Looking at a map of dingo habitats in Australia, the wild dogs are labeled as “common” throughout the north and central regions of the country, but in the bottom right corner, separated by a distinct, winding borderline, the dingo population suddenly is labeled "absent." This curvy frontier is no natural dingo-impeding force field: It’s the man-made Dingo Fence.

Spanning 3,488 miles of southeastern Australian desert, the Dingo Fence is the longest fence in the world, built so that no southeastern Aussie would ever again shriek “a dingo ate my sheep!” Originally constructed back in the 1880s to deter the spread of rabbits, the Dingo Fence was renovated in the early 1900s to block off the wild dogs that had become infamous for devouring Australian sheep.  

Unlike a typical dog fence, the Dingo Fence is surrounded by a 15-foot clearance zone on either side and continues unbroken through thousands of miles of arid land. Built with a combination of wire mesh and multi-strand electric fence, the six-foot tall-barrier was supposed to be the ultimate deterrent to the sheep-eating wild dogs that killed millions of Australian animals every year. But although it began as a success, the Dingo Fence has seen major unintended consequences that have negatively impacted the surrounding environment and even the sheep themselves.

Because the southeastern side of the fence is blocked off from the predatory dingoes, prey such as rabbits, kangaroos, and emus have seen increased numbers, leading to overgrazing on the sheep’s pasture and disturbing the ecological balance. In addition to these problems, the fence hasn’t been entirely effective at stopping dingoes in the first place; holes in the wire mesh have allowed a sizable amount of the dogs to crawl through each year. The sheep may be safer, but the Dingo Fence reminds us that the long term consequences of manipulating the environment can sometimes be dog gone unpredictable.

The Nobel is the world’s most prestigious award for academic, cultural, and scientific advances. A Nobel Laureate will, apart from the award money, get a medal and diploma right from the hands of the Swedish king. But for some, there is more to winning the prize than international prestige and a fatter bank account: a parking space on an overcrowded campus.

At the University of California, Berkeley, it’s easy to spot the bright blue signs marked "Reserved For NL/Special Permit Required At All Times." NL stands for Nobel Laureate, of course, and the spaces are reserved for the elite faculty who worked tirelessly for decades to win some coveted parking.

The Berkeley tradition dates back to 1980, when Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He wanted a spot, so he simply asked for one. The parking wish was granted, and it’s since become standard practice—one that apparently sticks in the craw of the Laureates over at Stanford.

During the second World War, at a mental hospital outside of Lund, Sweden, researchers forced a group of patients to ingest 24 pieces of a sticky, light brown substance in a single day. These severely disabled patients were involuntary participants in a long-term study commissioned by the state medical board in cooperation with big industry, and this coerced feeding would continue for three years. The four to six doses that they consumed four times a day over that time were in some ways sweeter than their typical medicines—but also more troubling. No benefit to the patient was ever expected. Rather, the goal was to measure the damage inflicted by the substance over time and determine a dosage safe for public consumption.

The ruinous “treatment” in question was a caramel candy. The corporate underwriters were sugar, chocolate, and candy companies. And the effects of the so-called Vipeholm experiments still reverberate today. In fact, one direct result has become a lasting—even beloved—part of Swedish culture.

In Sweden, Saturday is for sweets. The Swedish custom of lördagsgodis, or Saturday candy, was spurred by the outcomes at Vipeholm, which definitively proved that sugar, particularly between meals, causes tooth decay. The idea behind lördagsgodis is moderation—to limit candy consumption to a weekly, rather than a daily, occurrence.

Once a week, Swedes are given a free pass to indulge in all the gummies, chocolates, and salty liquorice their Nordic hearts desire. (Non-Nordic hearts will most likely take a pass on the salty liquorice.) However, few Swedes standing in line at the supermarket to collect pick-and-mix candy on Saturday morning know that their weekly indulgence has its origins in the sustained mistreatment of 660 psychiatric patients.

Before the Vipeholm experiments, the cause of tooth decay had been a topic of much speculation. People blamed their dental woes on everything from wine and hot foods to masturbation and vitamin deficiency, writes Samira Kawash in her book, Candy: A Century of Panic and Pleasure. By 1938, leading scientists around the world were pointing to either too many carbohydrates or a lack of various vitamins as the source of dental cavities. But there was no definitive proof.

