And the newcomers show no signs of slowing down.

Years before the Suez Canal opened, in November 1869, it was lauded as an economic boon. In February 1860, when the project was still very much theoretical, The New York Times marveled at “an enterprise designed to be of such incalculable benefit to the civilized world.”

In the midst of the industrial fervor of the 19th century, the focus was on how ships could avoid the lengthy circumvention of Africa. Little if any attention was paid to the nonhuman entities that would take advantage of the new corridor.

It’s no surprise why: People generally don’t build things with animals in mind. When we construct something like a coyote bridge, it’s anomalous. More often than not, the question of how an animal crosses a road is answered with a splat.

Which is why many bestial transfers have led to unforeseen consequences. Rats, for example, have piggy-backed on human movements for centuries, spreading disease along the way. When European colonists brought their dogs to the Americas, the new canids quickly subsumed native dog groups.

Canals can accelerate this phenomenon. Typically carved to serve our economic needs, these aquatic thoroughfares are a conduit for animals to interact with new areas and—naturally—other species. Around the world, this has posed a huge problem, as native species are frequently threatened, or entirely outmatched, by their invasive counterparts.

“The globalization of trade and transport has created global pathways of species transfer,” says Josephine Iacarella, an aquatic ecologist associated with Canada’s Institute of Ocean Sciences. “Species can be picked up in their native range and brought to a new location on the other side of the world, where if conditions are similar, they may be able to survive and establish [themselves]”—often at the expense of native animals.

Canals—from the English Midlands to upstate New York—have often been the answer for industrial entities seeking to deliver goods cheaper and faster than they can via land routes. But they’ve come with a price.

The sea lamprey, for example, which arrived in Lake Ontario by way of shipping canals stretching to the Atlantic, began its century-long wriggle into the other Great Lakes in 1938. In the ensuing decades, it preyed on the local trout, sturgeon, and salmon populations, heavily affecting American and Canadian fisheries. In the years since, control programs have reduced the lamprey to a fraction of its former presence. But as of November 2019, a quarter of a million lampreys remained in the lakes, according to the Great Lakes Fishery Commission.

The Suez Canal—gouged in Egypt, along the arid isthmus that separates Africa from the Middle East—is one of the world’s most famous aquatic shortcuts. For the last 151 years, it’s been a superhighway for species to enter, and change, the Mediterranean Sea. In recent years, the canal has become a divisive environmental issue among an international body of marine biologists and the Egyptian government, which hasn’t shown much interest in stopping, or even slowing, these migrations.

"‘Invasive species’ is a huge and nonspecific category," Moustafa Fouda, an adviser to Egypt's environment minister, told the Associated Press. Meaning that they’re not always bad. "They can even be productive, replacing species that are overfished, bringing economic benefits, or simply adapting to the new environment."

The inaction by the Egyptian government has caused considerable frustration for Bella Galil, an Israeli marine biologist at the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History in Tel Aviv who has spent several decades studying the eastern Mediterranean, and the animals that inhabit it.

“More than half of the consumable fish and invertebrates off the coast of Israel originated in the Red Sea,” says Galil. “It’s not like they added [economic] value [to the Mediterranean]. They replaced native species, and many native species had higher value to the consumer than nonnative species. Fishers are suffering.”

Invasive species haven’t merely survived in the Mediterranean; they’ve thrived. So many have made the migration here that the phenomenon has earned its own name: the Lessepsian migration, so named for Ferdinand de Lesseps, the Frenchman who supervised the Suez’s construction.

The invasive newcomers—which numbered around 1,000 species in 2014 (the last year for which data are available)—found that their commute was made easier by the geology of the region. The Red Sea is at a slightly higher altitude than the Mediterranean, so the water flows south to north. Those currents encourage the invasive species—from soldierfish and lionfish to moon crabs and jellyfish—through the choke point, and practically pull them into the brave new world of the Mediterranean.

“Every creature that’s swept through the Suez Canal is swept eastward along the Levantine coast—Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey—and then westward,” says Galil. “That’s the route. And since Israel is the first country [on that route], we get the largest number of species.”

Galil is a critic of the canal’s effects on the sea. From the beaches of Tel Aviv to Haifa Bay and Acre in the north, she says, invasive species have ravaged the coast, both outcompeting native species and causing coastal erosion. Red Sea mackerels have replaced Mediterranean meagres almost completely, and a foreign limpet species now coats the coasts of Israel, entirely erasing its native counterpart on the southern shore and aggressively taking up space on the northern one. While such impacts are easily seen in smaller habitats, the Mediterranean Sea is vast, making it harder to study—and its damage harder to calculate.

“Marine invasive species are very difficult to eradicate, owing to the open nature of marine systems (though there are some success stories in more enclosed areas),” says Iacarella. “Global shipping traffic is forecasted to increase dramatically [over the next several decades], and that will certainly increase the opportunity for worldwide species transfers.”

In 2015, the Suez Canal Corridor Area Project was completed, creating a newer, deeper Suez that merges with its predecessor. The New Suez Canal, as it’s called, has encouraged more movement of ships and aquatic creatures alike. As was the case during colonial rule in 19th-century Egypt, economic priorities have trumped ecological concerns.

The influx of invasives—unmitigated since the original Suez Canal opened—is expected to increase, and with it, the future of the Mediterranean’s native fish is likely to become starker. The warming of the sea—onset by climate change—has hastened and facilitated the invasion.

Egyptian marine biologist Tarek Temraz, who wrote the Egyptian environment ministry’s assessment on the New Suez Canal, focused on these other factors as direct causes of the Mediterranean’s shifts. "Invasions are a global trend due to pollution and climate change, the natural result of which is every species struggling to survive and searching for its optimal environment," Temraz told the AP.

An aspirational goal of Galil’s has been to increase the salinity of the Great Bitter Lakes north of Suez—naturally occurring saline deposits that she hopes would stymie the influx of salt-averse invasive species if they’re made even saltier. But she isn’t optimistic about how the situation will play out.

“I don’t think we’ve really started to absorb the enormity of these [invasions],” she says. “Not only in the Mediterranean, but the entire scale of [global] marine invasion[s]. We mainly look at land and inland waters; it’s where we live, it’s where we have access. But in the marine realm ... it’s a very, very complex Rubik's Cube.”

Like most human-fowl relationships, it's complicated.

Eleanore Sutherland, a laboratory science student, used to have to stop her car in the middle of the street to clear the geese out of the way.

“They don’t react to car honks,” she says, “so you had to get out and chase them in order to get through. I’ve been bitten for trying to not run them over.”

Many cities in the United States and Canada have a problem with Canada geese. Rochester, Minnesota, however, is a town that is uniquely proud of—and plagued by—its goose population.

Best known as the home of the world-famous Mayo Clinic, Rochester is also home to a subspecies of Canada goose that was once thought to be extinct: the giant Canada goose. These birds look just like regular Canada geese, only much, much larger. In fact, a giant Canada goose can weigh up to 24 pounds and have a wingspan of more than seven feet—twice the size of a normal goose.

Normally, the narrative around extinct and endangered species is one of how mankind has made the world uninhabitable for wildlife. Rochester's story is exactly the opposite: Its love affair with these geese was once so strong that it took a species from near extinction to omnipresent nuisance.

In its early days, Rochester was little more than a stop for stagecoach and railway travelers on their way through the Midwest. That changed in the 1880s when a tornado destroyed the town, killing 24 people and injuring 100.

Following this devastation, the local order of the Sisters of St. Francis fought to build a permanent medical facility in the region. Mother Alfred Moes approached a local physician, Dr. William Mayo, and offered to build a hospital if he and his sons would staff it. Dr. Mayo accepted, and thus changed the future of Rochester—and the international medical community. Today, Rochester is home to the top-rated hospital in the United States.

The Mayo family brought more to Rochester than just high-quality medical care. They also brought geese. In the 1920s, one of Dr. William Mayo’s sons, Dr. Charles Mayo, bought 15 Canada geese to keep on the 3,000-acre game refuge surrounding his mansion. An avid conservationist, he kept the geese for the pure enjoyment of feeding them while walking his grounds.

His flock quickly grew, attracting more than 600 geese—both giants and regular-size birds—from surrounding areas. The new population spread to Silver Lake, a 50-acre man-made reservoir in the center of town. And the Silver Lake geese soon became a staple of downtown life. Patients at the Mayo Clinic enjoyed feeding them corn during their stay. Some even bought additional geese to swell the downtown flock.

The goose population continued to grow, especially after a power plant started using Silver Lake as a heat sink in 1948. Under different circumstances, this could have been a dangerous disruption for local wildlife. But it ensured the growth and survival of the flock by preventing Silver Lake from freezing during the winter, turning it into a “goose hot tub.” Instead of migrating south each year, the Rochester geese began to overwinter at Silver Lake, protected from the harsh Minnesota climate by the power plant’s steamy discharge. By the early 1950s, more than 6,000 geese lived year-round in downtown Rochester near Silver Lake, and more joined them during each migration season.

In 1962, wildlife specialist Harold Hanson of the Illinois Natural History Survey made a surprising discovery. While conducting research on the growing Rochester goose population, in partnership with the Minnesota Department of Conservation, he realized that the large geese of Silver Lake were even larger than previously thought. They were so heavy, in fact, that the scientists were convinced that the scales they used to weigh the birds were broken. After buying bags of flour and sugar at a local grocery store to verify their weight, they realized that the scales were indeed correct.

And so the world learned that Rochester’s geese were actually Branta canadensis maxima—a giant subspecies of the Canada goose thought to have been extinct for more than three decades.

To make sure that they stayed not extinct, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources put strict hunting protections in place for the birds in Rochester. At the same time, it launched a national revitalization effort, transplanting giant Canada geese from the Midwest to protected locations on the East Coast.

The goose population in Rochester immediately skyrocketed. At its peak, in 2005, there were nearly 40,000 of the giant birds on the balmy waters of Silver Lake—compared with a human population in Rochester of less than 100,000—and their honking could be heard for miles.

Not that many people complained. Rochesterites loved the geese, and the geese loved Rochester. The warm water and unrestricted habitat were an avian paradise. The geese became the city's symbol, both officially and unofficially. Feeding them was a common pastime for residents and visitors alike. The birds’ image was emblazoned on parking garages, dental offices, and restaurants. In 1980, the city council adopted a new city flag design that prominently featured three giant Canada geese flying above the Rochester skyline. Goose statues decorated by local artists were put up throughout the city, creating prime photo opportunities.

But as both the human and goose populations continued to grow, their coexistence grew tense. After a decades-long feeding program that had begun in the 1930s, the geese were comfortable with humans—some would say too comfortable—and felt empowered to harass anyone in their path, expecting, and sometimes demanding, to be fed.

“When I was a young kid, I saw a one-footed goose at Goose Poop Park [aka Silver Lake Park],” says Sophie Goodner, 25. “I thought it looked lonely, so I went over to feed it. It saw the food in my hand and charged at me. I saw that one-footed monster several other times, and it charged me every single time.”

Bryan Mullen, a former Mayo Clinic nurse who lived in Rochester in the 2000s, recalls being afraid to go onto the patio of his condo because of the geese. “There were always two or three of them hanging around on the patio, honking at our window. I didn’t want to mess with them.”

But the goose chases and intimidations paled in comparison to the complaints about what the geese left behind. A regular Canada goose can produce up to three pounds of fecal matter a day. With tens of thousands of giant geese living on Silver Lake, many public areas in downtown Rochester became unusable. By 2002, nearly all of the waterways surrounding the lake were contaminated with goose fecal matter.

Nevertheless, Rochester’s humans and geese coexisted in a mostly peaceful manner—until 2006, when a potential avian influenza (H5N1) outbreak gripped the city and panicked its residents. The virus was first detected in geese in China, and countries throughout Asia that year were reporting a growing number of human fatalities from H5N1 outbreaks. While there were no reported cases in the United States at the time—including Rochester—some alarmists considered an outbreak inevitable. Faced with the possibility that one could potentially occur right next to the Mayo Clinic's large population of medically fragile patients, the city decided that it had to act to control the goose population.

But residents were divided on how best to address this potential threat. Some advocated lethal measures, including increasing the early season hunting and oiling eggs to prevent embryonic development. Many others, however, advocated on behalf of the geese.

Tensions ran high, and the city held two contentious open Goose Population Control Meetings to discuss options. During one of these meetings, resident Amy King—one of many attendees vehemently opposed to lethal measures—decried the extreme proposals as “cold-hearted and barbaric.”

After much debate, the city chose to protect the geese by making Silver Lake less inviting. In 2007, officials placed vegetation buffers—composed of prairie grasses and wetland plants—to deter nesting along the shoreline, and removed the goose feeding stations that ringed the lake.

The following year, the coal-burning power plant that prevented Silver Lake from freezing shut down. In the years since, Rochester’s resident goose population has plummeted. According to recent tallies by the Zumbro Valley Audubon society, there are now a mere 10,000 geese at Silver Lake.

Giant Canada geese are still a fixture in Rochester. The Canadian Honker remains a favorite restaurant, and the local amateur baseball team is still called the Rochester Honkers.

“Everyone [from Rochester] has such strong feelings about geese that one mention completely throws the conversation [in] that direction,” says Danny Luedkte, a former resident now living in Vermont. “I miss people from Rochester. No one else gets it.”

But as the goose population has dwindled, the city’s obsession with the giant birds has lessened. “With fewer geese around, there are fewer goose-and-human encounters,” says Dan Eckberg, a geographic information systems planner. “When I was a kid, everyone had a story about being chased by the geese. It’s just not the same anymore.”

In 2018 the city considered new designs for its municipal flag. Two of three three finalists did not feature any geese whatsoever.

“I just followed a trail of excrement.”

