In the small Romanian town of Săpânţa, when you die, you can expect a colorful goodbye.

At the town's Merry Cemetery, colorfully illustrated crosses depict soldiers being beheaded and resident being hit by a truck. And the epigraphs aren't sugar-coated. "Underneath this heavy cross lies my mother in law poor," reads one. "Try not to wake her up. For if she comes back home, she’ll bite my head off."

The quirky graveyard is the creation of Stan Ioan Pătraş, who was born in Săpânţa in 1908, and, by 14, had already begun carving crosses for the local cemetery. By 1935, Patrash was carving clever or ironic poems—done in a rough local dialect—about the deceased, as well as painting the crosses with images depicting the ways in which the individuals died.

Pătraş soon developed a careful symbolism in his work. Green represented life, yellow was fertility, red was passion,and black was death. The colors were always set against a deep blue, known as Săpânţa blue, which Pătraş believed represented hope and freedom.

Pătraş single-handedly carved, wrote poems for, and painted well over 800 of these folk art masterpieces over a period of 40 years. He died in 1977, having carved his own cross and left his house and work to his most talented apprentice, Dumitru Pop. Pop has since spent the last three decades continuing the work, carving the cemetery's crosses, and has turned the house into the Merry Cemetery's workshop-museum.

Despite the darkly comedic, or merely dark, tones of the crosses, Pop says no one has ever complained about the work. 

The Moon and Jupiter (Photo: Eric Kilby/Wikimedia)

Among the tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets and fragments dug up in the early 19th century from Mesopotamian cities, there are about 450 of those tablets and fragments, dated between about 350 B.C. and 50 B.C., that contain mathematical work on the night sky. Babylonians were excellent mathematicians and astronomers, and they recorded, in a base 60 number system, their calculations about the movement of the planets, stars and moon.

Among this work, though, there are four tablets, which describe a calculation involving a trapezoid, that have always puzzled scholars. They seemed to have something to do with Jupiter, but it wasn’t clear what was being measured. Babylonians had discovered many geometrical rules, but they were never applied in astronomy.

In a new paper, published in Science, Mathieu Ossendrijver, a specialist in Babylonian astral math at Berlin's Humboldt University, links a fifth cuneiform text to those four trapezoidal procedures to show their purpose–they describe the progression of Jupiter through space. This is a classic mathematical strategy for measuring the movement of planets, but until now, it was thought to have been first discovered a millennium and a half later, in 14th century Europe.

This fifth text, like the other four, is part of the British Museum’s collection, one of the largest libraries of cuneiform tablets in the world, with 50,000 items just from Babylonia in the first millennia B.C. The text has never been published before, but it contains the key to the four mysterious trapezoid texts.

Like the trapezoid texts, the new text refers to Jupiter, but it uses arithmetic to measure its progression across the sky. Essentially, the text describes how much Jupiter moves in one day, at a few key points during its appearance in the Earth’s view. The text uses those data points to calculate an average daily displacement for the planet and a total value for its movement. Understanding that calculation, Ossendrijver is able to show that the trapezoid procedures are making the same one, only using an elegant geometrical technique that Europeans rediscovered in the mid-1300s, in Paris and at Oxford College, in England.

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. 

Snow in Times Square (Photo: Johan Lange/flickr)

After a big snow storm, snow disposal, even in big cities, used to be relatively simple.

“We used to throw the snow in the water,” says the New York City Department of Sanitation’s Keith Mellis.

But these days, that’s no longer allowed. As snow is plowed from the streets, it rolls up with it all sorts of nasty stuff–normal road dirt, the salt and sand used to keep roads from icing over, and dangerous pollutants including lead, cadmium, coppers and zinc. Turns out, it’s not great for water quality to dump all that into a harbor, river or wetland, however convenient that might be.

Instead, cities make piles of snow.

Snow is actually gross (Photo: Mr.TinDC/flickr)

How do they decide where to make these piles? There are a few criteria that go into these decision. These spots need to publically owned, they need to be empty, and they need to be near enough to sewer infrastructure that can handle a significant volume of water when the snow melts.

In New York, for instance, the city is divided into sectors, and in each one, snow goes into designated areas, owned by the city, including public parking lots, park areas, and streets that are closed off for this purpose. They also have to be close to sewers designated by environmental regulators for quick and voluminous water disposal–not just any random manhole will do. The heads of each sector, Mellis says, are in charge of scouting out these spots and knowing where they are.

New York doesn’t let its snow just sit there, though. For two decades or so, it has used snow melters to speed disposal. As the snow piles build up, the city sends its melters to the piles to deal with the snow. In this past storm, there were 12 out melting snow, but the city has 36 in all (though it’s rare they’ll all be used at once). Before any one snow pile gets too large, the melters are out there, shrinking it down.

Old school snow removal (Photo: Library of Congress)

Melters, though, are an expensive way to get rid of snow and many cities opt to put their snow in one big pile and wait for it to melt. Minneapolis has a snow dump, although its location has been something of a mystery. According to a 2010 story in City Pages, this was the official attitude towards dump sites:

Apparently snow dumps are hard to come by and they don't want sneaky snow dumpers coming and using their precious space. City officials talk in vague descriptions, calling it "white gold" and refusing to reveal this amazing location.

St. Paul once built a mountain at Midway Stadium that didn’t melt for months. In D.C., after this most recent storm, the city has piled up snow in parking lot of the RFK Memorial Stadium, where some of the snow piles have reached 12 feet high.

As far as snow piles go, though, 12 feet tall is amateur hour. In Anchorage, the city builds snow mountains by creating a level of snow, then icing them down so trucks can climb up the initial level. “We keep ramping up and building up as the winter goes,” the public works superintendent told the Alaska Republic in 2012. That year, the city got so much snow that its private dumps started filling up, and at least one snow pile reached 60 feet. In Boston last winter, the city’s infamous snow pile at one time reached 75 feet and took until July to melt.

It's June 20th & there's a snow pile leftover at Minneapolis/St. Paul Int'l Airport! #mnwxpic.twitter.com/ec5fzpgC1j

— EricSorensen (@ERICSORENSEN) June 21, 2014

@jennhsu never forget - https://t.co/y3YYbYPhar

— bergmanj (@bergmanj) January 24, 2016

It is possible to optimize snow piles. “Montreal is, to my mind, one of the real leaders, because their problem is more constant than New York or Washington,” says James Campbell, a professor of management science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. “They face this every year. They get 80 or 90 inches of snow, and it doesn’t melt. So you have to put it somewhere.”

This was Boston's 'snow' pile last year @brentsbooger. It's not snow. pic.twitter.com/zyNzncF9w9

— moonlit (@wheeliesmom) January 25, 2016

This is what’s called an “assignment problem,” where you’re trying to assign snow from different parts of the city to particular snow disposal sites. Mathematically, it’s a relatively straightforward issue, says Campbell: You look at the amount of snow that falls, the sites available, and then assign certain neighborhoods to certain sites. But there are other dynamics that can complicate that calculation. Some streets might need to be cleared, because they’re near a hospital, for instance, or for some political reason. In a place where snow is fairly consistent, you wouldn’t have to change the assignments that much, although the place where you’d dispose of snow after the first snowfall might differ from the tenth, as the best sites get filled up.

Other than that, there’s really only one thing to do: hope for warm weather to melt the snow away.

Cryomyces fungi in a rock and under a microscope. (Photo: S. Onofri et. al.)

Last week, while everyone was ooh-ing and ahh-ing over astronaut Scott Kelly's space zinnias, other life forms were, in their own quiet way, being far more extreme.

Antarctic fungi who recently spent 18 months outside the International Space Station have returned, and they're doing alright, scientists from the European Space Agency's Lichens and Fungi Experiment (LIFE) announced this week.

The LIFE scientists were testing whether any Earthly organisms could hope to survive in Martian conditions. To find the right recruits, they traveled to the McMurdo Dry Valleys, an Antarctica desert known for its extreme dryness and killer wind. They came back with samples of Cryomyces antarcticus and Cryomyces minteri, fungi that survive these rough conditions by taking shelter within the rocks.

The EXTREME-E Platform, where Earth fungi lived for 18 months while suspended in space. (Photo: S. Onofri et. al.)

The fungi then hitched a ride to the International Space Station via the Space Shuttle Atlantis, and were placed outside the module in a special platform also designed to withstand hostile environments, called EXTREME-E. There, they were "exposed to Mars-like conditions"—super-high CO₂ levels, very moody temperature swings, extremely low pressure, intense ultraviolet radiation, and barely any oxygen or water.

After 18 months of Mars-like madness, "more than 60 percent of the [fungi] studied remained intact," said Rosa de la Torre Noetzel, a co-researcher on the project. 

This is not to say they weren't worse for wear. According to the paper, "less than 10 percent of the samples ... were able to proliferate and form colonies" after their ordeal. Sorry, zinnias—it's hard to relate to others when you've spent years in the cold void of space.

 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.

Early afternoon on Thursday, flurries of U.S. east coast residents rushed fearfully into the streets, convinced that an earthquake was making the ground tremble and windows rattle.

