol means it lasts longer than your typical cake.)

Boxed royal wedding-cake souvenirs emerged from the tradition of sending slices of un-iced "groom's cake" home with guests in the 17th century, writes Carol Wilson in her article Wedding Cake: A Slice of History. One piece of Queen Victoria's cake, preserved in a silver box, came with a hand-written note: "To Dream upon." Unmarried people sometimes slept with pieces of wedding cake under their pillows, in hopes of dreaming about their future spouse. The wedding cake of a queen would likely be especially potent.

More than a century later, then-Princess Elizabeth's wedding cake was even more spectacular than her great-great-grandmother's. At nine feet tall, it weighed 500 pounds. Many of those pounds were made up of ingredients sent in from all corners of the British empire, earning it the title of "the 10,000 Mile Cake." The Australian Girl Guides made a particularly large contribution to the wedding, and the Queen sent a tier back to them in thanks.

Through the 20th century, boxed cake souvenirs persisted. In fact, they've become collectors' items, going for thousand of dollars at auction. A slice of wedding cake from the wedding of Wallis Simpson and the Duke of Windsor sold for $29,900 in 1998. Last June, Julien's Auctions in Los Angeles sold five slices of royal wedding cake that spanned nearly 40 years of ceremonies. From the wedding cake of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips in 1973, to that of Prince William and Catherine Middleton in 2011, the slices of fruitcake came enclosed in neat tins or boxes. If it seems strange that so many slices of royal wedding cake still circulate, wonder no more: Ancillary cakes were often baked for the occasion, and some were even donated by bakers hoping for royal acknowledgement.

The tradition of boxed fruitcake souvenirs, however, has been bucked: Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's cake wasn't fruitcake, and it's unlikely that their lemon-and-elderflower cake would last for decades anyway. But needless to say, no amount of sugar, alcohol, or preservatives will make decades-old cake taste good. The royal wedding cakes that have survived are long past their shelf life.

This story originally ran on May 1, 2018.

Floating devices called "drifters" are helping oceanographers understand why.

Cape Cod, the famous summer haven for New England vacationers, is also an infamous death trap for some of the world’s smallest and most endangered sea turtles. Kemp’s ridley sea turtles spend their summers foraging along the coast, before they migrate south to warmer waters. But the turtles often become trapped in Cape Cod’s treacherous hook, and wind up stranded on beaches. “Suddenly the cold comes, and they get stunned and can’t swim,” says James Manning, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Manning is co-author of a new study on the turtle strandings, published December 4 in PLOS One.

The endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtles have been in trouble for decades, overharvested by humans and often caught in shrimp trawls. In 1947, more than 40,000 nesting females were recorded during a Kemp’s ridley arribada, or mass nesting event. In 1985, the same population produced just 702 nests, according to a U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service recovery plan. The turtle population living by Cape Cod has become uniquely imperiled: Warming waters encourage them to linger longer in the north—and then cold weather comes. In the fall of 2014, approximately 1,200 sea turtles, almost all of them Kemp’s ridley turtles, were stranded on the beaches of Cape Cod Bay—a new record. Scientists knew that sea turtles get stranded most often when cold waters make them inactive and helpless against currents, Manning says. But they weren’t quite sure what temperatures triggered this shock, and which region of the bay the turtles were coming from.

Manning, who is not a biologist, never set out to study sea turtles. He researches oceanic currents using satellite-tagged instruments called drifters, which can be tracked as they move through the bay. Consisting of a metal frame and four fabric sails, the instruments operate like weather balloons, sending back measurements such as temperature and location. Manning first launched drifters in the early 1990s, to understand how lobster larvae moved around in their first few weeks of life. “Where do they go, and where do they end up?” he says. “All these questions can be answered with drifters.”

These same questions applied to the mystery of the stranded Kemp’s ridley sea turtles. Manning had dozens of drifters dispatched in Cape Cod Bay, carried out to sea by approximately 50 different lobsterman, commercial trout fisherman, or whale-watchers. “Fishermen are always interested because it’s their ocean, and they want to know where the water goes,” Manning says. Almost all of the drifters ended up stranded on shore, and provided valuable data on their routes. One is still going: “It’s now approaching the Gulf Stream, heading off the Carolinas.”

In New England, drifters don’t look like ordinary oceanographic equipment. The trackers are crafted in high school classrooms, built according to scientific standards and decorated according to each classroom’s vision. “It’s funny what they come up with,” Manning says. “Sometimes it’s turtles, and sometimes it’s cartoon characters.” Manning’s favorite drifter in recent memory sported a detailed painting of a mermaid. He recently learned he wasn’t alone in his appreciation. “That drifter was found by a fisherman who liked it so much that he took it out of the water and took it home,” he says. (It had already served its purpose by the time of its rescue.)

According to Manning, the study’s most significant finding is that Kemp’s ridley sea turtles are more likely to strand when water temperatures drop below 50.9 degrees Fahrenheit. But he’s careful to stress that many facts of the turtle’s behavior around Cape Cod remain a mystery. For example, researchers aren’t sure if Kemp’s ridley turtles spend most of their time at the surface or submerged in the midwater, hundreds of feet below, where the currents are less affected by wind. The researchers are still split on the best way to answer this question. “We’ve considered divers, but the turtles are very little and it’s hard to find them,” Manning says.

Recently, researcher Felicia Page at the University of Rhode Island has been launching several new kinds of drifters, designed to imitate turtles at a number of depths. This past fall, Page launched the typical drifters painted by local students along with miniature sailboats, tiny wooden turtles the size of Kemp’s ridleys, and her own newfangled invention, a drifter with a weighted turtle attached to a retractable tether, mimicking how sea turtles might swim in midwater. “There’s still so much uncertainty about these turtles,” Manning says. “This will always be an ongoing study.”

In 2013, the mosque's minaret shattered into 2,000 pieces. A restoration team aims to put them back together.

On a bright spring day in April 2013, the minaret of one of the world’s most famous mosques came crashing to earth in the Syrian city of Aleppo. The sound was heard across the Old Quarter, even over the din of artillery and rattle of gunfire.

The Great Mosque of Aleppo had stood since the 12th century as a symbol of the city, on the site of an even older mosque from the Umayyad Caliphate. It had survived wars, fires, and earthquakes. Five times a day, for 919 years, the Muslim call to prayer had issued from the minaret, which overlooked a courtyard that covered almost an acre. The United Nations cultural agency, UNESCO, had pleaded for the mosque’s protection.

The precise cause of the collapse is not known, but the mosque had been seized by anti-government forces early that year, and it was in an area of heavy fighting. The regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad claimed that fighters from the Jabhat al-Nusra group, which was linked to al-Qaeda, had detonated explosives inside the minaret. Rebels claimed it was destroyed by tank fire from the Syrian Army.

Today, the Great Mosque’s minaret lies in more than 2,000 pieces of pale limestone. They litter the rectangular courtyard, obscuring its great expanse of black, white, and yellow geometrical paving. The loss of the minaret was a blow to the entire nation’s cultural heritage—and it was followed, just two years later, by the deliberate destruction of Palmyra’s temples by the Islamic State. And yet amidst all the rubble, a group of Syrians is trying to bring the Great Mosque back.

A civil engineer named Tamim Kasmo, 73, has joined a team of architects and engineers, stonemasons and woodworkers who have taken on the task of rebuilding the mosque. Faithfully reconstructing this architectural masterpiece is the biggest challenge of Kasmo’s long career in heritage restoration. “An expert may spot the difference between old and new, but the general public must not,” says Kasmo, as he walks among the ruins.

Kasmo’s team must put the minaret back up and repair the broken columns, scorched ceilings, and bullet-scarred walls of the prayer hall and arcades that surround the courtyard. During a tour of the site, Kasmo says that construction techniques and materials will be matched to the originals wherever possible. “We must respect what was done over the centuries,” he says.

In 2011, before the country tumbled into chaos and war, Aleppo was Syria’s biggest city, with almost five million residents. Today, its population is thought to be less than half that. The Syrian Army retook the city in December 2016, and in the years that followed, more than half a million war refugees returned, according to the United Nations. Life is burdened by shortages of food, medicines, electricity, and petrol, and many Aleppans still depend on UN aid.

With reconstruction plans crippled by an all-round shortage of funds, equipment, and skilled labor, only a handful of Syria’s heritage rehabilitation projects have gone forward. The Great Mosque—which is also called the Great Umayyad Mosque, and which supposedly held the remains of Zechariah, father of John the Baptist—is the most prominent. Its project director and architect, Sakher Oulabi, calls it the national government's “number one heritage restoration project.” He says every member of his team feels a heavy responsibility. “We all understand we are doing something very important for the soul of our city and our country.”