Zachary Hajian-Forooshani never expected to find snails in the mountainous, coffee-producing heart of Puerto Rico. In 2016, when he was a University of Michigan masters student, he and his peers noticed some curious excrement on the undersides of coffee plants, which they eventually traced to the invasive Asian tramp snail. “Cool things pop out and you follow up with them,” says Hajian-Forooshani, who has made the snails and their colorful poop the subject of his doctoral research. “I just followed a trail of excrement.”

The oddly colored snail poop was, not coincidentally, the same bright-orange color as coffee rust, a parasitic fungus that’s coming for your morning buzz.

Coffee leaf rust has been a menace for more than a century. After appearing on Sri Lanka in the late 1800s, it enveloped the island within 20 years, ridding what was once the world’s greatest coffee exporter of its cash crop in near entirety. Traveling on the wind across Africa’s coffee belt, coffee rust reached the Atlantic coast by the 1950s. Its arrival in Brazil in 1970 sowed panic in a heavily coffee-reliant economy, and within 12 years, no coffee-producing region in Latin America, where seven-eighths of the world’s joe is produced, was rust-free. Today, 70 percent of Central American farms are infected, costing the region $3.2 billion in damage and lost income.

Much to Hajian-Forooshani’s delight, these tiny mollusks were eating coffee leaf rust without damaging the plant itself. Along with two fellow researchers, he has published a new study that explores the role this invasive land snail may play in the war against coffee leaf rust. Ironically, this gastropod, which has a reputation for feeding on crops and gardens, may be an unexpected hero for coffee farmers and consumers alike.

Historically, attempts to stop the spread of rust have proved short-term solutions at best. “It’s a relatively fast-evolving fungus,” says Hajian-Forooshani. Honduran farmers tried planting rust-resistant hybrid coffee plants several years ago. “It was going to be the coffee leaf that saved us from rust,” he says, “but within a year it started to lose its resistance.” Not even 80-mile “safety zones” and diesel-fuel laced herbicides were enough to contain the spores that—let’s remember—crossed the Atlantic Ocean on wind alone.

The efforts thwarted by the rust make Hajian-Forooshani’s findings all the more shocking. “We didn’t have it anywhere in our minds that such a small snail could be eating rust like this,” he says. His team was stationed in the buggy, verdant mountains of the country’s Utuado region, collecting data on rust, or roya as it’s known locally, from farm to farm. “We noticed this kind of orange squiggle on the undersides of the leaves. Once we realized it was poop, we started finding the snails all over.”

After gathering samples of snails and rust-infected leaves, the team returned to their makeshift laboratory in the basement of their homestay. “We conducted the experiments in pie tins,” says Hajian-Forooshani. “It was no CDC.” The lack of state-of-the-art facilities, however, didn’t keep the team from conducting unprecedented research.

Their newly released paper, titled “Insights From Excrement,” explores the implications of the snails' unlikely Carribean diet. Despite being one of the most widely distributed invasive land snails, it reads, the species is known to be strictly herbivorous. In Puerto Rico, however, the snails pass on leaves for a larger helping of rust, imparting its poop with the telltale bright-orange tone. The shift is unheard-of, and significant: The study shows that when placed alone with a rust-infected leaf, a single snail can reduce spore coverage by 30 percent in 24 hours. While digestion may not render the spores inviable, Hajian-Forooshani notes that, at the very least, snail poop is far less wind-dispersible than naked spores.

While the snails may be a solution to coffee leaf rust, scientists advise against deploying an army of gastropods across the continent just yet.

Oliver Windram is a Research Fellow at the Imperial College London who studies fungal pathology. He distinguishes between specialists and generalists in the realm of biological controls, the former being, say, parasitic wasps who evolved alongside host caterpillars and cannot reproduce outside of their native ecosystem. “The chances of the wasp finding a new host in another location and becoming a problem are extremely minimal,” says Windram.

Snails, on the other hand, “are terrible generalists—they’ll eat almost anything." They changed their diet in Puerto Rico, so who knows what economically important crop they could ravage in Colombia, Brazil, or Peru?

“I’d be very worried about moving snails around the world,” says Windram. He advises simple biodiversity. “If you plant non-host trees around an infected area, when the wind blows, the spores are more likely to just land on a non-host plant, germinate, and die.” A quiet ending to a centuries-long, global scourge.

Hajian-Forooshani has similar concerns about scaling the miniscule champion to such a gargantuan threat. As unsure as we are of the snail’s potential benefits, we’re still unsure of the potential danger it may pose. “There’s such a long history of people making a relatively simple observation in the field and saying, ‘This snail can save everything, let’s introduce it into every coffee-producing country in the world,’” says Hajian-Forooshani, “and then it just messes everything up.” Believe it or not, there are worse things than running out of coffee.

They're just doing what sharks do.

The headline seemed straight out of the opening crawl of a bad movie. “Cluster of Sharks in One Spot Off Carolinas Coast Grows More Intense, and Mysterious,” read a February 10, 2020, story in The Charlotte Observer. And satellite data seemed to back it up: eight great whites’ tracking devices pinging in waters right off the border of North and South Carolina, with no tagged sharks elsewhere along the East Coast, according to the ocean data nonprofit OCEARCH. The sharks first appeared in the area in late January, but a recent OCEARCH map had seemed to depict them aggregating more closely. “Will they be voting?” wondered Twitter user Jorg Feldstein. “Bermuda Triangle,” commented Facebook user David Clouser.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, scientists say this mysterious cluster is neither mysterious nor a cluster. “It’s totally expected that the sharks would be there,” says Greg Skomal, a marine biologist at Boston University and the author of The Shark Handbook. “This is what they do.”

It’s not news that great whites love the southeastern coast of the United States. The migratory species has been observed wintering in the waters off the Carolinas and Georgia since the 1980s, Skomal says. “They’re on their normal migration, on their way back up north to cooler waters,” says Brian Dorn, the associate director of the North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher. These waters between the Gulf Stream and the coast are cool and nutrient-rich, and often contain an abundance of prey. The sharks’ migration closely mirrors the migration of baitfish, and while baitfish are too small to be a worthwhile meal for the sharks, the predators that feed on them are the perfect size.

Although eight sharks are clearly visible on OCEARCH’s map, they only seem to be tightly knit because of the scale of the map, which extends from North Carolina to the Bahamas. Closer in, it’s apparent that the sharks are pretty spread out. “This is not a cluster,” Skomal says. A real cluster of sharks is called an aggregation, and one of the best-known aggregations appears off Cape Cod in the summer, including in 2019. “Cape Cod amounts to a 40-mile stretch with hundreds of sharks,” Skomal says. “When you look at the Carolinas, that’s thousands of square miles and just a handful of sharks.” In other words, if you were sitting in a boat at the heart of the cluster, “you’d be hard-pressed to see one,” he adds. Great white sharks are not known to school or socialize, and often hunt across a wide geographic area. Aggregations, when they occur, signal an abundance of of prey, such as the bountiful, blubbery pile of seals that draws them to Cape Cod.

OCEACH’s data spotlights an unexpected problem that great white shark researchers often encounter: The massive fish are actually rather difficult to track. OCEARCH tracks them with tags on their dorsal fins that send pings to satellites—but only when those fins emerge from the water. This kind of tagging works great for marine mammals, such as elephant seals, but sharks have one crucial difference: They don’t need to come up for air. “In order to ping, the tags also have to be out of the surface for several seconds, making it an even rarer occurrence. So sharks are most easily tracked when they’re feeding on species near the surface, especially air-breathing seals. “Great whites do have the unique habit of coming up from underneath seals and knocking them out of the water,” Dorn says.

Some tagged sharks go months without appearing on tracking maps, says Dorn, so most of the time scientists don’t know where they are. And by the time the data are put together, they could be somewhere else entirely; great whites can dive thousands of feet below the surface and swim at 25 miles per hour. Some of the sharks from OCEARCH’s “cluster” could be far away now.

All the challenges in interpreting satellite tagging data begins with tagging them in the first place: a very personal interaction with a very scary fish. “In order to put those tags on the sharks, you have to bait them, capture them, haul them out of the water, and drill the tags into their dorsal fin,” Skomal says, adding, perhaps unnecessarily, “These are not small animals." It can take hours, by which point the animal is exhausted and potentially acting erratically. They’ll return to normal, but this also means that the tagging needs to take place far from shore and beach goers.

Skomal, who studies great whites when they’re off heavily touristed Cape Cod, uses acoustic tags, which send a ping whenever a shark swims within a couple hundred yards of a receiver. The system can then alert lifeguards, who can pull swimmers out of the water as a precaution. If you do venture out for a crisp February swim, Dorn says to keep an eye out for large schools of baitfish or feeding seabirds in the distance—both signs there could be a shark nearby. “If you’ve gone to the beach your entire life these animals have always been there,” he adds.

The final nail in the coffin of the “mysterious cluster” is that OCEARCH’s tracking team hasn’t been able to spot a great white off the Carolinas for the past three weeks, Skomal says. He chalks up the mysterious cluster’s recent virality as a product of the news cycle. “Sharks are always a fun story,” he says. “People can only listen to so much election coverage.”

In 1892, a newspaper described a cave that sheltered 21 formerly enslaved people. Ohioans are still looking for it.

When Donald Altstaetter was growing up, not far from Middletown, Ohio, he overheard a mysterious conversation between a local landowner and a hunter. The landowner was willing to allow the hunter onto his property, but only if he stayed away from a specific area. “If I find out you’ve been there, I’ll never allow you back,” Altstaetter remembers the landowner saying.

Alstaetter is now a retired high school principal in his 90s, yet all these decades later, he has never forgotten that conversation. The landowner’s words remind him of a dark local legend, rooted in several newspaper articles from 1892. Before the Civil War, homes in this part of rural Ohio were a part of the Underground Railroad. Once, the story goes, a nearby cave provided shelter to 21 people who were escaping slavery in the South. But the cave is said to have filled with toxic fumes, and purportedly became a sealed tomb.

More than 150 years after the end of the Civil War, the story of the cave still has a remarkable hold on the local imagination. Marlese Durr, a sociology professor at Wright State University who has studied the legacy of slavery, calls it “one of the first mysteries of the Underground Railroad in Ohio.” Durr hopes that it will inspire people to look more closely at history, and help them see that slavery is not a closed chapter. “They think it is over, but it isn’t over,” she says.

On a late-winter day in early 2019, before invasive honeysuckle has had a chance to strangle the forest floor, Altstaetter walks slowly toward the edge of a patch of woods. His steps are labored, his walker sinks into the mud with each step. “Up there,” he says, referring to the cave. “It’s up there.” Years earlier, he had seen a spot where the rocks looked disturbed and inconsistent with the surroundings.

Above him, runoff from a spring cascades down a hillside, covering jumbles of boulders in a watery sheen. Madison Township, on the west side of the lumbering Great Miami River near Middletown, is honeycombed with numerous such creeks, ravines, abandoned mines—and, just maybe, caves.

Chris Carberry, a longtime local who has searched for the cave, has joined today’s search. We leave Altstaetter on the path below, wondering whether we could solve a mystery that has haunted this township for generations. Following Alstaetter’s instructions, we climb and inspect a gorge, examining the occasional boulder, scrutinizing each outcropping of rock.

But after two hours of searching, we come up empty. Halfway up the slope, there were some neatly laid rocks, as if someone had once tried to build a wall here. But there is no sign of a cave.

In the summer of 1892, a writer identified only as “John” wrote a dramatic account about a cave filled with poisonous gases and filled with skeletons, and claimed that it had been sealed so that no one would ever stumble into it again. The account said the cave was six miles from Middletown, Ohio, and quoted John’s father: “I saw the bones of many men, how many I could not count. John, I will never, never enter that cave again…”

John’s narrative might well have been forgotten, but in the 1980s, a local historian from the Middletown area rediscovered it and wrote a new article for the local paper. The dispatch launched a generation of would-be spelunkers, including myself. The search is not entirely about adventure-seeking—it is also about paying homage to what would be a horrific incident along the Underground Railroad. Some have suggested that a memorial would be in order, if the story is true.

Ohio was one of the busiest places on the Underground Railroad, the somewhat misleading name given to a network of abolitionists and safe houses that helped enslaved people escape to the North. In the countryside west of Middletown, a network of abolitionist Quakers provided shelter as escapees made their way to Canada.

According to John’s account, one summer night in 1849, a group of escapees took shelter in the home of a Hamilton, Ohio, abolitionist and physician, about 10 miles south of Middletown. As the night wore on, the physician grew nervous that bounty hunters were approaching. He loaded his guests into two wagons and headed north, following an empty road that wound along Elk Creek. John claimed that the doctor ushered the group into a little-known cave, where they’d be cramped and cold but safe and unseen. The cave was on the property of an abolitionist sympathizer—John’s father.

In the newspaper story, the doctor runs to the farmhouse and knocks. It is well after midnight. “I told him what I knew of the cave, that it was a deathtrap and that I was sure not one of the twenty-one would emerge alive,” John’s father says. He tells the doctor that geologists from the “Department of Washington City, DC” had also visited the cave, several years before, and had never returned.

As unlikely as the story of the cave may sound, many locals have tried to confirm its existence. “I think it's 50-50," says Larry Helton, a local historian who has searched for it. Jeff Richardson, a geology professor at Columbus State Community College, says it might not have been a cave at all, but something known as a "joint" in the rock, which is more like a crack or a fissure. Altstaetter, who compiled a dossier on the cave, agrees, and theorizes that natural gas could have caused suffocation inside. (Natural gas is not known to be found in the area, but Chris Carberry, whose ancestors were in the West Elkton Quaker underground, says a well driller found evidence of natural gas on his property.)

