In the Namib desert, the land is patterned with mysterious circles, arranged in a regular pattern. Across the expanse, rings of high grass cordon off empty spots of sandy orange ground. The origins of those circles have never been determined.

For years, scientists have debated the cause of these “fairy circles," and recently a sharp divide has separated partisans of two competing theories. One gives credit for creating the circles to sand termites; the other to the plants.

Now, a new paper published in Nature suggests that both theories could be true and that the behavior of both sand termites and plants could contribute to creating the haunting pattern that has obsessed so many scientists.

Seen from above, the fairy circles dot the ground with such regularity that it’s hard to believe they’re natural. Along the circumference of the circles, the plants grow high, so that each fairy circle has a thick, fuzzy border. Scientists who ascribe to the plant theory of fairy circles think that plants competing for water self-organize into these patterns. The roots of stronger plants keep others from growing nearby, creating bare patches in the soil. Those bare patches, in turn, collect water that nourishes the stronger plants, reinforcing their dominance and sustaining the circles.

In 2013, Norbert Jürgens,  a professor at the University of Hamburg, published a paper in Science, reporting that he had found sand termites living among the fairy circles. According to the termite theory, the tiny insects eat away plants to form circles of bare earth. The water collected in those circles, in this theory, benefits both the plants surrounding the bare patch, which grow high, and the termites, which need water to thrive.

Since Jürgens published his theory, a rash of reports supporting the competing plant theory have come out. Last year, scientists also published a new piece of evidence for that side of the argument, when fairy circles were found in Australia.

Before this discovery, the Namibian circles were the only example of this strange phenomenon, and the Australian circles jived with the plant theory, that the arid environment and competition among plants for water created the magical pattern. When Stephan Getzin, a lead advocate for the plant theory, studied the Australian circles, he found no evidence of termites living in the area, either. (Knowing the scrutiny their research would be under, he and the team were exacting in their search for termites, he told The New York Times.) In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Getzin argued that the discovery of the Australian fairy circles shored up the plant hypothesis.

Corina Tarnita, the lead author of the new Nature paper, came to fairy circles via termites. Tarnita is a mathematician who models ecological systems, and in 2015 she and a group of colleagues published a paper showing how termite behavior could interact with plants’ own organization to form patterns at different scales. Their work built on previous research by one of the collaborators, Rob Pringle, on patterns created by termites, and in the 2015 Science report they argued that such patterns could help stabilize ecosystems and resist desertification. When they read Jürgens study on a fairy circles, Tarnita and Pringle thought, “Here’s another example of what termites could do.”

As they learned more about fairy circles and the debate around the cause, the researchers thought that both sides of the argument had some plausibility to them. After all, their own work already showed how plants and insects could both contribute to forming patterns. But there had been much more mathematical work done to shore up the plant theory. “The termite theory did not have the same mathematical backing,” says Tarnita.

The new Nature paper fills that gap, but also provides a model for how two processes, termite colonization and plant self-organization, could contribute to creating the fairy circles. First, they created a model, based on termite colony dynamics, that reproduced the pattern of the Namibian fairy circles. But they also considered the possibility that the plants could be contributing simultaneously. In this model, the termites and plants interacted—termite nests create bare patches, which, under wet conditions, are filled back in by plants. When it’s dry, though, the model shows “dense, tall grass rings” growing around the patches, similar to the grass rings observed in the field.

What that means, to Tarnita, is that either plants or termites could be responsible for the large-scale pattern of fairy circles, but that it’s also possible they’re both part of the answer. “Two very different processes, coordinated by very different organisms, could lead to that exact same pattern. That’s fascinating,” she says. “The next thing, though, is we can go further than that by combining them.”

The model also produced a result that the researchers weren’t expecting, which could be a sign they’re on the right track. The model showed that wet seasons would create small, regular clumps of plants in between the fairy circles, along with larger, random clumps during wet seasons, a feature not previously documented. But when couple of the team’s collaborators went out to the desert to photograph that vegetation, they found those large clumps of grass, just as predicted by the model.

This won’t be enough to convince plant partisans that termites are causing the fairy circles. “The model's output is in better accord with the observed patterns,” says Walter Tschinkel, a biologist at Florida State University who has studied the circles. “However, the assumptions made about the biology and behavior of the termites are completely untested. The causes of fairy circles can only be established through manipulative experiments, and these are still lacking.”

Tarnita recognizes that. “A model can never say this is exactly how it is,” she says. “A model can show you what’s possible and reveal new features, and show that combining different basic principles you get a better description of the system. But you have to test these idea with manipulative experiments in the field.”

She and her collaborators are considering options for how to take that next step. But to her what’s most exciting is what this line research indicates about how patterns might form in nature. “Patterns are much more prevalent than we would have thought 20 or 30 years ago,” she says. “There’s this wealth of simple interactions leading to emergent behavior in systems that we would not have guessed at before the advance of things like Google Earth and satellite images.”

Part of what’s fascinating to her is how different natural mechanism might create these same patterns. How many mechanisms might it take to create one pattern? How many patterns are there in nature? How many different mechanisms can lead to the same patterns? However much these dazzling designs might seem like the work of fairies or some other magic, she wants to know the natural explanation behind them.

