Goodnight, sweet Gum Wall. (Photo: jareed/Flickr)

For 20 years, the Gum Wall in downtown Seattle has been growing into a sticky technicolor mural bonded together by hundreds of thousands of strangers' saliva. Today, everything changes. Today, the Gum Wall gets scrubbed clean.

The Pike Place Market Preservation and Development Authority (PDA), which manages the waterfront market where the Gum Wall stands, announced that the wall will be washed in order to protect the integrity of its bricks. The estimated million wads of chewing gum will be removed beginning at 8 a.m. PST on November 10 in a steam-cleaning process that is expected to take three to four days.

November 9, 1989: the Berlin Wall begins to fall. November 10, 2015: the Gum Wall gets scrubbed. (Photo: Anupam_ts/Flickr)

The tradition of sticking chewed-up gum wads to the wall was established in the '90s, when people would line up in the alley to buy tickets to improv shows at the Market Theater. Soon, visitors and locals alike began to add their own masticated globs to the wall, eventually creating an eight-foot-high, 54-foot-wide artwork that was equal parts alluring, fascinating, and gross. 

Though the bricks will be thoroughly scrubbed, the Gum Wall is not gone forever. PDA Director of Communications and Marketing Emily Crawford said in the announcement that the beloved "crowd-sourced piece of public art" will live on—it's just "time to start with a clean canvas."

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

The entrance to Iwahig Prison and Penal Farm. (Photo: Audra Williams)

The signs for Iwahig Prison and Penal Farm in the Philippine city of Puerto Princesa start about a five-minute drive from the gate:

A PRISON WITHOUT WALLS IS LIKE A CELL WITH A KEY

It takes a few readings to parse the message. Most people don't have a point of reference for a prison without walls. Most people don't have a point of reference for a prison as a tourist destination, either. But Iwahig Prison and Penal Farm is both of those things: a place where incarcerated men move fairly freely over 64,000 acres and members of the public can come meet them, dance with them, and buy their handicrafts.

The souvenir shop, which sells handicrafts made by the prisoners. (Photo: Cheryll Del Rosario/flickr)

Surrounded by mountains rather than walls, Iwahig is twice the size of Paris. Visitors arrive by rented tricycle, or with the help of a tour guide. “Welcome to Iwahig Prison and Penal Colony” is spelled out in brightly colored rocks at the gates, which makes it feel more like the Heidelberg Project than Sing Sing. After a quick stop at security, there is a scenic 10-minute drive past rice paddies, makeshift stores, coconut plantations, corn fields, and countless dogs and goats before arriving in what resembles a town square.

Entrance to the post exchange. (Photo: Cheryll Del Rosario/flickr)

Just like any civic hub, there is a church, a post office, and a recreation center, all surrounded by lots of men working and chatting. Medium Security inmates wear brown t-shirts, and Minimum Security inmates wear blue. It’s not immediately evident if anyone is a member of staff, save for a middle-aged woman who drives through purposefully on a motorcycle. The recreation center is home to the dance rehearsal and performance space, and otherwise functions as a big souvenir shop.

The recreation center. (Photo: Cheryll Del Rosario/flickr)

Half a dozen inmates launch into a dance routine at the arrival of new guests, to Bruno Mars’ "Just The Way You Are." Most of them appear to be in their mid-20s, and at least a couple of them are lipsynching earnestly along with the song. After their performance, they are quick to lead visitors towards the specific handicrafts they have made themselves. Ninety percent of the proceeds from sales are used to keep the prison self-sustaining, but the remaining 10 percent goes to the inmates directly.

The inmates dancing. (Photo: Jarius Khan)

Iwahig has 10 pages of visitor reviews on TripAdvisor. A handful of these complain about how pushy the inmates are, particularly when encouraging tourists to buy their goods. In reality, the sales tactics are no more aggressive than at any open-air market or even shopping mall. The only difference at Iwahig is that the inmates are covered in homemade tattoos (some of them quite stunning) and will offer similar body art to visitors in exchange for a pack of cigarettes and a cup of coffee.

Crafts made by inmates. (Photo: Cheryll Del Rosario/flickr) 

When the inmates give visitors a tour, the contrast between the Maximum Security facilities and the rest of the grounds becomes clear. Three hundred Maximum Security inmates were crammed in a small, dilapidated building, with several guards out front and “NO FIXERS” signs everywhere. These are a result of the Anti Red Tape Act of 2007, legislative measures intended to stop bribery and corruption in government-operated agencies.

Some of the inmates at Iwahig. (Photo: Matt Paish)

The rest of the grounds, however, feel just like strolling around any real-world village. Men play ping pong on the ground floor of a big wooden building, while “five-six-seven-eight” (a familiar refrain for any dancer) echoes out of an upstairs room. Medium Security inmates live dormitory-style, a few hundred to a room, while Minimum Security inmates are allowed to live in a small hut with their family and farm and fish with little supervision.

Iwahig wasn’t always made up of huge open spaces and the potential for inmates to walk freely. Founded in 1904 as a way to get political prisoners far from the nation’s capital during an American occupation, it comprised 60 inmates and one guard, who were sent to a nearly uninhabitable piece of land on Palawan. The inmates were then used as free labor to clear out the rainforest to allow for further development of the island. Forty-two years later, after the Treaty of Manila relinquished US control of the islands, inmates who had completed their sentences were allowed to clear and keep for themselves up to to six hectares of land.

Now, Iwahig's 3000 or so inmates come from all around the Philippines, most of them serving long sentences for violent crimes. The rest of the population is made up of on-site prison staff and the inmates' wives and children. As the prisoners tend to be serving decades-long sentences, many of them have children who were born at the penal farm and have never lived anywhere else. Some of those children have gone on to have children of their own, a second generation who have never been outside of Iwahig. There is a school on-site, where children, staff, and inmates learn side-by-side.

(Photo: Arlene Paredes/flickr)

“The children are happy here, as if they were free,” a mother tells French filmmakers Alexandre Leborgne and Pierre Barougier in the 2006 documentary Out of Bounds. The film presents the story of Alejandro, a long-time inmate who acts as a “mayor” of the prisoners, who is soon to be released. Unlike the view you get as a tourist, watching it gives a much better sense of what it is like to be housed at the prison.

A still from the documentary film Out of Bounds, about Iwahig. (Photo: Courtesy Alexandre Leborgne)

When inmates arrive at Iwahig, they spend six months in Medium Security, before being eligible for Minimum Security freedoms. Infractions like drinking and smoking can send them back to Medium. There is bureaucracy and tedium, just like anywhere else. The Minimum Security long-timers supervise the work of their Medium Security counterparts, help them navigate the prison’s administration system, and advocate on their behalf. The tone is scolding, but their core motivation seems to be genuine concern.

Even though any inmate serving a long sentence has the option of going to Iwahig, not everyone wants to. It is far from home for most people, and long days spent farming or fishing pay between 100 and 200 pesos a month, the equivalent to a couple of packages of cigarettes. The number of inmates allowed to sleep with their families has dwindled to 20 after a 2014 escape plan saw at least one prisoner go free.

Still, the recidivism rate is only 10 percent—half of what it is in the rest of the country. As one of the inmates says in Out of Bounds: “My life could have been ruined, if I had not been sent to Iwahig.”

A particularly saucer-y lenticular cloud, over Dublin in June. (Photo: Omnisource5/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 4.0) 

This past weekend, eerie shadows passed over Cape Town, South Africa. Those who looked up saw huge puffy saucers hovering overhead, their dark underbellies promising either rain or aliens. In preparation, everyone hauled out their #UFO hashtags, as is customary around the globe.

 

It is time

These particular flying objects actually can be ID'd: they're lenticular clouds. This cloud type, which gets its name from the Latin word for "lens-like," is formed when strong, wet winds cool and condense as they blow over large obstructions, explains National Geographic's Brian Clark Howard. That's why you can often find them downwind of big landscape features, like Cape Town's Table Mountain.

 

Did you notice the UFO's flying over #capetown yesterday? 👽 Photo by @mijlof 📷

A photo posted by Instagram South Africa (@instagram_sa) on Nov 8, 2015 at 11:56pm PST

Local legend offers a different explanation, saying that the puffs are from a smoking contest between the devil and a Dutch pirate named Van Hunks. "It is said that Van Hunks won the competition but the Devil challenged him to a re-match," which accounts for the frequent stream of huge puffs, explains a local guidebook. 

UFOs and pirates aside, these particular clouds abducted no one. Instead, observers beamed their pictures up to Instagram, a good place to see the invasion's progression.

 

Did you notice the UFO's flying over #capetown yesterday? 👽 Photo by @mijlof 📷

A photo posted by Instagram South Africa (@instagram_sa) on Nov 8, 2015 at 11:56pm PST

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 edit@atlasobscura.com.

Three two-tailed melusines with mirrors. (Photo: cea +/flickr)

On a late October morning, the wind howls through the winding streets of ancient Otranto. Whitecaps curl up from a bright blue sea, smashing against the fortified walls of the southern Italian city. Otranto was once considered the easternmost tip of Western civilization, with just under 50 miles of Mediterranean sea separating the city from Albania. From the city’s bay, Crusaders left on missions to the Orient, early Christian travelers returned from pilgrimages to Jerusalem, and in the 15th century, the Ottoman Turks launched their attack on the city. All of these parties passed by the Otranto Cathedral at some point during their journey.