Many experts on local geology are skeptical. “I personally doubt the account,” says Bill Addington, an avid caver and member of the Cincinnati Grotto Club. “My experience is that in southwest Ohio, the limestone bedding planes are too thin to support the development of caves that would be large enough for people to enter.” Another leading cave expert went so far as to call the story “rubbish.”

One location that comes up frequently among those searching for the cave, including Alstaetter, is the Elk Creek MetroPark in Butler County, but Kelly Barkley, the communications director for the park system, says that’s just a rumor. “No past or current mapping suggests or supports the existence of any cave," she says.

Still, Erin Hazleton, a cave specialist with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, says subterranean caverns in Butler County aren’t out of the question. Hazleton says that the area “does have karst features such as sinkholes and caves,” which form when carbonate bedrock is dissolved by water. Cavers have scoured history books for leads, she says, “but it is certainly possible we missed a cave, and we find new caves every year as testament to that.”

In 1997, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, prompted by Alstaetter, commissioned a study to try and find the cave. After an exhausting field search and numerous interviews, the report came to no conclusion. The study was led by Mary Ann Olding, who has researched the history of black rural communities in Ohio. She spent days with archaeologists exploring a tract of land in Madison Township, but came up empty. “Still, I think it seems believable,” she says of John’s story.

Tom Calacro, the author of several books about the Underground Railroad, including The Search for The Underground Railroad in South Central Ohio, also finds the story plausible. He believes the absence of records of the tragedy is easily explainable. “Slaves didn’t have last names, they were considered property, they could disappear very easily,” he says. “I think it is very possible they could have died in the cave, and no one would know what happened to them.”

Could the story somehow have been a work of serialized fiction? Durr, the sociology professor, doesn’t think so. “I think the story is very plausible,” she says. “Why make something like that up?” She wonders whether the tale of the cave could perhaps be recovered in some family’s oral history. The Underground Railroad was secret by nature, and so the historical record is often patchy, but the stories of formerly enslaved people can live on among their descendants. “They made up songs and spirituals to tell the stories of their journey,” Durr says.

There is one other scrap of evidence that casts doubt on the story of the cave. “John” wrote that geologists from Washington, D.C., visited the cave in 1845, and never emerged. The U.S. Geological Survey didn’t exist then; Douglas Wilson, staff historian for the Army Corps of Engineers, couldn't find a record of any geologists employed at the time, or any casualties.

Even after all the unsuccessful efforts to find the cave, the mystery lives on in this part of Ohio, and locals are likely to keep searching for it. Donald Anstaetter retired in the early 1990s and moved to Florida, but he never forgot the cave. In fact, it was one of the reasons that he recently moved back to Ohio, to spend the late years of his life. "I drove a thousand miles back to Ohio just so I could look for the cave,” Altstaetter says. Recent surgeries have slowed him, but he says his quest will continue. “I am thoroughly, totally convinced it exists, and I hope to see it before I die.”

Book waste can be beautiful.

The purse is plenty pretty on the outside: emerald silk, embroidered with dainty yellow, purple, and peachy-pink blooms, arcing out of metallic vases. But things get more interesting when one pries the lustrous little parcel open. Between the seams and under the stitches, there’s something faded and faint, but unmistakable: a blue "Q" tucked between two stems, a stylized red "M" near one edge, rows and rows of tidy, brownish letters. In the belly of the bag, where one might expect just fabric, there is instead text—four parchment fragments, cut from a medieval manuscript.

Whoever made the bag, likely in Italy in the 17th century, started by deconstructing a volume and snipping the bifolia—the sheets of parchment that were folded to make the pages—into four tapered triangles. They stitched these together around the edges to form a little skeleton to build the rest of the bag around. The fragment is “an integral part of the purse itself,” says Jay Moschella, curator of rare books at the Boston Public Library, who recently acquired the object from Bernard Quaritch Ltd., a London dealer. The bits of bifolia wouldn’t otherwise be visible, but are here because the lining has gone missing. “It’s the non-decorative insides you weren’t meant to see,” he adds. “It looks fascinating now, but when it was produced, you would have had no idea that there was a fragment inside of it.”

For centuries, pieces of printed material have turned up in all sorts of surprising places. New books were routinely bound with fragments taken from older ones, or with bits of manuscripts, sheet music, and assorted print-shop castoffs. This scrap material, known as book waste, was up for grabs for all sorts of reasons, from the mundane to the doctrinal. Repurposing it was a reasonable way to dispose of and reuse, say, old contracts. On a larger scale, it also made use of the material in monastic libraries that, after the Reformation, no longer had so many devoted readers.

Even if a religious schism stripped a volume’s value as something to be read, studied, or recited, its raw materials were still useful, Megan Heffernan, an English professor at DePaul University, has explained. Parchment, which is not paper but untanned animal skins, was "such an incredibly flexible and durable substance,” Moschella says. “That’s one of the main reasons that so many early books were cut up and dismembered—usually to use in other books, but for all kids of purposes. It’s a very valuable and useful commodity.” And sometimes it could make for odd juxtapositions. Take the case of a 13th-century Norwegian manuscript that drew on Marie de France’s 12th-century verse about courtly and passionate love. Pieces of it wound up as the scaffolding for a bishop’s mitre, so a 16th-century Icelandic man of God unwittingly performed his duties with borderline-bawdy words floating above his head. “In these uses, [a text’s] previous existence as a book was a total afterthought,” Moschella says.

There’s much more to learn about this little purse, which measures about five by six inches. “We can only see so much of it, and we’ve only had it for a week,” Moschella says. Based on what he can decipher so far, Moschella surmises that while the purse seems to date from the 17th century, the text is much older. He believes it was probably part of a 14th- or 15th-century Italian breviary, a liturgical text that guided readers such as monks and clerics through daily prayers and hymns.

One hint was the style of handwriting, which can be a way to “very loosely date” manuscripts, Moschella says. Even though it’s faded, he adds, “you can see enough of it to get the main features.” This manuscript was written in rotunda, a rounded script typical of southern Europe. And based on the portions still legible, Moschella says, they might conclude that these are prayers that were pretty common and might appear in countless other old manuscripts. (Resources such as the Fragmentarium, a collaborative compendium of digitized fragments, sometimes make it possible for researchers to connect such scattered bits with their original sources.) More evidence that the manuscript was a breviary comes from “rubrics,” or little bits of red text that give readers instructions about what they should be doing during a service. “You can see some of those in this purse,” Moschella says. “Just tiny snippets of them.”

The Rare Books & Manuscripts Department at the Boston Public Library is currently closed for renovations. When it reopens in 2021, Moschella says, anyone will be able to wander in and ask for a glimpse of the purse with a hidden bookish streak. Libraries are archives of the written word, and maybe it’s fitting that that’s where this purse ended up. It’s an accidental archive of its own, preserving something that was never meant to be seen again.

Their names are Molly and Darla.

One day last May, Brian Engh was trying to spot dinosaur bones along a rock ledge in the Morrison Formation, a famed fossil site in the western United States, when he noticed something strange at his feet. It was the faint outline of what appeared to be a limb bone, and it was more than six feet long. Engh, a paleoartist who was there to observe dinosaur fossils in the field, couldn’t believe his eyes. “It was just way too big,” he writes in an email. The bone looked bigger than any bone he’d ever seen. So Engh hollered to his colleague Matt Wedel, an anatomist and paleontologist at the Western University of Health Sciences, who was studying fossilized poop nearby. Wedel came over and knew that a bone that big could only have come from one thing: Brachiosaurus, a gigantic, rare sauropod that lived in the Late Jurassic.

Engh, Wedel, and paleontologist Thuat Tran had discovered the dinosaur’s right humerus. “It was an exciting discovery but also a daunting one,” Engh says. “In part because finding any bones from Brachiosaurus is so rare, and in part because this one was perched on the edge of a gulch.” They returned in October to excavate the fossil, hauling the 1,020-pound bone out of a remote ravine with the help of two local Clydesdale horses, Darla and Molly. The fossil will soon go on display at the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum in Vernal, Utah. “I’ve been working in the Morrison Formation for 10 years, and I never anticipated we would dig up a Brachiosaurus,” says ReBecca Hunt-Foster, the park paleontologist for Dinosaur National Monument, who was involved in the excavation. “I never even thought we’d see one.”

The Morrison Formation is somewhere between 147 and 156 million years old. The vast majority of the dinosaurs excavated there come from the Morrison’s ashy upper layers, called the Brushy Basin Member. The first Brachiosaurus fossil, a partial skeleton, was discovered in 1900 in the Brushy Basin near Fruita, Colorado; no one has found a humerus since the 1950s. “It’s a rare element in a rare type of skeleton,” Foster says.

There are only 10 confirmed Brachiosaurus fossils in the world, none of which are complete. By comparison, the Morrison Formation has produced more than 200 fossils of Camarasaurus and more than 100 fossils of Diplodocus, Apatosaurus, and Brontosaurus, all of which were big, long-necked plant-eaters that lived in the same era, Foster says. “We don’t really know why that is,” says John Foster, the curator of collections at the Utah Field House and an expert on the formation. It could be that Brachiosauruses lived farther away and their bodies washed into the area, or that they occupied environments ill-suited to preserving bone. But despite their rarity, Brachiosaurus is pretty famous, for a dinosaur: It even appeared in the 1993 film Jurassic Park.

Engh’s group was focused on an older, less-studied section of the Morrison called the Salt Wash Member. Here, dinosaur bones are usually easy to spot. Over millions of years, the porous bones have soaked up heavy metals such as iron and uranium from the surrounding sandstone, turning them dark purple or brownish-red, Engh says. Paleontologists have always known the Salt Wash has much fossilized material as the Brushy Basin, but its landscape is much harder to access. “It’s much tougher terrain, an alternating series of hard sandstone benches and juniper and pinyon trees,” Foster says. The most visible fossils in the Salt Wash poke out of the exposed rock of cliff faces, which can be high-up and impossible to access for excavation. “The best you might get is a cross-section of a bone,” Foster says.

Fortunately, the Brachiosaurus humerus was on the ground, lying in what looked like loose dirt. After Engh and Wedel found it in May, they covered the bone up with some soil and brush, just in case another prospector came by and poached it. But they knew they had to remove the humerus before the winter, when freezing and thawing could splinter the bone to pieces. They returned with Foster in June, to begin excavation and figure out how to move the enormous bone.

Foster had come with his whole family: his wife, Hunt-Foster, and his kids, Ruby and Harrison. Luckily, nine-year-old Ruby had an idea. “She always wants to find a way to involve horses in everything,” Hunt-Foster says. The suggestion sounded like a joke, but it actually made sense. They didn’t have the money or the time to lift the bone out with a helicopter, and trying to lug it with people alone seemed a Sisyphian task. Foster turned to his museum’s gift shop manager, whose cousin had a pair of Clydesdale horses that love to pull heavy things.

In October, armed with all the right permits and the horses Molly and Darla, the paleontologists were ready to move the bone. “It reminded me of Oceans Eleven,” Foster says. “Everybody had their specialty. We had a rope guy. We had the horse people.” They cocooned the fossil in strips of burlap dipped in plaster of Paris, to prevent any unwanted dents, and rolled it onto a utility trailer that was hitched to Molly and Darla. The trickiest part was maneuvering the bone out of the ravine: The group had to rig a winch and pulley so that the horses could drag the bone to a stable, higher ledge. The kids on site ran back and forth between the bone and the horses to shout commands. “It was a game of telephone, telling us when to pull and when to stop,” Foster says. “It was quite the operation.”

After several hours, right as the sun began to set, Molly and Darla finally pulled the bone out of the ravine and onto flat ground. They dragged it the last half-mile in a few minutes. “It was deeply satisfying to use two very large animals to pull out a piece of a truly titanic animal,” Wedel wrote on his blog. Engh is working on a documentary about the discovery, the first part of which can be viewed here. Though the bone has yet to go on official display at the Utah Field House, visitors can see it being prepared behind a window in the lobby. For more intrepid dinosaur fans, Engh recommends going straight to Dinosaur National Monument to see heaps of fossils that are partially exposed in the rock. These dinosaurs aren’t meant to be excavated, so don’t bother bringing your Clydesdales.

Yossi Lugasi spent decades making portraits of famous people out of smashed ceramics.

Yossi Lugasi was tired during the final months of his life. He had a hard time getting out of bed, moving or eating. His wife, Yaffa, begged him to finish the portrait of Donald Trump he started working on when he was still feeling better. Lugasi would get up, drag himself to his work table, glue some orange, pink and yellow mosaic pieces to a net, and go back to bed.

Lugasi passed away a year ago. The small mosaic portrait of Trump hangs in a discreet corner of the living room in his apartment, in the Israeli port city of Jaffa. It is hidden among hundreds of such portraits, mostly of Zionist leaders, Jewish historical figures, and Israeli pop culture icons. The portraits cover the walls, doors, door frames and floors of the humble housing project apartment. They spill out onto the roof: artists and actors, prime ministers, presidents and philosophers, Holocaust martyrs, war heroes, members of failed American peace conferences, and the spy Eli Cohen, portrayed by Sacha Baron Cohen in the Netflix series The Spy. The portraits hang on walls on the roof, overlooking the Jaffa projects, blending into a landscape of solar water heaters and clothes lines.

Over four decades, Lugasi—who left school during the 5th grade, was barely literate and never studied art formally—created no less than 1,090 mosaics.

Yaffa Lugasi, who retired a few years ago from her position as a departmental secretary at the Electric Company, gives tours of her home for a modest fee, which also includes a film about her husband’s life. She says the house is the world’s largest mosaic creation. According to her, the family contacted Guinness World Records to have it included, but was turned away under the pretext that the house belongs in a new category, which Guinness has yet to define.