Franz Kafka, one of Prague's most celebrated literary sons (albeit only after his death), was plagued by self-doubt and depression throughout his life. This mirrored, kinetic sculpture of the author seeks to reflect that by physicalizing the ever-turning pieces of the writer's mind. His face is only there for a moment or two before disintegrating again once the layers begin to twist.

Created by artist David Černý, the bust is composed of 42 different layers that rotate individually. Each layer is mechanized, using gears inspired by traditional Czech clockwork, like that of the famed astronomical clock. The patterns in which the layers twist are reprogrammable, meaning they can be entirely randomized, or completely orderly.

The bust sits close to the insurance company in downtown Prague where Kafka worked his day job. Černý, who is known for his provocative installation work, was so pleased with the outcome of Hlava Franze Kafky (Franz Kafka's Head), he made another in North Carolina. Rather than a famed author, he made the bust in the shape of his own head. He kept some reference to Kafka in the title though: "the Metalmorphosis."

When you hear "dinner theater" you might think of early bird specials and murder mysteries. Not so at Manor Professional Wrestling Dinner Theater, where body slams and spandex are served up along with your ringside supper.

The Manor is the creation of Bryan Smith, who founded his pro wrestling dinner theater in the Silver Spurs rodeo arena on a dream and a Kickstarter campaign in 2012. He never met his funding goal, and the project was met with incredulous and sometimes derisive media coverage, but somehow the Manor Pro Wrestling Dinner Theater is still open and thriving.

The wrestlers, who are local professionals, compete once a month for the Manor Medallion. This prestigious prize has a folkloric backstory written by Smith himself, involving characters with names like "Lord Darkness" and "Lady Golden Eyes" competing in an endless battle of good versus evil. Whether that comes through the purple lights and smoky haze lingering around the performance is unclear, but all the glitz and drama of WWE-style wrestling is everywhere at the Manor. Even the menu offerings sound straight out of the mouth of Macho Man Randy Savage: Try the Head Lock Green Salad or the Drop Kicking Veggie Medley.

Couple all that with a Staind-inspired house band and free admission for kids under the age of 3, and you've got yourself an evening on the town.

According to lore, the story of El Camino Real, alternately known as the "Royal Road" or the "King’s Highway," starts in the early days of  California under Spanish colonial rule. The story goes that there was a trail that hooked up the 21 missions established by the Franciscans so that any distance between the settlements was only a day away by horseback.

Honoring that old route with a string of lovely bells hanging from shepherds’ staffs would be a great way to commemorate its vaunted history, if only that history were true.

In reality, such a distinct route didn't really exist at that time, although certain sections of it did. In 18^th and 19^th century California, many roads were called Camino Real, not just one singular path traversed by missionaries hopscotching up and down the coast. Still, the dangling bells are lovely things to try and spy along the highway.

How the lore of El Camino Real came to be has a history of its own. In the early 20^th century, automobiles were first tightening their grip on the Golden State. Joining forces in California Boosterism were then-popular women’s clubs, real estate developers, and the relatively new Automobile Club of Southern California. In an effort to improve the state’s roads, thereby allowing for more development (and the sale of new cars), the “historic” El Camino Real was born. Paving projects got underway to hook up the daisy chain of missions, presidios and other outposts, and in 1906 the first bells appeared.

Over the 20^th century many of the originals were lost or stolen from the route, but in the late 1990s a full-on restoration and “replanting” of the old bells was underway. From the bottom of the Royal Road at Mission San Diego to the top at Mission San Francisco Solano, the new bells (and if you’re lucky, a few of the originals) provide motorists with an excellent treasure hunt opportunity, if not a perfect history lesson. 

A version of this story originally appeared on Muckrock.com.

In January of 1977, FBI director Clarence M. Kelley received a much-anticipated memo from the Office of Professional Responsibility, informing him that the Martin Luther King Task Force had had completed its investigation.

The Task Force had been formed the year prior, in response to the fallout from a Congressional hearing that had revealed the extent of the Bureau’s domestic surveillance, particularly in regards to civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The revelations had been so damning, in fact, that they had cast doubts on the integrity of the FBI’s investigation into King’s murder and added credence to the theories that the Bureau was somehow responsible.

Disproving the latter was the Task Force’s primary concern, so the bulk of the report involved reviewing the case files for evidence that the FBI had, though action or inaction, aided or abetted James Earl Ray.

While the report found that the investigation had been hampered by a lack of coordination between the FBI, the Attorney General’s Office, and the Memphis Police, there was no evidence that the Bureau had done anything to sabotage the investigation, and had indeed pursued things within the full extent of its abilities.

But rather than exonerating the FBI, it was in evaluating those abilities that the Task Force uncovered its most damning findings. The second, shorter, and much more incendiary part of the report covers the extent of the Bureau’s “surveillance and harassment” of King at the behest of J. Edgar Hoover.

The Task Force found the investigation eventually became something of a personal vendetta for Hoover …

with certain CONTELPRO elements - such as the infamous suicide letter - blatant civil rights violations.