In the sunlight, the exterior of the cathedral is golden. The structure, built in 1088, is simple, with a few arched windows and carved capitals. But inside, wild animals, biblical characters, and fantastical creatures cavort across the cathedral floor. A monk named Pantaleone and his team of artisans created the enigmatic mosaic in the 1160s. It’s one of the largest in Europe and depicts all the important stories and figures of the time: the Tree of Life, the expulsion from Eden, Alexander the Great, elephants, sphinxes, centaurs, and much more.

How all of these stories and images from distant cultural traditions made their way onto the mosaic is still a mystery. But most intriguingly–at least for the contemporary coffee consumer–is a detailed image of a long-locked, sweetly smiling, twin-tailed mermaid.

The interior of Otranto Cathedral. (Photo: Lupiae/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Indeed, she looks a lot like the stylized green lady gazing staring serenely back at you from the white cup on your desk holding your cooling coffee. Though Starbucks claims that their image was originally drawn from a 16th century Norse woodcut, a little exploring reveals that the world’s most famous mermaid was famous long before the 16th century–and long before Starbucks.

On the backs of a male and female elephant, the Tree of Life stretches towards the apse of the church, with various stories documented on the branches of the tree. One segment is a medieval calendar, depicting every month of the year with its zodiac sign and related activities: for example, in September, a peasant pounds grapes with his feet underneath an image of Virgo. Another segment depicts heaven and hell, with punishments similar to those that would be described 200 years later in Dante’s Inferno. The fabled King Arthur rides his horse next to Cain and Able, laborers construct a soon-to-crumble Tower of Babel, the Roman goddess Diana shoots a deer, and in the mosaic version of a medieval bestiary, sphinxes and lions claw at one another.

With stories and symbols drawn from the Bible, the Koran, Greek mythology and medieval stories, the mosaic is a testament to the diversity of ideas that circulated in southern Italy during the Middle Ages.

The exterior of Otranto Cathedral. (Photo: Angelica Calabrese)

Inhabited since in the 8th century BC, with a strategic position at the center of a rich trade between the East and the West, Otranto would clock time as a part of the Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Norman empires. The Cathedral, commissioned by the city’s Norman rulers for completion by local Greek-Italian monks, combines early Christian, Byzantine, and Romanesque styles. Otranto was also home to a thriving Jewish community from its inception, and some hypothesize that Kabbalah is the key to understanding the unusual mosaic.

The twin-tailed mermaid is located in a section of the mosaic typically thought to represent virtues to aspire to and vices to steer clear of, in the form of various mythical creatures and historical figures. Along with a unicorn, a leopard, an elephant, the Queen of Sheba, and others, the mermaid likely served to remind the many travelers who passed through the cathedral to beware the temptations, carnal and otherwise, that might lead them to stray from their path.

The twin-tailed mermaid mosaic at Otranto Cathedral.  (Photo: Angelica Calabrese)

But in cities such as Otranto, with long histories of various rulers, cultures, and belief systems, no interpretation is certain, and it’s nearly impossible to trace the precise origin of an image like the twin-tailed mermaid. In many different ancient civilizations, from West Africa to Mesopotamia, the mermaid was a fertility symbol uniting man and nature. The first recognizable mermaid image appears on an Assyrian palace in 800 BC, with later cameos in Homer’s The Odyssey, and Etruscan funerary urns from 300 BC. Others claim the mermaid is related to Sheela-Na-Gig, a fertility symbol found in Ireland and Britain, and still others say that she may have been inspired by the allure of women from Eastern countries.

The particular split-tailed and long-locked mermaid whose descendants populate coffee cups all over the world first appears on the mosaic floor of a cathedral in Pesaro, Italy. This mosaic was created during the Byzantine era, in the 7th century. Five hundred years later, she became a focal part of the mosaic in the Otranto Cathedral.

It’s difficult to know where else she might have been depicted in the centuries in between, what mosaics and sculptures and frescoes may have been lost over time. But Otranto was a highly trafficked port city at the time, and it is possible that the image in the cathedral may have inspired other artists and travelers.

The mosaic's depiction of Satan in hell. (Photo: Angelica Calabrese)

Also popular in port cities like Venice, by the 13th century the twin-tailed mermaid began to travel through Europe. She became a crucial member of the medieval “bestiary,” a collection of animals used to decorate church capitals, porticoes, and religious texts. These fantastical figures served to warn men and women against the vices condemned by the medieval church, like temptation, greed, and pride. In the 14th century, a French text was published that described the story of Melusine, a beautiful queen whose bottom half became serpentine while she bathed; this character soon became associated with the twin-tailed siren.

When Starbucks was preparing to open its doors in 1971, the founders were in search of an image that could represent their fledgling Seattle coffee company. “There was a lot of poring over old marine books going on,” Starbucks staff writer Steve M. wrote in a 2011 blog post, and “suddenly, there she was: a 16th century Norse woodcut of a twin-tailed mermaid, or siren.”

The original Starbucks logo. (Photo: Blanca Garcia Gil/flickr)

While some have tried to track down the “16th century Norse woodcut” from which the original image was culled, others, like blogger Carl Pyrdum, argue that such a woodcut never existed. “By the time woodcut images on paper arose in medieval Europe, around 1400 give or take a decade, there weren’t any people that you could properly call ‘Norse,’” he writes in a post on Got Medieval.

The “woodcut” was likely drawn from an image of Melusine, who was popular in France and Northern Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries. This first siren had bare breasts, a plump stomach with a belly button, and promiscuously splayed tails, though redesigns have hidden these features. Howard Schultz, the businessman who transformed Starbucks into a contemporary global coffee empire, described her as “barebreasted and Rubenesque,” in his book Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time.

Today's Starbucks logo. (Photo: Noel Reinhold/flickr)

The mermaid was supposed to be “as seductive as the coffee itself,” he writes. Seductive, yes–but a medieval consumer confronted with the symbol would have known that she was a reminder to resist temptation, rather than to succumb to it. According to the company’s website, Starbucks also believed the siren’s image could “capture the seafaring history of coffee and Seattle’s strong seaport roots.”

Seen on the logos across the world as well as in the mosaic of the Otranto Cathedral, the siren is a potent symbol of globalization–but a globalization that was thriving long before Starbucks came around. With her roots (or rather, her tails) in the Mediterranean basin, she is the inevitable production of the countless cultural interactions and exchanges that took place in the region–like coffee itself, and, in fact, like Starbucks. After all, it was Italian coffee culture, its espresso drinks and leisurely cafés on every corner, that inspired Schultz to create his own coffee behemoth.

Maybe someday the mermaid on the mosaic of Otranto will be face to face with her modern reincarnation on a glass-walled coffee shop on the other side of the church’s piazza.

Do these classical nymphs even know it's almost Thanksgiving? (Image: Wikipedia)

Well America, it’s almost that time of year again: time to haul out the decorative cornucopias.

Perhaps you'll shell out for the $70 cornucopia at Williams-Sonoma. Maybe you'll decide to forego the whole centerpiece thing. Regardless, you'll be bombarded with images of woven cornucopias as the nation prepares to give thanks.

To most Americans, this bountiful horn is associated with the breaking of bread between the European pilgrims and Native Americans, or just simply the harvest season. But its history stretches back much farther than that. As seemingly all-American as this symbol of abundance is, the cornucopia has its roots in the mystery and magic of Greek mythology. What we generally see depicted today as a woven horn overflowing with flowers, fruits, nuts, grains, and all manner of wholesome symbols of domestic wealth, began as an animal horn. A magic animal’s horn.

A traditional Thanksgiving cornucopia. (Image: morano.vincent/Flickr)

According to the ancient Greeks, the horn of plenty, as the cornucopia was originally known, was broken off the head of an enchanted she-goat by Zeus himself. As the myth goes, the infant Zeus was hidden away from his father, the titan Cronos, in a cave on the isle of Crete. While in hiding, the baby Zeus was fed and cared for by Amalthea, a figure alternately depicted as a naiad (water nymph) or she-goat. Whether Amalthea was the goat herself, or just its caretaker, most of the myths agree that Zeus, while suckling at the teat of a magic goat, broke off its horn, which began to pour forth a never-ending supply of nourishment. Thus the symbol of the horn of plenty was born.

The ancient Romans, in their bid to appropriate the mythology of the ancient Greeks, told the story a bit differently. According to Ovid’s mock-epic poem, Metamorphoses, it was Hercules who created the horn. In the poem, the hero Theseus comes upon the moping river god, Achelous, and notices that one of his horns is missing. The pouting river spirit then tells the tale of how he battled Hercules over the hand of a woman, and in the end Hercules snapped off one of his horns. Nymphs filled it with “the choicest fruits of the autumn,” and it became the holy symbol for plenty. For the record, in the story the nymphs and choice fruits provide no joy to the defeated Achelous. 

Hercules breaking off Achelous' horn. For Thanksgiving. (Image: Wikipedia)

In addition to its specific origins, the horn of plenty became a symbol of wealth and abundance linked to mythological heavy-hitters Demeter, Goddess of the Harvest, and Dionysus, God of the Awesome Party, but it also became aligned with a number of minor gods in both the Greek and Roman pantheons. Most of the goddesses associated with the horn, which is itself a symbol of fertility, were patrons of luck, a bountiful harvest, or wealth. They had names like Abundantia, Fortuna, and even Copia, the goddess whose name can still be found in the word “cornucopia”—“cornu” meaning “horn” in Latin.

