Outside one of the Financial District's tallest towers lies a glistening hunk of black granite that's come to represent a very odd symbol.

The sculpture's official name is "Transcendence," and it was sculpted by Masayuki Nagare from 200 tons of black Swedish granite. It was commissioned in 1969 for the A.P. Giannini Plaza of 555 California Street, the building that was originally the headquarters for Bank of America, and as such, a hub of San Francisco finance.

But the monolith earned a new name after San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen dubbed it the "Banker's Heart." The name suited the slick, sinewy artwork, and it stuck. Though Bank of America moved its headquarters to North Carolina, it left its heart in San Francisco.

Late in the 1950s, when he was solidly in his 80s and retired, as much as was possible for a man like him, from political life, Winston Churchill brought a draft of an essay down to a villa in southern France.

The place belonged to his publisher, Emery Reves, who had bought it from Coco Chanel with the money he made from selling the foreign rights to Churchill’s books on World War II. In his old age, Churchill preferred the warmth and luxury of this place, named La Pausa, to the colder, grayer atmosphere of England, and he would stay for long stretches of time, being treated royally by his hosts and working on his History of the English-Speaking Peoples.

This essay, though, covered a different topic, one that was less typical for the aging statesman, as a new report published in Nature reveals. Originally titled “Are We Alone in Space?” the essay explored the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

Churchill had first started working on the essay in 1939, before the start of World War II, and it ran about 11 pages. At La Pausa Churchill worked on revising it, changing the title to “Are We Alone in the Universe?” The essay was never published, though; Churchill left the draft at La Pausa, and in the 1980s Wendy Reves, Emery’s wife, gave it to the National Churchill Museum, in Fulton, Missouri.

Last year, the museum’s new director, Timothy Riley, rediscovered this essentially unknown piece of writing. When he handed it to Mario Livio, an astrophysicist and author, it was “a great surprise,” Livio writes in Nature. Riley wanted a scientist’s opinion of the essay: Had Churchill gotten it right?

As Livio writes in his Nature note, Churchill’s great curiosity extended to science, and he was the first British Prime Minister to have a science adviser on his staff. He had written about evolution, cells, and fusion, and in this essay he took on the question of alien life with reasoning that “mirrors many modern arguments in astrobiology,” Livio writes. Churchill considered the size of the universe, the key role of water in sustaining life, and the habitable zone of any solar system, where conditions and distance from the star might be most hospitable to life. He also was able to see past a then-current theory (later proven wrong) of planet formation that made finding life elsewhere less likely.

“I am not sufficiently conceited to think that my sun is the only one with a family of planets,” Churchill wrote.

Much of Churchill’s reasoning has been backed up by the modern science of exoplanets. As he imagined, it’s possible to find planets throughout the universe, and it seems possible that one day we will find evidence on life on other planets. The essay, writes Livio, is a testament to Churchill’s willingness to embrace science and use all the tools at his disposal to understand the world. “At a time when a number of today’s politicians shun science, I find it moving to recall a leader who engaged with it so profoundly,” Livio writes.

Every day, pedestrians in Murcia, Spain use the Manterola Bridge to cross over the Segura River and get to work, class, or other engagements.

Starting this week, though, they'll have new commuting company. Thanks to a recently installed eel staircase, European eels traveling upstream will be passing right under their feet, Murcia Today reports.

Back in the 1990s, the Segura River was one of the most polluted in Europe, thanks to runoff from canning factories. By then, there was hardly any wildlife in the river. But over the past decade, as restoration efforts ramp up and the water becomes cleaner, many animals, including eels, are moving back in.

Now, the eel population is large enough to justify its own infrastructure. This "eel staircase" or ladder is actually a ramp covered in artificial grass, which lets the eels wriggle over a small weir in the middle of the river and travel upstream. (European eels are usually born in the Sargasso Sea, and swim up inland rivers to live out their adult lives. They then return to the sea to spawn, restarting the cycle.)

"It is hoped that [the staircase] will enable eels to travel 15 kilometers further inland than is currently the case," or about 9 miles, Murcia Today reports.

If it's successful, the river will get at least one more eel staircase before the end of summer. Murcians, get ready for some buff eels.

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.

Karachi Press Club, the first press club in Pakistan, has formally been around since 1958, when it was formed by a group of journalists in a stately Victorian-era manor. Today it has some 900 members focused on promoting democratic ideals, who gather at the clubhouse watering hole in Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan for debate, discussion, and drinks.

The KPC headquarters includes a press conference room, library, bar, and chess room, among other facilities. Up the stairs and through a spartan room is a space that is worth vying for an invitation to. The inside of a makeshift wood panel partition is festooned with whimsical doodles by Feica, celebrated political commentator and cartoonist for Dawn, the country's largest selling English language daily. 