Turns out the kerfuffle had nothing to do with an earthquake, but was instead spurred by a series of sonic booms from nearby fighter jets. A sonic boom, in addition to being an animated TV series, is the explosive noise caused by the shock wave from an aircraft zooming forward faster than the speed of sound. One of the jets in question, the F-35C, has a top speed of 1,200 miles per hour.

This video of a U.S. navy jet breaking the sound barrier will familiarize you with the sonic boom, so that next time the navy is conducting supersonic testing, you know exactly what's up.

Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 (Photo: yoppy/flickr)

Codenames is a simple game. There are 25 small cards, each with a word on it, and two teams are trying to guess, based on one-word hints, which eight or nine of those words belong to them. There’s not even a board; the game should cost $20. But over Christmas, demand was so high that, with stores out of stock, copies on Amazon were going at an incredible mark-up, for $50.

Vlaada Chvátil, a game designer who is famous enough for fans to try his new game on faith. Soon it became the highest-ranked party game on Board Game Geek, an online spot for game enthusiasts. The site has reviews and rankings, like Yelp, but also discussion boards, like Reddit. And as with Reddit, something that’s madly popular on Board Game Geek can break through to a wider audience and go viral—Codenames got picked up by sites like Geek Dad, Ars Technica, Popular Mechanics and more. Kentucky Sports Radio named it “party game of the year."

But why so much hype over, essentially, a few sets of cards?

Codenames (Photo: JIP/Wikimedia)

The current popularity of board games–call it a golden age, call it a renaissance–is usually traced back to Settlers of Catan, which is now two decades old and so popular that, like Madonna or Adele, it has achieved one-name-level fame and been rebranded as, simply, Catan. But year after year, the market for board games and other tabletop games (card games, dice games, role-playing games) keeps growing. In 2013, total retail sales of hobby games hit $700 million, and the next year topped $880 million. In 2015, more than twice as many people backed tabletop games on Kickstarter as in 2014, and they pledged two-thirds more money, almost $89 million altogether.

This boom is not just about European designers making great games and American audiences slowly discovering them. Online companies and gadget makers are constantly promising to bring people closer together; by their very nature, board games actually do that, and even with flocks of app-based games demanding attention, cardboard-based games are thriving. Gamers are a fairly small community with an intense interest in a somewhat obscure pursuit–exactly the sort of group enabled by the internet. Board games, designed in Europe, America, and Asia, too, are now moving at internet speed, so that where new games used to get popular ever so slowly, now, boom!, it’s possible for Exploding Kittens to blow up everywhere all at once.

The Not-Famous Famous Game Designer

Catan (Photo: dograapps/pixabay)

Early on in the 20th century, there was a wave of board game creativity, followed by a massive mid-20th century consolidation of American gaming companies. For a long time, game sales have depended on name-brand recognition, creating ever-expanding franchises. That’s how we’ve been blessed with Monopoly Empire edition, Monopoly Spongebob Squarepants, Monopoly Star Wars, Monopoly Rhode Island, Monopoly Junior, and so many other editions of Monopoly, despite the suspicion among gamers and designers that few people actually like playing Monopoly.

Newer games use this same trick: there’s also a Star Trek Catan. But now it’s possible for marquee designers to strike out on their own and sell games based in part on their own personal brand.

As even the most successful and high profile game designers will admit, there’s no such thing as an actually famous game designer. Possibly, possibly, if you are a fan of Catan, you know that its designer is Klaus Teuber. In the past, even designers with hit games often pursued their game design as a side job or a passion project; now they can sometimes make games their full-time job.

“It’s a really great time to be a not-famous game designer,” says Mike Selinker, a game designer and president of Lone Shark Games. His company made the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game in 2013, kind of a big deal in certain circles.

20-sided die (Photo: Scott Ogle/flickr)

These designers can thrive both because game sales are up and because sites like Board Game Geek (and Reddit where there’s a thriving board games subreddit) have created a community that can amplify their work. New games get passed around at the big gaming conventions; early reviews go out online, and gamers start anticipating their release.

There’s also an infrastructure of online tastemakers, most prominently Tabletop, a web show where Wil Wheaton (who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation) and a crew play through new and exciting games. If the show gives a positive review, people will go out and buy it. There’s even supposed to be a “Wil Wheaton” effect–a noticeable bump in sales after Tabletop reviews a game.

The Means of Production

Cards Against Humanity (Photo: brett jordan/flickr)

At the same time, control of the means of production for games has shifted. When European board games started getting popular in the U.S., it clued in game designers that maybe they didn’t need a giant company like Hasbro to survive. With consumer design tools and access to Chinese manufacturing, maybe they didn’t need to work with a company at all.

Kickstarter might have been made for game designers. Last year on the site, the Games category was the largest in terms of “total” and “successful” dollars. That includes video games, which tend to be more expensive, but also tabletop game projects that had millions of dollars pledged to them. The funding threshold for a tabletop game is also relatively low, compared to demand. It’s not uncommon to see a games project at 300 percent of its original funding goal, and some of them raise exponentially more money than they needed to go forward, and end with more than 1,000 percent more money than they asked for.

Cards Against Humanity is perhaps the poster child for games born from the internet. The group of friends who designed the game did not even try selling it to a traditional publisher. But they did need start-up capital. “We needed $4,000 to do the first printing, and it seemed like an impossible amount of money,” says Max Temkin, one of the game’s co-creators. “When we started working on games, we didn’t know anyone who had that much.”

The game’s Kickstarter campaign, in 2012, raised more than three times that–$15,570. It was a huge success. But that campaign seems incredibly modest compared to the breakout game on Kickstarter in 2015, Exploding Kittens, a simple card game in which players try to avoid drawing a card with an exploding kitten on it.

Exploding Kittens also had a relatively modest goal, of $10,000. It raised $8,782,571, and was the year’s most popular project, measured in the number of people contributing.

Exploding Kittens (Photo: Michael Brown/flickr)

Exploding Kittens had one particular advantage. Its art was done by Matthew Inman, the popular online cartoonist of the Oatmeal. When Toy & Game Con asked the game’s designer, Elan Lee, why it went viral, he said, “The easy answer to that is The Oatmeal. Matt has such a huge following, that simply posting to his social media accounts was the entirety of our initial marketing plan.”

That wasn’t entirely the end of the story: the team also promoted the game through live events and another big marketing push. But art–how a game looks–does seem to matter more than ever before.

That’s just one way in which designers have had to work harder for attention. “Your game has to get people in ways that it didn’t before,” says Selinker. The speed at which the industry now moves, he says, “has upped the pressure on game designers to be really innovative, all the time.”

Co-ops

Dice are still in style (Photo: Wikimedia)

America has gone through a few waves of insurgent gaming trends. In the 1980s, role-playing games started rolling out of the Midwest; in the 1990s, trading cards games, led by Magic the Gathering and Pokemon, took over. By the 2000s, Catan and its Euro-style clan were sweeping in.

The speed and growth of the game industry is incubating some new trends, although it’s not clear yet which might stick. Some games purposefully limit communication. It’s become more common, too, to have game incorporate a physical skill–you might fight a monster by flicking tokens at it, instead of rolling a die. The most lasting trend, though, might be games with a co-operative element, where players work together to “beat the board” rather than to best each other.

One of the most popular examples of a co-op game is Pandemic, in which players work together to stop the spread of viruses across the globe. It was first released in 2008, and since then, its creator, Matt Leacock, started noticing more and more games that had at least some co-operative element to them. He decided to gather data on Board Game Geek, “just to see, you know, is this an imagined effect or it is real?” And, he found, it was very real. When he look at the percentage of games that had a co-operative element, year-over-year, there was a growing trend starting in 2009. (He explains all the details here.) "It's pretty dramatic," he says.

(Data: Matt Leacock/Design: Blake Olmstead)

(Data: Matt Leacock/Design: Blake Olmstead)

Pandemic itself, though, is also mutating. Leacock partnered with another designer, Rob Daviau, to create a version of the game called Pandemic Legacy: Season 1, in which the game changes as it’s played

Daviau and Leacock come from somewhat different places in the gaming world. “We’re on opposite ends of the spectrum...well, not quite on opposite ends,” says Daviau. “We both have leanings,” says Leacock. “I tend to be a little more on the Euro, cleaner, tighter style. Rob excels at story.” (Storytelling is often associated with role-playing games.) Daviau worked at Hasbro for 14 years, before recently going independent; Leacock designed games on the side before the success of Pandemic meant he could make this his job. They didn’t meet before they began working on this game together.

Pandemic Legacy is both a Euro-style game and a very American one. Before leaving Hasbro, Daviau had designed a new type of game, based on a very old one. It was called Risk Legacy, and unlike in old-fashioned Risk, each game had consequences for the next. Over 15 rounds of the game, winners get bonuses, choices can’t be undone, cards get ripped up or otherwise destroyed, the game board is permanently modified. Pandemic Legacy takes this same idea and marries it to Pandemic. In this game, there are 12 “months,” each representing a round of the game. As players progress through the game, the viruses they’re fighting change, funding gets higher or lower, and characters gain new skills, or limitations, or even are eliminated altogether.

