Category: Bazaar News

Some Christmas themes are universal: be good, and you will be rewarded. Misbehave, and you’ll wish you hadn’t. Here in the United States, that reward often takes the form of giant piles of presents; the punishment, a lump of coal, or worse, no gifts at all. The idea is pretty much the same in Iceland, but the specifics are a little different. Where we have Santa, Icelandic kids can expect visits from the band of bearded wild men known as the Yule Lads. 

As Jaya Saxena explained for Atlas Obscura in 2015, every year, beginning on December 12, the 13 mountain men descend from their mountain homes. They come down singly, one each night, until Christmas Eve, which means 13 full days of fear-driven good behavior. 

The lads are said to be the sons of the child-eating trolls Grýla and Leppalúði. Like large, slightly unsettling versions of Snow White’s seven dwarfs, each lad has his own quirks, his own silly name, and his own demands. Spoon Licker requires a batter-covered spoon; Sheep Worrier tries to harass the sheep; and Meat Hook wants a taste of every family’s smoked lamb, which he steals with his hook. In exchange for these bribes, good children receive a small gift in their shoes each night. Bad children get a raw potato.

The Yule Lads weren’t always this cooperative. A few centuries ago, the lads and their friends Krampus and the Yule Cat bypassed the raw potatoes and went straight to kidnapping naughty children. Instead of asking nicely, they stole their milk and meat and ate people’s candles, leaving families to freeze in the dark.   

The troublemakers got a makeover in 1932, when a man named Jóhannes frá Kötlum penned a jolly poem called “Jólasveinavísur.” The poem reframed the lads’ mischievous past and bestowed them with the goofy names they bear today. 

These days, depictions of the Yule Lads have them dressed in red costumes, slinging big sacks of toys. In other words, the lads now look suspiciously like Santa. This is simply inaccurate, folklore expert Magnús Skarphéðinsson told Atlas Obscura: “I have met more than 800 Icelanders that have seen elves, and four or five that have seen Yule Lads. They were old fashioned dressed, poor, a little dirty, a little rude and hungry, trying to get food.” 

Whether the real Yule Lads are portly or gaunt, friendly or fierce, one thing’s for sure: When it comes to coercing good behavior out of little kids, they get the job done.  

A version of this story originally ran in 2015; it has been updated for 2023.

The brown-clad United Parcel Service workers deliver more than 24 million packages a day to more than 220 countries and territories around the world; they even deliver to the North Pole. But what’s it really like to be a UPS driver? Here are some little-known facts from drivers who did their time.

UPS knows time is money, and it is obsessed with using data to increase productivity. Jack Levis, UPS’s director of process management, told NPR in 2014 that “one minute per driver per day over the course of a year adds up to $14.5 million,” and “one minute of idle per driver per day is worth $500,000 of fuel at the end of the year.” The hand-held computer drivers carry around, called a DIAD (short for Delivery Information Acquisition Device), tracks their every move. Ever wondered why your UPS person can’t stick around to hear your life story? He probably has between 150 and 200 stops to make before the end of the day, and they’re being timed. “You’re trained to have a sense of urgency,” Wendy Widmann, who drove for 14 years, told Mental Floss in 2015. “Be polite, but you gotta go.” Sensors inside the truck monitor everything from whether the driver’s seat belt is buckled to how hard they’re braking, and if the truck’s doors are open or closed. All this data is compiled for UPS analysts who use it to come up with time-saving tactics.

All drivers must attend and graduate from a specialized training class called “Integrad,” which teaches them everything they need to know out in the field. They learn how to handle heavy boxes, which are filled with cinder blocks to simulate real packages. They’re taught how to start the truck with one hand while buckling up with the other to save time. And the “slip and fall simulator” teaches them to walk safely in slick conditions. There’s even a miniature delivery route complete with tiny houses “where they will drive in their truck and make simulated deliveries at houses,” UPS representative Dan Cardillo told Mental Floss in 2015.

Except for backing into a loading dock, “we generally will tell them the first rule of backing up is to avoid it,” Cardillo said. The way UPS sees it, backing up increases the likelihood a driver will unintentionally bump into something (or someone). In 2014, UPS driver Bill Earle told NPR he rarely goes a single day without being told he’s backing up too often or too quickly.

When a driver goes five years without an accident, they get to choose an item from retail stores’ catalogs. “The more years of safe driving you had, the better the gifts got,” Kevin Dyer, a former driver who spent 38 years behind the wheel, told Mental Floss in 2015. “One of the first few years I got a highway safety kit. It had everything in there: flares, booster cables, flashlight, tape, you name it. I got a set of golf clubs one year. I wore them out.” One “avoidable” accident bumps you back to zero. “I went seven years and then I backed into a small tree,” Widmann said. “Then I had to start from the beginning again. I was just getting to the good gifts like bikes and gas grills.”

A driver who goes 25 years without an accident is inducted into the UPS “Circle of Honor” and receives a special patch and a bomber jacket.

In 2023, UPS finally agreed to install air conditioning in its vehicles. According to the agreement, the technology will be included in every small package delivery vehicle the company buys after January 1, 2024. Without air conditioning, the vehicles get so dangerously hot that drivers have to run their routes with the doors open to stay cool. “It is cold in winter and hot in the summer,” Widmann said. “It was wonderful to have 50 and 60 degree days.”

At UPS, they’re referred to exclusively as “package cars.”

UPS “package cars” don’t come with radios, so if you want to listen to music, you have to pack your own player.

“Most UPS drivers are attacked by dogs,” one former New Orleans-based UPS driver told Mental Floss in 2015. “What you do is jump on the hood of the nearest vehicle and don’t move. There were some drivers that sat on the hood of a car for an hour or more.” Of course, UPS doesn’t train its drivers to jump on top of cars to avoid dogs, but it does tell them to shout “UPS!” before entering the property so dogs won’t be caught off guard. Their handheld devices can also keep track of houses that might have dangerous dogs on the property and warn drivers ahead of time. “We wanna protect our drivers,” Cardillo said.

Want to make your UPS driver’s job easier? In a 2012 Reddit thread, one driver said, “if you see them pulling up and you aren’t in the middle of something, meet them half way, or walk up to their truck.” Every extra step adds a little bit of time to their day. “If 10 of my 150 stops do that in a day I would get home 10–15 minutes earlier and actually get to spend time with my family,” the Reddit comment continued.

UPS used to be super strict about facial hair. Beards were not allowed, and mustaches were permitted—as long as they didn’t grow below the corners of the mouth. And men’s hair couldn’t touch the top of the collar. In 2020, UPS relaxed its rules. Now, workers can sport beards, longer hair, and natural Black hairstyles.

On average, drivers who have been at the company for at least four years are paid $42 an hour, according to UPS. At the end of his 38-year tenure, Dyer said he was making more than $75,000 a year.

As of July 2023, the Teamsters union is pushing for a pay increase, in addition to an improved wage system and better working conditions and safety measures; the union has voted to authorize a strike if a new contract is not ratified by the time the existing one expires on July 31.

Some drivers get cash, especially around the holidays. Wayne Turner, a former driver in California was once greeted at the door by a butler who gave him and his partner each $50. “It was the strangest thing, but we made an extra $50 that day,” he told Mental Floss in 2015. But more frequently, drivers get non-monetary tips like wine and food. Occasionally, they’ll get random (but valuable!) stuff: “I had a place that made permanent air filters that you can rinse out,” Turner said. “They gave me those any time I needed one. Those were selling at the time for $65 or $75. A construction company gave me a piece of 16-foot wood that would have cost hundreds of dollars.”

More tenured drivers get the privilege of bidding for the routes they want. The best routes, employees say, cover lots of ground but have few stops. So rural routes are often run by employees who have done their time.

By obsessively tracking its drivers (see #1), UPS found that “a significant cause of idling time resulted from drivers making left turns, essentially going against the flow of traffic,” according to Elizabeth Rasberry, a former UPS public relations manager. Drivers are instead encouraged to drive in right-hand loops to get to their destination.

Today, many of the routes are designed to avoid left turns, and UPS says the policy has saved 100 million gallons of gas and reduced carbon emissions by 100,000 metric tons since 2004. The habit sticks with drivers long after they’ve handed in the keys to their big brown truck. As Dyer said, “Even today I’ll sit in traffic and I’ll kind of talk to the car in front of me and say, ‘Turn right to go left!’”

“UPS drivers see a lot,” one former driver told Mental Floss. And they’re not just talking about making judgments based on packages. UPS drivers can discern a lot about your life through a cracked door. “We make instant judgments about you. We see if you have a maid. We know what kind of food you’re cooking, or if you have a dog. We know if you have orgies at your house. We can tell when someone’s getting a divorce.”

“There will always be someone on your route who is interested in pursuing a sexual relationship with you,” a former driver told Mental Floss. “The male drivers have stories about women who come to the door dressed in a negligee, and the women experience the same with the opposite sex. It happened to me twice.”

A few notable deliveries: In 1987, UPS delivered an iceberg chunk roughly the size of a fridge to a children’s museum in Venezuela. In 2007, two whales were shipped from Taiwan to Atlanta. And in 2008, a group of 2200-year-old Chinese terracotta warriors and horses were shipped via UPS to four American museums for exhibition.

A version of this story originally ran in 2015; it has been updated for 2023.

Often spinning over 100 miles per hour, a tornado is a violently rotating column of air in contact with the Earth and clouds that can cause major destruction. The powerful Tuscaloosa-Birmingham tornado of 2011, for example, lofted a 36-ton empty coal hopper rail car almost 400 feet. The equally impressive Hackleburg tornado on the same day carried jeans from a damaged denim factory more than 40 miles. Here are 12 facts about these dangerous whirlwinds.

When winds higher in the atmosphere are moving faster than wind closer to the ground, this creates vertical wind shear, which is a change in wind speed or wind direction with height. Much like a paddle wheel, this wind shear generates horizontal rotation. But to become a tornado, the horizontal rotation needs to become vertical. When a cool, dry air mass covers warm moist air, the overlap creates instability: The hot air wants to rise because it’s less dense, forming updrafts. This updraft can tilt the horizontal rotation into vertical rotation—the beginnings of a tornado.

A cap of warmer air can prevent this rotation from tilting, because it can block the updrafts from penetrating very high into the atmosphere. But if conditions change—say, as the heat of the day reaches its peak by mid- to late-afternoon—rising air from the surface layer of air becomes warmer than the cap, breaking it. Air can now ascend several miles into the sky. A thunderstorm with a rotating updraft—a supercell—will develop.

However, even when all these ingredients are present, the supercell may not produce a tornado. Scientists are still trying to identify the triggering mechanism is that turns a supercell into a twister. “The atmosphere has a way of getting the four together in ways with minor differences to either create a large EF5 tornado or a just some rain. We don’t know when and where these ingredients form in just the right way,” Roger Edwards, lead forecaster at the Storm Prediction Center, told Science of the South. In fact, 70 percent of tornado warnings issued are for storms that never produce tornadoes. It may seem like crying wolf, but think of the 30 percent of warnings that are accurate. And not all tornadoes come from supercells: With names like gustnado and landspout (cousin to the more famous waterspout), these form in unique ways but are much weaker than supercell tornadoes.

Tornadoes have occurred on every continent except Antarctica. However, the region known as Tornado Alley, in the south-central U.S., has earned that name for a good reason: Though it accounts for just 15 percent of the land in the U.S., it’s seen nearly 30 percent of the country’s tornadoes, with 16,674 twisters touching down there between 1950 and 2010. It averages 268 tornadoes per year. These tornadoes arise because of a clash between warm moist air from the Gulf of Mexico near the ground, colder air in the upper atmosphere from the west, and a third layer of very warm dry air between the two levels from the southwest that tries to keep the other two at bay.