Demeter watches as the horn of plenty spills over. (Image: Wikipedia)

Even after the end of the Classical Age, cornucopias continued to pop up over the centuries in depictions of the classical gods, such as a 17th-century Rubens painting of the goddess Abundantia.

Abundantia was all about the cornucopia. (Image: Rubens painting ca. 1630/Wikipedia)

Thanks to its appearances in artwork that portrayed pastoral abundance, the cornucopia became a symbol of the harvest season, and its image morphed from its origin as an actual horn to just a horn-shaped basket. It also became a more common physical artifact found at harvest festivals. 

Williams-Sonoma's Fall Cornucopia. $69.99. (Image: Williams-Sonoma) 

Today the horn of plenty is so ubiquitous it can be found on coats of arms from Colombia to Australia. To the American eye, the cornucopia means Thanksgiving, though it is unclear exactly when the cornucopia became associated with Turkey Day. It’s not impossible that there was an actual cornucopia at what is considered the original Thanksgiving, a three-day harvest festival in 1621, but there is no record of the decoration.

Regardless of when it first entered America’s symbolic lexicon, the cornucopia is here to stay—and available for an inflated price at your local upscale homewares store. This year, when you are giving thanks, be sure to give a shout-out to the angry classical gods who made one of the most iconic parts of the holiday possible.

Dairy cows eye their potential future. (Photo: Kristina D.C. Hoeppner/Flickr)

Next time you trace a nice chemtrail across the sky, or end up next to another plane on the runway, think twice before you wave. It's increasingly likely that the passengers are not people, but cows, sheep, or goats.

People have been flying large animals overseas since before World War II, when America sent mules to Southeast Asia as part of an economic development program. But rapidly growing meat and dairy markets, often situated far from established trade routes, have meant more and more planes are now stuffed nose to tail with livestock. 

Though you might not think of them as international travelers, "there are animals moving all the time," says Bill Patten, a transport expert with Australia's Livestock Air Corporation (motto: "We Give Horses Wings"). Many of the jetset animals are coming from Australia, the world's largest exporter of livestock. Last year, the country sent about 1.2 million cattle to southeast Asia, and 2.3 million sheep to the Middle East.

As we spoke, Patten was accompanying a group of 25 camels, horses and ponies to a theme park in the Philippines. Though boat transport remains the most popular option, this group, like hundreds of thousands of their fellows, traveled by air.

Most animal planes take off from ordinary commercial airports–"we just rock up at much the same area where [passengers] get off," says Patten. Freight workers load crates into the plane, generally in a prefigured arrangement to increase air flow, and the barn takes off. Livestock supervisors sit upstairs in business class, or with the pilot. There are no in-flight movies, no safety videos, and usually no problems, though sometimes the animals get bothered by turbulence. Crates and excrement mats are destroyed upon landing.

Planes with animal passengers are subject to strict weight and density regulations. Still, just as with humans, there's a distinct correlation between crowding and status. You can fit thousands of sheep in a 747 (engineers have developed ways to modify air circulation so that you can put them in all the compartments), but it's rare you'll find more than a couple hundred breeding pigs on the same flight, says Jay Truitt of the U.S. Livestock Exporters Association, since each needs her own crate, feed trough, and water. 

Top racehorses are in a class of their own: "Obviously those don't fly in the same plane as you'd fly a group of dairy heifers," says Truitt, "namely because the buyer often has his own G6 or 747 and he takes care of it." 

What happens after their journey depends on the species involved. Most sheep are shipped live specifically so that they can be slaughtered locally, either during religious rites or at the "wet market," where shoppers buy fresh meat. "They don't like it frozen," explains Patten, and in any case, "in a lot of places they don't have the facilities to freeze it." It's easier to let sheep keep themselves alive for the duration of the trip than to risk shipping meat that could thaw out and rot.

The Boeing 747-400 is a popular livestock transport model. (Photo: Adrian Pingstone/WikiCommons Public Domain)

Live cows, meanwhile, are in demand for reasons other than freshness. Farmers might import lives heifers to "make a big jump genetically," says Truitt. United States dairy cows make three to four times more milk than those in other markets, and so some overseas farmers bring them in to increase overall productivity. Others buy exclusively American: "When they build a new facility, a lot of folks would just as soon start with high-end genetics in the first place," Truitt says. Hundreds of thousands of cows leave the U.S. every year to start families elsewhere.

Those who have more expected of them upon landing are more likely to get the airplane treatment, explains Truitt. "Animals are just like human beings when it comes to reacting to stress," he says, "and if you're spending several thousand dollars for a dairy heifer, you obviously want her to be in as good a shape as you possibly can." Putting her on a boat might mean days at sea followed by a very bumpy truck ride inland. So even though it's more expensive and holds fewer animals, "a plane is faster, and a plane can land closer," says Truitt, leaving less time for animals to get freaked out or for something to go wrong. 

Still, problems can arise. A Singapore Airlines flight made news in late October when the pilot had to land after sheep emissions–code for flatulence and manure–set off the smoke alarm (this happens with cows, too). And animal rights groups object not just to the conditions of transport, but to the fate that economy-class animals meet at their destinations. Because of these concerns, New Zealand, previously the world's leading sheep exporter, hasn't transported livestock for slaughter since 2005. 

But those who travel alongside the cargo have a different view. "A lot of them are pretty spoiled animals," says Truitt. Also, the past was much worse: "You see pictures of them going on boats and being lifted up by cranes to get onto ships," Patten explains. "It's pretty odd. I can't imagine how it all happened that way." 

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.

Termites. (Photo: Bernard DuPont/flickr)  

What do termites and fecal implants have in common? It turns out that the little bugs are the unsung innovators in an increasingly popular medical procedure.

Also known by the more scientific-sounding term fecal microbiota transplantation, the practice refers to placing stool from one person into another person. The goal is for recipients to become imbued with healthy gut bacteria, whom are critical endosymbionts in our bodies for efficient digestion. Fecal transplants recently became popular with people suffering from Clostridium difficile infections, a serious and hard to treat health condition. Clostridium infections are estimated to affect dozens of thousands of people each year, killing many of them. For the afflicted, fecal transplants have been a literal life-saver.

 Clostridium difficile colonies. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Yet they are also now being promoted as an all-around holistic health practice to combat “dysbiosis,” a perceived imbalance of microbes within the body. This has given rise to the practice of DIY fecal implants, a practice was considered fringe, but has gone mainstream in recent years, with clinics all over the United States and Europe offering this service. Some people are now even debating saving the stool of their pure newborns, in case they need them as defiled adults. As further evidence of its accepted status as a mainstream medical practice, in 2013 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration decided to regulate fecal transplants.

But don’t let the newly formed tech start up or plethora of DIY websites with step-by-step instructions devoted to them fool you. Fecal transplants are nothing new.

And they are most definitely not evidence of human invention and ingenuity. Termites invented them, 251 million years ago.

Escherichia coli, one of the many species of bacteria present in the human gut. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Previous accounts have traced the origins of fecal transplants to a journal report from the U.S. in 1958 or ancient Chinese documents from 1700 years ago. But they’re wrong. Termites routinely use this practice. They’re either the original uncredited inspiration for our current craze – or we overlooked an organism we could learn a lot from. 

“Termites feed on wood and other plant materials,” says Patrick Liesch, extension entomologist of the Insect Diagnostic Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “The main ingredient is cellulose, and cellulose is tough for animals to break down.” He has a good point—how edible does a tree look to you? According to Liesch, termites are in a “unique situation” because their gut biome has microbial symbionts, like protozoa and bacteria. Termites ingest the cellulose and when it gets to their guts, the microbes break it down into molecules that can be used by the insect.

Trophallaxis in a weaver ant. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

What does this have to do with fecal transplants? Termites, like many other insects, molt, shedding their outer layer.  “When insects molt and shed their exoskeleton, they are actually losing parts of their digestive tract,” Liesch said. “In doing this, they lose their gut symbionts.” This is because termites have their gut bacteria in their midgut, deeper into their digestion tract, unlike other insects, which have gut bacteria in their hindgut. Fecal transplants are a key way that termites are able to get those crucial bacteria back and continue to successfully digest food.

“It’s called trophallaxis,” says Rachel Arango, an entomologist and student trainee with the USDA Forest Service. “Termites will feed mouth to anus; it’s very common and the best way to get their gut symbionts back.” Trophollaxis can also be performed mouth to mouth, as some life stages of termites, like soldiers and reproductive, cannot feed themselves.  She’s also seen them resort to more unconventional methods to obtain their needed gut bacteria. “Sometimes they will eat the entire abdomen of another worker or their own discarded exoskeleton,” she added.

Termites in action. (Photo: Aleksey Gnilenkov/flickr) 

Arango isn’t merely interested in understanding termite gut bacteria though; she’s interested in the implications and applications for human health. Human gut flora has become a cultural obsession of late: Multiple research groups have sequenced the meta-genome of the community of bacteria living in humans’ digestive tracts. We’ve learned that most of the cells in our body are bacterial, not human. Now our intestinal bacteria have been credited (blamed?) with everything from obesity to brain function.