Working on the games, “it began to feel like we were writing a TV season, really,” says Leacock. That’s where the full name, “Season 1,” came from. (There’s already a Season 2 in development.)

Some gamers fiercely oppose legacy games, because they require changing or destroying some parts of the game. But others love them. If Pandemic Legacy hasn’t exactly gone viral yet, wait: in January, it became the #1 ranked board game on Board Game Geek.

Work progresses on Cincinnati's subway in 1920. But the construction would soon stop for good. (Courtesy University of Cincinnati Library Archives)

Interstate 75 slices the city of Cincinnati in half like an orange. On one side is the city’s Catholic working class west, while the east side is favored by the wealthier academics and industrials holed up in enclaves with names like Indian Hill. On all sides are cars. Simple commutes from Cincinnati’s suburbs to downtown can take an hour or more. One hundred thousand cars and trucks a day clog both directions on I-75, many of them headed to towns elsewhere in Ohio.

But it was almost a different story. If just a few things had gone differently Cincinnati would today be a city of straphangers and bustling underground stations.

The Cincinnati subway stations are still there. But if you’re still waiting for a train to come, you’ve been waiting for almost a century. To this day Cincinnati remains home to the largest unused subway system in the world, with over two miles of empty tunnels. Engineers who inspected the tunnels recently deemed them in “very good condition.”

Today, the warren of underground tunnels appears flash-frozen in time, an underground Vesuvius where the clock stopped. Stations and platforms sit pristinely as if still waiting for passengers that’ll never come. Tracks disappear into the dark.

Cincinnati's subway would have been 30 or 40 feet below street level. In fact, some Cincinnati streets would have been lower than the subway. (Photo: Kevin Williams)

Almost exactly 100 years ago the automobile was still in its infancy and cities were looking for ways to shuttle their burgeoning populations from downtown workplaces to the nascent suburbs. Several midwestern cities, including Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Detroit, passed bond issues so that construction could begin on subway systems that emulated the successful New York City one, which began running trains underground in 1904. 

“Cincinnati was unique in that they were the only [midwestern] city to actually begin working on the subway,” says Jake Mecklenborg, who authored a book about Cincinnati’s doomed experiment. His book, Cincinnati’s Incomplete Subway, details much of the underground drama. But the problems the project faced were more political than logistical

In Mecklenborg’s telling, most of what stalled the progress of the subway happened above ground, in offices, where politicians made backroom deals and bold promises that rarely came to fruition. Complicating things further, the United States entered into World War I just as Cincinnati’s subway construction was beginning, which changed the nation’s needs and redirected resources away from the effort.

Then, “the world changed so much, so quickly after the war,” Mecklenborg says. The automobile had become firmly entrenched, as had suburbs far from city centers.

By the time the 1920s were in full swing, cost overruns, construction errors, property damage, and political finagling had shut down the Cincinnati subway for good. When construction ceased in the 1920s, 2.2 miles of tunnels had been constructed in what was once the old Miami-Erie Canal bed.

Aerial view of downtown Cincinnati in 2010. (Photo: Kdh/CC BY-SA 3.0)

There have been various attempts to revive the Cincinnati subway over the years but none of them have taken hold. There have also been several efforts to repurpose the tunnels, into everything “from storage to civil defense to mushroom farming to movie sets,” according to Kevin Grace, Head Archivist for the Archives & Rare Books Library at the University of Cincinnati.

Grace descended the stairs into Cincinnati’s underground in the 1990s as part of a project to archive and verify old photos of the Cincinnati subway. “At least they have a practical use right now,” he says, noting that the tunnels currently house water mains and electric wiring. But few people are captivated by water mains; it’s the rails that have enduring romance.

“You see all the water mains and conduits, but then you see two tracks. The tracks are there. The platforms are there. It looked like a subway station,” he recalls. He describes the old tunnels as being in sturdy shape. When went down there it was frigid above ground, but comfortable in the tunnels, which had clearly been visited by graffiti artists and thrill seekers.

The tunnels have proven especially alluring to the city’s college students, and even its universities. Indeed, Grace says the University of Cincinnati College of Engineering once studied the feasibility of turning one subway section into a “wind tunnel.” But the idea was abandoned.

Entrances to Cincinnati's underground can still be seen around town (Photo: Paul Koenig) 

Paul Koenig was one of many former engineering majors who have been captivated by the call of this subterranean world. What he saw as a 20-year-old urban spelunker in the late 1980s surprised him, and over a quarter century later the memories remain etched in his mind.

“Somewhere downtown the tunnels made a turn to follow the flow of Central Parkway,” Koenig recalls, referring to main east-west artery in downtown Cincinnati. It was in this unlikely spot that Koenig and his friends stumbled into a jarring symbol of international geopolitics. One of the abandoned stations, according to Koenig, had been converted into a fallout shelter, for use during the Cold War.

Inside it, he saws “decontamination showers” and “bunks along the walls,” barrels containing ready-to-eat meals [MREs], and 55-gallon barrels filled with water. “It was all pretty nuts for 20-year-old kids to wander into,” Koenig recalls. He also remembers a phone jack that you could plug into and call anywhere in the world for free, quite an amenity back in the days of expensive long distance.

“It was a huge loss not to build it,” Koenig says, of the subway. “When you compare almost any city in Europe to a Midwestern car-centric city there is no comparison in the quality of life.”

An entrance to Cincinnati's long abandoned subway. (Photo: Kevin Williams)

Ironically, Cincinnati is now in the midst of building an old-fashioned, $100 million dollar streetcar system which will run in a 3.6-mile downtown loop–while the subway tunnels sit unused underground.

For his part, Mecklenborg wonders “what might have been.” Had Cincinnati’s subway been completed and used he thinks it’d be a very different city today. Neighborhoods that fell into decline would probably be vibrant and alive today and the suburb expansion would have slowed somewhat.

But Mecklenborg hasn’t given up hope that one day the subway will see the light of day. Or at least trains and passengers. Back in 2002 a proposal was put before voters for a half-cent tax increase that would fund a regional light rail system, which have used parts of the already-constructed tunnel system. Voters defeated the issue, but Mecklenborg still believes the subway may one day serve its original purpose. “People don’t like to see things unfinished,” he says.

Meanwhile, an entrance to the Cincinnati subway yawns darkly towards car-clogged I-75. Garbage and debris, on a recent day, swirled in the wind at the subway opening. Perhaps, if things had turned out a bit differently almost a century ago there would be turnstiles there instead of trash.

A still from the movie version of So Aljannar Duniya, the first work published in Hausa by a woman. (Image: Youtube)

Say you've run into a spot of trouble–some relationship issues, or family drama, or your friends are angry at you. Or maybe it's worse–you're in a discriminatory situation, or even a dangerous one. You need help from someone smart; someone who really gets it. Who do you turn to? If you're living in Kano, Nigeria, you'll probably do the opposite of what you'd do anywhere else. You'd pick up a romance novel.

Littattafan soyayya, or “books of love,” are a special kind of soapy fiction unique to Kano, Nigeria's second-largest city. Written and read mostly by women, the works deal with issues ranging from living with HIV/AIDS to fighting for your education to marrying young, all wrapped in a love story and bound in brightly-colored covers emblazoned with smiling female faces. Authors publish the books through collectives, and sell them to their thousands of fans at roadside stands and market bookshops–in the same markets that, lately, are better known as attack sites for suicide bombers.

To Western readers, the phrase “books of love” brings to mind bare-chested Harlequin clones gazing soulfully out from supermarket checkout racks. But littattafan soyayya is less Danielle Steel and more Leo Tolstoy. Though generally serialized into small, affordable packets, like Victorian novels once were, complete works are often 500 pages or more,  says Dr. Carmen McCain, a scholar of Hausa film and literature at Kwara State University Malete in Nigeria. The characters need this much space to achieve their creators’ myriad purposes. Over many chapters, your average littattafan soyayya protagonist may lose and find love, but she also might deal with intergenerational conflict, seek an education, or learn how to strive for equality in her marriage.

An aerial view of Kano. (Photo: Shiraz Chakera/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0)

This genre is a subset of Kano market literature–a broad term that encompasses the many and diverse works written in Hausa, a language native to Nigeria. Browsing the markets today, you can find everything from thrillers to highbrow novels to mythical adventure fantasies. “I’ll see people in taxis and at weddings and on film sets reading novels,” McCain says. “You see them quite a few places.”

But, as scholars Graham Furniss and Abdalla Uba Adamu wrote in a 2012 paper, this now-thriving scene grew out of collapse. In the 1980s, they explain, the Nigerian economy crashed, and traditional publishing outlets crumbled along with it. This put Hausa writers in a perilous financial position–but instead of capping their pens, they circled up, forming writing groups and self-publishing their works with the help of a new tool, the personal computer.