The project is funded by a charitable foundation linked to the family of Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman ruler of Russia’s Muslim-majority republic of Chechnya. Russia has backed the Assad government against rebels and foreign fighters—including some backed by the US, other western powers, Turkey, and Gulf Arab monarchies. The mosque’s reconstruction is overseen by Syria's Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums and the Syria Trust for Development, which is sponsored by Assad’s government.

Rebuilding the mosque would be a major contribution to the regeneration of Syrian society, says historian Ross Burns, a former Australian ambassador to Syria and the author of Aleppo, A History. "The Great Mosque is a very important symbol of Aleppo and a point of pride to all Syrians," says Burns, whose website Monuments of Syria tracks conflict-related damage to Syria's built heritage. He says restoration of significant Syrian monuments would create local jobs, promote skills needed for post-war reconstruction, encourage the return of refugees, and eventually boost the tourism industry.

In the 1990s, Burns points out, the National Museum of Lebanon was "superbly brought back to life" in Beirut, as part of an effort to move past the country’s own civil war. "Future generations of Syrians deserve to know how splendid a past their country presented to the world," he says. But broad international support for reconstruction of Syria's monuments, he says, is hindered by ongoing disputes about how the conflict should be resolved. In the meantime, western archaeological institutions and experts can perhaps best assist by helping UNESCO to train Syrian heritage specialists, he suggests.

Even with funding in place, the minaret’s technical challenges are formidable. Oulabi’s workers have excavated its basement to learn how it was first erected, between 1089 and 1094. The square, double-walled structure was built of limestone blocks, connected by iron clamps and molten lead. This kept the five-story tower intact until 2013. Now, the minaret’s giant stones are being weighed and measured, strength-tested with ultrasound, and photographed from various angles so that photogrammetry—the science of making 3D models from pictures—can help to determine where they fit.

Professor Gabriele Fangi, an Italian photogrammetry expert from Marche Polytechnic University in Ancona, studied the minaret in 2010. He is one of very few western experts to have revisited the mosque since war broke out in 2011. In 2018, he gave the Syrian team his high-resolution photos of the structure, and says they intend to rebuild it “as it was before.”

Oulabi says most of the minaret’s original blocks can be reused. However, replacing the rest poses a problem: Limestone that best matches the original is in a quarry outside government control, in Idlib province. A senior official from the U.S. Defense Department, Michael Mulroy, noted in May that Idlib harbors "the largest collection of al-Qaeda affiliates in the world right now." Oulabi’s team is searching for another site with limestone identical to the original color.

Kasmo believes the toughest challenge will be to recreate the minaret’s intricate decorations, including carved bands of Arabic calligraphy adorned with floral motifs. They told the story of the mosque’s construction, and were a window into the city’s history. “Only half the inscriptions survived the collapse, so we will have to recreate the rest from photos and other records,” he says.

Burns, the Australian historian, has no doubt that Syrians have the dedication and expertise to rebuild the mosque. "I think it's well within their skill range. What they needed was the money to employ and train their own skilled workers and acquire heavy machinery, which they apparently have in the case of the Great Mosque,” he says. "We should not assume that experts from abroad would be more sensitive to the task of reviving such a monument."

He points out that many of Syria’s great monuments have been reconstructed, restored, or patched up over the years, especially in the past century. The Great Mosque's minaret is no exception. Burns shares a photograph of the minaret pre-1914, and another he took in 2005. They show that in the interim, much of the minaret's facade was reconstructed.

Aleppo's Old Quarter was once famed for its 13-kilometer labyrinth of covered souks, mosques, churches, public baths, and inns. Most of the souks, or marketplaces, date to the 14th century, and are named after the crafts and products they nurtured: the wool souk, the copper souk, the leather souk, and so on. UNESCO estimates that the conflict destroyed about 10 percent of the Old Quarter’s 500 historic buildings, and caused moderate to severe damage to more than half of the remainder. One portion of the marketplace, Souk al-Saqatiya, was recently restored and re-opened.

For residents of the Old Quarter, the Great Mosque had a significance beyond religion and its architectural status: It was vital to the social life of the city. The prayer hall gates opened directly onto the souks, Kasmo explains. “People would do their shopping, then walk into the mosque to pray, rest, and talk to their neighbors while their children played in the courtyard.” He expects the restoration project to attract international attention—and criticism. “Each restorer has his own way, and any job of restoration anywhere in the world will attract criticism. That is normal and should be expected.”

Though a mosque was built on the site early in the 8th century, construction of the current building took place from the 11th to the 14th century. UNESCO notes that throughout its history, the mosque has undergone multiple adaptations and reconstructions due to natural disasters, deliberate destruction, and expansion. Oulabi and Kasmo are veterans of its most recent restoration, done between 1999 to 2005, after the minaret developed a 40cm inclination. To stop it from leaning any further, they reinforced the walls with internal horizontal and vertical steel links, and injected mortar into cracks. The interior surface of the walls was further strengthened with aramid fibre.

Inside the mosque’s main prayer hall, walls and cross-vaulted ceilings are scorched by fire and pockmarked with thousands of bullet holes. The plan is to embed stainless steel pins into each bullet hole, to help fix mortar in place. “We made 22 different types of mortar before we got the right strength and color,” Kasmo says. “Our modern plaster didn’t match the original, so we had to import it from Egypt.”

Master woodworker Ahmad Khattab is in charge of recreating the mosque’s smashed and burned timbers, including gates, doors, archways, and blind windows. Using imported walnut and teak, his team works from AutoCAD drawings, which were created digitally from photographs and broken originals. “There are 12 unique archways and each one could take two to three months to make, because we don’t use nails or glue,” Khattab says.

Oulabi believes that the restoration will take another three years to complete. Work started in early 2018, but the site’s tower crane took six months to arrive from Damascus; the army did not control the entire 400-kilometer route. Now, a shortage of skilled tradespeople is the main reason for delays. “We are training more people in the use of hand tools and traditional craftsmanship, but it takes time,” Oulabi says. Perhaps, he adds, these same workers will help to restore the other historic sites that define Aleppo. “Eventually, the whole of the Old City will benefit from the new generation of craftsmen we are producing.”

When soldiers posed for portraits, they wanted to look their best.

A few years ago, as archaeologists combed through the dirt of Camp Nelson, in Kentucky, they kept stumbling across bits of old glass. The several-thousand-acre landscape, which was designated as a National Monument in 2018, was a significant Civil War site, serving as a Union Army hospital and supply center, and one of the nation’s largest enlistment hubs for African Americans joining the U.S. Colored Troops. Before they headed to battle, many of the men likely posed for photographs—and, judging by the glass that has turned up on the site, scores of them seem to have dyed or shellacked their hair before they wandered in front of the camera.

Camp Nelson was a bustling place: Its grounds contained barracks and a hospital, plus kick-back spots including taverns and a billiards hall, the Lexington Herald-Ledger reported. Archaeologists have found smashed green and amber bottles—probably once full of since-glugged alcohol—and shards of other clear ones, which likely held ink for letters and reports. The more unusual bits of glass are the aqua of a cloudless sky. Hundreds of these fragments and clear ones clustered around the footprint of a former shop operated by a man named William Berkele, who managed a so-called sutler store—a civilian-run shop where enlisted men could stock up on candy, cigars, sardines, and other provisions that the military didn’t necessarily dole out.

The jagged pieces of clear and blue glass were jumbled together with other artifacts, like glass plates, bits of brass photograph mats, and a stencil reading “C.J. Young, Artist,” says Stephen McBride, director of interpretation at Camp Nelson. The presence of these other materials suggested to McBride and his fellow diggers that there was also a photography studio on the premises, perhaps operated by Cassius Jones Young, who was a photographer’s apprentice before the war, and later set up his own studio in Lexington, Kentucky. Once the archaeologists cleaned their finds and began to reassemble the the glass pieces back into the shape of bottles, they got a sense of the grooming products that they once contained.

The still-young medium of photography was tottering toward maturity just as the bloody war erupted. “The technology of photography was in rabid flux, and just as the war was about to begin, portrait photography had become much more accessible,” says Matt Gallman, a historian at the University of Florida and the author of several books about the Civil War. Because of the growing popularity of the carte de visite format—where eight exposures could be made on a single glass plate, then chopped apart and mounted onto slim calling cards—customers could pop into a portrait studio and wind up with several images to hand out. Photographers still struggled to capture movement as anything other than a blurry streak, and the labor-intensive, wet-plate photography technique was poorly suited to the front lines. As such, many Civil War photographs show young men either steeling themselves for conflict, or strewn across a battlefield, their bodies drained of life.

When they posed for photographs, soldiers often dressed up in crisp uniforms and brandished multiple weapons, some of them borrowed from the 19th-century portrait studio equivalent of a prop closet. They wanted to look strong, brave, and maybe even a little handsome. That’s where the grooming products came in.