Yaffa seems to be waiting for her husband to come out of the bedroom and join the tour she gives me and Corinna, my photographer. She met Yossi in 1977, and they had three children together. “Yossi never had a regular job,” she says. “This is how he grew up, outside the establishment. I became the breadwinner and he stayed home to cook. I did this out of love, to give him peace of mind.”

After dropping his children at school, Lugasi would sit down to work in a tiny room at home. He created the mosaics with a technique he developed himself: he made pencil drawings on an insect protection net covered with a special substance. He then glued on the mosaic stones, which were actually bits of tiles, ceramics, and construction waste that he collected and smashed to pieces.

Lugasi was born in Morocco in 1949, to a family of eight siblings. In 1954, during the great immigration of Jews from Islamic countries to Israel, his family arrived at a tent camp for recent immigrants in the Beit She'an Valley. His mother Aliyah worked as a seamstress, and his father Eliyahu painted houses. Lugasi’s workroom features a murky oil painting of a hill covered with tents. At the front of the painting a woman sits on a pile of suitcases, watching children playing in the mud.

I imagine little Lugasi, wet and shivering in a rainwater-soaked tent. Avi Lugasi, his son, interrupts my fantasy of romanticized poverty. “This is not a sad painting,” he laughs. “A child doesn’t feel poor. He tells himself: ‘My parents have a harsh, complicated life, but that’s not my problem. I’m happy. I have a puddle of mud.’” But in 1963, the hardship and the alienation became too much, and the Lugasis moved to Jaffa. “Jaffa reminded them of Casablanca: a town with mixed population, sea, fishing,” Avi says. Lugasi dedicated one of his Jaffa apartment roof walls, not far from the Ashkenazi Holocaust hero portraits, to Arab music stars. “He had Arab friends and he wanted for them to have reason to come to the museum,” his son explains.

Jaffa was not an easy place to live in. Lugasi left school during the 5th grade and went to work. “One day he passed by the grocer, stole some food, got caught and was taken to the Welfare Office,” Yaffa says. “A social worker who was talking to him gave him a pencil and a paper, and he began to draw.” He never stopped.

“He would walk on foot from Jaffa to Tel Aviv and stand for hours in front of an art supplies store just to ‘fill up’,” with inspiration, Yaffa says. When he turned 13, as a bar mitzvah present, he went to visit his friends from the absorption camp back in the 1950s. The friends had moved to the poor ‘“development town” of Beit She'an. The camp was razed, and beneath it were found the remains of the grand Roman and Byzantine city Scythopolis and its many mosaics. As an adult, when he couldn’t find a place to store drawings that were vulnerable to the rain and sun, Lugasi chose as his medium the eternal mosaic, which, like in Scythopolis, never peels or fades.

Today, impossible meetings occur on Lugasi’s roof, under the strong Jaffa sun: Ben Gurion is watching Clinton and Elvis is staring at Itzhak Rabin. One could expect Lugasi to reject those people, the representatives of an establishment that marginalized him. Avi says his father did the exact opposite: He built a shrine to them, and so reclaimed power. “His creation,” Avi says, “complements his life story.”

3,000-year-old microparticles prove the fruit traveled across the ocean with early Pacific Islanders.

A typical day for Monica Tromp might include scraping tartar off 3,000-year-old human incisors. “It’s basically like being a dental hygienist for the dead,” says Tromp, an Affiliated Researcher at New Zealand’s University of Otago, about her work studying ancient Pacific Islanders’ diets.

The hot, humid climate of places like Vanuatu, an archipelago 1,100 miles east of Australia, makes it notoriously difficult to find archaeological plant and animal remains. So for the past several years, Tromp has turned to an unlikely treasure trove of culinary data on early Pacific Islanders’ diets: the calcified plaque, called calculus or tartar, left on ancient human teeth. Now, in a new paper, Tromp and her fellow researchers have solved an agricultural mystery that has puzzled archaeologists: the migration of the banana.

Bananas are staple crops across the Pacific Islands. Researchers have long suspected that the earliest mariners brought the fruit, along with other staples such as taro, yams, chickens, and pigs, with them when they first began navigating canoes from Southeast Asia across the Pacific 3,000 years ago, settling uninhabited islands along the way.

“They supposedly brought this whole transported landscape,” Tromp says. But the difficulty of finding preserved plant or animal matter in humid island climates meant that archaeologists lacked material proof that Vanuatu's earliest settlers carried specific fruits, including bananas. Instead, researchers relied on contemporary linguistic evidence: Pacific Islanders, for example, had very similar words for different foods, suggesting a single ancient origin for the plants.

Now, Tromp and her team have used banana microparticles, preserved in teeth from a 3,000-year-old human burial site, to show that bananas began their trans-Pacific journey with Oceania’s earliest settlers. Their find supports the theory that early settlers traveled with a floating plant and animal menagerie. It also adds credence to the increasingly accepted idea that indigenous people across the world actively shaped rainforest ecosystems once assumed to be largely untouched by humans.

The trail of evidence starts in Teouma, a cemetary of the ancient Lapita people who first settled Remote Oceania, the archipelagos east of the Solomon Islands. Located on Efate Island, in present-day Vanuatu, the cemetery is a rare example of Lapita material culture, well-preserved because the bodies are buried in limestone. The skeletons at Teouma had been decapitated, likely as part of rituals related to ancestor worship, says Tromp. But their teeth were left behind. After initial excavations in the early 2000s, researchers stored the remains at a museum in Vanuatu. That’s where, more than a decade later, Tromp found them, and began investigating the tales their teeth could tell.

While tartar is a bane for contemporary dental hygienists, it’s a boon for ancient ones. Throughout our lives, mineral microparticles from the plants we eat, called phytoliths, get trapped in our plaque. When our plaque calcifies, it preserves the particles, Tromp writes, “much like the infamous Jurassic Park mosquito in amber.” To study these microparticles, Tromp scraped the calculus off the ancient teeth and treated the substance with a weak acid, which degraded the tartar, leaving only phytoliths behind.

By comparing the phytoliths to microparticles from contemporary plant specimens, Tromp and her team were able to identify a range of plants from the burial site, including banana leaf and seed phytoliths. “They look like little, tiny volcanoes,” Tromp says. The presence of both leaves and seeds suggest Lapita people used bananas for a wide range of purposes, from eating to cloth- and jewelry-making. Tromp has examined calculus from sites all over the world, but the number of phytoliths at the Lapita site was particularly notable. “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen such a high concentration of this kind of microparticles,” she says. This suggests that Lapita people engaged in substantial use of culinary and medicinal plants, and that they had a greater hand in shaping Vanuatu’s rainforests than archaeologists previously thought.

Tromp’s research has changed her perspective on Vanuatu’s landscape as well. Now, when she walks through the dense, seemingly wild jungle, she notices yam plants, taro, and fruit-bearing trees, all part of an agricultural legacy first established by early Lapita settlers. It’s a big shift in perspective brought about by tiny particles, and an unlikely time capsule: human teeth.

Over 57 million pages of wildlife are catalogued.

The number of species on Earth is likely unknowable: There are simply too many hiding places for plants and critters, and the human gaze is too narrow and unfocused to look under every stone. Yet cataloguing the planet’s rich biodiversity has been a focus of the human mind for centuries. From Carl Linnaeus to John James Audubon, taxonomizing and documenting species have become lifelong pursuits. The unceasing desire to understand life more, and better, has kept the ball of discovery and categorization rolling for centuries.

Now, the collaborative Biodiversity Heritage Library—a digital archive compiled by a consortium of natural-history libraries—has released over 150,000 artworks of the natural world, allowing public access to one of the largest illustrated compendiums of life on Earth. Years before wildlife photographers began to catalogue the world’s egrets, cephalopods, and rafflesia corpse flowers, artists like Elizabeth Gould were portraying species with illustrations, often reprinted as lithographs for the public. The online archive today boasts over 500 years of illustrated works, including some of Gould’s, totaling more than 57 million individual pages.

From the Bone Wars Collection, which describes a paleontological competition between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, to the Early Women in Science catalogue, which elevates the work of scientists marginalized in their time, the library chronicles scientific events as they occurred and highlights previously understated histories and achievements.

The library is expanding at a time when much of life on Earth is under severe threat. Launched in 2006, the site states the importance of documenting species “in the midst of a major extinction crisis and widespread climate change.” It’s a grave mission, and the gravity has become only more obvious in recent years. Though we may not have the ability or will to save vanishing habitats and populations, we may at least have the bandwidth to memorialize them.

Given the age of some of these illustrations, not every one is scientifically accurate. But these images—of everything from barnacle-encrusted crustaceans to catalogues of Belgian horticulture—can still show us how animals and plants were seen in the mind’s eye of the naturalists of the time. They can also help us explore the remarkable march of evolution—and our understanding of it.

There's a whole lot we don't know vision and speech perception.

Lipreading has an almost mystical pull on the hearing population. Computer scientists pour money into automated lipreading programs, forensic scientists study it as a possible source of criminal information, Seinfeld based an entire episode on its possible (mis)use at parties. For linguists, it is a tremendously controversial and fluid topic of study. What are lipreaders actually looking at? Just how accurate is the understanding of speech on the basis of visual cues alone? What language, of the 6,000-plus distinct tongues in the world, is the hardest to lipread?

This last question, though seemingly simple, resists every attempt to answer it. Every theory runs into brick walls of evidence, the research is limited, and even the basic understanding of what lipreading is, how effective it is, and how it works is laden with conflicting points of view. This question, frankly, is a nightmare.

When we think of lipreading, generally we’re assuming that a lipreader is operating in complete silence, which is not, thanks to the popularity and technical improvements in cochlear implants and hearing aids, often the case. Seattle-based professional lipreader Consuelo González started to lose her hearing at a very young age, beginning at about four-and-a-half. “Over a period of about four years it went down to off the charts,” she says. (We conducted an interview over video chat, so she could read my lips.) Today she is profoundly deaf, and without hearing aids, she hears no sound at all. With them, she can pick up some environmental sounds, some tonality in speech, but not enough to understand what is being said to her—without seeing it, that is.

It turns out that we all do a bit of what González does—that is, use what we see to understand what is being said to us even if we can’t hear it well. “As far back as the 50s, there were classic studies that showed that people are better at perceiving speech in the presence of background noise if you can see the face of the talker,” says Matthew Masapollo, who studies speech perception at Boston University. There is a profound connection between the auditory and visual senses when understanding speech, though this connection is just barely understood. But there are all sorts of weird studies showing just how connected vision is to speech perception.

Let’s take the McGurk Effect, named for the researcher who discovered it accidentally in the 1970s. Say there’s a video of a person saying nonsense syllables: “gaga,” but the audio has been swapped with the same person saying “baba.” Subjects are asked to watch the video and identify which sound is being spoken. Bizarrely, most people perceive—using both eyes and ears—something else altogether: “dada.” The McGurk Effect shows just how strangely tied together sound and image are in speech perception, but it’s hardly the only study of its kind, Masapollo says.

There’s another study in which people holding a tube in their mouths, forcing their mouth to make an “oh” or “ooh” shape, are better at lipreading that vowel sound when it is spoken by other people, compared with people who aren’t holding tubes in their mouths. Another quirk of lipreading finds that one pair of vowel sounds is easier to lipread than another, even when the “lips” are just a sort of light-dot representation of a mouth. Turn that representation on a slight angle? The quirk is gone. Yet another found that it is easier to understand someone while watching a video of them speaking, even if the face is blurred or pixelated—maybe something to do with head movement or rhythm.

There have also been many studies on pre-speech infants that suggest they’re gathering visual information from speakers around them. Muted videos played of people speaking the language with which a baby is familiar—the language that will become the baby’s native tongue—hold the baby’s attention for longer than videos of people speaking another language. There seems to be some kind of innate lipreading ability in all of us.

There are a couple of different theories of how this develops as we grow. One is that visual information is mostly redundant to the speech we hear. Another approach is that visual cues provide information, but that we just don’t really know how to measure and record it. To add to the complexity, there is an awful lot of variability between individuals. Some people who can hear generally let their innate lipreading ability lapse, relying on the audio component of speech, while others make more use of visual information all the time. But plenty of sources online claim that lipreading is only about 30 percent accurate.

But that doesn’t really apply to those with impaired hearing. González does not know American Sign Language. She relies entirely on lipreading and the little bits of sound she can detect with her hearing aid. Our conversation was very smooth, once I placed my laptop on a stationary surface so the camera would stop bobbing around. At no point during the conversation did I have any concerns about whether González could understand every word I said.

The commonly cited low success rate for lipreading isn’t based on people like González. Much of the research uses subjects with normal hearing; Masapollo, for example, doesn’t work with deaf subjects. His work is less about lipreading than it is about the perception of speech. In fact, it’s weirdly difficult to find data about the effectiveness of lipreading as practiced by people who actually do it as part of their daily lives. People with normal hearing test at around 10 to 12 percent accuracy, and there’s some suggestion that hearing impaired people are more like 45 percent accurate. But most of these studies are a little weird, because they tend to test accuracy by seeing whether people can identify individual phonemes—the sounds that make up words, like “gah” or “th”—or words. But, according to González, that’s now how lipreading works.

“We don't lipread sounds,” she says. “Some people think we're looking at phonemes and stringing them into words. Doesn't work anything like that. We're seeing words and putting them together in sentences.” Context is everything for a lipreader, because, well, context is everything for anyone trying to understand speech, regardless of which sense is being used. Whether you can trick a lipreader into confusing the words “ball” and “bull” is not reflective of real-world accuracy, because it’s unlikely that those words would be used in a way that makes it unclear which one is intended: “The dog wants you to throw his bull.”

