Month: January 2024

For two years during World War II, a Jewish lawyer named Curt Bloch lived in an attic in the Netherlands, hiding from the Nazis. He received water, food and essentials from his hosts, as did thousands of other Jews hidden in similar circumstances.

But Bloch’s protectors also provided him with newspapers, pens, glue and other supplies. Each week, he used those materials to create a new issue of his own satirical magazine: Het Onderwater Cabaret. Next month, its 95 issues of art, poetry and song will go on display in “‘My Verses Are Like Dynamite’: Curt Bloch’s Het Onderwater Cabaret,” a free exhibition at the Jewish Museum Berlin.

Bloch’s work was previously “almost completely unknown,” as curator Aubrey Pomerance tells the New York Times’ Nina Siegal. “The overwhelming majority of writings that were created in hiding were destroyed. If they weren’t, they’ve come to the public attention before now. So, it’s tremendously exciting.”

Born in Dortmund, Germany, in 1908, Bloch was working as a legal clerk when Adolf Hitler became the country’s chancellor in 1933. Spurred by Hitler’s antisemitic rhetoric, anti-Jewish violence escalated in Dortmund, and after one of Bloch’s coworkers threatened him, Bloch moved to Amsterdam. Come 1940, he was working for a Persian rug business, hoping to move farther west, when Germany invaded the Netherlands. Bloch was transferred to the Hague, then to the small city of Enschede, where he began working for a local Jewish council.

In 1943, with the Nazis closing in and deportation to concentration camps looming, the council urged its members to go into hiding. That spring, Bloch moved into the home of Aleida and Bertus Menneken, a housekeeper and an undertaker, where he shared a small attic with two other Jews, according to Artnet’s Jo Lawson-Tancred.

His hiding place was arranged by Group Overduin, an organization of roughly 50 members who helped at least 1,000 Jews hide from the Nazis, per the Times. The group was founded by Leendert Overduin, a pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church, who was ultimately arrested and imprisoned for his efforts. In 1973, Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance center, named him Righteous Among the Nations.

In the attic, Bloch began his magazine, Het Onderwater Cabaret (or The Underwater Cabaret). Inspired by a German radio program called the “Sunday Afternoon Cabaret,” the title used “a unique term in Dutch for the act of going into hiding: ‘onderduiken,’” writes the Times. “Its literal translation is ‘to dive under,’ but a common translation is ‘to slip out of public view.’” Between August 1943 and April 1945, he created a pocket-sized issue every week.

In each issue, Bloch wrote about “the crimes of the Nazis and their collaborators, the course of the war, his situation in hiding, the fate of his family and the approaching defeat of the Axis powers,” according to a statement from the museum. He often targeted Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, writing in one poem, “If he writes straight, read it crooked. / If he writes crooked, read it straight.”

Bloch’s covers—often displaying the magazine’s abbreviated title, Het OWC—incorporated images cut from newspapers and magazines. Dutch author Gerard Groeneveld, who published The Underwater Cabaret: The Satirical Resistance of Curt Bloch last year, tells the Times that the covers were inspired by other anti-fascist satirical magazines, like Germany’s Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (Workers’ Illustrated Magazine).

Though Bloch had to remain hidden, his publication didn’t. Groeneveld estimates that the magazine had 20 to 30 readers, perhaps including other Jews in hiding.

“There was [a] huge organization behind him, which included couriers who brought food, but who could also bring the magazine out, to share with other people in the group who could be trusted,” says Groeneveld to the Times. “They must have also returned them in some way.”

Bloch and his roommates survived in the attic until the spring of 1945, when Germany surrendered. With the liberation of the Netherlands, Bloch was free. Most of his family, however, had died in the Holocaust. In 1946, he married a fellow survivor, Ruth Kan, and in 1948 the two immigrated to New York, where they raised two children.

Their daughter, Simone Bloch, now 64, tells the Times that her father would occasionally read from Het Onderwater Cabaret, but she couldn’t understand German as a child. Much later, Simone’s daughter, Lucy, embarked on a research journey to study the documents’ history, which led to Groeneveld’s book and the upcoming exhibition.

After Bloch was liberated from the Dutch attic that had held him for two years, he created a final issue of Het Onderwater Cabaret in April 1945. Its cover depicts two individuals emerging from a hatch, with the title declaring that they were at last “above water.”

“‘My Verses Are Like Dynamite’: Curt Bloch’s Het Onderwater Cabaret” will be on view at the Jewish Museum Berlin from February 9 to May 26.

I thought I saw more red foliage this fall. Is that related to climate change? Pam Johnsen | Pigeon Forge, Tennessee

When trees stop producing chlorophyll, other compounds shine through. The compounds vary by species and determine the color of the tree’s autumn foliage—so a species like the ginkgo, which turns yellow in fall, won’t turn red. But climate volatility can produce displays that are more or less vibrant in a given year. Warm days and cool nights tend to produce the best fall color. A 2021 study suggested that Northeastern U.S. maple leaves are changing later—though climate change can also bring dry weather, pests and pathogens, which could make leaves fall sooner. —Jessica Shue, head technician for ForestGEO, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center

How accurate are prehistoric instruments that measured the solstice or the planets? Joan J. Mathews | Englewood, Florida

Prehistoric people had their own ways of predicting solar and stellar motion. Viking navigators accurately determined latitude by using a notched stick to measure the height of the sun at noon. The stone circle at Stonehenge, erected around 2500 B.C., measured angles at the solstice by observing the sun as it appeared in certain aligned openings. The path of the sun was important in many cultures—I research the Mongolian Bronze Age around 3,000 years ago, where people aligned rows of east-facing megaliths called deer stones in a north-south direction. Sometime between 220 and 150 B.C., people in the Hellenistic world invented the astrolabe, a metal disk with carefully placed openings that let them calculate the positions of the stars and planets more precisely. —William Fitzhugh, senior scientist, National Museum of Natural History

Some mammals have tails that seem useless. Or am I missing something? Steve Richardson | Knoxville, Tennessee

At first glance it may seem that many mammals don’t use their tails for much, but in fact they do! Dogs, for example, use their tails for social signaling: You can observe hierarchy by whether a tail is held straight up or pointed downward or between the hind legs. Some cats such as the cheetah use their tails as a counterweight to help them balance. Some mammals have prehensile tails and can hang from them. The Bornean tufted ground squirrel puffs up its beautiful long furred tail, likely to confuse potential predators. —Melissa T.R. Hawkins, curator of mammals, National Museum of Natural History

When did American cartoonists switch from using captions to speech bubbles? Mary C. McKeown | Lakeside Park, Kentucky

Modern comic art follows caricature traditions that began as early as the 18th century. Dialogue used to be contained in labels, or long, outlined “word balloons.” The Yellow Kid, generally considered the first U.S. comic strip character, spoke in rounded speech bubbles when he first appeared at the end of the 1800s. The use of speech bubbles continued through the 1910s when artists began to be hired across the U.S. to produce a variety of cartoon titles, and into the golden age of superhero comics, which started with Superman’s 1938 debut. They prevail to this day. —Joan Boudreau, curator of printing and graphic arts, National Museum of American History

On June 26, 1931, comparative psychologist Winthrop Niles Kellogg and his wife welcomed a new arrival home: not a human infant, but a baby chimpanzee. The couple planned to raise the chimp, Gua, alongside their own baby boy, Donald. As later described in the Psychological Record, the idea was to see how environment influenced development. Could a chimp grow up to behave like a human? Or even think it was a human?

Since his student days, Kellogg had dreamed of conducting such an experiment. He was fascinated by wild children, or those raised with no human contact, often in nature. Abandoning a human child in the wilderness would be ethically reprehensible, Kellogg knew, so he opted to experiment on the reverse scenario—bringing an infant animal into civilization.