What was evident, however, was that the Swedes were in serious need of a dental intervention.  A study carried out in the 1930s showed that three-year-olds there had cavities in a whopping 83 percent of their teeth, notes Bo Krasse in a paper in the Journal of Dental Research. New laws mandated that municipalities provide dental care to citizens, but there were not enough dentists to meet demand. So a decision was made to shift over to a prevention-focused model, a better use of resources than long waiting lists at doctors’ offices. Problem was, no one knew how to prevent tooth decay yet.

In search of clarity, Sweden's national medical board decided to undertake a long-term nutritional study to determine the root cause of dental cavities once and for all. The most desirable, accurate study, it was determined, would test human subjects. In an ideal test, one would have human subjects whose vital signs could be monitored daily, who would follow a drug or dietary regime without fail, and whose environment could be totally controlled by the researchers.

But where would one find such subjects? For the medical board, the answer was obvious. They had jurisdiction over the state mental institutions.

Of the four state mental institutions in operation at the time, Vipeholm was perhaps the bleakest. It housed the cases deemed fully “uneducable.” Many patients could not dress themselves. Many were tied to their beds. The doors of the hospital were locked at all times and the only private bedroom was an isolation chamber without any furniture, where patients in solitary slept on a bed bolted to the middle of the floor. At mealtimes, there were no knives or forks, only spoons.

After an initial study focused on vitamins, the infamous Carbohydrate Study began in 1946. The 660 Vipeholm patients were chosen to undergo variations on extreme sugar consumption. One group consumed sugar in a solution, one group consumed sugary bread at meals, and the last group consumed special toffees between meals. The caramels had been specially formulated for stickiness, so that they would cling to teeth and gums. When the study ended, 50 of the research subjects had completely ruined teeth.

The Vipeholm study was a success insofar as it positively identified a link between sugar consumption and tooth decay. It was also reprehensible. It was the relative helplessness and immobility of the patients that made them attractive test subjects. In the dogged pursuit of a healthier society, the powers that be sacrificed the health of society’s most vulnerable members.

The Swedes were hardly alone in pursuing highly questionable controlled human experiments at this time. For example, the United States injected radioactive substances into otherwise healthy living subjects as part of the Manhattan Project. And, of course, concurrent to the Vipeholm experiments in Sweden, experimentation on human subjects was reaching its odious zenith in the Third Reich, with prisoners in Nazi concentration camps subjected to some tests so innately depraved that they qualify mostly as blood sport.

In 1947, following the revelations of these practices in the camps, the Counsel for War Crimes adopted the Nuremberg Code, which laid out a comprehensive set of medical and scientific ethics, including the principles of informed consent and nonmaleficence (or “do no harm”). These principles would later be incorporated into the Declaration of Helsinki, the current defining, international document on modern research ethics.

The lasting legacy of Vipeholm, however, turned out to be something a bit sweeter—Saturday candy. In 1957, following publication of the Vipeholm study’s results, a coordinated public health campaign kicked into gear. Radio PSAs, home-delivered pamphlets, and posters in waiting rooms encouraged young Swedes to brush their teeth and eat less sweets. The new message around candy was not prohibition, but moderation. The mantra was “All the sweets you like, but only once a week!”

Even today, you would be hard-pressed to find a Swedish child whose face doesn’t light up at the news that Saturday has arrived. Indeed, data implies that Swedish adults are equally excited. Swedes, it turns out, love candy. They consume more candy per capita than almost anyone else. And annoyingly, they do so while maintaining one of of the highest levels of dental health in the world.

Generations of good teeth and a twee tradition of Saturday sweets are surely the coziest possible outcome of the dark days at Vipeholm. But looking back, it’s hard to sweeten the pill.

In Xinyang, China, archaeologists excavating a tomb that dates back more than two millennia found a sword still sheathed in its scabbard. When they carefully pulled the sword out, they found a shining blade in good condition, even after more than 2,300 years.

The sword is thought to date back to China's Warring States period, which lasted about 250 years, from 475 B.C. to 221 B.C. During this period, the area roughly between Beijing and Shanghai was divided into many smaller states, with seven dominating and one state, Qin, emerging at the end as the ruling power. With all that political turmoil, a sword would have come in handy. 

Wannabe time travelers, start emptying your coffers: Canadiana Village, a massive fake 19th-century town, has gone up for sale. The village, located in Quebec, is 60 hectares of fields, trees, and ghost buildings, and is priced at $2.8 million, the CBC reports.