Not many studies acknowledge any of this, though one from 2000, in the journal Perception & Psychophysics, did. In it, the researchers examined lipreading abilities among those with impaired hearing (IH, in the study) and normal hearing. Crucially, it was assessing the ability to understand entire sentences rather than just phonemes. “Visual speech perception in highly skilled IH lipreaders is similar in accuracy to auditory speech perception under somewhat difficult to somewhat favorable listening conditions,” the researchers concluded. This tracks with what González told me: Lipreading, once you get really good at it, is more or less equivalent to understanding a speaker in a busy restaurant.

Lipreading is, in the deaf community, sometimes referred to as an “oralist” technique. Oralism refers to the emphasis on trying to interpret speech rather than on creating an alternate form of communication, namely sign language. Most developed countries have experienced a push to move away from oralism and toward sign language; there are now dozens of different sign languages around the world. It’s almost considered offensive, to some, to emphasize lipreading rather than a form of communication that does not put deaf people at a disadvantage.

Because of that, it’s generally the poor and often the illiterate who rely on lipreading. González is a real exception here, as someone who’s made a living with lipreading. In countries such as India and China, with high illiteracy rates among the deaf and reduced resources for teaching, oralism is still popular—but not very well documented.

There’s a body of literature on lipreading various non-English languages, but they don’t make things any clearer. The problem with trying to find the hardest language to lipread is that lipreading is exceedingly based on the individual, and most of the best lipreaders in each language—the ones who depend on it—don’t show up in studies. So figuring out how things differ from language to language requires an awful lot of guesswork. “It's sort of hard to know objectively, because our experience with a particular language informs how we attend to certain things,” says Masapollo. “What might be hard for an English speaker might not be hard for a Japanese speaker. It's highly experience-dependent.”

My first thought was to figure out which phonemes are especially hard to distinguish, under the assumption that a language that has more of those must be harder to lipread, right? There is data on this: A Swedish study from the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research in 2006 includes a chart of which phonemes were hardest to guess correctly when lipreading. Sometimes these phonemes are placed in groups along with similar-looking phonemes, called “visemes” (though not everyone thinks the divisions are as simple as that makes it sound).

According to that study, the hardest phoneme is one that doesn’t exist in English; it’s the sound between “th” and “d,” common in South Asian languages such as Hindi. (The word “Hindi” itself, pronounced properly, contains the sound.) In general, the hardest sounds to perceive are those for which very little happens on the lips: consonants like “d,” “g,” “n,” and “k,” all part of one viseme. (Naturally, one can often use context to distinguish “dot,” “got,” “not,” and even “knot.”)

But just because sounds are made without the lips doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re invisible to a lipreader—perhaps more accurately referred to as a “speech reader.” I sent González a video of a man speaking Jul’hoan, which is spoken in parts of Namibia and Botswana. The language has an incredibly large number of consonants, including dozens of clicks. She found these not difficult at all to detect: The lips may not be moving in quite the same way as an English consonant, but the movement of the tongue, cheeks, jaw, and muscles of the neck made them apparent to her. Of course, she doesn’t speak Jul’hoan, so she can’t say whether it would be easy or hard to read. Perhaps predictably, there are no studies on lipreading Jul’hoan, but it doesn’t seem impossible that a consonant-heavy language would be readable.

Another element of some languages that could present lipreading difficulty comes from tones. Many languages around the world are tonal, meaning that they rely on pitch to convey meaning, almost like a song. English is barely tonal at all (though we do raise the pitch at the end of a sentence to convey questions), but some languages have large numbers of complex tones that are vital to understanding them. Tones are produced by the larynx, and may not require any perceptible motion of the tongue, lips, cheeks, or jaw. Can those be perceived visually?

Well, yes, we think. A study from 2008, published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, tested the tonal understanding of speech reading in Mandarin, which has four tones, or five if you include the “neutral tone.” That study tested normal-hearing subjects fluent in Mandarin, and found that, at first, they were awful at detecting tones in audio-free speech. But after only 45 minutes of training, they improved dramatically. Those sessions taught the subjects to look at the movements of the neck, chin, and head, because certain dips, extensions, and vibrations that can indicate tone turn out to be fairly easy to detect.

Still other languages heavily rely on another class of sounds made without much from the lips—namely, by using the larynx or creating a sound back in the throat. Some languages have a lot of guttural sounds, including Welsh, Hebrew, and Dutch, which all have a number of consonants made way in the back of the mouth cavity. The research is not very conclusive on whether these sounds are harder to read. Some studies suggest that guttural phonemes are easily confused or harder to detect. But they carry the same issue as “ball/bull.” Just because a skilled lipreader can’t see a sound doesn’t mean they don’t know it’s there.

What might actually make lipreading harder has nothing to do with language: It’s personality. “Some people are very shy, don't move their faces or lips,” says González. “Not very much in the way of expressions. That makes it more difficult.” As we have seen, lipreading involves much more than the lips: The entire face, the head, even the rest of the body provide critical information. If someone is not very expressive, is not using all of the cues that a skilled lipreader employs, then, González says, they can be hard to read.

The studies looking at the overall landscape of visual language clues are a little tricky to interpret, and they point to a lot of broad generalizations. One study from Kumamoto University found that English speakers rely much more on visual information than Japanese speakers do. Another found that Japanese speakers display much less emotion in their facial expressions than Western Europeans do. Eye contact might be considered somewhat rude in Japan, further reducing the language’s conduciveness to speech reading. There’s also been some analysis of a Japanese tendency to cover the mouth with a hand, especially for women while laughing. There’s not really enough hard data on that to draw some kind of conclusion, but any form of concealing the lips would make an already difficult task much more difficult. That even applies to beards and mustaches. González says. “A mustache that comes down over your upper lip can affect being able to see what's going on.”

So where does that leave us in our central question of which language is the hardest to understand from visual cues? “The short answer is, we don’t know,” says Masapollo.

This is understandable, though not very satisfying, but I have some theories. I nominate Hebrew as one, due to its combination of a large number of guttural sounds and a large number of speakers who are observant Jews and wear long beards. That Swedish study pointed to languages such as Hindi, Tamil, and Gujarati, all spoken in India, which also happens to be maybe the most mustachioed country on the planet. Japanese should be considered as well, thanks to a bunch of cultural stuff that may reduce the connection between vision and speech. I’ll toss in Chechen, because it has such a startling number of consonants and vowels, around 50 of each, including a whole mess of sounds that are made back in the mouth and throat. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Pirahã, a language spoken by a few hundred people in the Brazilian Amazon. Pirahã has about as few phonemes as a language can possibly have, which I suspect would make a lot of words look the same. It’s also a tonal language and may be substantially informed by rhythm; nobody’s quite sure. (It’s one of the most mysterious, controversial languages on the planet.)

There’s no good answer to the question, but then again, there are very few good answers to any questions about lipreading.

A raft very likely carried chameleons between Madagascar and mainland Africa—but in which direction?

Millions of years ago, at least one chameleon likely surfed the seas between the island of Madagascar and mainland Africa. This voyage was probably not a conscious decision. “Chameleons did not want or plan to raft to Madagascar like some sailors,” says Andrej Čerňanský, a paleontologist at Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia, writes in an email. “These things happened accidentally.” But in this happy accident, the chameleon or chameleons survived the surf to crawl on the shores of a distant land.

Most herpetologists agree on the theory that a chameleon once crossed the portion of the Indian Ocean that separates Madagascar from the mainland. But they disagree on an important question: did the voyage begin on the island or the mainland? A new study by Čerňanský, recently published in Scientific Reports, supports the claim that chameleons originated on the mainland.

Chameleons—the wacky-looking family of lizards with swiveling eyes, petal-shaped hands, and often color-changing abilities—have a murky origin story. There are 213 known chameleon species, approximately half of which are found on Madagascar. This unusual biodiversity inspired a widely held theory that chameleons originated on the island before floating to mainland Africa on tree rafts, according to Čerňanský. But chameleon fossils are rare, making it hard to prove any theory of the family’s origin. “Almost all species are arboreal and the fossilization processes in forest environments are extremely difficult,” Čerňanský says. And the chameleon fossils that do survive are often fragmented, such as an isolated jaw or part of a skull.

Madagascar became an island around 150 million years ago, during the last gasps of the breakup of the supercontinent Gondwana, Čerňanský says. This was before the dinosaurs died off, but before chameleons evolved. In 2002, Christopher Raxworthy, a herpetologist at the American Museum of Natural History, suggested in a paper for Nature that chameleons left Madagascar on several separate occasions and migrated across the ocean to mainland Africa. In 2013, Krystal Tolley, a molecular ecologist at South African National Biodiversity Institute in Cape Town, and two co-authors published a study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences that analyzed chameleon genetics and found the opposite: that chameleons may have originated in mainland Africa.

In Čerňanský’s eyes, Tolley’s study made sense, but it was missing fossil evidence. He wanted to study one particular chameleon skull, which was found in the 1990s on Rusinga Island, a famed fossil site in Kenya. “Everybody knows that it is a very important piece of the chameleon history, because it is a complete three dimensionally preserved skull,” Čerňanský writes. But the skull was still partially trapped in rock, and the researchers who originally described it in 1992 did not have the technology that would have allowed them to see the whole skull. Čerňanský could not take the skull to Germany, where he worked at the time, to run it through a micro-CT scanner, because Kenya had enacted strict laws against colonial plundering. He finally got his skull scan with the help of Job Kibii, a paleontologist at the National Museums of Kenya.

The micro-CT scan produced an x-ray image of the entire structure of the skull, which suggested that it came from a new species in the genus Calumma, endemic to Madagascar. Čerňanský believes that this proves Calumma lived on continental Africa in the past, and provides strong evidence for an African origin for Madagascar chameleons. Olivier Rieppel, an evolutionary biologist at the Field Museum who wrote the first observational study of the Kenyan skull in 1992 and was not involved in Čerňanský’s study, finds the new study convincing. “Multiple dispersal events of chameleons out of Madagascar in different directions just seemed counterintuitive,” he says. “An African mainland origin of chameleons seems more plausible, and honestly, fits my intuition better.”

Miguel Vences, a herpetologist at the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany who co-authored the 2013 study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences that suggested chameleons originated in Africa, has doubts, even though Čerňanský’s study would support his paper. “There are several hints in the paper that suggest the skull is quite similar to African species such as Chamaeleo dilepis,” he writes in an email, referring to the flap-neck chameleon, one of the most common chameleon species in sub-Saharan Africa. In Vences’ eyes, there isn’t enough evidence to rule out the possibility that the skull could have come from an extinct ancestor of Chamaeleo, as opposed to from a species in Calumma.

Rafting is perhaps the best known method of oceanic dispersal, in which terrestrial organisms float across the sea from one landmass to another. Scientists believe many species colonized new lands this way millions of years ago, from long-tailed skinks to flightless weevils. In 1998, scientists observed 15 iguanas—enough to start a new population—floated 200 miles across the Caribbean Sea after a hurricane, according to The New York Times. “Chameleons live on trees and when a tree falls down into the ocean, it takes all "passengers" on it,” Čerňanský says. Chameleons are not particularly good at swimming, so Čerňanský consulted paleo-oceanographic models of the currents between Africa and Madagascar, which maps out how oceanic currents might have flowed in the past. He found that currents would have flowed to the east, toward Madagascar, making it seem likelier that a bad swimmer like a chameleon could have been carried to the island’s shores intact.

The fossilized skull in question is now on public view in the paleontology hall of the Nairobi National Museum.

Swamp cabbage is native, but a nuisance.

Along every highway, road, and boulevard in Florida, cabbage palms stand tall. The majestic trees, with their brown-gray trunks and green, leafy fronds have been a local symbol long before 1953, when they were named the official state tree. It’s hard to imagine eating the towering palms, but their tender cores are used in salads and other dishes. Yet the cabbage palms themselves have grown too abundant—good for chefs and landscapers, perhaps, but not for wildlife.

Over the last decade, this native plant has crowded out other species, devastating vital pine flatwood and wet prairie communities across southern Florida. These habitats “are critical for species like panthers, cockaded woodpeckers, and all kinds of other critters,” says Kevin Godsea, project leader at the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge.

“Cabbage palms in and of themselves are fine. They’re the state tree,” says Godsea. The problem, he notes, is that the region’s hydrology has been altered with the installation of canals and roads, negatively impacting groundwater levels. Historically, pine flatwood habitats had groundwater for about seven months out of the year. Since the hydrology change—which happened gradually over the past decade—those same areas now only get “wet maybe one, two, three months out of the year,” says Godsea.

This shift created the perfect environment for hardy cabbage palms to flourish when other plants can’t. Something as simple as drainage can impact larger plant communities and the animals that depend upon them, in particular Florida’s state animal, the endangered Florida panther. With only about 100 panthers left in the state, loss of habitat is one of the primary reasons behind their endangered species status. Of those remaining, the majority are found in south Florida and roam “less than five percent” of their historical range, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Further, because cabbage palms are fire-tolerant, wildfires and prescribed burns “burn hotter than if it were just grass,” says Godsea. Those flames burn high into the overstory, killing pine trees that may not have been scorched if not for the abundance of cabbage palms. The result is a major loss of pine flatwood habitat—a critical hunting ground for panthers.

“Deer, they thrive in those pine flatwoods. That’s the primary prey for panthers,” says Godsea.

As part of the Florida Panther Recovery Plan, Panther Refuge biologists and staff focus on thinning cabbage palm forests to enhance and restore native panther habitat in south Florida. But that’s not an easy feat, and includes long hours of hard work in high humidity. However, for the past few years, the Panther Refuge has hosted a regular harvest event, bringing together sportsmen groups and other volunteers to cut down the trees, which Godsea says is the hardest part. Then, they can remove the edible hearts.

