Hauling some tubes through the Alps. (Screenshot: Joshua Livingston/Flickr CC-BY 2.0)

The call of the open road can be unrelenting. Once you hear it, it takes hold of you, whispering “go, get out” every time you're in the driver’s seat. You start zooming out your GPS just for fun. Anything with wheels seems like a conduit for adventure.

In most cases, I would advise you to just go for it. But if you simply can’t throw off your shackles, there is another option. It’s called Euro Truck Simulator 2.

Euro Truck Simulator 2 (or, as its buddies call it, ETS2) is made by a Czech company called SCS Software, and it’s pretty much what it sounds like—a simulation game in which you drive a truck around Europe. You start out with a dream and not much else, working as a trucker-for-hire for companies that want to ship dry milk from Duisburg to Dortmund or lumber from Germany to France.

Getting the heck out of Venice. (Image: Cara Giaimo)

You make money by completing jobs well and on time, and lose it for damaging cargo, breaking traffic laws, or crushing the small innocent vehicles that drive too close to the median. If you shift your gears right, you can build up enough cash to buy your own trucks and truck yards and, of course, redecorate your truck with fun paint jobs. And you do all this by “driving”—little taps of the arrow keys that rev you up and down the highways and byways of scores of realistically-rendered European cities (and even more, if you install the expansion packs).

The original Euro Truck Simulator wasn’t much to CB radio home about, and neither were its single-nation followups. But Euro Truck Simulator 2 has garnered critical acclaim, several awards, and a cultish following. More dedicated fans trade favorite routes on Reddit, post time-lapse videos of good drives, and even build themselves desktop control centers complete with pedals, steering wheels, and multiple screens.

While some enjoy the challenge of becoming a trucking titan, others seem to prefer just zoning out and “driving,” taking life turn by turn. In a feature for PC Gamer, Andy Kelly documents a multi-day trip, from Odense, Denmark to Bergen, Norway: “Euro Truck is a bizarre kind of therapy for me,” he writes. “It’s pure escapism, with trucks.”

 
Shooting through a tunnel in Zurich.

It struck me, while investigating this fervor, that Euro Truck Simulator 2 might be a great option for someone who can’t squeeze in a European road trip whenever she wants—in other words, someone like me. So with all the spontaneity of someone stuffing their things in a backpack and taking off, I paid my $23 (way less than a tank of gas in Europe), chose my rig, and set to truckin’.

After a brief tutorial, during which I got a handle on the truck’s controls and smashed up a few parking-lot fences, I was ready to hit the road. For my first trip, I chose a jaunt up the Dutch coast, from Amsterdam to Groningen. In real life, this drive takes about two hours—barely enough time to switch your brain from manual to automatic, and more of a road-trip appetizer than a main course. The Euro Truck Simulator 2 version is barely a snack. It’s 20 minutes of road-trip highlight reel, just enough time to listen to the first side of your Led Zeppelin III cassette tape.

A lovely Dutch windmill on a lovely cloud-streaked day.

In the interest of hitting the sweet spot faster, I tried to game the game a little bit. I let the rules and details fall away (I was delivering oranges? I couldn’t just pull out into traffic without looking?) and tried to focus on the sights, sounds, and feelings of my new home, the virtual highway. I switched on some music in an offscreen window, sipped my paper cup of coffee (bad, on purpose, for realism’s sake), and did my best to settle into a groove.

The game helped me out by immediately zooming me through a tunnel, which felt about 10 percent as good as it does in real life. As I exited, and began motoring along in the outside lane, I was quickly swept up in the details of pixelated Dutch life. Overhead, wind turbines rotated ponderously, reminding me how small my fake truck was in the fake machine scheme of things, and then giving way, poetically, to the kind of old-school windmill you might see in a children’s book.

The details led to questions: why are there so many wind turbines? What was that giant green and pink ship floating on the Ijsselmeer? Is there a Euro Boat Simulator 2?

 
The mysterious boat.

These questions absorbed me partially because there was no way to answer them. I couldn’t pull off the road and explore (though I did use the breakdown lane to take pictures of the windmill), and if I clicked out of my browser to use the internet, that interrupted the flow of the trip. (Though I did later find out that Groningen has the Netherlands’ largest onshore wind farm.)

The computer road trip dangles tantalizing tidbits the same way a real road trip does. But if you try to veer away from your objective in order to investigate them, the programming runs out, and it just says “no”—which feels a lot less like a getaway and a lot more like the time- and imagination-strapped parts of real life that people are trying to escape.

But there was enough there to make me try again. This time I hauled myself through Switzerland, from Zurich to Geneva. The Alps reared above me, impressively big in game life. I thought about how huge they must be in real life, and how wonderful it would be to drive through them in a real truck (or a car, since there's one thing this game has viscerally taught me: I'm not cut out for truck-driving). There was sublimity there, just several times removed and throbbing faintly through lines of code.  

"Everyday" "life."

More interesting, somehow, were the Swiss road signs, exits, and other infrastructure. The cultural and technological remove made me more appreciative of the small ways in which they were different from my home country's versions, and the much larger ways in which they were the same. "This is what Swiss people see when they're just living their lives," I thought to myself, and I felt a burst of quotidian road-trip awe. I wanted to pull into a rest stop for some chocolate, but again, no dice.

On my third road-trip I finally snapped. I was supposed to be heading from Venice to Milan, another beginner-level leg in the journey that is EuroTruckSim. But somewhere around Verona, I decided, in the true spirit of road trips, that I didn't feel like going straight to Milan. I wanted to see Verona. There were churches and farmlands, and if I couldn't hop the guardrail and explore them, I at least wanted to drive by them on my own terms. So I clicked off my in-game GPS and just kept driving, and since my route was still within the game's map, it let me.

As I accelerated out of a fake Italian tollbooth, I did feel for an instant—as Whitman would say—"done with indoor complaints." Any pursuit that can manage that—especially a decidedly indoor one—is probably worth checking out. 

Portal to adventure—or reasonably close, anyway.

Where are you headed? (Photo: Nick Harris/Flickr)

Imagine that you're an American, leading, for all intents and purposes, a relatively successful American life. You have a decent job, good friends, more than enough money to get by. But then, for one reason or another, you have to leave the country, forever.

Maybe you committed a crime of passion, and you're determined not to go to jail. Maybe you engaged in a principled act of protest, à la Snowden, that's now threatening your freedom. Maybe the political climate has drastically changed and all of sudden it's clear that if you stay here, you'll be confined because of your ethnicity, your religion, or your political beliefs. Whatever the reason, you need to get out of town, and you can't come back.

So where do you go?

Answering this question is an exercise in escapist fantasy and mundane realism. There's no one right answer, because there are a number of factors to weigh. How long will your money last? Will you be able to get a job? Do you want to live somewhere English-speaking? Does climate matter? How about food and scenery? Will you go stir crazy if the country is too small and you can't cross borders? Ultimately, this is the challenge: Imagine starting an entirely new life somewhere. Then imagine you could never come back home.

The first obvious answer is that you'd want to go some place pleasant and easy to live, like Costa Rica, the Netherlands or a Scandinavian country—pick your favorite. And, depending on your reason for leaving, that may be possible. Roman Polanski, after all, spent three decades in France. (This would require some advance planning, though: Polanski had lived in France for a number of years before he fled his sentencing in the U.S., and had become a naturalized citizen there.)

But if you were worried about the U.S. government tracking you down, for whatever reason, or your newly adopted country sending you back, you'd need to pick a country without an extradition treaty with the U.S. Then, your options become more limited.

Any place in blue is off-limits, since it has an extradition treaty with the U.S. (Image: CRGreathouse/Wikimedia)

It's easiest to think about this in terms of regions, to start out with. South America is out (although Venezuela could work for political refugees). Almost all of Europe would be off-limits: a few small countries in the Balkans would be options, as well as Belarus and Ukraine.

Most African countries, on the other hand, do not have extradition treaties with the U.S. You could move to Morocco, from which it's relatively easy to access the rest of the continent. A number of West African countries, from Burkina Faso to the Ivory Coast and Senegal, would theoretically be safe, although the ones without extradition treaties are all French-speaking. Central and East Africa also have a number of candidates, but it might be wise to steer clear of too much political turmoil. (Although, again, depending on your reason for escape—what type of crime you've committed—maybe violence and political instability are up your alley.)

A better choice might be the southern part of the continent: In Namibia, for instance, English is the official language, and there are beaches, beautiful natural parks, giant red sand dunes and German-style beer. Also, any money you've managed to bring with you will likely last a lot longer than in pricey Europe.

In Namibia, you could also hang out with ostriches (Photo: Greg Willis/Flickr)

If you're not worried about money—maybe your life savings are more substantial than most Americans', maybe you pulled off an amazing heist—a handful of countries in the Middle East could work. Syria, right now, is probably not a good place to start a new life. But places like Qatar and Oman have very high standards of living...and very attractive tax policies.

You could also definitely go to Russia, a number of sprawling Central Asian countries or China. The weather isn't great, and language would be a problem. But if it's important that you have a big swath of the world to move around in, these might be good options.

Then there's Southeast Asia. It's more or less on the other side of the world from the U.S., which may, in this case, count as an advantage. Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam) seems like a pretty decent choice for a fleeing locale: there's good food, a fair number of English speakers, and plenty of room to explore. Plus, it's cheap enough to live there that you wouldn't immediately have to worry about running out of cash.

In selecting a country, you might also need to consider how you'll get there to begin with. It might be helpful to pick a country where a large enough bribe will work to get you across the border to begin with. And, come to think of it, depending on your situation, living in a country with some corruption might be an advantage in the long-term, too, since your position will always be somewhat shaky, legally. 

