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8 Places From Shakespeare That You Can Actually Visit

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Juliet's Balcony in Verona. (Photo: Spencer Wright/CC BY 2.0)

Ah, the Bard! While Shakespeare is known for his iconic characters and poetic dialogue, he was also a master of establishing place. From Ancient Greece to fair Verona, he often set his plays in real world cities and locations, lightly fictionalized for the stage.

Within these cities, Shakespeare would often set scenes in specific locations that were based on actual places, many of which still survive today. So join us as we take a short tour of eight real-world locations from the works of Shakespeare.    

1. Kronborg Castle
Helsignor, Denmark

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AKA Elsinore. (Photo: Dr. Splif/CC BY-SA 3.0)

"Gentlemen, you are welcome to Elsinore. Your
hands, come then. Th' appurtenance of welcome is
fashion and ceremony." - Hamlet, Hamlet, Act II, Scene II

Sitting on the sea on the eastern edge of Denmark is an ornate fortress known as Kronborg Castle. Shakespeare fans know it better as Elsinore. The historic place was originally established in the 1420s as a sea fort, but over a century later it was transformed into the ornate castle that still stands today. As Elsinore in Hamlet, the ramparts of the castle were where Hamlet saw the ghost of his father. Nowadays the castle is a UNESCO protected site, and open to the public. 

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(Photo: Guillaume Baviere/CC BY-SA 2.0)

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(Photo: Bruno Cordioli/CC BY 2.0)

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(Photo: Bruno Cordioli/CC BY 2.0)

2. Juliet's Balcony
Verona, Italy

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Just waiting for star-crossed lovers. (Photo: Jiuguang Wang/CC BY-SA 2.0)

"But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? 
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun." - Romeo, Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene II

Maybe the most famous place in all of Shakespeare's canon, Juliet's balcony is said to be the squat, stone window ledge on a building now known as the Casa di Giulietta. As the story goes, the house once belonged to the Capullo family, which some believe was the inspiration for the Capulets of the play.

Scholars agree that both Romeo and Juliet were fictional characters, and any real connection to the play is spurious at best, but the house is now one of the biggest attractions in Verona, and looks very much like it could have been the scene of the star-crossed lovers' balcony exchange. There is even a tradition of people sticking romantic notes to the wall for luck in love, but since the medieval building is a protected historic site, the local government has been trying to put a stop to it.   

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(Photo: Andy Hay/CC BY 2.0)

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(Photo: Uwe Hermann/CC BY-SA 3.0)

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(Photo: Elliot Brown/CC BY 2.0)

3. Romeo's House
Verona, Italy

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Wherefore art thou, Romeo? (Photo: Elliott Brown/CC BY 2.0)

"A dog of the house of Montague moves me." - Sampson, Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene I

Similar to Juliet's balcony above, the Verona location known as Romeo's House is said to have belonged to the Monteccis, a family that may have inspired the Montagues. While the connection to the play is tenuous, this has not stopped people from wanting to believe that it could have been the home of Juliet's beau. The medieval home is not open to visitors, but there is a plaque outside that marks it as Romeo's home. 

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(Photo: Elliott Brown/CC BY 2.0)

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(Photo: Elliott Brown/CC BY 2.0)

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(Photo: Sky Eckstrom/CC BY-SA 2.0)

4. Pontefract Castle
Pontefract, England

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The tower where Richard II died? (Photo: Tim Green/CC BY 2.0)

"O Pomfret, Pomfret! O thou bloody prison, 
Fatal and ominous to noble peers!
Within the guilty closure of thy walls,
Richard the Second here was hacked to death,
And, for more slander to thy dismal seat,
We give thee up our guiltless blood to drink." - Rivers, Richard III, Act III, Scene III

In the historical tragedy Richard III, Queen Elizabeth's doomed brother Lord Rivers delivers the tale of what happened to Richard II, saying he was hacked up in a prison called Pomfret. Surprisingly, this probably happened. When the real Richard II was deposed, he was taken to a tower in Pontefract Castle, and it is believed that he was killed there. Pontefract Castle now lies in ruins, some of which are open to visitors.

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(Photo: Tim Green/CC BY 2.0)

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(Photo: Jerzy Kociatkiewicz/CC BY-SA 2.0)

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(Photo: Tim Green/CC BY 2.0)

5. Jerusalem Chamber
London, England

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The room where Henry IV died. (Photo: Wikipedia/Public Domain)

"I pray you, take me up and bear me hence
Into some other chamber. Softly, pray." - King Henry IV, Henry IV, Part II, Act IV, Scene III

Located within Westminster Abbey, the room known as the Jerusalem Chamber is not only the setting of King Henry IV's final moments in Shakespeare's play about his life, but also the place where the real King Henry IV died in 1413.

The austere room was a later addition to the abbey and first served as the abbot's chamber before being converted to a more general use space. Along with the rest of Westminster Abbey, the Jerusalem Chamber has been carefully preserved and still holds historic tapestries and a period chandelier. The room is normally off-limits to the public, but access is sometimes granted for special projects

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(Photo: Hi540/CC BY-SA 4.0)

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(Photo: Jordan & Maxwell/Public Domain)

6. Ardennes Forest
French Ardennes, France

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In this forest, things are as you like it. (Photo: Jean-Pol GRANDMONT/CC BY-SA 2.5)

"They say he is already in the Forest of Arden, and a
many merry men with him; and there they live like
the old Robin Hood of England." - Charles, As You Like It, Act I, Scene I

Shakespeare's romantic comedy As You Like It takes place almost entirely in a character-filled wood called the Forest of Arden. Most scholars agree that this is a version of a forest in the Ardennes, a mountainous region that sprawls over Belgium, France, Luxembourg, and Germany. The real forest was the site of the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. 

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(Photo: Jean-Pol GRANDMONT/CC BY-SA 2.5)

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(Photo: Roman Boed/CC BY 2.0)

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(Photo: Roman Boed/CC BY 2.0)

7. Boar's Head Inn
London, England

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The tribute building on modern Eastcheap. (Photo: BH2008/CC BY-SA 3.0)

"Sirrah, Falstaff and the rest of the thieves are at
the door: shall we be merry?" - Prince Henry, Henry IV, Part I, Act II, Scene IV

Every great drunk needs a great bar to over-serve them, and for Shakespeare's Falstaff, maybe literature's greatest drunk, that place was the Boar's Head Tavern on Eastcheap. The location was based on a bar that actually existed during Shakespeare's time (although probably not in Falstaff's), that was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. But even though the original bar burned down, its memory has managed to live on.

The inn's sign was originally hung over the businesses that moved into the location after the fire, but it was eventually moved to the Globe Theatre. Just a stone's throw from the site of the original bar, on where Eastcheap lies today, there is a building (now an office building) from 1868 that was built to honor the tavern and has a carved stone boar on the facade. You can't drink there, but you could always bring a flask and wax poetic on the street.