The fabric may be fraying on the well worn sofas in the library but this is a tight-knight community pulsating with ideas and intense discussion. Overheard snippets of conversation among the old journalist "comrades" include "it was there on the lawn that I was arrested during Zia's rule," "a leftist state would care for all equally but I see it as a mother that will pay more attention to the child that is downtrodden," and "if our government were secular, religion would not be able to create divisions." 

The Karachi Press Club has organized countless protests against the government and rallies demanding civil and human rights over the decades, making it a sometimes controversial group to belong to. There have been attacks on the journalists themselves, the building has been vandalized, and their website has been hacked. Throughout it all though, the members hold dear the club, and what it represents. 

Nearly 200,000 people in California's Central Valley were evacuated this week—and later allowed to return—after officials said they were concerned that a spillway connected to the Oroville Dam might collapse. 

The dam, located some 70 miles north of Sacramento, is the tallest in the U.S., It stands 770 feet, which beats Nevada's Hoover Dam by 44 feet. Should the dam fail, a massive, lethal wave of water would be unleashed on several towns to the south, the largest of which, Yuba City, is home to over 65,000 people. 

So when residents were ordered to evacuate on Sunday, many left in haste, including some, in Sutter County, California* who left behind a few of their pets, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. And not just any pets: an albino kangaroo, a red kangaroo, and a muntjac, a type of small deer—named Kenzie, Dottie, and Mary, respectively. 

The animals were found safe—if perhaps a little traumatized—by the California Highway Patrol, officials said Tuesday, and, for now, are staying with a California family that has cared for abandoned animals in the past. The animals' owners were not named, but, hopefully, they'll be reunited soon. Their temporary caretakers said that Kenzie, in particular, was used to sleeping in bed with her owner. 

*CORRECTION: This post previously misstated the county where the animals were found. It is Sutter County, California, not Sutton County. 

Under the pavement of Fujiagou, a small town in the greater city of Chongqing in southwest China, craftsmen and women hustle to produce machinery parts in tunnels that were built as shelter against brutal bombings during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Chongqing, one of China’s fastest growing municipalities, is home to an array of tunnels built to defend the city—then known as Chung-King—from the hundreds of Japanese air raids that took place from 1939 to 1941. These raids usually targeted residential areas or other non-military marks. It was a campaign designed to terrify the local population into submission.

Now, decades after the war, the tunnels are used in very different ways: as grocery stores, restaurants, and factories.

Many tunnels in Chongqing were used unofficially as storage areas and businesses following the war. Now, things are more official. The people working in the tunnels are a mixture of locals from the city and rural migrants who have come to earn money to send home to their families. Those pictured here work in a former Jialing motorcycle factory that now produces machine parts.

“I came to this place two months ago,” says factory administration worker Chen Wen Yan. “We were colleagues at first, now we feel like family”. Members of the management have their own rooms, but the workers inhabit a room with about 17 people sharing bunk beds.

The days are long and the pay is low compared to the average city wage. Signs placed by factory bosses highlight the need for care in the tunnels, but workers wear little to no protective clothing save for face masks and overalls with cartoon animals.

But the days of working in these conditions are coming to an end. The local government has already closed over half of the tunnels in the area, to be converted into a museum and memorial for the war and it casualties. In 2017 the whole area will be transformed to accommodate, not workers, but tourists eager to see the battleground that survived the onslaught of war, then helped to rebuild industry.

King Richard I, or Richard the Lionheart, was known for his courage and military prowess in the Crusades. He met his end at the small castle of Châlus-Chabrol 1199, when shot by a peasant's crossbow. A surgeon botched the removal of the arrow, and Richard died when the wound became septic.

In keeping with the distribution entrails were removed and buried in Châlus, in the very cathedral that the fatal arrow was fired from. His body was sent to Fontevraud Abbey to be buried in a grave next to his father's, but his heart was removed and sent to Rouen. It was embalmed and entombed in a sarcophagus bearing his image in the Church of Notre-Dame in Rouen.

During church renovations in the 19th century a small lead box was discovered beneath Richard the Lionheart's effigy. Inscribed on the lid was the phrase "HIC IACET COR RICARDI REGIS ANGLORUM"—“Here is the heart of Richard, King of England.” Inside the box was a fine, rusty powder, all that remained of the king's heart. Forensic analysis conducted in 2013 found that the organ had been wrapped in fine linens and perfumed with herbs, flowers, and lime. Traces of rare frankincense were also found on the ancient heart, an allusion to the Christ-like nature of the king.

Despite their scientific intrigue and historic importance these are still human remains and had to be treated with respect. The royal heart was re-inhumed in the coffin at Rouen.

In the state of Nevada, almost exactly dead center, there is a cave lined with colorful pictographs. The site sits high on Pete’s Summit near the tiny town of Austin, inside the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest. There’s a history of gold and silver prospecting around here, but to the Western Shoshone people its purpose has little to do with shiny metals.