There are ways to make this thought experiment even trickier: maybe you're leaving the country for religious reasons, but there's been a sharp turn in U.S. foreign policy, and you need to live somewhere without a history of discrimination against those of your religion. Or maybe you've just escaped from prison, and your funds are really limited. Though in the United States (and many other non-volatile countries), citizens generally don't need to think about what the best choice for starting a life elsewhere would be, unless it's by choice. Which is ultimately a huge privilege—and probably one worth hanging onto.

Russia seems to be working ok for Snowden (Photo: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia)

(Photo: Hrag Vartanian/Flickr)

It’s well-known that Dr. Jacob “Jack” Kevorkian was no stranger to death. But he is less appreciated for his lust for life, which led him down just about every artistic road available, resulting in a creative life that was almost as noble and insane as his professional one.

Born in 1928, Kevorkian became a cultural phenomenon beginning in the 1980s and '90s: a constant presence on cable TV, he assisted in least 130 suicides, leading to his eight-year stint in prison starting in the early 2000s.

But among all of the furor surrounding his work as a pioneer in the Right-To-Die movement, there was another side of the man frequently depicted as a grim reaper. Kevorkian was quite alive—in addition to his medical work, he painted, played and composed music, wrote books, and according to a close friend, even filmed a movie which has been lost to the ages.

According to Neil Nicol, a close friend and colleague of Kevorkian, he “just tried to experience everything in life.”

“He did more than anybody I’ve ever known,” says Nicol, “Art was just one of the things he took his hand to.”

Very Still Life (Images courtesy of Neal Nicol unless otherwise noted)

The man who would become Dr. Death began painting in the early 1960s, when he and Nicol worked together at what was then the Pontiac General Hospital. It was during this time that Kevorkian enrolled himself in an adult education course on oil painting. As Nicol tells it, “[everyone else was painting] apples and oranges, and bowls, and landscapes, and stuff like that. Jack did his first painting, called ‘Very Still Life.’ It was a picture of a skull with an iris growing up out of the eye socket.”

After creating what would become possibly the most iconic image of his art with "Very Still Life", he continued to paint, moving on to works inspired by clinical symptoms with titles like “Nausea”, “Fever”, “Coma”, and “Paralysis”. He also created satirical portraits inspired by religious holidays, specifically Easter and Christmas.

In fact, while the imagery of many Kevorkian’s paintings was seen as morbid, nearly all of them had a sort of pitch black humor lining their thought-provoking message. For instance, in “Nearer My God To Thee,” a terrified man can be seen falling into a black abyss of indifferent faces, his fingers scraping desperately on the walls of the rift, exposing the bloody bone beneath. But Kevorkian himself described the message of the painting as such:

How forbidding that dark abyss! How stupendous the yearning to dodge its gaping orifice. How inexorable the engulfment. Yet, below are the disintegrating hulks of those who have gone before; they have made the insensible transition and wonder what the fuss is all about. After all, how excruciating can nothingness be?

Nearer My God To Thee

This is not to say that all of Kevorkian’s paintings were gruesome. He also created a handful of fairly straightforward works, like portraits of his parents, and of Johann Sebastian Bach. He further honored his love of music with a colorful painting of a simple musical note entitled, “Chromatic Fantasy.”

Maybe the most amazing thing about Kevorkian’s paintings is that, according to Nicol, none of the surviving works are the originals. In the late 1970s Kevorkian moved out to California where he took a pair of part time jobs in Long Beach. After leaving those initial jobs after disputes with his superiors, he devoted his life and life savings to a failed film version of Handel’s Messiah. Set to the famed oratorio, the film would have explored the biblical themes of the music. Unfortunately, his quest to create this film drove him to the poorhouse, and Kevorkian was living in his car by 1982.

Both his original paintings and all the work that had been completed on his film were placed in a storage locker, the payments on which eventually lapsed. All of the paintings and all traces of his film were lost, likely ending up in a garbage dump. The only remaining record of the film seems to be Nicol’s own vague memory of the trailer:

It was about Jesus, and shepherds, and the Bible, apparently. [The trailer] showed a picture of someone dressed like Jesus, and another woman dressed as Mary. After that he started to run out of money, and he wanted to find clips that were done by the major studios, but that weren’t going to be used in the movies. So he started to buy those and integrate them into the Messiah. So it was kind of a disjointed presentation.

After returning to Michigan to begin his work on death counseling in earnest, Kevorkian decided to remake the paintings that had been lost, but had no visual record of them. Luckily, he was able to locate someone who had taken Kodachrome photos of many of the paintings, and Kevorkian set out to recreate a number of them. It doesn’t seem to be known how many, if any, Kevorkian failed to repaint, but according to Nicol, all of the works extant today are the second of their kind, and there may have been some that were lost forever.

The Gourmet

Painting and film were not Kevorkian’s only passion, as he also dabbled in musical composition and performance. Kevorkian played flute and organ and actually released a full album in 1997, entitled A Very Still Life, appropriating the name of his first painting. The 12-track LP was a collection of jazz-funk songs comprised almost exclusively of Kevorkian’s original compositions. The album was completely instrumental with Kevorkian on flute and organ, sounding a bit like Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas by way of Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks soundtrack. Only 5,000 copies of the record were ever produced but it can still be found on YouTube.

In 1999, Kevorkian was convicted of second-degree homicide by a Michigan court and was sentenced to 10-to-25 years in prison. While he served only eight years of his sentence before being released, his incarceration may have spelled the end to Kevorkian’s artistic endeavors. Nicol says that while Kevorkian thought about playing music or painting while he was in prison, it was hard to schedule a time in the crowded facilities, and “[Kevorkian] said it was just not worth his time.” Discussing how Kevorkian felt about his own works, Nicol says, “He bored easily. Once he’d get bored with them, he didn’t want to do it any more. He was very enthusiastic about it when he’d get started, but then once he got bored with it, he’d just stop doing it.” 

Kevorkian died from a blood clot in June, 2011.

He did achieve some commercial success, post-death, from his artwork: in 2014, a gallery was selling his painting for $45,000 a pop, claiming that the unsold work would go to the Smithsonian. This sale came after years of legal wrangling, as the work had formerly been housed in Armenian Library and Museum of America in Watertown, Massachusetts.

Artistically, though, Kevorkian's work remains enigmatic. It’s not easy to find a through line in Kevorkian’s shaggy body of creative output. From a bloody painting that uses decapitation as a metaphor to war, to the filming of a biblical opera, to some noirish jazz licks, Kevorkian seemed to follow whatever muse struck him. While his words are a bit opaque, his description of his first painting, "Very Still Life" seems to nicely sum up his body of work:

The message here, though somewhat capricious, nebulous and indefinable, is clearly underscored by intense feeling. Brilliant colors highlight the melancholoy age-old balance between the warmth of life and the iciness of death, spiced with the sardonic humor of irony. The disquieting mood portends inescapable doom for the frail symbol of individual life and seemingly callous extinction of its evanescent aura. The age-old balance is certainly skewed.

Emily the Cow and Meg Randa show their appreciation for each other. (Photos: Meg Randa/Middlesex News)

For Emily the Cow, November 14, 1995 probably started off like any normal day. She would have eaten her breakfast, let out some quiet moos, maybe mulled about with the other cows. By the time she was loaded onto a trailer with others from her herd and driven to nearby Arena Slaughterhouse, in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, she might have guessed things were a little off. By noon, when she was next in line for the kill floor, she knew something was gravely wrong.

That’s when the workers decided to break for lunch—and when this brave bovine decided to take her fate into her own hooves. Belying her 1600-pound bulk, she leapt over the five-foot gate that was holding her in the slaughter line and bolted for freedom.

A group of surprised slaughterhouse workers dropped their sandwiches and chased her, but to no avail. “This is one of the quickest cows I have ever seen,” one employee told a reporter. “I thought she was a reindeer in a cow costume.” Before they fully understood what was happening, the Holstein Houdini was on the loose. The slaughterhouse had lost about $500 in hamburger meat, and the cow had gained a second chance.

With her giant leap, the cow had unknowingly started a journey that would bring together countless people—not just over county lines, but across faiths, cultures, and continents. 

Emily the Cow struts her stuff. (Photo: Meg Randa/Middlesex News)

But first, Emily had to survive a Massachusetts winter—no mean feat for any creature, let alone one accustomed to the sedate, cloistered rhythms of farm life. For weeks, the cow on the lam avoided emissaries from the slaughterhouse, along with the police—who, after enough failed corral attempts, had been ordered to shoot her on sight.

She even managed to find the 40 pounds of food a day necessary to keep a creature of her size warm during the snowy nights, living off of hay put out by concerned residents and crops from Elmwood Farm—which normally grew food for needy people, but decided not to discriminate based on species. According to several eyewitnesses, she took foraging lessons from some local deer.

Middlesex County is a pretty sleepy place. A cow behind a fence wouldn’t garner much more than a lazy nod of recognition, but one on the loose was exciting enough to make front-page news. Soon, the stories and sightings started piling up. She surprised one family putting up Christmas decorations. She ghosted in and out of people’s backyards, leaving only hoofprints and clouds of steamy breath. She even nosed around the starting line of the Boston marathon, as though plotting, come spring, to put her newfound sprinting skills to good use.

 
Emily is coaxed onto the trailer. (Photo: Meg Randa/Middlesex News)

To one local family, the fugitive cow was more than a curiosity. Meg Randa first heard about the escape while browsing the local paper during her daughter’s dance class. She and the rest of her family had recently become vegetarians, and something about the story resonated with Rand immediately. “I grabbed [my daughter] and ran out of the studio,” she recalled in a phone interview.

“I went home and showed [my husband] Lewis the article, and I said, ‘We have to do something. We have to save this cow.’” 