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(Photo: BH2008/CC BY-SA 3.0)

8. London Stone
London, England

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The rock from which Cade made his proclamations. (Photo: Joe McGowan/CC BY 2.0)

"And here, sitting
upon London-stone, I charge and command that, of the
city's cost, the pissing-conduit run nothing but
claret wine this first year of our reign." - Cade, Henry VI, Part II, Act IV, Scene VI

Sitting behind a squat decorative gate, the London Stone is a mysterious chunk of rock that once belonged to a much larger stone that was installed nearby sometime around 1100. No one is quite sure what the original significance of the London Stone was, but it has been kept in the city as a landmark for centuries.

As it appears in Henry IV, the stone is used as a throne and symbol of authority in Shakespeare's dramatized version of the story of English revolutionary Jack Cade. The current block behind the grill was moved to its position in the late 1700s, where it remains, looking bizarrely forgotten next to a garish modern storefront.   

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(Photo: tpholland/CC BY 2.0)

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(Photo: Fin Fahey/CC BY-SA 2.0


Firefighters Yank Fake Horse Out Of The Mud

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Passers-by in Soccoro, New Mexico faced an unusual sight yesterday—an enormous fake horse, sunk up to its shoulders in a pit of mud.

But this was not the work of a mannequin mobster, or a hater of merry-go-rounds. It was a challenge for dozens of local firefighters, tasked with saving this fake horse to prepare for the sticky escapades of real ones.

"Llamas, goats, they can get out of anything, but not so with horses," Rebecca Gimenez, leader of the training session and co-founder of Georgia's Technical Large Animal Emergency Rescue, told El Defensor Chieftain. During the rainy spring and summer seasons, horses often get stuck in mudholes or slippery-sided crevices, and end up at a loss. While some cowboys can pull off their own rescues, others end up calling for assistance from emergency personnel.

The three-day training session drew 30 firefighters from volunteer companies across the state. Participants first practiced yanking the horse out with a large tripod, called a trifecta. Because many stuck-horse situations are too tight for large equipment, they also tried it out with simpler tools: rope, webbing, and elbow grease.

Gimenez flew a horse mannequin in from the UK for the occasion. Worried about customs, she also had a backup plan—a 350-pound barrel. "For our purpose, basically a horse is a big barrel with legs on it," she told the Chieftain. (Luckily, customs saw nothing amiss, and they were able to use the real[ish] thing.)

New Mexico's mud-loving horses will be glad to know the hoisters were successful. And for those stuck elsewhere, Gimenez is coming for you: next, she's headed to Canada, Portugal, and Korea. In the meantime, you'll just have to hold yourselves.

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.

Audubon Made Up At Least 28 Fake Species To Prank A Rival

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A page from Rafinesque's field notebook. (Image: Smithsonian Institution Archives/SIA2012-6095)

Pranks are meant to be discovered—what’s the point in fooling someone if they never notice they’ve been fooled? But one 19th century prank, sprung by John James Audubon on another naturalist, was so extensive and so well executed that its full scope is only now coming to light.

The prank began when the French naturalist Constantine Rafinesque sought on Audubon on a journey down the Ohio River in 1818. Audubon was years away from publishing Birds in America, but even then he was known among colleagues for his ornithological drawings. Rafinesque was on the hunt for new species—plants in particular—and he imagined that Audubon might have unwittingly included some unnamed specimens in his sketches.

Rafinesque was an extremely enthusiastic namer of species: during his career as a naturalist, he named 2,700 plant genera and 6,700 species, approximately. He was self-taught, and the letter of introduction he handed to Audubon described him as “an odd fish.” When they met, Audubon noted, Rafinesque was wearing a “long loose coat...stained all over with the juice of plants,” a waistcoat “with enormous pockets” and a very long beard. Rafinesque was not known for his social graces; as John Jeremiah Sullivan writes, Audubon is the "only person on record" as actually liked him.

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Constantine Rafinesque. (Image: Public domain)

During their visit, though, Audubon fed Rafinesque descriptions of American creatures, including 11 species of fish that never really existed. Rafinesque duly jotted them down in his notebook and later proffered those descriptions as evidence of new species. For 50 or so years, those 11 fish remained in the scientific record as real species, despite their very unusual features, including bulletproof (!) scales.

By the 1870s, the truth about the fish had been discovered. But the fish were only part of Audubon’s prank. In a new paper in the Archives of Natural History, Neal Woodman, a curator at Smithsonian's natural history museum, details its fuller extent: Audubon also fabricated at least two birds, a “trivalved” brachiopod, three snails, two plants, and nine wild rats, all of which Rafinesque accepted as real.

Woodman has been systematically checking through Rafinesque’s work in mammalogy. A mammalogist himself, he first started wondering about Rafinesque’s accuracy when he found that a shrew Rafinesque had identified was, in fact, a jumping mouse. One of Woodman’s long term goals is to try to identify the actual species Rafinesque was describing.

When he figured out that Rafinesque had also been naming mammals based on his time with Audubon, he started worrying.

In his field journals from that period, Rafinesque describes ten “wild rats.” They included:

A “big-eye jumping mouse" 

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Not real. (Image: Smithsonian Institution Archives/SIA2012-6095)

A “lion-tail jumping mouse"

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Also not real. (Image: Smithsonian Institution Archives/SIA2012-6095)

a “three-striped mole rat"

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You get the idea. (Image: Smithsonian Institution Archives/SIA2012-6095)

a “black-eared shrew" 

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Hm. (Image: Smithsonian Institution Archives/SIA2012-6096)

And a “brindled stamiter."

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Cheek pouches on the outside. (Image: Smithsonian Institution Archives/SIA2012-6096)

In the descriptions he gave to Rafinesque, some of these animals had very odd features. The “three-striped mole rat” was attributed to a genus that had no business being in North America. The “white-stripe lemming” carried its young on its back, despite have teats on its chest. The brindled stamiter had its cheek pouches, usually an interior feature, on the outside.

Rafinesque did worry a little bit about the information Audubon was giving him, Woodman reports—but only about the accuracy of small details. He never seemed to suspect that the species might not exist at all.

At this point in taxonomic history, no one’s relying on Rafinesque’s identifications for real information. The point of uncovering the prank, says Woodman, is that credit should go where credit is due.

“People have blamed Rafinesque for making species up himself,” he says. “They refer to Rafinesque’s fertile imagination.” But it was Audubon’s imagination they should have been crediting all along.

Bought: A Billboard Pleading For Old Star Wars Stories

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For better or worse, Star Wars isn’t what it used to be, and some fans are not taking it lying down. As the new films conquer the box office, there is still a diehard portion of the fan community that wants the stories from the books and other media that have come out to be respected. And now, they’ve taken out an entire billboard for their cause.

When Star Wars: The Force Awakens came out in 2015, it was an instant hit among most viewers and fans, but the continuation of the saga had a consequence that is not as well known. As Disney took over Lucasfilm, and the Star Wars franchise with it, they suddenly had years of licensed books, comic books, and video games that fans had come to accept as canon. Instead of trying to incorporate the conflicting stories into their new ones, the continuity judges over at Disney decided that they would rebrand all portions of what had come to be known as the “Expanded Universe,” as “Legends.” This way they could make new franchise products without throwing out the still popular media that had come out between the films, simply rebranding them as a sort of, “people tell these stories to each other in the Star Wars universe,” thing.