The Task Force was so worried about the extent of this extralegal surveillance becoming public, either through King’s relatives or even worse, FOIA requesters, that they recommended the evidence sealed and destroyed as quickly as possible.

The report closes on the strong recommendation that, in order to avoid risking the loss of the public’s faith in institution, the FBI never again overstep its bounds and engage in this kind of illicit, illegal behavior.

The reader can decide the extent to which the Bureau decided to heed that advice.

The first part of MLK’s FBI file is embedded below.

Who is the real Alice King Chatham, sculptor of helmets worn by monkey astronauts?

That was the question posed to a panel of four celebrities—one of whom was Betty White—in the August 31, 1964 episode of the game show To Tell The Truth. The host, Bud Collyer, presented three people to the panel, all of whom claimed to be King Chatham. 

As you can see at the 18-minute mark in the video below, the celebrities interrogated the women with questions. Two were impostors, their answers all lies. One was the real King Chatham—a sculptor who helped craft the earliest space helmets of the United States Space Program.

“I have cast in wax the heads of the seven Mercury astronauts,” the host Bud Collyer read from a statement King Chatham wrote, before the panel spoke to the women. “These models were used to design for each man a perfect fitting helmet liner.”

None of the celebrities were able to correctly identify King Chatham, whose exact contributions to the field of space helmet design are the subject of debate.

During the height of 1960s space and flight exploration in the United States, Alice King Chatham worked behind the scenes creating partial-pressure pilot suits, test dummies, oxygen masks, space beds, and helmets for NASA and the U.S. Air Force. She even helped design suits for the television show Star Trek.

In the early 1940s, King Chatham was working as an artist and sculptor when she was recruited by the Air Force to help make the first successful oxygen breathing masks worn by all American World War II pilots. She was involved in an array of major experiments, studies, and projects, from creating space helmets for the 1963 first man-in-space program Project Mercury to designing prototype suits for monkeys that flew in the Aerobee sub-orbital rocket tests during the 1940s.

It was not uncommon for female artists to be recruited into the U.S. Army for their skills during wartime. Around 1943, King Chatham had been sculpting ducks, dogs, and horses at the Art Institute in Dayton, Ohio, when she received a request from the head of the anthropology unit at Wright Field’s Aero-Medical Laboratory, Francis Randall. “As an artist and sculptress she understood the human body,” reported Lee Street for The Baltimore Sun in 1953.

In the '40s, new fighter planes were reaching increasingly higher altitudes, requiring pilots to wear pressurized masks to avoid blacking out during flight. King Chatham's sculpting expertise was needed at the Wright Air Development Center, the Air Force base near Dayton, for a crucial mission: to help perfect an oral-nasal oxygen mask for pilots traveling above 20,000 feet. The various designs and prototypes eventually led to the mask that became ubiquitous head gear among World War II pilots.  

King Chatham became an expert of the flight helmet and the lab’s equipment specialist for personal protective gear. She is credited with developing a new pressure helmet that improved an iteration of the 1946 S-1 pressure flight suits, and special ear counter-pressure devices.

Scientists came to King Chatham with a list of different criteria for different kinds of helmets—one with a breathing tube, a microphone, and an opening for liquid feeding. She would, over several months, fashion experimental models out of rubber, plastics, and fabrics. 

 “The professional men at the Laboratory admit they don’t know how she does it,” Street wrote.

King Chatham’s lab often smelled like a zoo, says Street. She fitted oxygen equipment to many animals that flew in tests, including guinea pigs, rabbits, pigs, and a 140-pound Saint Bernard. King Chatham also made clothes for monkeys, outfitting them in tiny pressure suits and helmets for the Aerobee rockets that flew 34 miles above the Earth. However, one accomplishment under high debate and speculation is her involvement with the X-1 project, the top-secret rocket plane piloted by Captain Chuck Yeager that would break the sound barrier in 1947.

According to her obituary and authors of the book Mothers of Invention, King Chatham had to create a special helmet that would protect Yeager from the extreme pressures of the high-speed flight. It’s said that she had tested several different prototypes, which led to the actual helmet Yeager wore during the X-1 mission. However, research by Shayler David and Ian Moule in Women in Space contradicts her ownership of the helmet’s design. Yeager stated that he had built it himself by cutting a World War II tank helmet and fastening it to a leather flying helmet. King Chatham may have been a part of designing pressure helmets of Yeager’s later X-1 missions.

Her work designing oxygen masks and pilot helmets for the Air Force led her to NASA. For the Mercury Project, she was commissioned to create the helmets, casting each of the astronauts’ heads in wax to get perfect, custom headgear. “All the astronauts are extremely stable, and have great personalities,” King Chatham told Mary Ann Callan for the Los Angeles Times in 1961. “They were easy to work with, even though the fitting took half a day each.”

King Chatham would often be the lone woman assigned to projects. During her employment at Douglas Aircraft Company in Santa Monica, California in the 1960s, she was the only female developing features to add comfort in personnel gear, wrote Callan. She had the unprecedented task of thinking “of everything, because there is simply no ‘room service’ in a space capsule.”