For the next nine months, for 12 hours a day and seven days a week, Kellogg and his wife conducted tireless tests on Donald and Gua.

They raised the two babies in exactly the same way, in addition to conducting an exhaustive list of scientific experiments that included subjects such as “blood pressure, memory, body size, scribbling, reflexes, depth perception, vocalization, locomotion, reactions to tickling, strength, manual dexterity, problem solving, fears, equilibrium, play behavior, climbing, obedience, grasping, language comprehension, attention span and others,” the Psychological Record authors note.

For a while, Gua actually excelled at these tests compared to Donald.

Comparative Tests On A Human And A Chimpanzee Infant Of Approximately The Same Age, Pt 2

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But eventually, as NPR notes, Gua hit a cognitive wall: No amount of training or nurturing could overcome the fact that, genetically, she was a chimpanzee. As such, the Psychological Record authors write, the Kelloggs’ experiment “probably succeeded better than any study before its time in demonstrating the limitations heredity placed on an organism regardless of environmental opportunities as well as the developmental gains that could be made in enriched environments.”

The experiment, however, ended rather abruptly and mysteriously. As the Psychological Record authors describe:

Our final concern is why the project ended when it did.

We are told only that the study was terminated on March 28, 1932, when Gua was returned to the Orange Park primate colony through a gradual rehabilitating process. But as for why, the Kelloggs, who are so specific on so many other points, leave the reader wondering.

It could be that the Kelloggs were simply exhausted from nine months of nonstop parenting and scientific work. Or perhaps it was the fact that Gua was becoming stronger and less manageable, and that the Kelloggs feared she might harm her human brother. Finally, one other possibility comes to mind, the authors point out: While Gua showed no signs of learning human languages, her brother Donald had begun imitating Gua’s chimp noises. “In short, the language retardation in Donald may have brought an end to the study,” the authors write.

It’s July 12, 2017, and Jens Dopke walks into a windowless room in Oxfordshire, England, all of his attention trained on a small, white frame that he carries with both hands. The space, which looks like a futuristic engine room, is crowded with sleek metal tables, switches and platforms topped with tubes and boxes. A tangle of pipes and wires covers the walls and floor like vines.

In the middle of the room, Dopke, a physicist, eases the frame into a holder mounted on a metal turntable, a red laser playing on the back of his hand. Then he uses his cellphone to call his colleague Michael Drakopoulos, who is sitting in a control room a few yards away. “Give it another half a millimeter,” Dopke says. Working together, they adjust the turntable so that the laser aligns perfectly with a dark, charred speck at the center of the frame.

Dozens of similar rooms, or “hutches,” are arrayed around this huge, doughnut-shaped building, a type of particle accelerator called a synchrotron. It propels electrons to near light speed around its 500-meter-long ring, bending them with magnets so they emit light. The resulting radiation is focused into intense beams, in this case high-energy X-rays, which travel through each hutch. That red laser shows the path the beam will take. A thick lead shutter, attached to the wall, is all that stands between Dopke and a blast of photons ten billion times brighter than the Sun.

The facility, called Diamond Light Source, is one of the most powerful and sophisticated X-ray facilities in the world, used to probe everything from viruses to jet engines. On this summer afternoon, though, its epic beam will focus on a tiny crumb of papyrus that has already survived one of the most destructive forces on the planet—and 2,000 years of history. It comes from a scroll found in Herculaneum, an ancient Roman resort on the Bay of Naples, Italy, that was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. In the 18th century, workmen employed by King Charles III of Spain, then in charge of much of southern Italy, discovered the remains of a magnificent villa, thought to have belonged to Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus (known as Piso), a wealthy statesman and the father-in-law of Julius Caesar. The luxurious residence had elaborate gardens surrounded by colonnaded walkways and was filled with beautiful mosaics, frescoes and sculptures. And, in what was to become one of the most frustrating archaeological discoveries ever, the workmen also found approximately 2,000 papyrus scrolls.

The scrolls represent the only intact library known from the classical world, an unprecedented cache of ancient knowledge. Most classical texts we know today were copied, and were therefore filtered and distorted, by scribes over centuries, but these works came straight from the hands of the Greek and Roman scholars themselves. Yet the tremendous volcanic heat and gases spewed by Vesuvius carbonized the scrolls, turning them black and hard like lumps of coal. Over the years, various attempts to open some of them created a mess of fragile flakes that yielded only brief snippets of text. Hundreds of the papyri were therefore left unopened, with no realistic prospect that their contents would ever be revealed. And it probably would have remained that way except for an American computer scientist named Brent Seales, director of the Center for Visualization & Virtual Environments at the University of Kentucky.

Seales is in the control room now, watching intently: frowning, hands in pockets, legs wide.

The papyrus scrap in the white frame, held between two layers of transparent orange film, is just three millimeters across, and sports one barely visible letter: an old-fashioned Greek character called a lunate sigma, which looks like a lowercase “c.” Next to the turntable, shielded inside a tungsten tube, is a high-resolution X-ray detector, called HEXITEC, that has taken engineers ten years to develop. Seales believes that it will pick up the desperately faint signal he’s looking for and, in doing so, “read” the tiny Greek letter. “When I started thinking about this, this technology didn’t exist,” he says. “I don’t think there’s another detector in the world right now that could do this kind of measurement.” If it works, imaging the single letter on this charred crumb could help to unlock the secrets of the entire library.

A wailing alarm sounds as Dopke exits the hutch before Drakopoulos swings shut the 1,500-pound, lead-lined door. Back in the control room, computer screens show a live feed of the papyrus from multiple angles as Drakopoulos clicks his mouse to raise the shutter and flood the hutch with radiation. Sitting next to him, an engineer prepares to capture data from the detector. “Ready?” he asks. “I’m going to press Play.”

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Seales, who is 54, has wide-set eyes beneath a prominent brow, and an air of sincere and abiding optimism. He’s an unlikely pioneer in papyrus studies. Brought up near Buffalo, New York, he has no training in the classics. While European curators and textual scholars yearn to discover lost works of classical literature in the Herculaneum scrolls, Seales, an evangelical Christian, dreams of finding letters written by the apostle Paul, who was said to have traveled around Naples in the years before Vesuvius erupted.

Seales came of age in the 1970s and ’80s—the era of early video games, when big-dreaming Californians were building computers in their garages—and he was a techie from a young age. With no money for college, but with a brain for complex mathematics and music (he played violin at his local church), Seales won a double scholarship from the University of Southwestern Louisiana to study computer science and music. Later, while earning his doctorate, at the University of Wisconsin, he became fascinated with “computer vision,” and began writing algorithms to convert two-dimensional photographs into 3-D models—a technique that later enabled vehicles such as Mars rovers, for example, to navigate terrain on their own. Seales went to work at the University of Kentucky in 1991, and when a colleague took him along to the British Library to photograph fragile manuscripts, Seales, captivated by the idea of seeing the unseeable, found the challenge thrilling.

The British Library project was part of a “digital renaissance” in which millions of books and hundreds of thousands of manuscripts were photographed for posterity and stored online. Seales helped make a digital version of the only surviving copy of the Old English epic poem Beowulf, using ultraviolet light to enhance the surviving text. But working with the warped, cockled pages made him realize the inadequacy of two-dimensional photographs, in which words can be distorted or hidden in creases and folds.

So in 2000, he created three-dimensional computer models of the pages of a damaged manuscript, Otho B.x (an 11th-century collection of saints’ lives), then developed an algorithm to stretch them, producing an artificial “flat” version that didn’t exist in reality. When that worked, he wondered if he could go even further, and use digital imaging not just to flatten crinkled pages but to “virtually unwrap” unopened scrolls—and reveal texts that hadn’t been read since antiquity. “I realized that no one else was doing this,” he says.