However, among some in the Star Wars fanbase, the Expanded Universe stories had become as integral as any of the films, with fan-favorite characters like Mara Jade (a secret Jedi that first tried to kill Luke Skywalker before marrying him) and Jaina and Jacen Solo (the twin children of Han Solo and Princess Leia, one of whom went to the dark side long before Episode VII came out), being established across multiple platforms. Chewbacca was even killed when they crashed a moon into him. It was crazy, but beloved.

Disney’s reasoning behind eliminating over 30 years of conflicting, niche-market storytelling wasn’t unexpected, but just now, years after the rebranding of the Expanded Universe, a devoted fan organization calling themselves the EU Movement, has taken out a Los Angeles billboard as an open letter to Lucasfilm, asking for a continuation of the Expanded Universe stories. They don’t want them integrated into the new stories, but continued as their own history.

It remains to be seen whether the EU Movement will pull off the Jedi Mind Trick they are going for, but for now, they are more than willing to simply send out a call, and hope the universe is listening.

Do You Like Dialect Quizzes? You Have a French Bicyclist To Thank

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A 1900s-era bicycle—Edmond Edmont's tool of the trade. (Image: Public Domain)

Back in 2013, millions of Americans spent a few minutes clicking through this dialect survey. They threw their lots in with "crayfish" or "crawdad." They marveled at the number of words for rubbernecking. At the end, they likely received their geographic diagnoses with pride. Despite coming out on December 20, this quiz was the New York Times's top-trafficked story of that year.

A decade earlier, when linguist Bert Vaux wrote the questions that inspired the quiz, he was thinking about his dad, from New York, for whom "orange" is one syllable, and his mom, from Indiana, who pronounces the "law" in "lawyer." He was thinking about cola, pop, and soda. He may have even been thinking about jawn, Philadelphia's all-purpose noun. But he was also channelinga particular professional hero—a bicycling French surveyor named Edmond Edmont.

Long before we had viral quizzes to gather our peculiarities, there was only Edmont—a linguistic assistant who spent the end of the 19th century bicycling around France, speaking to locals, and cataloguing their unique words and phrases. Over four years, Edmont journeyed to over 600 towns, gathering material for what would become the Atlas Linguistique de la France: the world's first great linguistic atlas.

A century later—after technological revolutions and scholarly schisms wholly reshaped the field—Edmont remains, in the words of one linguist, "a mythical figure in the history of dialect surveys." Whether you're the kind of surveyor who spends hours speaking to farmers in Georgia, or the kind who dreams up the Buzzfeed Accent Challenge, his work remains both vital and informative.

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The University of Malburg, from which Wenker surveyed Gemany. (Image: Hydro/CC BY-SA 3.0)

Today, locals like to show off their sonic quirks.But for most of history, people weren't nearly as concerned with how or why their speech patterns differed from their neighbors'. Everyone knew other people spoke differently—and some even noticed that these changes were specific to certain spots—but no attempt was made to study this phenomenon with any sort of rigor. It just was how it was.

As the 1800s wore on, though, the grid of science was applied to other disciplines: economics, meteorology, natural history. Eventually, a group of German linguists, called the Neogrammarians, decided to try laying it over language. In 1876, a PhD student named Georg Wenker drew up 42 sentences that, in his estimation, covered the most changeable aspects of the German language.

Over the next decade, Wenker mailed nearly 50,000 sentence sets out to schoolmasters around the country, with instructions to "translate" them into the local vernacular and send them back. By mapping how people from different places rendered statements like "In the wintertime dried leaves fly about in the air," or "I will slap your ears with the cooking spoon, you monkey!," he could trace each word and sound's place-specific evolution.

The reality was much messier—Wenker's results were so varied and illogical, they ended up disproving the Neogrammarian's theories about how words worked—but he had done something vital: he had pulled off the first mail-order dialect survey.

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A page from the Atlas Linguistique de la France, mapping pronunciations onto localities. (Image: Jules Gilliéron/Public Domain)

One linguist, a French professor named Jules Gilliéron, decided he could improve on Wenker's work. In 1896, he drew up his own set of 2,000 common words and phrases, similarly designed to cover a broad swath of French. Taking notes from Wenker's failures, he eschewed the translation method in favor of elicitation: rather than stuffing chosen words and phrases into sentences, he designed questions that would inspire his research subjects to say them naturally. This way, he figured, he could avoid biasing his results before he even started.

But Gilliéron's secret weapon wasn't his strategic word-wrangling: it was Edmond Edmont, a man renowned for his keen hearing, his powers of observation, and, presumably, his strong legs. For the next four years, Edmont spent every day bicycling around France. He'd roll into town, find a volunteer, and spend hours going through Gilliéron's questions. As the pair spoke, Edmont would scribble down answers in a phonetic shorthand. In all, Edmont visited 639 different points across the country. He was, in the words of one linguist, a "human transcribing machine."

Edmont mailed his thousands of pages of notes back to Gilliéron, who gathered them into what would become the Atlas Linguistique de la France, published in installments between 1902 and 1910. While sifting through the hand-written pages, Gilliéron hit on the founding insight of dialectology. Rather than conforming to a set of general rules, he concluded, "every word has its own history." The only way to trace a particular word's past was to keep asking around.

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People call this guy all kinds of different things. (Photo: Tony Hisgett/CC BY 2.0)

This mantra, and the Atlas Linguistique, birthed scores of imitators. Over the next century, dialectologists from Switzerland to Japan sent their own Edmonts from town to town, seeking volunteers, making them talk, and noting down their every hard vowel and phrasal habit. For Americans, always trying to figure out where they really came from, the method held particular appeal.

In the late 1920s, linguist Hans Kurath ordered teams of helpers around the United States, where they asked every farmer they met to name the parts of a plow and demonstrate how they called in their cows. Kurath's teams came out convinced that there were three types of American English—North, Midland, and South—each traceable to the different areas of Britain that had colonized them. Midway through the 1960s, professor Fred Cassidy sent 800 graduate students around the country in vans he called "Word Wagons," each wielding a 1,600-part questionnaire. Cassidy and company came out with the Dictionary of American Regional English.

Around this time, though, dialectology underwent a massive shift. Linguists like William Labov began arguing that geographically large samples were less important than demographically representative ones, and a schism appeared between the old style and the new. "The whole world of what was valuable and what wasn't changed in the 60s," Vaux says. "Since then, large-scale surveys have been profoundly out of fashion."



In 2002, when Vaux put together the Harvard Dialect Surveya subset of which eventually inspired the New York Times quiz, along with countless other linguistic lists and heat maps—he had these pre-schism days in mind. "I loved the idea of trying to comprehensively cover a physical space the way they did with the French survey, and I also liked the idea of exhaustively covering a language."