The Randas didn’t know much about cows, but they did know a lot about banding together for a cause—for nearly a decade, their family had run the Peace Abbey, a foundation in the town of Sherborn dedicated to interfaith peace movements, human rights, and advocacy. The cow’s rescue quickly became a family project (“I became obsessed, completely,” Meg Randa says). The Randas visited the slaughterhouse, and convinced the owners to sell the cow to them for one dollar. “They just wanted to be done with it,” Meg remembers. The Randas also learned her name—Emily.

“As soon as she had a name... she had a face and a personality, and people were really rallying behind her,” Meg says. Whole towns in Middlesex County started coming out to search for Emily, whose chances of survival grew slimmer as the winter progressed. They brought dogs, lassos, news photographers, and other tools that, in retrospect, would be more likely to chase away a fugitive that bring her home. “I finally one day decided to just go by myself,” Meg says. She brought hay and warm water, and walked quietly. Not long after, she was nose-to-nose with Emily.

Meg Randa earns Emily's trust. (Photo: Meg Randa/Middlesex News)

“All of a sudden she was before me,” Meg says. Emily was too huge to handle alone, so Meg coaxed her out to a clearing with handfuls of hay, and then brought in a trailer filled with even more, plus blankets. After a couple of days, the cow allowed herself to be led onto the trailer, and she was brought to the Peace Abbey to live out her days as freely as a domestic animal can.

But Emily wasn’t just free, she was famous. Post-recapture, her legend only grew. She got written up in People and Parade. She was a bridesmaid in two weddings (“she ate the bouquet in one of them,” Meg says). She served as the spokescow for several animal rights organizations—visitors came to see her and left convinced that they would “never eat another hamburger,” Meg says.

Aspects of Emily’s story and presence resonated with several religious and cultural traditions—she escaped on November 14, the birthday of the beloved first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the white marking on her forehead resembled that country’s silhouette. She was also at large for “40 days and 40 nights”—the amount of time it rained when God cleansed the world in the Bible—and was finally brought in on Christmas Eve. Combine this with the Peace Abbey’s interfaith mission, and you had pilgrims of all sorts flocking to a tiny abbey, in the middle of a tiny town, to see a huge former fugitive cow.

“We’d go out to the barn and Emily would have a red dot on her forehead, and there’d be bananas and flowers and things at her feet,” Meg said. When a coalition of Hindus arrived from India to visit, one, Jayenti Patel, said it was “like meeting a famous person.”

Emily's distinctive India-shaped marking. (Photo: Meg Randa/Middlesex News)

When Emily died, of bovine leukemia, in 2003, the Peace Abbey commissioned a life-sized replica in her honor. It stands in Sherborn to this day, next to a similar statue of Mahatma Gandhi. Some of Emily's supporters brought bits of her hair and blood to India and released them into the Ganges River, making Emily one of the best-traveled ungulates the world has ever known. It was a fitting end for the cow who dared to take a leap.

Emily's statue in Sherborn, Massachusetts. (Photo: Daderot/WikiCommons CC0 1.0)

Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to cara@atlasobscura.com.

 Drones crash. (Photo: Via @steveoiraq)

On July 16, the American military lost a drone. As the Pentagon recently confirmed to Buzzfeed, "an MQ-1 crashed on its way to its recovery base in Iraq."

This actually happens fairly often. As the Washington Postreported last year, since 2001, "more than 400 large U.S. military drones have crashed in major accidents." And the British military lost 450 drones from 2008 to 2013, the Guardian reported a couple years back. But when those drones are lost, usually you don't see this:

 
Drone selfie—why not? (Photo: Via @steveoiraq)

This particular drone was very quickly found, and the people who found it, in southern Iraq, started posting pictures of it to social media. Because, really, what else are you supposed to do when a giant gray flying object that looks like it came from a Star Wars set lands in your backyard? Selfies seem like the obvious choice.

Bonus finds: $1 million painting being used as a message board in a London kitchen, fragments of what could be the oldest Koran

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

A young cheetah learns to hunt. (Photo: Volt Collection/shutterstock.com)

For many years, humans thought simplistically about how animals escape their predators. Because, if another animal wants to eat you, the best course of action seemed simple enough.

You RUN. As fast as you can. In the opposite direction.

But that's not actually what happens. Most prey, when they detect a predator, do not try to escape immediately. "This is a decision, like many other decisions," says Dan Blumstein, a UCLA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, and co-editor of the new book Escaping From Predators.

Say, for instance, that you're a low-status bird. No one likes you, and you're not always going to have great access to food. But, at this moment, you're feasting on a rich source of nutrition. A predator approaches. Maybe the other birds take off. But not you. "Lower status birds will stick around longer because that's their chance to eat," says Blumstein.

It's only in the past decade or so, though, that biologists have really begun to understand the factors that contribute to animals' escape plans. When Ronald Ydenberg and Lawrence Dill published the first paper on the economics of flight in 1986, “few thought of fleeing as a ‘decision’ or saw that there were costs, most notably lost opportunity," they write in the foreword to the new book. And even after that first paper, few scientists looked closely at how animal fled their would-be killers.

But in the past ten years, the study of escape behavior has been a booming field of research, and scientists are beginning to better understand how animals decide to run, walk, jump, dive, sprint or saunter for their lives.

"This is one of those hidden success stories of taking a very economic approach," says Blumstein. It's clear now that the decision to flee can be influenced by rank, hunger level, sexual drive, season, location, or prior experience with predators. And they can begin before animals are even born.

Karen Warkentin first started studying the eggs of red-eyed tree frogs back in the early 1990s, when she was just beginning her doctoral work. She was in Costa Rica and looking for, in her words, "a frog that did something cool that Canadian frogs don't do." (She grew up in Canada.)

At the particular pond where she was working, red-eyed tree frogs were abundant, but so were snakes. About the half the eggs that the frogs laid—little translucent globes with wide-eyed tadpoles peering out—were being eaten by snakes. Given how many were dying, it seemed to Warkentin like these soon-to-hatch tadpoles should have a strategy for running away, once they were under attack.

To test her hypothesis, she gathered up eggs, put them in a cage with a snake and let the snake into the eggs' side of the cage. When the snake attacked the egg clutch, the uneaten tadpoles started escaping—instead of waiting to spontaneously hatch, they sensed the danger and—plop—fled from their eggs and into the water below.

This isn't just a random reaction. In the years that followed, Warkentin, now an associate professor at Boston University, and her collaborators were able to show that escape hatching is a specific response to being attacked. Sometimes, the eggs wouldn't have hatched for days otherwise.

There are trade-offs to escape hatching, though. There may be a risk, for instance, of trying to hatch too early and failing, leaving the poor tadpole in danger, now in a damaged egg. It's like being "trapped in a deflated water balloon," says Warkentin. "You better be really sure you're about to die if you're going to risk that."

Of course, once the tadpoles escape the snake, they're not home free. Waiting for them in the water are aquatic predators, happy to suck up vulnerable tadpoles.

Animals face the possibility of predation throughout their life, but they do have one advantage. "The prey's life is at stake. The predator misses a meal," Blumstein says. This is called the life/dinner principle, and the stakes are much higher for the animals on the "life" side of that equation. 

Even once an animal decides to flee, though, it won't necessarily devote all its energy to the escape. It might be running for its life, but that doesn't mean sprinting as fast as possible to the nearest refuge.

"The escape response was thought of as being an all or none response, either on or off," says Paolo Domenici, a researcher at the Italian National Research Council. "But there's more and more evidence that it's not really so black and white. If there is a response, there can be different levels. It can be a half hearted response or a full response."

If your predator is far enough away, for instance, you can run or swim a little slower—save energy and still get away from the danger. If the refuge is near by, you can walk towards it. Or maybe you're just tuckered out from some other activity, and you can't muster the will to speed away as fast as might be wise.

When animals resolve to escape, they don't always turn away from their predators, either. "You'd think it'd all be away," says Domenici. "But that's not the case. Not all animals will. The proportion varies from 50 to 90 percent."

Scientists aren't sure why, exactly, but it may have something to do with the element of surprise. Predictability is dangerous in its own way. One snake will signal an attack from one direction, and its prey, a fish, will turn away from that wave of pressure. But the sneaky snake has actually positioned its head behind the fish—in the direction its prey will most likely escape.

"The fish, by escaping from the pressure wave, will go straight into the predator's mouth," Domenici says.

Some animals do always run away: schools of fish, in particular, tend to all turn one way—away from the danger—probably in order to stay together. Not all animals flee in a straight line from their predator, either. If the predator is faster than the prey, there's some advantage to running at an angle from the predator, as sharp as 90 degrees. A cockroach depends on the element of surprise: it might turn 90, 120, 150, or 180 degrees away from its potential predator. 

And some animals flee at an angle where they can keep an eye on their pursuer: "If I'm chasing you and you go straight away from me, you have a hard time checking out what I'm doing," says Domenici. "You can't turn your head while you're running, but if you run 120 degrees away from me—at a bit of an angle—with the corner of your eye, you can be checking out what i'm doing, if I'm throwing rocks or something."

Biologists are still studying the mechanism and genetics of this. Different populations of the same species, for instance, have different tendencies to escape. "You can walk right up to an urban squirrel," Blumstein points out. Scientists are still trying to understand if different populations have actually evolved to be less flight-prone, or if they're simply sorting themselves out based on their preferences. Individual animals, too, can be more skittish.

Blumstein runs a long-term study of marmots, and his wife, a collaborator, once noted that across 10 different experiments, one animal ran away immediately from any stimulus. "We couldn’t include it in anything," he says. "That was a nervous nelly."

Once the decision is made to flee, though, there's a whole world of ways to actually run away. In Escaping from Predators, the author of one chapter note that mammals "show tremendous variation in how they flee from predators: rapid running, jumping, dropping from trees to the ground, fleeing into a burrow or other covers, climbing trees moving into water, and even flying away. In the Reptiles chapter, we learn that lizards often prefer refuges, "most commonly trees, logs, crevices in rocks, and animal burroww."