“Many termites live in the soil, surrounded by pathogenic mold and bacteria—and yet they don’t get sick,” she says. “I’m interested in the antibodies they produce with their gut symbionts. By understanding how the termites defend themselves, we can potentially identify natural properties and potentially use them against human pathogens.” Insights from termites may help us humans understand even more about our nature. “Sharing gut bacteria is thought to help termites recognize their nest-mates and cooperate socially,” Arango added. Maybe sharing stool will live up to the hype after all.

View from the edge. (Photo: Fidelio/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 4.0-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0)

A few evenings ago, dressed in sneakers, slacks, and a magenta sweater, a British freeclimber and his friend casually scaled the Eiffel Tower. Later, as the sun began to rise over Paris, the two hid in crooks in the metal framework, while French security teams lit up the entire edifice in an effort to track them down.

Their punishment, when finally apprehended by authorities? An oath not to climb the national landmark again for three entire years. Their reward? Eternal glory, and over a million views on their YouTube video in two days.

In the video, filmed by 25 year-old James Kingston with the help of a selfie stick, you can climb along with them. They begin in the dark of night, their bodies entirely untethered as they navigate upwards. You can hear their measured breathing as they balance their sneakered feet on metals bars a few inches wide, along edges that end with several hundred-foot drops. It’s like you’ve entered the secret realm of a real-life James Bond, who has swapped his tux for a YouTuber’s wardrobe.

At an elevation of 896 feet (total height of the Eiffel Tower: 984 feet), the two climbers open a door to a well-lit platform. Suddenly, the sound of French voices over walkie talkies reverberates off the walls, and they immediately retreat. The wind whooshes by as night fades; cars rev in the distance and Paris awakes. Kingston and his buddy continue to teeter along as the first elevator of the day starts to ascend.

Staring up the Eiffel Tower. (Photo: ewiemann/WikiCommons CC BY 2.0)

They were finally spotted at 9 a.m. and detained in the local police station for around six hours. This wasn’t Kingston’s first climbing-related detainment–a year ago, he was caught scurrying up Dubai’s 101-story Princess Tower. According to his website, Kingston, “unable to attain his creative potential through the constraints of an oppressive educational system,” has redirected his energy into climbing massive structures, which include London’s Wembley Arch, Ukraine’s Dnipro Towers, and an enormous chimney in Germany. He never has any ropes, and he always makes sure to snap an epic selfie. 

With authorities doling out barely a slap on the wrist, are others going to start seeing the iconic structure as a climbing playground? Just two months ago, in September, the area was evacuated when a man hoisting a rucksack was seen scaling the tower. 

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to edit@atlasobscura.com.

The Giza Pyramid complex, photographed by Eduard Spelterini from a hot air balloon in 1904. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons) 

In 867 AD, a European monk named Bernard caught a ride on a slave ship out of the southern Italian city of Taranto. He was heading for the Holy Land, on a pilgrimage with two fellow monks. Somewhere along the line, though, they decided to make a detour through Egypt. This was a pretty normal travel itinerary for the time. In fact, in his book, Wonderful Things: A History of Egyptology from Antiquity to 1881, author Jason Thompson writes that even many of the Crusades for the Holy Land ended up sacking Egypt, instead. And that fact might go a long way toward explaining why Bernard and his friends were promptly dumped into a Cairo prison and had to bribe their way back out.

From this rather inauspicious tour guide comes what is likely the first first-person account of the Pyramids of Giza in Western literature.

Bernard, echoing older traditional stories told by people who hadn’t seen the pyramids first-hand, calls them "Joseph’s granaries". He’s name-dropping a hero of the Biblical book of Genesis, a son of Jacob who is sold into slavery by his brothers and then rises to political power as an advisor to the Egyptian pharaoh. (You probably know him best as the owner of the amazing Technicolor dreamcoat.)  In one story, Joseph saves Egypt by predicting a famine and convincing the pharaoh to store up seven years worth of grain in advance.

Illustration of Joseph with his grain (and coat)), from the 1869 book The History of Joseph and His Brethren. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)  

Pyramids have been in the news recently: Thermal scans just showed the existence of “anomalies” in stones at Giza, suggesting empty spaces, warmer internal air currents or different building materials. Already, online chatter turns to speculation that it's a secret chamber hiding god-knows-what treasures. Last week, Buzzfeed posted an old video from 1998 showing presidential candidate Ben Carson talking about how he believes, essentially, the same thing Bernard the monk believed almost 1,500 years ago. “My own personal theory is the Joseph built the pyramids to store grain,” Carson said. “Now all the archaeologists think they were made for the pharaohs’ graves. But, you know, it would have to be something awfully big if you stop and think about it. And I don’t think it’d just disappear over the course of time to store that much grain.”

Carson has presented this idea as a Biblical view of history. Bernard probably would have, as well. But, in reality, Genesis never mentions the pyramids or anything like them. Instead, Bernard and Carson are both part of a different and equally powerful Western tradition: Speculating wildly about the wonders of ancient Egypt for fun and profit.

It’s a big-tent institution, encompassing the secular and the religious, the Atlanteans and the aliens and the people who believe England is home to the lost tribes of Israel. In fact, it dates all the way back to the very “father of history” himself, Herodotus, the ancient Greek who wrote a nine-volume history of the world sometime around 450 BC. Herodotus presents his work on Egypt as first-hand information and, for a very long time—like, up until the 1950s—scholars generally took him at his word. Eventually, people started to notice that not everything Herodotus had to say made sense, says Ethan Watrall, a Michigan State University professor of anthropology, who specializes in both Egyptology and pseudoarchaeology.

Ignatius Donelly's map of the Atlantean Empire, from his book Atlantis: the Antediluvian World, 1882. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

For instance, Herodotus describes watching the process of mummification and says that it involved soaking a corpse in a bath of liquefied natron salt, which desiccated it. “But how could you desiccate something in liquid?” Watrall says. “It’s illogical.” Today, we know that mummies were, instead, desiccated by covering them in bags stuffed with natro—larger versions of the “DO NOT EAT” packets you might find in your dried fruit. Herodotus got the bit about natron right. But it’s also obvious that he never watched the mummification process himself.

Herodotus’ slight exaggerations pale in comparison to, say, the work of Ignatius Donnelly, the second lieutenant governor of Minnesota, 19^th-century state representative, and Atlantean literalist. Donnelly gets the credit for popularizing the idea that Plato’s probably-allegorical lost city was, in fact, totally real, and also highly advanced. When Atlantis fell, Donnelly wrote, its refugees became the rulers and/or gods and goddesses of all the world’s great ancient civilizations, including Egypt. Ancient Egyptian culture came to mimic that of lost Atlantis. It was the Atlanteans who designed and built the pyramids.

Fragment from Herodotus' Histories, Book VIII on papyrus, dated to early 2nd century AD. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

You only have to turn on the History Channel to see how this thread stretches into our own time period—despite the fact that the actual ancient Egyptians flat-out told us both why and how the pyramids were built.

“They were prolific bureaucrats. Building it was a massive state undertaking, a public works project,” Watrall says. “The logistics and ideology are clearly documented in thousands and thousands of texts.”

So why would anyone believe in Atlanteans or think the Egyptians stored grain in pyramids? We are, after all, talking about one of the most self-documented ancient civilizations in the world. Why not listen to what they say about themselves?

According to Watrall, there are two big reasons that ancient Egypt attracts grandiose claims, evidence-free speculation, and insinuations of conspiracy.  First, you have the people, like Carson, who believe that every word of the Bible is a literal history book/encyclopedia. When they look at a place like Egypt, which figures prominently in the Old Testament, they want to see evidence that their religious text really is true. And that leads them from point A to point Z—Joseph built storehouses of grain for the pharaoh, grain silos are often big buildings, pyramids are big buildings, so maybe the pyramids are grain silos.It may not be a literal interpretation of the Bible to say that Joseph stored grain in the pyramids, but the desire for Biblical literalism drives people to make those logical leaps.

Inside the Great Pyramid of Giza: The King's Chamber, with sarcophagus. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

The other source of Egyptian pseudoscience is more universal, but also more malignant. The pyramids, you may have noticed, are big—really, crazily, overwhelmingly massive. To stand in their shadow is to be in awe of a level of engineering and coordination that few of us can imagine successfully undertaking. And so, we choose to believe that no humans were capable of it, and definitely not people who lived a long time ago, and who were so different than us, and clearly very backward.. “And the problem with that,” Watrall says, “is that the underlying principal is, at best, highly ethnocentric and, at worst, rank racism.”

If Bernard (and Ben Carson) had taken a closer look at the region, they’d have seen extraordinary clear evidence that the pyramids are not giant grain silos. Near the Pyramids of Giza, archaeologists have uncovered Gebel Qibli, a city that basically functioned as the company town for the workers who built the pyramids. Those workers were paid in grain, collected as taxes on noble landowners, Watrall says—so Gebel Qibli is home to actual ancient Egyptian grain storage buildings. These are circular, mud-brick structures, sealed against bugs with more mud, but not so sealed that fungus could grow in the stagnant air. “I could stand in the middle of one of them, reach my arms out and that would be the diameter,” Watrall says. “I couldn’t stand up. It’s less than my height and I’m 6’5”.

An artist's image of GJ1132b (Image: Dana Berry)

Of the thousands of exoplanets discovered in recent years, GJ1132b is one to get excited about. It is, one astronomer told the Guardian, "arguably the most important planet ever found outside the solar system," and it's very, very close to us. (Relatively speaking, of course.)