A decade into this new business model, “a number of novels began to focus on the boy-girl relationship, demurely and within a framework of Islamic propriety.” But it wasn’t until 1980 that the subgenre really took off, thanks to So Aljannar Duniya (roughly, “The World Wants a Garden), an interracial romance that, in the words of Furniss and Adamu, “really set the world alight to [Hausa] love-story writing.” The author, Hafsat Abdulwaheed, was the first woman to ever publish a book in Hausa.

Bookshelves at Bayero University in Kano. (Photo: Michael Sean Gallagher/Flickr)

Fast forward to the 2010s, and, as editor Rakesh Khanna writes in the introduction to a Hausa work, female writers “now dominate the field.” Some of these women live in purdah, a Muslim tradition that dictates married women stay indoors at almost all times. Others are presences in Kano’s thriving movie scene, Kannywood, where they write and direct screenplays based on their novels. Some are members of Kano’s many writing groups, while others “are just kind of writing at home” and getting publishing help from friends, says McCain. Regardless, they dedicate their free time to writing complex, multi-part stories for their fans–younger generations of women who, Khanna writes, “make up the bulk of the readership.”

"The books are often credited as being partly responsible for the marked rise in literacy among Hausa women," says Khanna.

For many of the most influential littattafan soyayya authors, this was all part of the plan. Bilkisu Salisu Ahmed Funtuwa, a prolific and bestselling member of the scene, told an interviewer she is galvanized by the difficulties women face when marriage interferes with their schooling. “I realized that through the medium of writing, using the little talent God gave me, I could put into the heads of these girls ideas–through entertainment and enlightenment–to appreciate the importance of education,” she said.

In Funtuwa’s works, even plot points that might seem shallow at first glance are, in the context of the novels, suffused with larger issues. For instance, in Funtuwa’s Sa’adatu Sa’ar Mata (“Sa’adatu the Lucky Woman”), when the main character is going through a rough spot in her relationship, her parents and grandparents suggest she buy a love potion. Although Sa’adatu doesn’t believe in such potions, she must find a way to compromise with prior generations, and, as Funtua explained in an interview, to reconcile the presence of this “age-old tradition” with newer knowledge. (Sa’adatu ends up swapping out the potion for milk, honey, meat and dates, and eventually lives happily ever after.)

The frankness of the wisdom on offer has rankled some critics, though, who blame foreign influence for what they see as nontraditional or anti-Islamic messages in the works. The early 2000s saw the formation of a the Kano State Censorship Board, along with several state-organized book burnings. In 2007, tensions came to a head when the state censors announced they would begin requiring writers to register individually with the board, and to seek line-by-line approval before releasing their works. The writers went on strike in protest, and the Association of Nigerian Authors had to broker a truce, says McCain.

Things remained tense until around 2011, but have cooled down since then, says McCain. Doubters have found new spaces to vent their concerns, though. “I went to a writer’s conference, and the head of the censor’s board was basically saying he wasn’t going to censor any more love novels, because there were too many love novels, so people had to write about more serious things,” she says. Such showdowns are common in academic settings according to McCain, where littattafan soyayya is often taken less seriously than it deserves. As one author, whose works are a common sight in secondary school classrooms, said an interview, “if I had that much soyayya in it, the education people [wouldn’t] put it in the syllabus.”

 

C U P I D O N T A R G E T ------------------------------------------------- "Ta ce na je yau" (overheard him saying)

A photo posted by kaibakano (@kaibakano) on Nov 17, 2015 at 1:02am PST

Because of this, translation of littattafan soyayya into other languages is often “a labor of love,” says McCain, who has undertaken some of it herself. As a result, English language readers who would like to learn more about the genre have a limited number of entry points (though one, an upcoming photography book called Diagram of the Heart, looks exciting). One good place to start is Sin is a Puppy (That Follows You Home), a twisty, acerbic tale of one relationship’s effect on a community by soyayya pioneer Balaraba Ramat Yakubu. Released by Indian publisher Blaft in 2012, Sin is a Puppy… is the first full-length contemporary Hausa work to be published in English, and is available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle editions.

Soon after the translation’s publication, Yakubu was interviewed about the milestone. After expressing her desire to have more works translated, she brought the conversation back to her guiding principle: appealing to her audience. “Whenever I write or talk, I side with women,” she said. “All I want is for women to get their rights. That’s what my books are about and what I stand for.” 

The town of Ostana (Source: Wikimedia Commons/Francofranco56)

Pretty late for a new year's baby but the BBC reports that the tiny Italian mountain town of Ostana welcomed its first newborn since 1987, bringing its total population up to 85.

The birth is being celebrated by the entire area and bringing hope to other towns in the region. Depopulation is a widespread issue among Italy’s small towns, with some mayor’s taking drastic measures, including banning people from getting sick and giving away houses. These unusual strategies have seen varying levels of success; the New York Times reports that the town of Gangi quickly found new owners for 100 free homes, with a substantial waiting list for the remaining 200. And while Mayor Zicchinella may not be able to prevent germs from entering Sellia, over 100 people visited the local clinic for a check-up in the month since illness was banned.

You might wonder how small towns end up so desperate for residents. As noted by the BBC, job shortages are a major factor, and Baby Pablo’s own parents even considered leaving at one point. To help combat depopulation due to unemployment, the European Association of Mountain Areas, Euromontana, has created the PADIMA project to help small mountain towns adopt policies to encourage people to relocate to or keep living in their towns. This has led to community projects like the Italian town of Bracca’s effort to become a community centered around the cultivation of truffles and the rehabilitation and sale of abandoned farmhouses in Norway’s Buskerud region.

In addition to the employment concerns in rural areas, many European nations have compounded the issue with extremely low birth rates. As the population ages and dies, it isn’t fully replenished with new babies, leading to heavy burdens on government services and healthcare for the elderly, plus a shrinking labor force and tax base to fund and staff those services. These low birth rates are the other reason rural depopulation in Italy and other parts of Europe is so striking, with towns like Ostana dropping from populations of thousands to dozens within a century.

Of course, even though the negative effects of phenomena like depopulation are readily apparent, there’s always someone willing to believe it’s the desired effect of a massive, global conspiracy, and this one incorporates all of the conspiracy “greatest hits.” According to the fringe—Henry Kissinger, the Nazis, and Ted Turner all play a part in the UN/secret world government conspiracy to depopulate the Earth of “useless eaters” at the behest of our secret Reptilian overlords. Their chosen methods—vaccines and the false threat of global warming, of course.

Fortunately, conspiracy theories aren’t real (although some take them seriously). Unfortunately, depopulation is a growing concern that could have a significant impact on our future. Hopefully, the various efforts being undertaken—whether unusual or mundane—will work, and Baby Pablo can have some new playmates soon.

A Tijuana bible (Source: Wikimedia Commons/Anonymous author)

Note: Many of the links in this article contain sexually explicit material that is definitely NSFW.

This week, Twitter's capacity for unfiltered interaction between celebrities, corporate brands, and the average—or not-so-average—human achieved a new milestone when Kellogg's cereal mascot Tony the Tiger was forced to ask users to stop sending him sexually explicit fan-created images. Tony's "fans" were so persistent that Kellogg's ultimately resorted to blocking a number of users, giving Cheetoh's Chester the Cheetah the perfect opportunity to dash in and pounce on any displaced fans of anthromorpohized cartoon animals.

The story sounds like an only-in-the-Internet-age event; however, erotic, fan-made illustrations of American celebrities, public figures, and—yes—cartoon characters existed well before Twitter and Tumblr.

Tijuana Bibles—also known as eight-pagers, Tillie-and-Mac books, and bluesies, among other names—first began appearing in the 1930s. These small printed pamphlets depicted famous newspaper comic characters, among other notable figures, in pornographic terms. The exact details of the publication process is somewhat mysterious, but academics such as Phillip Smith and Ellen Wright have found indications that they were printed by bootleggers, who had printing presses for making bottle labels, and initially sold in speakeasies. It's generally accepted that between 700 and 1,000 comics were produced during the '30s, '40s, and '50s by a small number of anonymous artists. Dr. Donald Gilmore, who pioneered the study of Tijuana Bibles with his 1971, four-volume work Sex in Comics: A History of the Eight Pagers, asserted that the bulk of bibles were produced by 12 artists, whom he identified with names like "Mr. Prolific."

In fact, many bible collectors conjecture that some popular mainstream comic artists and advertising illustrators such as Wesley Morse, the creator of Bazooka Joe moonlighted in eight-page smut.

Bad Donald. (Photo: Tijuana-bibles.com)

And who were the subjects of Tijuana Bibles? Movie stars such as Cary Grant and Rita Hayworth, obviously—but also public figures like Joseph Stalin (a particularly memorable Communist sex romp is described here), comic strip characters such as Popeye and Dagwood, Disney characters, and advertising mascots like Bazooka Joe. The bibles' disregard for copyright and libel laws undoubtedly played a major role in their notoriety (and appeal), with tabloids of the era describing movie stars "victimized by smut". The subversion of comic strip and cartoon characters' kid-friendly images also inspired the artists of the 1960s "underground comix" movement, including Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman. In one notable instance, a Tijuana Bible-inspired "Disneyland Memorial Orgy" was published in a 1967 issue of groundbreaking satire magazine The Realist in commemoration of Walt Disney's death.