The village, which is not open to the public, is generally used for weddings, corporate meetings, and movie shoots. A video slideshow reveals an endless array of nostalgic structures, including a saloon, a church, a school, and a blacksmith's shop—all either eerily or charmingly empty, depending on how you feel about such things.

There's a reason for this: The buildings are just for show, says Mary-Catherine Kaija, the broker in charge of the sale. "There's only one liveable home," she told the CBC. (There are, however, real tombstones, moved from a nearby town to the fake church after the town's cemetery ran out of room.)

All this shouldn't be too huge of a problem for the future owner, who is almost certainly going to use the space to live out their own personal Westworld (Northworld?) fantasy. Who needs accommodation for friends when you've got a butter separator all to yourself?

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.

Public shaming has, sadly, a long history. Stocks and pillories were used for centuries to put criminals and troublemakers on public display, to try and keep a town’s rowdier elements in check. Throughout parts of Europe there was another form of humiliation as punishment, called the “cage of shame.”

Such a cage can be found in Levoča, a small Slovakian town that dates to the 16th century. Fashioned from wrought iron, it looks more like a big bird cage than anything else. In keeping with its reformatory intent, there is a small metal heart worked into the design of the door, as if to welcome the next delinquent and whisper “this is for your own good.”

In order to maximize the dishonor, the cage was often used during markets, fairs and festivals, when crowds were teeming. Miscreants would be locked up for any number of offenses: excessive gossiping, cheating on your spouse, public drunkenness, or just staying out too late could all land you inside for a couple of days, where you’d be pelted by rocks and rotten vegetables, or just plain old spit.

You can find cages of shame in other Slovakian towns, but this one is said to be the biggest and most historical. It’s in the old Town Square, which is bordered by the renaissance Town Hall, colorful medieval row houses, and a 14th century Church of St. James. The cage is kept locked most of the time, but occasionally it’s opened up for special events. On those days feel free to pop inside for a shameful gag photo.

While there is a whole sport dedicated to summiting the highest point in each state, there is not one for summiting the lowest point in each state. You may assume this is because getting to a state's lowest point isn't really a challenge. However, very few states without access to a coast have easily reachable low points.

One of the inland states where it is possible to summit the low point is Illinois, whose lowest point is located at a 279 foot elevation at Fort Defiance Point, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers.  Known as Camp Defiance during the American Civil War, Fort Defiance is a former military fortification. Formerly a State Park, it now is owned and maintained by the city of Cairo, Illinois. 

Pietre dure is the art of using the natural variegation in semi-precious stones to assemble an image—much like a paint-by-number picture, executed as a jigsaw puzzle of stone veneers. Tucked amid the tourist circuit in Florence, the Opificio Delle Pietre Dure (which literally translates to "workshop of semi-precious stones") is the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage's center for this intricate art.

The center contains a conservation school, a specialist library, archives of conservations, and a scientific laboratory. But the general public will likely mainly be interested in the museum's display of historic examples of pietre dure, which includes exquisite examples of finished objects—largely tabletops and cabinet plaques, but also an absolutely massive malachite fireplace.

Also on display are samples demonstrating how the stone is cut and fitted together, historical tools once used for the stone work, and extensive displays showcasing the wide varieties of colors and patternings in stone traditionally available to the historical pietra dure craftsperson. The museum is close to the central Florentine tourist crush but is generally sparsely attended—don't be surprised if the ticket seller seems taken aback to see you.

Filled with Japanese tourists in straw hats and a handful of gaijin, or Westerners, the cruise ship plied through the calm waters of the South China Sea. I was on my way to Japan's Hashima Island, a long-abandoned 16-acre island nine miles from Nagasaki. Most people today refer to it as Gunkanjima, or Battleship Island.

Now derelict, Hashima was once a booming undersea coal mining facility that Mitsubishi Corporation developed for nearly 90 years. The city experienced its heyday in the period following World War II, with its population peaking at 5,259 in 1959. But beginning in the 1940s, many workers were not there by choice: they were laborers from Korea who were forced to toil under brutal conditions. 

Surrounded by an ocean in every direction, this dense urban environment consisted of every facility needed to support the population—restaurants, barber shops, schools, swimming pools, even pachinko gambling parlors. Workers returned to looming 10-story concrete apartment blocks at night. 

After skirting Hashima's encircling sea wall, my fellow passengers were taken to an open area for tour guides to explain the history of the island in Japanese and English. We were unfortunately prohibited from going off on our own. 