While some cabbage palms may grow as high as 80 to 90 feet, hearts of palm are usually harvested from trees that grow between eight and 10 feet, according to the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Florida (IFAS). For a nuisance, hearts of palm are delicious, with the “consistency, tenderness and texture of regular cabbage,” according to IFAS, leading to their local nickname: swamp cabbage.

Considered a traditional Native American food, swamp cabbage is part of the historical Seminole, Miccosukee, and Calusa tribal diets. Native wildlife, such as bears, are also known to eat it. Today, it’s most often found in cans at your local grocery store. Locally, it’s used fresh in a variety of dishes, such as a hearts of palm salad topped with green ice cream at the Cedar Key’s Island Hotel.

During Panther Refuge harvests, volunteers “cut about the top two-and-a-half feet or so off the tree, and whittle it down until you get to the heart,” says Godsea. “It’s kind of like shucking corn.” Those hearts are then donated to the annual Swamp Cabbage Festival in the town of LaBelle, which hosts the festival during the last full weekend in February. Food vendors are encouraged to be creative with the bounty. Every year, you’ll find a variety of interesting dishes, such as swamp cabbage fritters or a spin on traditional Seminole Taal-holelke, boiled swamp cabbage.

Other land agencies, such as the Florida Forest Service, contract with landscapers who dig up the trees and sell them to developers and new home builders, which can be a more effective way of removing excess cabbage palms. “The harvest events are more of a way of bringing cultural awareness,” says Godsea. “The volunteers do great work and, in half a day, they probably cut maybe 400 or 500 trees. We might thin out five or so acres at a time.”

While the harvest events aren’t prescribed in the Florida Panther Recovery Plan, they indirectly help biologists “manage the habitat the best we can,” says Godsea.

“The panthers are the umbrella that everything else seems to live under,” he adds. “The whole goal here is habitat management and making sure that we maintain community structures that are going to be supportive of the most number of species—not just panthers.”

Color, community, and empowerment are enlivening Jordan's capital.

Passerby in secondhand overcoats scattered to get out of the rain as dusty Parisian songs mingled with old favorites from Lebanon and Egypt at a fashionable café in Amman’s Jabal Luweibdeh. The district is popular with expats and home to a large portion of the city’s cultural centers, coffee houses, pastry shops, and bars.

This café is usually a hipster hive, filled with large beanies, oversized glasses, and pricey lattes, plus a nice staff, well-watered plants, and a couple of stray cats. But on a cold Monday night in January, the biting rain had chased most everyone away.

Though not quite everyone: Miramar Al Nayyar, a 23-year-old artist, dawdled at a pub table behind the barista bar, smoking cigarettes, discussing the city’s changing art scene, and describing her life with humor and candor.

She spoke about her family, and how they fled Iraq in 1992, when government officials targeted her father for forging documents used to get imprisoned communists out of jail. She spoke about her decision to drop out of college and pursue art full time. And she spoke about emotion, philosophy, and the fundamentals of art, as her eyes wandered in search of words to describe it all.

Al Nayyar and a small community of untrained street artists are at the forefront of a burgeoning art scene in Amman—one that exists outside the traditional galleries that dot Jabal Luweibdeh and other districts like it.

Traditionally, the galleries here have been reserved for “specific” kinds of people, according to Al Nayyar. That is to say, those who can afford to buy paintings to fill their homes. In Jordan, where wages are low and unemployment is high, art usually has little place in the day to day struggle to put food on the table.

Founded on seven hills, or jabals, Amman has swelled in size and population over the last century. When the city was chosen as the new capital of Jordan, in 1921, it had about 5,000 residents. But in 1948, in the wake of the Arab-Israeli war, wave after wave of refugees began to arrive here. Now more than four million people call Amman home.

As the city’s population ballooned, so too did the area it encompassed, swallowing and integrating Palestinian refugee camps that were once outside the city limits, and triggering a building boom to accommodate all the new residents. In response, Amman’s civic planners erected a patchwork of cheap concrete and sandstone buildings, which today snake up the city’s hills and into its valleys like discarded cardboard boxes, arrayed in no obvious order. The word “drab” has long been used to describe the city’s facade.

But lately that has started to change. The influx of immigrants from different countries has included artists from Iraq, skilled carpenters and tradesmen from Syria, and educated Palestinians. All of that mixing and mingling has birthed an unofficial citywide rejuvenation project that began over a decade ago and has accelerated in the past five years. Vibrant murals and graffiti—some sanctioned by the city, some not—have popped up on walls across Amman like spring flowers peeking through cracks in the pavement.

Bright pops of color—blues and pinks, yellows and greens, reds and oranges—now adorn the city’s shabby stairs, metal doors and shutters, and sides of apartment buildings and alleyways, forming striking portraits of robots and cats, cartoons and calligraphy, poems and quotations.

Crowded markets, or souqs, and Roman ruins—the city’s traditional tourist draws—have started to share the spotlight with street art, creating a new cottage industry for independent artists and organizations that are centering tours around murals and graffiti, and that receive commissions from private businesses to beautify walls.

“The art tours have been really interesting,” says Hind Joucka, a 27-year-old art consultant, who leads tours herself and founded an online platform for local artists called Artmejo. “They’re lots of fun, and there’s been this extra level of communication between people coming to visit and really finding out about the [city’s modern] culture.”

To Joucka, the trend is a boon for residents and visitors alike. “You’re beautifying the city, you’re adding a bit of color,” she says. “Everyone says Amman is a beige color, and now it’s no longer that.”

Every day, she says, it seems like a new mural or work of graffiti appears. Walk around long enough and you’ll see the names Rain, Wize One, and Siner frequently tagged on walls across the city. And murals are cropping up so fast that the Amman Street Art Documentation Project, a map dedicated to tracking them, has had trouble keeping up.

The municipal government seems to have taken notice, and in 2013, after years of indifference to public art, it approved a new street-art festival called Baladk. Founded by the community-focused Al Balad Theatre, Baladk functions as a giant citywide workshop each year, bringing international talent to Amman to partner with local artists to paint murals.

Beyond the festival, however, getting permission from the city to paint on public walls can still mean a lot of red tape. Amman remains a conservative place, and officials worry about offending religiously orthodox communities, where subjects such as homosexuality and gender-based violence remain taboo.

For a recent public-art project called “Breaking The Silence,” organized in part by Joucka and aimed at female empowerment, officials seemed wary to grant permission upon learning that an eight-story mural, painted by Al Nayyar and 22-year-old Dalal Mitwally, would feature a woman.

“The people I was working with were a little bit accepting of things,” says Joucka. “But at the same time they would be like, ‘Oh, I have to see the picture. I have to see the woman. We heard it was a female picture, so we need to know.'”

Mitwally painted her first mural with Baladk in 2018. She now works part time at a cultural foundation tucked away in Jabal Amman, another neighborhood dotted with art galleries. Surveying the city’s chaotic downtown and rolling hills of concrete from the foundation’s library, she says, “I think we as a community ... have [a] problem with our visual taste. I feel like [Amman] is very gray and drab—beige even.”

Public art is starting to address that aesthetic problem, and gender disparities too. Most of the street artists in Amman are women, says Mitwally. When they paint a new mural, residents often gather around them, watching them work. It speaks to the communal nature of street art, and of murals in particular. It also helps chip away at entrenched notions of what women can and can’t do.

“It’s ... this interactivity with the public that’s so unique,” says Mitwally. “You have kids walking around and asking to help. You have old ladies passing by and just saying, ‘Yatik al afia’ [Arabic for ‘May God give you good health’] and offering you tea.”

This gives artists a chance to talk directly to residents, and to listen to their stories in a way “you don’t really have a chance to do unless you go knocking on their doors and say ‘I want to get to know you.’”

Mitwally painted her first mural in Hashmi Shamali, a low-income neighborhood that houses a Palestinian refugee camp. Baladk has commissioned at least half a dozen murals in the area, and residents now gladly direct tourists who are looking to capture photos of some of Amman’s vibrant artwork.

“If it wasn’t for the art,” says Mitwally, “they wouldn’t be that welcoming to the foreigners that pass by. But they are very welcoming at this point, so [the art has] created this openness.”

But Mitwally, like Al Nayyar, says that in some ways the city’s al fresco art scene, though changing, isn't exactly new.

“[Amman’s street art] is very underrated, I feel, because ... if you pass by school walls, you find all these quotes by these kids [written with] household spray cans ... regarding their favorite national team, or their favorite soccer league, or talking about their girlfriend. This kind of stuff really does express the community. We have a lot more [to show] than these huge … murals. We were already painting on walls ... way before we started to professionally paint.”

Many of the quotes and poems that Mitwally refers to can be found in Amman’s 7Hills Skatepark, tucked away at the foot of Jabal Luweibdeh, near the city’s old downtown. They’re on what’s called an “open wall”—a wall or a space that anyone can tag or paint, without permission.

Across the street from the skate park, a local photographer has rented a studio that he hopes to turn into a gallery. For now, a collage of brushes and dried paint clutters the floor inside, next to makeshift ashtrays, newly finished paintings, take-out shawarma, colored pencils, an anatomical skeleton named Haiker (Arabic for “skeleton”), and Al Nayyar, who comes here to practice and work as part of what she calls a “residency.”

“We don’t have a standard here, we don’t have a scene,” she says of Amman. “It’s barely started. My goal is to ... create a standard in the public through street art.” But to achieve that, Al Nayyar is adamant that she must improve. “I feel responsible for the community … and it drives me toward that path.”

Art, she says, has literally saved her life, pulling her back from the brink when she felt like ending it. “Art was the only way to turn that destructiveness into constructiveness through creation,” she says. “And when you see that creation on a certain medium, like canvas, you start to analyze it and know more about yourself. It was very therapeutic, and that impact really helped me. [Now] I want to make it public.”

Working in the glow of a small three-legged lamp, Al Nayyar sketches facial expressions in a black-and-white journal, practicing the fundamentals, she says, while humming a poignant but hopeful tune. Outside—as workers make the evening commute home and kids leave the skate park wearing beanies and jackets—street lights illuminate graffiti and murals in the distance.

Swamp cabbage is native, but a nuisance.

Along every highway, road, and boulevard in Florida, cabbage palms stand tall. The majestic trees, with their brown-gray trunks and green, leafy fronds, have been a local symbol since long before 1953, when they were named the official state tree. It’s hard to imagine eating the towering palms, but their tender cores are used in salads and other dishes. Yet the cabbage palms themselves have grown too abundant—good for chefs and landscapers, perhaps, but not for wildlife.

Over the last decade, this native plant has crowded out other species, devastating vital pine flatwood and wet prairie communities across southern Florida. These habitats “are critical for species like panthers, cockaded woodpeckers, and all kinds of other critters,” says Kevin Godsea, project leader at the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge.

“Cabbage palms in and of themselves are fine. They’re the state tree,” says Godsea. The problem, he notes, is that the region’s hydrology has been altered with the installation of canals and roads, negatively impacting groundwater levels. Historically, pine flatwood habitats had groundwater for about seven months out of the year. Since the hydrology change—which happened gradually over the past decade—those same areas now only get “wet maybe one, two, three months out of the year,” says Godsea.

This shift created the perfect environment for hardy cabbage palms to flourish when other plants can’t. Something as simple as drainage can impact larger plant communities and the animals that depend upon them, in particular Florida’s state animal, the endangered Florida panther. With only about 100 panthers left in the state, loss of habitat is one of the primary reasons behind their endangered species status. Of those remaining, the majority are found in south Florida and roam “less than five percent” of their historical range, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Further, because cabbage palms are fire-tolerant, wildfires and prescribed burns “burn hotter than if it were just grass,” says Godsea. Those flames burn high into the overstory, killing pine trees that may not have been scorched if not for the abundance of cabbage palms. The result is a major loss of pine flatwood habitat—a critical hunting ground for panthers.

“Deer, they thrive in those pine flatwoods. That’s the primary prey for panthers,” says Godsea.

As part of the Florida Panther Recovery Plan, Panther Refuge biologists and staff focus on thinning cabbage palm forests to enhance and restore native panther habitat in south Florida. But that’s not an easy feat, and includes long hours of hard work in high humidity. However, for the past few years, the Panther Refuge has hosted a regular harvest event, bringing together sportsmen groups and other volunteers to cut down the trees, which Godsea says is the hardest part. Then, they can remove the edible hearts.

While some cabbage palms may grow as high as 80 to 90 feet, hearts of palm are usually harvested from trees that grow between eight and 10 feet, according to the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Florida (IFAS). For a nuisance, hearts of palm are delicious, with the “consistency, tenderness and texture of regular cabbage,” according to IFAS, leading to their local nickname: swamp cabbage.

Considered a traditional Native American food, swamp cabbage is part of the historical Seminole, Miccosukee, and Calusa tribal diets. Native wildlife, such as bears, are also known to eat it. Today, it’s most often found in cans at your local grocery store. Locally, it’s used fresh in a variety of dishes, such as a hearts of palm salad topped with green ice cream at the Cedar Key’s Island Hotel.

During Panther Refuge harvests, volunteers “cut about the top two-and-a-half feet or so off the tree, and whittle it down until you get to the heart,” says Godsea. “It’s kind of like shucking corn.” Those hearts are then donated to the annual Swamp Cabbage Festival in the town of LaBelle, which hosts the festival during the last full weekend in February. Food vendors are encouraged to be creative with the bounty. Every year, you’ll find a variety of interesting dishes, such as swamp cabbage fritters or a spin on traditional Seminole Taal-holelke, boiled swamp cabbage.

Other land agencies, such as the Florida Forest Service, contract with landscapers who dig up the trees and sell them to developers and new home builders, which can be a more effective way of removing excess cabbage palms. “The harvest events are more of a way of bringing cultural awareness,” says Godsea. “The volunteers do great work and, in half a day, they probably cut maybe 400 or 500 trees. We might thin out five or so acres at a time.”