He didn't have a tireless biker, but he did have the Internet. With the help of a student at CalTech, he rigged his survey so that it showed respondents a real-time geographic heat map, based on data from just one question. People loved seeing their linguistic allegiances charted out. His initial survey received 60,000 responses. 

Vaux does not ascribe to regionalism, exactly, instead believing that "every individual human is different linguistically." No matter where they are from, they've been privy to diverse influences. "I want to know what every one of them says, ideally." The way to do this, he thinks, is combining new-school tech with old-school scope.

Those who prefer the opposite technique—in-person surveys of representative samples—are feeling the march of progress in a different way. The leisurely, six-hour guided conversation, for instance, has gone the way of the long-distance bicycle commute. "In the 1930s and 40s, you could get someone to sit down for that long and answer questions for you," says Bill Kretzschmar, editor in chief of the Linguistic Atlas Project. "But who's going to do that now?" In recent decades, project organizers have cut the questionnaire in half, and then in half again, "to deal with the pace of life."

Vaux, meanwhile, is currently working on a survey to tease out the differences in international English dialects. "My way of thinking is very much in the minority among professional linguists at the moment," he says. "But I think it's highly likely that the online type [of survey] will predominate for the foreseeable future." 

If you want to reach a lot of people in a short span of time, the Internet beats even a bicycle.

The Hidden Vaults With $248 Billion in Gold Underneath London

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(Photo: Bullion Vault/CC BY-ND 2.0)

Around one-fifth of all the gold held by governments is beneath the streets of London, in hidden vaults that have been storing the gold in bars for decades. 

The vaults are not a secret so much as a government institution, reports the BBC. Home to the Bank of England's gold since the 1930s, they now store nearly nearly 5,659 tons of it, mostly in gold bars, worth $200 billion; over 1,200 more tons are stored around the city of London, adding $48 billion more to the tally. 

Each bar weighs around 27 pounds, and is stacked in rows in the vault. However, London is built on clay, and if the stacks are too heavy, according to the BBC, the vaults will sink deeper into the earth. 

The gold is not all the U.K,'s; some of it belongs to other governments, or is privately owned. Accessing the vault is surprisingly old-fashioned, with metal keys. This is thought to be safer than electronic locks, mainly because metal keys can't be hacked. 

The gold gets there through traditional means as well: by sea, or by commercial jet.

“In the cargo hold of commercial passenger planes, you often find gold, fresh flowers, and dead bodies,” Ruth Crowell, chief executive of the London Bullion Market Association, tells the BBC

You can't visit the gold, of course. But if you want to get close, stand in front of the Bank of England on Threadneedle Street in downtown London, look down, and imagine. 

After 59 Years, Sewage Will Finally Stop Flowing Into Florida Bay

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(Photo: Google Maps)

Since 1957, sewage from the toilets at the Pensacola Library flowed directly into nearby Pensacola Bay via the city's stormwater drains. That's the year the library was built. 

A 2013 renovation of the library was supposed to fix this issue, for the first time connecting the library to the city's sewer system. 

But last week, according to the Pensacola News Journal, a worker at the library smelled something: sewage. A city crew later determined that the renovation had not exactly fixed the problem. On Wednesday, workers solved the problem again.

Or at least they think they did, since the city suspects that many other old buildings might have sewage emptying into stormwater drains. No one's quite sure why the library wasn't connected in the first place. Was that simply standard practice back then? Or were engineers skirting the rules? 

Surprisingly, neighbors seemed to take the news pretty casually. 

"It wasn't overwhelming like it was when the sewer plant was down here," one neighbor told the Pensacola News Journal. "It just had that sewer, gassy smell. We just didn't know what to attribute it to since the sewer plant was gone."

Inscription on Newly Found 2,400-Year-Old Mosaic: 'Be Cheerful, Enjoy Your Life'

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Look. It's been a long week. We should probably just open a bottle of rosé. Or tell ourselves some platitudes. Life does go on. 

Take this advice, for example, uncovered recently in Turkey on a mosaic that is believed to have been in the dining room of a home in the 3rd century, B.C.E.: "Be cheerful, enjoy your life." 

Another Turkish news outlet reports that the phrase is in fact "Be cheerful, live your life," confusingly citing the same archaeologist. Whatever the iteration, we can probably all agree that that is good, if somewhat banal, advice.

Below the inscription is a bottle of wine, some bread, and a reclining skeleton. In the skeleton's hand? A jorum, or cup, most likely full of said wine. Which, after a long week, sounds about right. 


The Unexpected Individuals Featured on American Currency

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Twenty dollar bills, soon to be updated. (Photo: selbstfotografiert/CC BY-SA-3.0)

This week, the U.S. Treasury announced a number of changes to the banknotes’ designs, most prominently changing the face featured on the $20 bill from Andrew Jackson to Harriet Tubman. The makeover—the first change to the portraits featured on banknotes since 1928—incorporates numerous women and African-Americans from US history, such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, Jr.

While the currency overhaul seems novel to us, banknote portraiture has changed frequently enough that 53 individuals “central to US history” have been featured at one time or another, ranging from politicians to soldiers to inventors. We’ve highlighted a few of the more interesting selections below.

Running Antelope

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The $5 "Chief Silver" Silver Certificate featuring Running Antelope. (Photo: National Numismatic Collection, National Museum of American History/Public Domain)

Running Antelope was a leader of the Hunkpapa people and closely allied with Sitting Bull. He was the first—and so far, only—Native American featured on US paper currency, with his likeness used for the $5 silver certificate introduced in 1899. Allegedly, Running Antelope’s portrayal was less-than-ideal: some claim that the Hunkpapa chief’s headdress was too large to fit in the engraving used for the portrait, so it was swapped with a Pawnee headdress. The $5 silver certificates, which could be redeemed for silver coins or bullion, were circulated until 1928.

Samuel Morse and Robert Fulton

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The $2 Silver Certificate, with Robert Fulton and Samuel Morse (l to r). (Photo: National Numismatic Collection, National Museum of American History/Public Domain)

Yes, the namesake of Morse Code was once featured on US currency; specifically, the $2 silver certificate that began circulating in 1896. Morse’s invention of the electromagnetic telegraph—the first method of rapid long-distance communication—represented a great technological contribution to humankind, and one that the US Treasury apparently considered worth commemorating. Prior to his efforts to develop a telegraph network within the US, Morse had been a noted portrait painter; his portrait of President James Monroe still decorates the White House.

Pictured beside Morse is Robert Fulton, who invented the first practical submarine when he designed the Nautilus for Napoleon Bonaparte; presumably the Treasury found this very cool.

Martha Washington

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The $1 Silver Certificate, with Martha Washington. (Photo: National Numismatic Collection, National Museum of American History/Public Domain)

Until this week’s announcement, Martha Washington was the only woman ever featured on U.S. paper currency, with her portrait on the 1886-issued $1 silver certificate. When the note was redesigned in 1896, a portrait of Martha’s husband, George, was also included.