Today, Tijuana Bibles continue to be traded and analyzed by devoted collectors, some of whom share their finds on the web. Even university libraries maintain collections of Tijuana Bibles as important artifacts of illustration and Americana. And as Tony the Tiger is now well-aware, the practice of sexualizing cultural figures is far from a thing of the past, and rampant examples can be found anywhere fans gather online.

Interestingly, one of the closest present-day analogues to the Tijuana Bible trade can be found in Japan's dōjinshi (self-published comics, often based on existing copyrighted works) industry. Only a small percentage of dōjinshi are sexually explicit works, but they sometimes represent the vast majority of fan-made work for an individual series, as these numbers from 2009 indicate. Although dōjinshi violate Japanese copyright law, it's been theorized that the market ultimately benefits the larger manga (comics) industry in Japan and is therefore tacitly allowed. After this week's events, it's doubtful that Kellogg's shares that sentiment, but we can be certain they're now aware of Rule 34 at least.

Hackathon participant Nelly Rosaria, making the Wiki-world a more textured place. (Photo: Atlas Obscura)

It's a scene no one would look twice at–on a Friday afternoon at the end of January, in a gray-walled MIT computer lab, a dozen wrinkle-browed hackers stare at their screens, surrounded by coffee cups and half-eaten cookies.

But this is no ordinary afternoon hack. The group is unusually diverse–old and young, male and female, from the Institute and the surrounding community. Most of them have books cracked open on their laps. And at the front of the room, on a whiteboard, is a list of subjects to tackle: not Python scripts or Javascript arrays, but "Marron William Fort" and "Margaret S. Collins." For the next few hours, this group will lend their interdisciplinary talents to a surprisingly difficult task–editing black history into Wikipedia.

"Wikipedia's goal is to share with the entire planet the sum of all human knowledge," Phoebe Ayers, one of the hackathon's organizers, tells the crowd as they set to work. "We're not even close to that goal."

Around the room, the hackers choose their subjects, rifling through library books and going deep on Google searches. Tips fly from desk to desk: “obituary sections are full of interesting people,” or “look for Army photos, they’re all free to use.”

Hackers need snacks too. (Photo: Atlas Obscura)

Nelly Rosario, a writer and researcher for the Blacks at MIT History Project and a member of the Class of '94, is hoping to flesh out some existing pages. "Texture is so important to me," she says. "I think sometimes we flatten history. If we know these people as human beings, we know the texture of their daily life, it becomes more real to us."

Rosario has lately become fascinated by a 1920s celebrity couple, Myra Adele Logan and Charles Alston. "She was a surgeon at the Harlem Hospital, and he was a muralist–like the Diego Rivera of Harlem," she says. "I'm trying to fill in some of her entry from details of his entry, which is way more in-depth than hers."

Wikipedia's skewed perspective is a well-known problem, acknowledged by the Wikimedia Foundation and much of the larger community, some of whom who have formed groups and campaigns to address it. What to do about it is much less clear. The issue is deeper than the site itself: as Ayers says, "there are a lot of inherent problems in how knowledge is represented," throughout history and across media.

Since Wikipedia is a compendium of information that already exists elsewhere, it reflects this long-standing bias. In addition, Wikipedia’s editorship–the tens of millions of volunteers who add, tinker with, and argue about articles–is not particularly diverse.

“It’s largely younger, largely male, largely white,” Ayers says. “And people often write about their own interests, which is natural and makes sense. But what that means is that we have a lot of articles about software and famous military figures, and not a lot about, say, traditional women’s handicrafts or activists in the developing world.” For a site that aims to “really reflect the fullness of our collective human experience,” Ayers says, this is a big issue.

A Black History edit-a-thon in London in 2015. (Photo: Caroline Bressey/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

It's “a nightmarishly vexed problem,” says Alex Hyland, a content expert at the Wiki Education Foundation, which works to bridge the gap between the site and academia. Hyland, who sports a black and green “Ask Me About Wikipedia” shirt, spends his afternoon jumping from computer to computer, helping people format sources and hashing out the finer points of the “Five Pillars,” the fundamental principles that underlay the whole Wikipedia endeavor. The last of these pillars is “Wikipedia has no rules,” a Fight Club-esque paradox that, though necessary to the spirit of the site, makes it difficult to exert change.

When new perspectives do manage to eke their way through, they're subject to intense scrutiny. Groups of old-guard editors write scripts that show them edits from new users, and then police them overzealously, Hyland says, reversing their contributions and often scaring them off for good. The only thing that has “really moved the needle” is educational outreach–give a diverse group of people the tools, the desire, and the support to get through these obstacles, and the whole thing starts looking less monolithic.

Even at organized events, this is easier said than done. As the hackers dig in, roadblocks keep popping up–some common to all historical efforts, others unique to this one. One hacker, trying to separate a psychologist couple into two independent pages (“it’s like she’s glued to her husband’s side!”) has difficulty finding sources that credit the female half of the pair with anything. Another recalls making a prior effort, only to find her changes immediately reversed by the overzealous editors Hyland was talking about. Still another finds she can’t edit a page at all–it has been locked to new contributors after a different user repeatedly vandalized it.

Maya Wagoner dives into Dr. Dorothy Celeste Boulding Farabee's page. (Photo: Atlas Obscura)

Maya Wagoner, a graduate student in comparative media studies, has been researching black history on her own since high school, and recently got involved in the Wikipedia scene. “So far it’s been terrifying,” she says. “It seems very easy to do, and then when you edit something, there is all this aggressive language–‘so and so patrolled your pages and took down your addition.’”

Wagoner is expanding the page for Dr. Dorothy Celeste Boulding Farabee, a 20th century obstetrician and civil rights activist, and has pages and pages of notes. “I’m afraid that even after I add a bunch to this, someone’s going to patrol it and take it down… as a new editor, all I’ve experienced is negativity,” she says.

Still, she says, "I'll probably keep trying." Rosario will too–in fact, she's having trouble stopping. "I drove in from New York for this," she says. "Now I understand why this is a four-hour session. I'm in a wormhole!" If she and her fellow hackers can keep their footing, that wormhole might start to look a little more like Earth.

A Balinese funeral procession. (Photo: Flickr/William Cho)

When David Bowie’s will was made public on Friday, it revealed plenty of the unique details you expect from the legendary figure’s final requests. Among the most interesting was the singer’s instructions for his cremation. As the New York Times reports, “Mr. Bowie said in the will that he wanted his body shipped to Bali and cremated there ‘in accordance with the Buddhist rituals of Bali.’ But he added that if cremation in Bali were not possible, he wanted his ashes scattered there nevertheless.”

Bowie’s appreciation of Bali, and Indonesia as a whole, can be traced back to a trip he took with friend and collaborator Iggy Pop, which was recounted in the 1984 song “Tumble and Twirl.” The lyrics don’t indicate that Bowie had the opportunity to observe a Ngaben—the traditional Balinese cremation ceremony he was likely referring to in his will—but it’s no surprise that he admired this beautiful and elaborate ritual.

A Wadah, used to transport the body during the funeral procession. (Photo: Flickr/Guillaume)

Like an Irish Wake or a New Orleans second line, the Ngaben combines celebration with sorrow in a multi-part ritual that lasts almost two weeks. It's a tradition unique to the island: Most Balinese practice a form of Hinduism unique to the island, which mixes traditional Hindu beliefs with Buddhism and local animist religions. This religious heritage has given rise to rituals only practiced on Bali, including the Ngaben. The ritual’s name comes from the word ngabuin or ngabu, which means “turn to ash.” 

If the family has the means to hold an individual Ngaben, the first step is consultation with a priest to determine the day of the ceremony. In the interim, the family will construct a Wadah—a tower-like structure built of papier-mache, wood, and bamboo—and a Lembu—a sarcophagus in the shape of an ox. Members of the royal family or other high-caste individuals have more elaborate ceremonies, called Pelebon, and may have Lembu in the shape of other animals, such as a lion or dragon.

 Lembu, used as containers during cremation. (Photo: Flickr/William Cho)

Once the day of the ceremony has arrived, the body of the deceased is placed in the Wadah and is taken to the creation site in a procession with a joyful, parade-like atmosphere. In Bali, Ngaben are a time to celebrate and help the deceased move on from their previous life, and the procession is often accompanied by an orchestra and crowds of mourners carrying offerings and memorials for the deceased. After reaching the cremation site, the body is transferred to the Lembu and a priest oversees the burning of the body. Finally, 12 days after the cremation, the ashes are scattered into the sea, or a river leading to the sea in a final act of purification.

For the Balinese, this is one of their most important ceremonies, as it represents the release of the deceased’s spirit from the body, allowing them to reincarnate or find final rest in Moksha, free from the cycle of reincarnation and death. Fittingly, it requires significant effort, time, and expense; to help defray the costs of a Ngaben, many Balinese temporarily bury their deceased, to be exhumed for participation in a mass Ngaben at a later date.