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Huntsville have discovered that topography and roughness of the landscape can also influence the power of a tornado. In simulations, the “rougher” the area is, the stronger and wider a tornado can get. Forested areas have a rougher surface than open agricultural areas, and forested mountains are even rougher, according to Kevin Knupp, lead of the Alabama research team. But the picture is more complicated than that, according to his colleague Anthony Lyza, who has found that tornadoes in Alabama are affected by topography. According to Lyza, tornadoes weaken as they proceed up mountains and hills—but they strengthen as they proceed down. And sometimes, regardless of whether a tornado is moving up or down a hill or mountain, the land mass will cause a tornado to dissipate.

Tetsuya Fujita was a Japanese meteorologist living in the town of Kokura during World War II. Kokura was the primary target of one of the atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on Japan, but due to cloudy conditions, that bomb was unleashed on its secondary target—Nagasaki. Fujita’s study of the damage of the nuclear bomb blasts led to the discovery of meteorological phenomena called microbursts, among many other breakthroughs. Fujita’s passion for storms earned him the nickname “Mr. Tornado” from his colleagues at the University of Chicago.

Before 1971, all tornadoes were essentially treated the same, regardless of strength, size, path, or damage zone. That year, Fujita released his method of categorizing them: The F-scale, which indirectly measures the wind speed of a tornado. Because of difficulties getting accurate wind speeds inside a tornado, Fujita looked at how much destruction various tornadoes caused and back-calculated wind speeds based on that. He then created a scale that ranged from F1 to F12, linking together the Beaufort scale of wind strength, long used by mariners and meteorologists, and Mach scale (yes, like jets). An F1 tornado corresponds to a 12 on the Beaufort scale, and an F12 corresponds to Mach 1. He then added an F0 (40-72 mph) to have a baseline at a level that wouldn’t cause appreciable damage to most structures (influenced by Beaufort’s 0—calm/no wind), and maxed the tornado part of the scale at F5 (261-318 mph). An F5 is the highest rating given to a tornado, because Fujita believed this to be the theoretical upper limit for how fast winds in a tornado could reach.

An F0 causes light damage to chimneys, breaks tree branches, and damages billboards. An F5 causes incredible damage. It can lift framed houses off their foundations and carry them a considerable distance. It can toss cars more than 300 feet through the air. It can completely debark trees. Even steel-reinforced concrete isn’t safe.

According to meteorologist Charles A. Doswell, there are problems with using the F-scale. “The real-world application of the F-scale has always been in terms of damage, not wind speed,” he told Science of the South. “Unfortunately, the relationship between the wind speeds and the damage categories has not been tested in any comprehensive way.”

In 2004 and 2005, dozens of meteorologists and civil engineers collaborated through a research center at Texas Tech University on a more objective scale, which they named the Enhanced Fujita Scale. A year later, the EF-scale went into use in the U.S. The EF-scale has more rigorous and standardized measures of damage, adds additional building and vegetation types, accounts for differences in construction quality, dramatically lowers the wind speeds associated with stronger tornadoes, and expands degrees of damage. Or, as the tornado-chasing character played by Bill Paxton in Twister (1996) puts it, “It measures a tornado’s intensity by how much it eats.”

Although radar originated in the 1930s, it wasn’t used for the weather until the 1950s. The first radar detection of a tornado occurred in 1953, using a radar designed for naval aircraft. Far more important was the discovery of the tornado vortex signature in 1973, based on observation of a tornado in Union City, Oklahoma. Scientists discovered there was a telltale pattern that appeared before the tornado formed.

Before then, researchers had used films, photos, or damage markings for clues. The discovery of the tornado vortex signature led to the modern tornado warning system in the U.S., including a national network of next-generation Doppler radars (NEXRAD) operated by the National Weather Service, the Air Force, and the Federal Aviation Administration.

The tornado vortex signature appears on the radar as red/yellow (indicating high outbound velocity) and green/blue (inbound velocity) pixels occurring adjacent to each other over a relatively small area. This is also called a velocity couplet, and it’s associated with the mesocyclone, the rotating vortex of air within the supercell. Radar can also be used to detect a hook echo extending from the rear part of the storm, resulting from precipitation wrapping around the backside of the rotating updraft. Radar can also detect the debris ball from a tornado; objects lofted into the air by a tornado reflect radar waves very well.

The tornado season of 2011, known as the Super Outbreak, was one of the most deadly in U.S. history, with 59 tornadoes in 14 states causing more than 550 fatalities. Most of these deaths occurred in Alabama and Missouri. The three most deadly tornadoes of 2011 were the Joplin, Missouri EF5, which took 161 lives; the Hackleburg EF5, which claimed 72; and the Tuscaloosa-Birmingham EF4, which killed 65. Six of the top 10 deadliest tornadoes that year occurred in Alabama. April 27, 2011, was the deadliest tornado day in the U.S. since March 18, 1925. 

From 1985 to 2010, more tornado-related deaths in the southeast U.S. occurred in mobile homes than in any other structure. In the decade before 2011, half of all fatalities occurred in mobile homes. Some of this is related to the fact that the Southeast in general has more mobile homes than any other U.S. region.

A year after the 2011 Super Outbreak, scientists assessed 2000 adolescent survivors of the tornadoes for signs of major depressive episodes (MDE) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Roughly 1 in 15 adolescents suffered from PTSD and 1 in 13 developed MDE. Unsurprisingly, both also occurred in greater frequency when a family member had been injured. Nearly one-third of the children surveyed suffered from hyperarousal—a state of tension produced by hormones released during the fight-or-flight reaction—and re-experiencing (or reliving) the event.

Despite the continued occurrence of massive tornadoes, fatalities from these weather phenomena have declined. Until the 1930s, the average death toll from tornadoes was well above 200 per year. Since the late 1990s, the average has hovered near 50 deaths per year. Thanks to better technology, models, and data, scientists can increasingly predict conditions that are likely to produce a tornado, thus saving a greater number of people.

A version of this story ran in 2015; it has been updated for 2023.

Ever been told to “mind your p’s and q’s”? Unless you were working a mechanical printing press at the time, chances are you were fairly subtly being told to mind your manners. But what exactly are your p’s and q’s?

The short answer is that no one really knows. But just because we don’t have a definitive answer doesn’t mean that we don’t have any answers at all. In fact, there are a number of competing theories as to what the original p’s and q’s might have been, some of which are a lot more convincing than others.

Probably the most widely held explanation also happens to be the most straightforward: p’s sounds a bit like “please,” q’s sounds a bit like “thank yous,” so to mind your p’s and q’s ultimately means “to mind your good manners.” It’s a neat idea, but it’s not a particularly reliable one: There isn’t enough textual evidence to support it, which suggests this is probably a relatively recent bit of folk etymology, based on the modern interpretation of the phrase p’s and q’s. So if this isn’t right, what is?

A much less well-known explanation suggests that your p’s and q’s might actually have their origins way back when handwritten Latin documents were still being widely compiled and interpreted.

Latin is a tough enough language to get your head around at the best of times, but in the Medieval period, scholars and scribes were seemingly determined to make things even harder. In the interests of keeping their texts brief and compact, an elaborate system of scribal abbreviations was employed that saw various combinations of dots, dashes, bars, hooks, tails, stars, and other flourishes and embellishments attached to letters as abbreviations of lengthier words. Anyone reading these texts would have to be careful to interpret these symbols correctly, or else risk misreading or mistranslating—and because p and q were among the most commonly embellished letters of all, that would naturally involve minding your p’s and q’s.

This is another neat idea that unfortunately falls down both through lack of evidence, and given the fact that the most complex of these scribal abbreviations had long since fallen out of use before the phrase p’s and q’s first appeared in the language. But when exactly was that?

The earliest record we have of someone’s p’s and q’s comes from a snappily titled Jacobean stage play called Satiromastix, or The Untrussing of the Humorous Poet written by the English playwright Thomas Dekker in 1601. The line in question reads, “Now thou art in thy Pee and Kue, thou hast such a villanous broad backe.”

Both Dekker’s unusual spellings (pee and kue) and his equally unusual phrasing (“in your p’s and q’s”) has led to suggestions that the original p’s and q’s might have been items of clothing—namely, a sailor’s pea-coat or pea-jacket (a kind of thick, loose-fitting overcoat) and a queue or queue-peruke (a long plait of hair that was once a popular fashion accessory among high-ranking naval officers). But how does a sailor’s pea-coat and a naval officer’s wig give us a phrase meaning “mind your manners”? That’s a good question, and it’s not one that can be sufficiently answered—unless, of course, we’ve only got things half right …

Forget the pea-coat for a second. Imagine instead that you’re wearing your favorite queue-peruke while simultaneously learning to dance a courtly French jig. You’d understandably have to be careful not to hit the other dancers in the face with the tail end of your peruke as you were paying close attention to your feet. And the French word for foot? Well, that’s a pied. So all in all you’d have to mind your pieds and queues.

If this explanation all sounds a bit too contrived, you’re quite right to be suspicious of it. There’s no record of pieds and queues in any other context in English, and queue hairpieces really didn’t come into fashion in England until the early 18th century—that’s more than 100 years after Dekker’s play. Speaking of which …

In 1607, five years after the publication of Satiromastix, Dekker published another play called Westward Hoe. It contains the line, “at her p. and q. neither Marchantes [merchant’s] daughter, Aldermans wife, young countrey Gentle-woman, nor Courtiers Mistris [mistress], can match her.” Same author, same phrase. But very different spelling.

The Oxford English Dictionary points out that the fact that Dekker uses periods after the p. and q. in this line suggests that they might originally have been abbreviations—in which case the pee and kue he used five years earlier might just have been phonetic spellings, like aitch or em. But if p. and q. is really an abbreviation, what does it stand for?

According to the The English Dialect Dictionary, p and q means “prime quality”—but that explanation doesn’t quite account for the and that separates them, and so is probably another later invention. One unlikely idea is that they stand for penta and quinque, the Greek and Latin words for “five,” which would make the original p’s and q’s a classicist’s reminder that Greek and Latin word roots should never mix. Much more likely is that p and q stands for “pints and quarts,” in which case the phrase might originally have referred to a landlord totting up a customer’s tab, or to a drinker being told to mind how much they’re putting away. Or, given that there are four pints in a quart, perhaps the original implication was something along the lines of “take care of the little things, and the big things will look after themselves.”

The “pints and quarts” theory is plausible, but even the OED admits that it can “neither be substantiated nor dismissed.” Perhaps the most likely solution, then, is one of the simplest.

This is the explanation Merriam-Webster ascribes to: Children being taught to read and write commonly mix up their lowercase p’s and lowercase q’s, so telling them to “mind their p’s and q’s” means telling them to be extra careful, so as not to make a mistake. Similarly, another theory suggests that the original p’s and q’s might have been the individual pieces of moveable type used back in the early days of printing, when typesetters (who would be working with the letters back to front) might easily mistake a lowercase p for a lowercase q and ruin an entire page of printed text.

There is at least some evidence to support the theory that the p’s and q’s you’re being told to mind are nothing more than the letters of the alphabet. Oxford Dictionaries, for instance, cites a half dozen examples of the phrase p’s and q’s being used in an extended sense to mean essentially “your ABCs,” but problematically the earliest reference they’ve found in this context only dates back to 1763, whereas Dekker was writing in the early 1600s.

Not only that, but q is one of the least used letters of the alphabet—presumably a child (or a typesetter, for that matter) is much more likely to confuse more common letters of the alphabet, like d and b or t and f than they are p and q? Why would that become the established expression? Despite these reservations, however, this final theory looks to be the most likely explanation on offer—at least, until another theory comes along.

A version of this story ran in 2015; it has been updated for 2023.

The concept of a road trip is as American as apple pie, and yet, devising the “best” U.S. driving route is a bit of a head scratcher. Much depends on time parameters, personal preference, and frankly, how long you want to spend behind the wheel.

In 2015, Tracy Staedter at Discovery News decided to take on that challenge, enlisting Randy Olson—the data scientist behind the famed (and super helpful) Where’s Waldo algorithm—to devise what you might call the platonic ideal of the United States road trip. The parameters were: It had to hit all of the 48 continental states; every stop had to be a National Natural Landmark, a National Historic Site, a National Park, or a National Monument; and of course, had to be confined to car travel and within U.S. borders.