Due to safety concerns, the walking tour afterward was fairly limited, covering only about 1/10 of the periphery of the island. Slowly scanning the abandoned concrete buildings, crumbling stairs, rusting steel, and decaying streets from the periphery of the island, I wondered about the living conditions of the population there. 

In 1970, only 12 round trips per day to Nagasaki were available. Did inhabitants try to take off to Nagasaki as much as possible? Or did they have to adjust to living within the confines of a 16-acre island?

Hashima’s economic existence ended in 1974 when coal was toppled by petroleum and gas. A rapid exodus followed, and from 1974 to 2009 the island was closed to the public. It opened for tours in 2009, and in 2015 joined the UNESCO World Heritage list as part of the Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining grouping, stirring controversy due to the associated forced labor policy of WWII prisoners.

Many people seem to look past this dark side of Hashima, however, as this island is perhaps most well known as the location of the villain’s lair in the 2012 Bond film Skyfall. 

Walking back towards the ship at the end of the tour, I was surprised at how little nature seems to have reclaimed the urban land over the past decades. The amount of green is not as extensive as I would have thought given more than 40 years in isolation. Though bushes and trees do show up on the few hills around the island, with a few peeking above the roofline of a few buildings, the solid concrete walls still dominate the surroundings.

After boarding the tourist cruise ship for the return trip to Nagasaki, our vessel took a final lap around the island. From a certain perspective, the “battleship” nickname is fitting as the island does resemble a prototypical battleship from the WWII era, turrets being replaced by lone buildings on top of the few hills in the middle of the island. This “battleship” name reportedly arose due to its resemblance to an incomplete Japanese battleship of the 1920s.

Even with the broken window frames and holes in walls showing some sign of decay, Hashima still gives the visual impression of a lonely grey fortress floating adrift in the sea.

Twenty years ago, an “Eager Beaver” backyard wood chipper became an accidental movie icon. In its star-making scene, the chipper is about as grisly as the Coen Brothers get, sucking down Steve Buscemi’s body parts until all that’s left is his right foot and bloody gym sock.

The Eager Beaver can now be found tickling tourists and movie fans at the F + M Visitors Center, just off the interstate on the west side of Fargo. Despite the gore at the heart of the scene, the prop has been a big hit for the tourist bureau, who have embraced the movie and the Eager Beaver wholeheartedly. They’ve even added a mannequin’s leg and gym sock to the tableau (minus all the blood).

The film Fargo was released in 1996, as a low-budget follow-up to the brothers’ overblown Hudsucker Proxy from two years earlier. Getting back to their down-and-dirty film roots, the pivotal scene is simple and quiet, with the Eager Beaver (a fictional brand, based on an actual chipper called the Wood Chuck) grinding up one of the movie’s inept kidnappers until policer officer Marge Gunderson arrives, giving us one of the best reaction faces in a movie full of impressive reaction faces.

When you get your picture taken with the chipper, be sure to ask the staff for a Fargo-style hat. They keep a few on hand to complete the shot.

In the 18th century during the brisk winter months, Parisians flocked to the glistening frozen fields of La Glaciére, or the Glacier. The grassy terrain, flooded with water and frozen over, was an icy playground for upper-class citizens. And none were more showy than the male ice skaters dressed in bicep-revealing red jackets, tight pants, and graduation caps.

These fraternities of gentlemen showed off with challenging jumps and graceful arm movements—charms that could “seduce weak mortals,” according to the 19th-century French ice skater Jean Garcin. “There are no good skaters anywhere but in Paris,” he boasted. 

Ice skating is a centuries-old pastime. Before bladed skates were invented around the 14th century, people tied bones to their feet and pushed themselves along the ice with poles. It was primarily used as a mode of transportation, but became a popular leisure activity reserved for aristocratic men in France during the late-18th-century reign of Louis XVI. They formed skating clubs or fraternities to practice together, shovel snow off the ice, and protect rinks from hooligans. Women wouldn’t be allowed into clubs until 1833, writes James Hines in Figure Skating in the Formative Years.