He began to experiment with a medical-grade computed tomography (or CT) scanner, which uses X-rays to create a three-dimensional image of an object’s internal structure. First, he tried imaging the paint on a modern rolled-up canvas. Then he scanned his first authentic object—a 15th-century bookbinding thought to contain a fragment of Ecclesiastes hidden inside. It worked.

Buoyed by his success, Seales imagined reading fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which include the oldest biblical writings ever found, dating to as far back as the third century B.C., sections of which remain unopened today. Then, in 2005, a classicist colleague took him to Naples, where many of the excavated Herculaneum scrolls are displayed at the National Library, a few steps from a window with a view across the bay to Vesuvius itself. Seared by gases at hundreds of degrees centigrade and superheated volcanic materials that in time hardened into 60 feet of rock, the distorted, crumbling rolls were believed by most scholars to be the very definition of a lost cause.

For Seales, viewing them was an “almost otherworldly” experience, he says. “I realized that there were many dozens, probably hundreds, of these intact scrolls, and nobody had the first idea about what the text might be. We were looking at manuscripts that represent the biggest mysteries that I can imagine.”

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He isn’t the first to try to solve these mysteries. In 1752, when Charles III’s workmen found the carbonized lumps inside what’s now known as the Villa dei Papiri, they assumed they were pieces of coal and burned them or threw them in the sea. But once they were identified as scrolls, Camillo Paderni, an artist in charge of the recovered antiquities, set about opening the remaining ones. His method involved slicing the rolls in half, copying any visible text, then scraping away each layer in turn to reveal what was beneath. Hundreds of rolls were transcribed that way—and destroyed in the process.

In 1754, a Vatican priest and conservator named Antonio Piaggio dreamed up a new scheme: He glued goldbeater’s skin (a calf’s extremely thin yet tough intestinal membrane) to a scroll’s surface, then used a contraption involving weights on strings to ease it open. Artists watched this excruciatingly slow process and copied any exposed writing in pencil sketches known as disegni. Many of the flaky outer layers of the scrolls were removed before the inner portion could be unwound, and the papyrus often tore off in narrow strips, leaving layers stuck together. Hundreds of scrolls were pulled apart using Piaggio’s machine, but they revealed only limited text.

Scholars searching the transcribed fragments for lost works of literature have largely been disappointed. A few pieces of Latin works were discovered, including parts of the Annales, by Quintus Ennius, a second-century B.C. epic poem about the early history of Rome, and Carmen de bello Actiaco, which tells of the final hours of Antony and Cleopatra. The vast majority of the opened scrolls contained Greek philosophical texts, relating to the ideas of Epicurus, an Athenian philosopher in the late fourth and early third centuries B.C., who believed that everything in nature is made up of atoms too small to see. Some are by Epicurus himself, such as a piece of On Nature, a huge work that was previously known but lost. But most are by Philodemus, an Epicurean employed by Piso in the first century B.C., and cover Epicurus’ views on ethics, poetry and music.

None of the Herculaneum scrolls has been opened since the 19th century, and scholars have instead focused on squeezing information out of the already-revealed texts. A step forward came in the 1980s, when Dirk Obbink of Oxford University and Daniel Delattre of France’s National Center for Scientific Research independently worked out how to reassemble fragments dissected under Paderni. In the 1990s, Brigham Young University researchers photographed the surviving opened papyri using multispectral imaging, which deploys a range of wavelengths of light to illuminate the text. Infrared light, in particular, increased the contrast between the black ink and dark background. That was a “huge breakthrough,” says Obbink. “It enabled us to read vastly more of the unrolled rolls.”

The new images triggered a wave of scholarship into Epicurean philosophy, which had been poorly understood compared with the rival ideas of Plato, Aristotle or the Stoics. But the texts were still incomplete. The beginnings of all the manuscripts remain missing. And the prose is often scrambled, because letters and words from different layers of a scroll wound up next to one another in two-dimensional renderings. “What we’d really like to do,” says Obbink, “is to read a text from beginning to end.”

That was thought impossible, until Seales saw the scrolls in Naples and realized that his research had been leading to exactly this grand challenge. “I thought, I’m a year away,” Seales says. “All I have to do is get access to the scrolls, and we can solve this.”

That was 13 years ago.

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Seales vastly underestimated, among other things, the difficulty of getting permission even to study the scrolls. Conservators are understandably reluctant to hand out these terribly fragile objects, and the library in Naples refused Seales’ requests to scan one. But a handful of Herculaneum papyri ended up in England and France, as gifts from Ferdinand, son of Charles III and King of Naples and Sicily. Seales collaborated with Delattre and the Institut de France, which has six scrolls in its possession. Two of the scrolls are in hundreds of pieces after past attempts to open them, and Seales eventually received permission to study three small fragments.

The first problem he hoped to solve was how to detect ink hidden inside rolled-up scrolls. From the late third century A.D. onward, ink tended to include iron, which is dense and easy to spot in X-ray images. But the papyri found at Herculaneum, created before A.D. 79, were written with ink made primarily of charcoal mixed with water, which is extremely difficult to distinguish from the carbonized papyrus it sits on.

At his lab in Kentucky, Seales subjected the papyrus scraps to a battery of noninvasive tests. He looked for trace elements in the ink—anything that might show up in CT—and discovered tiny amounts of lead, perhaps contamination from a lead inkwell or water pipe. It was enough for the Institut de France to give him access to two intact papyri: blackened sausage-shaped artifacts that Seales nicknamed “Banana Boy” and “Fat Bastard.” Seales arranged for a 600-pound high-resolution CT scanner to be sent by truck from Belgium, and he made intricately detailed scans of the scrolls. But after months of analyzing the data, Seales was disheartened to find that the ink inside the scrolls, despite the traces of lead, was invisible.

What was worse, the scans showed the layers inside the scrolls to be so carbonized that in many places there was no detectable separation between them. “It was just too complicated for our algorithms,” Seales admits. He played me a video of the CT scan data, showing one of the scrolls in cross-section. The whorls of papyrus glowed white against a dark background, like closely wound strands of silk. “Just take a look at that,” said Seales. “This is when we knew we were doomed for the present time.”

What makes virtual unwrapping such a complex challenge is that, even if you imaged the inside of a rolled-up scroll written in ink that glowed brightly in scans, you would still only see a dizzying mess of tightly packed letters floating in space, like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle—but without a final picture to use as a guide. To decipher that jumble of letters, Seales’ key innovation was to develop software to locate and model the surface layer within a wound-up scroll, which analyzes each point in as many as 12,000 cross-sections. Then he looks for density changes that correspond to the ink, and applies filters or other techniques to increase the contrast of the letters as much as possible. The final step is to figuratively “unroll” the image for reading.

Seales spent 2012 and 2013 as a visiting scientist at the Google Cultural Institute in Paris, amping up his algorithms to cope with the complex structures the CT scans had revealed. He got the chance to try his new approach soon afterward, when Pnina Shor, at the Israel Antiquities Authority, or IAA, in Jerusalem, contacted him about a carbonized roll of parchment found in the ancient town of Ein Gedi, on the western shore of the Dead Sea. The scroll was excavated from the remains of a synagogue, which was destroyed by fire in the sixth century A.D. The charred, cigar-shaped lump was far too fragile to open, but Israeli researchers had recently CT-scanned it. Would Seales take a look at the data? Shor handed over a hard drive, and Seales and his colleagues went to work.