GJ1132b is a rocky planet, about 1.2 times the size of Earth. According to the scientists who found the planet, it's orbiting a star that's about a fifth the size of the sun. It's also blindingly hot–about 440 degrees Fahrenheit on average. That's still much cooler than other rocky, Earth-like exoplanets found so far, and it's cool enough that the planet should still have an atmosphere. (If the planet gets too hot, the atmosphere burns away.) GJ1132b also has one side that always faces its star, just like one side of the moon always faces Earth.

But perhaps that most exciting thing about this planet is that it's about three times closer to us than any other planet of this type that we've found so far. It's so close that astronomers will be able to observe its atmosphere with telescopes that have already been developed.

What that means is that we have a better chance of understanding how this planet works than any other found so far. That put us one step closer to finding a planet where life as we understand it might exist—which is the ultimate goal of exoplanet exploration.

Bonus finds: Ancient stars, underwater gold reserves, the bones of Russia's last tsar, a new Edith Wharton story

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. 

Burbling tanks of frags for sale glow under blacklights at the Manhattan Reefs Fall Frag Swap. (Photo: Kyle Frischkorn)

Early on a Sunday morning in November, a bunch of fraggers from an online forum gathered in a blacklight-infused room in lower Manhattan to exchange merchandise.

The 200 or so attendees were there in search of something most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about: coral. Fraggers are people who buy, sell, and swap coral fragments, or "frags," for their own home aquariums. At this New York event, around 200 fraggers gathered in the student union of Pace University for a "frag swap," in which professionals and hobbyists alike set up table displays of their best pieces of coral.

Frag swaps are as much for the community as they are for buying and selling. People milled around the big room as vendors set up aquariums holding coral to buy and sell. Every once in a while you would hear the loud whirr of a spinning blade cutting off a coral fragment. Many participants had coolers in their hands, each filled with plastic bags containing corals they were planning on swapping.

Coolers to keep corals at appropriate temperatures during transit are critical gear for fraggers. (Photo: Kyle Frischkorn)

The tying bind was a love of colorful saltwater-filled basins and every sort of organism they support. These people keep aquariums in their homes and pride themselves on the diversity of wildlife contained in them. They frequently converse online via '90s-esque HTML forums, most of which contain the word "reef" or ‘frag" in the title. One of the more popular sites, Manhattan Reefs., hosted the New York frag swap.

The hobby of home saltwater reef upkeep—or as some more entrenched participants call it, “reef aquarium husbandry”—has been around for decades. At the event was a man named Paul Baldassano, who proudly proclaimed that he owns the oldest saltwater aquarium in the country. It's been going strong since 1971. Since then, he has built and maintained (or, rather, husbanded) many more aquariums and even invented a few tools to make coral maintenance easier.

Frags are prepared to order by using a bone saw to cleave branches from the mother coral. (Photo: Kyle Frischkorn)

Baldassano considers himself a master saltwater aquarium keeper, although it’s always been just a hobby for the born-and-raised New Yorker. Through trial and error he taught himself how to keep organisms alive in the small tanks, and has even written a book about his travails as a hobbyist saltwater aquarium owner. Now, he says, things are different than 40 years ago. The methods he helped create have come and gone, and now other supposed experts discuss the topic online. But more often than not, these other hobbyists are wrong. “Not that the internet is a bad thing,” he writes in his book The Avant-Garde Marine Biologist, “but there are just too many opinions and no fact checkers online.”

Sure enough there were numerous other amateur fraggers eager to share their knowledge at this frag swap. One man, who went by the name of Tony and wore orange goggles to better see the corals’ color, explained that his interest in coral was thanks to his marine biologist wife. After one of her trips to sea she brought home a few specimens, which led the couple to buy their own aquariums.

Fraggers use blacklights to draw attention to healthy corals—and hot deals. (Photo: Kyle Frischkorn)

What started as a benign hobby turned into a valued and expensive collection. “I basically spend a paycheck a month,” Tony said while perusing potential coral to buy. Over the years his aquariums grew and so did his eye for specific types he wanted to raise. He often meets with other fraggers to buy or swap coral—he had in fact brought his cooler to do just that. But he also studied which organisms he was going to purchase from a vendor. On this day he had his eye on a $300 piece of coral. He said it was about an inch wide but looked like “a rainbow chalice.”

People like Tony are not outliers. The market for coral is huge. Estimates put the official coral trade at over a billion dollars every year, but this doesn’t necessarily apply to fraggers. Trade refers to official commerce from source countries to coral vendors. But given the demand for these coral, you can only extrapolate that the underground market between hobbyist fraggers is also quite large.

“It’s a fairly big market,” explained marine biology Professor Andrew Rhyne of Roger Williams University, who studies trends in marine ornamental aquaria. At the same time, he added “we don’t have very good numbers.” He and a group of other scholars have put together a project with the New England Aquarium to collect and analyze data related to marine aquarium biodiversity and its international trade.

 Coral fragments roughly the size of a silver dollar can fetch up to $200 at frag swaps. (Photo: Kyle Frischkorn)

More marine biologists are focusing on this topic of late as coral reefs are on a steep decline. Ocean temperatures have been rising, and other environmental factors like this year’s strong, Pacific Ocean-warming El Niño have been messing with the aquatic environment. These have led to what’s known as “coral bleaching,” which happens when coral reefs expel algae and lose their color. This stress-induced event eventually leads to coral starvation. One estimate has as many as 4,000 square miles of coral dying by year’s end. Other factors like ocean acidification have also led to a steady decline in coral population. Couple that with the growing trade, and there’s undoubtedly a coral disaster nearing.

Are fraggers aiding in this coral endangerment? The answer is complicated. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last year upped the number of endangered coral species to over 20. This, reported National Geographic, is 10 times the number of coral species ever put on the list before. This means that many coral species are facing extinction if they aren’t properly protected. Some conservationists say that trade and fragging may help further this depletion of the organisms.

Interestingly enough, some fraggers claim just the opposite. At the swap event, a few hobbyists who were more than aware of the coral crisis said they didn't necessarily see themselves as the problem. To them, fragging may actually help create coral biodiversity, as they are growing specimens in conditions that won’t ultimately kill them. Moreover, the increased interest in coral is putting a newfound spotlight on the species.

Coral enthusiasts peruse the the displays of frags for sale. (Photo: Kyle Frischkorn)

Professor Rhyne admits that fragging likely doesn’t have a huge impact on the global decline, but that doesn’t mean that coral swappers are coral saviors. Fraggers "have very little impact on coral conservation, unless they act,” he said. In short, what good is conserving a species of coral if you’re not going to actually reintroduce it or use it to help out with the greater conservation effort? Most fraggers are swapping their goods to make their aquarium look more colorful.

Whether the official coral trade impacts future species is also complex. The NOAA, in its multi-hundred-page report about the status of coral conservation, admitted that trade does impact coral populations. But compared to other problems such as climate change, pollution, and over-fishing, the effects are “minor.”

Even so, this likely will not stop fraggers from continuing their passion for coral. People like Baldassano and Tony will continue to find local swaps, and online forums in dozens of countries will continue to be populated with questions, tips, and frag offers. For them it’s not only the goods being hawked but the people behind it.

As Tony put it, “it’s become more of a community thing.” That is, thousands of small communities exchanging heaps of money for colorful salty objects.

True friendship can be hard to find. For industrial titans bent on dominating the world, finding someone who understands you is nearly impossible.

The friendship that formed between Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, therefore, was genuinely special to both of them. They even bought houses together in Florida, and when Edison was confined to a wheelchair in his later years, Henry Ford bought his own so they could race around their estates together. Edison was nearly brought to tears when describing his friendship with the younger inventor at a 1929 celebration of the 50th anniversary of the lightbulb. 

Though celebrated as heroes in mid-century histories, both Edison and Ford's negative sides have since been exposed—Ford fought unions and exhibited anti-Semitism, whereas Edison electrocuted animals, screwed over Tesla, and generally stole inventions. Today both of them are often cast as villains rather than heroes. However, even if what united them was their utter domination of their respective empires, their friendship shows a more human side of the two men.  Nowhere is this affection more clearly demonstrated than in unusual and deeply personal gift of Edison's Last Breath to his best friend Henry Ford. 

(Photo: Screenshot)

When a fan runs out onto the soccer field, it's annoying. When a fantail (or some other bird) does it, it's cute! And maybe a little annoying.

A soccer game in Brazil yesterday had to be temporarily halted when a family of lapwings ran out onto the pitch. The long-legged birds look like they're holding their own World Cup match, while everyone else stands around looking taken aback.

But this wasn't even the first pitch invasion by lapwings. They also disrupted a match between Arsenal and San Lorenzo in October 2014. At one point, the mama lapwing just sat down on the pitch, and her babies snuggled up under her wings, and the players all waited patiently. And then lobbed a ball at her. 

Soccer games have also been disrupted by pine martens, cats, and moths, thus proving that nature hates sports.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to edit@atlasobscura.com. 

A tres leches cake. (Photo: Hungry Dudes/flickr) 

Desserts have a special place on the Turkish table—after all, this is a country whose main cultural export is Turkish Delight (lokum). But it’s not just helva country. Turkey has a long and noble pastry history, with many dessert variations, and a special knack for soaked desserts like revani (a semolina cake), soaked in a light syrup, and lokma, fried dough balls, splashed with syrup.