To get there, they might jump, glide, swim or dive. When they run up trees, they often choose "the side of the tree opposite that of the approaching predator, where their movements are invisible." In an earlier book on antipredator defenses, the scientist Tim Caro describes animals “zigzagging, looping, wild bouncing, and sudden twisting"—everything “from ponderous moment to extremely fast dashes."

Every animal has its own particular strategy. Blumstein has also studied hermit crabs, and, he says," I feel a little sorry for the work I've done with these guys." In the wild, he says, they'll slowly make their way away from the water, moving slowly up steep mountain slopes in the Virgin Islands. "They'll be pretty far away from the water," says Blumstein. "But as soon as they detect you, they pull their legs in, and they start rolling down," losing all the ground they've covered in an instant.

On the upside, at least they have a chance of getting away.

This Vintage Cherry Corp. Red Doubleshot "Esc" Key was in fact sold for $250. (Photo: BiNiaRiS/Imgur)

In the second decade of the 21st century, few people care about the escape key.

What escape key? That one, in the top left-hand corner of a keyboard. Invented in 1960, for the first decades of popular computing, the escape key got programmers and clueless computer users out of jams. But while there are certain people who still use it regularly—Unix programmers, TV producers, players of games like World of Warcraft and Elder Scrolls—it has languished for years. (One of the easiest ways to get a sense of people who depend on this key is to search the phrase "escape key not working.") Google N-gram "escape key," and you'll find its usage peaked in 1989.

But not so long ago, around 2012, there was a certain type of escape key that one group of people cared very much about—enough to spend hundreds of dollars to acquire one.

This was the Vintage Cherry Corp. Red Doubleshot "Esc" Key.

Among keyboard enthusiasts, this key is a treasure. "No other 'Esc' made will look as beautiful unless Cherry makes it again," one fan wrote on GeekHack, a forum for all things keyboard. "These are one of the rarest and most sought after Cherry doubleshot keycaps," wrote another. Cherry, which makes "computer input devices," stopped making this particular key after 2009, and its value skyrocketed. In 2012, at the height of the Cherry Red Doubleshot Esc Key bubble, two of these keys were sold on GeekHack for $250 each.

What makes a computer key so desirable? This one has history: Cherry started producing keyboards in the 1960s and is one of the oldest manufacturers around. It's also well-made: "doubleshot" refers to a manufacturing process where an exterior layer of plastic is molded around a smaller plastic insert. Keys made in this way are supposedly to be more durable.

According to Ripster, the "founder and moderator of the largest and fastest growing keyboard community on the planet," there are a few other key features that make the Cherry Corp Red Esc key unique. There's a cross-hatch pattern on the back of the key. "Esc" is written in particular font. The outside has particular texture. Its color is slightly more orange than its imitators.

However special the Cherry Corp.key is, even for collectors, $250 was a very high price to pay. And it didn't last. Another company started producing red doubleshot Esc keys that closely resembled these, and started selling them for the bargain price of $3.50.

But, of course, a true original is always worth more than a later version. Own a vintage Cherry Corp. Red Doubleshot "Esc" Key, and as one seller put it, "You will officially be in the keyboard elite."

The car pulled out of the lake (Photo: Caldwell County Sheriff's Office)

One night in 1972, Pamela Shook Kolbe's father never came home. She recently told a local North Carolina news station:

“My parents were separated so it was just the two of us living together,” Kolbe said. “I got home probably around 8 p.m. that day and he never showed back up. The next day when I got up he still wasn’t there and neither was his car.  I was scared.”

For 43 years, no one knew exactly what happened to her father; he was declared dead in the early 1980s. But early this week, not long after Kolbe asked to reopen the case, the  the county sheriff's office found her father's car, 1968 Pontiac Catalina, in a local lake.

Th car's roof had caved in, but the windows were still closed. In the car, the investigators found the remains of a person they believe is Kolbe's father, Amos Shook, along with a wallet with his ID cards inside.  

The records of the original investigation into his disappearance are long since gone, but the sheriff's office believes the new search benefitted from modern technology—they found the car at the bottom of the lake using advanced sonar. 

It's not clear exactly why they chose to look there, though. And even though the mystery of what happened to Amos Shook has been solved, it may never be known how or why he got there. 

Bonus finds: A second Plutonian mountain range, an 18th century village buried under a Montreal highway

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

This is how beautiful your commute could be, through No Ad. (Image provided by PublicAdCampaign featuring the work of Soren Solkaer)

Bulbous yellow Minions. Protein World urgently asking if you're "beach body ready." Promises to make money as a dental technician—all of these advertisements are repetitive parts of one's daily subway commute.

New Yorkers facing such woes can now transform their subway surroundings with No Ad, a free phone app that's one of the first publicly available “mobile art galleries” specifically designed for use in the city’s vast train network.

No Ad works by recognizing the patterns on the advertisements, then comparing each ad to a database of all of the current subway ads at any given time—no internet access required. Point your phone at your most reviled subway advertisement (be gone with you, fake online college attendees), then watch on your phone screen as the ad transforms into a beautiful piece of public art. 

Regular subway ads... (Image: Jeremy Berke) 

Turning the entire New York subway system into a pop-up gallery is no small task. To come up with the hundreds of images necessary to replace each ad with art, No Ad is curated by a revolving door of artists and institutions up to the task. "Exhibitions" change on a monthly, or bimonthly, basis. The app currently works only on the two-panel ads that appear on the walls of New York's subway platforms, but there's a plan to expand to the smaller ads posted inside the trains, too. 

An early example of using augmented reality technology in public art, No Ad is a nod to the future in which everyone is walking around in their own headspace, seeing only what they want to see. “That is something that collectively as a society we’ll have to deal with once wearables become mainstream,” says Jordan Seiler, one of the founding partners of No Ad.

...are transformed into works of art before your eyes. On exhibition this month are pieces from the Brooklyn-based artist collective FAILE (Image: Jeremy Berke)

While No Ad is, according to Seiler, “just one example of how augmentation can be used in the public space,” it’s decidedly not a money-making enterprise. 

“In a large part, it’s an art project,” says Seiler. “We’d eventually like the city to embrace it as a tool for commuters and tourists to experience the vibrant culture of the city that’s above ground, while they are traveling underground.”

No Ad rethinks the concept of space from a digital perspective. The app operates much like an art gallery does—but instead of a big room with whitewashed walls available for rent, No Ad uses the existing infrastructure of subway advertisements and imposes its own digital gallery on top of it. 

No Ad at work. (Image provided by PublicAdCampaign featuring the work provided by ICP teachers)

When asked if the app had received any negative feedback from advertisers, Seiler says, "We're definitely not their best friends. There will be attempts to render this technology useless to the average individual who wants to curate their own world, as opposed to the larger corporations controlling what you can and can't see."

Seiler continues: "We wanted to get into this [augmented reality] space early, before our only options are the Coca-Cola, or McDonald's channels."

Beyond espousing a pro-art, anti-corporate agenda, No Ad is just plain fun to use. Whereas before, your only options for in-commute entertainment were fiddling around on your phone, or staring at the colorful characters riding along with you, "there's something really nice about this, a kind of gallery space sitting in your pocket," says Seiler. "It's kind of like walking into a physical gallery, and not knowing what the artist is showing. The serendipity of discovery is important."

No Ad has plans to roll out to Berlin in September, including billboards. (Image provided by PublicAdCampaign featuring the work provided by ICP teachers)

Coldness is an odd concept.

Close to its lowest point, hovering just a smidge over absolute zero, matter becomes another form altogether. It's not a gas, liquid, or solid, but instead something called Bose-Einstein condensate, a super conductive, super fluid material whereby the atoms blob together and begin to act like one big quantum object. In this state, actions normally only visible on a quantum scale can be seen at a macro scale.  

This level of cold is unusual, and most of the universe is much much warmer. In fact, even the coldest places in space never get colder than 2.7 Kelvin or -270.45 Celsius, heated by cosmic background radiation. Earth, meanwhile, keeps a comfortable and life-friendly temperature that, on average, is 61 degrees Fahrenheit. A lovely fall day.

However, even within the relatively limited range of natural temperatures on earth, cold plays odd tricks. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the world's coldest inhabited town, Oymyakon, in Siberia. Cars, electronics, and materials like metals and plastics, all begin to fail. For its 500 residents, with an average winter temperature of -46, absolute zero can't feel that far away. 

Who wants to go to space?!

Unfortunately getting anything to break free from the inexorable pull of Earth's gravity requires a startling amount of power and fuel, as objects must reach escape velocity around (25,000 miles an hour) to break orbit. But just how much juice does it take to blast a thing into space? Say a watermelon, or the Statue of Liberty? Using the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, we were able to calculate just how much fuel it would take to shoot some random objects away from Earth. Thanks to Wolfram Alpha we were even able to find some handy size comparisons that make the struggle all the more real. Check out Atlas Obscura's above guide to escaping the Earth!

(Photo: Everett Collection/shutterstock.com)

The communication from FedEx’s media relations team was brief. “Dan,” a FedEx employee identified over email only as “Media Relations” wrote, “The shipment of humans is prohibited in our network as a matter of policy.”

But behind that banal corporate phrasing lies a rich history, a subset of the stowaway phenomenon—the story of people attempting to mail themselves in boxes.

Like stowaways on ships, trains, and planes, people have attempted (and sometimes succeeded!) in mailing themselves as recently as just a few years ago. It’s not easy, nor legal, nor permitted by any major shipping company, but that hasn't stopped a very special group of people from trying. 

Whether to escape slavery or merely the cost of a plane ticket, people have been trying for over a century and a half to package themselves like so many rolls of toilet paper from Amazon.  