With a stop in Washington, D.C. and two in California, the result is 50 points of all American awesomeness. Here are the destinations:

1. Grand Canyon, Arizona 
2. Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah
3. Craters of the Moon, Idaho 
4. Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming 
5. Pikes Peak, Colorado 
6. Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico
7. The Alamo, Texas
8. The Platt Historic District, Oklahoma 
9. Toltec Mounds, Arkansas 
10. Elvis Presley’s Graceland, Tennessee 
11. Vicksburg National Military Park, Mississippi 
12. French Quarter, Louisiana 
13. USS Alabama, Alabama 
14. Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida 
15. Okefenokee Swamp Park, Georgia 
16. Fort Sumter National Monument, South Carolina 
17. Lost World Caverns, West Virginia 
18. Wright Brothers National Memorial Visitor Center, North Carolina 
19. Mount Vernon, Virginia 
20. White House, Washington, D.C. 
21. Colonial Annapolis Historic District, Maryland 
22. New Castle Historic District, Delaware 
23. Cape May Historic District, New Jersey 
24. Liberty Bell, Pennsylvania 
25. Statue of Liberty, New York 
26. The Mark Twain House & Museum, Connecticut 
27. The Breakers, Rhode Island
28. USS Constitution, Massachusetts 
29. Acadia National Park, Maine
30. Mount Washington Hotel, New Hampshire 
31. Shelburne Farms, Vermont 
32. Fox Theater, Michigan 
33. Spring Grove Cemetery, Ohio 
34. Mammoth Cave National Park, Kentucky 
35. West Baden Springs Hotel, Indiana 
36. Abraham Lincoln’s Home, Illinois 
37. Gateway Arch, Missouri 
38. C. W. Parker Carousel Museum, Kansas 
39. Terrace Hill Governor’s Mansion, Iowa 
40. Taliesin, Wisconcin 
41. Fort Snelling, Minnesota 
42. Ashfall Fossil Bed, Nebraska 
43. Mount Rushmore, South Dakota 
44. Fort Union Trading Post, North Dakota 
45. Glacier National Park, Montana 
46. Hanford Site, Washington 
47. Columbia River Highway, Oregon 
48. San Francisco Cable Cars, California 
49. San Andreas Fault, California 
50. Hoover Dam, Nevada

That list starts with the Grand Canyon, but you could theoretically begin anywhere as long as you drive in sequence after that. Staedter guessed it would take a little over nine days of driving straight through, but more realistically is a two- or three-month trip.

For the details on how he came up with the route, check out Olson’s blog. After determining the stops, the main goal of the algorithm was to find the shortest distance between points.

Olson wrote to Staedter: “Instead of exhaustively looking at every possible solution, genetic algorithms start with a handful of random solutions and continually tinker with these solutions—always trying something slightly different from the current solution and keeping the best one—until they can’t find a better solution any more.”

And whether or not you understand the specifics of how it was created, the map is truly a marvel and the kind of itinerary you’ll probably spend all winter dreaming about. See the map here, and for additional travel goals, check out Olson’s road trip maps for South America and Europe.

A version of this story ran in 2015; it has been updated for 2023.

Few statues are as enduring and iconic as Michelangelo’s David (which found itself in the news in 2023 when a Florida school principal was asked to resign after the statue was shown to sixth grade students at her school, allegedly leading to parent complaints). But while much of the world could sketch this majestic masterpiece from memory, few know the quirks and curiosities that went into its creation.

At first glance, Michelangelo’s famed naked man may not scream “biblical hero.” But if you look closely, David cradles a sling over his left shoulder and clutches a rock in his right hand. These items and the statue’s name identify the subject as the David who faced down the vicious giant Goliath. Michelangelo broke from convention by not including the future king’s fearsome foe in his sculpture. In a further departure from tradition, art historians believe David depicts the legendary underdog before the great battle, in part because of the anxiety that’s clearly etched on his face. 

David stands 17 feet tall, nearly three times the size of the average man. 

It’s too big to fit perfectly with the rest of his body. This asymmetry is believed to be Michelangelo’s clever nod to David’s nickname, manu fortis, meaning “strong of hand.” 

You can tell he’s a southpaw from where the slingshot lies—but strangely, his body position is more suggestive of a righty.

The block of marble that became one of history’s most famous masterpieces proves the old cliché about one man’s trash being another’s treasure. Michelangelo created David from a piece of marble that had been twice discarded by other sculptors. Agostino di Duccio gave up on a project using the block, after which it sat untouched for 10 years. At that point, Antonio Rossellino took a crack at the block but decided it was too much of a pain to work with. When Michelangelo finally got his hands on it, the marble had been waiting for 40 years for someone who was up to its challenge. 

In 1501, the city government of Florence commissioned Michelangelo to create the piece as part of a series of statues meant to adorn the roofline of Florence’s cathedral dome. But upon its completion, Michelangelo’s patrons were so overwhelmed by David’s beauty that they decided to scrap that plan and place it where it could be appreciated up close. In 2010, a Florence art project showed David as it was intended, perching a replica high on the Cathedral’s exterior, as well as in every other spot that had been suggested upon its completion in 1504. 

Sixteenth-century Italian painter and architect Giorgio Vasari wrote of David, “Whoever has seen this work need not trouble to see any other work executed in sculpture, either in our own or in other times.” With praise like that, how could the people of Florence tuck the statue up high on a rooftop? 

Five years before David’s debut, Michelangelo’s Pietà made him famous. But it was his David that defined the 29-year-old High Renaissance artist as a master sculptor. Four years later, in 1508, he would begin work on his greatest painting achievement in the Sistine Chapel. 

Specifically, it’s believed that Michelangelo based David’s pose on depictions of Hercules, a hero with deep ties to the city of Florence who had even appeared on the Florentine seal for centuries. By creating such a glorious statue in the Roman tradition, Michelangelo helped ensure the work was instantly embraced by the people of Florence. 

After much debate, David was placed outside Florence’s government offices in the Palazzo Della Signoria, creating a strong connection in the public’s mind. In 1494, the powerful Medici family was exiled from Florence, and as such, this new republic was under constant threat from both the returning Medicis (who regained power in 1512) and the surrounding states, making Florence feel like the biblical David. It’s said the statue’s wary gaze was knowingly pointed toward Rome. 

These political overtones led to the statue being attacked twice in its early days. Protesters pelted it with stones the year it debuted, and, in 1527, an anti-Medici riot resulted in its left arm being broken into three pieces.  

On September 14, 1991, Italian artist Piero Cannata snuck a small hammer into the statue’s home at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence. He approached the towering statue and promptly smashed off the second toe on his left foot. The museum’s visitors leapt into action, converging on David’s attacker, preventing him from doing any further damage and subduing him until the police arrived. When asked why he’d do such a thing, Cannata claimed that a model for the Renaissance artist Paolo Veronese, who was a rough contemporary of Michelangelo, had asked him to do it. 

Since David is one of the world’s most popular pieces of art, there are reproductions of it on t-shirts, mouse pads, and just about any medium you can imagine. But even full-fledged replicas exist—and Florence has two of them.

While the real David sits in a museum, a full-sized copy stands in its original place in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, and a bronzed replica towers over the city from its perch on Piazzale Michelangelo. 

Fans of The Simpsons will recall a plot where the locals of Springfield demand that David put on some pants. While this request was used as a comical extreme of censorship, it mirrored actual events in the nude statue’s past. 

In 1857, the Grand Duke of Tuscany surprised England’s Queen Victoria with a replica of Michelangelo’s David. It’s said the prim royal was so scandalized by the piece’s nudity that a detachable plaster cast fig leaf was created to preserve the modesty of this marble man and protect the gentlewomen who might visit him at the modern day Victoria and Albert Museum in London. 

Over 8 million visitors a year tromp through the Galleria dell’Accademia to take in the sight of David. Unfortunately, studies show that all this foot traffic creates vibrations that amount to little, near-constant earthquakes that are tearing at the marble and through recent restoration work of the centuries-old piece. 

David has stood on display at Florence’s Galleria dell’Accademia since 1873. But as more and more tourists were drawn to take in the wonder of David, the Italian government began to itch to define the national treasure’s ownership. In 2010, the Italian government began a campaign to solidify its claim to the iconic marble statue. 

Does the statue belong to the city of Florence or the nation of Italy? A court case burrowed through the history of both in an attempt to figure it out. Florence’s then-mayor Matteo Renzi declared, “This is a new instance of David versus Goliath. Our battle is for a different way of managing the cultural patrimony of a city that lives off culture.” The dispute doesn’t seem to have been resolved.

A version of this story ran in 2015; it has been updated for 2023.

Who wouldn’t want a teacher like Ms. Frizzle? Brought to life by children’s author Joanna Cole—who died on July 12, 2020, at 75 years old—and illustrator Bruce Degen, Ms. Frizzle and her trusty vehicle transported kids and kids-at-heart into the wonderful world of science. Take a ride down memory lane with these fun facts about The Magic School Bus.

By the 1980s, educational children’s books had come a long way. Whimsical wordsmiths like Dr. Seuss and Beverly Cleary had produced energizing page-turners that kids actually wanted to read.

Still, certain subjects remained largely ignored. Tales like Ramona Quimby, Age 8 were helpful for English teachers, but science instructors were still left without entertaining reads for their students. Eventually, educators started asking publishers to fill the void.

“In the 1980s, during the great era for picture book sales, we kept getting requests from teachers who were interested in seeing more [picture] books in the science category,” Craig Walker, the late former vice president of Scholastic, Inc., told Publisher’s Weekly in 2006. “So we had the breakthrough idea of putting curriculum science inside a story.”

One day, inspiration struck when Walker remembered how much he’d enjoyed school trips as a boy. “… I thought about doing books about kids going on field trips to places they really couldn’t: through a water system, to the bottom of the ocean, inside the Earth.”

To helm his new franchise, Walker hired offbeat illustrator Bruce Degen and science/humor writer Joanna Cole. Their first installment, The Magic School Bus at the Waterworks, was released in 1986. Readers from around the world fell in love with both the book and its red-headed protagonist.

Walker modeled Ms. Frizzle after a beloved, eccentric second-grade teacher from his childhood school. Degen and Cole have also each cited a teacher from their respective childhoods as inspiring some of Ms. Frizzle’s numerous quirks. “Ms. Frizzle is based on my junior high school science teacher, who was always running ahead,” Cole said in a 2007 interview with TeachingBooks.net. “She didn’t stop to make sure that we understood everything. She just went on. And I loved her for that.”

The name Frizzle itself was also a portmanteau of frizz and drizzle, which Cole reportedly came up with on a rainy day.

The Magic School Bus at the Waterworks was a difficult juggling act. Cole knew from the start that her story needed to be funny and informative in equal measure. She also knew she’d have to boil down complicated ideas into terms any child could understand—without boring her young readers. “I was very nervous about it, because I didn’t know if I could do this—to combine all these things,” Cole admitted. “So, I cleaned out my closets, and I washed things. I mean, the kinds of things I never do. And one day I just said to myself, ‘You have to write today. You have to sit down.’ And so I wrote.”

Right off the bat, her opening paragraph captured the tone she was going for. “I knew I had a teacher, and I knew I had a class, and I knew they were going to take these school trips that were going to be wacky, but I didn’t know what the teacher was going to be like. So, I wrote these words: ‘Our class really has bad luck. This year, we got Ms. Frizzle, the strangest teacher in school. We don’t mind her strange dresses or her strange shoes. It’s the way she acts that really gets us.’” Using those lines as her guide, Cole fleshed out Ms. Frizzle’s character and the journey that was about to unfold.

Degen would sift through old elementary school picture day portraits. Then he’d pick out a kid whose outfit and hairdo he liked and convert them into a caricature. The illustrator believes most of those selected children “are in the class and … don’t know it.” Still, at least one was notified.

Nervous and bespectacled Arnold was, in fact, based on a good friend of Degen’s son. “I didn’t tell him until he was 16 years old,” Degen revealed. The news didn’t go over too well. “He said, ‘I don’t look like Arnold!’ I said, ‘Well, that day, you were wearing … that white and yellow striped polo shirt. And you had that blondish, curly hair; and that was you. You were Arnold.’”