So when a Latin America dessert called tres leches (modified to trileçe in Turkish) began appearing on menus throughout Istanbul a few years ago, it made sense, palate-wise. What is more surprising is the source of this dish: South American soap operas.

The cake itself is a fairly simple concoction, one that is easily modified. In the Americas, tres leches is often a yellow or white cake, soaked in three different kinds of milk: evaporated milk, condensed milk, and heavy cream or whole milk. The canned products are hard to find in Turkey, so bakers use whatever they can find that tastes good – any thick and sweet dairy will work. The food blog Culinary Backstreets published a throrough look at Istanbul’s different trileçe recipes earlier this year and found different bases for the cake. It’s sometimes made of standard flour, sometimes of semolina. It’s soaked with just about any type of milk–sheep, goat, cow, or water buffalo; whipping cream, heavy cream, or whole milk; condensed or evaporated or sweetened. It is usually topped with caramel, a feature not found on the American version.

A 19th century advertisement for Nestle condensed milk. (Photo: Boston Public Library/ flickr) 

Nobody really knows who invented the tres leches cake; it’s extremely common and integral to the cultures of most Latin American cultures, from Mexico to Argentina, and is even popular in Brazil, which sometimes due to linguistic differences is exempt from trends in Latin America. It’s possible it was invented by Nestle, the main producer of canned milk (including condensed and evaporated milks), which began putting a recipe for tres leches on the labels of its products in around the 1940s. It also draws from the tradition of European soaked cakes – think Italian tiramisu, which includes baked ladyfinger cakes dipped in coffee until soft, or British savarin, a cake soaked in syrup.

But we do have a guess about how tres leches became trileçe. It’s all about soap operas.

Turkish trileçe. (Photo: gorkem demir/shutterstock.com)

See, Turks are nuts about soap operas. The Wall Street Journal reported that in 2012, Turkish soap operas were worth an estimated $130 million. More importantly, Turkish soap operas, with high production values, are exported to all surrounding regions–and given Turkey’s strategic spot in the center of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, that means an awful lot of people outside Turkey are familiar with the stars of Aşk-ı Memnu, Ayrılık, and other shows. An estimated 75 percent of people in the Arab world have seen a Turkish soap.

In fact, the Turkish hunger for soap operas is so deep and intense that even the thriving domestic industry can’t provide enough content. So foreign soaps are extremely popular in Turkey, including many from Latin America. Many sources guess that Latin American soaps, especially a few from Brazil, were responsible for introducing the tres leches to Turkey. (The Turkish newspaper Hurriyet credits Albania with first introducing the South American dessert into the region—soaps are very popular there, as well.)

Turkish baklava. (Photo: Natalie Sayin/flickr) 

This isn’t as weird as it sounds. In the U.S., where we have a massive film and television industry backed by billions of dollars and full of global superstars, the quick-and-dirty world of soaps is restricted to daytime viewing. American soaps are a niche genre–a successful niche genre, sure, but a niche. American soaps have their own publications, their own airing times, their own fans; they don’t tend to break out into the culture at large. In other countries, including Turkey, Mexico, and South Korea, things couldn’t be more different.

Outside the U.S., soaps are exported around the world, traded and obsessed over, and their stars and settings become famous. The concept of “soap tourism” is a new field of sociological study, and a source of millions of tourist dollars for various governments.

Chinese viewers of the Korean soap My Love From The Star have been flocking to the spots where key scenes were filmed, including the beautiful Jangsado Island in Tongyeong. Muslim tourists from the Middle East have been heading to Turkey to see the house where the eponymous star of the Turkish soap Noor lives. South Koreans have booked flights in droves to Prague to see the beautiful city that serves as the setting for the soap Lovers In Prague.

And in little ways, the cross-pollination of cultures via soap operas is serving as its own little harbinger of globalization. In the same way that tres leches became popular in Turkey, Chinese imports of a South Korean beer featured in a popular soap have soared. But there are more serious effects as well; smuggled South Korean soap operas have long served as a window to the outside for North Koreans who have no other way to see it. They’ve often been cited as a potential spur to defection, and the North Korean government has actually killed citizens for viewing them.

Soap operas in the U.S. may seem like ephemeral bits of fluff, a low-budget, poorly written, poorly acted version of our dominant prestige entertainment industry. But elsewhere, they’re powerful forces of education and diplomacy. Or at least cake.

Update, 11/12: The story originally confused lokum with baklava. We regret the error.

Glowing eel! (Photo: Gruber et al/PLOS ONE)

While working underwater off the coast of Little Cayman Island, southwest of Cuba, biologist David Gruber accidentally took a photo of an amazing creature. It was a small, snake-like animal, "glowing as bright as the coral," National Geographic reports—a biofluorescent eel, the first ever photographed in its natural habitat.

That was back in 2011; now, Gruber, an associate professor at the City University of New York, and his collaborators have found the proteins that give these little eels their light, they report in PLOS ONE. 

After they "serendipitously imaged" that first eel, as the scientists put it in their paper, they went back and found more. It wasn't so easy: these eels, a type of "false moray eel," are shy and they blend in with the biofluorescent corals where they live. 

Biofluorescent animals absorb and emit light (as opposed to bioluminescent animals, which make their own with chemical reactions). The scientists don't know exactly what the green glow of the eels is meant to do; possibly it's camouflage, possibly it has to do with reproduction. Whatever the reason, it's both beautiful and eerie to imagine little snakes of light flashing through fields of softly glowing coral.

Bonus finds: A funny-faced dinosaur, ancient lamps that absorb smoke, an unseen Charlotte Brontë story

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. 

Oran Sands and a friend en route to setting a world record. (Photo: screen shot)

It’s a phenomenal time for world record and auto enthusiasts. Recently, two monumental records were set, one for the longest time spent driving in a roundabout, and another for the tightest parallel park in reverse. Only try the first one at home.

Oran Sands, a 64-year-old from Carmel, Indiana, recently drove around a local roundabout for three hours, 36 minutes, and 24 seconds. He arrived at the roundabout prepared—he had two action cams set up in his 1987 Volkswagen Cabriolet to film his record-in-the-making, some friends to keep him company, and the Mayor’s office on board. He had already done his research to make sure that no such record yet existed and that he wouldn’t be violating traffic law. Naturally, he filmed the whole drive.

Sands was careful in his roundabout selection, especially since Carmel has more than 60 roundabouts—more than any other city in the U.S. and more than most states. He ended up choosing a dog-boned shaped roundabout, whose shape and multiple lanes would make those three and a half hours easier for him and better for other cars. A circular roundabout would have been a whole other equation.

The mayor even took a turn in the passengers seat, and delivered a Mayoral Proclamation declaring it Roundabout World Record Day. Sands has written a detailed narrative of the drive, which totaled 65 miles clocked at 19 miles per hour. The record has been registered on Record Setter but not yet with the Guinness World Records, which Sands says takes much longer. 

 

13 NOV: Speedy parallel parking sets new world record #ParallelParking #Parking #GuinnessRecords Alastair Moffatt, a stunt driver in the UK, has beaten the Guinness World Record for the "tightest reverse parallel park". Watch more: bbc.in/park #BBCShorts @BBCNews

A video posted by BBC News (@bbcnews) on Nov 13, 2015 at 4:29am PST

Meanwhile, in Brooklands, England, a British stunt driver was busy setting a new parallel parking Guinness World Record, which was a much speedier endeavor. The record setter, Alastair Moffatt, squeezed a classic Mini Cooper into a space just 13.3 inches larger than the car, a feat that required reversing at 40 miles per hour and then spinning 180 degrees. After much practice and planning, he succeeded on his second official attempt. 

"It would be physically impossible to get the car into the space by shunting it in,” Moffatt told The Telegraph. Moffatt beat the previous 2012 record by one centimeter.

Guinness World Records Editor-in-Chief Craig Glenday even commented on the feat: “Our parallel parking records are always hotly contested and his demonstration of skill, precision and dedication to achieve such a difficult record is really inspirational stuff.”

I doubt the driver of this car can claim credit for its parking. (Photo: Marcus Hansson/flickr)

Why spend all this time to set records? Well, here’s some wisdom from Oran Sands: “If there is a moral to this story it’s to do what you dream about… This isn’t achieving world peace but it’s making an attempt and succeeding. And that leads to do more of the same.”

In less exciting car news, one of Google’s little round self-driving cars was pulled over in Mountain View, California for driving too slow—24 mph in a 35 mph zone, according to police. There was no infraction, but human drivers should be wary of Google prototypes slowing down neighborhood traffic.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to edit@atlasobscura.com.  

A honeybee at work. (Photo: Peter Shanks/Flickr)

In this age of food scares and secret adulterations, when what you put in your mouth is a chemical facsimile of what it’s purported to be, good news: the real stuff is still out there. In fact, depending on your choice of brand there’s more nature in your honey than you may have thought possible. If you’ve ever sprung for a jar of Pacific Coast Cold Packed or a Mediterranean blend, odds are you, like more and more honey enthusiasts around the globe, have filled your tea with honeydew honey: a precise and delicious marriage of tree sap, bee vomit, and bug poop.