Searching a ship for stowaways, c.1850. (Photo: Library of Congress) 

The specific concept of a stowaway probably dates back to the early 1800s. Freighthopping, or leaping onto a train, became especially common after the Civil War, and stowaways on ships reached their peak in the early decades of the 1900s. It’s a dangerous thing to do; secreting oneself in the bowels and containers of a ship carries with it the risk of suffocation, starvation, and thirst. A stowaway’s legal position is rarely secure, and if the stowaway is discovered, he or she is unlikely to find much sympathy from a ship’s crew.

As travel technology changed, the romantic notion of a stowaway took a hit. Stowaways on planes are more rare due to the near-suicidal level of danger in the strategy. Wikipedia maintains a lengthy, though sometimes uncorroborated, list of attempts to stow away in the wheel well of an airplane, an empty space just large enough for a human. This is a bonkers thing to try, as temperatures can reach -81 degrees F, the pressure from the elevation collapses lungs, and there’s not nearly enough oxygen to survive at even relatively low cruising levels. The only modern surviving airplane stowaways, like 21-year-old Indonesian man Mario Steven Ambarita, who survived a flight from Sumatra to Jakarta earlier this year, have tended to try for short flights at low altitudes.

But mailing oneself in a box, that’s something different. Shipping companies like FedEx and the United States Postal Service (USPS) ship packages in temperature-controlled, pressurized cargo holds. A box itself provides some level of privacy and security, though it also minimizes one’s ability to move. And staying inside a box allows one to remain, sort of, in plain sight: once you’re past the initial line of security, you can stay put and await delivery.

Illustration of Henry Box Brown's ‘resurrection’ in Philadelphia, from the 1872 book "The Underground Railroad" by Willliam Still. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Perhaps the most famous self-mailer is Henry “Box” Brown, an escaped Virginia slave who mailed himself to Pennsylvania, a free state, in 1849. Brown severely burned his hand to get out of work one day, then, in collusion with abolitionists in Philadelphia, had himself packaged into a box equipped with a bottle of water, a few biscuits, and a rough blanket, and shipped via the Adams Express Company, now an investment firm that in the 19th century was a shipping and freighting company known for its privacy. The shipping cost Brown $86, just over $2,500 in today’s dollars, and took an extremely uncomfortable 27 hours. But he was delivered successfully, and became a well-known abolitionist speaker and entertainer later in life. (Apparently Frederick Douglass was annoyed with Brown for revealing his method of escape, thus preventing other slaves from doing the same.)  

Reg Spiers, who posted himself in a box from England to Australia. (Photo: Courtesy Marcus McSorley/ Roaring Forties Press)

Much later, in 1964, Reg Spiers, a near-Olympic-level Australian javelin thrower, found himself stranded in England after failing to qualify for the English Olympic team. Spiers told the BBC earlier this year that his wallet was stolen, leaving him penniless, and that his best option for getting home was to mail himself in a large crate, cash on delivery, and figure out payment when he got home to Australia. A friend, John McSorley, built Spiers a box, 5 feet by 3 feet by 2.5 feet, equipped with some straps so Spiers could hold himself steady as he was moved.

The box was loaded with Spiers himself, a pillow, a blanket, some cans of food, a bottle of water, and an empty bottle as a makeshift bathroom, and sent to Australia. Amazingly, after delays in London and an especially brutal layover in steamy Mumbai, Spiers survived the three-day trip home. Back in the Perth airport, Spiers says he let himself out of the box and cut a hole in the airport’s wall. After stealing a beer from the cargo area and dressing in his own suit, he simply walked out of the hole he’d cut and hitchhiked home.

The box being inspected at Perth International Airport. (Photo: Courtesy Marcus McSorley/ Roaring Forties Press)

Little did he know that McSorley, having not heard from Spiers for days, was getting worried, and alerted the press. So within a week he found himself hounded by reporters wanting to know about his amazing journey. The attention did have one nice effect, though: the airline forgave his debt. (Another outcome was that McSorely co-authored a book called, appropriately, Out of the Box, about the whole affair.)

A replica of the box Reg Spiers travelled in. (Photo: Courtesy Marcus McSorley/ Roaring Forties Press)

I contacted both FedEx and the USPS to find out about shipping myself. Both prohibit it, though it’s worth noting that the USPS employees I talked to have a sense of humor about this kind of thing and gleefully chatted with me about the weird stuff you’re allowed to ship.

Legally, you are allowed to ship only very specific types of live animals. Those include day-old birds, certain adult birds (chickens, for example), bees, a selection of cold-blooded animals including baby alligators and chameleons, and, bizarrely enough, some scorpions. “Yeah, bees, crickets … I used to work in the processing plants when those things would come through. They must be packaged very specifically to protect the insects and the postal workers,” says Sue Brennan, senior public relations specialist at the USPS.

The rules for mailing baby alligators are as follows: The alligator must be under 20 inches in length, it must not require any food or water during its journey, and it must not create “sanitary problems” or “obnoxious odors.” Otherwise it’s pretty much no problem to mail a baby alligator.

Scorpions are mailable only if they’re to be used for medical or anti-venom research, must be packed in a special sort of double-walled container, and must be clearly labeled “live scorpions.”

Warm-blooded animals, aside from those few birds, are not permitted at all. The official USPS document specifically mentions that you are not allowed to mail somebody a flying squirrel. I’m not sure if the USPS has had a problem with boxes of live flying squirrels or what.

The larger problem with attempting to mail yourself is weight. FedEx and UPS both have a 150 pound weight limit, and the USPS has a mere 70 pound weight limit. Along with the box material and survival supplies, that could make it tricky to mail oneself, if one was to ignore the very strict rules on the subject. The size of a package won’t likely be a problem; none of the three major shipping companies in the US restrict boxes to a size that would be difficult for a human to fit in. UPS, for example, allows packages up to 108 inches long, with a maximum of 168 inches in combined length and width.

Of course, it’s also unlikely you’d get away with it; security technology, especially scanners, has improved a great deal since the times of Henry “Box” Brown and even Reg Spiers. On the plus side, there’s no extra fee—you just pay by weight and how quick you want yourself to get there, and you’re on your way. Hopefully.

A net escape chute at an air traffic control tower in Missouri (Photo: U.S. Air Force)

The opening to an escape chute isn't exactly inviting. Mostly used on industrial rigs or in buildings when other emergency exits are unsafe, the chute, at its entrance, looks something like the maw of a blood-sucking lamprey (except without the teeth) or, if we're being honest, sort of like the terminal end of your digestive tract.

To use the chute, which is made of concentric tubes of fabric, you must entrust your body to this orifice.

"If we get a job that's a reasonable size, we turn up with a scaffold, with an escape chute about five meters high," says Eric Hooper, the owner of Escape Chute Systems. (Five meters is just about 16 and a half feet, or two short stories high.) "We train people to go through, and if they're going to too fast we can slow them down. Then we take up them up to the roof. It could be between 40 meters and 80 meters"—between about 130 feet and 260 feet—"high, and there's a mental thing then. They know they've got an 80 meter drop."

There's alway someone who balks at going through. He'll take that person, rush them to the front of the line, and tell them: There's a fire. You can jump. You can stay up here, be burnt and die. Or you can you use the chute.

They always go down, and they're always happy about it, under the circumstances. "It's long, and it's scary. There's no other way to put it," says Hooper. "When you're going down there's nothing underneath you."

In the annal of escape technology, the escape chute never really had its big moment, but the idea, in one form of another, has been around for about two centuries. In 1813, a collection of recently patented inventions described it as a bag "by which a person on the highest stories of houses may expeditiously descend." It was "composed of a single piece of strong cloth, about twenty-two meters long and two meters wide." In this model, the tube was then pulled away from the building at an angle. People could get in it and slide down, safely, to the ground. In one experiment in Geneva, a M. Bordier reported, "twenty-two persons have descended by it in one minute and fifty seconds from a fourth story."

Early in the 20th century, some schools installed metal escape chutes, not unlike slides. In 1948, an Atlanta hospital installed a similar, spiral escape chute through which patients, still in their beds, could be evacuated.

A metal escape chute from the early 20th century (Photo: NARA/Wikimedia)

But the chutes began gaining popularity again around the 1970s, as high-tech fabrics improved their performance. (The exterior layer can now be fireproof, for instance.) There are three main designs: the one Hooper sells, where the tube drops straight down, one that requires the bottom end to be anchored at an angle to the building, and one that involves an interior, spiral-like structure that slows down the person's descent.

Although some office buildings do install escape chutes, they're most often used in higher risk industries. Most of Hooper's sales, for instance, are to mining companies, which need easy routes of escape from huge machines that can rise around 40 feet high. They're also used on sites like oil rigs and air traffic control towers—places where the expense of the chutes, which can cost more than $10,000, are easy to justify. The technology is also more popular outside the U.S.; Asia is a booming market.

As long as people don't choke while entering the chute, it is an expeditious point of exit. Once you're inside the chute, you can move fast: up to about 12 feet a second, according to Hooper, although few people go that fast. A couple dozen people per minute can enter the chute: one company puts it as high as 30. When you're inside, if you look down, you'll see the person descending in front of you.

What everyone wants to know, according to Hooper, is what about people who are overweight? And, he says, there is a limit to how big a person can be. There's a metal ring holding the top of the chute open, and it's about two feet across. To use the chute, you have to be able to fit through that ring.

But the chute can handle quite large people. When Hooper was installing a chute at the Santa Monica pier, a "massive policeman" wanted to be put through. "I thought, no, I can't put him through, but he insisted," Hooper says. They took the ring off the top of the chute, and the policeman's  body fit through that. "We put him through," says Hooper. "If they stretch up like that"—he raises his arms alongside his ears, stretching the body into a straighter line—"they can do it."

Inside the net (Photo: U.S. Air Force)

Notre Dame (Photo: Chi King/Flickr)

So you are in 13th century England and you’ve been accused of, or maybe have actually committed, a murder. To be taken into custody and tried would likely result in execution, so you need to go to ground, fast.