It’s hard to gauge exactly how many 19th-century men were slathering their head with hair dye, says Sean Trainor, a lecturer at the University of Florida and historian who of men’s hairstyles. Men were “tremendously touchy” about the subject, he adds, because it was often seen as “foppish, vain, and unnatural.” But even if men didn’t fess up to purchasing hair dyes—which contained dangerous ingredients including silver nitrate, turpentine, and sulfur—Trainor says that it’s clear that they used them. Newspaper advertisements marketed these products, both through urban shops and via mail order, and men could even cook up chemical cocktails at home. “If I had to make a guess,” Trainor says, “I’d bet that middle-aged professionals and younger, fashionable men were the heaviest users of dyes—groups, incidentally, that were well-represented in the Union Army.”

McBride says that, according to a note he encountered in a book on Civil War photos, people sometimes darkened blonde, white, or salt-and-pepper hair for photos, so it didn’t look too washed out. “I’ve never seen any written evidence to confirm that dyeing one’s hair for photos was common,” Trainor says, “but it sounds reasonable.”

McBride and his collaborators used toothbrushes and warm water to scrub 150 years of dirt off the fragments. After that, the team began the finicky work of matching them with other bits from the same bottles. The lips and bases of bottles helped McBride’s team puzzle out the minimum number of containers they were working with. To piece them back together, the reconstructors applied a bit of superglue, added some masking tape to help fasten the pieces together, and then nestled the bottles into a bit of fine sand, to keep the repaired vessels stable while the glue dried.

Once McBride’s team had reassembled the bottles, they found that text marched down some of the sides. They embarked on a bit of detective work, scouring newspaper articles and books about historic bottles to learn about the companies that produced them and what they were advertised for. They found bottles of Dr. Jaynes (also spelled “Dr. Jayne’s”) and Cristadoro hair dye, plus Bear's oil, which also claimed to make sparse locks a little bushier. Near the portrait studio site, the researchers found about 10 bottles of hair dye and seven bottles of hair oil. (None of those types of bottles showed up anywhere else at Camp Nelson.) Roughly half of them have been reconstructed. Though none are presently on view to the public, McBride hopes to exhibit some in the future.

Since the bottles were shattered and anything in them is long gone, McBride says it’s hard to say exactly what was inside. But Trainor suspects that the dyes would have been a beguiling dark brown or black. “As far as I know, virtually all available dyes darkened the hair,” he says. Even if blonde dyes had been available—and Trainor isn’t sure whether they were—they likely wouldn’t have been as popular as the inkier options. “Mid-nineteenth century Americans considered dark hair fetching,” he adds.

Soldiers knew that there was a good chance they wouldn’t return home from the war; at least 620,000 of them (and possibly many more) lost their lives. McBride’s team hasn’t yet found any of the photos that they believe were taken at the Camp Nelson studio, but the bottles are a reminder that, before they went to battle, many men tried to preserve their visage in portraits, and put their best face forward.

Sally Warring knows a lot about what we can't see.

On a fall day, Sally Warring had come to one of New York’s grandest stagnant pools of water to find an old friend. She is at Ridgewood Reservoir, a 50-acre wetland somewhere on the border of Brooklyn and Queens, looking for a colony of cells named Volvox. As far as algae go, Volvox is pretty charismatic, a cluster of green gems encircled in a sphere that looks almost like a planet. And the colonies are big enough to be seen with the naked eye—a real rarity in the microbial world. Warring wants a reunion.

“This time last year I found a great algae out here, it was one of my favorite species,” she says as she walks around the large pond. “I was growing it until about a few weeks ago, when it died.” Volvox. It is one of the first microbes she ever saw, so it holds a special, hard-to-see place in her heart. As she speaks, Warring pulls on a pair of dark khaki waders, the iconic pants-cum-boots favored by many fishers. I do the same. We wear waders because, in order to find the tiny green spheres, we must meet them on their own turf. Warring, who is originally from New Zealand, is a young, charming microbial encyclopedia. She talks about microbes almost as if they were people—how they meet and how they eat and how they reproduce, just like us. While she talks, her eyes are always on the water or, more specifically, on the sludge.

Now a microbiologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Warring has devoted her career to tiny, rarely seen denizens of the natural world. She’s less interested in the microbes that colonize the far reaches of the planet than she is with more cosmopolitan organisms that call urban oases home. Warring also runs the popular Instagram account @pondlife_pondlife, in which she artistically presents the life she finds in the ponds of the city—and there is more than you might think. Her process is simple: go to a pond and scoop up some water in a jar. There will always be something interesting inside.

Warring rarely has a specific agenda for these expeditions. Her work is not oriented around monitoring the health of the wetland, but rather peeking into—and getting people excited about—the vast biodiversity that teems in metropolitan puddles of various sizes. And today, she is hoping to collect new specimens of Volvox to take back and breed in her lab.

Ridgewood Reservoir was built in 1858 to quench Brooklyn’s growing thirst. It’s actually composed of three basins divided by walls, only one of which contains water today. The reservoir was designed to capture runoff from the moraine that marks the southern extent of the last Ice Age, according to Matt Malina, the executive director of the nonprofit NYC H2O, who is assisting a team of volunteers as they weed the wetland. “The reservoir’s history and ecology is unique,” he says.

The reservoir was decommissioned in 1959 and nearly drained in 1989, according to Curbed New York. In December 2018, after years of community and activist effort, the New York State Historic Review Board placed the reservoir on the state’s official list of historic places, which should protect it as a wetland for the foreseeable future. Today, the reservoir looks entirely natural: a pond fringed with native sweetgum and honey locust trees. It’s the perfect place for wildlife: big (double-crested cormorants), small (swamp sparrows), and very small (microbes).

To descend into the middle basin of the reservoir, we have to climb over an iron fence and rappel down 30 feet, using a rope slick with pond scum. “This is the original wall of the reservoir,” Malina says once we’ve made it safely down. “We’re going out to fish for microbes,” Warring announces, brandishing the glass jar.

As Warring and I wade into the reservoir, the pressure of the water squeezes in on the waders like a vacuum bag. We are not wet, she reminds me, even though it desperately feels like I am. On this day, the pond is actually far from idyllic; a discordant orchestra of electric-powered aquatic mowers is being used to hack down a thick fringe of yellow reeds encircling the reservoir.

The reeds are phragmites, Warring says, a trenchant, non-native wetland grass that’s suffocating the reservoir’s native plants. NYC H2O is on a mission to eradicate the phragmites, one that could take a decade. We wade through a 20-foot channel sawed through the reeds. “Be careful,” Warring says. “That’s the only advice I have!” She steps as confidently as one can through water that is rapidly approaching the tops of our waders.

Beyond the yellow curtain of phragmites, the reservoir looks like an almost offensively bucolic oasis in a concrete city. The distant sliver of forest across the reservoir is splashed with fall’s yellows and reds. The water is not clear, but an orange-brown that Warring ascribes to the clay dredged up from the bottom. “This is definitely a lot deeper than it was the last time I was here!” she says “Last time I had no fear getting water in my waders, but this time I’m a little worried.”

Though most microbes are impossible to spot on their own, they often accumulate together enough—as scum, sludge, or general murk—to be visible to the naked eye. “All the stuff growing on here,” Warring says, as she lifts a floating stick covered in brown sludge, “that’s all microbes.”

We’ve settled into a spot where the water laps at our chests, and Warring pulls out a plankton net that resembles a long sleeve of ultrafine mesh and drags it across the top of the water. “More microbes, less water, basically,” she says, explaining the device. The sieve has a pore size of just 50 microns, approximately the width of some strands of human hair. “It’s actually a little bigger than I would like,” Warring says. “I’m buying a new one soon.” Volvox hangs out on the surface of the water, so Warring is hoping it will turn up. She dunks the glass jar (which formerly housed peanut butter) into the pond, shakes it, and holds it up to the light.

Volvox is a common denizen of New York wetlands. The colonial species was first observed in 1700 by early Dutch microbiologist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. He published the observation in a letter, “concerning the Worms in Sheeps Livers, Gnats, and Animalcula in the Excrements of Frogs,” according to botanist Ernst Pringsheim Jr. in a 1970 paper in Soil Ecology Letters. In 1758, Charles Linnaeus broke out the genus Volvox with two species: V. globator and V. chaos, the latter of which has now been recategorized as an amoeba called Chaos. The algal colonies can pop up in any number of moist spots, including bogs, brooks, ditches, forest pools, and basins. Large blooms of Volvox indicate nitrogen-heavy water and can be harmful to larger aquatic life.

Back on land, Warring sheds her waders pulls out a portable microscope that she connects to her phone. She extracts a little water from the jar with a dropper and sploots it on a slide, which she positions in front of the camera. Immediately, on the screen, there’s life. “That’s a rotifer there, that’s actually a tiny animal,” Warring explains as she follows the creature, which resembles an eensy horseshoe crab, as it wriggles across the slide. She swivels the microscope to take in a larger view of the slide. “That’s a big ciliate,” she says, almost yelping. “Nice!”