While the exact details of her contributions to space and aviation innovation remains unknown, it’s clear that King Chatham’s career as a space sculptor was captivating, indicated by the amazed cast of To Tell The Truth.

King Chatham died in Los Angeles at 81 in July 1989. A number of her early art sculptures were placed on display at the Dayton Art Institute, according to her obituary.

“What Alice did exactly is currently debatable,” Bruce Hess, historian at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base says in Women in Space, “but she undoubtedly was involved in those pioneering steps involving manned space exploration and flight.”

It's winter, and the highways are icy. What do you do? You can cover them with salt. You can spray them down with de-icer. Or you can do like they just did in Dodge County, Wisconsin and let someone accidentally spill hundreds of thousands of sticky Skittles all over the road.

According to the Dodge County Sheriff's Office, the Skittles—all red ones—were found on Tuesday night, around 9 p.m., after falling off a flatbed pickup truck. When the Highway Department arrived to clean them up, they were treated to "a distinct Skittles smell," Sheriff Dale Schmidt told WISN. Photos show the tiny lentils, denuded of most of their color, strewn across both lanes.

Schmidt later learned that they were a reject batch, and were traveling to a nearby ranch to become supplementary cattle feed. (When the price of corn is high, farmers give their cows leftover candy, which is a cheap source of carbs.)

Instead, no one will eat them. As Schmidt pointed out to WBAY, "They're past the 5- or 10-second rule."

(For more sundries accidentally discarded at high speeds, check out our 2016 truck spill map.)

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.

Millau Viaduct is the world's tallest bridge, a claim based on the height of the towers, which are taller than the Eiffel Tower. The height of the bridge deck itself is only the 17th tallest in the world, yet driving over it still feels like you're literally in the clouds.

This cable stay bridge is on the E11, a popular motorway route between Calais and the French and Spanish Mediterranean coasts. It's 890 feet from the road deck to the valley below, and the views are fantastic when it is not shrouded in cloud (which it commonly is).

The architects of this bridge have created a thing of wonder. How did anybody build it? In fact many of the engineering aspects of the bridge were already worked out before the architects were given the brief to make the bridge look so good. Building this bridge really was a team effort; the list of famous engineering companies involved is too long to include here. The story of the construction process is available widely but it is a great experience to read about at the visitor centre while enjoying an excellent view of the bridge itself.

Even at one of the most famous monuments in the world, there are still secrets to be uncovered.

At Rome’s Colosseum, in an area around the steps leading to the basement, the skull of a horse was found, while the area was being cleaned up, reports the Local.

The head is dated to the 12th or 13th century, when the Colosseum was being used for more practical purposes than gladiatorial battles. In the 12th century, parts of the amphitheater were rented out for residential or commercial use; in the 13th century, a powerful Roman family controlled the structure and turned it into a castle/fort situation.

This new find, according to the city’s Superintendent for Archaeological Heritage, should be taken as indication that the Colosseum still has places that need exploration. If there’s a horse head just lying around, who knows what else might be hidden away?

This giant abandoned government building is located in Sukhumi, the capital of a country that isn't widely recognized as such. 

After the fall of the Soviet Union in the early '90s, various countries began to form and celebrated their newfound independence. Abkhazia, which had been part of Georgia during Soviet rule, sought to gain their own independence as well, but Georgia, also newly autonomous, fought bitterly with them over the region. 

From 1992 to 1993, thousands of ethnic Georgians fled or were killed in the Abkhazia region, buildings were destroyed, and the once prosperous seaside region fell into a state of disrepair that has yet to recover even today. 

One of the bloodiest battles during the Georgian-Abkhaz war took place at the former Council of the Ministries building, located in the very centre of Sukhumi. Tank shells and bullets flew, and at one point the building was gutted by flames. The Georgians of Sukhumi were brutally massacred by the Abkhaz in an effort to retain control of the region, though there are some suggestions the violence was instead carried out by Russian supporting forces.

Today the building remains abandoned, unfenced and accessible to the public. A sad reminder of the recent war and what was lost, it is also a good example of Soviet Brutalist architecture style. 

One of only four known surviving C-97 Stratofreighters, this one's fate saw it flown into the now-closed Dodgeville Municipal Airport in Wisconsin and subsequently's towed to the Don Q Inn, where it now sits in a field.

The original plan for the military transport aircraft, which never took shape, was to open it as a coffee shop. Since then it has often been used for filming commercials, and the fuselage was once signed by Farrah Fawcett.

The C-97 was developed by Boeing towards the end of World War II, based on the B-29 bomber. The first Stratofreighter flew on July 8, 1947, and the model was used during the Berlin Airlift and Korea War. Only 56 were ever built.

Sadly, this C-97 has been neglected and is looking rather shabby. But there are stairs up to an open door and it can be viewed free of charge.

Unveiled in time for the 25th anniversary of his Senate hearings on music censorship, this bust of Frank Zappa is a tribute to the avant-garde Baltimore icon who passed away in 1993.

Sitting in front of the latest addition to Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library, the bust was commissioned by a Lithuanian organization by a sculptor who "normally does busts of Stalin," and stands on top of a 12-foot pole. At Christmastime, the bust is adorned with a Santa hat.  The street near the library has also been (unofficially) renamed Frank Zappa Way. 