This three-horned creature resembles a curly-tailed Triceratops. Native to eastern Africa, the animal now roams the Hawaiian islands as well, thanks to careless pet owners. Originally, it was Cole who hatched the idea of giving Frizzle a lizard sidekick. Degen then chose this particular species because it was reportedly the weirdest-looking one he’d ever seen.

Launched in 1994, the PBS series lasted for four seasons and 52 episodes. The hard-rocking intro was penned by lyricist Peter Lurye and sung by 1950s icon Little Richard, who is perhaps best-known for his 1955 mega-hit, “Tutti Frutti.”

Lily Tomlin became the voice of Ms. Frizzle in 1994, but has said some kids don’t believe it. “[These kids] didn’t believe I’m Ms. Frizzle, so Ms. Frizzle would say something and then they’d turn real fast to me and say, ‘You say it!’ I had to audition for Ms. Frizzle,” Tomlin said in a 2014 interview. At the 1995 Daytime Emmy Awards ceremony, she won the Outstanding Performer in an Animated Program category.

The Magic School Bus and the Climate Challenge, released in 2010, explained the scientific facts of climate change in a kid-friendly way, to the chagrin of some parents. Cole felt the book was both timely and necessary. “Kids should know about [global warming] and talk about it and they should talk to their elders about it,” she argued. “They can be a real influence because it’s their world that’s being changed.”

Cole typically spent six months researching the topic of a given installment. Afterwards, she’d spend another six months putting the actual book together, with Degen illustrating it throughout this same period.

Eventually, Ms. Frizzle decided to branch out into the realm of social studies. Those books find Frizzle going on vacation, far away from her students and bus. To help set them further apart from the scientifically inclined stories, Degen used a darker sort of paint called gouache in place of his standard watercolor.

To commemorate a quarter century’s worth of adventures, an actress dressed as Ms. Frizzle rang the final stock market closing bell at the NASDAQ MarketSite in Times Square on October 17, 2011.

Lily Tomlin once again brought Ms. Frizzle to life in The Magic School Bus Rides Again. The reboot featured Fiona Frizzle (voiced by Kate McKinnon), the younger sister of Ms. Frizzle (now Professor Fizzle), who wields the keys to the legendary bus. It first appeared in Netflix queues in 2017, and was canceled after just two seasons (although three 45-minute specials aired in 2020).

The show, which had a theme song done by Lin-Manuel Miranda of Hamilton, was originally meant to be a computer-animated series titled The Magic School Bus 360° and was scheduled for a 2016 release.

A version of this article was originally published in 2015; it has been updated in 2023.

The tradition of sitting down for a family meal at the end of the day is as American as meat and potatoes—or sloppy joes and macaroni and cheese. Over the past 100 years, our idea of what constitutes a “traditional” American dinner has gone through quite the evolution. In the below video, Mode.com breaks up the century’s most iconic family dishes decade by decade.

The video starts with a hearty meal of Franconia potatoes and roast beef. Flash forward a decade to 1925, and the plate is now covered with a pile of chicken and vegetables heaped atop a bed of rice. Rice was introduced to what would become the United States in the 1600s; as the centuries went on, it became a staple for many.

Things start to get a bit more processed in the post-war era. Spam makes its dinner plate debut in the video in 1945. The canned meat was actually invented in the 1930s, but its popularity boomed as fresh meat became scarce during World War II. The processed pork is followed by the ubiquitous TV dinner of the ‘50s. The one shown in the video features roast turkey with gravy, mashed potatoes, and peas. It’s no coincidence that it looks like a small Thanksgiving feast: The first TV dinner was actually modeled after the holiday’s traditional fixings. 

The meals’ transition from hearty, cooked-from-scratch fare to processed foods highlights a shift in many households. After World War II, families had access to new gadgets like refrigerators and microwaves and an abundance of canned, convenient food that cut down the time they needed to spend cooking. The 1970s-style fondue feast shown in the video also demonstrates how women’s roles were starting to change from housewife to hostess.

From the 1950s TV dinners to the sloppy joes and boxed macaroni and cheese of the ’80s and hard-shell taco meals of the ’90s, it’s apparent that healthy eating rarely took priority over convenience. Things began to turn in the 21st century, with meals of sushi and grilled salmon with quinoa and kale representing the two most recent decades portrayed. That’s definitely an improvement over the fried spam we were eating in the ’40s.

A version of this story originally ran in 2015; it has been updated for 2023.

Cryptozoology is the study of creatures whose existence has yet to be—or else cannot entirely be—proved or disproved by science. These creatures, known collectively as cryptids, include examples like the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, and the Himalayan Yeti, yet these famous cases are by no means the only ones on record. In fact, practically every country and corner of the globe has its own legendary monster or mystery creature that supposedly dwells there, from giant bats in Java to enormous water hounds in Ireland.

Ahools are enormous carnivorous bats that are said to inhabit the rainforests of Java in Indonesia. Believed to have a wingspan in excess of 10 feet (making them roughly the same size as a condor), ahools are said to be covered in a thick brown or black fur like fruit bats, but unlike bats have long, powerful legs and claws and are supposedly capable of pouncing on and snatching up live prey—including humans, if the stories are to be believed—from open ground. Sightings of ahools are often dismissed simply as mistaken glimpses of owls, eagles, and other large birds of prey that inhabit the same rainforests, but some sources claim the creatures do indeed exist, and may even be an isolated and as-yet undiscovered species descended from pterosaurs.

The Ainu people of Japan have long believed that Volcano Bay, off the south coast of Hokkaido, is home to an enormous octopus called the Akkorokamui. Numerous sightings of the creature have been made over the years. British missionary John Batchelor, who was working on Hokkaido in the early 1900s, recorded one such sighting in his book The Ainu and Their Folklore, writing that “a great sea monster with large staring eyes” had attacked three local fishermen and their boat: “The monster was round in shape, and emitted a dark fluid and noxious odor … The three men fled in dismay, not so much indeed for fear, they say, but on account of the dreadful smell. However that may have been, they were so scared that the next morning all three refused to get up and eat; they were lying in their beds pale and trembling.”

The Altamaha-ha is a river monster, measuring 20 to 30 feet long, with large flippers and a seal-like snout that is said to inhabit the mouth of the Altamaha River near Darien, Georgia. Although numerous accounts of sightings of the Altamaha-ha have apparently been made over the years, the fact that Darien was founded as New Inverness by a band of Scottish Highlanders in 1736 seems to suggest that the legend is probably a descendant of Scots settlers’ tales of the Loch Ness Monster.

The Dobhar-chú, or “water-hound,” is a legendary otter-like animal that supposedly lives in isolated freshwater loughs and rivers in Ireland. Usually described as a half-dog, half-fish hybrid, with a long snaking body covered in thick fur, the Dobhar-chú is large and heavyset, but can move very fast both in the water and on land—even, according to one story, being able to keep up with a galloping horse. Sightings of the creature date back several centuries in Ireland, and there are at least two gravestones (including one, in County Leitrim, dating back as far as 1722) of people who were reportedly attacked and killed by a Dobhar-chú.

A number of Central African tribes are said to believe the swamps of the Congo basin are inhabited by an enormous, semi-aquatic creature known as the emela-ntouka. Similar to but larger than a hippopotamus, and armed with a single long bony tusk or horn in the center of its forehead, the emela-ntouka is apparently herbivorous. But, like the hippo, it has a reputation for being dangerously confrontational when disturbed, and has even been known to kill creatures even larger than itself; its name means “elephant killer.”

The waters off the coast of Cape Greco National Park in Cyprus are supposedly home to a sea monster known locally as To Filiko Teras, or “the friendly monster.” As its name suggests, the monster has apparently never attacked humans, but it has nevertheless gained a reputation for destroying fishermen’s nets and upturning smaller boats. Stories of the Filiko Teras are probably inspired by the Greek legend of Scylla, a huge sea monster that attacks Odysseus’s boat in The Odyssey. Sightings of the creature are probably nothing more than glimpses of squids or octopuses.

The grootslang, or “great snake,” is a legendary monster said to dwell in the caves of the Richtersveld, a mountainous desert region in northwestern South Africa. In local mythology, grootslangs were primordial creatures comprised of the head and front of an elephant and the back and tail of an enormous serpent. When Earth was created, the grootslangs were all apparently destroyed, but according to legend, some survived and retreated to the deepest caves of the Northern Cape province. Tales of enormous tusked snakes—probably inspired by real-life sightings of enormous pythons that live in the same area—have rumbled on in South African folklore ever since. The mysterious disappearance of a British diamond magnate named Peter Grayson in the Richtersveld caves in 1917 is sometimes blamed on a grootslang.

The Jersey Devil is a cryptid said to live in the Pine Barrens region of New Jersey. According to legend, the creature was the 13th son of one of the state’s earliest settlers, Mother Leeds, who offered her son to the devil upon his birth in 1735 because she and her husband couldn’t afford to raise another child. Ever since then, hundreds of sightings of a grotesque, two-legged hooved monster with a sheep-like head and large scaly wings have been reported in the Pine Barrens, including one famous incident in the winter of 1909 when a long trail of hoof prints, crossing under fences and over walls and rooftops, mysteriously appeared in the snow one night.

The Mapinguari is a large ape-like creature said to inhabit the rainforests straddling the border of Brazil and Bolivia. According to local folklore, the Mapinguari stands around 8 feet tall, has a tough (and apparently bulletproof) covering of scales on its back, thick red fur on its head and belly, long curved claws, and, if all of the stories are to be believed, a second mouth in the center of its stomach. When approached by humans, the Mapinguari is said to rear up on its hind legs like a bear and can supposedly produce a foul-smelling scent to ward off potential hunters. As recently as 2007, a sighting was reported in The New York Times.

The Ogopogo is a vast water serpent said to reside in Lake Okanagan in British Columbia. Sightings of the Ogopogo date back to the early 1800s, when the creature was originally known by the name n’haitaka , meaning “lake devil.” The name Ogopogo wasn’t adopted until the 1920s, when it was lifted from the title of a popular English musical hall number called The Ogo-Pogo: The Funny Foxtrot. According to the lyrics, the singer is “looking for the Ogo-pogo, / The funny little Ogo-pogo. / His mother was an earwig, his father was a whale, / I’m going to put a little bit of salt on his tail.”

This 4-foot-long subterranean cryptid is somewhat like a giant earthworm. Also known as the “Mongolian death worm,” the olgoi-khorkhoi apparently lives beneath the sands of the southern Gobi Desert, only coming up to the surface in the warmer summer months or when the ground becomes too wet for it to survive. Sightings of the worms date back several centuries among Mongolians, many of whom claim the olgoi-khorkhoi is able to spit venom or even acid from its mouth, while its body is apparently coated with such a toxic slime that anyone who happens to touch it will be instantly killed.

“Momo”—short for “Missouri monster”—is a mysterious apeman similar to Bigfoot, which is said to inhabit the forests along the Mississippi Riveri. First reported in 1971, Momo is described as 7 to 8 feet tall with a broad, pumpkin-shaped head, and is supposedly covered head to foot in thick dark fur. According to some accounts, the creature is notoriously aggressive, and like the South American Mapinguari, is able to produce a grotesque smell—even worse than a skunk’s—to ward off would-be attackers.

The folklore of the British Isles is littered with tales of mysterious black dogs that supposedly haunt rural towns and villages across the country. The Shuck—a huge black hound said to dwell in East Anglia, on the far eastern coast of England—is probably one of the most famous, having apparently attacked a church in the village of Bungay, Suffolk, during a thunderstorm in 1577. According to local records, while the villagers were sheltering from the storm in the church, a gigantic black dog burst through the church’s door, killing a man and his son, and pulling down one of the pillars supporting the church steeple, which collapsed into the nave. As it fled the church, the Shuck apparently left scorch marks in the wood of the church door that can still be seen to this day.