Let’s back up. All honey, unless it’s corn syrup disguised in a plastic bear, is basically just bee-regurgitated sweet stuff. Usually, that stuff is nectar, the sugar water produced by plants explicitly so that bees, birds, and other animals will come visit them and spread their pollen around. Forager bees drink the nectar, fully digest enough to give them energy to fly home, and store the rest in a special “honey stomach,” which breaks down some of the sugars and squeezes out water, pollen grains, bacteria, and other excess material. When they get back to the hive, they regurgitate it and give it to the house bees, who swallow it and spit it up over and over before storing it in the comb, where it matures further. According to one expert, “it takes at least 100,000 vomits” to make one pound of the glowing substance we know and love.

A bee, close-up. The honey stomach is located at the front of the abdomen. (Photo: Bartosz Kosiorek/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Though most use nectar, bees can and will go through this process with pretty much anything sugary. Some of their innovations are bad news for beekeepers–in 2012, the prized swarms of Alsace, France started feasting on waste from an M&M factory and producing bright blue, unsellable honey–but sometimes they hit on a new taste sensation. Enter scale insects. These crumb-sized critters live under the bark and leaves of particular plants, and spend all day sucking the sap out of them. The tiny bugs only need the two percent of the sap that is pure protein, so they expel the rest as sticky goop called honeydew. In lean times or places where nectar isn’t available, bees collect this special bug poop and make it into honey.

Honeydew and its transformations were popular long before anyone knew from whence it came. Pliny the Elder, who encountered trees studded with the substance while exploring the hills of Rome, postulated that it was “the sweat of the heavens… or the saliva emanating from the stars.” At least one expert thinks the Biblical “manna” is honeydew, pointing out that the word is similar to “man hu,” which is Arabic for “this is plant lice.” In Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare compared it to tears gathering on the cheeks of a young maiden, and thought, like many of his time, that it was shed by the plants themselves. Even a couple of centuries after 1740, when a French naturalist named René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur noticed that ants would follow scale insects around to drink their sugary excretions, scientific journals and farmer’s almanacs dedicated entire pages to discussing its provenance.

Bees aren't the only insects that like honeydew–here, an ant harvests it from an aphid. (Photo: Dawidi/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

But the sweet tooth doesn’t wait for science, and by the time a consensus was reached, beekeepers had long been farming the unlikely honey on purpose. In the 1910s, 40 percent of Swiss honey was from fir tree honeydew, which “notwithstanding its greenish-black color… is much esteemed by the population,” according to the 1916 American Bee Journal. Midcentury New Yorkers loved it, though they were coy about where it came from.

Today, honeydew honey is renowned for its “woody, warm aroma,” its low acidity, and its resistance to crystallization. As with other honey types, particular regions produce subvarieties that boast different tastes and properties depending on the terroir–in this case, the particular combination of plant, sucker-bug and bee. Honey forums are swarmed with dealers trying to get ahold of the stuff. Sixty percent of Greek honey is from pine and fir honeydew, and market demand has led some beekeepers to artificially infest trees with scale insects to start the process. This summer, the government of Bulgaria announced a subsidy that would allow beekeepers in the Strandzha Mountains to transform the entire range into what one apiarist is calling“an industrial zone” for honeydew honey production, so that local beekeepers can keep up with orders.

Miel D'Alsace, a prestigious French variety that often contains silver fir, lime tree, and other types of honeydew honey. (Photo: Claude Truong-Ngoc/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0).

It’s a predictable craze–after all, humans are willing to pay top dollar for food that’s already been digested once. There’s the infamous kopi luwak, $30-a-cup coffee made of beans that have passed through Indonesian civet cats, and its supersized descendant, Black Ivory Coffee, which is “processed” by elephants. Even early steps of the GI process are valuable–edible bird’s nests, made of swiftlet saliva, can go for $2,500 per kilogram. Under this logic, honeydew honey–which averages about $20 per 16-ounce jar and has passed through two different species before it reaches your mouth–is really a pretty sweet deal.

A "ghost bus" parked in the Atlantic City Transportation Center. Some reincarnating carriers paint their buses white so that it's easier to switch them between companies. (Photo: Anonymous/Used with permission)

Let's say you own a bus company. Specifically, a small bus company–you're in charge of a few of the thousands of carriers speeding along the highways of the U.S. trying to get students, workers, and other budget-conscious people from point A to point B.

Then, disaster hits (literally): You get into an accident. Passengers are injured, and you've been slacking on some safety protocols, so you know it's your fault. You're going to get fined at best, or shut down at worst. 

What do you do? If you're a law-abiding type, you take your lumps. But if you're not, there's another option. Maybe you've secretly registered another bus company, an extra one for situations just like these. Repaint your buses, re-hire your drivers, and you're back on the road in no time, safety violations be damned. In industry parlance, you've reincarnated. 

Reincarnation–also called "morphing" or being a "chameleon"–allows bus, trucking, and other transport companies to continue operating after breaking the law. Such companies "purposely and recklessly endanger every traveler on our highways and roads," says Duane DeBruyne, spokesman for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Association (FMCSA), the group tasked with reducing interstate bus and truck crashes. As the busiest travel time of the year approaches, with over 43 million Americans hitting the road to travel to and from Thanksgiving feasts, keeping these dangerous vehicles off the highway is particularly crucial.

A few years ago, reincarnation was "one of the biggest issues [the bus industry was] dealing with," says American Bus Association President and CEO Peter Pantuso. Even after vast improvements in detection and enforcement in the decade since the practice was first discovered, it continues to this day–and under trickier and trickier guises. According to safety experts, the difficulties regulators face in this fight shed light on how hard it is to keep a sprawling U.S. transportation industry safe. 

Passengers wait to get on a Chinatown bus in Manhattan. (Photo: LuHungnguong/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

On March 5th, 2010, drivers on Arizona's Interstate 10 were pulled into a grisly scene. A bus carrying 20 passengers to Los Angeles from Zacatecas, Mexico rear-ended a pickup truck, skidded across the highway and into the shoulder, tipped over, and kept sliding. By the time it righted itself again, six passengers had died. Investigations soon pinned the tragedy on an uninsured, sleep-deprived driver and defective brakes.

But this accident had a deeper, sneakier root. According to official records, the bus company involved in the crash, Tierra Santa Inc., had only existed for a year. But in reality, it was the latest in a line of bus companies run by the same person. This operator had reincarnated three times in four years, after each of his companies–Tierra Santa Tours, Cayetanos Bus Line Inc., Azteca Bus Line–had racked up enough fines and safety violations to get shuttered. Each successive company used the same buses, drivers, headquarters, and even business cards.

There are a few different ways bus companies can reincarnate, explains Elisa Braver, an epidemiologist who worked in transportation safety for 25 years, and co-author of a 2012 National Transportation Safety Board report on fatal bus crashes. All are possible because it's relatively easy to start a bus company–all you have to do to get on the road is fill out a form or two and provide proof of insurance, and you're issued a Department of Transportation (DOT) number. (New interstate bus companies must eventually undergo a safety audit, but that may take a while, as there are only about 1.15 inspectors per 1,000 truck and bus companies, according to a NTSB report.) After that, you're cruising, unless you get trouble with the FMCSA, who can shut you down if they hear you have violated laws or failed a safety audit. 

But if you know how to reincarnate, you can pop right back up again with a new name and DOT number, a clean slate, and all the same buses, drivers, and safety issues. This zombie-like form of reincarnation is the most egregious and illegal, and it's also the one the FMCSA has been fighting the longest. 

Due to their slippery nature, it's difficult to estimate how many reincarnated carriers are on the road at any given time. But investigations show that the ones that are there pose an outsized danger. Compared to automobile accidents, bus crashes are relatively rare, but when they do occur, they are three times more likely to involve companies with chameleon attributes than above-board companies, according to the 2012 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. Particularly unsafe companies might go through iteration after iteration until they're finally stopped by a disaster.

Route 10 in Phoenix, the site of the Tierra Santa, Inc. crash. (Photo: Patriarca12/WikiCommons)

After a 2008 crash of a reincarnated carrier in Houston killed 17 people, the FMCSA began vetting every new bus company for reincarnation by comparing the data they provide on registration forms to existing companies that recently shut down, or are on thin ice. If an address, a phone number, or a driver's name is the same between companies, that raises suspicion. In their 2012 report, the GAO recommended that the FMCSA further refine its algorithms and registration forms in order to more accurately identify newly registered carriers with chameleon attributes.

In March 2011, just a year after the Tierra Santa crash, the exhausted driver of a World Wide Travel bus packed with 32 revelers returning to New York City's Chinatown from a Mohegan Sun casino in Connecticut decided, under cover of nightfall, to save time by driving the bus as fast as it could go: 78 miles per hour. As the bus crossed into the Bronx and the sun began to rise, the driver nodded off and sent the bus flying across the shoulder into a guard rail. The bus, full of screaming passengers, flipped onto its side and skidded 500 feet before a highway signpost stopped it, shearing off the top of the bus in the process. Fifteen people died, and the remaining 18 were injured.

An investigation later determined that the driver had been driving the same route with barely any sleep for three straight days and nights, "only taking short naps inside the bus while passengers were in the casino gambling." After World Wide Travel got shut down soon after, all but one of its vehicles and most of its employees were quickly transferred to a sister company called Great Escapes, which had been opened by the same owner in 2001. 

It took a full year and a number of new violations before Great Escapes was taken off the road in 2012. That's because that company had used another, trickier form of reincarnation–one that requires more planning ahead, and forces regulators to stay on top of even more information. If a bus company anticipates trouble, they can register multiple DOT numbers from the get-go, as separate entities. Then, "if one of your companies starts to rack up roadside inspection violations or speeding tickets or crashes, you can transfer your drivers and vehicles to a different company operated by the same management," says Braver. 