During the early 1800s, Jean Garcin was a member of the skating fraternity Gilets Rouge, or red waistcoats, an elite all-male group of skaters whose philosophy valued artistic expression over athleticism. In 1813 book Le vrai patineur, or The True Skater, or Principles of the Art of Skating with Grace, Garcin illustrates the typical uniform of a Gilets Rouge ice skater: a form-fitting embroidered vest or coat, tight pants, and academic caps with a square top and tassel, known as mortarboards, or berets. While it’s unknown what kind of audience Garcin wrote the book for, Hines suggests he may have wrote it specifically for the Gilets Rouge.

 In his book, Garcin argued that the French style of ice skating reigned supreme. Part instructional manual and part treatise, Le vrai patineur was the second book published on ice skating and the first in French. Garcin captured the different kinds of moves often observed on the icy fields of La Glaciére, describing more than 30 figures—each with whimsical names. The book contains color and black-and-white illustrations of various poses, arm positions, and even suggested facial expressions.

“There was a kind of detail to the hand and the fingers, and you see that in these pictures,” says Mary Louise Adams, a sports sociologist at Queen’s University in Ontario. “This was a textbook and it was a treatise to show how French skating was better than these other kinds of skating in other countries where grace was not as important.”

As ice skating spread, countries embraced different techniques and styles. The French blended masculinity and beauty that wasn’t often seen on the rinks in England, Austria, and other countries of Europe. While Garcin thought foreign skaters lacked flare, he believed they could pick up this style, writes Adams in her book Artistic Impressions: Figure Skating, Masculinity and the Limits of Sport, quoting Garcin:

“The Germans, English, Danes and people from other cold places are incapable of skating otherwise, but look at them the first time they show their knowledge here: The body is bent, the arms swinging, the derriere pitches, or straight as a picket, all stiff, inflexible, without grace, without attitude. It is surprising to us, but after a few winters here with our skaters they change … though they are always missing a little softness of their movements and abandon.”

The French also called ice skating “patinage artistique,” or artistic skating, explains Hines. “The French skaters placed their emphasis on artistry, specifically artistry associated with dance,” Hines writes. “Garcin viewed technique as important, but artistic expression as preeminent.”

Garcin dedicated Le vrai patineur to Geniéve Gosselin, the premier dancer at the Academy of Music in Paris, and often employed language used to describe ballet. The elegance in the poise of the body was of utmost importance.

“As to the position of the body,” he wrote. “It should be developed graciously: the head held high, the eyes attentive to the direction of movement, the arms free but comfortably positioned, allowing free movement of the shoulders with each turn of the head.”   

He instructed skaters to pay special attention to the positioning of the arms and hands, writing that delicate placement “contributes to the aplomb and grace of a skater.” If not holding a cane, the palms were both held open, “as if you are representing them to a friend,” and to raise the arms as when “one implores favors from heaven.”

The face was just as important as the fingers—the meaning of a move could be completely altered with a new facial expression.

“What is interesting is that the kind of image he was advising to conduct was built on very fine details, so historically that's very different,” says Adams. “Think about North American physical culture right now. Men are not supposed to pay attention to little details about their bodies.”

Many of the moves were not only challenging and beautiful, but dangerous. Garcin devoted the last chapters to the risks and hazards of ice skating. He described the safest conditions to go out on the ice and gave advice on how to get out of a pond if a skater broke through ice and became submerged waist-deep in frigid water.

Garcin noted the half-revolution three jump of the Saut du Zephyre (the Zephyr’s Leap), a dangerous but spectacular move, and the perilous Pas d’Apollon (the Step of Apollo). Several of the shapes and figures resemble similar moves you would see on the ice today. For example, the Révérence (bow) is a kind of spread-eagle figure, which is a common move, says Adams. “It requires very open hip joints. The person in this image isn’t doing it exactly the same, but it’s the same idea,” she says.

Garcin also documented figure-eight patterns in moves such as Le Courtisan (the courtier)—the pattern a crucial move for the figures seen 80 years later at international competitions, writes Hines.

While there are vestiges of the intricately drawn figures and diligent documentation of Le vrai patineur in today’s ice skating, it’s also evident how much the activity has evolved over the centuries. Garcin was proud of the 18th-century French way of skating, and suggested that elegance and grace strengthened the practice.

“Who knows how many people in France shared Garcin’s views or not,” says Adams. “It was important to construct the French skater as more naturally graceful than his counterparts in other countries, and that was a way of demonstrating superiority.”

Le vrai patineur was translated with the assistance of Mariana Zapata.

In what might be the dork misdeed of the year-so-far (although seriously, at least one person might lose their job), a small cabal of library workers in Florida have been caught juking the check-out stats of some classic books using a made up reader.