“Oh that’s nice,” she says, zooming in on what sort of resembles a hairy turd. It is a ciliate called Frontonia, and within its membrane are green shapes—algae, living symbiotically inside the microscopic animal. “This is a beauty,” Warring says, almost tenderly. “It’s got a mouth and anus somewhere, but I’m not sure which is which.”

We see several other rotund diatoms, rod-like bacteria, and an outsized blob, which Warring assures me is likely insect larvae, looking almost monstrous alongside the tidy, tumbling, symmetrical microbes. But no Volvox. Warring sets the microscope aside and peers into the orange-ish liquid in the jar. From what I can see, there are twigs, large pieces of green sludge, some long translucent critters that look almost like fish, and a piece of red ribbon. “Bloodworm,” Warring says. I tell her I feed freeze-dried versions of that to my fish sometimes. “You can take it with you, if you’d like!” she says, almost serious.

A few yards away, a group of students from Christ the King High School test for environmental DNA, or genetic fragments that might indicate whether certain animals have been in or passed through the reservoir recently. They don’t find much—the pond has been empty of fish for years now, but they seem to enjoy the field trip, organized by NYC H2O in the hope of reuniting the city’s land-dwellers with this mostly forgotten wetland in their midst.

Having given up on finding Volvox for the day, Warring stows her microscope in her backpack, which has somehow managed to stay bright white despite all the pond scum. As Malina thanks all the visitors and volunteers, Warring shows me her former Volvox colonies on her phone, the way one might flash a video of her dog or kids. The globes orbit like reckless planets, some fast and some slow, tumbling in and out of the frame.

No matter where you are in the world, you are surrounded by an invisible menagerie of microbial life, hunting and eating and reproducing and whirling around right in front of your eyes. In a way, @pondlife_pondlife is a nature-in-miniature documentary that rivals Planet Earth. Warring says that the darker green gems inside each Volvox represent the next generation. Once these young colonies are fully formed, each globe will burst like a bubble, releasing the small green spheres to make their own way in the city.

Pushed out of brewing more than a century ago, they're making a comeback.

Miho Fujita was a high-powered executive working at a Tokyo toy company. Miho Imada worked in traditional Noh theater. Chizuko Niikawa-Helton was in the fashion industry. But at some point in their careers, all three women had a realization: Their true passion was sake.

So Fujita left corporate life to join her family’s newly acquired Mioya Brewery in Ishikawa Prefecture, where she ultimately became president. Imada returned home to the family business, the fifth-generation Imada Shuro brewery, or kura, and became a master brewer, or toji. Niikawa-Helton trained to become a sake sommelier, eventually opening her own sake-promotion business, Sake Discoveries, in New York City.

Since sake is the most iconic alcoholic drink of Japan, these career shifts may not seem notable. But besides their talent, something else sets Imada, Fujita, and Niikawa-Helton apart in the sake world: They’re women.

“The image of sake is older men,” says Monica Samuels, Director of Sake and Spirits at Vine Connections, one of Imada and Fujita’s U.S. importers. “It’s still not really considered appropriate in a lot of generations and a lot of regions of Japan for a woman to go to a bar.”

Out of Japan’s approximately 1,500 licensed sake breweries, fewer than 50 are run by women. This reflects the workplace challenges women face in Japan, and indeed worldwide. But it also reflects of cultural taboos specific to the production and consumption of the rice-based drink. “Women are perceived as unclean traditionally in Japanese culture,” says Samuels. “That’s a lot of the reason women aren’t allowed in sake breweries.”

But women were once integral to sake production. From sake’s mythic origins to its first appearance in the historical record, women are central to the drink’s tradition. They invented it as temple attendants, brewed it in family enterprises, and made livings hawking it in premodern villages. Indeed, taboos against women making sake aren’t an age-old tradition—they’re fairly recent, arising in full force when Japan began its breakneck modernization in 1868. Alongside a growing number of prominent women in sake, Imada, Fujita, and Niikawa-Helton's rise is a revolution. But it's also a return to sake's roots.

Here is a founding myth. A goddess chews rice and spits it into a jar. The enzymes in her saliva break down the starch, fermenting the rice from a sober grain into an effervescent elixir, puckery-sour, lively with yeast, its alcohol content enough to bring her worshippers to ecstasy. This, says Paula R. Curtis, a scholar of premodern Japanese history currently based at Yale, is one of the origin stories of sake.

It’s hard to separate fact from myth in the story of a drink with purportedly divine origins, but historians date women’s participation back to the earliest records of sake in the sixth century. Reading between the lines, they speculate that sake brewing began not with the saliva of a goddess, but with that of female attendants at Shinto shrines, who chewed and spat rice grains to brew alcohol for rituals. The word “toji,” or master brewer, itself holds a suggestion of these origins: It’s often translated as “independent woman” or “housewife,” the female master of a house.

By the eighth century, women and sake entered administrative and literary records together, with women depicted as brewers and money lenders in agricultural economies. By the late-Medieval period, female sake brewers were prominent enough to engage in that age-old practice of the powerful: tax evasion. “We have tax documents and legal documents saying that male and female sake brewers who aren’t following tax regulations will be punished,” Curtis says.

Literature from the time suggests these women were loud, proud, and all business. In one scene from the Shichijuichiban shokunun Uta Awase, a collection of monologues written around 1500 by courtiers in the persona of different “commoner” professions, a pot seller hawks his wares on the street, only to have a female brewer interject, “First, buy some sake!”

So how did women get banned from breweries? Like most major social and cultural shifts, it’s complicated. We tend to think of modernity as freeing women from age-old oppressions. In many contexts, that’s true. But some historians argue that in Edo Japan, an early-modern period starting in 1603, taboos around women’s ritual defilement—the belief that they were inherently polluted, partly because of menstruation—actually increased. It may be around this time that the belief that “when a woman enters the brewery, the sake will spoil” became widespread, Curtis says.

By the time of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan’s economy was shifting away from a village-based model of local family enterprises knit together by webs of social obligation to a more modern, monetary economy. This shift further displaced women, who went from the center of thriving household economies to occupying domestic space separate from the outer, economic realm of business. Like most of Japan's business world, sake companies tend to be male-dominated.

It’s this landscape that Miho Fujita, now the president of Mioya brewery, entered when she joined the family business in 2003. “It was less common in 2003 than it is now for a woman to work in a brewery, let alone be the president of the brewery,” writes Fujita in an email, translated by distributor Monica Samuels. Fujita was a trailblazer. “I try to hire women when I can, as I have found that they are working very hard to prove themselves in this field,” she adds.

Entering a male-dominated field was challenging. When Niikawa-Helton began working with distributors and producers as an independent sake promoter in New York City more than 10 years ago, she was often one of the only women in the room. “I didn’t see much selling of sake by a female at the time,” she says. As a result, Niikawa-Helton sometimes faced skepticism from distributors. “The first two years were very tough,” she says. She credits female and LGBTQ friends and mentors in the field, as well as her husband, with encouraging her. Now, she says, she doesn’t feel limited by gender.

Indeed, while they’re often asked to talk about gender, Fujita and Imada both say that their work speaks for itself. Fujita’s brewery, in line with her family’s relatively new entry into the industry, has a reputation for experimental techniques, producing brews with strong acidity that she says taste better after they’ve been left open for a few months. Imada’s products, just like her role as a female toji, embody the contemporaneity of tradition. For the past several years, she’s been reviving hattanso, a heritage variety of rice native to the Hiroshima prefecture. She hopes the revival will put Hiroshima’s traditional terroir onto the international stage.

The rise of women in sake illustrates the fact that modern culinary innovations often remix traditional foodways. It also shows what stays constant across time. “In 16th-century courtier diaries, some entries will just be, ‘Tonight we had a poetry gathering at my manor, and xyz came over and we drank sake,’” Curtis says. “Or it will be just a list of 20 people and a note, ‘We drank sake.’’’ Five hundred years and several major historical transformations later, it’s this spirit of companionship and pleasure that continues to motivate Miho Imada. “Good sake makes everyone happy, and that is my drive to brew,” she says.

Romance, magazines, and technology made delicate confections a must-have.

In Japan, Christmas cakes are a big deal. Starting in November, bakery chains, hotels, restaurants, department stores, supermarkets, and convenience stores announce their cake line-ups to huge fanfare, with popular cakes selling out far in advance of the holiday. Internationally renowned pâtissiers and chocolatiers such as Pierre Hermé, Frédéric Cassel, and Jean-Paul Hévin offer their own versions for the Japanese market, as do domestic favorites like Sadaharu Aoki and Hironobu Tsujiguchi. Even fast food chains get into the Christmas cake act. KFC always offers a special cake—a triple-berry tiramisu cake this year—as a set deal with their famous Christmas Bucket of fried chicken, and Baskin-Robbins, known as 31 Ice Cream in Japan, has a selection of festive ice cream cakes that will never appear stateside.