Located in the Toquima Mountain Range, these remote and rocky hills are full of bighorn sheep, golden eagles, and a chubby partridge called a chukar. The cave is also called Toquima (both are named for a tribe from the lower Reese River valley), and it has nourished deep spiritual roots for Native Americans for millennia.

The pictographs on the cave walls were painted by hand, thousands of years ago, using pigments of bleached white, bright red, and a yellowy turmeric orange. Unlike petroglyphs (you can see some of those here, here and here), the images are not carved into the rock but added to the surface, most likely with fingers, in circular, cross-hatched, and beautiful snaking patterns.

The images, over three hundred in all, date from around 1000 B.C. to 500 A.D., a time of hunter-gatherers in the Americas. The cave depth is fairly shallow, so if it was used as a dwelling it was probably short-term, an archaeological conclusion bolstered by the lack of artifacts that have been excavated here (you can see a cave that was used more for “storage” at Hidden Cave in Fallon, Nevada, about 100 miles due west). Given the sweeping views from the cliff, the site may have instead been used as a place-marker or geographical guide post for finding food sources, tracking hunting grounds or managing other tribal movements.

Deciphering the images has been a challenge undertaken by archeologists and anthropologists alike, but specific answers to their meaning have been elusive. They may be keys to the land or, as some have posited, keys to other, less worldly, places. Caves shelters are seen as portals by some Native peoples, providing access to commune with the earth, experience visions, and to seek understanding of what lies beyond.  

Whether used for the temporal or spiritual world, Toquima Cave and the pictographs hold great power for the Western Shoshone, and when visiting it’s important to remember and revere that power–of the earth, of the Native cultures of central Nevada, and of the symbols left behind by ancient stained fingers.

Mary Phelps, known as Polly to friends, was born in 1891 to a family that could trace its heritage to such luminaries as William Bradford, Plymouth Colony's first governor, and Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat. As New England royalty, Polly grew up in New Rochelle, New York, wanting for nothing.

It wasn’t until 1910 that Polly realized something important was missing from her life. She was busy one day preparing for a debutante ball when she looked in the mirror and realized she loathed the way a corset made her look. It bunched up her bodice and squished her breasts into a single, uncomfortable monobosom. In her memoir, The Passionate Years, she referred to it as “a box-like armour of whalebone and pink cordage.”

Like all great innovators before her, necessity was the mother of Polly’s invention. She grabbed a handkerchief, ribbon, and a needle, and before the party was off the ground, had fashioned herself a new undergarment: the modern bra.

Polly wore her new bra to the party and turned heads. Not only was she wearing considerably less under her dress than most of the other women, she was also thrilled to tell everyone about it. Society may have been scandalized, but the girls went crazy for this new garment. So light! So comfortable! No whale bones making a stomach sandwich with your ribs! When a stranger offered a dollar to make her one of these new fangled backless brassiers, Polly realized she had a hit on her hands.

“That night at the ball,” Polly later wrote in The Passionate Years, “I was so fresh and supple that in the dressing room afterward my friends came flocking around. I gave them a peek and outlined the invention...From then on we all wore them.”

Bra-like garments go back to Ancient Egypt—Polly wasn’t the first to create one. In 1859, Henry S. Lesher invented a “breast pad and perspiration shield,” though his garment was torturous to wear. They were mostly made of rubber, making them hot, impractical, and uncomfortable. Another forerunner was invented by Luman L. Chapman. He created an improved corset, which included a sheet metal front clasp and “breast puffs,” which helped relieve the tightness of most corsets.

So Polly wasn’t the first to develop a more effective breast delivery system, but she was the first to file a patent on the forerunner to today’s wireless bra. Polly filed for a patent for her “backless brassier” on February 12, 1914, and it was granted in November of that year.

In her patent application, Polly wrote that her new invention was "capable of universal fit to such an extent that… the size and shape of a single garment will be suitable for a considerable variety of different customers" and was "so efficient that it may be worn even by persons engaged in violent exercise like tennis."

With her patent in hand, Polly started the Fashion Form Brassiere Co., where she employed women to manufacture wireless bras. Another big reason the modern bra caught on? World War I. Unlike corsets, these brassieres required no metal. Metal was for war machines, not a woman’s cleavage. Polly’s patent was not only better for women’s health and fashion, but also for our boys abroad.

But before her invention really took off, Polly sold the patent to The Warner Brothers Corset Company for $1,500. Warner went on to earn more than $15 million from the bra patent over the next 30 years alone.

For most people, patenting the modern bra might be the crowning achievement of an otherwise ordinary life. But Polly had never been most people.

After her first marriage ended in divorce, Polly married Harry Crosby and the couple moved to Paris, where Polly decided to reinvent herself. She rechristened herself Caresse Crosby (she’d briefly considered calling herself Clytoris, but instead settled on naming her whippet that instead), and the pair vowed to live, what Harry called in a telegram home to Boston, “A mad and extravagant life.”