In the meantime, Seales was chasing a new idea for reading carbon-based ink: X-ray phase-contrast tomography, a highly sensitive form of imaging that can detect subtle density changes in a material—the kind that might result from applying ink to papyrus—by measuring the changing intensity of the beam as it passes through an object. Only a large particle accelerator, though, can produce such a beam. One of the nearest was Synchrotron Soleil, outside Paris. Seales’ request for “beam time” there was rejected, but he and Delattre were subsequently approached by an Italian physicist named Vito Mocella, who had close ties to another synchrotron in Grenoble, in southeastern France. Seales provided custom-designed cases for the scrolls, built using data from his CT scans, but his schedule didn’t allow him to travel. So in December 2013, Delattre took Banana Boy and another scroll to Grenoble without him.*

Seales waited eagerly for the promised data, but the files did not arrive. Then, in January 2015, Mocella’s group published the results without him. It was, Seales says, an “excruciatingly frustrating” experience. “I believed we were collaborating, until I realized that the feeling was not mutual.”

News stories around the world reported that Herculaneum scrolls had been deciphered at last. But, in fact, Mocella had claimed to read only letters, and some scholars are cautious about even those, not least because the group did not publish enough information for others to replicate the analysis. Mocella finally shared his data with Seales and others after publication. After reviewing it, Seales concluded that the findings were a bust. “The dataset did not produce any contrast at the ink,” he told me. Seales thinks the researchers, who were without software to model the surfaces within the scrolls, were seeing “ghosts”—random patterns in the papyrus’ fiber structure that just happen to look like letters. He is now convinced that phase-contrast tomography alone is not sufficient to read the Herculaneum scrolls in any meaningful way. (Mocella insists the letters he saw were real, and he took issue with Seales’ version of the incident. “From my point of view, I and my team are still working with Brent, since we’ve given him, as with other specialists like him, most of the scans,” Mocella said.)

By that point Seales had finished a preliminary analysis of the Ein Gedi scroll, and in July 2015 he and the IAA announced their results. “We absolutely hit a home run,” Seales says.

Unlike the authors of the Herculaneum scrolls, the Hebrew scribes had mixed metals into their ink. Seales’ software correctly mapped the letters to the rolled-up parchment, then virtually unfurled it, revealing all of the surviving text, in perfect sequence, on each of the five wraps of the scroll. There were 35 lines of text in two columns, composed of Hebrew letters just two millimeters tall. Israeli researchers identified the text as the first two chapters of the Book of Leviticus, dating to the third or fourth century A.D. It was a hugely significant find for biblical scholars: the oldest extant copy of the Hebrew Bible outside of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and a glimpse into the history of the Bible during a period from which hardly any texts survive.

And it was proof that Seales’ method worked. Following Mocella’s publication, however, the Institut de France refused further access to its Herculaneum scrolls. Which is why Seales turned his attention to Oxford.

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The Bodleian Libraries, at Oxford University, possess four Herculaneum scrolls, which arrived in 1810, after they were presented to the Prince of Wales. They are kept deep inside the building, in a location so secret that even David Howell, the Bodleian’s head of heritage science, says he doesn’t know where it is.

Seales wasn’t permitted to see the intact papyri, never mind scan them. But one of the four, known as “P.Herc. 118,” was sent to Naples in 1883, to be unrolled using Piaggio’s machine. It came back as a mosaic of crumbs, which were glued onto tissue paper and mounted behind glass in 12 wood frames. The text appears to be a history of Epicurean philosophy, probably by Philodemus, but it has been particularly challenging for scholars to interpret. A fragment might seem covered with continuous lines of writing, says Obbink, “but really every inch you’re jumping up or down a layer.”

To prove the value of his approach, Seales asked the Bodleian to let him analyze P.Herc. 118. If all went well, he hoped, he might get a shot at scanning the intact scrolls later. “We wouldn’t necessarily have chosen to get involved, except for Brent’s enthusiasm,” says Howell. So in July 2017, the 12 frames were removed from storage and taken to Howell’s third-floor office—something of a coup for Seales, given their invaluable nature. Cheerful and ruddy-faced, Howell has worked in conservation for close to 35 years, and even he felt daunted as the protective glass frames were removed, exposing the fragile papyrus beneath. “These are the most terrifying objects I’ve ever handled,” he says. “If you sneeze, they’d blow away.”

Seales and another colleague scanned these scroll fragments using a hand-held 3-D scanner called an Artec Space Spider. Meanwhile, Howell carried out hyperspectral imaging, which uses hundreds of wavelengths of light. Howell listened to Pink Floyd through noise-canceling headphones to escape the grinding noise of the scanner, he says, plus the knowledge that if anything went wrong, “I might as well pack my bags and go home and not come back.”

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After Seales returned to Kentucky, he and his colleagues spent months mapping all of the available 2-D images onto the 3-D template produced by the Artec Space Spider. This past March, they returned to Oxford to present the results on a big screen to a packed conference room. At such a high resolution, the charred papyrus resembled a dark-brown mountain range as seen from above, with lines of text snaking over the ridges and peaks. There was a gasp from the audience as Seales’ student Hannah Hatch rotated the image, then zoomed into creases and peeked over folds, flipping seamlessly between high-resolution photographs, infrared images and even the disegni drawings—all matched up to the 3-D template.

Shortly afterward, James Brusuelas, an Oxford papyrologist working with Seales, revealed several new details visible in the scans, such as the name Pythocles, who was a young follower of Epicurus. More important, Brusuelas was able to decipher the column structure of the text—17 characters per line—which will be crucial for reading the rest of the roll, particularly when trying to join different fragments together. “We have the basic information we need to put Humpty Dumpty back together again,” he said.

The audience buzzed with questions and applause. It was the reaction Seales was hoping for, and a step toward his real goal—gaining access to intact scrolls.

He’d saved his own presentation until last. It wasn’t about P.Herc. 118, but rather one tiny letter: the lunate sigma.

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Driving south from the stone archways and quadrangles of Oxford, the road soon cuts through flat green fields reaching to the horizon. On the day I visited, fork-tailed red kites hovered high in the blue July sky. After 15 or so miles a sprawling campus of low gray buildings came into view. At first, it resembled an ordinary industrial park, until I noticed the names of the roads: Fermi, Rutherford, Becquerel, all giants of 19th- and 20th-century physics. Behind a wire fence a huge, silver dome, more than a quarter-mile in circumference, rose from the grass like a giant flying saucer. This was Diamond Light Source, and Seales was waiting inside.

He’d brought a speck of charred papyrus from one of the Herculaneum scrolls he studied a decade earlier. The ink on it, he had found, contained a trace of lead. In Grenoble, direct X-ray imaging of the scrolls had not been enough to detect the ink. But when you fire hugely powerful X-rays through lead, the metal emits electromagnetic radiation, or “fluoresces,” at a characteristic frequency. Seales hoped to pick up that signal with a detector placed beside the fragment, which was specially calibrated to capture photons at lead’s characteristic frequency.

It was a long shot. The minuscule fluorescence of the letter would be swamped by radiation from the protective lead lining the room—like looking for a flickering candle from miles away on a rainy night, Seales said, as we stood in the crowded hutch. But after several days of intense work—optimizing the angle of the detector, shielding the main X-ray beam with tungsten “flight tubes”—the team finally got what it was looking for: a grainy, but clearly recognizable, “c.”

“We’ve proven it,” Seales said in triumph as he displayed the legible image to the Oxford audience in March. It is, Seales hopes, the last piece of the puzzle he needs to read the ink inside a Herculaneum scroll.

The results have scholars excitedly re-evaluating what they might now be able to achieve. “I think it’s actually very close to being cracked,” says Obbink, the Oxford papyrologist. He estimates that at least 500 Herculaneum scrolls haven’t been opened. Moreover, excavations at Herculaneum in the 1990s revealed two unexplored layers of the villa, which some scholars believe may contain hundreds or even thousands more scrolls.