According to the Orlando Sentinel, a "reader" by the name of Chuck Finley checked out 2,361 books from the East Lake County Library in Sorrento, Florida over a nine-month period last year. Or at least he would have if he’d actually existed. Finley, with home address, driver’s license number, and all, was the creation of a pair of librarians who were using his check-out record to save classic books from being circulated off the library shelves (the real Chuck Finley was a long-time MLB pitcher).

Under the library’s official policy, books that don’t get checked out for a couple of years are taken off the shelves, and often times have to be repurchased when they are eventually requested again. The library workers’ scheme was uncovered by an internal investigation launched after an anonymous tip.

While this all sounds like low-stakes noir, the fake Finley’s check-out rate actually altered the library’s circulation rate by 3.9 percent, which could have fraudulently buffed the branch’s funding. The culprits have been reprimanded, but no one has yet been fired.

At the intersection of the Venn diagram where dog lovers meet art lovers is this niche museum, which houses an extensive collection of fine art devoted to man's best friend, from Impressionist paintings of Basque collies to porcelain figurines to portraits of pets by local contemporary artists.

The American Kennel Club's Museum of the Dog features more than 700 drawings, watercolors, prints, sculptures, bronzes, and figurines. It's a collection that's sure to (bow-)wow you.

Indigenous people have lived in Peru since as early as 12,000 BC, leaving Peruvian archaeologists with thousands of years of prehistoric human skulls to examine. The Museum of Anthropology, Archaeology, and History in Lima, Peru contains over 10,000 of these skulls, packed together tightly in the museum’s Human Remains Gallery.

The room is filled with so many skulls that it has been speculated to be the largest ancient skull collection in the world. The collection also includes hundreds of ancient ceramics and stone statues.

Perhaps the most interesting of the museum’s 10,000 skulls is the Paracas collection, known worldwide for their stretched, elongated shape. These strange skulls have foreheads that are massively taller than those of normal humans, which many archaeologists suspect is the result of rigidly tying cloth or two pieces of wood around the head to show elite status in society.

The debate over whether the skulls' elongated shapes stem from cultural, genetic, or perhaps alien origin makes the Paracas collection one of the museum’s main draws and its most highly disputed exhibit.

Stretched across a 3,500 square foot “S” shaped table “The Great Train Story” takes visitors from Chicago across the plain states and over the Rockies all the way to the Port of Seattle. This huge model train set cost $3.5 million dollars and opened to the public in 2002.

The exhibit focuses on the intersection of transportation infrastructure and economic activity—the intercity elevated train, suburban commuter rail, and cross country freight lines, all buzzing with a vibrant post-WWII industrial economy of decades past.

The trip begins in Chicago, which is the most recognizable area to a contemporary visitor. Iconic buildings like the Sears Tower and downtown neighborhoods like the Loop are shown in a spellbinding level of detail, replete with miniature cars, pedestrians and vegetation. Tiny electric trains scoot around through the skyscraper valleys and every half hour the museum lights dim as the exhibit enters “nighttime mode.”

Outside of Chicago The Great Train Story enters a fictionalized abstraction of the prairie and plain states. Train tracks shoot across the flat checkerboard corn fields, past grain silos and small towns that recall nostalgic Bruce Springsteen verses.

As the exhibit moves westward five foot tall Rocky Mountain peaks rise into the air. The tracks cut through mountain tunnels and lumber towns before finally catching sight of the Pacific Ocean and the Port of Seattle. A hulking container ship is docked on the coast, ready to receive the raw materials and manufactured products collected along the 2,000 mile route from Chicago.

Though only one man died during the little-known Fremantle Wharf Riot of 1919, his loss inspired workers across Australia.

In 1917, the Fremantle Lumpers Union (an association of dock workers) had refused to load ships they believed to be carrying supplies to Germany, an enemy nation. In response, the shipowners brought in workers from a rival union, the National Waterside Workers Union. The dispute between the two unions continued for over two years and came to a head on May 4, 1919 at the "Battle of the Barricades."

The Lumpers Union blockaded the wharf to prevent the unloading of the SS Dimboola.  In order to evade the blockade, the NWWU arrived at the ship in smaller boats, accompanied by the recently appointed Western Australian Premier, Hal Colebatch. The Lumpers Union started throwing rocks and other missiles at the boats from the wharf, and the police retaliated with batons and bayonets. Tom Edwards, in the Lumpers Union, was struck on the head by a police baton. He died three days later, the only casualty of the wharf riots.