While the harvest events aren’t prescribed in the Florida Panther Recovery Plan, they indirectly help biologists “manage the habitat the best we can,” says Godsea.

“The panthers are the umbrella that everything else seems to live under,” he adds. “The whole goal here is habitat management and making sure that we maintain community structures that are going to be supportive of the most number of species—not just panthers.”

The tiny town has imported a 19th-century windmill and starred in two Danish TV shows.

A few months ago, in the lobby of a Midwestern hotel, a clerk asked a visitor an oddly specific question: “You from Denmark?" It seemed like a strange thing to hear in Elk Horn, Iowa, which sits 80 miles west of Des Moines and has a population of around 650.

But this is not your typical rural American community. In Elk Horn, Danish flags line Main Street and sandwiches are served open-faced. There's a 19th-century Danish windmill towering over the modest downtown. The windmill was shipped in pieces from Nørre Snede, Denmark, and reassembled in 1976 by over 300 volunteers, at a cost of nearly $100,000.

“It was a way to honor our Danish heritage, and keep a small town from dying,” says Lisa Steen Riggs, who has been managing the windmill and its adjacent gift shop for over four decades. Before that, she says, “We knew we were very Danish but we weren’t really selling it.”

Elk Horn is indeed very Danish: Forty-three percent of residents claim Danish heritage. The state of Iowa was named after the Ioway, one of many Native American peoples who inhabited the land for generations; in the early-19th century, white settlers seized the land through dubious treaties and forced removals. Danes came to Iowa during a subsequent wave of migration, starting in the second half of the 19th century.

In modern-day Elk Horn, many traditions handed down by Danish immigrant ancestors have been preserved due to the community’s rural nature. “We’re not trying to be Danish, we are Danish,” Riggs says. “It’s the way we were raised. We eat Danish open faced sandwiches: one piece of bread smeared with butter, meat and condiments on top. It’s kind of a work of art. I grew up thinking everyone ate that way.”

“My kids love the hygge thing,” adds Elk Horn resident Jana Simonsen Boettger, referring to the Danish concept of cozy contentment that has become an international trend. Her casual conversation is dotted with Danish words. “We make frikadeller and aebleskiver”—Danish meatballs and pancake balls, respectively—“and try to cook traditional pork roast and potatoes at Christmas.” The culinary traditions also extend to a drink that keeps Danes warm in the Arctic: “We do the aquavit and skål and all that business—we have fun with it.”

Karma Sorensen, another Elk Horn resident, grew up with the same cultural heritage. “My kids are well-versed in Danish traditions,” she says. “They’ve been handed on by our parents, so we hand them on to our kids and grandchildren.”

In addition to cooking Danish specialties and displaying Nordic decor in their homes, the community celebrates Tivoli Fest every year over Memorial Day weekend. Named after a Copenhagen amusement park, the event includes folk dancing, Viking reenactments, and an aebleskiver eating contest. Another popular local festival is Julefest, which commemorates the Christmas season with glögg mulled wine, Danish food, and trees decorated with traditional ornaments.

Elk Horn is also the home of the Museum of Danish America, which draws in visitors with sleek exhibits about Danish-American history and contemporary Danish culture, as well as a genealogy center. The Danish Table restaurant serves up herring with rye bread, flights of open-faced sandwiches, and homemade sausages. At the Norse Horse Tavern, the cuisine is American, but there’s Danish beer on tap.

In 2013, Elk Horn’s commitment to Danishness inspired a Danish television documentary, Denmark on the Prairie. Its success led to a 2014 sequel, two episodes of the Danish cooking show Spise med Price, and a small but steady stream of Danish tourists.

Riggs estimates that 1,500 Danes per year seek out the rural Danish enclave—which is more than twice the number of people who live there. “Because of the two documentaries, visitors started coming in droves,” says Riggs. The visits began just three days after the first documentary aired on Danish television. “A guy came on a bus, had them drop him off at the Elk Horn exit, and hitchhiked here off the interstate. He stayed for six weeks!”

“Denmark has found us to be very amusing,” Riggs goes on. “They thought it was weird a little town in America would be eating open-faced sandwiches, eating frikadeller, that we folk danced at our festival. That’s fine, we can laugh at ourselves.” The windmill’s gift shop is stocked with familiar Danish products like salted black licorice.

Of course, Elk Horn takes some creative license. Its version of aebleskiver, a dessert item, is served with a spiced sausage called medisterpølse. (This is a little like serving Christmas cookies with barbequed ribs.) “We’ve probably gotten 1,000 emails, saying no, you don’t serve medisterpølse with aebleskiver,” says Riggs. “But that’s something that evolved with Danish-Americans. That’s how we are—something that’s evolved.”

Perhaps most of all, the Danes come to meet Mayor Stan Jens, the bearded, Harley-riding politician who is prominently featured in the documentaries and cooking shows. He takes immense pride in Elk Horn’s Danish heritage, and his own affability shines through each scene, whether he’s struggling to translate his Tivoli Fest speech into Danish or starring in the cooking show, making a Danish-style liver pâté that his own dog won’t eat. “He’s become a celebrity,” says Riggs. “On his Facebook page, he’d say something and get 2,000 likes.”

Jens is always willing to pose for a photo with visitors, and he's a bit bemused with his unique form of fame. “They just re-aired the Christmas cooking show this weekend, because I got a bunch more friend requests from Denmark and Snapchats with my picture on TV,” Jens says. “It’s so wild. I’m just about as average as anybody.”

Tourism has undoubtedly been an economic boon to Elk Horn, whether it’s in the form of visitors from Denmark or drivers on the interstate, who spot the sign for the Danish Windmill and take the next exit. Erik Norkjaer, who lives in Aulum, Denmark, has organized three group tours to this tiny Iowa community. “Elk Horn has managed to be more than a sleepy prairie town because of their Danishness,” he says. “They are so proud of their heritage. For tourists it’s neat to see the windmill and the museum, but the main attraction for me is the people and their history.”

For the town’s inhabitants, the attention has also yielded benefits that can’t be measured with dollar signs. “There’s been real outreach from some very nice people,” says Jens. “Personally, I’ve developed cool relationships. I’ve met thousands of people and got about 200 recipes for liver pâté.”

Riggs says that tourism has amplified the pride that the community already felt. “We treat people as guests, not as strangers,” she says. “We don’t just walk and keep going. We look you in the eye and smile.”

In the late 19th century, Richard Henry laid a blueprint for modern conservation in New Zealand.

In 1893, in Auckland, New Zealand, 48-year-old Richard Henry was going through a peculiar midlife crisis. It wasn’t for any of the usual reasons, such as a failed marriage (though he had one) or a failed career (though he had been chasing a dream job for several years), but rather it was over his obsession with flightless, moss-colored parrots called kākāpōs. Henry had observed the birds’ steep decline after mustelids, such as ferrets and stoats, were introduced to the country, and had spent much of the previous decade trying to convince scientists that the birds were in real danger of going extinct, write Susanne and John Hill in the biography, Richard Henry of Resolution Island. But Henry, who did not have traditional scientific training, went unheard by scientists. On October 3, a deeply depressed Henry attempted to shoot himself twice. The first shot missed and the second misfired, and Henry checked himself into the hospital, where doctors removed the bullet from his skull.

Several months later, Henry got that dream job: caretaker of Resolution Island, an 80-square-mile, uninhabited hunk of rock off southern New Zealand that he hoped to turn into a predator-free sanctuary for kākāpōs and other native birds. For the next 14 years, he toiled away alone on the island in pursuit of this revolutionary conservation idea. He rowed hundreds native birds from the mainland, across choppy waters, to keep them safe from the snapping jaws of furry little predators.

Despite his pioneering vision, Henry was rarely taken seriously as a conservationist in his lifetime, and after he died, he became a tragic footnote in New Zealand’s archives of conservation. “He was a visionary, a bit of a recluse, and a hermit,” says Andrew Digby, a kākāpō conservation biologist with the New Zealand Department of Conservation. “But he was so far ahead of his time, and had a lot of things right that other people didn’t.”

Henry was the first to understand the kākāpōs' erratic breeding patterns and behavior, and his scheme for Resolution Island laid the blueprint for one of the country's major modern conservation initiatives. This year, New Zealand hopes to restart Henry’s long-abandoned project and actually turn Resolution Island into a kākāpō sanctuary.

Henry, who was born in Ireland, went to New Zealand with his family in 1851 to escape the potato famine. He worked odd jobs: machine repairman, gardener, sawmiller, shepherd, carpenter, rabbiter, bird collector, and taxidermist. As the latter, he would stuff and sell any of New Zealand’s large, flightless birds, but the amiably chunky kākāpō was far and away the easiest prey. The birds smelled like papaya, had no fear of humans, and abounded across New Zealand, utterly without defenses. Before New Zealand was colonized by Europeans, the Māori hunted the unusual parrots for meat and turned their feathers into lush, colorful cloaks called kākahu. Scottish explorer and surveyor Charlie Douglas once wrote that you could shake a tree and kākāpō would fall like fluffy green apples. On one hunting expedition in the 1880s, Henry watched a flightless weka bird (a rail about the size of a chicken) maul a kākāpō that had eaten so many broadleaf shoots that it could barely waddle away.“They are the easiest thing in the world to exterminate,” he wrote in a letter to a friend, according to the Hills' biography.

In the 1860s, rabbits were introduced to New Zealand as a game animal, and soon multiplied into a nightmare. They razed meadows, killing tens of thousands of sheep with nothing left to graze on. In 1876, two men in the town of Invercagill requested five pairs of weasels to fix the problem. Scientists raged against the idea but shepherds rejoiced, and in 1882 the government began releasing torrents of weasels, ferrets, and stoats.

Almost immediately, birds began disappearing. First to go were the large, brown wekas, then the Picasso-colored paradise ducks, and then many of the kiwis and kākāpōs. Henry’s years of hunting plentiful birds had morphed into a kind of love, and he tried to warn the public about their plight. The government, slow to act and reluctant to spend, finally designated Resolution Island as a wildlife reserve in 1891 and apportioned funds for a curator. The requirements were both daunting and almost nonexistent—the person just had to be willing to live alone for years. Just seven people applied. In 1894, a few months into his hospital stay, Henry got the job.

Resolution Island is a harsh kind of wild: densely wooded mountains and rugged cliffs fringed with wind-sculpted alpine scrub. “It feels like being on the edge of the world,” Digby says. The weather can be just awful, with squalls blowing more than 70 miles per hour and more rainy days than not. “It’s a really, really wet place,” he adds. “Not to mention the sand flies.” The surrounding fjord, Dusky Sound, is dangerously choppy, probably rough enough to sink a swimming stoat. The island made a perfect potential bird sanctuary.

In 1895, Henry began the painstaking job of catching enormous parrots from the mainland and rowing them across Dusky Sound. His fox terrier, Lassie, sniffed the birds out (while wearing a muzzle), and Henry followed the sound of the dog’s bell. “Lassie was the first-ever conservation dog,” says Erica Wilkinson, a threatened species ambassador for the New Zealand Department of Conservation. Lassie did sometimes accidentally frighten or maim the birds, but her nose led Henry more than 500 of them over six years. Once found, the birds were not hard to catch. Henry could just grab them and stuff them into a knapsack to transport them to pens. “He originally had one big pen, but then he found out the kākāpō tend to severely attack each other in close proximity,” Wilkinson says. As Henry collected the birds, he took copious notes about their breeding behaviors, noting that the birds gathered to breed every two or four years—something scientists argued over as late as the 1980s, the Hills write.

While the birds were under his care, Henry fed them oats, gooseberries, and blue peas. The birds also loved to chew their way through the cages he held them in. One unhappy bird chewed through so many cages that Henry felt obliged to release him, the Hills write. Securing one kākāpō per day was good, any more was dumb luck. Once Henry had caught enough to justify a dangerous voyage to the island, he put the birds in cages and waited for the rain to clear. “He nearly died several times rowing these birds backwards and forwards,” Digby says. “He’d get caught in a squall and his boat would fill with water and the kākāpō would drown.”

Henry’s plan was chugging along until March 4, 1900, when tourists on a boat passing through Dusky Sound told him they’d spotted a weasel chasing a weka on the beach. Henry, in a state of disbelief, wrote in his diary that it almost sounded like a joke, the Hills write. Henry then spent 91 days attempting to catch the animal. Six months later, he saw a stoat himself, and knew the great experiment of Resolution Island would soon be over. In the coming years, the newly established population of stoats would eventually kill every surviving kākāpō Henry had arduously rowed to Resolution. He remained for eight more years, moving more than 700 birds in total, before growing more frustrated and ornery and eventually resigning his post, the Hills write. No one continued his project, and when he died in 1929, only the postmaster attended his funeral.

In 1975, the conservationist Don Merton was on a quest to find a kākāpō in the mountains of Fiordland, the mainland coast closest to Resolution Island. Scientists were unsure then whether the kākāpō had gone extinct. All the birds they captured and moved into conservation facilities in the 1960s had died in captivity. But Merton’s tracking dogs had picked up a scent and cornered a kākāpō against the edge of a cliff. He dove, caught the bowling-ball-sized bird, and named it Richard Henry, according to New Zealand Geographic. Scientists estimated that bird Henry was born in the 1930s—the last kākāpō known to have survived on the mainland.

Scientists spirited Henry to Maud Island, called Te Hoiere in Māori, a predator-free reserve off New Zealand’s North Island. Soon after, a population of fewer than 200 birds was discovered on Stewart Island, southwest of Resolution, that was declining quickly due to cat predation. Over the next few decades, scientists moved every known kākāpō to Maud Island, Codfish Island, and Little Barrier Island, north of Auckland. Henry went to Maud, where he soon found a female kākāpō from Stewart Island named Flossie. The pair had three chicks: Kuia, Gulliver, and Sinbad, all of whom hatched in 1998. Henry was later moved to Codfish Island.

