It’s September 8, 2017, at 7:10 p.m., and the Boston Red Sox are taking the field against the Tampa Bay Rays. The atmosphere is relaxed. It’s a home game, and the Sox are leading the American League East, coming into this series off a two-game win streak. But nothing is over until it’s over, and it’s only the top of the first.
Four levels above the on-field action, Josh Kantor, the park’s organist, has his own challenge to deal with. He’s trying to learn the theme song from Game of Thrones. “Somebody wanted to hear it,” he explains, his fingers working. “It’ll be a little bit of an adventure in about 40 seconds.”
The 40 seconds pass. “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” the DJ’s latest pick, fades out. Kantor’s organ cranks up, and Fenway Park transforms, briefly, into a land of war and dragons.
By the song’s end, there are two outs on the…

More than 100 years ago, New Orleans was on the forefront of urban infrastructure.
Since its founding in 1718, between the natural levee of Mississippi River banks and higher land along the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, the bowl-like city has never had adequate drainage. In its early days, New Orleans’s system of drainage ditches and canals “was totally inadequate, even for a town with as little runoff as early New Orleans,” according to a 1999 Army Corps of Engineers report on the city’s drainage history. During storms, each of the city’s blocks became an island surrounded by flood waters. One year, Mardi Gras parades waded through flooded streets. The soggy city was a breeding ground for mosquitoes and the diseases they carry.
In the 1890s, the city council decided to deal with the “extraordinary disastrous condition” of the city’s drainage. By the turn of the century, the city had built giant drainage canals…

When Anna Bertha Roentgen’s husband spent seven weeks obsessed in his lab in late 1895, she was supportive. She silently brought him hot meals when he forgot to eat, and otherwise left him to his work. And when he needed a hand, she patiently provided one. In fact, her left hand became the subject of Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen’s most famous image, “Hand mit Ringen,” which helped him win the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901.
It is a ghostly picture of her hand, unlike any ever taken before, with long, shadowy finger bones and a large dark wedding ring. The image is the first radiograph, a photograph exposed by X-rays instead of light, ever taken. It was an image that sparked a craze for the invisible rays that could shine through the opaque and illuminate the inner workings of the human body, and it catapulted Wilhelm Roentgen to worldwide fame.

Those seven…

A small group from a British Antarctic Expedition, led by Robert Falcon Scott, reached the South Pole on January 17, 1912. They arrived just 34 days after a Norwegian group led by Roald Amundsen. The small British team’s diaries and photographs, detailing their harrowing, and ultimately fatal, attempt to trek back to the ship were found by a search party eight months after their deaths on the ice. Scott’s poor planning has been cited as the reason the group failed to return, but new research may clear his name. Instead, it now appears that Scott’s second-in-command, Edward Evans, was to blame.
Scott had reservations about Evans early on in the expedition, at one point writing, “Teddy Evans is a thoroughly well-meaning little man, but proves on close acquaintance to be rather a duffer in anything but his own particular work.” He decided not to take Evans with him to the South Pole,…

How would Botticelli’s Birth of Venus appear if it were painted as a cerebral cortex? Would you eat a Big Mac covered in an old man’s face? What if Freddy Krueger was composed not of mottled flesh, but Dunkin’ Donuts?
These are the questions that, one can only imagine, kept digital artist Chris Rodley up at night. Then he found a way to answer them, using an image-generating neural network developed by Artificial Intelligence researchers at the University of Tübingen. Conceptually, it’s pretty simple—you upload any image, and then apply the style of another image (think brushstrokes, lines, colors) to the initial one. It’s not just an picture mash-up; according to Rodley, it’s better to think of it as “texture synthesis.” The style-transfer network, known as DeepArt, which was originally developed to emulate painting styles, was already widely known in the tech world. But whereas in the past it had been used…

Weather radar maps are pretty neat. Using just colors, the maps can indicate whether rain, snow, or sleet is passing over. Every once in a while, though, even experts aren’t quite sure what a particular big blob is.
Such was the case at around 1 p.m. on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 3. At that point, someone from the National Weather Service in Boulder, Colorado, looked at their ZDR radar, which indicates shape as well as size, and saw a strange pink cloud swooping over the Denver metro area.
The pink color indicated large, round objects. Based on previous experience, the NWS offered up a diagnosis. They included a GIF of the visitors, and helpfully labeled it, “Birds.”