Bowie was cremated without ceremony shortly after his death on January 10th and plans for the scattering of his ashes have not been announced. Regardless of the specifics of the ceremony, his fans around the world have created numerous memorials celebrating his life, echoing the intention and tone of the Ngaben.

A Balinese royal cremation ceremony (Pelebon). (Video: Youtube/Travel2Asia)

A worker sprays DDT directly into a water supply during the National Malaria Eradication Program. (Photo: CDC Public Health Image Library, ID#4684)

Mosquitoes might just be the most unpopular insect on Earth. At their most harmless, they cause infuriatingly itchy welts, ruining barbecues and birthday parties around the globe. At their worst, they’re vectors for serious diseases like malaria, Dengue fever, West Nile virus, and the Zika virus, which experts now think may be a bigger threat to global health than the recent Ebola epidemic.

The threat is so severe that some, such as Wellcome Trust head of infection and immunobiology Mike Turner, are advocating the use of DDT—long banned in the United States and elsewhere due to its environmental and health risks—to eliminate the mosquito species’ that serve as carriers of the virus.

This weekend, a few pundits have taken things one step further by calling for the eradication of all mosquitoes.

Purposefully eradicating an entire species sounds outrageous, but we already use a variety of strategies to control mosquito population growth. Famously, in 1947, the U.S. carried out the National Malaria Eradication Program, blanketing the southeast in DDT and eradicating malaria in the U.S. in just four years. Today, New Yorkers and other urbanites are likely familiar with local pesticide-spraying events to combat the spread of West Nile virus and other mosquito-borne illnesses. And looking forward, many scientists are moving beyond pesticide and looking to genetically modify mosquitoes to control—or even eliminate—certain populations. The modifications come in a variety of flavors; one team modified mosquitoes' smell receptors, eliminating their ability to smell nearby humans. Professor Anthony James and colleagues at UC Irvine modified Aedes aegypti so that female mosquitoes were born without wings, crippling their ability to survive and reproduce. Right now, mosquitoes possessing a lethal gene that prevents them from reaching adulthood are being released in Brazil to reduce mosquito numbers and, hopefully, control the spread of the Zika virus.

Humans have shown an aptitude for unwittingly driving other species to extinction, but should we really turn our talents towards purposeful eradication? Some scientists have argued that the consequences of allowing mosquitoes to live outweigh any dangers posed by removing them from the ecosystem. Carlos Brisola Marcondes, a medical entomologist, tells Nature unequivocally that a world without mosquitoes would be “more secure for us,” and biologist Olivia Judson argued in the New York Times that other insects could easily replace mosquitoes’ role in any ecological niche. But each of these arguments have a counter—entomologist Phil Lounibus points out that whatever replaces the mosquito could be "equally, or more, undesirable from a public health viewpoint".

Even if the idea seems sound from a biological perspective, many are ethically squeamish about purposefully eliminating another species. That might be why some scientists have focused on less murderous ways to lessen the health impacts of mosquitoes. The Kew Royal Botanical Gardens is working on a project to track harmful mosquitoes with acoustic devices, and James has moved on from removing wings to genetically modifying mosquitoes so they can't spread disease.

Regardless of whether you think mosquitoes should be driven from the Earth, or simply made a little less dangerous, large-scale implementation of these strategies is probably a long way off; but the next time you find yourself scratching, take comfort in the fact that future could hold a mosquito-free world.

A series of images from the countdown sequence of Fritz Lang's Woman in the Moon. (Image: Frau im Mond/Youtube)

On December 1, 2014, NASA retired a historic piece of equipment at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It wasn’t a rocket, or even a deep space nine-iron—it was the original countdown clock, an analog display the size of a titan’s wristwatch that stood across the river from the rocket launch site and stoically ticked off the seconds until blastoff.

Countdown clocks allow technicians and astronauts to synchronize their moves throughout a rocket launch sequence, from T-minus 43 hours all the way until the final ignition. But their appeal goes way beyond practicality. The clock also serves as the visual version of a whistling teakettle, allowing spectators to ramp up their excitement as launch time draws nearer. When those last few seconds tick away before a launch, it's dramatic, emotional—even cinematic. Which makes sense considering the rocket-launch countdown clock wasn’t invented by meticulous engineers, but dreamed up by a filmmaker: science fiction pioneer Fritz Lang.

The countdown clock, switching into elapsed time mode after the 2005 launch of Space Shuttle Discovery. (Photo: NASA/KSC Public Domain)

As media scholars Tom Gunning and Katharina Loew detail in “Lunar Landings and Rocket Fever: Rediscovering Woman in the Moon,” one little-known Lang movie “not only predicted the future of rocketry,” but “actually played an effective role in its early development.” In 1927, Gunning and Loew write, Lang was desperate for a hit. Metropolis, though today considered an undisputed classic, was a box office flop in its own time, and Lang’s production company, Ufa, was threatening to cut him off. To make matters worse, Lang was a silent filmmaker, and sound was rapidly becoming the hot new cinematic trend. Lang’s next movie had to be so exciting that the public wouldn’t even notice how quiet it was.

Luckily, he had the perfect subject matter right at his fingertips. In the mid-1920s, Germany had a bad case of rocket fever. Still getting over the trauma of World War I, and unsure how to reconcile the power of new technology with the power of old-school spirituality, the public turned to space travel as a literal escapist fantasy, writes media scholar Katharina Loew.

The surprise bestseller of the decade was a popularized version of Die Rakete zu den Palnetenräumen (By Rocket into Planetary Space), a Transylvanian high school teacher’s rejected dissertation that argued scientifically for the possibility of space travel. Soon, enthusiasts at Germany’s new Society for Space Travel were putting out a monthly magazine, Die Rakete (The Rocket), tinkerers were building rocket-powered sleds and cars, and readers were snapping up the latest spaceflight novels.

Members of the Society for Space Travel in 1930. Oberth is directly to the left of the rocket. (Photo: Public.Resource.org/Flickr)

One of these novels, Die Frau im Mond, happened to be written by Thea von Harbou, Lang’s longtime collaborator and then-wife (the two later separated, after von Harbou decided to throw her lot in with the Nazis). The book, which follows a group of backstabbing moon prospectors, is a rollercoaster ride of love triangles, business intrigue, and lunar gunfights, and Lang set out to turn it into a film. While writing the novel, von Harbou had researched spaceflight meticulously, and Lang, wanting his film to be equally grounded in scientific possibility, hired Hermann Oberth—the Transylvanian teacher who had started the whole space craze—as the film’s scientific advisor. Oberth hightailed it to Berlin.

What followed was a historic collaboration between art and science. For each obstacle that faced the spacefaring characters—rocket design, oxygen shortages, zero gravity—Oberth would calculate the most probable solution, and Lang and his crew would make it happen. Other German rocket enthusiasts, including Willy Ley and Max Valier, gravitated to the set to throw in their two cents, and to watch as their wildest dreams materialized. Lang felt unfettered by his supposed budget constraints—in one memorable line item, he ordered 40 carloads of sea sand to be trucked in and roasted to form the perfect moonscape. The only limits were the scientists’ calculations and Lang’s imagination.

Lang on the set of Woman In The Moon, with cameraman Curt Courant. (Image: WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Lang and his advisors came up with a number of spacefaring features that, years later, showed up on actual launchpads. The astronauts lock into footstraps to keep from floating around, and the rocket itself has multiple stages and engines that it jettisons one at a time, presaging modern designs. Another prescient decision came together in editing. The launch itself is a tense moment, worthy of a dramatic buildup. Lang remained vehemently anti-sound, and refused to add any effects, so loudly revving up the blasters was out of the picture. Instead, he decided to use a less obvious suspense technique: intertitles.

As the astronauts lie in their bunks, eyes wide and jaws tense, the screen cuts to an announcement: “Noch 10 Sekunden-!”—10 seconds remaining! The mission leader grips the firing lever—”Noch 6 Sekunden!” The numbers get bigger, filling the screen: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, JETZT! Now! The lever lowers, and the rocket blasts out of the water. Nearly a hundred years later, it still gets the heart pumping.

Although some earlier novels and films used count-ups, this was the first time the rocket met the countdown. Since then, they’ve been inseparable. The film’s space advisors brought lessons they learned from the film set back with them to the Society for Space Travel, where they found that loudly timing launches to the second was not only dramatic, but helpful. When NASA launched its first successful satellite, Explorer 1, in 1958, newsreels broadcasting the event breathlessly announced, “the moment is at hand, the countdown reaches zero!”

As for Frau im Mond, audiences ate up the gadgets and moonscapes, and it was the year’s highest-grossing film. Critics weren’t so keen, though, and this particular Lang film has largely been lost to time, overshadowed by more well-rounded classics like M and Metropolis. But every time a real rocket leaves its launchpad, spurred on by people worldwide mouthing “ten… nine… eight,” the spirit of Frau im Mond takes off with it.