Most European cities would be proud to have a Roman theatre. The city of Lyon, France claims two.

Situated in the Fourvière area of Lyon, both theaters are in a remarkable state of preservation and are well worth incorporating into a visit to this great city. The larger and older of the two dates from about 15 BCE. This impressive structure is just south of the prominent Notre Dame basilica and has the usual steeply tiered seating, a decorated floor and the foundations of an extensive stage. It is still used for performances.

The smaller theatre, called the Odeon (or sometimes Odeum), was used for poetry and musical recitals. It was highly decorated and you can still see the inlaid marble on the floor. It is thought that it was built at the same time as an extension to the main theatre during the reign of the emperor Hadrian in the second century AD. It is very close to the large theater, slightly nearer the top of the hill.

The year is 1813. You’re an undergraduate at the University of Oxford, enrolled in a course on the science of geology. The teacher, a man clad in long black robes and grasping a large hyena skull, rushes toward you and bellows, “What rules the world?” You have no clue what this man wants you to say. You draw back in your chair, eyes wide, and squeak out, “Haven’t an idea.” The lecturer rears back and shouts: “The stomach rules the world! The great ones eat the less, and the less the lesser still.”

The teacher is William Buckland, a man whose passion for geology and paleontology was matched only by the voracity of his stomach. As eccentric as his character was—complemented by a blue pouch at his side stuffed with mammoth teeth and skin, petrified feces and that hyena skull—what passed his lips was much more bizarre. 

William entertained guests at his home and the college with exotic meals of things like hedgehogs, roast ostrich, porpoise, crocodile steaks and even cooked puppies. His son, Francis, had an equally egalitarian palate. Together, they viewed Noah's Ark as a dinner menu.

It’s unclear exactly why William embraced such a curious diet. Most likely it was a combination of fame and curiosity. His father was educated, but their family lived modestly. Through luck and hard work, he entered Corpus Christi College, a small but prestigious branch of Oxford. While a young professor at Oxford, he was hard-pressed for money so he amped up his eccentricities in lectures to attract fee-paying students with racy jokes and profanity.

There appears to be no clear incident or time period when William started taking a fork and knife through the animal kingdom, but it could have been his doubling-down on eccentric behavior for widespread notoriety. Patrick John Boylan, a geologist who wrote his doctoral thesis on William in 1984, said as much: “Buckland progressed from a relatively modest middle class provincial background ... by means of his extraordinary hard work, innate intelligence and ability, and considerable charm (of which his well documented eccentricities were an integral, and probably deliberately contrived at times, part).”

William had a fondness for mice served on toast. The common mole held the crowning achievement of the vilest dish he had eaten until he chewed on the bluebottle fly. His house was stuffed to the brim with bones and fossils and bustled with pets like guinea pigs, at least one pony, snakes, frogs, ferrets, hawks, owls, cats, dogs and a pet hyena named Billy. Outside, the children liked to stand on a large pet tortoise while foxes and chickens ran about.

When Buckland was visiting an Italian cathedra some time between 1826 and 1836, a priest told him the slick floor was due to the miraculously ever-flowing blood of sacrificed martyrs; he knelt, ran his tongue across the ground, and declared the liquid to be bat urine. Most notably, William allegedly ingested the 140ish-year-old mummified heart belonging to King Louis XIV of France. The heart had been stolen during the French Revolution until William’s friend, Lord Harcourt, somehow acquired it. When Harcourt withdrew the heart from a silver snuffbox, William quickly popped it in his mouth. Whether trying to determine its geological origin (perhaps he thought it was a stone), or whether he wanted another notch on his apron (most sources seem to agree with that theory), he gobbled it up. The most well-known tale says William announced “I have eaten many strange things, but have never eaten the heart of a king before” before poor King Louis’ heart dropped to Buckland’s stomach.

No matter his outlandish behavior, William was and remains a respected scientist in his field—he excavated one of the oldest human remains ever found, pioneered the modern sciences of geology and paleontology and became Dean of Westminster Abbey. Not everyone liked his eccentricities—Charles Darwin called him a “vulgar and almost coarse man” driven more by notoriety than his love of science.

William's son, Francis Trevelyan Buckland, was born in 1826. Like his father, Francis was a committed zoophagist—an indiscriminate eater of animals in what must be the most literal interpretation of Genesis 9:3: “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you.“ In fact, Francis probably ate a number of more strange things than his father (albeit not the heart of a king).

Francis was a short man with a consistently disheveled appearance, but was jovial and popular, with a childlike view of the world. It’s little wonder why Francis developed his eccentricities. Take this account from Francis’ own diary when he was just seven years old:

“A live turtle was sent down from London.... My father tied a long rope round the turtle's fin, and let him have a swim in 'Mercury,' the ornamental water in the middle of the Christ Church Quad, while I held the string. I recollect, too, that my father made me stand on the back of the turtle while he held me on (I was then a little fellow), and I had a ride for a few yards as it swam round and round the pond. As a treat I was allowed to assist the cook to cut off the turtle's head in the college kitchen. The head, after it was separated, nipped the finger of one of the kitchen boys who was opening the beast's mouth. This same head is now in my museum.”