The Crosbys spent the next several years raising hell in the City of Lights. Together they opened a publishing company, Black Sun Press, and quickly amassed an impressive roster of authors including D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Lewis Carroll, James Joyce, Charles Bukowski, and Henry Miller. Time magazine would go on to describe Caresse as the "literary godmother to the Lost Generation of expatriate writers in Paris." Black Sun Press became one of the most important publishing houses in Paris.

When not publishing, Caresse entertained Paris’s ex-pats with booze-fueled all-night sex romps that would have made Lord Byron blush. She and Harry bought an abandoned mill outside of Paris, named it “Le Moulin du Soleil” (The Mill of the Sun), and turned it into one the world’s greatest party venues. A plain, white wall functioned as their guest book—all famous guests were instructed to sign it on their way out. The wall was eventually destroyed during World War II, but we know such luminaries as Salvador Dali and D. H. Lawrence signed it (ironically, so did Eva Braun).

The Crosbys’ private lives were as wild as their social scene. Their open marriage led to affairs on both sides. Harry painted his fingernails, wore a black gardenia in a buttonhole, and had the bottoms of his feet tattooed. They bought their own tombstones, kept them on the roof of their apartment building, and grew fond of sunbathing naked on them. They roared around Paris in a green limousine convertible, with their whippets in the backseat wearing goggles.

The Crosbys’ marriage ended abruptly in 1929, when Harry killed himself in a murder-suicide pact with his mistress. His final entry in his journal, according to the author Geoffrey Wolff, read, “One is not in love unless one desires to die with one's beloved. There is only one happiness it is to love and to be loved.”

Caresse took the million-dollar fortune left her by Harry and returned to America, where, in addition to Black Sun Press, she established Crosby Continental Editions, which published Hemingway, Faulkner, Dorothy Parker and others. She would go on to open an art gallery in Washington, D.C., star in several experimental dance films, and ghost write pornography for her friend Henry Miller. Caresse also married a football player 18 years her junior, then divorced him to romance a black boxing star, and later had an affair with the famous architect Buckminster Fuller.

At the age of 60, while on a tour of Italy, Caresse fell in love with a run-down castle near Rome named Castello di Rocca Sinibalda. She bought the castle, which came with a title, making her Princess Caresse Crosby. Caresse turned the castle into an artist’s colony for her friends, and spent the rest of her life dividing her time between its hallways and the U.S.

Caresse Crosby died in 1970, in Rome. Just before she died, a documentary filmmaker made a short movie about life in her castle. While giving him a tour, 70 year-old Caresse flashed the camera. No doubt her breasts were marvelously well supported.

Adam Pearl, of Meridian, Idaho, owns a pet squirrel named Joey, who enjoys Whoppers (the candy) and running around Pearl's home, occasionally spooking guests. 

Joey doesn't usually bite, Pearl told KIVI, "but you never know," he added, "because he is a squirrel"—a squirrel, we now know, with a protective streak for his owner.

Or at least his owner's house.

Because on Tuesday, when a burglar entered, hoping, apparently, to make off with some of Pearl's guns, Joey sprang into action and attacked, driving the thief from the home with much less loot than he hoped for. (Pearl's gun safe was never breached.)

Joey's heroism might have gone unnoticed except for an observant cop, who saw some scratches on a suspect's hands. When asked if it was the work of a certain squirrel, the suspect admitted it was. 

"He said, 'Yeah, damn thing kept attacking me and wouldn't stop until I left,'" Pearl said the cop told him.

You probably shouldn't keep a pet squirrel for a lot of reasons, but Pearl and Joey seem to be getting along for now, even if Joey probably just wants to spend his days hanging out with other squirrels and not being called to violently defend his master's stuff. 

Robert the Bruce was one of Scotland's national heroes, a warrior who successfully fought for Scottish independence. Ultimately it wasn't battle that killed Robert the Bruce, but a disease today believed to be leprosy. He died in 1329, just one month shy of his 55th birthday.

After the king's death his body and his organs were buried separately from each other, as was customary for monarchs at that time. His guts were buried where he died in Cardross, as the body was easier to embalm without them. His corpse went to Dunfermline Abbey with a massive funeral procession of knights in black robes, but not before his heart had been removed and embalmed separately. 

Robert had requested that his heart be taken on a tour of the Holy Land and presented before God at Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre before ultimately being buried at Melrose Abbey in Roxburghshire. The heart was given to Sir James Douglas in a metal urn to be worn on a necklace. However before Douglas and his company of knights could undertake the heart's holy tour, they were called to fight against the Moors attempting to take Spain—the heart went along with.

Sir James Douglas was killed in a surprise attack, but before the confronting his attackers he is said to have thrown the heart urn ahead of him and shouted, "Lead on brave heart, I'll follow thee." Robert the Bruce's heart was carried along with Douglas' remains back to Scotland. 