Luckily, all that entailed was running into a Christian church.

The right to sanctuary, as the tradition is called, is probably best known through the titular outcast of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, who used the protective right to save his true love. But it actually dates all the way back to traditions from the ancient Greece and Rome, yet surprisingly survived (in a much changed form) into the 17th century.

Taking refuge in these miraculous safe zones, though, was far more complicated and dangerous than most people think.

The ancient Greeks, Romans, and even Hebrews had a similar concept of sanctuary from which the romanticized medieval laws grew. In Greek and Roman society, all temples to the gods could harbor runaway slaves and criminals to a certain extent, while Hebraic tradition went bigger, declaring six whole cities as places where criminals could take refuge. These early asylums were established under the belief that the gods (or god) were inviolable, and thus their temples and holy sites shared this untouchable aspect. Of course, these sites were not just hidey holes where fugitives could go to thumb their nose at the authorities; the petitioner for sanctuary had to atone and pay penance for their crimes.

According to Karl Shoemaker,  Associate Professor of History and Law at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and author of Sanctuary and Crime in the Middle Ages, 400-1500, it was from these examples of holy forgiveness that the better-known version of medieval sanctuary sprung. The earliest Christians were aware that pagan temples offered sanctuary for criminals, and they did not want to be shown up in their piety by their pagan rivals. Thus the idea that criminals should be offered protection within Christian churches as well, with the added benefit that asylum seekers might be converted or offered a chance to repent.

The Sanctuary Knocker at Durham Cathedral (Photo: dun_deagh/Flickr)

Shoemaker explains that as Christianity spread across Europe, sanctuary protections came along with it, supported by the church, as well as the various crowns. Thanks to the precise and pervasive record-keeping of the English, their codified and standardized version of sanctuary procedure is the process best known today.

In order for a felon to gain sanctuary, an asylum seeker had to simply enter a church and wait for an appointed officer of the crown (known as a coroner) to arrive. Once the coroner arrived, the seeker had to confess to their crime, whether they committed it or not, and they were then under the protection of the church. In some cases, more specific action was required such as ringing a certain bell, sitting down on a special bench (known as a “frith-stool”), or wrapping their hand around a special door-knocker, as was the case at the Durham Cathedral, and giving it a rap, not unlike a historic, legal version of freeze tag.

During the existence of English sanctuary laws, which lasted until 1624, countless thousands of felons claimed sanctuary. Shoemaker claims that “in some counties as many as half of the recorded felonies would end in a sanctuary claim rather than a trial.” This could be even higher in some counties, where up to two-thirds of all the felonies were “resolved” in a sanctuary. During this period all Christian churches offered sanctuary within their walls. Certain churches also offered a widened area of protection that was extended to areas surrounding the church, demarcated by monuments known as “sanctuary stones” or “sanctuary crosses” Those churches (there were at least 22, including Westminster Abbey) that offered a wider sanctuary usually had to be approved by a charter from the king.

The Sanctuary Ring at Notre Dame (Photo: Myrabella/Creative Commons)

The vast majority of asylum seekers were fleeing from capitol crimes such as murder and theft, which surprisingly often carried the death penalty in those days. Other offences such as rape and arson were also not unheard of.

Shoemaker walked us through a typical (and hypothetical) scenario:

Two guys are drinking in a tavern. They get a little too deep into their cups. Violence erupts. One of them pulls a knife. In the fight, he kills, whether on purpose or a little accidentally, the other guy. First thing he’s gonna do in that situation if he’s in England any time between 1300 and the abolition of sanctuary in 1624, is run to the nearest church. He’ll enter the church and he’ll wait until [the coroner] arrives. When that man arrives, the fugitive will confess, he’ll say, ‘I killed so-and-so. I claim sanctuary.’

The coroner will write that down, and then at some point, months or perhaps even years later, when royal judges come into that vicinity to administer justice, that man’s crime, and his sanctuary claim will be reported into the judicial record. Then the last thing that will happen is that the killer will, what they call ‘abjure the realm,’ that is he will swear an oath to leave England and never return.

Once their sanctuary was resolved in this way, the fugitive would have to forfeit all of their possessions, money, and land to the crown, and get the hell out of dodge, so to speak. The traditional custom was that the abjuring fugitive would dress in the clothes of a penitent (a simple tunic, no shoes, no hat), and head for the nearest port, where ship’s captains were required to take them on, and ferry them abroad, often to Ireland or France. Unfortunately, between the crusader’s garb marking their status as a criminal, ensuring a less than friendly (if not outright hostile) journey out of the country, and their new, penniless life in a new country, leaving sanctuary was no free ride.

Through much of the existence of English sanctuary laws, fugitives would be given around 40 days to remain in the church, setting their affairs in order, and generally preparing for their journey to exile. While they remained within the prescribed sanctuary grounds, their protection was sacrosanct. It was not unheard of for people to take justice into their own hands, although abusing or messing with fugitives in sanctuary held heavy penalties for the perpetrators.

As the centuries rolled on, the length of sanctuary afforded to fugitives began to increase, with many churches extending their fugitives indefinite stays. This form of sanctuary began looking pretty attractive to some criminals who would flock to these church safehouses, essentially forming small dens of thieves, under the protection of the church. Again from Shoemaker, “We have evidence of [the fugitives] are going out in marauding bands. Robbing shopkeepers, robbing others. Then retreating back to these sanctuaries.” This began to change the perception of church sanctuaries among the people of England, and was likely the death knell of English sanctuary law.

Notre Dame back in the Notre Day. (Photo: Wikipedia)

Shoemaker believes that the changing nature of the role of law during the late 16th century in English society was the ultimate downfall of church asylum. Previously, sanctuary was seen as an act of kindness, forgiveness, and piety on the part of both Christianity and the crown. But as the feeling that an effective criminal system would deter wrongdoing through punishment began to grow in the country, the view of sanctuary’s penitent treatment of fugitives seemed to only be rewarding the criminal acts by allowing asylum seekers to avoid the official penalty.

Slowly, sanctuary laws were rolled back. The eligible number of crimes were reduced. By 1624, standard sanctuary laws were abolished, and fugitives were no safer in a church than they were in the streets.

Correction: Karl Shoemaker's title was previously mentioned as Associate Professor of History at University of Wisconsin Law School. This has been corrected to reflect his correct position.

The maybe-snake (Photo: Dave Martill, University of Portsmouth)

The snake fossil that David Martill, a British paleobiologist, found in a German museum may not be the oldest snake fossil ever found. But it is the only snake fossil ever to be found with four legs. 

If, that is, it's actually a snake.

Martill, who works at the University of Portsmouth, found the fossil on a field trip to the Bürgermeister Müller Museum in Germany. It originally came from northeastern Brazil, although it's not exactly clear when it was collected. It's about 6 inches long, and has 272 vertebrae. It has two tiny hind legs. But given that even some snakes today have vestigial hind legs, those were not as surprising as the two tiny front legs.

Before this, no snake fossil with four legs has ever been found. "This is once-in-a-lifetime discovery," Martill told Ed Yong, for National Geographic. But, as another scientist told Yong,“Opinions on snake evolution are highly polarized." He writes:

It’s certainly possible that Tetrapodophis could be something else. In the squamates alone, a snake-like body has independently evolved at least 26 times, producing a wide menagerie of legless lizards. These include the slow worm of Europe, and the bizarre worm-lizard Bipes, which has lost its hind legs but has kept the stubby front pair. True snakes represent just one of these many forays into leglessness.

Part of the difficulty is that some of the fossil's other features don't seem snake-like. So some scientists aren't quite ready call a snake a snake. They'll want a closer look at the actual fossil before weighing in.

The legs themselves are so diminutive that Martill and his colleagues don't think they were used to help this creature move around. Instead, they think they were limbs used for grasping mates during reproduction—or for pinning down prey to keep it from getting away.

Snake feet (Photo: Dave Martill, University of Portsmouth)

Bonus finds: An Earth-like planet near a Sun-like star, a shipwreck in Lake Michigan

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

April 2015 in Galacia Spain while on a walk along the Camino Portuguese. (Photo: Paul Kiczek/Freewalkers.)

For a few months in the mid-1960s, a new exercise technique swept the globe. Like jazzercise, aerobics, Crossfit or Prancercise, hoards of people around the world flocked to try it.

It was walking. Specifically, long distance walking.

Walking became an American fad in 1963, thanks to President John F. Kennedy. President Kennedy often talked about the importance of physical fitness, pointing out that during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency marine officers were required to be able to walk 50 miles in 20 hours. Then-attorney general Robert F. Kennedy decided to back his brother up and in February 1963 he walked a 50 mile route that ended in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. A walking craze overtook the nation. According to an April 1963 New York Times article, teenagers, marines, Boy Scouts, government workers and “Sunday drivers” took to roads and walkways in droves, while department stores scrambled to meet the demand for pedometers. Interest in the 50-mile Kennedy March, as it came to be known, ignited globally, and today you can still attend an annual version in Sittard in the Netherlands. But the craze is mostly forgotten in the U.S. today.

Paul Kiczek is trying to change that.

Kiczek was one of those teenagers inspired by President Kennedy in 1963. He and his friends set out to walk 50 miles through their home state of New Jersey, clocking 38 miles in 12 hours before throwing in the towel. Kiczek, like most of the Kennedy walkers, never tried long distance walking again, favoring running and cycling. But the memory stayed with him and in 2009 he challenged himself to try again, tracing a version of Robert Kennedy's 1963 walk. Again, he made it 38 miles. Shortly thereafter, he founded FreeWalkers, an organization devoted to promoting long distance walking. The organization has since racked up 1,500 members and earned non-profit status.

A view of the northern ascent of Catbells (facing south) in the Lake District near Keswick, Cumbria. (Photo: David Liff/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

FreeWalkers convenes about 40 walks a year, mostly on the East Coast, although Kiczek took his first group to Spain for a weeklong trot this year.

