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A Centuries-Old Frieze, Newly Deciphered, Tells the Story of the End of the Bronze Age

A limestone slab, 31 yards long, may have related the story of the end of the Bronze Age. An interdisciplinary team of Swiss and Dutch archaeologists have now deciphered the symbols thought to have adorned the frieze, almost 150 years after it was discovered and summarily destroyed. In 1878, villagers in Beyköy, a tiny hamlet in western Turkey, found the large, mysterious artifact in pieces in the ground, and saw that it was engraved with seemingly illegible pictograms and scribbles. It would be 70 years before that language, now known to be millennia-old Luwian, could be read by scholars.
According to Eberhard Zangger, the president of a nonprofit foundation called Luwian Studies, the symbols tell stories of wars, invasions, and battles waged by a great prince, Muksus. Muksus hailed from the kingdom of Mira, which controlled Troy 3,200 years ago. The inscription describes his military advance all the way through the Levant…

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Amazing Ways to Visit Zealandia, Earth’s Lost Eighth Continent

After nine weeks of poking, prodding, and drilling, a group of international scientists recently made waves when their research confirmed the existence of the lost continent of Zealandia. They unearthed its hidden history and revealed that the submerged terrain is the world’s eighth continent, having sunk beneath the Pacific Ocean after breaking off from Australia millions of years ago.
Yet people have actually been exploring Zealandia for ages in the places where it peeks above the water, albeit unaware they were treading on a long-lost landmass. Even after most of Zealandia slipped beneath the sea, six percent of its land managed to remain above the surface. These places are currently home to approximately 5 million people.
New Zealand and its outlying islands make up a whopping 93 percent of Zealandia’s total land area, including the continent’s highest point, Aoraki (Mount Cook). But the towering peak isn’t the only awe-inspiring Zealandia location worth visiting….

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Toronto Airport’s Inunnguat Are Sending the Wrong Message

If you fly into the Toronto Pearson International Airport via Terminal One, you’re welcomed into the city by three human-like figures, made out of stones placed on top of stones. One has its arms straight out, one has them raised, and one is making them into a sort of “L” shape.
To some travelers, the sculptures may resemble a trio of air traffic controllers (or, as someone said on Facebook, a few friends trying to hail a cab). But to those in the know, they’re bearing a much more dire—and almost certainly unintended—message. These are inunnguat, traditional Inuit artworks that encode particular messages. And an inunnguaq with its arms raised up means, essentially, “Stay away! This is a place of violent death.”

If you’re looking to add some Inuit artworks to your airport, building some inunnguat isn’t a bad idea. Along with inuksuit*—sculptures that, while also made of stone, take less humanoid forms—they…

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Help Puerto Rico Recover by Mapping Damaged Areas

In many parts of the world, it’s easy to take for granted the availability of incredibly detailed digital maps. From my apartment, I can look up my address and not only does Google Maps show the outline of every building in my very dense neighborhood, but it also knows about the yoga studio, the tiny pasta shop, and other local businesses tucked into otherwise residential buildings.
“When you go someplace like Dominica, you simply don’t have that,” says Tyler Radford, the executive director of Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, a nonprofit that does emergency mapping in the wake of disasters. “If you pull up a map, you won’t see the outline of each building. You’ll only see the major roads.”
These mapping disparities matter for governmental and humanitarian organizations delivering aid after a hurricane, earthquake, or other disaster. Radford’s organization mobilizes volunteers from around the world to try to fill in those gaps, fast. Currently,…

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Scientists Want to Make Sure They’re Breeding the Right Giant Stick Insects

When S.S. Makambo ran aground in 1918 at Lord Howe Island, off Australia’s eastern coast, black rats made their way ashore. Before long, five birds and 13 insects had gone extinct. But one of those insect species managed to survive, by clinging to rocks on a nearby island. That giant bug, the Lord Howe Island stick insect, was only rediscovered in 2001 on Ball’s Pyramid, an inhospitable shard of rock jutting out the ocean—one of the bits of the sunken continent of Zealandia that breaks the water’s surface. Some of the insects found on this nearly inaccessible island were taken to the Melbourne Zoo to start a breeding program that could help restore the species to Lord Howe Island. But some scientists always had a nagging doubt about this plan. The surviving bugs didn’t look quite like museum specimens from Lord Howe Island. Is it possible that they were two separate…