Salmon Chase

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The very first $1 "greenaback" note, with Salmon P. Chase. (Photo: National Numismatic Collection, National Museum of American History/Public Domain)

You might assume that all of the 53 individuals featured on US currency are names you’d immediately recognize. But some slightly more obscure figures snuck in too. Salmon Chase served as President Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury during the Civil War, when the first “greenback” banknotes were introduced into circulation. Not one to eschew self-promotion, Chase selected himself to adorn the $1 bill introduced in 1862.

After Treasurer Francis Spinner and Superintendent of the National Currency Bureau Spencer Clark took Chase’s lead and had themselves placed on newly-invented fractional currency in 1873, the Treasury Department was legally barred from placing portraits of living people on any US currency.

In 1929, when US banknotes assumed the size and general appearance they possess today, the Treasury determined that U.S. Presidents “have a more permanent familiarity in the minds of the public than any others” and were most appropriate for currency, with exceptions made for Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, and Salmon Chase.

In expanding the portraiture of U.S. paper currency to include notable American women and African-Americans, the Treasury has moved beyond this nearly-century-old notion that only Presidents should feature on our greenbacks, and created a currency with an appearance more reflective of our society and values.

German City Experiments with Ground Lighting for Smartphone-Fixated Pedestrians

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Flashing LED lights in the ground are intended to identify red lights to smartphone users at the pedestrian crossing for the Haunstetter street tram stop. (Photo: swa/Thomas Hosemann)

Hardly a day passes without hearing someone lament our ever-growing attachment to mobile devices. After a recent European study concluded that a sixth of all pedestrians were more focused on their device than where they were walking, increasing the potential for pedestrian traffic accidents, one city in Germany has decided to take action.

In the Bavarian city of Augsburg, two streetcar stops have been outfitted with ground-level light strips in an attempt to get “smombies”—a German term combining “smartphone” and “zombie”—to look up long enough to get out of the way of an oncoming streetcar, according to a report in Deutsche Welle. As explained in an official press release from the utility company behind the lights, when the streetcar is approaching (or the pedestrian just doesn’t have the right of way), the lights rapidly blink red, hopefully catching the eye of anyone attempting to reply to their texts while crossing the street.

According to The Local, the idea arose after two recent incidents of “smombies” colliding with the quiet, electric streetcars and sustaining minor injuries. City officials feel the ground lights are more aligned with “smombies'” line of sight than the more-common traffic light, and might stand a better chance at stopping them before they step off the curb. Augsburg’s tactic is strikingly different from other municipalities; around the U.S., attempts have been made to impose fines for “distracted walking,” most recently in New Jersey, where a recently introduced bill would impose a fine of $50 or 15 days in jail for texting or using a smartphone while crossing the street.

While there’s no details on how long the trial will last or whether there are plans for expansion, area residents seem to find the concept reasonable. Its efficacy, though, has not been tested. "To be honest," one teen admitted to The Augsburger Allgemaine,  "I didn’t even notice it.”

Sold: Some of the Original 'Laws of Base Ball,' For Over $3 Million

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In a home run for the SCP Auction House, they sold some of the original rules of baseball for over $3 million dollars, making it the third most expensive piece of baseball memorabilia ever.

The handwritten rules were penned by original New York Knickerbocker Daniel “Doc” Adams in 1857, when 14 clubs came together to write the game's laws, many of which remain in force today. Among the rules set down in the 23-page Laws of Base Ball: the nine inning game, the nine-person team on the field, and exactly 90-feet between bases.

Prior to the game-changing summit in 1857, baseball, having evolved from older European ball-and-stick games, was governed by a set of rules laid down in 1845 by Alexander Cartwright, who is often referred to as the father of baseball. The 1857 summit and the rules that had come out of it were known to historians thanks to widespread news coverage of the event in its day, but until the discovery of the Laws of Base Ball, no original documentation from the meeting was thought to have survived. More than just being a rare artifact, they also give a key insight into the competing interests and struggles that took place between the clubs.

The documents had survived in a private family collection before being purchased at auction in 1999 in a parcel of other documents. It was not until their original buyer had them appraised for resale that they were discovered for what they were. SCP sold the papers as the “Magna Carta of Baseball,” and their tactics seemed to work: they sold for $3.26 million to an anonymous bidder, making them the single most expensive baseball document ever sold.

A 19th-Century Map of Our 'Square and Stationary' Earth

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(Image: Library of Congress/2011594831)

According to Orlando Ferguson we are not living on a globe but in a giant donut mold.

In 1893, Ferguson, of Hot Springs, South Dakota, published his Map of the Square and Stationary Earth. It depicts the world spread over a basin with a mound in the middle. Lining the rim of the basin is the jagged coast of Antarctica, which forms the icy edge of the world. The sun and moon are depicted as rotating lamps suspended at the end of arc-shaped arms rooted in the Arctic.

This geography is inventive enough to be fascinating in itself, but then there is what lies beyond the icy edge. Ferguson chose to extend the perimeter to form a square shape, and placed an angel at each corner. This detail was inspired by a phrase in the opening sentence of Revelations 7: “four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds.”

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Ferguson including other relevant passages of scripture beneath the map in an effort to bolster his flat-Earth argument. On the right side, he included an image of two men clinging to a rapidly rotating, globe-shaped Earth.  Such a thing, he contended, must be impossible.

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Considering Pythagoras cottoned on to the spherical Earth thing around 500 BCE, and that, by the Middle Ages, the prevailing view was that we live on a globe, 1893 seems pretty late in the game to be producing a map of the world as a square, stationary chunk. But Orlando Ferguson wasn't a lone voice. The latter half of the 19th century had seen a resurgence of the flat-Earth movement.

In 1885, for example, William Carpenter of Baltimore publishedOne Hundred Proofs that the Earth is Not a Globe. The list of not-quite-proofs includes "the Moon's beams are cold" and "it is the star that moves." Twenty years earlier, English writer Samuel Rowbotham had published a book titled Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe! It includes a run-down of experiments "proving the Earth to be a Plane."

Originals of Ferguson's flat-Earth map are scarce, but one lives on at the Library of Congress, and another at the Pioneer Museum in Ferguson's hometown of Hot Springs, South Dakota. The flat-Earth movement also endures, spearheaded by the small but determined Flat Earth Society.

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

Found: A 1994 Computer Game Starring Prince

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Enter Prince's world. (Image: Screenshot)

Everyone needs to mourn Prince in their own way. At Mashable, Adam Rosenberg tracked a 22-year-old CD-ROM game called Prince Interactive, which contains the world of Prince and allows you to wander around in it.

Rosenberg had to pull out a 14-year-old laptop to actually play the game, but once he got it running, it was worth it.

The game’s premise is simple: “0+> INTERACTIVE is an interactive experience revealing 0+> and his music.” Rosenberg’s journey takes him to Prince’s bedroom, Prince’s closet and through a series of puzzles that help him collect pieces of the 0+> symbol that Prince was using as his name at the time.

The game’s version of Prince’s world is full of hidden wonders:

Rosenberg patiently explored much of the game's world, and has many more beautiful moments to share, including the contents of Prince's secret safe. 