The heart was buried along with Douglas near Melrose Abbey. In 1920 it was exhumed, and then buried again without a marker. In 1996 during excavations of the abbey ruins the urn was discovered and confirmed to hold the heart of Robert the Bruce. His heart was finally interred within Melrose Abbey, almost 700 years after he had initially requested it.

In 1988, Yi Nianhua, a frail, sickly woman in her 80s, spent many evenings scribbling elegant characters at a table in her kitchen in the small rice-farming village of Shangjiangxu Township, China. With only a blunt writing brush, the elongated script came out fat and blotchy on the newsprint she used for paper. But Cathy Silber, a professor at Skidmore College in New York, worked alongside Yi in her kitchen, diligently deciphering and studying the written language.

“Out of the thousands of scripts that are gender-specific to men, here we have one that we know is gender-specific to women,” says Silber, who has been researching Nüshu since 1985. Yi was one of the last remaining writers of Nüshu, a fading script that only women knew how to write and read.

Stemming from the southwestern Hunan Province county of Jiangyong, a small group of women in the 19th and 20th centuries practiced this special script that no man could read or write. The writing system allowed these women to keep autobiographies, write poetry and stories, and communicate with “sworn sisters,” bonds between women who were not biologically related. The tradition of Nüshu is slowly vanishing, but at one time gave the women of Shanjiangxu freedom to express themselves.  

In the middle of the 20th century, it wasn’t uncommon for Chinese women of higher socioeconomic classes to write songs, ballads, complaints, or stories, as Wilt Idema details in the book Heroines of Jiangyong: Chinese Narrative Ballads in Women’s Script. However, it was extremely rare to find such intimate texts from peasant women. As of 2012, there were approximately 500 known texts written in Nüshu, ranging from four-line poems to long autobiographical narratives. Today, the texts that have survived give researchers such as Silber the opportunity to peer into the daily lives of Chinese women throughout this period of history.

When Nüshu was first discovered by people outside of Jiangyong in the 1980s, the media sensationalized the script as an invented, secret language that women could use to spite men and a patriarchal society. This is what initially drew Silber to study Nüshu. But what she found was that men were well aware that women had been writing in the script. It wasn’t an entirely new, made-up language but actually a writing system for the local dialect, and if men heard Nüshu read aloud they most likely would have been able to understand. Men mostly just didn’t care to learn how to write in women’s script.

“Men were not exactly clamoring to be let in on this ‘secret,’ just as they were not storming the lofts demanding to learn embroidery,” Silber says. “Even though it wasn’t a secret, it was for all practical purposes used exclusively by women.”

During the 19th century, many of the communities throughout China were structured around a highly patriarchal system. Women had to follow the “three obediences”—obey one’s father, husband, and son. The practice of foot binding—preventing young girls from walking to show their high social standing—was still widespread throughout Jiangyong County, and unmarried girls were tucked away in house lofts doing needlework, weaving, and household chores.

“Jiangyong County girls were referred to as ‘upstairs girls,’” writes Fei-wen Liu in the book Gendered Words. Historically, writing in China had been a privilege of men, Liu explains, while women were largely denied access to literacy. Even when women could write and receive education, it was largely limited to urban elites. Yi Nianhua, born in 1906, came from an educated family and was one of the few girls who was allowed to attend classes with boys, says Silber.  

The exact origins of Nüshu are hazy. Scholars have debated various plausible hypotheses for why the script was created. Some have suggested that it derived from writing systems among southwestern local minorities, or even inscriptions found on oracle bones. A local legend says that it was first written by an imperial concubine in the late 11th century, who used Nüshu to communicate the sorrows of her life to people back home—a subject Silber has written about for the magazine Ms. The most popular explanation is that Nüshu was created in retaliation of women’s exclusion from education.

“I wouldn’t say that, ‘oh, women were oppressed and deprived of access, and therefore they [created Nüshu],’” says Silber. “But, I would say that the emergence of this kind of phenomenon is consistent with a very sex-segregated society.”

No concrete historical evidence exists to prove any of these theories.

The first definite record of Nüshu dates to 1931, but Silber and most academics reason women likely began writing it in the early years of the 19th century. The script is syllabic, each sign standing for a distinct unit of sound in the local dialect. More than 1,000 signs have been counted thus far, according to Idema.

“It’s more efficient than Chinese because it’s phonetic,” says Silber. “A single symbol would represent every syllable with the same sound. So you get more bang for your buck with each character.”

Additionally, Nüshu’s elegant, elongated lines contrast the stocky, squat blocks of Chinese characters. The visual beauty of Nüshu is distinguished by fine wisps and thin strokes, flanked by diamond shapes and precise dots. Some people even called it ‘mosquito writing’ because the characters looked like they were drawn by the legs of an insect, says Silber.

Traditionally, women would use a sharpened bamboo stylus dipped in ink, and write verse on paper, cloth, and fans. However, Yi and the last surviving writers were forced to use what they had, even writing the beautiful characters down with a ballpoint pen on the edges of newspapers.