Eating was one of the first things that landed Francis in trouble. According to William, when his son was two-and-a-half years old, he ate the end of a candle. As punishment, William shoved him inside the thorny furze bush for 10 minutes. He probably would have avoided punishment if it were a stray field mouse.

Like his father, Francis went into the sciences and studied at Oxford. He pursued paths of zoology and naturalism but trained as a surgeon, trading  fish for human corpse parts to further his studies. Although he wasn’t a great student and strayed from his medical path as time went on. In his day he was best known for his writings; he travelled extensively and wrote popular articles about the world’s natural curiosities in a more casual tone that differed from the stuffy literature dominating Victorian Britain.

Growing up in a house of exotic pets, it’s no wonder that Francis began his own menagerie at college. Before entering his chamber, first you might smell a rotten odor. Opening the door, you would see“an eagle, a jackal, besides marmots, guinea-pigs, squirrels and dormice, an adder and many harmless snakes and slow-worms, tortoises, green frogs, and a chameleon. Skeletons and stuffed specimens were numerous...” Oh and that smell? It wasn’t only from his tiny zoo. Francis had been dissecting a cat and kept the corpse in a box under his bed.

His most notorious companion was a bear cub named Tig, whom Francis dressed in a cap and gown appropriate for the Christ Church College at Oxford. The bear attended wine parties, performed tricks, liked to suck fingers, and roamed the streets for candy when left unattended. Sometimes Francis took rats and de-fanged snakes from his coat at parties to further the entertainment. Francis owned several monkeys throughout his life. Two of them, Jacko and Jenny, he served port every Sunday and beer during the week. When Jacko died, he turned his hide into a tablecloth as an act of memoriam.

Whether at home or elsewhere, guests were served steaming plates of boiled elephant trunk, boiled and fried meat taken from the head of a porpoise, roasted giraffe necks and rhinoceros pie. Boa constrictor, sea slugs and ear wigs made their way to his stomach, although he ended up hating those last two. When he heard a panther had recently died at a zoo, he had the curator dig up the corpse and send over some panther chops (“It was not very good.”)

Not all of this was done just for the palate. While much of Francis’ omnivorous nature stemmed from simply wanting to know what the animal kingdom tasted like, there was a scientific reasoning behind other meals. In 1860, he founded the Acclimation Society of Britain; its goal was to find and introduce exotic fauna to the country in order to gain another food source. Their dinners included things like Syrian pig, sheep from China, curassow and other animals from across the globe. Because of their population, Francis advocated for horse meat, but it tasted awful. He suggested it be served to prisoners instead.

While the Acclimation Society was fruitless and Francis never achieved the level of prestige his father reached, his advocacy and research calling for responsible fishing and fish farming helped prevent Britain from overfishing. His good nature and love of life translated to his writing and his lecturers were well-attended. He was more a popularizer of science—something of a Neil deGrasse Tyson—than a hardcore academic. When he died at just 54, papers around the country wrote mournful memorials praising him. Unfortunately, history has mostly forgotten him until very recently. A British author just wrote a book about this obscure oddball of the Victorian age—maybe the Bucklands can still inspire a whole new generation of omnivores.

At the end of 1989, Timișoara became the first city freed from the Communist regime in Romania. Shortly after, many Romanians began throwing out items that were used in the household during the Communist era. It was out with the old, in with the new. 

Twenty-five years later, starting with a vinyl collection of old Romanian LPs and aided by word of mouth, a museum began to take shape.

Located close to the Timișoara city center, the Museum of the Communist Consumer is a collection of items that Romanians could buy during the "golden age" (as it was called by communist propaganda) that showcases a way of life that was present in every household of Communist Romania. 

The unique museum is set up like a typical apartment, where visitors can explore armoires, drawers and shelves to discover all sorts of items that were in use in Communist Romania, ranging from old TV and radio sets to kitchen amenities, bicycles and toys, school supplies and many more.

For some visitors, the memorabilia serves as a way to learn about a way of living that no longer exists. Others will remember and recognize items that used to be in their own homes. 

These three balancing rocks were once the main design motif of one of the highest of the high denomination currencies in the world, the Zimbabwean dollar. Every note issued by Zimbabwe’s Central Bank—from the one-dollar note issued after independence in 1980 to the 100 trillion-dollar banknote (100,000,000,000,000) issued in the hyper-inflationary zenith of 2008, has pictured these three stones.

The image of the stones was chosen as a conjoined metaphor for development and environmental protection following the country’s independence from white-ruled Rhodesia. The rocks themselves can be found in a national park with an abandoned feel in Epworth, a suburb in the thinly signposted outskirts of Harare. The stones pictured on the banknotes are the most iconic example of this peculiar geological feature found in many places throughout Zimbabwe: rocks formations naturally situated in perfect balance.

Matopos itself is well worth seeking out. Once inside, visitors can either walk or drive around the Stone Age rock formations with evocative names like the "Giant’s Playground" and "Flying Boat." Even rocks with no honorific convey a silent magnitude. Outside the park, some enterprising residents have built their homes among the giant boulders that pock all of Epworth.    