Bonus finds: Observations of a supernova from 1006 A.D. 

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

The Strange Pocket of Modern Houses in Virginia that Were Considered Communist

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A house designed by Charles M Goodman in Hollin Hills, Virginia. (Photo: Clarissa Peterson/CC BY-SA 3.0)

“Virginia is for Lovers” reads the sign as you head south across the Potomac River from Washington D.C.

Not for lovers of architecture though.

The suburbs that surround the capital city contain some of the most uninspired housing ever to have dribbled from an architect’s mechanical pencil. Mile after mile of undifferentiated Colonial Revival houses stand parallel to the street, their yard dimensions unchanging, their buzz-cut front lawns giving off a disturbing nitrogen glow. Why is the affectionate state’s housing so impotent, so sterile?

Well, not all of it is. Just as you’ve abandoned all hope and are desperately trying to negotiate an escape, a dramatic shift takes place. Turn off a main road just north of George Washington’s old home at Mount Vernon and it feels as if an enchantment has fallen on the area. The land becomes heavily wooded and hilly. The road breaks free from the gridiron pattern and starts to meander along the land’s contours. Something glints in the sunshine, a glass house, and then another. Rectangular modernist houses, built low to the ground, reveal themselves hiding amongst the blossoms. This is the community of Hollin Hills—a mid-century modern utopia, a jewel box amidst lunch pails and, at one time, a terrifying threat to the American way of life.

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Philip Johnson's Glass House in Connecticut. (Photo: Mark B. Schlemmer/CC BY 2.0)

The year these houses were built, 1949, was a banner one for Modernist architecture in America. While Europe had largely accepted the new style, the United States had yet to “embrace the box.” But then Philip Johnson’s Glass House was unveiled in Canaan, Connecticut—its walls made only of sheet glass—and modernist architecture was thrust into the public consciousness. At exactly the same time in Hollin Hills the public was being thrust into modernist architecture.

Through the 1960s, some 450 ultra-modern houses were built across 300 acres of craggy Virginia land. These houses were not quite as extreme as Johnson’s but they carried with them many of the same Modernist precepts: flat or low-pitched roofs, open floor plans with movable interior partitions, and of course floor to ceiling windows. (You can see for yourself if you're in the area for the 2016 Hollin Hills House & Garden Tour on Saturday, April 30th.) Glass was the essential quality of these buildings, and the minimal amounts of structural framing allowed it to be everywhere: you didn’t look at a Hollin Hills house, you looked through it. What’s more this was affordable housing, the brick salvaged from urban renewal projects, the wood trusses prefabricated. Modernism had finally come to the masses.

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Washington Airport photographed in 1941, designed by Goodman. (Photo: Library of Congress/LC-USF34-045058-D)

The design of Hollin Hills was the brainchild of the architect Charles Goodman, who had previously designed nearby Washington National Airport. Just as radical as his designs was the site of the development. A normal developer would have attempted to bulldoze it flat, but Goodman chose to work with the shape of the land, carving roads along, not across, the slopes and hills, and fitting his houses around the old-growth trees. Goodman was adamant that people shouldn’t live on the landscape but should live in it. This sensitivity to place led to an eccentric pattern of homes, with some standing side-on to the road, others at an angle. Comparing it to other housing subdivisions at the time one critic called it “a jazz riff in place of a classical fugue.”

Indeed Goodman saw his housing as creating something more than just shelter: “The dignity of the individual can come about only by self-examination and creating a physical climate conducive to self-examination. 

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Red Channels, a 1950 publication claiming to report on "communist influence in radio and television". (Photo: Public Domain)

Yet just as Johnson’s Glass House was sneered at for subordinating comfort to aesthetic pleasure, so were Goodman’s utopian pronouncements in the firing line. In 1953, Elizabeth Gordon, the imperious editor of the prestigious House Beautiful magazine, launched an astonishing, Trump-ish attack on Modernist design under the title, “The Threat to the New America.” Gordon warned of a conspiracy to subvert American taste in favor of “foreign” design. She saw the buildings of architects such as Johnson and Goodman as being “barren” and “grim” and attacking the very heart of American society - the home. “Two ways of life stretch before us,” wrote Gordon, “one leads to the richness of variety, to comfort and beauty. The other…to poverty and unlivability.”

As Greg Castillo’s essential Cold War on the Home Front spells out, Gordon viewed the clean open spaces of Modernist houses, the “less is more” aesthetic, as an affront to the post-war American mindset of abundance. Her insinuation that communist ideals lay behind these creations was all too clear, especially with Senator Joseph McCarthy’s "Red Scare" running rampant at the time. She was not alone. Even the great American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, declared purveyors of the style “not wholesome people.” In a perverse piece of logic the inhabitants of a glass house—by exposing themselves to the world so blatantly—clearly had something to hide.

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Goodman's Unitarian Universalist Church in Arlington, Virginia, which was built in 1964. (Photo: Ser Amantio di Nicolao/CC BY-SA 3.0)

And in some ways they were right. The architect and critic Michael Sorkin, who was born in Hollin Hills, declared it “decidedly pinkish from the first.” Attracted by the cutting-edge design and Goodman’s Emersonian philosophy, artists, musicians and architects helped turn Hollin Hills into a bastion of liberal values in the midst of an extremely conservative state. The author, Bernard Fall, lived there while writing Street Without Joy, a discouraging history of foreign involvement in Vietnam that became a foundational text for the anti-war movement. The singer Roberta Flack chose to live there at the height of her “Killing Me Softly” fame, as did Gil Scott-Heron, the “Godfather of Rap”, despite the fact that Virginia had fought racial desegregation tooth and claw. Dan Bishop, the Emmy Award-winning production designer for the TV show Mad Men, who also grew up there, recalled the suburb as being awash with “card-carrying hippies.” Hollin Hills became a cultured enclave, a preserve of sanity, a broadminded community fused together by its architecture. “Progressivism inhered in those glass walls,” recalled Sorkin.

Whether due to the House Beautiful attack, or simply because of the houses’ varying levels of functionality—all those glass walls meant they were often draughty and cold—Hollin Hills remained an outlier rather than a trailblazer. Yet even today, amidst the acres of tract housing, it remains a community apart, an emblem of what might have been, an alternative future that just happens to exist.

Statue Gets Detachable Penis After Vandals Keep Stealing It

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A French statue of Heracles, also known by his Roman name Hercules, has been suffering from a particularly invasive form of vandalism. But local authorities think they’ve come up with a solution: a prosthetic penis.

The nine-foot Heracles, which wears only a lion-skin cloak, stands in the Parc Mauresque in Arcachon, where it is meant to represent the French resistance against the Nazis. But thieves “emasculate” the statue constantly, leaving “a small steel rod not even big enough to serve as a perch to a tiny bird,” Sud Ouest reported last year.

“I wouldn't want anyone—not even my worst enemies—to go through what happens to this statue," Mayor Yves Foulon said during a town meeting last week, calling the removal “systematic.” Although his office had considered the issue previously, it took a new deputy mayor, Martine Phelippot, to get this initiative off the ground. (“She is a doctor,” explained the mayor.)