Many scholars are convinced that Piso’s great library must have contained a range of literature far wider than what has been documented so far. Obbink says he wouldn’t be surprised to find more Latin literature, or a once-unimaginable treasure of lost poems by Sappho, the revered seventh-century B.C. poet known today only through the briefest of fragments.

Michael Phelps, of the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library, in California, who recently used multispectral imaging to reveal dozens of hidden texts on reused parchment at St. Catherine’s Monastery, in Egypt, calls Seales’ methods “revolutionary.” Scholars have long faced a choice between attempting to read concealed texts (and potentially destroying them in the process) or conserving them unread. “Brent Seales’ technology is removing that dilemma,” Phelps says.

Successfully reading Herculaneum scrolls could trigger a new “renaissance of classical antiquity,” says Gregory Heyworth, a medievalist at the University of Rochester in New York. He points out that virtual unwrapping could be applied to countless other texts. In Western Europe alone, he estimates, there are tens of thousands of manuscripts dating from before A.D. 1500—from carbonized scrolls to book covers made from older, glued-together pages—that could benefit from such imaging.

“We’d change the canon,” Heyworth says. “I think the next generation is going to have a very different picture of antiquity.”

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Seales has lately been enhancing his technique, by using artificial intelligence to train his software to recognize subtle differences in texture between papyrus and ink. He plans to combine such machine learning and X-ray fluorescence to produce the clearest possible text. In the future, “it’ll all be automated,” he predicts. “Put it in the scanner and it will all just unfurl.”

Seales is still negotiating with curators in Oxford, Naples and Paris for access to intact scrolls. He has surmounted huge technical hurdles, but the complex political challenge of navigating the gatekeepers, winning beam time at particle accelerators and lining up funding can, very occasionally, puncture his optimism. “How does a guy like me make all that stuff happen all at once?” he said in one such moment. He shrugged and looked around him. “It’s more than a computer scientist is really capable of doing.”

Then belief returned to his wide, hazel eyes. “I refuse to accept that it’s not possible,” he said. “At every turn, there has been something that opened up.” Reading a complete intact scroll at last, he went on, would be “like returning home to your family, who have been waiting all along for you to do the thing you started.”

*Editor’s Note: This article was updated to correct the name of the French research facility that declined Seales’ proposal to scan a Herculaneum scroll, and to clarify how the scrolls were ultimately scanned at Grenoble.

Launching his kayak into the St. Johns River on a nearly cloudless day in northern Florida, a retired environmental engineer named Dean Campbell heads south, leading a tour to Mount Royal, an ancient Indigenous burial mound that is now encircled by a suburban development. Campbell paddles with expert flicks of the wrist, gliding past fields of water lilies and the shell of an abandoned, half-sunk boat. Silver fish leap above the surface, twisting like gymnasts, and a pet peacock screeches from the shore.

We disembark beside a long wooden dock, walking through a neighborhood of neat lawns and towering palm trees until we come to a hill marked with a state historical sign for “The Mount Royal Site.” The mound’s slope is gradual and grassy, its summit shadowed by mature live oaks. Tendrils of Spanish moss tremble in the breeze, and the sand is soft beneath our feet.

Standing along the St. Johns and gazing at Mount Royal, we are following in the footsteps of William Bartram, the American naturalist and writer, who visited this spot several times in the 18th century. In 1773, Bartram left his home in Pennsylvania and embarked on a four-year journey throughout the Southeast that would eventually yield Travels, his sprawling, poetic account of the landscapes, plants, animals and people he encountered in Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. Part travelogue, part spiritual memoir and part scientific catalog, Travels extols Bartram’s belief in nature’s interconnectedness—and the preciousness of all its creatures. In his introduction, Bartram celebrates the azalea’s “show of mirth and gaiety” and delights in the “sportive” movements of the Venus flytrap; he believed that animals were capable of “premeditation” and “perseverance,” and he wrote with feeling about the “filial affections” of a loyal bear cub.

The St. Johns served as the main thoroughfare for Bartram’s travels in Florida as he recorded his impressions of the area’s ferocious alligators “roaring terribly and belching floods of water,” and of freshwater springs “so extremely clear as to be absolutely diaphanous or transparent as the ether.” His book soon brought wide attention to many unheralded natural wonders in the South, turning the Floridian wilderness into a focus of international scientific fascination and literary inspiration. Bartram’s rambling route has attracted curious scholars, wanderers and artists ever since.

Although Travels was published in Philadelphia, London and Paris in the 1790s, appreciation for Bartram’s work declined during the 19th century, and another major edition in the United States did not appear until 1928. In 1958, the preface to a new edition announced its aim: to “make Bartram live again.”

In the 21st century, a Bartram revival is underway, led by enthusiasts like Campbell, who call themselves “Bartramites” and refer to William as “Billy,” as if he were an old friend. Renewed interest in Bartram’s writing, art and contributions to natural history is fueling new scholarship, a biennial conference and a movement to recognize Bartram’s route nationally. Bartram’s work, and his holistic philosophy of nature, are not only an invitation to imagine a wilder Southern past; they also contain a blueprint for a better future, one where nature is both protected and restored. With climate change and population growth imperiling what’s left of the wilderness of Bartram’s day, that vision has never been more urgent.

The shiny hull of Campbell’s kayak is decorated with a sticker that reads “In the wake of William Bartram,” and he has spent a lifetime studying the river with a well-loved copy of Travels nestled in the bow of his boat. Visiting sites like Mount Royal is special, Campbell says, because “you can know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you’re right where he was.” Campbell first learned about Bartram in the 1980s, when he was working for the St. Johns River Water Management District in northern Florida’s Putnam County, where he grew up and where Mount Royal is located. Using Travels, Campbell pieced together the precolonial history of the river, before industry and tourism changed the landscape. Through Bartram’s eyes, Campbell says, he could see what the St. Johns once was—and what it might be again.

William Bartram was born in 1739 to a Quaker family a few miles outside Philadelphia. His father was John Bartram, an accomplished botanist, whom the young William accompanied on expeditions to collect and study plants. William also showed an early talent for drawing. In 1773, at the age of 33 and with funding from a London patron, Bartram led a surveying trip through the Southeast. He lovingly collected plant and seed specimens, documented animal behavior, recorded the customs of Indigenous tribes and illustrated the wildlife he encountered, often drawing them within the context of their habitats, an innovative choice that would influence later artists to move away from the conventional style of showing animals and plants in isolation, divorced from their native context. Travels describes 358 species, 130 of which were new to Western science when he identified them. A few of these species, like Bartram’s ixia, an endangered type of iris endemic to northern Florida, are now named for him. Bartram was thus a trailblazer in a stunning array of disciplines: botany, ecology, zoology, ethnography, ornithology. Soon after Travels was published, in 1791, other American naturalists, including John James Audubon and the entomologist Thomas Say, began to retrace Bartram’s route, eager to corroborate his observations and experience the territories evoked in the book.

At once a travel narrative and a scientific treatise, “Travels is a weird book,” says Kathryn Braund, a historian who has edited two recent essay anthologies about Bartram. The great author’s idiosyncratic shifts in voice and topic can sometimes be jarring, but his rich observations reward rereading. “No matter what you make of Bartram’s Travels, it is America’s first great literary masterpiece, in my view,” Braund says. Bartram’s writing influenced Romantic poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who praised Travels as a “work of high merit [in] every way,” and the book’s fusion of internal reflection and vivid description became a template for generations of American environmental writers, from Henry David Thoreau to Rachel Carson, says Thomas Hallock, a literary scholar at the University of South Florida who co-edited a collection of Bartram’s letters and unpublished manuscripts. “I can’t imagine [Thoreau’s] Walden without Bartram’s Travels,” Hallock says. “You describe the natural world and then you explain what it means to you, and you come to some moral conviction. That’s the formula that goes back to Bartram.”