Tatzelwurms are lizard-like creatures that are supposed to inhabit the most isolated regions of the Alps. Although accounts of their size and appearance vary, they are said to be around 2 to 5 feet in length, with a broad cat-like head and a wide gaping mouth. Their forelimbs are short and armed with long claws, but they have no hind legs and instead their bodies taper into a long snake-like tail. Numerous sightings of the creatures—which are known as tatzelwurms in Germany, arassas in France, stollenwurms in Switzerland, bergstutzens in Austria, and basiliscos in Italy—have been made all over the Alps, including a recent spate of sightings reported in Italy’s Il Giorno newspaper as recently as 2009.

Tahoe Tessie is a lake monster said to live in the waters of Lake Tahoe on the border of central California and Nevada. Sightings of Tessie date back to at least the 19th century and usually describe a big snake-like creature with a long neck and humped back, which swims so fast that it can even keep up with sailboats. According to local folklore, Tessie sightings are always more common in even-numbered years than odd.

Yowies are a species of Bigfoot-like apes said to inhabit the Australian Outback. Usually described as tall and stocky, and covered head to foot in thick black or dark red fur, most accounts of yowie sightings claim the creatures are shy and very easily spooked, although some tales claim they can be confrontational and can produce a blood-curdling scream when threatened. Today, the creatures are generally considered a myth, but in the 19th century, sightings were remarkably common. In 1892, an Australian amateur adventurer and scholar named Herbert J. McCooey—who had supposedly spotted a yowie near Bateman’s Bay in New South Wales several years earlier—wrote to the Australian Museum in Sydney, offering to capture one of the creatures for a fee of £40 (about $5783 in 2023). He failed.

A version of this story was published in 2015; it has been updated for 2023.

In the ocean, cuttlefish are the masters of disguise. The mollusks belong to the same class, Cephalopoda, as squids, octopuses, and nautiluses. Like some octopuses, cuttlefish can change their shape, color, and texture to blend in with seaweed, sand, coral, and pretty much any other underwater scenery they encounter.

But how would a cuttlefish fare in a less-familiar setting? Would it be able to camouflage itself against the more structured patterns seen in a human being’s living room, for instance?

The BBC’s Richard Hammond set out to answer that question in an episode of Miracles of Nature. Hammond designed an underwater living room set, complete with a black-and-white checkerboard floor, striped walls, and a calico-patterned couch. Then, he released a cuttlefish into the room, and observed how it adapted to its surroundings. The cuttlefish swam around a bit to investigate, then settled on the checkerboard floor; its skin color changed to a black-and-white pattern that didn’t quite master the geometric regularity of the floor. The little guy had better luck when plopped down on the couch. It was able to camouflage itself against the chintz by altering its color to a mottled reddish brown and its skin texture from smooth to bumpy. The experiment proved that cuttlefish are, indeed, masters of camouflage—though they probably wouldn’t win a game of hide-and-seek against a human competitor.

How do they do this neat trick? Cuttlefish have pigmented organs called chromatophores distributed throughout their skin. The super-intelligent mollusks can control the shape and texture of the chromatophores so that they reflect or absorb light, thereby changing colors according to the message the cuttlefish want to convey. Scientists have been able to quantify common cuttlefish patterns [PDF] and interpret them as means of camouflaging themselves from predators, hunting prey, attracting mates, or defending their territory.

Biologists continue to plumb the secrets of cuttlefish intelligence. In 2020, researchers put custom-made sets of 3D glasses on the mollusks to gauge their depth perception.

A version of this story was published in 2015; it has been updated for 2024.

In describing the system of wires that comprises the internet, Neal Stephenson once compared Earth to a computer motherboard. From telephone poles suspending bundles of cable to signs posted warning of buried fiber optic lines, we are surrounded by evidence that at a basic level, the internet is really just a spaghetti-work of really long wires. But what we see is just a small part of the physical makeup of the net. The rest of it can be found in the coldest depths of the ocean. Here are 10 things you might not know about the internet’s system of undersea cables.

More than 95 percent of international data is transmitted by wires at the bottom of the ocean called submarine communications cables. In total, they are hundreds of thousands of miles long and can lie 8000 meters below the surface—as deep as Mount Everest is tall. The cables are installed by special boats called cable-layers. It’s more than a matter of dropping wires with anvils attached to them—the cables must generally be run across flat surfaces of the ocean floor, and care is taken to avoid coral reefs, sunken ships, fish beds, and other ecological habitats and general obstructions.

The diameter of a shallow water cable is about the same as a soda can, while deep water cables are much thinner—about the size of a Magic Marker. The size difference is related to simple vulnerability—there’s not much going on 8000 feet below sea level; consequently, there’s less need for galvanized shielding wire. Cables located at shallow depths are buried beneath the ocean floor using high pressure water jets. Though per-mile prices for installation change depending on total length and destination, running a cable across the ocean invariably costs hundreds of millions of dollars.

There’s disagreement as to why, exactly, sharks occasionally gnaw on submarine communications cables. Maybe it has something to do with electromagnetic fields. Maybe they’re just curious. Maybe they’re trying to disrupt our communications infrastructure before mounting a land-based assault. The point remains that sharks have been discovered chewing on the internet, and they sometimes damage it—but “fish bites” account for less than 1 percent of cable faults in the industry’s history, according to the International Cable Protection Committee. Still, companies such as Google have shielded their cables in shark-proof wrappers.

It seems like every couple of years, some well-meaning construction worker puts his bulldozer in gear and kills Netflix for the whole continent. While the ocean is free of construction equipment that might otherwise combine to form Devastator, there are many ongoing aquatic threats to the submarine cables. Sharks aside, the internet is ever at risk of being disrupted by boat anchors, trawling by fishing vessels, and natural disasters. A Toronto-based company has proposed running a cable through the Arctic that connects Tokyo and London. This was previously considered impossible, but climate change and receding ice have moved the proposal firmly into the doable-but-really-expensive category.

In 1854, installation began on the first transatlantic telegraph cable, which connected Newfoundland and Ireland. Four years later the first transmission was sent, reading: “Laws, Whitehouse received five minutes signal. Coil signals too weak to relay. Try drive slow and regular. I have put intermediate pulley. Reply by coils.” This is, admittedly, not very inspiring. (“Whitehouse” referred to Wildman Whitehouse, the chief electrician of the Atlantic Telegraph Company.)

For historical context: During those four years of cable construction, Charles Dickens was still writing novels; Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass; a small settlement called Dallas was formally incorporated in Texas; and Abraham Lincoln, candidate for the U.S. Senate, gave his “House Divided” speech.

During the height of the Cold War, the USSR often transmitted weakly encoded messages between two of its major naval bases. Soviet officials thought strong encryption was a bother—and also overkill—because the bases were directly linked by an undersea cable located in sensor-laden Soviet territorial waters. No way would the Americans risk World War III by trying to somehow access and tap that cable.

They didn’t count on the U.S.S. Halibut, a specially fitted submarine capable of slipping by Soviet defenses. The American submarine found the cable and installed a giant wiretap, returning monthly to gather the transmissions it had recorded. This operation, called IVY BELLS, was later compromised by a former NSA analyst named Ronald Pelton, who sold information on the mission to the Soviets. Today, tapping submarine communications cables is standard operating procedure for spy agencies.

With respect to electronic espionage, one big advantage held by the United States is the key role its scientists, engineers, and corporations played in inventing and building large parts of the global telecommunications infrastructure. Major lines of data tend to cross into American borders and territorial waters, making wiretapping a breeze, relatively speaking. When documents stolen by former NSA analyst Edward Snowden came to light, many countries were outraged to learn the extent to which American spy agencies were intercepting foreign data. As a result, some countries are reconsidering the infrastructure of the internet itself. Brazil, for example, launched a project to build a submarine communications cable to Portugal that not only bypassed the United States entirely, but also specifically excludes U.S. companies from involvement.

As of 2022, there were more than 5000 satellites in orbit. We’re landing probes on comets, we’re deflecting asteroids so they don’t collide with Earth, and we’re planning missions to Mars. We’re living in the future! It just seems self-evident that space would be a better way to virtually “wire” the internet than our current method of running really long cables along the ocean floor. Surely satellites would be better than a technology invented before the invention of the telephone—right?

As it turns out, no. Though fiber optic cables and communications satellites were both developed in the 1960s, satellites have a two-fold problem: latency and bit loss. Sending and receiving signals to and from space takes time. Meanwhile, researchers have developed optical fibers that can transmit information at 99.7 percent the speed of light. For an idea of what the internet would be like without undersea cables, visit Antarctica, the only continent without a physical connection to the net. The continent relies on satellites, and bandwidth is at a premium [PDF] which is no small problem when one considers the important, data-intensive climate research underway. Today, Antarctic research stations produce more data than they can transmit through space.

The good news is that it’s hard to cut through a submarine communications cable due to the thousands of very lethal volts running through each of them. The bad news is that it is possible, as seen in Egypt in 2013. There, just north of Alexandria, men in wetsuits intentionally cut through the South-East-Asia-Middle-East-West-Europe 4 cable, which runs 12,500 miles and connects three continents. Internet speeds in Egypt plunged by 60 percent until the line could be repaired.

If you think replacing that one ethernet cable you can’t quite reach behind your desk is a pain, try replacing a solid, broken garden hose at the bottom of the ocean. When a submarine cable is damaged, special repair ships are dispatched. If the cable is located in shallow waters, robots are deployed to grab the cable and haul it to the surface. If the cable is in deep waters (6500 feet or greater), the ships lower specially designed grapnels that grab onto the cable and hoist it up for mending. To make things easier, grapnels sometimes cut the damaged cable in two, and repair ships raise each end separately for patching above the water.

As of 2023 there were more than 500 communications cables at the bottom of the ocean. Submarine cables have a life expectancy of 25 years, during which time they are considered economically viable from a capacity standpoint. But global data consumption has exploded. In 2013, internet traffic was 5 gigabytes per capita. In 2023, Finland has the world’s highest rate of data consumption, at nearly 36 gigabytes per month for each broadband subscription in the country. Fortunately, techniques in phase modulation and improvements in submarine line terminal equipment (SLTE) have boosted capacity of existing cables in some places by as much as 8000 percent. The wires we have are more than ready for today’s traffic.

A version of this story ran in 2015; it has been updated for 2023.

The polka dot may be a ubiquitous feature of dresses, bikinis, and twee collegiate bedspreads in the modern era, but as patterns go, it hasn’t been around for that long. The eye-popping pattern gets its name from the polka music craze that engulfed Europe in the mid-1800s.

“Marketers during this period hawked every product they could as polka-themed, including foods like polka pudding (a boozy confection of orange-water-flavored cream, drizzled with sherry ‘polka sauce’),” as design writer Jude Stewart writes in her book Patternalia, a cultural and historical exploration of graphic patterns like stripes, plaid, and yes, polka dots. “But much of it—polka curtains, polka hats—was identifiable by the spattering of sprightly dots.” Here are seven things you might not know about those cutesy dots.

In Germany, they’re Thalertupfen, after the silver coin called a Thaler, used as currency throughout Europe until the 1800s. In Spanish, the term is lunares, or little moons (also the word for moles). In French, clothes are à pois, or marked with peas. The English term comes from the mass popularity of polka music in Europe and the U.S. in the 19th century.

“The connection between the dance and the patterns on all that spotted merch is murky at best,” Stewart writes. “Possibly the spotted pattern evoked the lively half-step of the dance. It’s also unclear whether marketers intended all those polka hats, vests, and shoes as dancewear, or if calling something ‘polka’ just made a product seem more cheerful.” One of the earliest sources of the pattern’s name came from Godey’s Lady’s Book, a Philadelphia-based women’s magazine popular in the mid-1800s. 

Dotted patterns didn’t become popular until there were machines that could make them perfectly spaced. In Medieval Europe, irregular spots on fabrics would have reminded people of skin blemishes and of the blood-spotted handkerchiefs that signaled the onset of tuberculosis, University of Cambridge historian Steven Connor tells Stewart.