Japanese Christmas cakes are quite different from the long-keeping holiday sweets that are traditional in many Western countries. The quintessential Christmas cake in Japan is strawberry shortcake, an ethereal creation of feather-light génoise sponge, crème Chantilly or whipped cream, and red, ripe strawberries—none of which is at all hearty or long-keeping. A mash-up of American and French pastry, the Japanese Christmas cake is a secular symbol of celebration that arose after decades of media promotion of Christmas as a stylish, romantic event.

While Christmas has been embraced enthusiastically in Japan, it’s not a public holiday. Most businesses stay open, and public transit runs on regular hours. Modern Japan is a largely secular country, though Shinto and Buddhism are deeply woven into the fabric of daily life. According to statistics published by Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs, as of 2017 there were only 1.9 million Christians in Japan.

While Christianity entered Japan via Portuguese and Spanish missionaries, it was subsequently banned in the 17th century by the Tokugawa shogunate, which considered it an infiltration of European influence and a threat to national security. Yet after the American government, represented by Commodore Matthew Perry, abruptly ended Japan’s long period of isolation in 1853, the Meiji government regarded the adaptation of European customs as critical for Japan to be regarded as a modern country. Administrators actively encouraged the populace to take on western dress and hair styles, the eating of meat, and even timekeeping methods such as the Gregorian calendar.

They didn't actively encourage the adoption of Christianity, or any other religion. However, newspapers and magazines of the time promoted the decorated Christmas tree and Christmas dinner as stylish and modern things to try, with just passing mentions of their religious roots. The media disseminated images of Santa Claus, but not obviously Christian symbols such Nativity scenes. In essence, Christmas was strictly secular almost from the start.

Essayist Kenichiro Horii, the author of the provocatively titled "The Merry Christmas of Love and Raves: How a Festival From a Foreign Culture Became Japanized," writes that Christmas really took off in Japan after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. Emboldened by their victory over a western power, the nation as a whole became more open to foreign customs. According to Horii, "in those early days Christmas in Japan was a holiday for adults, an excuse to hold stylish parties, rather than an occasion for families and children in the way it is in most western Christian countries.”

The history of the Christmas cake in Japan started in the waning days of the Meiji period. In 1910, Fujiya, a European-style pastry shop in Tokyo’s port city of Yokohama, introduced what is widely considered to be the very first Japanese Christmas cake. According to a representative from Fujiya's PR department, "the base of the cake was a rich, liqueur-soaked fruitcake" in the European style. But the bakers considered its plain brown appearance not eye-catching enough, so they decorated it with snow-white royal icing, complete with little Christmas trees. Over the next decade, bakers around the country decorated their Christmas desserts with strawberries after growing methods made them available in December, although both strawberries and the cakes they decorated remained expensive and reserved for the well-off.

During World War II, western customs were frowned upon, so Christmas was essentially banned. It came back after the war in 1947, helped along in part by the presence of the occupying mostly American Allied Forces. The strawberry shortcake as we know it now, with its soft sponge cake base, fresh strawberries, and whipped cream, only came about in the late 1950s. As the country finally left behind the impoverished postwar period and became more prosperous, Japanese people rapidly adopted the refrigerator along with the black-and-white television and the washing machine, dubbing them the "Three Sacred Treasures." With a refrigerator, the delicate whipped-cream and fresh strawberry-topped strawberry shortcake could be kept for a day or so.

As the nation entered the Economic Miracle period in the late 1960s to 1970s, western-style cakes and pastries became even more popular. But while the strawberry shortcake still reigned supreme, Christmas dessert could mean Swiss roll cake, the Mont Blanc (made with chestnut cream and whipped cream) or small fruit tarts. Grown-up elegance is a common factor, though, especially since Christmas Eve in Japan is mainly regarded as a day for romance. Businesses marketed the idea heavily in the 1980s and 1990s, with JR Tokai, which operates the busy Tokyo-to-Osaka Tokaido Shinkansen bullet train, at the forefront. The company ran a series of legendary commercials featuring young couples reunited just in time for Christmas Eve by the Shinkansen.

For the past few years, the big players in the crowded Christmas cake market have been the national convenience store chains. 7-Eleven, FamilyMart and Lawson all offer beautiful and very tasty cakes at relatively reasonable prices, with the added convenience of ordering the requisite fried or roast chicken and other party foods at the same time. You can even order flash-frozen Christmas cakes from Amazon and other online merchants. And while the strawberry shortcake remains the one and only Christmas cake for many people, there are now a bewildering array of choices. As the Christmas cake market has gotten ever more competitive, traditional European Christmas fare like German stollen, Italian panettone, and the French bûche de Noël are more popular than ever. These days, just about any cake is appreciated at Christmastime in Japan, as long as it's delicious, fun, and festive.

The Dominican Republic's fifth Living Museum in the Sea has just opened.

Under 55 feet of water isn’t the typical setting for a museum exhibit, but it can work. For years, underwater archaeologists from Indiana University’s Center for Underwater Science have collaborated with the government of the Dominican Republic to study the historic wrecks off its shores. More recently they’ve worked together to open a series of publicly accessible maritime archaeological parks—essentially life-size historic shipwreck museum dioramas beneath the waves. Recently, the fifth museum of this kind was put together, and will open on December 12, 2019, not far from Santo Domingo.

The new Living Museum in the Sea, as they’re called, is the wreck site of a Spanish merchant vessel, Nuestra Señora de Begoña, that went down in a storm in 1725 (while smuggling silver). Other underwater museums include Spanish galleons in Samana Bay to the north, and the wreck of Captain Kidd’s vessel, Quedagh Merchant, off the southern coast.

The parks are set up—using a combination of real artifacts, period-correct items, and replicas—to look like a real wreck would appear underwater when it was discovered, with the wood long eaten away, for snorkelers and divers to explore. In some cases, it also helps scientists and officials preserve wreck sites in situ.

“The thing with artifacts in maritime archaeology is that they’re underwater, and they’ve taken in chloride and salt ions from the saltwater,” says Tori Galloway, a research associate with Indiana University who helped reconstruct this wreck site. “When you pull them out of the water, they disintegrate much more quickly.”

Treasure hunting remains legal in Dominican waters, on the condition that half of the objects taken from a site are given to the government. In some cases these objects, stored in government facilities, have gone back underwater into the parks, where their degradation will slow.

“People will say to me, ‘Wait a minute, I’ve never seen archaeologists putting things back in the water,’” says Charles Beeker, a marine archaeologist and director of the Center for Underwater Science. “It’s a little different from the paradigm, but it’s certainly successful.”

To restore and reconstruct the wreck site of Nuestra Señora de Begoña, the team lowered a couple of concrete replica cannons into the water by crane, to join a couple other period-correct cannons that had been placed there before. Then, using inflatable lift bags, divers maneuvered them into place. “I’ve lifted cannons before,” Galloway says. “It’s a recurring theme.”

For those who don’t want to brave the waves, some artifacts from the ship have been conserved and can be seen in the country’s Royal Shipyards heritage museum in Santo Domingo's Colonial Zone. But the sense of discovery that comes with seeing 18th-century cannons underwater—even replicas, put there on purpose—is worth getting wet for.

North Dakota's corn fields will spend the winter under a snowy blanket.

Recently, a heavy snow carpeted the fields that stipple eastern North Dakota. Afterwards, satellite images captured wispy clouds and shadows above swaths of white. Images of agricultural communities near the squiggly Goose River, such as Hillsboro and Mayville, also revealed something else: a slew of little brown squares among the white ones, which made the landscape look like a patchwork of pixels. The flecks of brown turn out to be vast expanses of corn that never made it out of the field, and that will now spend the winter under a blanket of snow.

Despite the tidy beauty of the image, which was taken on the Landsat 7 satellite and published by the NASA Earth Observatory, this was a frustrating year for North Dakota’s corn farmers. Over the past five years, the state’s farmers have harvested an average of 85 percent of their corn by the middle of November, says Chris Hawthorn, a statistician in the crops branch of the National Agricultural Statistics Service. But this year, 57 percent of North Dakota’s corn was still in the fields in early-December, according to a Department of Agriculture report. That’s 1.88 million acres of corn lingering in limbo, according to the agriculture news site AgWeb.

Generally, by this time of year, satellite images of the open prairie would reveal either bare soil or “a sea of white,” says Daryl Ritchison, director of the North Dakota Agricultural Weather Network, a project run out of the School of Natural Resource Sciences at North Dakota State University. Now, because the corn is still standing in rows, stalk to stalk, the plants squeeze out the view of the snow from the air, writes Kathryn Hansen, a science communicator at the Earth Observatory. NASA’s photographs were taken from roughly 438 miles above the Earth’s surface.