Heracles’s manhood has been challenged before. According to Sud Ouest, sculptor Claude Bouscau had to shave down his creation’s measurements twice following its 1948 unveiling, after women repeatedly complained.

From now on, Heracles will wear his own anatomy only during special park ceremonies. Afterwards, he will be once again dis-membered, says Phelippot.

"It's not the perfect solution because obviously men would prefer that part of their anatomy to be permanent,” she told The Local, “but… we think a detachable penis is for the best.”

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.


Watch One Man Walk 1,630 Feet Across the Utah Sky

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Mondays might make you feel at your worst. But folks like Théo Sanson remind us that we can do anything. All one needs is a committed support crew and some serious gumption.

On November 15, 2015, Frenchman Théo Sanson walked high in the air along nearly 500 meters (1,630 feet) of slackline. Slackline is a flat webbing with far less tension than a tightrope, allowing for more bounce and stretch. Sanson's line extended between two of Castle Valley Utah's towering edifices: The Rectory and Castleton Tower, which both rise 400 feet. You can see members of his 15-person team standing atop each of the two soaring sandstone skyscrapers, watching Sanson's each step.

And not to worry, he's wearing a safety harness. 

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.

Why Bears Will Save Cherries From Climate Change But Not Apples

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Cherry savior. (Photo: OpenCage/CC BY-SA 2.5)

Every ten days for three summers, a team of Japanese scientists followed a 10-mile route in the high mountains of central Japan. They moved along unpaved forest roads and animal trails in search of bear feces or, more specifically, bear feces with cherry seeds inside. They were trying to find out if cherry trees and bears could together pull off a great escape.

Cherry trees depend on animals to spread their seeds. But would these animals be able to help the trees outrun climate change, too?

As the global climate warms, plants and animals are having a harder time surviving in the places where they’ve done well in the past. To live, they will have to migrate to places where the climate feels more familiar. Usually that means towards one of the poles, or further up a mountain. Those movements are already happening, but one of the big unanswered questions of climate change is if other species—plants, in particular—will be able to move fast enough that they’ll colonize new, now-warmer areas, before their current habitats become unlivable.

For plants, one way to survive, at least in the short term, could be moving up the slope of mountains. “It is likely the most efficient way of plant escape,” say Shoji Naoe, who led the study of bears and cherry trees. Moving 100 yards vertically up a mountain can translate to a more significant drop in temperature than moving 100 yards towards a pole.

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Prunus verecunda. (Photo: Toshio Katsuki)

Naoe and his colleagues were looking to see if the mammals that dispersed cherry tree seeds were moving them fast enough and far enough to make a difference. The cherry tree they studied, Prunus verecunda, disperses its seeds only by enticing animals to eat its fruit. When the scientists surveyed their routes, they would identify, by size, shape and smell, the feces of two particular species of wild cherry enthusiasts, Asiatic black bears and Japanese martens.

What they found was that the animals—mostly the bears—were transporting the cherry seeds over several hundreds yards, a big enough change in altitude that, theoretically, the trees would be able to ascend as quickly as the climate warmed. The bears were also almost always moving the seeds up the mountain.

It was a very elegant finding, and surprisingly so. Not only were the bears moving the seeds far enough that they had a chance of surviving, they were moving them in the right direction. What was going on?

The scientists think that the cherry trees are benefitting from the time at which they produce fruit, in the spring. In that season, bears are usually heading up the mountains, grazing as they go. Since temperatures higher up are cooler, those plants produce fruit, aka bear food, later in the season. The bears, following the fruit, just happen to be going in the direction that’s most beneficial for the cherry trees.

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Nom, nom, nom.. (Photo: Abu0804/CC BY-SA 3.0)

This is good news for trees that produce seeds in the spring. But it could work in reverse for trees that bear fruit in autumn: in that season, animals like bears head down the mountains as the chill sets in, and if they take seeds with them, they could be planting those seeds at too-warm altitudes, where they will never grow into thriving trees. It also would only apply to trees in temperate climates, Naoe points out, because tropical climates don’t have the same seasonal cycles.

Increasingly scientists are trying to determine which species might be able to save themselves from the dangers of climate change and which will need assistance if they’re going to survive at all. Studies like this one can help focus efforts to aid in migration: if bears are relocating cherry trees further up mountains, then humans don’t have to and can focus on transplanting apple trees, say.

“People tend to notice the negative effects of animals rather than positive ones,” says Naoe. “There may be an important positive effect of animals not noticed yet.” In other words, bears may be a danger to humans, but in this case they’re our allies in making sure climate change can’t snuff out cherry blossom season.

The Top Secret Military Base Hidden in Chernobyl's Irradiated Forest

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Radar antennas at Chernobyl. (Photo: Ingmar Runge/CC BY 3.0)

This April 26 marks the 30th anniversary of one of mankind’s most catastrophic events: the explosion at Chernobyl’s reactor number four.

Recent years have seen Ukrainian authorities allowing intrepid visitors into the Exclusion Zone to see the haunting side effects of the disaster. But while the abandoned town of Pripyat, with its iconic ferris wheel, receives the most attention, there is an even more mysterious site hidden in the irradiated forest.

The site was shrouded in such secrecy during the height of the Cold War that on official maps, it was marked as a children’s summer camp. Like the rest of what would become the Exclusion Zone, it had to be abandoned suddenly in 1986. While it once was at the forefront of Soviet military and scientific technology, classified as top secret, today it rests, mostly forgotten and silent in the woods surrounding Chernobyl.

Venturing deep into the forests of the Exclusion Zone for Atlas Obscura, I went to explore the derelict and awe-inspiring military base known as Duga-3.

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Officially, Duga -3 didn't exist; on maps it was marked as a children's summer camp. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

In 1976 amateur shortwave radio enthusiasts began hearing an unusual and highly powerful signal. Ham radio fans all over the world soon had their listening disrupted by an unrelenting tapping sound. When source of the mysterious new transmission was triangulated, it appeared to be coming from somewhere deep behind the Iron Curtain. The peculiar signal was given the nickname "Russian Woodpecker."

The 'Woodpecker' sound. 

Throughout Europe, public radio broadcasts began to suffer from interference. My Chernobyl guide recalls that higher-end Soviet television sets were sold with a special “woodpecker jamming” device built in. More alarmingly, the mysterious signal began to interfere with emergency frequencies for aircraft.

The purpose of the Russian Woodpecker remained a mystery. Conspiracy theories ranged from Soviet mind control to weather experiments. Then came the collapse of the Soviet Union, which revealed that the Russian Woodpecker was at the forefront of what is known as “over the horizon” radar, designed to provide early warning of an inter continental ballistic missile attack. The Duga-3 (Eastern) radar broadcasting the Woodpecker signal was located in the forests surrounding Chernobyl.