“Walking, it gives you a different perspective entirely,” says Kiczek.

In the U.S., it’s common to walk long distances in order to raise money for a charity, but not for much else. And that’s fine, but Kiczek wants people to walk for walking’s sake.

A sweet spot for a Freewalkers walk is about 25-30 miles, with 50 being on the “extreme side”. Many of the walks organized by the group meander through scenic locales, but there are also plenty of less dreamy routes. This September the Freewalkers will amble across every pedestrian-accessible bridge in Pittsburgh. They’ve traced a Revolutionary War battle march. They’ve walked through industrial areas and from New Jersey to Penn Station. Freewalker events are frequently organized around mass transit.

The group at start of the Hudson Loop Walk, June 6, 2015 - Exchange Place, Jersey City, NJ. (Photo: Paul Kiczek/Freewalkers)

While long distance walking is a novelty for many Americans, it has long been popular in Europe—miles of established paths criss-cross the continent, and in England they are often clearly marked and cared for. If a path unravels across a farm, the farmer is the caretaker of that expanse. Many enthusiasts belong to the Long Distance Walkers Association, based out of England. Founded in 1972, the LDWA is a clearinghouse for information, organizes long distance walks, publishes a journal called “Strider”, and holds an annual meeting. It has around 8,000 members. The LDWA site cautions that “what constitutes an LDP [long distance path] is a matter of opinion and views vary widely” but most of the routes they catalog are 20 miles or longer.

More recently, too, walking pilgrimages have come back in vogue, even for the non-religious. The Way of St. James, a 1,200-mile trek through Europe, has seen its walking members swell to over 200,000. The most intense leg of the journey stretches for 500 miles and, amazingly, many people walk to completion.  

The West Highland Way in 2005, view from the summit of the Devil's Staircase looking south over the east end of Glen Coe, towards Buachaille Etive Mòr with Creise and Meall a' Bhuiridh beyond. (Photo: Colin Souza/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.5)

Gail Elrick has walked all over the world. She started walking as a child with her family, and she’s now the chair of the LDWA. Many of her walks are peaceful tromps through the countryside, but she has had her share of adventures, such as a scary moment on a mountain pass in Patagonia.

Elrick had been looking forward to reaching a particular part of the trail in Torres del Paine National Park; even though the pass was noted for its difficulty, the reward was spectacular views of a glacier on the other side. But it started snowing, her visibility was reduced to almost zero, and the wind was blowing fiercely.

Then a strong gust picked her up, flinging her several yards.

“It was at this point that I said to my husband, ‘I really think we should go down,’” says Elrick. “And he said ‘Yes, I think we should’ and I said, ‘I think we could die here’ because people had died on that pass and there was no one else around.”

Cuidad Perdita Lost City Trek. (Photo: Jonathan Hood/Flickr.)

Elrick delivers this story cheerfully, although she says she was quite frightened at the time. The weather never improved, so Elrick and her husband abandoned their trek and went back home to England. But the scare wasn’t enough to keep them away and they returned. Twice.

Plenty of people would put that in the same category as “hiker”, and Elrick does do walks that are more akin to a wilderness trek than a brisk constitutional.

But long distance walking isn’t quite the same as hiking. For one thing, many long distance walkers simply go for one long walk that lasts a day—20 or more miles is common. Walks organized by the LDWA average around 26 miles. Once a year they host a 100-mile walk split up over two days. And long distance walkers aren’t necessarily campers. Even when they do go on adventurous multi-day excursions, they’re just as likely to post up at a bed and breakfast where they can take a shower and have a beer. There are even businesses that will carry your gear for you. And long distance walking doesn’t have to be rural; some tramp through urban centers or parks. Long distance walkers go solo, but they also go in groups. There are no “hard and fast” rules, says Elrick 

The wonderful thing about walking, according to its proponents, is that there’s a low barrier of entry. It is not as physically daunting as, say, running a marathon. Kiczek and Elrick both say they have many members in their 60s or older. But it is, of course, hard work. Kiczek says that after 30 miles, one's feet start to ache “a lot”. Elrick, who wears out a pair of shoes a year, has persevered through rain, mud and snow. And of course, there is the bane of the long distance walker: blisters. Several threads on the LDWA forums are devoted to how best to combat, treat and drain blisters. Methods discussed include an absorbing plaster called “Compeed”, duct tape, and immersing sweaty feet in a bag of corn flour.

Distance marker at Refugio Grey, Torres del Paine, Patagonia, Chile. (Photo: Phil Whitehouse/Flickr)

But the bodily toll is worth it.

Elrick eventually spied her glacier. On her second trip to Patagonia, she and her husband made it over the pass, but the coy landmark was hidden by mist. On the third trip, the sun shone and the pair was rewarded -- after three carefully planned, expensive trips—with a fantastic view.

A lot of people, upon hearing about the LDWA’s annual 100 mile event, think the walkers are “complete lunatics” says Elrick, and she understands. Because there are times during the walk that she wonders ‘Why am I doing this?’.

“But at the end, when you’ve done it and recovered and had a good night’s sleep and something to eat and forgotten how painful it was,” she says, “You think, ‘Oh, well, I’ll do it again next year!’”

Carmen Sandiego on the Sega Master System, (Photo: Kevin Simpson/flickr)

When video games moved from arcades to living rooms, a whole new industry was born as Atari, Sega, Nintendo and others competed to dominate the world's home console markets. For Sega, a company initially founded in the U.S. before moving to Japan, it was always a fight to unseat Nintendo; famously, its Master System (the predecessor to the Genesis, Sega's calling card in America), featured superior technology, yet it couldn't shake its secondary status. Eventually, the '90s ended, Sony Playstation 2 was released and it was largely game over.

And yet, there was an unexpected place where Sega reigned supreme: Brazil. And even stranger, Sega still moves hundreds of thousands of game systems every year.

The number of Master System consoles on the market in Brazil, based on sales figures compiled by UOL Games in 2012 is 5 million. That's a larger install base in Brazil than for the Genesis, the most popular Sega game system in the U.S., which sold 3 million copies during its lifetime. The website also notes a stunning fact—despite being a console that's nearly 30 years old, it still sells around 150,000 units per year in the country. That's a level that holds its own compared to more modern consoles like the Sony PlayStation 4.

It's like Brazil exists in an alternate universe—it's as if Betamax beat VHS, as if Samsung flip phones outsold iPhones. And the video game stakes are high, as Brazil represents the fourth-largest video game market in the world. The story of how Sega came to dominate is part historical accident, part savvy marketing and part slap in the face to the idea that globalism has erased all regional differences in taste.

The Brazilian Sega hit. (Photo: Tedium)

Sega itself has gone through many twists and turns since its World War II-era founding. Begun in 1940 in Hawaii, its initial name was “Service Games” and its first business was in slot machines and coin-operated jukeboxes. In the mid-60s, it merged with another game company to become Sega. By the late ‘70s, arcade games had made Sega huge; the video game crash of 1983, though, hit profits hard. Around that time, though, home consoles began to appear on the marketplace—and Sega, bought again, moved its headquarters to Tokyo. The Sega Master System, called Sega Mark III, appeared on Japanese store shelves in 1985.  

During this era, Nintendo and Sega had a very Coke-versus-Pepsi relationship—with Sega being second banana Pepsi. Sega's biggest problem was both simple and intractable: Nintendo had exclusive licenses with nearly every large game maker of the era, so Sega didn't have the games that everyone wanted.

Sega, though, did several things right with Brazil, a country with roughly two-thirds the population of the U.S. but nearly as much interest in games. Nintendo ignored the market but Sega built a licensing agreement with Tectoy, a powerful local toy manufacturer. That agreement ensured the Sega would always have a backer in Brazil. And because Nintendo had ignored the market at first, NES piracy was rampant by the time it got there. While the rest of the world was focused on Nintendo, Sega’s presence just grew and grew.

But even past the console’s heyday, nostalgia fueled game sales. Gamer memories of the Master System in Brazil rival those of the NES in the U.S., and because Sega eventually got out of the market for building new consoles, Tectoy was essentially left to market the Master System and Mega Drive (which you might know as the Genesis) by its lonesome. Rather than giving up on the system, the company adapted its approach, coming out with continually updated versions of the device and even producing new games long after the system had faded from view everywhere else.

More Master System Carmen Sandiego. (Photo: Kevin Simpson/flickr)

Price, too, plays a part in Sega’s lingering success. Brazil is one of the largest markets in the world for video games, but because of a set of strict import taxes designed to ensure that locally built products get preference in the market, piracy has become rampant.

“Buying original games in Brazil is so expensive that [it] even frightens. To give an idea, a just-launched game can cost up to BRL 250 in the country, almost half of the workers’ minimum salary,” says Brazilian journalist Juliana Mello.  Microsoft gets around this problem with its Xboxes by creating factories to build consoles locally. As a result, the Xbox One, while still more expensive in Brazil than in the U.S., is still more than $100 cheaper than the cost of Sony's Playstation 4 models. (By the way, the exchange rate between the Brazilian Real and the U.S. dollar is 1 real for every 31 cents—so a single video game generally goes for around $80 in Brazil.)

Around the time of the Playstation 4's launch in 2013, it was revealed that Sony's console had a pretty insane price for the Brazilian market. At a time when the system was selling for $399 in the U.S., an equivalent system was heading to Brazil for $1,899. "It’s not good for our gamers and it’s not good for the PlayStation brand," Sony admitted, but said its hands were tied due to high import taxes. Tectoy, meanwhile, doesn't have this problem, because it produces the systems locally, meaning that you can get a Master System with 132 built-in games for around $50 in U.S. money at Walmart—a steal compared to the $712 price of the PS4 now.