Local farmers faced a double whammy of misfortune in 2019. “Corn was planted late due to a cold spring, so the crop started off behind,” says Joel Ransom, an extension agronomist at North Dakota State University. Then, a cold October and wet November slowed the drying process. Farmers usually harvest field corn when it has lost roughly half its moisture, and it’s typically turned into animal feed, ethanol, or corn syrup. “To do anything with the corn, it has to be dry,” says Ritchison—otherwise, “it’s just a bunch of mush,” and may get moldy. Farmers can nudge the drying process along themselves, with propane and other tools, but it’s costly. Ideally, Ransom says, “we depend on nature.”

Still, corn generally fares pretty well under its chilly comforter. The crop soars several feet above the surface of the soil, so it can hold up okay if heavy snow and biting winds don’t splinter the stalks. Then again, roaming animals might chow down. Some kernels will split, Hawthorn says, and others might mildew.

Assuming that the winter doesn't loosen its grip, farmers will simply have to wait. “There’s nothing farmers can do except leave the corn in the field,” Hawthorn adds. In the meantime, we can enjoy this high-tech view from high above.

And why it night not be so diverse for much longer.

Walt Wolfram grew up in a city so linguistically fascinating that the first time he met Bill Labov, the godfather of American sociolinguistics, Labov simply cornered him and made him say different words. Yet he left his native Philadelphia for a teaching job elsewhere—a place of even greater linguistic intrigue. “I got an offer I couldn't refuse, Wolfram says, “to die and come to dialect heaven.”

Wolfram is coauthor of Talkin’ Tar Heel: How Our Voices Tell the Story of North Carolina, an examination of his adopted home, where he works at North Carolina State University (alongside his coauthor Jeffrey Reaser). He also happens to be one of the great American linguists of the past 50 years, with a specialty in ethnic and regional American English dialects. He has been a central figure in getting stigmatized dialects, such as African-American English and Appalachian English, recognized as legitimate language systems.

Wolfram has called North Carolina the most linguistically diverse state in the country, but that diversity is waning. The Tar Heel State is the intertidal zone of the linguistic South: Overwhelming forces wash in and out, but weird, fascinating little tide pools remain.

Language in the American South has gone through several sweeping changes in a relatively short period of time. But first, a little housekeeping—distinguishing an “accent” from a “dialect” from a "language." An accent is composed purely pronunciation changes, almost always vowel sounds. Dialects, on the other hand, incorporate all kinds of other stuff, including vocabulary, structure, syntax, idioms, and tenses. Generally, speakers of different accents or dialects in the same language can understand one another. The South has various species of both.

Before the Civil War, white Southeasterners did not seem to have spoken in what would be a recognizably Southern accent by modern standards. (There is some debate over this, but a 1997 study of uncovered interviews with Civil War veterans has become a major data point in Southern English history analysis, and indicates that this is true.) There were differences in the way people talked, but it wasn’t split as evenly along North/South lines as one would think. Southerners then, for example, seem to have had what’s called the “coil-curl merger,” which makes the “oy” and “er” sounds very similar. Think of calling a toilet a “terlet.” But that merger is also associated with an extremely non-Southern place: New York City and its old “Thoity-Thoid Street” accent.

Distinctly Southern dialects among the white population of the American South seem only to have taken hold starting around the time of the Civil War. (African-American and other minority dialects have their own histories, which will be addressed later.) “The things that we think are Southern today were embryonic in the South before the Civil War, but only took off afterwards,” says Wolfram. The period from the end of the Civil War until World War I—which seems like a long time, but is very condensed linguistically, less than three generations—saw an explosion of diversity in what are sometimes referred to as Older Southern American Accents.

In Southern states bordering the Atlantic Ocean, regional dialects sprung up seemingly overnight, influenced by a combination of factors including the destruction of infrastructure, the panic of Reconstruction, lesser-known stuff like the boll weevil crisis, and the general fact that regional accents tend to be strongest among the poorest people. In the post–Civil War period, Southerners left the South en masse; the ones who stayed were often the ones who couldn’t afford to leave, and often the keepers of the strongest regional accents. A lack of migration into the South, either from the North or internationally, allowed its regional accents to bloom in relative isolation.

This period of the South’s history spawned dozens of distinct dialects and accents, especially in the Atlantic states. World War II then began a series of events that pushed against these regional accents. Oil drilling, manufacturing, retirement communities, and military bases brought Northerners and wealth down to the South. “There’s been a lot of dialect leveling, that’s what linguists call it,” says Erik Thomas, a linguist at North Carolina State who often works on regional and minority speech.

When regional accents get leveled, they end up losing many of their distinctive elements—and essentially begin to sound more like one another. This is why old people from the South, especially anyone born before around 1930, sound different from young Southerners: They maintain at least the vestiges of the rich tapestry of Southern dialects. That’s all dying now. But it’s dying a little bit more slowly in some places than in others.

North Carolina stands out among Southern states for its tremendous geographic diversity. East of the Mississippi, there aren’t that many states with a substantial mountain range, a large plateau, and a long, island-pocked coastline. The ones that do, like New York, tend to exhibit an awful lot of different regional linguistic differences. And west of the Mississippi, there aren't nearly as many of these differences among geographic regions within states.

There were many distinct regional accents or dialects in the pre–Civil War South, but some were more widespread (and better-known to modern linguists) than others. These include the Lowcountry accent near Charleston, South Carolina; the Appalachian accent, which ranges from Pennsylvania down to Georgia; the Plantation or Black Belt region, home to the richest soil and the highest numbers of slaves; the Cajun and Creole dialects of Louisiana; and the aristocratic Tidewater accent of Eastern Virginia.

North Carolina, smack in the middle of the Atlantic South, found more of those dialects within its borders than any other state. On top of that, North Carolina is home to a dialect found nowhere else in the world: the English spoken by those in the Pamlico Sound region, the coastal area that includes the Outer Banks.

Only a few generations ago, you could find an Appalachian speaker in the mountains of the west, a Tidewater speaker in the counties bordering Virginia, a Black Belt speaker in the eastern lowlands, and a Pamlico Sound speaker out on Ocracoke and Harkers Island, all without leaving the state.

These are dramatically different ways of speaking. Frankly, it would take too long to get into what makes them unique, but it’s easy enough to hash out a few of the best-known distinguishing features. Appalachian English often shows “a-prefixing,” as in “a-hunting and a-fishing.” The South in general tends to do what’s called a monophthongization of the long “i” sound. This turns vowels that are normally made up of two sounds—the vowel in a word like “spied” contains both “ah” and “ee”—and compresses them into one sound. Take these two words: “tight” and “tie.” In most of the South, that vowel sound is more like “ah” in the latter word. In Appalachia, it’s that way in both.

The Tidewater accent, a sort of upper-crust way of speaking, is best known for turning the vowel sound in “out” into “oo.” It is weirdly similar to the Canadian “oot and aboot,” though the southern Virginians and northern North Carolinians seem to have developed that on their own. They also have historically used the word “boot” for a car’s trunk and, amazingly, Wolfram says that one developed independently from the British, too. There are a couple of theories as to where “boot” in that use came from, but Wolfram suggests one in particular: that the storage for pre-car carriages was on the floor, next to a rider’s boots. Eventually any vehicle storage space came to be called a boot. Whether you’re in England or on the Virginia-North Carolina border, the nickname just makes sense.

The Black Belt accent is most similar to the Lowcountry accent of South Carolina. It’s known for British-y vowel sounds; “bath” gets more of an “ah” sound. It’s also a non-rhotic accent, meaning the “r” sound is dropped after many vowels: A word like “year” sounds like “yee-ah” (sort of like what a native Bostonian would say). One of the great examples of this accent can be found in the speech of late senator Fritz Hollings.

Then we get to the Pamlico Sound accent and dialect, which is the way people speak on the islands and, sometimes, mainland Hyde County. “It's the only dialect in the United States that people routinely think is not an American dialect,” says Wolfram. The long “i” is changed, but not to a monophthong “ah,” as it is in the rest of the South. Instead it’s “oy,” which gives the people of Ocracoke and nearby islands their nickname: Hoi Toiders.

The speech of the Hoi Toiders sounds, upon first listen, closer to a Cockney or rural Australian accent than anything else in the South. It’s chock full of stuff that’s totally unlike any other American accent. “Fish” becomes “feesh.” The vowel in a word like “down” turns the word into something more like “deh-een.”

The vocabulary is also rife with local terminology. Vocabulary is not necessarily something linguists look at as a differentiating factor among accents and dialects, as unique words and descriptions pop into being and fade like fireflies, and aren’t always reflective of larger linguistic differences. But the Hoi Toiders have so many, and they’re so weird and cool, that linguists like Wolfram make sure to note them. These often come from the sea, as the life of a Hoi Toider revolves around boats, fishing, and marine weather.