You can see this formula in Bartram’s writing about Mount Royal, which begins with imagery and ends with a prayer. Bartram described a large orange grove; palms, live oaks and magnolias; and a “grand highway” and artificial lake, built by the Indigenous people who also built the mound over hundreds of years. “The glittering water pond played on the sight, through the dark grove, like a brilliant diamond, on the bosom of the illumined savanna,” Bartram wrote. In 1848, more than 50 years after Travels was first published, Bartram’s observations about Mount Royal were still being cited in Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, an early Smithsonian publication about Indigenous burial mounds in the Eastern U.S., which credited Bartram as its main source of information about these monuments in the South.

Bartram is known for his evocations of the Southern wilderness, but he also knew the sadness of returning to find a beautiful and sacred place changed by human whims. “That venerable grove is now no more. All has been cleared away and planted with indigo, corn and cotton, but since deserted,” Bartram wrote of Mount Royal, comparing what he found in the 1770s with what he saw in the 1760s, when he was traveling with his father, John. The planter who had apparently abandoned these fields did preserve the burial mound and some of the orange grove, Bartram notes, and he still describes Mount Royal as sublime.

When I ask Dorinda Dallmeyer, who wrote the screenplay for a 2020 documentary about Bartram called Cultivating the Wild, to name her favorite part of Travels, she demurs at first. “That’s just like picking among your children,” she says. Dallmeyer says she loves the moments in Bartram that feel like time travel. Once, she recalled, she was horseback riding in a preserve of longleaf pines in South Georgia, and she thought of Bartram. “I was experiencing there, in those old-growth longleafs, the same thing that he experienced when he wrote about the wiregrass brushing his stirrups,” she says. In this way, Bartram offers readers a means “of injecting poetry into local landscapes,” Hallock says.

Decades ago, working for the water management district to rehabilitate the St. Johns’ damaged ecosystem, Campbell turned to Bartram for guidance in his quest. Reading Travels alongside the detailed journals of William’s father, John, Campbell saw that their observations could be invaluable to scientists who wanted to return the St. Johns to a pre-European equilibrium. The Bartrams’ records are often the oldest documentation of a place’s natural features, and their writing has been used as a baseline for ecological restoration by scientists all over Florida who were inspired by William Bartram, as Campbell was. The Florida Park Service bases its management of Paynes Prairie on Bartram’s words, using Travels as a reference for everything from the topography and water cycles to the wildlife and plants. The 2013 management plan for the park quotes from Bartram’s descriptions of the forests and wetlands to show how these places have changed. Longleaf pine restoration is ongoing at the park now, a nod to the pine forest that Bartram saw.

Despite conservation efforts over the last 50 years, some of the landscapes that Bartram memorialized remain gravely threatened. In Florida, development has altered or swallowed much of Bartram’s route on land and water, and the population boom shows no signs of slowing: The state saw 2.7 million new residents from 2010 to 2020. “People wanting to move here is the greatest threat to the St. Johns. They are literally loving Florida to death,” says Rob Mattson, an environmental scientist who worked for the St. Johns River Water Management District for 17 years, carrying out ecological research and monitoring. Newcomers may be undeterred by Florida’s hurricanes, but recent storms have been disastrous at all levels of life—even for eelgrass, an important food source for manatees. On our kayaking trip, Campbell points out indentations along the shoreline made by manatees dragging themselves onto land in a desperate search for something to eat.

Over years of paddling, Campbell matched the various springs, points and bluffs of today’s St. Johns River to the river Bartram described on the page. Later, he introduced his friend Sam Carr to Bartram, and Carr soon joined Campbell in searching for glimpses of the past in the present landscape. Putnam County is one of the poorest in Florida, and its relative lack of development has preserved sites like Satsuma Spring, a hidden sulfur spring that Bartram visited with his father. Seeing (and smelling) Satsuma has moved some Bartram scholars to tears, Carr says, because it is so remarkably intact. “There are so few places where you can have that kind of an experience, where nature is preserved in a pretty close state to what it was when he was here,” Campbell says.

Campbell and Carr, both now retired, realized that Bartram could be useful not only for science; he could also help them change their hometown’s fortunes and protect their beloved river at the same time. They set out to mark the Bartram Trail in Putnam County, hoping to teach residents about the river’s history and attract ecotourists who would appreciate its beauty without harming its wildlife, and they installed interactive signs with QR codes that allow visitors to read Bartram’s words on their phones. In 2016, the National Parks Service recognized the Bartram Trail in Putnam County as a National Recreation Trail.

“I honestly believe that this is an absolute jewel in the state of Florida,” Carr says. In 2014, Carr and Campbell also founded an annual spring festival, the Bartram Frolic, which features boat rides, bike tours, academic presentations and historical re-enactments. During this event, local schoolchildren learn about the river’s ecology and Bartram’s travels through Putnam County.

At Mount Royal, Campbell opens his worn copy of Travels, its pages thick with curling Post-its and scribbled notes. He reads aloud: “Continually impelled by a restless spirit of curiosity…my chief happiness consisted in tracing and admiring the infinite power, majesty and perfection of the great Almighty Creator, and in the contemplation that…I might be instrumental in discovering…some original productions of nature which might become useful to society.” As Campbell reads, a red-winged blackbird swoops down from the trees, eavesdropping.

Bartram’s work has indeed been “useful to society” in ways he could never have foreseen, though the true value of Travels, Hallock says, is it “allows us to act on our best intentions,” to seek harmony with the earth rather than selfish dominion. “When you read Bartram,” he says, “there’s a sense of hope that we can do better.”

In a small town north of Rome, researchers have unearthed a 1,600-year-old temple dedicated to a Roman emperor’s ancestors. Built during the reign of Constantine in the fourth century C.E., the structure sheds light on the empire’s transition from pagan worship to Christianity.

As Saint Louis University historian Douglas Boin recently announced at the Archaeological Institute of America’s annual meeting, he and his team discovered three walls of the “monumental structure” in Spello, Italy, during excavations last summer.

“It will significantly aid in the understanding of the ancient town, the ancient townscape and city society in the later Roman Empire,” says Boin in a statement. “It shows the continuities between the classical pagan world and early Christian Roman world that often get blurred out or written out of the sweeping historical narratives.”

Boin first came to Spello because of a letter Constantine wrote to the townspeople during his reign. The rescript—an authoritative message from an emperor—was rediscovered in the 1700s and is now on display in Spello’s town hall, reports Newsweek’s Aristos Georgiou. In it, Constantine granted Spello’s people permission to celebrate a religious festival in their own town, rather than making the long journey to another, under one condition: They must build a temple dedicated to worshipping Constantine’s imperial ancestors.

At the time, the Roman Empire was in the midst of a dramatic cultural shift. After worshiping pagan gods like Jupiter, Juno and Minerva for centuries, its people were increasingly accepting Christianity. Constantine helped lead this transition, issuing a decree permitting Christian worship in 313 C.E.

The fourth-century rescript indicates, though, that the emperor entertained different religious values simultaneously: In addition to Christianity, he appears to have supported “imperial cult” traditions, which were based on the old Roman belief that emperors were divine figures.

“The idea that Constantine is just as involved in promoting a pagan cult of the emperors as he is [in] embracing his own newfound Christianity is just one of these weird chapters in history I personally love,” Boin tells St. Louis Public Radio’s Elaine Cha. “It shows us that our neat and tidy way of understanding the past zigzags a lot more than we might be comfortable admitting.”