Nüshu was used in a variety of ways, often reflecting the different phases of women's lives. Young girls would write letters to each other, as well as prayers, plights, and pleas to goddesses that they would leave at temples. One of the most common texts found in Nüshu were the “third day missives,” or sanzhaoshu—a cloth-bound book written and delivered to brides the third day after their weddings. The books contained messages of congratulations—and condolences—from the bride's mother, female relatives, sisters, and peers. Women also wrote lengthy autobiographies. Unlike diaries, these texts contained narrative verse, telling the life story of the woman, says Silber.

In addition to the written language, women also recited Nüge or “women’s songs,” tunes that had a particularly “haunting minor melody,” says Silber. The Nüshu tradition has even inspired the composer Tan Dun’s recent concert called The Secret Songs of Women, allowing the text to be sung again. The song below, translated by Silber, was sung by Tang Baozhen, one of Yi’s sworn sisters.

On red paper, I write a letter.
I'll have my say.
Today you who know my heart haven't gotten out of bed,
Though the sun shines in the room, over the mountains.
I told you to avoid it and you didn't,
Now you're ill and it's too late.
A cold or a headache is easy to cure,
But you did it too soon after childbirth and died....
We spoke true words,
And if you'd kept them, you'd still be worth something.
We went to the street, bought red paper,
We bought red paper and made a contract.
We made a contract, and said those words,
Just like buying a field of rice seedlings.

The practice of Nüshu was passed down from mother to daughter, but the writing has dwindled drastically with time. During the 1949 Chinese Revolution, many texts were burned or destroyed. The new marriage law and socioeconomic reforms changed the state of society for women, which may have decreased the need for writing in a female-specific script, notes Liu. Some women also had their writing buried with them when they died, leaving few surviving original scripts from the period.  

Yi died in 1991 at the age of 85. The last identified woman to possess genuine knowledge of Nüshu died in 2004, according to China Daily.

Since the outside world learned about Nüshu in the 1980s, there have been a few attempts to bring the written system back. Locals have held classes, and texts were preserved in a museum in Jiangyong County. Academics at Tsinghua University in Beijing taught Nüshu at one point (to both men and women) to preserve it. However, the women’s writing may soon be an extinct system.

Silber plans to return to Jiangyong County this summer. She is continuing her research for an upcoming book she’s writing about Nüshu and the women in the region.

“To me the most interesting thing of all is how these texts shaped women’s understandings of themselves,” says Silber. “This writing system teaches us quite a lot about the relationship between literacy and different powered groups in society.”

The film above is thought to contain the only known footage of Marcel Proust, the French author most famous for the masterwork In Search of Lost Time. The footage was captured in 1904, at the wedding of Élaine Greffulhe, the daughter of one of Proust's great friends. Watch as the couple pass, and then about 35 seconds in, after singletons have started skirting down the side, he appears—a man in a bowler hat and a light grey suit.

This footage was found in an archive at the Canadian National Cinema Centre by Jean-Pierre Sirois-Trahan, a professor at Laval University, in Quebec. It's impossible to know for sure if the man in the grey suit is Proust, but experts are enthusiastic about the possibility, TheGuardian reports. The author was known at this point in his life to favor the bowler hat/grey suit combo, and the man's face shape also matches pictures of Proust.

It's likely, too, that he would have been at this wedding. The bride's mother, the Countess of Greffulhe, was close enough with Proust that she inspired one of the characters in his books. 

 “There can be no absolute proof that it is indeed Proust," one expert told The Guardian. "But in any case, it’s a valuable document about the world of In Search of Lost Time.”

The South Philly crack full of jimmies was public art because of course. https://t.co/UQRggAEiQ2pic.twitter.com/SVGI4U1WS7

— Billy Penn (@billy_penn) February 15, 2017

Most days, South Philadelphia resident Rebecca Kenton looks out the window of her apartment and sees an ordinary, right-angled crack in the street, jutting through the concrete as street cracks are wont to do.

But yesterday afternoon—Valentine's Day—she saw that her friendly neighborhood infrastructure breach had dressed up for the holiday: Someone had filled it to the brim with rainbow sprinkles. Photos show the eight-foot crack multicolored and resplendent, if a little garish.

When Billy Penn asked the Streets Department about the impromptu maintenance, they refused to be caught up in the spirit. “Appropriate materials are used to do repairs; ice cream toppings are not one of them," they replied.

The outlet also tracked down the sprinkler, a restaurant worker named Dave S. Pettengill who moonlights as a public artist. Pettengill "has produced multiple pieces based on street flaws," Billy Penn reports. This one, which he calls "A Valentine to Philly," took three pounds of sprinkles. Don't worry Streets Department—he expects it to melt in the rain.

For about as long as heraldry has been around, the heart symbol has been a common feature on coats of arms and other armorial bearings. The earliest examples date back to the Middle Ages. “You can find [hearts on] ancient arms back when there were actual heralds going from shire to shire, recording arms from people who had themselves either adopted or created [their own coats of arms],” says David Robert Wooten, the executive director of the American College of Heraldry.

