Wild Life: Prairie Dog LanguageEach week, Atlas Obscura is providing a new short excerpt from our upcoming book, Wild Life: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Living Wonders (). In the early twentieth century, some prairie dog towns stretched for hundreds of miles.
The Supermarket Scanner Changed the Way We Buy Groceries ForeverInvented 50 years ago, the curious box deciphered an arcane kind of code to offer shoppers a trip into the future.
Five Types of Trees You Can Safely Plant Close to Your HouseIf you would like to plant a tree in your yard but you’re not sure that you have the space because you've heard it's a bad idea to plant a tree too close to your house, you’re in luck.
UK's Graduate Visa programs may stay, but Sunak plans crackdown on foreign education agentsUK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is expected to announce a crackdown on agents marketing graduate visa schemes overseas, aiming to project a tough stance on migration before this year’s general elections.
Recycled sewage, public health and the memory of the world: Books in briefThe cover of this revolutionary book shows a recycling symbol, with arrows of clear blue water. Yet the subject is sewage. Environmental and water journalist Peter Annin is satisfied that recycled sewage can be drunk, after studying water recycling for two decades.
Students protested for Palestine before Israel was even foundedAnd for decades, schools have tried to crack down on their activism.
‘It’s deeper than slavery’: Lisbon street project reclaims Portugal’s unseen black historyIt takes just a short stroll around Lisbon’s Sâo Domingos church to get a sense of its centuries-long history; a monument bearing the Star of David commemorates the thousands of Jews killed by a mob in 1506, while the church’s scorched pillars hint at the 1959 fire that ravaged its interior, la
The Progressive Brooklyn School Being Divided Over IsraelAt Brooklyn Friends School, progressive Quaker values are part of the curriculum. A required seminar for ninth-grade students encourages them to explore matters of identity and social justice, and there are land acknowledgments on the walls.
The Historic Trump Court Cases That We Cannot SeeOver the past month, in two courtrooms some two hundred and fifty miles apart, the government was hearing arguments in two of the most consequential court cases in American history. In New York, at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, a judge was presiding over the first criminal trial of a former U.
Donald Trump already won the only Supreme Court fight that matteredThis case is about delaying his trial, and the GOP-controlled Supreme Court has given him everything he could reasonably hope for and more. On Thursday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Trump v.
What Myths About the Anthropocene Get WrongThe concept of the Anthropocene epoch was born in February 2000 out of a moment of spontaneity. Chemist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen had been listening to a narrative emerging at an international convening of scientists in Mexico.
'I thought they hated me' – Lyon on Ashes, Lancashire and BazballNathan Lyon was heartbroken, but wishes he'd allowed himself the time to take it all in. Ten months ago, the Australia off-spinner was limping down the Lord's pavilion steps and into Ashes folklore, his calf shredded and his series over.
These Electric School Buses Are on Their Way to Save the GridThe big yellow school bus is a US icon, but perhaps not one that future Americans will remember fondly. Chugging through neighborhoods, idling in front of kids’ houses, the vehicles spew both noise and fossil-fuel pollution all across town.
The Seven Best Ways to Organize Notes in Google KeepNotetaking Jedis know the power of organization. Creating a system for your Google Keep notes isn't any different, even if the sticky notes app doesn't have an obvious tier of folders and sub-folders.
How today’s antiwar protests stack up against major student movements in historyCampus protests for Gaza may be the biggest of the 21st century.