The result of the economic climate is that older consoles tend to stick around a long time. Research from the developer Sequoia finds that while locally manufactured versions of the Xbox 360 represent the country’s most popular gaming platform with a 42.9 percent market share, close behind is the Playstation 2, a 15-year-old console that nonetheless retains a 38.9 percent market share—and only officially went on sale in Brazil in 2009.

(Modern game manufacturers tend not to release sales numbers for local markets such as Brazil.)

Things are so challenging for modern game-makers that Nintendo announced it was leaving the Brazilian market earlier this year, citing local import taxes and financial rules that made it difficult for the company to run its eShop online store.

The result, according to the research firm Superdata, is that while gaming was a $4.5 billion market in Latin America in 2014—with Brazil being the largest local market—console gaming makes up just 6 percent of that market, with mobile gaming taking up the lion’s share at 43 percent.

In an environment like this, it’s understandable why the Master System hasn’t completely died off yet.

In the end, the Brazilian video game time warp might have as much to do with solid business fundamentals as anything else. Take, for example, how Sega handled Street Fighter II.

Street Fighter II is the ultimate 16-bit game. The 1991 quarter-muncher was colorful, violent, ridiculously popular and one of the first games that showed a large number of gamers how awesome an arcade game could be with a ton of buttons. It had fluid animation and definitely used all 16 of those bits.

The Master System version of Street Fighter II.

And yet, technical difficulties in recreating the look and usability kept the iconic game off-limits for an 8-bit game system like Sega's.

Except, of course, in Brazil.

It was Sega's partner, the Brazilian Tectoy, who succeeded in getting the game ported to the Master System in 1997—way after the Master System had been removed from the market in most other countries. Porting the game between systems was difficult but Tectoy made its mission to keep Sega relevant in ways it was no where else on Earth. For instance, Mortal Kombat III also appeared on the Master System.

"Maybe the reason for our success was based on low cost, high quality, locally manufactured products, plus aggressive marketing and a good knowledge of our end consumer," Tectoy President Stefano Arnhold told Hardcore Gaming 101. "We did not only sell them a product, we invited them to join Sega Club where they enjoyed a sense of participating in a community."

But with Sega having not built a new console in more than 15 years, Tectoy has shifted its strategy a bit. Instead of simply making video games, it now makes DVD players, Android tablets, and even baby monitors. They may not have Microsoft or Nintendo in their corner, but their licensing game is strong—with both Mickey Mouse and Spongebob Squarepants giving their DVD players a little extra snazz.

Even now, Tectoy is confident that its relationship with Sega might bear new fruit eventually.

“The future will come with Sega again through mobile games," Arnhold added.

In an age where globalization permeates everything, Tectoy’s success—not just as a toy company, but as a local filter for that globalization—is actually kind of refreshing. Sega chose wisely all those years ago.  

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail

Update, 7/27: An earlier version confused the Sega Master System and Mega Drive. The Mega Drive was known as the Sega Genesis in the U.S. We regret the error.

The plant—Drosera magnifica (Photo: Facebook/Paulo Gonella)

The second largest carnivorous plant in the Americas lives on a single mountain peak in the southeast of Brazil. It can grow almost five feet tall, and its long sticky leaves can catch "insects the size of a dragonfly," The Telegraph reports. Although the mountaintop on which the plant lives is surrounded by human development, the plant was unknown to science—until one amateur researcher posted its picture to Facebook.

There are forums online where plant enthusiasts and scientists gather to share pictures of their finds: often, the amateurs' photos are useful for scientists establishing the range of certain species. But this Facebook submission was unusual, and eventually the picture found its way to scientists who specialize in this type of plant.

Along with Reginaldo Vasconcelos, the man who first found the plant, scientists traveled to the site and determined that the plant was a previously unknown species. This is the first time that any plant has been "discovered through photographs on a social network," the scientists who formally described it write in Phytotaxa.

Bonus finds: 13 new species of spider, a baby mammoth tooth

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

Global lightning map based on satellite observations between 1995-2013. (Photo: NASA/Public Domain)

Where do hurricanes corkscrew into being? Where does the black dervish of a tornado tend to roar up? And where do the elements of sunlight and moisture and breeze all come together to summon a big thunderhead? Storms can pop up anyplace, but certain corners of the Earth, known as storm nurseries, breed them over and over.

These hotspots can seem remote or downright unremarkable. But even a farflung tract of ocean or a sweep of featureless prairie can incubate maelstroms of destruction, sometimes thousands of miles away.

Meteorologists keep a wary eye on storm nurseries like these to forecast tempests like hurricanes, tornadoes, and blizzards. Below are detailed maps highlighting some of these fraught weather factories.

A satellite photo showing the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). (Photo: NASA/Public Domain)

The world’s most relentless birthplace for thunderstorms is the sultry equatorial belt called the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), where the trade winds from both hemispheres merge. Sailors have long referred to this area as “the doldrums.”

Over the oceans, the ITCZ mostly produces chronic rain squalls. Where the belt crosses South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, though, it harbors much stronger thunderstorms, producing some of the most staggering lightning shows on Earth.

On the map at the top of this article, the zones of heaviest annual lighting stand out in radioactive purple. The most vigorous large-scale nursery—unmistakable on the map—is the Congo Basin in central Africa, where daily thunderheads produce some 230 lightning flashes per square kilometer annually.

Only one spot in the New World, though, goes toe-to-toe with the Congo in terms of lighting production: Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. Here the evening skies spit electricity so reliably—with close to 250 flashes per square kilometer per year—that Caribbean mariners used it for navigation.

Global tornado heartland: U.S. tornadoes, 1950-2014 (Photo: NOAA Storm Prediction Center)

Great summertime thunderstorms, meanwhile, breed prolifically in the vast reaches of the central United States—basically a sprawling flatland boxing ring for continental and maritime air masses to duke it out. This sets the stage for some of the world’s most brutal weather, including by far the most numerous and severe tornadoes.

Florida sees a healthy dose of annual tornadoes, but the most violent twisters (usually spawned in rotating thunderstorms called supercells) tend to form in two major nurseries: the Plains Tornado Alley, a swath stretching from central Texas to Nebraska and Iowa; and Dixie Alley, anchored by the lower Mississippi Valley and the Gulf Coast.

The grasslands of the South American Pampas are the planet’s second-greatest tornado hotbed. The twister-prone strip from southern Brazil to central Argentina is sometimes called Pasillo de los Tornados—the Tornado Corridor.

A map showing tropical cyclone tracks. (Photo: Climate.gov)

As the map above shows, tropical cyclones—also called hurricanes and typhoons—form in equatorial waters and hitch a ride on the easterly trade winds. The world’s hurricane cradles typically fall within 10 and 30 degrees of latitude in the warmest areas of the North Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. However, the equator itself doesn’t breed any cyclones, because one important ingredient for hurricane formation is winds warped by the earth’s rotation; that spin effect is nil right along the equator.

Some of today’s fiercest hurricanes are born near the Cape Verde islands, a group of ten volcanic islands 350 miles off the coast of West Africa. These cyclones in the North Atlantic pack a punch partly because they have such a long, open ramp of warm waters to gather steam across.

The seeds for most Atlantic hurricanes, including those Cape Verde monsters, are subtle atmospheric disturbances called easterly waves that pulse off the African continent; recent research suggests thunderstorms over Africa may actually spark these waves in the first place. (Which means meteorologists might be able to look at lightning outbreaks over Africa for a heads-up on other Atlantic cyclones a week in the future.)

The typhoons of the northwestern Pacific are even more ferocious and frequent than their Atlantic cousins. Here, the main typhoon breeding ground—a migratory low-pressure corridor called the monsoon trough—slants across the Philippine Sea southeast into Micronesia. The map below shows the track of the biggest and most intense tropical cyclone on record, Typhoon Tip, which emerged in the monsoon trough in October 1979. At its peak near Guam, this super-sized whirlwind stretched 1,380 miles across and spun at 190 miles per hour.

The track of the strongest tropical cyclone ever recorded, 1979's Typhoon Tip, born in the monsoon trough of the western North Pacific (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Everyone remembers when temperate places are suddenly hit with dramatic winter weather. This phenomenon is born in the polar front, where cold air from the poles and warm air from the tropics meet. Waves along the polar front brew low-pressure howlers called extratropical cyclones, complete with gales that can approach the breadth of a small continent. These clashes are strongest in winter.

The fearsome nor’easters that slam the East Coast are extratropical cyclones that often arise in the Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf Stream off the mid-Atlantic coast (particularly around the Carolinas). If conditions and storm tracks align, these big blows can deliver monumental snowfalls.

Hurricanes and extratropical cyclones have different fuel sources, but they sometimes shape shift into one another. Some North Atlantic hurricanes that spiral poleward are reborn as mid-latitude storms. And a handful of extra tropical cyclones that stall over warm waters become hurricanes.

The wacky (and violent) path of the "Perfect Storm," encompassing both its nor'easter and hurricane incarnations (Image: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

The notorious “Perfect Storm” of 1991 blurred the lines more than once: As an epic nor’easter in the western Atlantic, it swallowed a dying hurricane called Hurricane Grace. Then, drifting southward over the Gulf Stream, it spawned a brand-new tropical storm in its heart. This eventually gained hurricane status and trundled northeastward, partly retracing its parent storm’s path and squalling out over eastern Canada, but not before causing more than $200 million worth of damage.

The storm nurseries these maps depict aren’t just ferocious inconveniences, though they’re responsible for massive chaos and upheaval. The furies they send out into the world also help redistribute energy in the atmosphere, address the heat imbalance between the tropics and the poles, and vanquish drought with torrential rains.

Charged though they are with latent destructive power, we ought to pay these genesis zones a little respect.

A tornado spawned by a supercell thunderstorm in Oklahoma in 1999 (Photo: NOAA/Public Domain)

Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.