It's 8:30. (I think?) (Image: Twitter/Wikimedia)

There is a mystery that has long bothered me. From time to time, in the course of normal texting, when I’m scrolling through the emoji on my phone, I scroll far enough to the right that I come across those 24 clock emojis. And I wonder: why? Why do they exist? Why are they taking up so much space on the emoji keyboard? Who in the world could possible need 24 clocks faces?

I decided to find out.

Here, if you are not familiar, are all 24 clock emojis: 🕐🕑🕒🕓🕔🕕🕖🕗🕘🕙🕚🕛🕜🕝🕞🕟🕠🕡🕢🕣🕤🕥🕦🕧.

Theoretically, they could be used to indicate, in an emoji diptych, “afternoon tea,” “time flies,” or a “midnight snack.” But who actually uses them this way? They are consistently among the least used emoji, and the sheer number of them can provoke rage. (“24 FUCKING CLOCK EMOJIS,” Buzzfeed fumes.) When I surveyed my own friends and acquaintances about clock emoji use, I only got two reactions. Either people had never heard of them, or they found them totally useless.

"I don't understand any circumstance where using one would be preferable to just writing out the time you mean," huffed one friend. "Wait there are emoji clocks?" asked another, seriously. “These clocks are a waste of my time; pun intended,” my former kindergarten teacher wrote.  

Three o'clock, clearly (Image: emojione/Wikimedia)

Why are there clock emoji at all, then? According the Unicode Consortium, the non-profit responsible for the standardization of text in all software–the deciding body for which emoji are added to the universal emoji dictionary–one of the most important factors for emoji inclusion is “a high expected frequency of use.”

Even if it could be argued that there was a use for one generic clock emoji, how often does the average person really need to indicate 4:00 versus 4:30, or 5:00 versus 5:30? Especially by using an image tiny enough that actually reading the time on it would require a squint? Why use an emoji clock when it's almost definitely faster to just write the time out, an approach that also allows the indication of a time that’s not on the hour or half hour?

There had to be a reason.

I got in touch with the Unicode Consortium, which did shed some light on this mystery. When Unicode was first standardizing emoji, starting back in 2009, they based their initial emoji set on the emoji used by Japanese phone companies, the creators of emoji. Twelve of the clocks–the ones that show the hour–were part of one of those original sets, from SoftBank. Those emoji apparently weren’t subject to the same scrutiny as new emoji are today.

So we can blame SoftBank for 12 of the clocks. But what about the other 12?

Now it's 7:00 (Photo: Mozilla/Wikimedia)

It turns out that those other 12 clocks, the ones that show the half-hour, come from Wingdings.

Possibly you remember Wingdings and its crazy cousin font, Zapf Dingbats. They haunt the tail end of the font list. Way back when, they were always the last two fonts on the drop-down list, and they were full of incomprehensible little symbols that seemed to have no purpose at all. Dingbats are actually a relic of the print publishing industry, and were used as spacers in publishing, sometimes quite elaborately.

Some of those original Japanese emoji also appeared in these font sets, and when the Unicode Consortium was working on the original emoji set, it considered Wingdings for inclusion. As the original set of emoji was already going to include 12 clocks, the consortium figured: why not add the other 12 clocks from the Wingdings set, too?

Once you understand this–that half of the emoji clocks are actually Wingdings characters–the entire spectrum of useless and unispired emoji, the ones that you have to scroll far, far to the right for on an iPhone, start to make a little bit more sense. A bunch of those purple symbols came only from Wingdings. Those mailboxes came from Wingdings. Folders and paper clips and that random candle–directly from Wingdings. The pause button. The record button. The wired mouse. It goes on.

Wingdings infiltrated the 21st century via emoji (Image: Public domain)

To be fair, Japanese phone companies had already adopted many Wingdings symbols before Unicode got involved. The scissors. The weird black boxes in many sizes. Those old-fashioned incoming and outgoing mail trays. And some of the Wingdings characters are great. The alien head. The bird head. The martini glass.

But the fact remains, anytime you want to send an emoji, you are basically sorting through Wingdings characters. Unicode hasn’t been shy about this–its 2014 release of new emoji was primarily drawn from Wingdings.

It does feel like sort of a scam, though. All these years we’ve been carrying Wingdings around on our phones, and we still have to wait until June for an avocado emoji.

The SS Monte Carlo (Photo: Jamie Lantzy/Wikimedia)

On the coast of Coronado, California, there's a ship buried in the sand—the wreckage of the SS Monte Carlo, a ship once dedicated to sin, and ruined by a winter storm in December 1936.

Occasionally the ship's remains make an appearance from beneath the sand. This year, El Niño storms have shifted the sand enough to reveal parts of the wreck that haven't been seen in years.

The SS Monte Carlo was 300 feet long and, at peak usage, would host 15,000 people a week, including, most famously Clark Gable and Mae West. The ship was anchored miles offshore, so that it was located in international waters, where, even during Prohibition, no one could stop the drinking and gambling. Guests could play blackjack, roulette or slots, and often there would be huge parties on board. 

In December 1936, the ship was closed for the season, so when a storm snapped it from its moorings, only a couple of caretakers were on board. When the wreckage made it to shore, no one wanted to claim it as their own, given its shady business. The city carted away the liquor that was still in the ship and stripped the vessel of its valuable parts—although it's said that a hoard of silver coins were left behind and can still be found in the wreckage. 

Bonus finds: 9,000 bottles of fake champagne, perhaps the earliest known image of the Virgin Mary

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. 

Brain scans at a research facility. (Photo: Tushchakorn/shutterstock.com)

Dr. Vahram Haroutunian opened the plastic tupperware with a careful, rigid pop. Inside are over a dozen pink, carefully freeze-packed slices of a human brain. White clouds of cold air escaped from the door, where dozens of these containers were neatly stacked and stored.

“This is a case that we got in February of ’96,” Haroutunian says. The brain slices are individually sealed in thick, vacuum-sealed plastic, see-through like a frosty windowpane. When looking at them, it’s hard not to think of frozen pork chops at the grocery store. Each freezer holds about 100 donations, and there are over a dozen freezers here. I am standing in a room with the brains of over a thousand people.

Haroutunian is the director of the Mount Sinai NIH Brain and Tissue Repository at the James J. Peters VA Medical Center, in the Bronx. Known as a brain bank, this lab is one of five in a multi-state consortium called the NeuroBioBank that stores donated brains for neuroscientists to study brain function, mental illness and degenerative disease.

A single brain can, over the course of decades, reach laboratories all over the world. “We have five requests pending at any point and time—it’s a continuous thing,” says Haroutunian. “It’s kind of like going in and asking for a mortgage. We negotiate, and what happens is all the NeuroBio banks look at the request that has come in, and they chime in if they have the specific cases or brain areas that are of interest.”

The idea is to pool the efforts of each bank to maximize the brain tissue available for worldwide research. A scientist in France might ask for 15,000 samples of a specific part of the brain, for instance, and then the request is forwarded to the member banks, who will work together to contribute as many of the total number of samples needed as they can.

Dr. Vahram Haroutunian in front of fixed brain specimens at the brain bank. (Photo: Natalie Zarrelli)

Haroutunian has been working at his brain bank for 34 years, since its previous incarnation as an Alzheimer’s research center in the ‘80s. At the time, Haroutunian treated and studied patients who exhibited Alzheimer’s symptoms, but couldn’t officially diagnose the disease without looking at the brain tissue itself. After a visiting NIH official asked about this problem, Haroutunian’s research center was inspired to store and collect brains, eventually growing to incorporate those of several other degenerative diseases, and even brains of completely healthy individuals.

“We and everyone else who came after us realized that there was a lot more,” says Haroutunian. And there is more. He takes me into the next room, which looks like a classic sci-fi movie scene—it is lined with brains preserved in jars.

Up close, I can see the small curves and wrinkles that used to hold worries and memories. Haroutunian explains that preserving the brain in formalin, a formaldehyde product, helps protect the structure of soft brain tissue, so its anatomy and cell structure are easily seen.

The freezer where specimens are kept, labeled by serial number. (Photo: Natalie Zarrelli)

In the freezers and jars, the brains are labeled by serial number. As with many professions that involve human organs, the bank’s staff keep the brains separate from their former human identities while dissecting and studying them—a necessary combination of respect and anonymity that helps them perform their work.There is no mention of the donor’s name, though the brain bank knows it from medical records; Haroutunian refers to the brains only as “specimens.” A red sticker on a freezer door reminds, a bit ominously, that it is not a place to store food or drink.

All this is not to say that the donor and donor’s family aren't treated with empathy; in fact, an enormous amount of time is spent assuring consent from the donor, and after the donor's death, from their next of kin. This presents brain banks with a challenge when asking for organs from grieving families. The brain is an organ that is particularly human and impossible to replace–it shapes both our personalities and identities—but researchers sorely need them.

Brain banks do what they can to make their good intentions known: pamphlets emphasize the potential of saving lives, and show happy, brain-having families. The Columbia University Brain Bank allays fears with their FAQ, assuring potential donors and their families that open casket funerals are possible after donating a brain. Haroutunian’s lab employs a donation coordinator, Maxwell Bustamante, who is the first contact for a donor’s family, and answers questions day and night.