The exact meaning of any single symbol on a coat of arms can vary widely. These are symbols, after all, that were created for very specific people or families. “A hundred years from now, that meaning will be completely lost, and only the person in that family and the persons in his immediate family would have known what was intended,” Wooten says. One exception to this, however, are canting (or punning) arms, which are designed to act as a sort of visual play on a family name. For instance, a coat of arms for someone named Hartford might feature a heart above water, literally fording a river. 

When hearts are employed, as they often are, they can absolutely stand for the sorts of ideas we might expect them to today: love, loyalty, fealty, kindness, and the like. They can also carry a religious connotation, say when they're depicted surrounded by flames or thorns. But in some instances, a heart can also represent concepts that are a far cry from feelings of kindness and love. Maybe the most famous instance of this alternate symbology is the use of hearts in the coat of arms of Denmark. One feature of its design is a portion featuring a trio of blue lions surrounded by red hearts (pictured above). Here, the hearts are in fact thought to represent lily pads.

In Denmark, these symbols are often referred to as “søblade” or “sea leaves,” and in the abstract, the shape of a lily pad is similar to the classic heart. Still, Wooten believes that even if this was one intended meaning, the hearts would also have carried their more traditional meaning as well. “You could say it’s a lily pad, but it’s red and it’s shaped like that, so the intent is that it’s a heart more than anything else.”    

Depicting hearts in alternate configurations, to subtly change their meaning, is even more common. Instead of a regular heart, with the scalloped bumps at the top and the point at the bottom, there are many cases where the shape has been repurposed. Among the ways Wooten says he's seen hearts incorporated into other symbols include as the hand basket of a sword, the end of a key, as an arrowhead, and as the leaves of a shamrock or trefoil.

Famously, the coat of arms of the 15th century Italian military leader Bartolomeo Colleoni includes three upside-down hearts. Historically however, it's believed these are meant to symbolize pairs of testicles. This coat was likely an example of punning arms, with Colleoni sounding remarkably close to the Italian word “coglioni,” meaning “testicles.” In life, Colleoni was also rumored to have three balls. “Obviously it didn’t spread too far and wide, otherwise, we’d see a lot of testicular hearts out there,” says Wooten  

Thanks to their instant recognizability and infinite symbolic malleability, hearts are one of the most used symbols in heraldry, and they aren’t likely to disappear any time soon. “It’s not for ownership of an item, or bravery in battle, or anything else, it’s for love of family, love of God, love of whatever, so it’s an easy thing to insert into and commonly express,” says Wooten. Also, testicles.  

The National Bonsai Museum isn’t the most heavily visited museum in Washington, D.C., but it might be the most unique. This amazing horticultural collection includes 150 miniature specimens, lovingly doted on by an expert bonsai staff. 

The museum sprouted into life in 1976 when the people of Japan presented Secretary of State Henry Kissinger with a gift of 53 bonsai trees to commemorate the U.S. bicentennial. (This wasn't the first time Japan gave the U.S. a botanical gift—in 1912 it sent over the 3,000 cherry blossom trees that still decorate the National Mall).

The bonsai collection, located within the Department of Agricultures “living museum,” the National Arboretum, has expanded gradually over the years with donations and now includes an assortment of Beeches, Maples, Pines, and others species. There are several different schools of bonsai on display at the museum. Formal center-of-the-pot trees are referred to as Chokkan style, while the daring kengai trees twist around their containers in a simulation of trees growing down mountains. Scores of other styles include "root-over-rock," "multi-trunk," and "forest" (i.e. several trees in one container).

The crown jewel of the Bonsai Museum is a Japanese White Pine that has been “under training” since 1625—a tree that is as old as the first colonial settlements in North America. This stunning example of bonsai was actually in Hiroshima in August, 1945 and survived the atomic bombing. It was planted and tended to by five generations of the Yamaki family before they donated it to the U.S. 

Patrick Acton of Gladbrook, Iowa has been building detailed scale models with wooden matchsticks for nearly 40 years. In that time he’s created around 70 elaborate designs, from the Notre Dame Cathedral to the Wright Brothers’ Flyer.

The Matchstick Marvels Museum is where these painstaking creations are displayed. At any time, about 20 models can be viewed by the public, most of which are large scale creations. Action’s model of Minas Tirith from the Lord of the Rings, for example, is over six feet tall, while his model of the battleship USS Iowa stretches a full 13 feet. Other models include the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars, the Hogwarts castle from Harry Potter, the Space Shuttle Challenger, and a fire-breathing dragon.

Each model is comprised of hundreds of thousands of two-inch matchsticks, which Action has spent hours shaping, warping, and gluing together with careful precision in an impressive one-man operation. For those interested in the all the work that happens ahead of construction, Action’s drawings and plans for the models are also on display, as well as the tools he uses, and a short video documentary on his process.