Edwards became a symbol for Western Australia's Labor Party and his funeral procession was attended by thousands. In memory of his sacrifice, a fountain was sculpted by Pietro Porcelli outside the Fremantle Trades Hall. It was moved to Adelaide Street near Town Hall, where it still commemorates "Comrade Tom Edwards, Working Class Martyr."

This strangely shaped 47-floor building is the highest residential building in Spain, and one of the few high rise buildings in the world in the shape of an arch.

The high rise is located just inland from Poniente Beach in Benidorm, Alicante, the city with, reputedly, more high rise buildings per capita than any other city in in the world.

The two towers are about 61 feet apart and the cone at the top starts at floor 38. There is a commonly held view that the M shape is a tribute to the city of Madrid following a 2004 terrorist attack, but this has never been confirmed by the architects Pérez-Guerras Arquitectos & Ingeniero.

Construction was completed in 2014 yet as of 2016 the building remains unoccupied, after the 2008 financial crisis saddled the developers with monetary problems.

The towering "M" can be seen from most places in Benidorm, south of the old town, and from the Autovia del Mediterrano (AP-7) which bypasses the city or the N-332 which runs parallel to it. Another great place to see the building and appreciate its scale is from Benidorm Island, about a mile offshore.

Prince Randian was born without limbs in British Guyana in 1871. Propelled to stardom under P.T. Barnum, he built a comfortable life for himself, his wife, and their four children by making a living as a circus performer.

Randian was billed variously as "The Snake Man", "The Human Worm," "The Human Caterpillar," or "The Living Torso" when appearing in sideshows. He wowed audiences simply by performing the everyday tasks he learned to do out of necessity, such as shaving, painting, and writing. In this short clip from 1932's Freaks, which featured many real sideshow performers, Randian performs one of his most famous acts: rolling and lighting a cigarette with only the use of his mouth.

Aside from his dexterous talents, Randian was pretty witty. At the end of this brief clip, during which a clown has been rambling on about his new act to Randian, "The Human Caterpillar" offers, "Can you do anything about your eyebrows?!"

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

Scientists have long known about the mesentery, a membrane that lines your abdominal cavity and keeps your intestines in place, but until recently, it didn't get the credit it deserved. That's because scientists didn't quite know what it was, having previously thought that the mesentery was a disconnected group of parts. 

But researchers in Ireland said in November that those parts were in fact continuously connected, working to keep the intestines where they should be, according to Science Alert. This means the mesentery is a brand new, classified body organ. 

"We are now saying we have an organ in the body which hasn’t been acknowledged as such to date,” said J. Calvin Coffey, who co-wrote the paper, published in The Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology. "This is relevant universally as it affects all of us. Up to now there was no such field as mesenteric science. Now we have established anatomy and the structure. The next step is the function. If you understand the function you can identify abnormal function, and then you have disease."

And while new diseases might seem like a bad thing, in this case, scientists say, deepening our understanding of the mesentery could help us better understand other abdominal diseases, as well as, practically speaking, reduce the number of invasive surgeries. 

In the meantime, if you go look, you can also find the mesentery in Gray's Anatomy, the continuously updated catalogue of our bodies. It was Coffey's research that got it there. 

For much of recorded history the human body was a black box—a highly capable yet mysterious assemblage of organs, muscles and bones. Even Hippocrates, a man who declared anatomy to be the foundation of medicine, had some interestingideas about our insides.  

By the early Renaissance, scientists and artists were chipping away at this anatomical inscrutability, and illustration was proving a particularly effective way to spread what was being learned via human dissection. There remained one nagging issue, however: accurately representing the body's three-dimensional structure on a flat, two-dimensional piece of paper. Some artists relied on creative uses of perspective to solve the problem. Others began using flaps.

The first known anatomical flap prints were produced in Strasbourg, France, in 1538 by Heinrich Vogtherr. The German artist, printer, and poet pieced together multiple layers of pressed linen so that readers could open up his illustrations to reveal the positions of major organs in both male and female figures. While volvelles, or multi-layered, moveable wheel charts, had been used in medieval astronomy and navigational texts, this was the first time a similar idea had been applied to anatomical illustration. 