These days, most donations are made courtesy of people that Haroutunian has never met, generally after a call comes in from New York’s optimistically-named organ donation center, LiveOnNY. Once consent is given, brain banks act fast. Brain tissue degrades quickly after death, which limits what they can be used for. Haroutunian says that while a 48-hour-old brain can be studied for anatomy, you probably can't observe a specific protein in its cells, for example. If the donor's death happens far away, they pack the brain in a box of ice, and ship it over to the lab for deeper freezing and processing.

Lab technician Christine processes a brain at the Mount Sinai NIH Brain and Tissue Repository. (Photo: Natalie Zarrelli)

In Haroutunian’s lab, technicians separate the brain into its left and right hemispheres. The right half is cut into pieces and fixed in jars for anatomical studies, and the left is sliced and snap-frozen in liquid nitrogen, and can later be ground into smaller pieces using a nitrogen-cooled mortar and pestle. “The idea is preserving the tissue and the biochemistry of the specimen as permanently as we can, and the best we can do with modern technology is to keep it as cold as is practically feasible,” Haroutunian explains. 

Lab technicians note the brain sections–like the hippocampus or prefrontal cortex–wrap the pieces in plastic, and store them away.“At that point, everything comes almost to a standstill, while we go on an information gathering mission,” Haroutunian says. He and his staff investigate the donor, through hospital records and the family, to fill the gaps of the donor's medical history.

“As a brain banker, I have to be thinking 10, 15, 20 years ahead. I’m not arrogant enough to think that what medical features I think are important today are going to be important 30 years from now,” he says, noting that the oldest brain stored at the bank was donated in 1983, and they’re still using it. “Did they take a multivitamin? I don’t think that’s going to be important—but what do I know?” Haroutunian laughs. “Was there toenail fungus that was diagnosed during the last year? Maybe 50 years from now, that will be important.”   

New discoveries involving brain donations are happening all the time. Just this year, Haroutunian's lab continued research that ties a gene to an anomaly in the brain nerve coating of schizophrenic patients. This is significant —at first glance, schizophrenic brains are not physically different from one without the disease. “We can almost diagnose schizophrenia by looking at how these genes are behaving…to the point of creating transgenic animal models,” says Haroutunian. Now, they are activating a portion of these genes in rats, to see if this results in the same nerve characteristics present in schizophrenic humans. Discoveries like these can only be found through brain and tissue donations.

Dr. Lawrence Honig, professor of clinical neurology at the Columbia University Medical Center, says that brain banks are vital to his work. “We can find out what molecules, what pathways are changed or altered; what make the disease progress,” says Honig. “You can't find that from asking [the patient] questions.” Honig, who works on the clinical side of the brain bank world through his university, treats patients with neurodegenerative diseases during their life, but uses research from donated brains to understand how to best treat his patients.

That connection to the clinical side of the neuroscience world seems to be more relevant than ever. “As of now, what's the fastest growing segment of the US population? People over the age of 85,” says Haroutunian. The longer people live, the more we need to understand degenerative diseases related to aging. With this comes new mysteries: older patients are often misdiagnosed with Alzheimer's, and Haroutunian's lab only learns the patients never had it when they examine their brains. “Maybe they have something else, and that whatever it is, is letting centenarians not die of cancer,” he offers. Brain banks and scientists the world over will be looking to find out.

You might be wondering if you can contribute to solving these new puzzles some day. Haroutunian says that you can—though he hopes your chance to donate your own brain doesn’t happen any time soon. If you do eventually want to donate a brain, you can start by filling out a form at your local tissue repository, or if you're signed up as an organ donor, donation centers will likely give a call to the brain bankers near you.

This story appeared as part of Atlas Obscura's Time Week, a week devoted to the perplexing particulars of keeping time throughout history. See more Time Week stories here. 

As anticipation grows for Sunday night's Super Bowl 50, we bring you an NFL promo from 1970 that you don't have to be a football fan to appreciate. 

The minute-long spot essentially looks like the opening credits to a '70s detective TV show that can't make up its mind as to whether it's more Twilight Zone or Brady Bunch. And of course, it wouldn't be '70s television without plenty of psychedelic colors. 

Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

The key to longevity? (Photo: Justin/flickr)

The naked mole-rat—as its name fairly shouts—is not a comely animal. It looks like a wrinkled potato with pinhole eyes, a wet, pink divot for a nose and two dagger-like teeth. But its weirdness runs more than skin deep.

Indigenous to East Africa, naked mole-rats live in colonies beneath the earth, ruled by a queen, like bees or ants. They are remarkably pain-resistant and have very low body temperatures.

They may also hold the key to unlocking everlasting life in humans.

Naked mole rats can live to be 30 years old–the longest life ever clocked in a rodent–and are nearly impervious to cancer. (The oldest recorded naked mole rat, Old Man, perished at the advanced age of 32 at a research colony in San Antonio, Texas.) Such traits mark them as an “extreme animal”–creatures with remarkable features some scientists believe can be studied and mimicked in humans. 

Can naked mole-rats help humans achieve immortality? (Photo: Jedimentat44/WikiCommons CC BY 2.0)

João Pedro de Magalhães, a scientist, futurist and senior lecturer at the University of Liverpool, has been fascinated by extreme animals and naked mole rats in particular for many years, and spearheaded an effort to sequence its genome. He and his collaborators succeeded, and the annotated genome is now available to researchers for free download.

“Aging is the biggest cause of illness and suffering in modern society,” says de Magalhães, who believes that—whether we all want it or not—the end-run of biomedical research is a cure for aging.

De Magalhães is not a scientific Quixote—plenty of high-profile funders have sunk money into the quest for radical life extension. (Craig Venter, credited with being one of the first scientists to unravel the human genome, founded Human Longevity Inc., an organization devoted to studying aging-related diseases and, ultimately, extending human life.) We may be centuries away from such a reality, according to de Magalhães. But studying extreme animals like the naked mole-rat could change the game. 

If researchers are able to pinpoint the mechanisms that enable longevity in naked-mole rats, it’s possible that drugs could be developed that mimic the same behavior in humans, or even insert them directly into a patient’s cells via gene therapy. This isn’t unheard of—scientists successfully extended the life of worms with the genes of zebrafish, which have unusually long lifespans (for fish).

A cozy nest of naked mole rats. (Photo: Benny Mazur/WikiCommons CC BY 2.0)

De Magalhães, who favors studying mammals, is currently trying to get funding to put naked mole-rat genes in mice and see if that protects them from cancer or causes them to live longer.

De Magalhães and his team have also sequenced the genome of the Bowhead whale, which can live to be 200 years old. And there are plenty of other long-lived animals out there: Some bats, Galapagos tortoises, and capuchin monkeys all live long lives. The Ocean Quahog clam can live 500 years. There’s even a tiny, immortal jellyfish that could theoretically live forever if not devoured by a predator or otherwise dispatched.

In recent years, the cost of sequencing genomes has declined dramatically, although hurdles remain. Obtaining DNA, for example, can be tricky. De Magalhães once landed a Bowhead whale sample by sheer luck. He happened to read a paper by scientists in Denmark who had obtained whale DNA following a legal subsistence hunt in Greenland, and they agreed to share with him. 

Good fodder for a joke? (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Finding suitable DNA to work with is not the only challenge he faces: when not occupied with the mysteries of aging, de Magalhães pursues his hobby of stand-up comedy. He hasn’t found a way to meld hobby and work yet–aging is too difficult to joke about, he says–but he believes naked mole-rats might have some potential for this, too. 

“Whenever you show a slide, you can always make a joke about how they look,” de Magalhães says. “Because they have a queen, in Britain you can make a joke about that as well. So, yeah, naked mole-rats are good comedy material I would say.”

This story appeared as part of Atlas Obscura's Time Week, a week devoted to the perplexing particulars of keeping time throughout history. See more Time Week stories here. 

That was a boat, 4,500 years ago (Photo: Czech Institute of Egyptology/V. Dulikova)

In the desert sand of Abusir, an archaeological site south of Cairo, archaeologists from the Czech Republic have uncovered a boat that was made 4,500 years ago.

The boat is 60 feet long and incredibly well preserved—it's still possible to observe the wooden planks that make up its sides, the pegs that connected the boards, and the plant fibers that lashed them together. It's probably the most whole example of any boat of this age ever found in Egypt.

The boat was discovered at the site of a mud brick tomb. Archaeologists do not totally understand why Egyptians buried boats with their dead, but they're usually connected to royal burials. It's not known who was interred in this tomb, but archaeologists believe the person was a very high ranking member of Egyptian society circa 2550 B.C. 

Because the vessel is so well preserved, it could give scientists clues about the techniques Egyptians used for building boats—even the ones meant to be used in life. After all, you don't want your boat to leak, regardless of whether it's crossing a river on Earth or the time-space of the afterworld.

Bonus finds: A reason that time goes forward

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.