“Mommucked” means to be extremely frustrated. A porch is a “pizer.” “Whopperjawed” means something is out of true. A “dingbatter” is a mainlander. And lest you think that all of these terms are straight out of Shakespearean English, that one comes from the early 1970s. Television first came to Ocracoke in 1972, when the show All in the Family was a huge hit. Archie Bunker used to call his wife, Edith, a dingbat, and the term ended up in wide use on Ocracoke to refer to the many tourists who didn’t know their port from their starboard.

These are all white accents, and North Carolina is, of course, not all white. The state is about 23 percent black and 15 percent Latinx, and has the sixth largest Native American population of any state in the country.

The idea that there are regional African-American dialects is actually sort of new to linguistics, likely due to the fact that the field has long been dominated by white, and often Northern, men. Hell, it’s really only in the past couple of decades that linguists have studied African-American English as a dialect, rather than as an incorrect or broken form of “standard,” white American English. There was, and often still is, an assumption among linguists that there is a homogeneous African-American English. Really though, there are simply some core African-American language features that span the country, and regional variations on those.

In any case, African-American North Carolinians seem to have a geographic division of dialects and accents, too. This video shows a substantial difference in vowel sounds between Appalachian and coastal speech, with coastal speech having some, but not all, of the Hoi Toider accent. Wolfram conducted experiments that found that listeners usually could not distinguish between old North Carolinians, regardless of race. Those same listeners, though, easily distinguished younger white from younger black North Carolinians, which is generally the case nationally as well. As with the other regional Southern accents, black North Carolinians are experiencing leveling. As white North Carolinians level to a way of speaking more like the rest of the white South, black North Carolinians are leveling to the black South.

A forthcoming book from Wolfram and Mary Kohn looks at regionality in African-American English, often using North Carolina as a base, and finds empirical differences by region. But there are so many other variables in African-American English: geographic region, urban versus rural, the stigmatization of black speech by whites, class differences, demographics—all kinds of stuff. It’s very complicated, and linguists are only now starting to try to unpack it.

The Latinx population in North Carolina is a more recent arrival, and faster-growing than any other non-white population in the state. The English spoken by native English speakers of Latin American descent in North Carolina is newish, but has the potential to become, or might already be, a distinct dialect. That long “i” sound in “spied” seems to be somewhere in between the sound in a Spanish word like “hay” and the flattened, monophthong “ah” of a white North Carolinian. There’s also a substantial overlap in language between Latinx and African-American populations in North Carolina, so Latinx speakers sometimes use what’s called the “habitual be,” as in “I be speaking.” It’s a form that indicates an ongoing action, and it’s heavily associated with African-American English. Latinx populations adopting African-American English features isn’t new, of course. It’s been well-documented in, just for example, the Puerto Rican population in New York City.

The Lumbee Indians make up the largest tribe east of the Mississippi, and mostly live in the eastern part of North Carolina. Wolfram has also studied Lumbee English, which sometimes has the Hoi Toider vowel change, but also comes with a series of vocabulary and grammatical distinctions. “Ellick” is a sweetened coffee, “juvember” is a slingshot, that kind of thing. What’s especially fascinating about the Lumbee population is that it’s so concentrated, which is extremely unusual for Native Americans in the Eastern United States. The small city of Pembroke is a whopping 90 percent Lumbee. That concentration functions as an isolating factor, and isolation is key for maintaining regional accents and dialects.

Basically, the Lumbee have sustained their regional accent in a much stronger enduring way than other populations. Ocracoke has a regional accent because it’s literally an island; Pembroke has one because it’s figuratively an island.

So North Carolina has a startling variety of American English dialects, including a couple found nowhere else. Yet, if you travel to North Carolina, there’s an extremely high chance that you won’t hear any of them.

North Carolina has the linguistic advantage of varied geography and a central location within the Southeast. But over the past 75 years or so, accents and dialects have been fading incredibly rapidly. Urbanization, an influx of new residents from other American regions and abroad, increased communication and national media, and improved infrastructure have all contributed to leveling throughout the South.

Today, the vast majority of the South sounds, largely, the same. The biggest split left is urban versus rural. Someone from rural Georgia sounds, for the most part, like someone from rural Texas, rural Tennessee, or rural Virginia. The cities sound like each other, too, and thanks to a greater flow of people, but then again Southern accents in cities have always been far weaker than those in the country. North Carolina is not exempt from any of this.

“The Southern-sounding accents have become more like each other, and in the cities they're more like national norms,” says Thomas. The number of people speaking a Hoi Toider dialect on Ocracoke is down in the low hundreds. Good luck finding someone with a Tidewater accent who’s under 90 years old.

But a combination of geography, weather, and infrastructure have slowed dialect leveling in North Carolina a bit. “Before the 1920s, North Carolina had absolutely awful roads,” says Thomas. In the springtime, rains would turn the meager dirt roads into impassable mud pits. The Outer Banks relied on water transportation, isolating it from the mainland. Ocracoke still has no bridge. North Carolina’s Appalachian region is rugged and extreme, as distant from a major city as Appalachian West Virginia or Kentucky. That isolation has kept the local Appalachian English around, though it, too, is fading.

There are efforts to save endangered languages around the world, but dialects are generally left to mutate, merge, or disappear as part of the natural order of things. They are harder to get a hold of than distinct languages. Not all features are used by all speakers, the borders are fuzzy, the changes frequent.

“I'm one of the few people who says there's no reason to exclude dialects from the endangerment canon, and there's every reason to include them. They don't much listen to me,” laughs Wolfram, who is trying his best to save or preserve the Pamlico Sound dialect. He has spent his spring break every year for the past 27 years teaching a class on it, on the island itself. “They're interested,” he says, “but they're not really saying they want to keep the dialect alive.”

Leveling has swept into the South like a tide. North Carolina has pockets that are hard for the water to reach, tidepools resistant to waves. But a roising toid is probably going to reach them, too.

The shells may have once pointed the way to freedom.

It was a scorching hot Saturday in the Recôncavo region of Bahia, Brazil, but instead of heading to the beach or Paraguaçu River, hundreds of people had chosen to dine alfresco at Quilombo Kaonge, a community located far from the main road and deep within the trees and bramble. On the menu: freshly caught oysters served fried, raw with a spritz of lime, stewed in a moqueca (seafood stew), or grilled over an open fire. While classic Samba do Rio blared from the stereos, partygoers sang along from their seats. Elderly black women sat in circles fanning themselves, some in towering headwraps and many in straw hats, while those with relaxed hair consistently dabbed their edges. As the day progressed, the crowd shifted to Afro-Brazilian youth on their phones, who took pictures to share on Whatsapp and danced to bass-focused pagode music.

This was the 11th annual Festa da Ostra (oyster festival) held in October. During the festivities, there was acknowledgement of a Black past and a celebration of its future, and families, neighbors, and travelers from as far as São Paulo had come to take part in it. They were celebrating a community that emerged from pain and sacrifice: Before Brazil abolished the slave industry in 1888, some 4 million Africans arrived in chains in the ports of the Recôncavo. Of those who escaped, many found refuge in quilombos—well-hidden communities built in densely forested mountains and swampy lowlands by formerly enslaved people. The money raised by the Festa da Ostra helps maintain Quilombo Kaonge as an independent center of Black life—even as Brazil’s new president disparages quilombos’ existence.

Brazil’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade dates back to the 1400s, and the country ultimately “imported” more enslaved Africans than the United States, Cuba, Jamaica, and Haiti combined. For the Africans who survived the Atlantic passage—and found themselves in Bahia’s sugarcane fields or the country’s Southern mines—resistance looked like revolts, covert religious ceremonies, and quilombos.

The name quilombo comes from the Kimbundu word “kilombo,” which means “war camp” or “hideout, and originally described a temporary residence for nomads or displaced people. At its peak, the Palmares Quilombo, which was founded by two of Brazil’s most revered Black leaders, Zumbi dos Palmares and his wife Dandara dos Palmares, was home to more than 20,000 inhabitants. Quilombos and the people who lived there, known as Quilombolas, lived separate from Portuguese rule under a political system rooted in the Bantu traditions they had come from (community, balance, and agriculturally based). Although Brazil’s census does not include national data on quilombos, NGOs estimate that there are more than 1,500 across the country with more than 100 whose land claims are still pending. Kaonge, which has been politically recognized, is a matriarchal community led by its spiritual leader and griote (storyteller), senhora Juviani Viana.

“My entire family has lived here for generations,” senhora Viana tells me. She is sitting in the middle of the square, keeping her eyes closely trained on everything happening around her. “I took on the role of leader after my oldest sister passed away a few years ago.”