Matchstick Marvel Museum isn’t the only place to see Action’s work; while most of his creations aren’t for sale, he did create several matchstick models for Ripley's Believe It or Not locations around the world. An interactive steampunk-style locomotive with wings now lives in Ripley's Times Square location.

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

When the final season of Showtime’s Masters of Sex started this past Fall, it occurred to me that the show’s protagonists, sex researchers Dr. William Masters and Virginia Johnson, would be excellent subjects for a FOIA request to the FBI - after all, not only were they sex researchers when such a thing was frowned upon, but they were sex researchers when J. Edgar Hoover was in charge of the Bureau.

While the FBI said they had nothing on Johnson, they did indicate records on Masters were sent to the National Archives and Records Administration, so I filed a request with them. A couple months later, NARA came through - the eight responsive pages provided were not exactly what you would expect, but they’re interesting nonetheless.

If the FBI was dealing honestly, then they never investigated Masters - but they did field multiple letters asking for information about him. At least initially, this dealt with Masters’ role as part of the nonprofit The Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS). Giving out accurate information about human sexuality was always a priority for Masters, and, well, some people didn’t like that, including representatives of various churches.

Others were more concerned with the possibility of communism infiltrating the National Council of Churches and, as a result, SIECUS, which they endorsed.

Each request was rebuffed in a letter purportedly from Hoover, citing that any files were confidential.

This all makes more sense when you check out the reply that Hoover sent to Paul McKnight, editor of New Jersey’s Newark Weekly newspaper. McKnight had asked for “any information the Bureau may have concerning the activities of SIECUS,” and also politely turned down - however, the internal note appended to Hoover’s response, while noting that the FBI had no file on Masters, does include all of the details on which SIECUS doctors (and their family members) were communists and/or homosexuals.

Because after all, this IS from Hoover’s FBI.

If the note is any indication, this was either more than paranoia or it was specifically the very type of paranoia practiced at the FBI. Apparently, according to the Bureau’s Bufiles system, they had SIECUS’s Dr. William Genne on a list of NCC members with ties to communist fronts. As for whether or not this is true? That will probably require another FOIA request.

Read the full file embedded below:

It’s not hard to see why Native American tribes considered the ancient sandstone pillars of the Medicine Rocks in southeastern Montana sacred. The remote landscape is both peaceful and beautiful, covered with strange geological rock formations. In the 1800s, Sioux and Northern Cheyenne camped near these unique perforated rocks, which are filled with holes and tunnels crafted by rainfall and wind over 61 million years. 

The Medicine Rocks site is populated with chained and isolated arches, and caves and spires reaching 80 feet high and 200 feet across. Tribes came here searching for medicinal plants to use in their vision quests, as well as lookout points for hunting bison and resting spots while traveling from the Yellowstone River Valley to the Black Hills. Later, in 1883, future President Theodore Roosevelt visited the land and wrote, "As fantastically beautiful a place as I have ever seen."

The 320 acres of Medicine Rocks still offers physical reminders of the past. You can find thousands of tribal petroglyphs that predate European settlement, signatures of cowpunchers, a sheepherder's famous profile of a woman with a flower beside a bird, and recent inscriptions of elk, cattle brands, and military mentions.

Carving into the rocks is prohibited and park officials ask you be careful not to vandalize the site or disturb earlier markings. Instead, they recommend climbing the "swiss cheese" rocks and taking in the sights of the golden eagles flying in the skies above, and the mule deer and sharp-tailed grouse moving on the prairie below.

Medicine Rocks is set about 11 miles north of Ekalaka and 30 miles west of both the North Dakota and South Dakota borders. The site was privately owned until Carter County, Montana seized the property in the 1930s. The state of Montana took over ownership in 1957 and in 1993 it had the site declared a "primitive park." Today, the park is managed by the state Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks.

Next time you want to tell a loved one how you feel, you can build them an electrically powered heart. In the video above posted on YouTube by MrfixitRick, two copper-wire hearts spin together as one in a romantic dance (set to the doo-wop tune "Be Excellent to Each Other"). The simple spinning invention is called a homopolar motor.

These motors are easy to make. To build one of your own, all you need are three common household items: copper wire, an AA battery, and a magnet. For the magnet in the video, MrfixitRick used a bass speaker and a stack of pennies to direct the current flow.

The flat, negative end of the battery is placed on top of the magnet. When the copper wire touches the battery's positive terminal tip it completes the electric circuit and begins to rotate. The homopolar motor was first demonstrated by scientist Michael Faraday in 1821, making it the very first electrical motor to ever be built.

"The flat heart shape is the most basic of homopolar motors," MrfixitRick writes in this how-to guide. But people have gotten creative and elaborate with the wire shapes.

Someone crafted a carousel.

MrfixitRick has also made a dragonfly homopolar motor that even hums and vibrates.