Henry’s Fiordland genes provided invaluable genetic diversity to the Stewart Island population’s limited gene pool. “Genetically, he was invaluable,” Digby says. “He saved the species,” Wilkinson adds. In 2016, Richard Henry’s grand-chick, Henry, was born. Henry’s offspring do look different from other kākāpōs. “They have more bulging eyes,” Digby says. In the 2019 breeding season, more than 86 chicks hatched in total—a new record.

On Christmas Eve, 2010, the second Richard Henry was found dead on Codfish Island, according to the country’s Department of Conservation. He was an old bird, more than 80 years old, it's thought, and had gone blind in one eye. Just a few months earlier, Merton spent a few days with the frail, deteriorating Henry to say goodbye, Jane Goodall writes in Hope for Animals and Their World. When Henry died, there were 121 kākāpōs.

Today, there are 211 of them, each with a name and an electronic transmitter that allows researchers to monitor their activity. The birds now all live on three sanctuary islands: Codfish and Little Barrier, as well as Anchor Island. The first two are predator-free. Though Henry’s strategy of translocation was controversial in his lifetime, it now forms the backbone of modern kākāpō conservation, Digby says. “The great tragedy of Richard Henry is he didn’t get to see this legacy that he left us, how he laid the blueprint for new wildlife sanctuary islands,” Wilkinson says. “He thought of himself as a failure.” The separate island populations also help protect against disease, critical in a population with so little genetic diversity.

Kākāpō conservation is currently undergoing a paradigm shift, Digby says. “Kākāpō are one of the most intensely managed species on earth, and we’re beginning to step back more and more.” There are actually so many kākāpōs now that scientists are looking for a new island to act as a home. “One of the places we’re thinking of putting them next year is Resolution Island,” Digby says. There are still stoats on the island, but the scientists hope to set out a fierce barricade of traps and actively manage the predator population to get it as close to zero as possible. The first birds to enter Resolution will likely be males, which tend to be bigger and better able to defend themselves.

Meanwhile, New Zealand has set an ambitious goal to rid the entire country—composed of the two big islands and hundreds of smaller ones—of every stoat, rat, and possum by 2050. It’s a herculean task, but Wilkinson is optimistic. “We have small predator-free havens all around the country,” she says. “As soon as there’s a weasel, everything shuts down.” Henry’s dream was never just to see kākāpōs thriving on Resolution, but to see them back in New Zealand.

Lauren Ko is as American as mango pie.

When Lauren Ko says she’s a pie designer, she often gets quizzical looks—until she opens Instagram. Her account, Lokokitchen, which functions like a baker’s portfolio, is flush with a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of colors, geometric patterns, and scrumptious fillings that make one thing clear: Her pie game is on another level.

Ko’s colorful creations have won her big-name acclaim—she’s been featured in The Washington Post, Vogue, and Martha Stewart. But her most recent project, My American Pie, tells the stories of Americans from all over the country, from the verdant hills of Kentucky to the lively shores of Rockaway Beach in New York City. Working with the collaboration lab ResidNYC, Ko took stories sourced by the lab and baked them into a celebration of America’s diversity.

“The traditional image of an American is usually Caucasian with blonde hair and blue eyes,” says Ko, “but there are lots of people who identify as American.”

Ko kicked off the series on Instagram last July with her own pie, which she filled with mango, a nod to her picking the fragrant fruit as a kid. In her post, she’s vulnerable about growing up in a multicultural household. “I'm not just Chinese, I'm not just Honduran and not just American, but all of that plays and factors in together to create my own story,” Ko says.

A poignant aspect of Ko’s My American Pie project is that her obsession didn’t start with nostalgic childhood memories; in fact, she didn’t grow up making pies at all. “There's this kind of irony that I make pies for a living,” Ko says, “because, in my Chinese-Honduran family, there's not a lot of traditional apple pie going around.”

Posting her story was somewhat risky—Trump’s immigration policies were dominating the news, and Ko already receives her fair share of vitriol. “I write stupid captions, and my account is lighthearted and fun,” she says, “but I still see that ugly part of the internet’s underbelly.” Ko knew she was onto something, though, when her post received almost 41,000 likes and 2,000 comments, more than any of her other posts. “It spoke to how much people need to hear—and tell—these stories.”

At a time when people are questioning what it is (and who can claim) to be American, it was important for Ko to illustrate that being American contains multitudes. Ko took each person’s story—brimming with layers of culture, identity, and tradition—and conducted research to mold each narrative into edible form. “I would focus on a design inspired by one culture or aspect of their story, and then a filling that incorporated a little more of their narrative,” Ko says.

For Peter’s story, Ko recreated a Croatian embroidery pattern with a savory lumpia filling, which honored his Croatian and Filipino roots. For Dominique's pie, Ko grilled peaches and warmed them with cinnamon and ginger, playing on Dominique's memories of summertime BBQs. The peaches sit underneath a braided dough that mimics Dominique's blond braids and doubles as the symbolic bonds in African-American communities that she reflects fondly on.

While designing the West African, Ankara-print pie inspired by Maia, who is Black, Filipino, Lebanese, and Liberian, Ko found herself connecting unexpectedly with Maia’s story. “My cultural background doesn’t intersect with hers, but I was able to draw on some of her warm memories in the kitchen with her grandmother and relate to that,” Ko says. “There are always facets of people’s stories that we can identify with and hold on to, and I’m hoping that people reading these stories and looking at the images feel that same way.”

While Ko is brainstorming new ideas with ResidNYC, she’d like to extend the series. As she continues to spread a bit of humanity and joy on the Internet, Ko reflects on what she’s learned. “You have to let people tell their own stories and not narrate for them or dictate what they share,” she says. “There’s power in people using their own words to say what they want.”

The extra digits are yet another of the odd animal's oddities.

In the small hours of the night in the jungles of Madagascar, nightjars croak in the canopies, and hordes of chocolate-colored cockroaches skitter through the undergrowth, hissing as they go. Somewhere in between the forest floor and the treetops, a rapid tapping reverberates from a rotten branch. The bug-eyed aye-aye is hunting, using its echolocating ears, its skeletal fingers, and its thumbs—all four of them.

“The aye-ayes have absurd hands,” says Adam Hartstone-Rose, an evolutionary biologist at North Carolina State University who specializes in primate morphology. “Their hands are crazy. They almost look like bat fingers. They’re so long and so thin.”

The aye-aye is a type of tree-carving lemur that’s nominally impossible to understand—a platypus of the trees. Its hand makes up 41 percent of its forelimb; for a human, that would be like having a foot-long mitt. When the French naturalist Pierre Sonnerat described the primate in 1782, he suggested that its name—as spoken by locals—was derived from the sound people would make when they saw it.

Though Sonnerat was wrong, it’s possible that the name is derived from “heh heh”— Malagasy for “I don’t know,” and a pretty on-the-nose indication of how humans understand the animal. Which is why in October 2019, when dissections of the aye-aye revealed extra thumbs on each of its hands, Hartstone-Rose was nonplussed.

“The muscle you need to hitchhike—that muscle—as it passed the aye-aye’s wrist, we found most of it did go to the thumb, but some of it went to a different place,” he says. “The wrong place.”

Hartstone-Rose studies primate forearms. Specifically, he looks at how different muscles are strung together, and uses the anatomy to figure out how apes, monkeys, and lemurs may have adapted for life in the trees or on the ground. He’s dissected hundreds of primates over the years, and has always wanted to examine an aye-aye. But specimens are hard to come by.

Last fall, however—“thanks to unfortunate circumstances,” Hartstone-Rose says tactfully—a few captive aye-ayes and one wild specimen died of natural causes, and were made available for scientific inquiry. Probing the specimens, the research team made a surprising find, published last fall in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology: a strange protuberance of cartilage and bone on the hand, with the capabilities of an entirely separate digit.

“The way I think of it working is like, if you had a golf ball, you could pick that up just by using your palm,” Hartstone-Rose says. “The aye-aye has that, but to the nth degree.”

The aye-aye’s “pseudo-thumb” acts to counterbalance the slender, delicate fingers on the opposite side of the lemur’s palm, which are capable only of light lifting. Yet those fingers are a perfect evolutionary tool for the animal’s unique hunting style. When aye-ayes find grub-riddled tree limbs, they use their hearing to locate the transects that insects have made inside. Then they create a sort of mental map of the tunnels in the wood, and use their ever-growing teeth to puncture the limb at the tunnels’ intersection, and their extra-long middle finger to scoop out the wriggling morsels inside.

For a human, it’d be like having a finger that’s over five inches long—probably not bad for backscratching.

“Although they have these amazing hands that enable them to do this … that means their hands are no longer good at doing [regular] ‘hand stuff,’” Hartstone-Rose says. “We think that the pseudo-thumb evolved in order to compensate for that very specialized finger.”

The aye-aye’s pseudo-thumb has its own fingerprint—akin to the unique whorls the human hand has where the base of the pinkie slightly protrudes from the palm. Hartstone-Rose’s team found these prints even on a neonatal aye-aye, suggesting that they originate by birth.

Aye-ayes are the only known primate with a pseudo-thumb, but they aren’t the only famous mammal that has one.

“The same [evolutionary split] happened with bears,” Hartstone-Rose says. “[O]ne lineage of bear ended up doing something no self-respecting bear should do. They started eating bamboo.”

The giant panda’s pseudo-thumb developed as an additional wrist structure to support its iconic diet. Just as humans became bipedal, and an opposable big toe on the side of the foot gradually moved forward to become the sedentary big toe we know now, so too did most bears have their extra digit subsumed into the rest of their foot structure.

As improbable as aye-ayes are, their complex anatomy gives them a unique set of skills for surviving in the jungles of Madagascar. Perhaps, if we’re lucky, more mysteries of this mysterious animal remain to be discovered—and will keep us saying “aye-aye” far into the future.

A Syracuse rooftop still holds some pretty puzzling real estate.

Harvey A. Moyer got into the carriage-making business about a quarter-century before the Ford Motor Company started making cars. It was a hard time to bet on the horse-hauled market. Moyer, who eventually got into the luxury automobile business himself, operated out of a vast brick factory complex in Syracuse, New York, at a time when other manufactures were revving up production to try and keep pace with rivals. More than a century after Moyer’s business ran out of gas, his old factory is up for sale. It comes with a storied history and a mysterious house perched on top.

Moyer mainly trafficked in handmade, horse-hauled vehicles. The H. A. Moyer Carriage Company set up shop in 1876, and the first building in Moyer’s industrial compound in Syracuse—which would eventually sprawl across some 200,000 square feet—went up in 1880, according to the Preservation Association of Central New York. By the first decade of the 1900s, when automobiles started bumping their way into the mainstream, Moyer expanded the factory’s footprint and broadened his business to so-called “horseless carriages.” He peddled a humble number of cars each year, built one at a time. But as Henry Ford and other manufactures began sending cars rolling off assembly lines—which led to zippier production and lower prices for customers—it was clear that Moyer was getting left in the dust.

After the Moyer business went defunct, the complex became home to Porter-Cable, which still manufactures power tools. Later, it was home to the Penfield Manufacturing Co., and produced mattresses and box springs. The factory’s most recent owner, Yiorgos Kyriakopoulos, purchased the facility around 2005 and used it as a parking garage for a vast collection of vehicles.

Kyriakopoulos died a few years ago, and his estate is looking to offload the property, says Martin McDermott, a real estate salesperson at JF Real Estate who is overseeing the sale. The property is listed at $1.625 million, which includes all of the buildings and 2.2 acres of land.

When the crew at JF Real Estate first got a glimpse inside, they found that Kyriakopoulos had left his mark. “There was an old fire engine, and engines from Porsches, and 50 or 60 cars, including a Mercedes,” McDermott says. “He would be able to drive them right in and store them, and there was a big outside lot with trucks, boats, and stuff.”

But there were traces of the building’s various past lives, too—the Penfield Manufacturing name on the side of one building; an interior corner with large windows and intricate woodwork, which McDermott suspects may have been an H. A. Moyer showroom; and a Mad Men-era office suite, with ceiling tiles and paneling that seem to date from the Porter-Cable days.

As many bystanders have noticed over the years, there’s also a curious little house plopped on the roof of the building that still bears the Penfield name. It’s been there for over a century, but “there’s just so much unknown about it still,” McDermott says. According to Syracuse Landmarks, a 1993 book about the city’s architectural history produced by the Onondaga Historical Association, it was an advertising stunt. There was once reportedly a carriage parked next door. (Now, according to the book, the house conceals machinery and sprinklers; McDermott says it powers the elevator, but he isn’t sure when that contraption was added to the building.) This story about the gimmick was repeated by Moyer’s daughter, Syracuse’s Post-Standard newspaper reported.

That tracks, more or less, with what McDermott has found: “If you’re thinking it’s a three-bedroom house, and here’s the kitchen, there’s no remnants of that,” he says. But then again, he adds, the interior includes some intricate detailing, such as beadboard and crown molding, that would be surprising in a place meant to be viewed from far away, and only from the outside.

The complex is currently under contract, McDermott says, but the deal isn’t done just yet—another one stalled out last year. If it does get squared away, the property would eventually be transformed into several types of residences. One order of business would be applying for landmark status, so that the developer could leverage state historic tax credits toward renovations, McDermott says. These funds come with several strings attached, he adds: “They want to make sure that, at the end of the day, the historic nature of the property is maintained, it’s still intact, and that people walking by have a sense and feeling of how the area was when it was built.” If you happen to buy the complex and fix it up, you could live alongside the ghosts of the industrial past—maybe even from a roost on the roof.