Look at what’s flying into Denver! Radar from last hour showing what we believe to be birds. Any bird experts know what kind? #ornithology pic.twitter.com/EAqzdMwpFU
— NWS Boulder (@NWSBoulder) October 3, 2017
Then the controversy began. Jeff Wells,…

The Liberian Greenbul is one of the world’s rarest songbirds—so rare, in fact, that experts are beginning to wonder whether it ever existed in the first place. This little bird, with its butter-yellow chest, was allegedly first spotted in a West African forest about 25 years ago. Just one specimen exists, with a spattering of distinctive white spots across its plumage that differentiate it from its common cousin, the Icterine Greenbul. Unless, of course, they don’t. New DNA analysis and research from the University of Aberdeen suggest that this handsome little fellow is, in fact, just an Icterine Greenbul, and that those spots are just an “unusual plumage variant.” The Liberian Greenbul is so hard to find because, well, there is no Liberian Greenbul.

Beyond the obviously mythological (unicorns and the like), species like the Liberian Greenbul, that were once thought to exist but no longer are, are few and far between….

War happens fast. When the passengers on the SS Athenia, a British passenger liner, left Glasgow on a fall day in 1939, the world was not officially at war, though tensions between Germany and England were reaching a breaking point. Two days later Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain went on the radio at 11 a.m. and announced that the country was at war with Germany.
Less than 9 hours later, around 7:40 p.m., a German U-boat torpedoed the Athenia, and it sank slowly into the ocean, finally disappearing the next morning, just 24 hours after the war’s official start.
During World War II, thousands of ships sank, and most of them have been rusting anonymously beneath the ocean waters, including the Athenia. Now, though, a shipwreck hunter believes he has relocated it.
At the behest of the BBC, David Mearns went looking for the wreck of the Athenia and found it without ever venturing out…

Florida is the boating capital of the United States: In 2016, the state had more registered recreational boats than any other. But to Julie Duggins, an archaeologist for the state’s Division of Historical Resources, that nautical achievement is only the modern iteration of a history that goes back more than 6,000 years.
“Florida has always been a capital for watercraft and boating,” she says. More impressive than the state’s current boating record is its archaeological one. Florida has the highest concentration of archaeological dugout canoes of anywhere in the world—more than 400 wooden boats that show, as Duggins says, “how early Floridians navigated our rivers like highways.”

The most recent addition to that collection is a battered canoe spotted by a photographer out for a bike ride following Hurricane Irma in September. It has not yet been officially dated, but this newly discovered dugout—a canoe made from a single, hollowed-out log—has metal nails…

In 2015, writer Maryam Omidi found herself in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, during a trip across Central Asia. She was only a short distance from Khoja Obi Garm, a Soviet-era sanatorium that specializes in radon water treatments. She found herself strangely smitten, “in awe of the architecture, the treatments and the hospitality … The more I read about sanatoriums, the more fascinated I was by them.”
Two years later, after visiting 39 sanatoriums across 11 former Eastern Bloc countries, and after a successful crowdfunding campaign, Omidi and London-based publisher Fuel have released Holidays in Soviet Sanatoriums. Omidi worked with eight different photographers who specialize in the region to capture both the architecture and the people who still visit these once-popular—once-state-mandated—vacation destinations.

In 1920, Lenin issued the decree “On utilizing the Crimea for the medical treatment of working people.” The Labor Code of 1922 formalized mandatory vacations, and throughout the Soviet years, sanatoriums…