The Zimbabwean dollar, however, is no more. The government effectively abandoned its currency and was de-monetised entirely in 2015. Now, the notes can be found on eBay, on the back of playing cards, in the hands of hawkers trying to sell the dead currency to tourists visiting Zimbabwe, or as props for cautionary tales of the dangers of runaway inflation, devaluations, and mercurial government economic policy.

Nowadays, Zimbabwe has a multi-currency system. Money from almost every continent in the world is legal tender: the Aussie dollar, the British pound, the Botswanan pula, the Chinese Yuan, the Euro, the Indian Rupee, the Japanese yen, the South African rand. However, the most predominant note in circulation is the U.S. dollar in which prices are quoted in shops, restaurants, and, yes, even parks housing the iconic balancing stones. "Bond coins" of 1,2,5,10, 25 and 50 cent dominations are given out as small change.  

But the stones are making a making a comeback in the newest type of money in Zimbabwe’s bountiful currency basket. Last year, the Zimbabwean government introduced a "bond note" that is pegged to the U.S. dollar and is illustrated with those same rocks from the old Zimbabwean dollar. Only a 2 dollar bond note is in circulation currently, but the government plans to incrementally introduce 5, 10, 20 and 50 dollar values over the next few months.

Having a local currency bound to another is unusual, but by no means unique. Bosnia-Herzegovina has convertible mark tied originally to the German deutschmark and now one-to-one with the euro. For 50 or so years, there was de facto parity between the pounds of Ireland and the United Kingdom. But there remains apprehensiveness among many Zimbabweans who remember the old Zimbabwe dollar days. They live in hope that their new money will be as solid, stable, and unwavering as these three majestic rocks themselves.

Before majestic skeletal structures of centuries-old species are placed on display at museums, an intricate process takes place behind the scenes. Hundreds and thousands of hours are spent removing the delicate fossils from bedrock.

The time-lapse video above shows Natural History Museum of Utah preparator Nathan Ong at work excavating prehistoric ribs, vertebrae, and a large Mastodon tooth. It's a fossil preparator's job to gently uncover and prepare paleontological specimens for both study and exhibit. Ong's work requires careful brush, chisel, and scraping technique to extract the precious specimens. 

He uses probes, scalpels, toothbrushes, dental picks, microscopes, and power tools to break away at the rock and sediment. When researchers in the field come across bones at an excavation site, they'll dig around the specimen, wrap them in plaster, and send it to a fossil preparation lab. At the 36-second mark, you can see Ong using hand power tools to remove rocks in one of these large plaster casings. He also uses glue to mount the pieces.

"Where most people see Tyrannosaurus or Hadrosaurus, I tend to see the product of millions of hours of dedication," Ong says in the video.

Sharp observers will notice something strange about the attractive residences lining Am Fischtal, a bucolic street in the Zehlendorf section of Berlin. On one side, the buildings have flat roofs, while on the other they are pitched: a situation that is less architectural happenstance than the result of a so-called “roof war,” waged in the Weimar Republic and which embodied many of the deeper conflicts that roiled Germany in the years before the Nazis came to power.

Flat roof advocates argued in the 1920s that they were less expensive to build and maintain, in addition to fitting in with Modernist ideas about minimalism and functionality, like using roofs as terraces. But the pitched roof partisans—including many nationalists—argued something entirely different: that flat roofs were a blight on traditional German architecture, or, as the critic Paul Schultze-Naumburg wrote, “immediately recognizable as the child of other skies and other blood.” Other critics were more explicit. The architect Paul Bonatz, for one, said that flat roofs bear “more resemblance to a suburb of Jerusalem than to a group of homes in Stuttgart.”

The two sides met on Am Fischtal, which today survives as a literal and figurative monument to the Weimar Republic’s increasing political divide. The flat roof residences came first, part of a housing development built by a leftist housing cooperative between 1926 and 1932 known as Onkel Toms Hütte, or Uncle Tom's Cabin, an unlikely moniker borrowed from a nearby tavern which was named after the Harriet Beecher Stowe novel. Across the street, GAGFAH, a housing cooperative supported by conservative white collar unions, built their response in 1928: a community called Fischtalgrund, which consists of 30 buildings with 120 housing units. The roofs, of course, were pitched.

“What happened in 1928 in the quiet Berlin forest suburb,” Bruno Taut, the architect who designed Onkel Toms Hütte later wrote, “was like an omen of that which all Germans experienced in 1933”—when the Nazis came to power.

Before residents moved in, Fischtalgrund opened first as an exhibition in September and October 1928, its location inspiring the press to run stories about the “Zehlendorf Roof War,” and, indeed, it made good copy. The public, also, was interested: a year earlier, a flat roof housing development built in Stuttgart attracted nearly 500,000 people during an exhibition, in the process casting a spotlight on flat roofs.

But for the architects involved, the debate was more nuanced. Heinrich Tessenow, the lead architect behind Fischtalgrund, publicly rejected the idea of a war.