In Spello, Boin’s team performed underground imaging to scan for potential archaeological sites. Based on their findings, they decided to excavate the ground beneath a parking lot, where they unearthed what Boin thinks are the temple’s internal walls. He calls the find the most significant evidence of imperial cult practices in the late Roman Empire.

“There’s evidence from other places throughout the Roman world that Christian rulers supported imperial cult practices,” says Boin. “We’ve known that pagans worshiped at their temples in the fourth century, but those findings have all been small and inconsequential. And we’ve known that Christians supported the imperial cult, and we’ve known that without any sense of where it would have happened.”

The newly discovered structure bridges these gaps in the historical record, he adds. “Any study of the imperial cult in the fourth-century Roman Empire is now going to have to take account of this temple.”

As Boin tells Newsweek, the temple was likely used for at least two generations, until officials prohibited pagan practices near the end of the fourth century. The temple’s continuous use through a period of cultural change illustrates its role as a unifying force.

“This building, in a very radical way on its own, shows us the staying power of the pagan traditions that had been on the ground for centuries prior to the rise of Christianity,” says Boin in the statement. “It shows us how the Roman emperors continued to negotiate their own values, their own hopes and dreams for the future of the emperor and the empire without knocking down or burying the past.”

Big cats like tigers and lions have earned a reputation for being some of the fiercest predators on the planet. But bigger doesn’t always mean better in the animal kingdom—just ask Gaia, the 8-month-old black-footed cat who recently arrived at Utah’s Hogle Zoo.

Though she may look cute, Gaia is a top-notch hunter. In the wild, black-footed cats successfully catch their prey 60 percent of the time—earning them the title of the “world’s deadliest cat.” The animals eat between eight and 14 meals every evening, and just one of the felines can devour upwards of 3,000 rodents per year. (For comparison, big cats have a hunting success rate of around 25 percent, reports the Salt Lake Tribune’s Jordan Miller.)

But black-footed cats are in trouble—and that’s where Gaia comes in. She’s part of a North American breeding program organized by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums that aims to help the cats’ numbers rebound. Zookeepers brought Gaia to Hogle Zoo, because they hope she will one day mate with a 3-year-old male at the facility named Ryder.

“We laugh and joke about it as being endangered species dating,” says Bob Cisneros, Hogle Zoo’s associate director of animal care, to the Salt Lake Tribune.

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The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists black-footed cats as “vulnerable.” Scientists estimate roughly 9,700 mature individuals live in the savannas, grasslands and deserts of Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. Their numbers are decreasing because of human development, livestock farming, hunting, trapping, disease and habitat changes, per the IUCN.

Black-footed cats are smaller than a typical house cat, weighing between 2 and 6 pounds on average. Even so, they’re some of the most exacting killers on the planet. They hunt at night, using their stellar vision and quick speed to pounce on birds, reptiles, insects and rodents. In captivity, Gaia is eating special food made of organs, skeletal muscle and ground bone, plus a few humanely euthanized mice, reports the Salt Lake Tribune.

Gaia was one of four kittens born at the Fossil Rim Wildlife Center in Texas last year. She’s genetically different enough from Ryder that zookeepers thought the two would make a good breeding pair, so they sent her to Utah in October. They’re being kept apart for now, but once Gaia reaches sexual maturity, zookeepers will put them together and see if sparks fly. That could happen as early as this fall.

Last week, staff at Hogle Zoo put Gaia on display in the small animals exhibit, giving the public their first opportunity to see her. So far, the 2.64-pound kitty is still getting comfortable in her new environment. And, like other members of her species, Gaia is nocturnal, so she’s the most active at night, when the zoo is closed.

But, over time, zookeepers hope she’ll serve as an ambassador for her species and for wildlife conservation efforts more broadly.

“While animals like Ryder and Gaia may be found in Africa, far away from what we do on a daily basis… they become representatives of a conservation message that applies to everything here,” says Cisneros to the Washington Post’s Justine McDaniel.

2023 was a banner year for the National Museum of Natural History marked by the arrival of significant specimens, the unveiling of multiple exhibitions and hundreds of scientific publications.  Join us for the “NMNH in Review” series over the next month to learn about a new orca specimen, historic asteroid samples and other exciting discoveries made by museum scientists this year. Read previous installments here.

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Scientists wearing brightly colored gloves pulled vertebrae after vertebrae from bulging black trash bags in a Smithsonian lab as jets of water removed chunks of flesh from a colossal skull.  Nearby, ribs were stacked like bundles of firewood on a sterile metal examination table. Suddenly, the amalgamation of scattered bones began to fit together like the pieces of a biological puzzle as a majestic marine mammal took shape.

The 21-foot skeleton belongs to Orcinus orca, the largest member of the dolphin family.  Although the striking sight (and smell) of such a skeleton may make many people squeamish, the National Museum of Natural History’s marine mammal specialist, John Ososky, had been waiting months to get his hands on the oversized specimen.  The excitement was palpable as Ososky and a team of collections specialists rushed around the Osteo Prep Lab at the Smithsonian’s Museum Support Center noting every nick, scratch and crack on the dirt-encrusted bones.

In early January 2023, a female orca was found stranded near Palm Coast, Florida, immediately sparking the interest of marine mammal researchers all along the Eastern Seaboard.  In a collaborative effort, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission performed a post-death examination of the specimen, collecting tissue and DNA samples that will be used to analyze the orca’s life and potentially explain her death.

When Ososky heard about the orca, he immediately knew that he wanted it for the Smithsonian’s collections. In North America’s crowded coastal waters, human activity has depleted marine food resources and created a host of environmental hazards.  As a result, orca populations have dwindled over the years, making these strandings increasingly rare.

Although Ososky has processed close to 1,500 specimens during his 25 years at the museum, this was the first orca stranding he had ever responded to.  “This is a very rare animal, so every bit of data we get is precious,” Ososky said.  “Each specimen can help us understand how the species is changing through time, which has become harder and harder to assess.”

After the orca was taken to the University of Florida in Gainesville for a forensic study, Ososky requested that the specimen be covered in hay and compost material for 5 months to allow the remains to skeletonize.  When Ososky and NMNH vertebrate zoology museum technician Teresa Hsu arrived to collect the specimen, the compost pile was hot to the touch.  The heat was a strong indicator that the decomposition process was nearly complete, and the microbes in the compost material had broken down the whale’s organic matter.

An unusual August road trip brought the orca to the Smithsonian.  Despite the nose-wrinkling smell, other drivers on the road may never have guessed what was inside of the mountain of bags piled in the back of a pickup truck. At the Osteo Prep Lab, the skeleton was carefully laid out on the floor as Ososky and Hsu took their first thorough look at the museum’s newest marine mammal specimen.

Almost instantly, Ososky and Hsu noticed that this skeleton looked different than anything they had ever seen before.  Unlike many of the orca specimens in the Smithsonian’s collection, these bones were covered with imperfections that had accumulated over time.

“This skeleton has a lot of character to it for the same reason I have a lot of character to me: it’s old,” Ososky said with a laugh. “You can see her life history written in the holes and cracks in her bones, and it’s one of the things that makes this specimen very unique.”

This represents the first complete skeleton of a mature orca in the Smithsonian’s marine mammal collection, offering valuable research insights not seen in juvenile specimens.

To determine the exact age of the orca, scientists from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission are planning to cut into the specimen’s teeth to count the growth rings that accumulated over the animal’s lifetime.  But according to Hsu, the plates at the ends of the whale’s vertebrae were completely fused, a characteristic that occurs only when a mammal reaches maturity.