Abner Krill, a.k.a. Mister Polka-Dot or Polka-Dot Man, is a Batman villain who first appeared in a February 1962 comic wearing a skin-tight costume covered in colorful polka dots that would swell up to create deadly weapons at the push of a button. He used a getaway car called the Flying Polka Dot. 

Chuck Close, who passed away in 2021, created photorealistic portraits out of pixelated dots. “I discovered about 150 dots is the minimum number of dots to make a specific recognizable person,” he said in a 2002 interview with ARTZAR.com. 

It’s called a quincunx—or, in French, quinconce. The term comes from a pattern on Roman coins. 

Frank Sinatra’s first hit, recorded with jazz musician Tommy Dorsey in 1940, was a song called “Polka Dots and Moonbeams.”

A version of this story ran in 2015; it has been updated for 2023.

Unless you live in a scorching climate, heating your home is a necessary and unavoidable expense every winter. Rather than just accepting this as an annual hit to your wallet, try out some of these helpful tips to raise the heat and lower your bills.

You’ve spent money heating your house, so the last thing you want to do is to let that heat seep out. Warmed air leaking out around poorly sealed doors, window frames, power sockets, recessed light fittings, and other gaps is a big source of heat loss in homes. When the wind blows, you may even feel drafts from those gaps. Use caulk, foam strips, or expanding foam to seal up unwanted cracks in your home. Ventilation is important, but you can control it.

If your house is modern and well constructed, its walls, floors, ceilings, and roof will already contain some insulation material. Commonly, builders use affordable fiberglass or expanded polystyrene (EPS) to insulate homes. But many other types are available—from sheep’s wool to thin-but-effective NASA-style metallic “multifoil.” Add extra insulation to your home cheaply by layering up mineral wool in your attic. Thick curtains help to insulate glass at windows. If your windows are single-glazed, consider sticking transparent polyethylene film to your internal window frames to act as super-low-budget “double-glazing.”

Although some people seem to struggle with the concept, thermostats are self-regulating devices that keep spaces at a constant temperature. If you have room thermostats, decide what temperature you want for each room, set them, and then leave them alone. They have one job, so let them do it. Fiddling with them won’t do much besides cost you money. 

Although they’re not cheap, you can buy ultra-efficient learning thermostats—such as the Nest Learning Thermostat—that automatically track your patterns of temperature preference and auto-adjust accordingly.

Water has a very high specific heat capacity. It doesn’t like to warm up, so you have to input a lot of energy to force it to. On the upside, it also takes a long time to cool down, so it’s an efficient energy storage medium. To reduce the amount of energy used in heating up all that water, turn down your water heater a little. Many water heaters are factory-set to a 140°F (60°C) default, and reducing the temperature by as little as 10°F (5.5°C) will save you money—up to 5 percent of your water-heating costs.

Thermal energy is infrared radiation. With an infrared camera, cold spots in a house, like windows, appear dark or even black. The term emissivity describes the amount of infrared radiation that objects radiate. These days, you can fit low-emissivity (“low-e”) glazing in your home. A special coating on window glass makes it a better reflector of thermal energy, reflecting much more heat back into the room than standard glass by allowing less to radiate away outside. As a cheap alternative to replacement windows, stick low-e window film to your standard glass to improve its thermal performance.

Even if you don’t have solar panels, you can still take advantage of the sun’s energy to heat your home in the winter. Open your south-facing curtains at sunrise to make best use of the sun’s rays (which experts call “passive solar gain”). This works particularly well if your home has stone or concrete floors: These materials have a large thermal mass, meaning they soak up a lot of heat and release it slowly. Remember to close your curtains as soon as the sun dips to trap all that free heat.

Denser, cooler air stays closer to the ground, and warmer air rises. All that warm air isn’t much use to you up at the ceiling, so force it downwards with a low-speed ceiling fan. Simply reverse the fan’s setting, which sends the warm air upwards and redistributes it back down to mix with the rest of the air in the room, gradually raising the ambient temperature.

Some equipment in your home generates a lot of “waste heat” during normal operation. Think about a desktop computer. During processing, its CPU belts out waste heat that’s conducted to a heat sink and then dispersed with the aid of cooling fins and a fan. Computers—especially powerful gaming ones—are like convection heaters. Position your workstation where you can best use that thermal energy to help warm your room, for a free (though subtle) Grand Theft Auto-assisted heating system.

Working out raises your body temperature by burning calories of heat faster. Your body converts food energy into a nucleic acid called adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which, among other things, allows you to maintain a body temperature around 98.6°F (37°C). These energy-producing chemical reactions in your body generate heat, and they do more reacting when you exercise, temporarily raising your body temperature above normal.

Finally, you can always take your mom’s advice for lowering the thermal conductivity of your own external insulating layer—otherwise known as putting on another sweater.

A version of this story was published in 2015; it has been updated for 2024.

As New York continues to bask in the feel-good energy of last weekend’s marathon (and proceeds to collect and tear down the miles upon miles worth of gates and barricades scattered throughout the five boroughs), many of us spectators have started to think about hitting the gym and possibly gearing up to run a marathon of our own.

But if you’ve thought the number of people running marathons seems to be on the rise, you’re right! There’s a reason everyone has a former roommate or an uncle or a handful of co-workers who are constantly training: more than half a million people complete American marathons each year, and adjusting for events like natural disasters, the number of participants has steadily been on the rise.

So, of course it makes sense that of the hundreds of thousands who strap on their sneakers each year, some of them will be more well-known than others. This year’s New York City Marathon counted Alicia Keys, Ethan Hawke, and Tiki Barber amongst its participants. And whether they’re running for their physical health, their mental health, or a charity (or, more likely, a combination of all three), we commend everyone who sticks it out for the grueling 26.2 miles, including these 12 celebrities. (Note that many of these people have run multiple marathons; the event and time listed are each person’s personal record.)

Besides being a world-renowned mathematician and code-breaker, Turing was also an avid runner. He even tried out for the 1948 British Olympic team, coming in fifth in the trials. A Brit took home the silver that year with a time of 2:35:07—if he’d been in that race, Turing’s time would have landed him in 15th.

The popular host of NPR’s “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” also writes a column for Runner’s World on his many multi-mile endeavors. In 2013, he acted as a sighted running partner for a visually impaired man during the Boston Marathon—they finished together just five minutes before the bombs went off. “BOOM. An enormous noise, like the most powerful firework you’ve ever heard, thundered from behind us. … Another BOOM. White smoke rose in a miniature mushroom cloud into the air, a hundred yards away, just on the other side of the finish,” Sagal wrote the next day. “I had just finished my 10th marathon, my third Boston, and I had never heard anything like that. Ever. Cowbells, music, cries of pain, sure, but never that.”

Winfrey is often credited with the 1990s and 2000s upswing in marathon participants—she’d vowed to run one before she turned 40, and when the Queen of Daytime Talk Shows says she’s going to meet a goal, you know it’s going to happen. She ran 26 miles in a downpour, with two National Enquirer reporters tagging along beside her.

The newly elected Speaker of the House caused quite a stir back in 2012 when he told a radio program that he ran a sub-three-hour marathon—a feat relatively few amateur athletes can claim (though former CIA director David Petraeus ran a 2:50:53 in Omaha in 1982). Turns out, he lied; or, misremembered, as his spokesperson said. The then-20-year-old college student had run the hilariously titled Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth, Minn. in just over four hours, a time former New York governor Eliot Spitzer (who ran a 3:58:44 in NYC in 1983) made sure to write a full article in Slate to point out: “A sub-4-hour marathon is possible for a determined but not-too-talented runner. Sub-3 requires real talent.”

You know who did nearly run a sub-three-hour marathon though? Sherlock. No, not the Cumberbatch (though he did quite a bit of running when he played the aforementioned Alan Turing in ). Elementary‘s Sherlock has not only run more than 15 marathons, but he’s also completed a number of ultra-marathons, including one 50-miler this past spring. That solves the case of his 26.2 tattoo!

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Puffy (then P. Diddy) trained hard for his hometown race—and he fund-raised hard too. The rapper raised $2 million for New York public schools and children in need, wrangling his celebrity friends like Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg to kick in. One of his self-proclaimed “Diddy Runs the City” goals? To beat Oprah’s marathon time. “I’ve never experienced mental or physical pain like that,” Combs, then 33, told reporters after crossing the finish line. “But it was a beautiful experience.”

Everyone’s favorite TV teacher began training for the New York City Marathon when he was a young actor in the city who had just been fired from a soap opera gig. Sulking around, he happened upon the finish line and later told that he was so inspired by the “old people, children, people in bunny costumes, people who’d lost their legs, this amazing menagerie of humanity” who were finishing the race, that he began training immediately to run the following year.

Aduba has won two Emmys for her role as “Crazy Eyes” on Orange is the New Black, and for this year’s Boston Marathon, she put her celebrity to use and ran for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. As Aduba told Women’s Health, she lost a woman she described as a “second mom” last year to cancer. And not only did this woman help her realize her dreams as a child, she gave her a playlist for life. “When I think of Andrea—talk about a fighter—when she passed away, the song that was most played on her iPod was ‘Brave’ by Sara Bareilles. I love that song so much. I run to that every single day, and I’m going to run to it … when I’m coming through the finish line. … I’m going to listen to that song because that’s the song she was fighting [for] her life with, that was her motivator getting through every single day of treatment, every single round of chemo, that was what she was listening to constantly. And I listen to that when I’m training now, and I can hear her telling me, ‘Keep going.’”

Jason Wesley Upton via Flickr // CC BY-ND 2.0

The famed Japanese author and one of this year’s TIME 100 Most Influential People didn’t start running until he was in his thirties. Since then he’s completed ultra-marathons and written a best-selling memoir about running, 2008’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. His takeaway? “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”

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Though quite a number of presidential contenders have run marathons (Sarah Palin, Al Gore, and Michael Dukakis among them), George W. is the only president who has one on the books. Bush was 46 when he ran the Houston race—two years before he became governor of Texas—and he continued running while in the Oval Office. “I believe anyone can make the time [to run],” he told Runner’s World in 2002. “As a matter of fact, I don’t believe it—I know it. If the President of the United States can make the time, anyone can.”

Plenty of professional and Olympic athletes have decided to go the distance with a marathon, and most soon realize they have to completely revamp their training techniques. Eight-time Olympic speed-skating medalist Ohno was no different. “I went from short, ballistic-type one-and-a-half minute training to something that lasts 3 hours, 24 minutes longer,” he told Extra after the race. “The last 6.2 miles are gruesome, my body isn’t designed for this.”

You can always count on Ferrell to put things in perspective. “Running a marathon is not a question of whether it will be painful, but when it will be painful,” he said after completing Boston, his third marathon (he’s also run NYC and Stockholm). A few years later, he noted, “People are terribly underwhelmed when they recognize me in a race. There’s nothing funny going on. It’s just a lot of silence and pain.”

Despite its name, a raccoon dog is neither a raccoon nor a dog, but it does belong to the canid family, the lineage that includes dogs, wolves, and foxes. Here are some fascinating facts about the adorable omnivorous creatures that are found in forests, wetlands, farmlands, and urban areas from Sweden to Japan.

Raccoon dogs are native to Asia and are classified into two species. Nyctereutes viverrinus, the Japanese raccoon dog or tanuki, is endemic to Japan. Nyctereutes procyonoides, or common raccoon dog, is further classified into four subspecies: N. p. procyonoides is native to China; N. p. koreensis lives in North and South Korea; N. p. orestes is found in northern Vietnam and southeastern China; and N. p. ussuriensis is native to Russia but is now an invasive species in northern Europe.

For centuries, Japanese people have associated tanukis with magical folklore and luck. Referred to as bake-danuk, these mythical tanukis are mischievous shapeshifters. One exaggerated feature is the tanuki’s giant scrotum, which represents good luck with money. In cartoons, paintings, and commercials, this part of the animal’s anatomy is often illustrated as a pair of “money bags.” The enlarged testes represent good luck with money, more so than anything sexual. Tanuki totems are placed inside businesses to bring money.

If you remember the 1990 Nintendo game Super Mario Bros. 3 (which originated in Japan), Mario can put on a Tanooki Suit and transform into a raccoon-like animal that’s able to fly. It turns out that Mario is one of those magical raccoon dogs.