Because you're not registering any new carriers, you're not going through the chameleon-catching gateway that the FMCSA has implemented. (Registration only has to be updated every two years.) Passengers that choose to take your bus line home for Thanksgiving won't know you're essentially the same as the company that got shut down last week.

The World Wide Travel bus crash that killed 15. (Photo: New York State Police/National Travel and Safety Bureau)

Double-dipping is not, in itself, illegal–a carrier "may have legitimate reasons for needing more than one number," such as actual changes in ownership or a desire to operate in more than one location, says the FMCSA. But it can be, and is, used for shady purposes. Because they were aware of its relation to World Wide Travel, the FMCSA kept a close eye on Great Escapes, and found cause to shut it down in 2012. To enable such oversight, the FMCSA has decided that, starting in September 2016, any company applying for or updating its registration must identify whether it is related to any other existing companies, and which ones. 

In general, experts say the FMCSA has made good strides in addressing the problem. In recent years, they have shut down large reincarnation networks focused in Manhattan and California, and their vetting program will soon expand to include all interstate carriers, including trucking companies. "It's gotten better, certainly, than it was," says Pantuso. "I'm not sure they're 100 percent there yet, but they're certainly moving in the right direction." A GAO representative confirmed that the FMCSA had implemented two of their four recommendations, and is working on the other two. 

But whether reincarnated carriers can ever be wiped out completely is still uncertain. Although Braver says the FMCSA "has been making a very strong effort," she fears that without the resources to enforce the new rules, simply issuing a different form won't be enough�. Many carriers don't fill out the ones that are already required. Similarly, she says, the FMCSA's reliance on data compilation to point out problematic companies is undercut by the fact that they often don't receive all the right data. Officers who pull over buses for infractions don't always have the ability to report those infractions in a way that trickles all the way up to the federal level, and states are often lax about sending their crash data to the feds.

Researchers at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute found that in 2009, New York reported only 25.3 percent of its bus crashes. In 2008, Florida reported a mere 5.3 percent. Because of this, public safety ratings, reincarnation investigations, and enforcement decisions are all "based on incomplete information," she says.

Travelers hoping to get some information for themselves can use the FMCSA's passenger safety website, where is it now possible to check out specific carriers and see if they are flagged for safety violations. Still, says Braver, "if you want to see which company has the best safety records based on violations, inspections, and crashes, that's much harder."

"The good news," says Pantuso, is "there are a lot fewer illegal carriers." But those who fight them must continue to collect and sort data from multiple sources, keep up with thousands of companies, and pin down shapeshifters who do their best to weave around even the most stringent regulations. The goal, says DeBruyne, is zero reincarnators–to "thwart these rogue and unscrupulous carriers from ever succeeding in returning to our roadways." But as is true of many bus journeys, how long it will actually take to get there remains to be seen.

Space debris seen from outside geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO). The two main debris fields are the ring of objects in GEO and the cloud of objects in low Earth orbit (LEO). (Photo: NASA/Public Domain/WikiCommons)

What the F is WT1190F? We know it was a mysterious piece of man-made "space junk" that lit up the sky for just a few seconds this morning before crashing into the Indian Ocean. But even as the ripples of its impact dissipate, scientists are still trying to figure out exactly what it was.

WT1190F was identified weeks ago by the Catalina Sky Survey (CSS), and it's been carefully tracked by NASA, European Space Agency, U.S. Strategic Command's JFCC Space, astronomers, and amateur observers alike across the globe. Scientists were able to accurately predict where and when the space debris would fall, allowing for a rare opportunity to observe an object acting in the same fashion as an asteroid–minus the catastrophic damage. 

ISS extravehicular activity. Most space debris is rocket stages, old satellites and fragments from disintegration, erosion and collisions. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

WT1190F (the name is based on when and where it was most recently seen) was actually first spotted back in 2009 and seen again twice in 2013. At that time, it was quickly determined to be a man-made object and, therefore, largely ignored by Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) due to its primary mission of tracking natural Low-Earth Objects in orbit, like asteroids and comets. The distinction between those few times and its identification last month is that astronomers realized its destination. 

“The difference this time was that the orbit was calculated and propagated into the near future and it was determined to be on an impacting trajectory (with Earth),” explains principal investigator Eric Christensen.

The location of the space debris is also what gave observing astronomers pause. NASA says there are over a half million pieces of “space junk” orbiting Earth (including Scottish bagpipes). Most of that is in low orbit, defined as below 2,000 kilometers from Earth’s surface. WT1190F was in high Earth orbit (about 36,000 kilometers above the Earth) meaning its original mission was a bit more lofty.

“The fact that it is in such a high orbit makes it interesting because it probably means it is associated with some kind lunar or planetary mission... and those are few and far between,” says Christensen.

WT1190F first spotted back in 2009. It was seen again twice in 2013. (Photo courtesy Catalina Sky Survey)

Upon determining that WT1190F was a high-orbiting, man-made object headed for planet Earth, Catalina Sky Survey turned to independent astronomy software developer Bill Gray to help figure out the when, where, and what. Gray and CSS are long time partners, working together informally for about 10 years to determine near-asteroid trajectories–including recently for NASA’s Near Earth Object Program.

Using his software and other observations coming in from around the world, Gray says he was able to determine a “fairly precise” longitude and latitude and time (to the second) of impact. For WT1190F, Gray estimated that it was going to hit about 100 kilometers off the southern coast of Sri Lanka into the Indian Ocean at 6:19 Universal Time (1:19 AM EST). He was right –within a few tenths of a second and a hundred meters.

Bill Gray's prediction of the impact site for WT1190F.  (Photo courtesy Bill Gray)

Between CSS observations, archival research, and Gray’s software, we can answer a few questions about exactly what WT1190F was. “We do know it’s in the very rough ballpark of one to six feet long,” Gray told Atlas Obscura on Monday. “We know how bright it is, but we don’t know if it is a small, shiny object or a larger, not so shiny object.” He also explains that it was so lightweight it was being pushed around by sunlight, making it pretty clear that the object is man-made. “There is nothing natural up there that is that white and fluffy,” jokes Gray. In addition, when it came falling out of the sky on Friday morning, it was tumbling. As Gray explains in Friday's follow-up conversation, "It looked as if it was rotating about every second and half. You could see a bright flash and, in between, a faint flash. It probably was spinning fairly quickly as it came in." This lends credence to the theory that it could be a rocket engine, which is currently being researched by Dr. Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Though early reports suggested that WT1190F might date back to the Apollo-era (1960s and early 1970s), Gray is skeptical. He and CSS have both been going through historical records of space junk, trying to link the debris to previous sightings. They were able to date it to September 2009, but that's as far back as they could be sure.

Based on the fact that WT1190F is still orbiting near Earth and hasn't been knocked out of the Earth-Moon system, Gray theorizes that it probably dates back to a mission that took place between the late 1990s and the late 2000s. “It might have crossed a busy street a dozen times without getting hit. That could have happened, in which case it could be from Apollo. But it doesn’t seem too likely,” he says.

A PAM-D module that crashed in the Saudi Arabian desert in 2001, from a GPS satellite that had launched in 1993. (Photo: Public Domain/NASA)

Much of WT1190F burned up upon reentry and what didn’t–“a few nuts and bolts”–is probably lost forever in the depths of the Indian Ocean. As both Gray and Christensen both pointed out in separate conversations, it is unlikely we will ever know exactly what WT1190F was, though, after Friday's observation, Gray is somewhat optimistic about Dr. McDowell's rocket engine theory.

Says Christensen, “The fact that we as a species put something out there and then we lost track of it and now it is coming back to haunt or hit us... I understand the desire to identify exactly what it is–unfortunately, we may never know in this case.”

Black Square. (Image: Kazimir Malevich/Wikimedia)

One hundred years ago, Russian artist Kazimir Malevich broke with the work he had been doing up until that point, and dedicated himself to simple colors and geometric forms. At 0.10: The Last Futurist Exhibition, he introduced his new conviction: that painting should move away from representation, in favor of "pure artistic feeling." 

This movement was called "suprematism," and one of Malevich most famous paintings in this mode is Black Square, which is exactly what it sounds like—a black square of paint. 

Over the last century, though, the paint of the square has cracked, revealing color beneath. It was clear that Malevich had blotted out some of his previous work as part of this new direction. And, for the painting's centenary, the curators at the State Tretyakov Gallery, where the painting now hangs, decided to see what was underneath, as Hyperallergic writes.

They found not one but two paintings. One was in a "Cubo-Futurist" style, the curators told the Russian TV show Kultura, and the other was "proto-Suprematist."

But the curators also found a bit of writing. The first word, they are sure, is "battle." And although the rest isn't as clear, they think that it reads "Battle of negroes in a dark cave."

European audiences at the time would have considered this a joke. And not even an original one: in 1897, French humorist Alphonse Allais published a black square with the caption "Combat de Nègres dans une cave pendant la nuit"—"battle of negroes in a cave, during the night." 

The inscription under the paint of Black Square, then, more closely unites this iconic piece of work with the French precedent, both in conception and in bad taste.

Bonus finds: JFK's leather jacket, a portrait of Confucius

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.