The researchers pinpointed a large hole in one of the vertebrae and signs of old age on the whale’s scapula.  “The vertebra should be solid, but this one is hollowed out like a bowl due to a long-standing infection,” Hsu said. “This would have been painful for the animal and restricted movement, and it’s clear that orca’s body was trying to react to it.”

This infection and bone degradation could have been caused by disease, arthritis or even a ship strike. According to Ososky, human interaction damage is commonly found on whale, dolphin and other marine mammal specimens.  Although researchers may never be able to determine this orca’s cause of death, a closer analysis of the bones using CT and laser scanning will help give context to the various injuries on its skeleton.

Once the initial analysis of the skeleton had been completed, the specimen underwent months of thorough cleaning.  While the Osteo Prep Lab has an abundance of skeletal preparation methods at its fingertips, Ososky was confident that macerating, or soaking, the specimen would be the least harmful and most effective plan.  Submerging the bones in water allowed natural microbial action to break down any remaining bits of grease and organic material. A quick bath in ammonia got rid of the fishy odor that stuck to the bones.

The skeleton is now through 90% of the cleaning process, and Ososky has begun numbering the bones to prepare them for installation in the Smithsonian’s marine mammal repository.  The bones will be available to researchers from around the world and could help answer some big questions in marine mammal science.

Although there are over 10 different varieties of orca, each with their own distinct size and characteristics, there is only one option when classifying this specimen.  “It has to be Orcinus orca,” Ososky says.  “That’s the only recognized species of orca at the moment.”

Many researchers believe that all orca varieties should be separated into distinct species. The technological tools needed to make these genetic and physical distinctions are becoming increasingly advanced.  However, in order to compare orca varieties, scientists need to examine mature specimens that are fully developed.

In a marine ecosystem that is facing the effects of human interactions, it is rare for orcas to survive to advanced ages.  Every specimen that has lived past the juvenile stage offers new opportunities for research into the complexities and differences between orca varieties and populations.  “We want to compare apples to apples, not apples to oranges,” Ososky said.  “It’s another reason why this complete, mature specimen is scientifically valuable and such a necessary addition to this collection.”

A specimen like this will also attract the interest of scientists from around the globe, helping them to investigate questions specific to their own research.  According to NMNH’s curator of marine mammals, Michael McGowen, “my postdoc Ellen Coombs and I will be scanning the jaws as part of a study on jaw morphology and ecology in killer whale groups called ‘ecotypes’ that feed on different things.”

Researchers from NOAA and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission have taken genetic samples that could be used to link the whale with other populations.  This research should be able to explain where this orca originated, and why it was down near the Gulf of Mexico when it died.

As the first and only mature orca skeleton in the collection, this specimen will be a crucial addition to the Smithsonian’s global repository, the largest and most diverse marine mammal collections in the world at 18,000 species strong. This unique data point will allow generations of future researchers to study and further understand this species.

“If I were to sum up natural history science in one phrase, it would be ‘change over time,’” Ososky said.  “Orcas are just endlessly fascinating creatures and studying how they are changing in today’s world has become more important than ever.”

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Zahiru’d-din Muhammad Babur (1483-1530), the founder of South Asia’s Mughal dynasty, believed that wooing allies was as important as fighting battles when it came to building an empire. With no finer way to win friends than over a good meal, his memoir, The Babur-nama (a plate from a 1590 illustrated version, left), is full of references to parties and picnics, replete with wine and fruit syrups, goose kebabs, “loaves of fine flour” and “plenty of sweet melons.”

Babur’s epicureanism was part of a longstanding culture of feasting in the Islamic world. “So much of Islamic art is related to the sourcing, preparation, serving and consumption of food,” notes Linda Komaroff, curator of “Dining with the Sultan,” a new exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art that brings together some 250 objects dating from the 7th to the early 20th centuries, presented in the context of culinary and dining traditions. They include a cookbook published in 13th-century Tehran, ornate brass trays, jade dishes and jeweled spoons, and an entire 18th-century reception room salvaged from a Damascus mansion.

“I think food is a good way of introducing an American museum audience to a different culture,” says Komaroff, who strove to make the show a multisensory experience. Guests will be invited to seat themselves on fancy cushions for a “virtual feast” and to sniff scent boxes stocked with cardamom, rosewater, orange blossoms and other heady aromas. Komaroff anticipates they will leave with their appetites thoroughly stimulated. “I think it’s good for people to be hungry.”

Should humans kill members of one bird species to help protect another? That’s the question scientists and conservationists are grappling with right now in the Pacific Northwest.

In a bid to save northern spotted owls from extinction, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has suggested shooting more than 470,000 barred owls over the next 30 years. The agency’s proposal—which is still a draft and will remain open for public comment through January 16—has drawn criticism from some wildlife conservation groups and highlights the difficulties land managers face while trying to maintain the delicate balance of ecosystems.

Spotted owls and barred owls are closely related. But only spotted owls are native to the Pacific Northwest. Barred owls, meanwhile, are an invasive species native to eastern North America that has slowly come to dominate the region over the last century. Their larger size, more generalist nature and faster reproduction rate have primed them to outcompete spotted owls.

The species’ proliferation has come at a cost to spotted owls in the region, whose numbers have dropped by roughly 75 percent over the last 20 years, according to the USFWS. Today, scientists estimate between 3,000 and 5,200 spotted owls live on federal lands in Washington, Oregon and northern California. Barred owls, by contrast, number over 100,000 in the same area.

“The populations are really at a tipping point right now,” said Alan Franklin, a research scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Wildlife Research Center, to Audubon magazine’s Ashley Braun in 2022. “Something has to be done quickly.”

Biologists have long pondered how to keep the barred owl population in check. In 2021, scientists published the results of an experiment that involved killing 2,485 barred owls in five study areas. Over five years, spotted owl survival rates increased by an average of 10 percent at the sites.

But to truly recover, spotted owls might need more than five years, because they are slow to reproduce. That’s the driving factor behind the agency’s recently proposed, long-term management plan that includes lethally removing hundreds of thousands of barred owls from parts of Washington, Oregon and California.

Government scientists argue that culling barred owls will give spotted owls the best chance of rebounding. But not everyone agrees.

“We don’t think it’s ethical to be going out and calling for barred owls and shooting them with a shotgun because they are currently doing better in the existing environment and outcompeting other species,” says Jennifer Best, wildlife law program director for the Connecticut-based animal advocacy group Friends of Animals, to NBC News’ Evan Bush.

Other conservationists are conflicted about the plan. While they understand that science may support the culling of barred owls, they worry about the ethical implications of killing off members of one species to save another. Bob Sallinger, executive director of the nonprofit Bird Conservation Oregon, describes the current moment to the Seattle Times’ Lynda V. Mapes as a “no-win, awful situation” that humans have “created for ourselves.”

“Are we going to do more harm than good?” he says to the publication. “Do we really want a bunch of people in the woods shooting at what are otherwise protected birds?”

This is far from the first controversial invasive species culling plan. In Oregon, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers killed thousands of cormorants in an effort to protect salmon in the Columbia River. In Australia, the government has proposed shooting feral horses, known as “brumbies,” from helicopters to help rebalance the ecosystem. And in Britain, scientists say that culling gray squirrels is one of the best ways to save native, threatened red squirrels.

In the case of the barred and spotted owls, biologists say the culling plan will ultimately help both types of birds thrive. They also came up with the proposal after considering other population control methods, including non-lethal removal and sterilization, but they ultimately determined those ideas would be impractical.

“Rather than choosing to conserve one bird over the other, this is about conserving two species,” says Kessina Lee, supervisor of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office in Oregon, to Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Sage Van Wing. “Spotted owls are fighting for their existence right now. Whereas, even if the service was able to remove that number of barred owls over the next 30 years, that would represent less than 1 percent of the global population of barred owls.”