Now in her late 50s, she walks with the aid of a wooden stick. “I used to be able to help make everything we eat and sell here: the dende oil, the pimenta, the oysters. But now my body just can't take it,” she says with a resigned laugh.

During the festival, seafood is the most popular option, and oysters are the main course. Which is fitting, since oysters have long been key to quilombos surviving and thriving.

Historically, Brazilians viewed oysters as peasant food, considering them too much of a hardship to both find and properly clean. “People thought oysters were dirty food,” says senhora Viana. “Black people couldn’t afford to eat beef and pork, so we made oysters something that we could enjoy.”

Many quilombos were built next to river beds with significant oyster populations that fed their free inhabitants. In addition, crushed oyster shells were used as ancestral summoning tools during sacred ceremonies that continue today, and oral stories passed through generations speak of Quilombolas marking the way to the hard-to-find quilombos with oyster shells.

In the neighboring city of Salvador, high-end restaurants now charge upwards of 120 reais ($28) for an oyster dish, one you can easily purchase for 20 or 40 reais at Quilombo Kaonge. Kaonge sustains itself with oyster farming, and the weekend festa raises money that funds better harvesting equipment, school tuitions, more than a dozen grassroots community organizations, and the daily upkeep of homes. In a country where white workers earn 72.5 percent more than black and brown workers, the economic self-sufficiency of Kaonge is both a relief and an inspiration. The weekend long get-together is an opportunity to not only revel in the successes of an Afro-Brazilian settlement, but also acknowledge Black ingenuity and lose yourself in untempered Black joy.

Senhora Anna, a Kaonge elder, says it’s because she grew up here that she has such a compassionate love for black people. “Everyone in my family is black—that dark African black,” she says, as she sits next to fried oysters she has placed in to-go boxes so people can take them home. “I just think it’s so beautiful.”

Like all societies that reside on the margins of society, caught between legitimacy and erasure, not everyone finds comfort within the community. Senhora Anna and her husband sent their three sons, who they raised in Kaonge, to Catholic schools, which are the majority in Brazil’s public education system. Her three sons then decided that the African traditions and spiritualism practiced on their quilombo were paganism. They moved to the city and rarely come to visit. “These things happen,” says Senhora Anna. “They don’t believe in what I believe in.”

As radically subversive as the history of quilombos is, the majority of the settlements, much like Native American and First Nations reservations in the U.S. and Canada, have very poor living conditions. In 2007, the most current and extensive report regarding quilombos’ quality of life found that 91 percent of Quilombola families had a monthly income of less than $190, compared to the average national income of $204. The same report discovered that the number of malnourished children in quilombos is 76 percent higher than the national rate. It’s inside this inescapable reality that Quilombo Kaonge exists as a space that has navigated inequitable systems of power and access to create a safe place for its residents.

In 1986, Afro-Brazilian Congresswoman Benedita da Silva created a law that would allow quilombo residents to own their land. This was meant to halt the hundreds of cases where Quilombolas were forced off their land by farmers or the fast-growing eucalyptus monoculture business, which plants acres of the tree to make paper. In 2003, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva expanded on this law by issuing a presidential decree classifying Quilombola as an ethnicity with a distinct history and culture that, when claimed and proven, would give descendants full land rights.

But government bureaucracy has made claiming land rights a slow and unnerving process, one that could be quickly and easily undone by President Jair Bolsonaro, whose election last October has meant a rise in ultra right-wing political rhetoric. During a 2017 interview while still a Federal Deputy, Bolsonaro was asked about the importance of quilombos and safeguarding their history. “I have been on a quilombo. The quilombolas don’t do anything,” he responded. “They are not even good for breeding anymore. More than R$1 billion is spent on them.” As of January this year at least 230 quilombo and indigenous territories were under threat after Bolsonaro transferred quilombo and indigenous land claims to the Ministry of Agriculture—a ministry that largely favors major farming and mining companies.

This disdain and anti-blackness has meant heightened uncertainty and fear regarding quilombos and their autonomy. “Look things are difficult right now,” says Senhora Viana. “But we have always found a way to be here. My parents did it, their parents did, and we will too.”

There is a tangible sense of ubuntu, the Zulu word for humanity, on Quilombo Kaonge. The tenet of ubuntu, “I am because we are,” is a deeply African principle, and it’s one that almost four centuries of slavery and subsequent decades of systemic and structural anti-black violence have failed to break down. Because during one October weekend, in a small community of less than 50 families, copious amounts of cerveja were consumed and one man and his two sons shucked and shared 40 kilograms of oysters and, on the last night, as people slowly filed out, Senhora Viana delivered a blessing: “We are the children of Obàtálá, the children of Iemanjá. Go in peace.”

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“It was the most fragile object we have ever encountered.”

It’s not easy being a 2,000-year-old Buddhist scroll. A slight gust of wind, a particularly humid day, or even a simple exhalation could cause the scroll to crack or crumble into pieces. To unroll a scroll this old is almost unthinkable—but recently, conservators at the Library of Congress found themselves with no other option. They wanted to read the words scrawled inside the Gandhara scroll.

Before the scroll came to the library, it was buried for 2,000 years in a clay jar in a Buddhist stupa, or dome-shaped shrine, in the ancient region of Gandhara, now the Peshawar Valley in northern Afghanistan and Pakistan. The high-altitude, arid climate kept it from crumbling until it was excavated in the 1990s. In 2005, conservators received the scroll in a Parker Pen box on a bed of cotton. “It was the most fragile object we have ever encountered,” Holly Krueger, a retired paper conservator at the library, writes in an email. A year passed before the conservators felt ready to unfurl the scroll without destroying it completely.

The scroll, which was radiocarbon dated to the first century B.C., is one of a handful of surviving early Buddhist manuscripts from Gandhara, according to Jonathan Loar, a South Asia specialist at the library. Gandhara, situated on the Silk Road, served as a gateway to India, and the region’s monks are credited with spreading Buddhism into Iran and China, Krueger writes in a 2008 paper in The Book and Paper Group Annual. It was written in Gandhari, a language related to Sanskrit, on birch bark, an ancient writing material that consists of thin layers held together with a natural glue—almost like ancient phyllo pastry. “As it ages, this glue breaks down, leaving the layers extremely vulnerable to shattering with the slightest disturbance,” Krueger says, adding that a scroll this unstable could have only survived in a jar.

Krueger consulted conservators at the British Library, who had successfully unrolled 30 scrolls, for their input. Without any ancient, coiled birch bark laying around for a trial run, she practiced on a baked cigar roll, teasing apart its wafer-thin layers with bamboo spatulas. “It was not as fragile as the scroll proved to be,” Krueger says. A few days before the unrolling, the conservators placed the scroll in a specially constructed, humidified chamber, which softened the birch bark so it would not break upon contact.

The actual unrolling happened in June, 2005, on a Saturday, to reduce the risk of air currents created by coworkers and better control the humidity and temperature of the library’s paper lab. Krueger was present with only two others: Yasmeen Khan, a senior rare book conservator at the library, and Mark Barnard, the chief conservator at the British Library. “One cannot underestimate the nerves of steel required for such a project,” Krueger says. “We had only one chance for success.”

Krueger and Barnard removed the scroll from its moist chamber and placed it on top of a pane of borosilicate glass. One turn at a time, using bamboo spatulas, they unfurled the birch bark, placing small glass weights on newly flat sections. Each fresh turn revealed new fragments, which the researchers weighed down to preserve their place in the text. If the scroll seemed on the verge of cracking, a conservator would mist the air with a preservation pencil.

It was a dramatic and silent affair: Everyone took shallow, controlled breaths. One misplaced exhale could scatter the scroll shards and render something translatable into something lost. “I was doing the photography and informed the conservators whenever I was going to move so that they would be prepared for air movement and change,” Khan writes in an email. When the whole thing was laid flat, Krueger and Barnard removed the glass weights and laid a second pane of glass on the whole revealed scroll, pushing down tiny pieces that popped up with the bamboo sticks.

Finally translated, the final scroll has no title, beginning, or end, but it does retain around 75 to 80 percent of the original text—one of the better-preserved Gandharan scrolls in existence, Loar says. It tells the story of 15 seekers of enlightenment who came before and after Siddhārtha Gautama, the sage living in the 5th or 6th century B.C. who became known as the Buddha. “Repeating these names—verbally, mentally, and or in writing—is a powerful practice,” Loar says, adding that it functioned as a meditative exercise.

Too fragile for public display, the scroll has been reburied—this time in a box within the archives of the library. There’s also a drawer that holds all the tiny bits of dust that sprung from the scroll during the unrolling. Conservators now transport it around the library on a cart with vibration dampening to ease its journey, Krueger says. But this past summer, the conservators digitized the entire scroll, making it surprisingly easy to read a millennia-old account of the lives of buddhas—that is, if you read Gandhari.