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The 'over the horizon radar' was designed to listen for incoming U.S. missile attacks. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

While the nuclear reactors and the abandoned ghost town of Pripyat receive the most attention from photographers and urban explorers, there is far more to the Exclusion Zone that remains secluded. According to my guide, the Exclusion Zone, covering some 30 square kilometers (12 square miles), was once home to over 90 villages. With a night time curfew still in place, most of the officially sanctioned guided tours into the Zone remain day trips.

To reach the Duga radar base requires a much longer stay. Fortunately and quite surprisingly, there is still a working hotel inside Chernobyl. The staff at the Chernobyl Hotel work on a strict rotation of 15 days inside the Zone and 15 out, to maintain relatively safe levels of radiation exposure. There are several thousand workers still active in the Zone, occupied with either patrolling the checkpoints or working on a new giant sarcophagus, which one will one day cover the still precarious reactor number four. 

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Duga-3, like the rest of what would become the Exclusion Zone, had to be abandoned after disaster struck reactor number four. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

Driving in the opposite direction from Pripyat, there is a small turn off the main road back to the checkpoints and Kiev. This solitary track winds deep into the deserted woods. According to my guide, the Duga-3 radar base was never officially recognized; the summer camp it was disguised as on maps was supposed to be for the Pioneer youth movement.

Several miles into the abandoned forest, there is a sagging security fence with rusted Soviet stars on it. During the Cold War, even approaching this spot would have had dire consequences, but today there is just one guard, near a dilapidated guard house with wood smoke rising from the chimney. 

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The radar base was shrouded in the highest levels of security but today remains abandoned. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

Inside the perimeter fence are the remains of the radar base. Rusted vehicles lie abandoned in the tall grass. Buildings decorated with once vibrant murals of Soviet propaganda depicting soldiers and jet fighters are gradually crumbling.

When Duga-3 was fully operational, over 1,500 military personnel, scientists and technicians lived and worked here, says my guide. There were apartments, and even a kindergarten, all of which are deserted, like the wooden sentry boxes watching over them.

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Over 1500 people once worked at Duga-3. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

Soaring high over the pines and firs in a forest clearing is the Duga structure. It looks as if someone had taken a 20-mile stretch of electricity pylons and squashed them into a line the length of a football field. A swirling mass of wires, pylons and cylindrical cones form a geometric structure of steel roughly 300 meters (984 feet) high.

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The source of the mysterious 'Russian Woodpecker' that baffled NATO intelligence and frustrated radio hams. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

While the U.S. invested heavily in the NIKE missile and radar system for protection from Soviet missiles, the Soviets built the complex Duga radar to watch for U.S. missiles. Underneath the now-silent pylons is the network of buildings that once housed the forefront of 1970s Soviet computer technology. Today, masses of computer terminals, radios, wires and displays written in Cyrillic lie among the snow and the weeds.

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Once the height of Soviet technology, much of Duga-3 has been left to rust. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

The inside of the control building is pitch black. Torchlight reveals banks of rusted switches and eerie rooms of electronics that lead off a central walkway. One room resembles a small auditorium, with rows of computer terminals facing a large wall. The floor is covered with broken glass. It turns out this was the control room for the radar base.

Although no photographs exist of the control room when it was fully operational, it is thought that the glass covered the far wall and functioned as some form of map display similar to Houston’s Mission Control Center.

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The education room of Duga -3. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

Further along from the mission control room is the old canteen. The walls are decorated with futuristic science-fiction murals: a model space station city on some future planet; satellites; and cheerful cosmonauts, depicting a utopian communist future.

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The canteen at Duga-3 was decorated with futuristic murals of the Soviet space program. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

Up a crumbling staircase is a room decorated with pictures of Soviet fighter jets, model soldiers, Lenin, and a wall of anti-American iconography. In one mural, U.S. Marines terrorize a Russian woman and her child. A businessman, complete with Stetson hat, is a shadowy menacing figure, wearing a giant gold signet ring on his fist, stamped and engraved “US.”

This was the propaganda classroom for the workers of Duga. After growing up in the West and being warned of the evil threats of Communism, it is fascinating to see anti-American propaganda preaching against the evil threats of capitalism and American military aggression.

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Anti US propaganda at Duga-3, the sinister face of American capitalism and military aggression. (Photo: Luke Spencer)

The fateful day of April 26, 1986 suddenly brought the veil down on the radar station. Like the rest of what would become the Exclusion Zone, Duga-3 was eventually evacuated, and left to decay in the forest. By 1989, alert ham radio enthusiasts noticed that the curious tapping signal, the Russian Woodpecker, had suddenly stopped.

Walking today amid the silent pylons, and seeing remnants of the pinnacle of Soviet computer technology lying rusted on the ground, one is struck by the vast amounts of money, expertise and energy spent on designing, constructing and working the radar system. The exact date the Duga project was abandoned is, like most of the Exclusion Zone, somewhat of a mystery, but it seems that the base wasn't vacated immediately after the fateful explosion. Within a few years, the peculiar Russian Woodpecker, so long vexing to shortwave radio enthusiasts, and cause for concern for Western intelligence, disappeared from the airwaves, never to be heard again. 

Australian Politician Sets River on Fire, Blames Fracking

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It shouldn't be possible for a river, which is usually made up of water, to be set ablaze. But it has happened, of course, dozens of times throughout history (most infamously on Cleveland's Cuyahoga River, at least twice), generally due to heavy pollution.

The phenomenon just occurred again in Australia. Jeremy Buckingham, a member of the country's Parliament was able to—pretty easily, from the looks of the video—light up the Condamine River in the southeastern region of the country. 

But Buckingham blames fracking, not pollution, for the river's flammability, saying that drilling nearby has led methane to seep into the water.

"Unbelievable," he says in the video. "A river on fire." 

An energy company responsible for gas wells near the river denied that the methane was linked to fracking, saying, in part, "We understand that this can be worrying, however, the seeps pose no risk to the environment, or to public safety, providing people show common sense and act responsibly around them."

Whether the methane is there because of fracking or not (it's likely fracking), Buckingham's video was alarming proof that at least one of Australia's rivers was now combustible. 

"I was shocked by [the] force of the explosion when I tested whether gas boiling through the Condamine River, [Queensland] was flammable," Buckingham wrote on Facebook.

Or, as he says in the video, "Holy fuck!"

This Overweight Gorilla Just Shocked Zookeepers By Giving Birth

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Life had been rough to Shinda, a 24-year-old gorilla kept at the Prague Zoo in the Czech Republic (which we are now supposed to call Czechia). She had gone through several miscarriages, and, as the years rolled on, put on some extra weight.

But for the past eight months, she was carrying with a her a happy secret: a baby. On Saturday, Shinda gave birth, shocking zookeepers who had not noticed that she was pregnant, according to the Associated Press. (Even for thin gorillas, pregnancy can be tough to spot because of their body shape.) 

"It seems that a miracle happens from time to time," Miroslav Bobek, the zoo's director, told the AP

Shinda and her baby are healthy and doing well, Bobek said.

If you're in Prague, consider stopping by. Shinda and her newborn are already on view. 

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