As it turned out, people were eager to learn about their insides, and early flap anatomies (or "fugitive sheets" as they're now known) proved immensely popular during the 16th century. Many of the loose-leaf prints came with descriptions of individual organs and were ultimately reprinted in a variety of languages. Some were even meant to be paired with separate texts that offered further insights into the body and how to treat various maladies.

"These were very much part of a bigger idea of not only understanding anatomy, but also having a sort of folk remedy available," says Cali Buckley, an art history PhD candidate at Penn State who has studied flap anatomies. "It was very much about public edification."

Still, despite such instructive aims, not all early flap anatomies got everything right. Flip through one of Vogtherr's female illustrations, for example, and you'll find a U-shaped curiosity called the "lacmamil." "It's basically two tubules coming down from the nipples that were thought to turn blood into milk, which is something that obviously does not exist," Buckley says.

While early flap anatomies were aimed at a general public interested in the body's inner workings, it didn't take long for more specialized audiences to emerge. Andreas Vesalius, the Dutchman responsible for two of history's most celebrated anatomical texts, almost certainly knew about flap anatomies when he published his 1543 twin opuses, De Humani Corporis Fabrica ("On the fabric of the human body") and its condensed, much less expensive companion, Epitome. These were both aimed squarely at students of anatomy, with the latter being an attempt at "compressing all the parts of the human body into a few pages of text and pictures," according to the National Library of Medicine's book, "Hidden Treasure."

To that end, students were invited to cut out various anatomical parts from a spare page in Epitome and paste everything together to form their own personal flap anatomy. Vesalius' theory was that this would help them memorize and better understand both the composition and spatial arrangement of the body's internal organs, nerves and muscles.

If Vesalius helped establish a new benchmark for anatomical rigor in flap anatomies, later practitioners like Johann Remmelin combined that precision with artistic flair. His 1619 Catoptrum Microcosmicum features three full-page plates with dozens of detailed anatomical illustrations of both male and female bodies. "They were incredibly complicated, but also accurate and kind of wildly pretentious," says Buckley. Catoptrum Microcosmicum features text in Greek, Latin and Hebrew, and mixes together ideas from literature, poetry and philosophy. It was also "vaguely alchemical," according to Buckley, insofar as it tried to give readers an understanding of the entire universe, using the body as a microcosm.

As printing techniques grew more sophisticated in the 18th and 19th centuries, so too did flap illustrations. Gustave J. Witkowski’s colorful "Human anatomy and physiology" has a multi-layered brain with more than 20 movable parts. Similarly, Eduard Oskar Schmidt's "The anatomy of the human head and neck" features a mustachioed Victorian man, whose head you can peel back to reveal the underlying musculature, nerves, eyes and brain.

Pregnancy, which had always been a preoccupation for male anatomists and physicians, also got the flap treatment. George Spratt’s epically titled 1848 edition of "Obstetric Tables: Comprising Graphic Illustrations with Descriptions and Practical Remarks; Exhibiting on Dissected Plates Many Important Subjects in Midwifery" shows, among other things, the various stages of pregnancy. The preface to Spratt's American edition raved:

The superiority of the present work over any other series of Obstetrical illustrations, is universally admitted. It is a happy combination of the Picture and the Model...To the busy practitioner, who wants something to refresh his memory, it obviates the necessity for continual post mortem examination…To the student it is equivalent to a whole series of practical demonstrations, with the advantage that it can be carried about with him and studied wherever he may desire. 

Eventually, ever larger flap contributions appeared, like “White's Physiological Manikin” in 1886. Produced by James T. White and Co. and "examined and approved by Frank H. Hamilton M.D.," one of the four physicians who tried to save President Garfield, this wall-friendly model was meant for classrooms and doctor's offices. Among other things, it showcased "the form, position, color, and relation of the organs of a healthy body," according to "Hidden Treasures." It also had some morally instructive flaps that depicted "the effects of alcohol and narcotics on the human stomach, and the deformation of the female rib cage caused by corsetry." 

Today, X-ray imaging, sonograms, CT scans, and MRIs let us peek inside the body in ways 16th century anatomists couldn't have dreamed of. But it's worth noting that even with all these technological advances, flap anatomies never really went away. Popular pop-up books like Jonathan Miller’s "The Human Body" are in many ways the modern descendants of flap anatomies. And if you ask a medical or nursing student about their own experiences learning anatomy, you'll likely hear just as much about layered plastic anatomical transparencies as you will about layered computer animations. Turns out, Vesalius was onto something.