“Here as there, this is essentially a serious search for the best architectural solutions,” he said then. Meanwhile, the architect Walter Gropius, a well-known flat roofer and ostensibly Tessenow’s opposition, insisted “the question of whether a roof is flat or pitched is to be answered solely on the basis of practicality, technology, and efficiency. It is a mistake to make it a religious symbol, as is the case in the battle around the new architecture today.”

Still, such conciliatory comments were often downplayed or ignored in press reports, and, symbolically, the roof debate evolved as a proxy for the fight over Germany’s future.

On Am Fischtal, it was the flat roofers who struck the opening blow. Onkel Toms Hütte was developed by GEHAG, a cooperative housing corporation owned by blue collar unions with left-wing political affiliations that, during the 1920s, was one of the leaders in creating better housing for Berlin workers, who up until that time typically lived in crowded and unsanitary tenements called rental barracks.

GEHAG had hired Bruno Taut to be its chief architect in 1924. Although not well remembered today, Taut was a part of a group, including Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier, who popularized Modernist architecture in Europe during the 1920s. At Onkel Toms Hütte, Taut led a team of architects in creating a new community of approximately 1,900 housing units in colorful rowhouses and small apartment buildings with flat roofs spread across several blocks.

And in 1926, just as Onkel Toms Hütte began construction, the roof debate intensified, prompting GAGFAH to scramble a response, which would turn out to be Fischtalgrund, in which 17 architects designed new houses and small apartment buildings, all with pitched roofs. To lead their effort, GAGFAH chose Tessenow, an architect who used traditional designs but also emphasized that “the best is always simple,” an approach similar to Modernist thinking. While the political debates raged, in other words, the architects working on Am Fischtal were never that far apart.

Today, Onkel Toms Hütte celebrates its architectural legacy and in particular Taut, who left Germany when the Nazis came to power and died in 1938 while working in Turkey. There is a monument dedicated to him in the community, while the roof war itself is also commemorated by an interpretive sign on Am Fischtal.

Karl Kiem, a German architectural historian, argues that apart from their contrasting roofs, the two developments share many similarities, such as their human scale and balance between built form and landscape. The roof war is a reminder of a divisive past, but flat and pitched roofs have co-existed for nearly 90 years and together they form a listed historic district, suggesting that now Am Fischtal is a symbol of harmony, not conflict.

If you’re traveling south from Baltimore on I-95, glance to your right as you cross the I-695 Beltway and you’ll see the huge canopy of a white oak tree, standing nearly 70 feet tall and dwarfing its neighbors. This is the Arbutus Oak, a sentinel on this patch of land for well over 3,000 years.

The old oak, named for the nearby community of Arbutus, was just a little acorn’s sapling at the end of the 17^th century, and it marks the spot where (as the story goes) General Lafayette and his troops passed by in 1781 on their way to battle the British at Elkton during the American Revolution.

It’s a lonesome giant, one that sparks the imagination, and if you catch it in just the right light, backlit by the setting sun on a late spring evening, it dances like a painting. It’s made it through three centuries, but its survival hasn’t always been guaranteed. By the 1950s, although the tree had stood on what was private property since the late 1600s, that land came under the ownership of the U.S. Highway Department. Today, the historic tree is trapped by ribbons of highway concrete, in the middle of one of the busiest interchanges along the I-95 corridor.

As the route for the new I-95 was being excavated, construction workers found a treasure trove of Native American artifacts around the tree. Like other large oaks in North America, it was thought that this one may have served as a gathering place for early native peoples, and a decision was made to realign the ramp from the outer loop of the Beltway to I-95, in order to save the tree.

The tree was spared, but more trouble did strike in 2002 when a bolt of lightning took away some of its height and a good deal of its crown. Luckily the magnificent Arbutus Oak made it through, to keep on going into another century.

As you walk through the Royal Arcade in Melbourne's Central Business District (the CBD), if you arrive at the top of the hour you'll hear Gaunt’s Clock alerting you to the time. Follow the chimes and look up and you’ll see two statues flanking the clock dial, imaginings of mythical giants named Gog and Magog.

Since 1892, these two medieval warriors have watched over the southern side of the arcade, striking the chimes with their mechanical arms. Each is about seven feet tall, and carved from pine by a man named Mortimer Godfrey. He modeled the two on similar figures that watch over Guildhall in London, where the same characters have been the guardians of the city since the 15th century.

The mechanical statues stand on either side of Gaunt’s Clock, a feature that was added to the Arcade about 20 years after it was built. Thomas Gaunt, a well-known Melbourne jeweler, watch and clock maker, had a shop in the Royal Arcade, and adding a prominent time piece with a couple of mythical giants could only be good for business.

Although variations of the characters of Gog and Magog appear in many ancient texts, including the Old Testament and the Quran, these two are actually a jumble of several religious stories and pagan myths, more grounded in medieval lore than the Bible. As the display itself will tell you (slightly editing here), “These two … symbolise the conflict between the ancient Britons and the Trojan invaders… having been captured in battle… and made to serve as porters at the gateway of an ancient palace on a site later occupied by the Guildhall.”

So they’re a little bit biblical, a little bit Roman, a little bit pagan, and a little bit medieval. Everything good giants should be.