Not everybody thinks raccoon dogs are worth having around. Sure, some of the animals carry tapeworms and rabies and have mange, and they like to murder birds and muskrats and destroy gardens and vineyards (similar to actual raccoons). These annoyances have caught the ire of usually neutral Sweden. The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency encourages people to hunt and kill the animal to reduce their population. Apparently, Denmark takes issue with the animals, too.

Scientists believe the extinct N. donnezani is an ancestor of the modern raccoon dog from fossils found in late Pliocene sites in Italy, France, Hungary, and Romania. Excavated fossils indicate that a larger form named N. megamastoiodes appeared in Spain, France, and Hungary in the early Pleistocene.  According to fossil deposits found in Tochigi Prefecture in Japan, the Japanese dog first appeared during the Pleistocene era (between 2,588,000 to 11,700 years ago).

In some countries, raccoon dogs are bred for their fur, which is used in apparel and calligraphy brushes. Britain, Hungary, and Sweden have outlawed fur farming, but the raccoon dog and other furry animals are bred at fur farms throughout China and Japan, and reports have shown the animals are sometimes skinned alive. The Humane Society petitioned the Federal Trade Commission to have them include raccoon dogs as part of the Dog and Cat Protection Act, but in 2014 the commission ruled the animals should be labeled Asiatic raccoons, not dogs.

Between November and April every year, the animals take a long nap, but they don’t sleep too deeply. If they didn’t store enough fat pre-hibernation and if an unseasonably warm day occurs, they may wake up and forage for food. Before they hibernate, though, their food intake increases their body mass by 50 percent.

In 2004, Kōka absorbed the city of Shigaraki, which in the 12th century was one of Japan’s six kiln cities. Today, tanuki statues abound all over town, including in front of bars, parks, and street corners.  Over 60 years ago an emperor visited the town, so the townspeople spruced up the city by creating these statues as a sort of welcome. The tradition stuck, and the more modern Shigaraki-ware tanuki statues are still on display: a rotund animal wearing a straw hat, holding a sake flask, and propped up by its giant testicles.

Instead of barking like a dog, raccoon dogs give off a high-pitched whine or whimper, which can be interpreted as either submissive or friendly behavior. But when the animals feel threatened, they growl at each other. Unlike dogs, they don’t wag their tails, but they do use their olfactory senses to sniff for food.

Raccoon dogs are stronger in pairs, so they band together to raise their young. The male forages for food and brings his findings to his pregnant mate. Once the pups are born, the male helps the female raise them. The pups get weaned after 40 days, and they’re able to take care of themselves around the four-month mark.

In 2013, an all-white tanuki with blue eyes was found on a farm in Japan, caught in a trap intended for another animal. Because it’s white, the Japanese think it’s good luck. The unusual coloring may have been due to leucism, a genetic mutation that inhibits production of melanin.

The origin of the coronavirus pandemic remains unknown, but a 2023 analysis of DNA data pointed to raccoon dogs as vectors of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Swabs taken in a particular area of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, picked up the virus’s RNA as well as DNA from raccoon dogs, which were likely being sold illegally there. The evidence supports the theory that the virus jumped from infected animals to humans, a phenomenon called zoonotic spillover.

A version of this story ran in 2015; it has been updated for 2023. Additionally, a fact about keeping raccoon dogs as pets has been removed because the practice is now banned in the U.S. and UK.

The Lewis Chessmen are the most important chess pieces in history. Ever since the ivory figures were discovered sometime before 1831 on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, these kings, queens, knights, rooks, bishops, and pawns carved from walrus tusk and sperm whale teeth have long fascinated us with their exquisite craftsmanship and adorably anxious expressions.

Despite their fame, some key details about them remain unknown. Here are 12 facts about these Viking-age treasures.

According to Ivory Vikings: The Mystery of the Most Famous Chessmen in the World and the Woman Who Made Them by Nancy Marie Brown, the chessmen may have been unearthed from beneath 15 feet of sand at the head of Uig Bay. Or perhaps they were found in a sandbank by a simple farmer who mistook them for elves and promptly fled, only returning to retrieve them at the urging of his braver wife. Or perhaps the survivors of a shipwreck buried treasure they salvaged from the wreck but never returned for it. Yet another theory places them in the ruins of the House of the Black Women, an abandoned nunnery.

These various tales have one thing in common: they put the discovery of the chessmen in Uig. All we know for sure is that the chessmen had to have been found before April 11, 1831, when they were displayed in Edinburgh at the Society of Antiquaries for Scotland.

The most widely accepted theory puts the chessmen’s place of origin as Trondheim, Norway. Another has them carved in Skaholt, Iceland. According to the Saga of Bishop Pall, Margret the Adroit, the high-status wife of a priest, “was the most skilled carver in all Iceland” and was regularly commissioned by the bishop to craft walrus ivory gifts he sent to friends overseas. In this theory, that could be how the chess pieces got to the Isle of Lewis, which was an important trading center at the time. Some archaeologists have floated the idea of excavating areas in Skalholt to look for Margret’s ivory workshop.     

Two museum artifact specialists have proposed that, based on the varying quality of the chessmen, at least four carvers created them. And in 2009, forensic anthropologist Caroline Wilkinson, a specialist in facial reconstruction who has “fleshed” out the skulls of King Richard III, Mary, Queen of Scots; and Johann Sebastian Bach, put that number at five based on her analysis of the varied faces on 59 chessmen. She sorted them into five groups based on common characteristics like “round open eyes” and “inferiorly placed nostrils.” (Perhaps it’s possible Margret the Adroit had four assistants in her workshop.)

There’s no archaeological context for the pieces, so we can’t date them precisely. But their clothing offers reliable clues. The rooks are all warriors decked out in a fashion typical of the late-Norse period: long leather coats, kite-shaped Norman shields, expensive swords, and pointy helmets (though two look more like a bowler hat and a bucket, respectively). As for the bishops’ miters, or pointed hats—the way they’re peaked front and back identifies them as a style worn in the late 12th century.

How can we tell? They’re biting their shields. Berserkers, according to a 13th-century account by Icelandic writer Snorri Sturluson, “wore no armor and were as mad as dogs or wolves, bit their shields, were as strong as bears or bulls. They killed other men, but neither fire nor iron could kill them.” The battle frenzy depicted on the chess pieces marks the warrior rooks as being from the North. As Brown notes, “No other culture claims shield-biters.”

The 16 bishops in the set are unarmed, richly clothed, and well fed. How did these chubby men of the cloth get onto the battlefield of the board? As the oldest extant chess set that clearly includes bishops, the Lewis set could mark their debut. Perhaps their inclusion was ordered by Pall, bishop of Skalholt, the commissioner of Margret the Adroit’s famed ivory works.

The tall steeds we picture knights in the Middle Ages mounted on weren’t actually very common in the 12th century; from Italy to England, most people rode stocky breeds, with the rider’s legs dangling well below the horse’s belly. The Lewis knights’ horses are no different. Even today, Icelandic horses, purebred since the 12th century—the time of the Lewis chessmen’s creation—are strong and agile, but they are also pony-sized.

At the time, the queen was the weakest piece on the board, moving only one space per turn; it wasn’t until the late 15th century that the queen began to emerge as the most powerful piece in the game. Does that lowly status account for the intense emotion on the queens’ faces, and the position of their hands? All eight queens are crowned, seated on thrones, bedecked in elaborate gowns, and hold their right hand to their cheek. The emotion behind this distinctive pose has been variously read as grief, despair, patience, calculation, disapproval, or surprise, among others. Despite these wildly different interpretations, Brown writes, “everyone can agree that the Lewis queens do not look pleased. Though not warrior women, they are women at war.”

Like the queens, the eight kings sit on thrones, and their faces are equally grim (except for the two young ones, who are a bit eager). They have swords across their laps and all but one sport long hair twisted into locks. If the pieces do indeed date to the late 12th century, we may be able to identify two of them: Magnus V, crowned in Norway in 1164, and Sverrir (1184–1202), who followed him.

Magnus V—not to be confused with Magnus Barefoot or Magnus the Blind—became king at just 8 years old, but his father Erling Skew-Neck ruled Norway until he died in 1179, by which time Magnus was a handsome man fond of drink and women. Sverrir, on the other hand, was stout and broad, and “looked most kingly when he was sitting down,” Brown writes.

When Magnus died in 1184, Sverrir took the throne, but clashes with the archbishop led to his excommunication, and he soon had an armed rebellion on his hands. Eventually the rebels were trapped at Viken and reduced to eating their walrus-hide ropes, and Sverrir gave them quarter. A kind of peace ensued, but Sverrir died months later of illness, still excommunicated. The year was 1202. According to the Saga of King Sverrir, the king griped towards the end, “Being a king has brought me war and trouble and hard work.”

In the scene from the first Harry Potter film, the iconic chess pieces move by themselves.

Today, 82 of the 93 known pieces from the hoard—which contained the Lewis Chessmen and other gaming pieces— are in the British Museum, and 11 chessmen are at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.

During the movement for Scottish independence in 2012, some called for the repatriation of the Lewis Chessmen from the British Museum. The pro-independence, center-right Scottish Democratic Alliance party published a white paper titled “The Future Governance of Scotland” that included five key aspects of the “exit strategy from the UK.” Number three on the list: “Negotiation on division of the U.K. assets (oil, financial, military, Lewis chessmen, etc.).” In 2014 Scotland voted against independence, and the chessmen remain at the British Museum.

Museum nan Eilean, on the grounds of Lews Castle in Stornoway, is the new home of six Lewis Chessmen on permanent loan from the British Museum. In addition to the display of the figurines, the museum showcases the heritage of the Outer Hebrides so visitors can understand the world from which the chessmen emerged.

A version of this story ran in 2016; it has been updated for 2023.

“Bohemiam Rhapsody,” Queen’s classic “mock opera,” was released on October 31, 1975. Though the song was met with skepticism when played for preview audiences, it ended up spending nine weeks at No. 1 on the UK charts in 1976. It currently ranks as the third best-selling UK single of all time (behind Elton John’s Princess Diana tribute “Candle in the Wind” and Band Aid’s holiday-made “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”) and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2004.

Here are some facts about the iconic song to consider the next time you’re hitting those “Galileo” high notes along with your car radio.

The story of “Bohemian Rhapsody”—or “Bo Rhap,” as it is known by Queen fans—began in 1968, when Freddie Mercury was a student at London’s Ealing Art College. He had come up with an opening line—“Mama, just killed a man”—but no melody. Because of the Old West feel (in his mind) to the lyric, he referred to his work in progress as “The Cowboy Song.”

In May 2023, as a collection of Mercury’s personal belongings were getting ready to head to auction at Sotheby’s, an amazing discovery was made. A copy of the singer’s handwritten lyrics to the song revealed that he had seemingly wanted to title it “Mongolian Rhapsody.” According to The New York Times, that’s the title that Mercury wrote down with the lyrics—until he later crossed out the first word and replaced it with “Bohemian.”

Roy Thomas Baker, who produced the band’s A Night at the Opera album, first heard the framework for “Bohemian Rhapsody” when he picked Freddie up at his Holland Road flat in London one evening before going out to dinner. Freddie led him to the piano to play the song he’d been working on. As Baker recalled of the scene, Freddie played the opening ballad section of the tune then stopped and exclaimed, “And this is where the opera section comes in!” Baker laughed at the time, but when Freddie came to the studio days later armed with various pieces of paper with notes and doodles outlining his composition, the producer determined to use all his talent and equipment to capture Mercury’s vision on tape.

In 1975, “state-of-the-art” recording meant 24-track analog tape. The harmonies on the opera section (all sung by Mercury, drummer Roger Taylor, and guitarist Brian May) required 180 separate overdubs, and eventually the tape had been run over the recording heads so many times that it became almost transparent. In the end it took three weeks (Mercury was always adding “another ‘Galileo,’” Baker explained) and five different studios to complete the track.