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The Mystery Hiding in the Cracks of a 17th-Century Painting Has Been Revealed

Art history has its share of mysteries. Is a long-lost Da Vinci fresco hidden behind another mural? Did Michelangelo plant secret messages about brains in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? How did Dan Brown sell so many books?
Recently, an artistic mystery has been solved thanks to an attentive conservator who figuratively scratched the surface of a 17th-century painting hanging in the hallway of Yale Divinity School on Connecticut.
The dark-toned painting by an unknown artist depicts Martin Luther, head of the Protestant Reformation, surrounded by more than a dozen other Reformation figures, including John Calvin and Theodore Beze. During conservation work on the painting, conservator Kathy Hebb was looking at the painting’s largely gray foreground under a microscope and saw bright colors breaking through some of the cracks. She then checked other works depicting the same subject, including an engraving held at the British Museum, and found out that they feature…

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The Ocean’s Low-Oxygen Dead Zones Are Getting Worse, Just Like Wildfires

Each year, wildfires scorch large swaths of the West, and scientists try to predict just how bad the fire season will be for an upcoming year based on moisture levels, weather, and a host of other factors. But fire season isn’t the only annual environmental event that can have catastrophic impacts—take the hurricane or tornado seasons, for example. We can now add hypoxia season to the list, thanks to a familiar culprit—the same one that’s likely been fanning fire season.
Along the West Coast, low-oxygen levels in bottom layers of the ocean, known as hypoxia, have become a big concern for scientists and fishers alike—fish and crabs are vital to ecosystems, research, and an entire industry. “We’re always on the lookout to see, is this going to be a bad year?” says Francis Chan, a marine ecologist at Oregon State University who studies the effects of ocean chemistry. And by all accounts,…

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Found: Long-Lost Footage of Selena, the Pioneering Tejano Singer

In a stroke of luck, the National Museum of American History has uncovered film footage, lost for more than two decades, of the singer Selena Quintanilla. A segment for Tejano USA, shot in 1994, the film shows the young singer talking about her “big year”—she had just won a Grammy and was on her way to the next level of fame and fortune.

After the singer was murdered in 1995, the production manager of San Antonio’s KWEX-TV, which created the segment, “looked everywhere” for this tape, according to the museum. But he never found it. It was only by chance that the footage ended up in the hands of the National Museum of American History.
In the past couple of years, the museum has started work to document the history of Spanish-language broadcasting in the United States. Although the museum’s collections include extensive television footage and artifacts, it only had a few items…

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The Slowly Expanding World of Pet Deathcare

The road to Bubbling Well Pet Memorial Park in Napa, California, follows a range of twists and turns up a rocky, sparsely vegetated hillside. Eventually, a row of trees shading a series of sweeping glens appears, along with a pair of imposing gates. At first glance, Bubbling Well—which was immortalized in the 1978 Errol Morris film Gates of Heaven and features a burbling fountain to back up the name—looks like an ordinary cemetery, but a closer look reveals the graves are actually for cats, dogs, the occasional rabbit, and a few other species.
I came to Bubbling Well to explore the wide, and growing, world of pet death care. According to the American Veterinary Medical Association, some 30 percent of U.S. households have cats, and 36 percent have dogs—that adds up to a lot of animal remains every year. Pet guardians may spend time thinking about where their pets go when they…

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The Smell of Pumpkin Spice Forced a Baltimore School to Evacuate

In America, the month of October means two things: frightful tales of fear and doom, and the annual culture war over pumpkin spice, a combination of nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon, and cloves whose omnipresence provokes joy and hate and in equal measure.
Usually, these two elements are kept separate. But this year, at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Baltimore, they came together. On Thursday, October 5, the entire school building was evacuated due to the smell of pumpkin spice.
According to the school’s official statement, it all started at 2:30 p.m., when students on the third floor “reported a strange odor.” Students and staff were evacuated.

UPDATE: A spokesman for the Baltimore City Fire Dept has confirmed the source of the odor was a pumpkin spice air freshener https://t.co/JvYiezuFvJ
— ABC2NEWS (@ABC2NEWS) October 5, 2017
“Emergency personnel, including the HAZMAT team of the Baltimore City Fire Department,” were soon on the scene, evaluating people for exposure….