Prior to its release, Queen’s manager played a rough mix of the song to one of his other high-profile clients, Elton John, to get his opinion. “Are you f***ing mad?” was the singer’s alleged reaction after listening to the nearly six-minute-long song. His verdict: it was too long and too “weird” for radio.

“Bohemian Rhapsody” owes part of its success to British DJ Kenny Everett, who had a popular morning radio show on Capital Radio. In early October 1975, EMI was still pressuring Queen to release “You’re My Best Friend” as the first single from A Night at the Opera. Everett got his hands on an early pressing of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” with strict instructions not to broadcast it (wink, wink). Somehow, strictly by accident (his finger must have slipped), he played the song 14 times over the course of two days. Callers flooded the radio station and local record stores with requests for the song, so the suits at EMI relented and released the magnum opus as a single.

After it was decided to release “Bohemian Rhapsody” as a single, the band was faced with a bit of a dilemma: At the time in England, it was traditional for bands to appear on shows like Top of the Pops to promote their latest hits. But Queen was scheduled to begin a tour soon, plus (as Brian May admitted) they’d feel self-conscious miming to the operatic section. They solved the problem by filming a promotional film, or “pop promo” as it was called in the industry lingo of the time, that could be shown not only on UK music shows, but also around the world in other markets, such as American Bandstand.

The band arrived at Elstree Studios (using the same stage they were using to rehearse for their upcoming tour) at 7:30 in the morning, and were finished and relaxing at the local pub by 11:30 a.m. The total cost of the video was £4500, or about $2025. This was the first music video directed by Bruce Gowers, and the success of that clip eventually prompted him to move to Hollywood, where he went on to direct such TV programs as the MTV Movie Awards, the Primetime Emmy Awards, the People’s Choice Awards, and the first 10 seasons of American Idol.

The classic scene in the 1992 film Wayne’s World, on the other hand, took 10 hours to film. Dana Carvey didn’t learn the lyrics ahead of time, and if you watch closely you can see that he’s often just randomly moving his mouth while “singing” along. (And all the actors complained of neck pain after headbanging through so many takes.)

When the band launched their tour to support A Night at the Opera, Roger Taylor’s drum kit was outfitted with a 60-inch symphonic gong (which had to be cleaned, packed, and set up on each date) just so he could strike that final note in “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

The Holy Grail in terms of Queen collectibles is a 7-inch limited edition of “Bohemian Rhapsody” that was pressed in blue vinyl. In the summer of 1978, EMI Records won the Queen’s Award To Industry For Export Achievement (that’s “Queen” as in Her Majesty Elizabeth II). The label’s primary reason for sales in far-reaching territories that lacked manufacturing facilities was Queen, as in the band. To celebrate their prestigious award, EMI pressed 200 copies of “Bohemian Rhapsody” in blue vinyl, each of which was hand-numbered. Numbers one through four went to the band members, of course, while other low-numbered copies were given to friends and family members. Bona fide copies from this currently sell for upwards of $5000.

Additional sources:
Queen: As It Began, by Jacky Smith and Jim Jenkins
Is This the Real Life? The Untold Story of Queen, by Mark Blake
“The Making of Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’”

This story was originally published in 2015; it has been updated for 2023.

Believe in them or not, the stories of these women ghosts live on. But whether born of folklore or a historical tragedy, each of these ladies has a haunting tale.

After King Henry VIII successfully divorced his first wife, he made Anne Boleyn his second; she became the Queen of England in 1533. Boleyn’s reign was short after she failed to produce a male heir, which turned her once-loving husband against her. She was beheaded at the Tower of London on May 19th, 1536. People have since claimed to see her ghost not only at the location of her death, but also at Hever Castle, Blickling Hall, Salle Church, and Marwell Hall. The most chilling tale of her appearance tells of a guard at the Tower of London who was approached by a “whitish, female figure.” Panicked, the man stabbed his bayonet at the spirit before fainting from fear.

Dare you stand before a mirror and call her name thrice, she’ll appear. The folklore involving this ghost varies. Some believe she was a witch from the notorious Salem trials. Others claim she was the victim of a grisly murder by a stranger or lover. Still others believe her to be Queen Mary I of England, damned for her persecution of the Protestants. Whether she’s a dangerous spirit in the first place is a matter of debate. To test for yourself, shut off the lights. Take a candle into your bathroom, and give Mary a call. If you dare.

A freaky figure from Japan’s urban legends is this terrifying spirit, whose name translates to “Slit-Mouthed Woman“ or “Severed-Mouthed Woman.” Rumors of her first surfaced in the late 1970s. Her mouth is said to be sliced open from ear to ear, and she appears solely to chase and torment children. At first she hides her deformity with the help of a surgical mask, but when she finds a child alone she pulls the mask away and asks if they find her beautiful. It’s said that if they say no she will slash at them with scissors. But if they say yes, she will slice their faces from ear to ear to resemble her own. Fear of this figure grew so intense that children would travel home from school in groups for safety.

This ghost is said to roam Canada’s French Fort Cove, lonely and seeking her lost head. In Doug Underhill’s Miramichi Tales Tall & True, he places her origins in the 1700s, when noble French women were sent to Canada to join convents. But this poor nun met a tragic end when she came across either a deranged fur trapper or a pair of sailors merciless in their search for treasure. Either way, the story ends the same way, with the nun’s head lopped off and the rest of her beginning a never-ceasing search to make herself whole once more.

There are many ghosts all over the world who are called “The White Lady.” White Ladies linger in castles all over the United Kingdom. In medieval England, she was believed to appear as an omen of death. In Scotland, she was rumored to have been the lost soul of a suicidal girl who threw herself out of a tower. In Malta, she lept from a balcony to escape an undesired marriage. In the Philippines and in Portugal she died in a car accident. In the U.S., her white dress is often believed to be a bridal gown for a wedding that would never take place. Other White Ladies are said to be searching for lost children or deceased husbands, or else they are damned to walk the earth for killing an unwanted child.

There are plenty of stories about apparitions dubbed The Grey Lady popping up in Wales, Scotland, New Zealand, and even Evansville, Indiana. In 2014, the English legend of Dudley Castle’s Grey Lady made headlines after a photograph snapped by a tourist appeared to have captured the lady who is believed to have haunted the place for centuries. The castle, which was built in 1071, has had its fair share of residents, and it is said to be haunted by many spirits—chief of which is the Grey Lady. She is believed to be Dorothy Beaumont, who died shortly after giving birth to a stillborn daughter. Her story claims she wanders the castle looking for her husband and baby, both of whom she called for on her deathbed to no avail.

Believed to be the spirit of Lady Dorothy Walpole, this ghost is named for the brown brocade dress she has been spotted wearing. She was the wife of Whig statesman Viscount Charles Townshend and lived in the posh country house Raynham Hall, but her life there was one of misery. Her husband was notorious for his bad temper, and when he discovered his wife’s infidelity, he imprisoned her in the house they shared. She died there of smallpox in 1726, and the first recorded sighting of her ghost came on Christmas 1835. The following year she frightened one burly visitor so much that he fired a gun into her ghostly face. She vanished, but has been spotted since in 1926 and 1936, when a photographer claims he snapped a picture of her as she descended the stairs toward him.

In her book 13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey, Kathryn Tucker Windham tells a tragic story of an outsider named Martha, who reluctantly came from New York to Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama, because it was her grandmother’s alma mater. Said to have been a shy girl, the boldest thing about her was her love of the color red, which she draped about her bedroom in blankets, curtains, rugs, and knickknacks. She failed to make friends and became increasingly withdrawn. Martha eventually began wandering to the doorways of others’ dorms, staring in at night without saying a word. It’s a pattern she’s said to repeat to this day, after having swathed herself in her red blanket and dying by suicide in her room.

In California, the Moss Beach Distillery Café claims to be the home of a ghost in a blue dress. As her story goes, she was a young married woman of the Prohibition era who fell for a handsome pianist who played at the café. One night while walking the beach, they were attacked, and she was killed. Those who work at the café claim she still wanders through looking for her lost lover; they cite mysterious phone calls, levitating objects, and locked rooms. Her story has been featured on Unsolved Mysteries and Ghost Hunters, but the latter declared that the Blue Lady legend was bunk.

A dark tale from West Virginia is that of Jenny, a poor woman reduced to living in a shack near some train tracks. One night, Jenny was huddled near the fire, trying to keep warm while she ravenously gobbled up the meager food she’d acquired. This is when her skirt caught fire. She couldn’t put herself out, and so ran down the tracks toward the station, screaming for help. But in her panic, she didn’t see the train coming. She was buried in a pauper’s grave, and might have been forgotten were it not for her return on the anniversary of her death. She’s said to appear in a ball of flame, tearing down the train tracks screaming.

Named for the family she is believed to have tormented, this poltergeist was once known as Kate Batts. In 1800s Tennessee, she’d had a land dispute with neighbor John Bell Sr., and became notorious for her bad behavior toward him. But things got worse once she died. His children were attacked in their sleep by unseen hands, household objects moved on their own, and a séance revealed it all to be caused by Batts. The story goes that her ghost went on to poison Mr. Bell, and at his funeral her voice could be heard singing a drinking song. Today, her presence is less feared and more a tourist attraction.

The wife of President James Madison, Dolley is often credited with transforming Washington, D.C. from swamp to a civilized destination to see and be seen. She was known for her winsome spirit, vibrant parties, and for taking exceptional pride in how her tastes shaped the interior design and landscapes of the White House. Dolley is said to have continued the house’s upkeep, even after death. Legend has it that during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, his second wife Edith dared to demand the Rose Garden be ripped up, but every time a gardener drew near the place, Dolley would appear to shoo them away. Since her death in 1849, she’s also been spotted rocking in a chair on the porch of The Cutts-Madison House, where she lived after her tenure as First Lady ended.

The daughter of Vice President Aaron Burr and wife of South Carolina governor Joseph Alston, Theodosia was positioned for a life of luxury and ease, but sorrow plagued her. She was raised in New York City and struggled to adjust to life on her husband’s mosquito-plagued Southern estate. Her father was tried for treason, and she lost her only child from malaria when he was just 10 years old. Deep in grief, she boarded a ship on New Year’s Eve 1812 to visit her father in New York, but she’d never arrive; the ship was lost at sea with no trace. Since then, Theodosia’s ghost has been known to travel. She’s been spotted by the Georgetown dock where she boarded the ill-fated vessel, near her old summer home in Debordieu, and strolling around the old Oaks Plantation, now renamed Brookgreen Gardens. Another version of her tale claims she washed up on shore with a portrait of herself, but no memory of who she was.

Credited by some as America’s first woman serial killer, LaLaurie has left a dark stain on her New Orleans home. She was among the social elite of the city in the 1830s until a fire in 1834 revealed the horrible secrets she had locked within her house. When neighbors rushed into help, they followed screams to a locked door. Upon breaking it down they discovered a horror show of enslaved people, tortured, chained, and mutilated. An angry mob chased LaLaurie out of town, and corpses were reportedly uncovered under the house’s floorboards. She died in 1849 in Paris, but some say her hideous acts have condemned her to walk the lands of her old home for all time. She’s been spotted with a sneer and a whip, hovering over babies and children.

Olive Thomas was the original flapper, having starred in the 1920 film that coined the phrase. Her life was glamorous and included a stint as a Ziegfeld Follies showgirl and a marriage to Jack Pickford, brother of the movie star Mary Pickford. Her death came too soon, at age 25, when Thomas drank down the mercury bichloride that was intended to treat her husband’s syphilis topically. Whether this was accidental—perhaps she thought it was illicit hooch—or intentionally suicidal was a matter of debate. But since then, Olive has been said to haunt the New Amsterdam Theater in New York City, where she once owned the spotlight. Thomas struts around in a green beaded costume that she wore as part of the Follies while clutching a blue bottle. She supposedly appears before men and flirts before she vanishes. She’s been spotted so often by stagehands that a superstition has risen, claiming it’s best to say, “Goodnight, Olive,” as you leave so as not to snub the theater’s long-time resident.

A version of this story originally ran in 2015; it has been updated for 2023.