travel
Business Travel Got You Down? Rent a Goldfish to Keep You Company
Wait, does the restaurant also serve fish?
All Stories
lightning
Cargo Ships Are Creating Sea Lightning
Oceanic shipping lanes see double the number of strikes.
cryptography
The World's Most Mysterious Medieval Manuscript May No Longer Be a Mystery
But we're not reading the Voynich manuscript quite yet.
rodents
Scientists Have a New Way to Listen to the Songs of Mice
The little rodents make a lot of noise, mostly out of the range of human hearing.
solar power
The Mysterious Connection Between Solar Storms and Stranded Whales
Could cosmic events be leading sperm whales to their deaths?
competitions
The International Hide and Seek Championship Starts Today
Start counting backward from 100.
sexism
Found: Evidence That a Lavish Burial Honored a Viking Warrior Woman
Turns out they weren't just myths.
passports
The History of Passport Photos, From 'Anything Goes' to Today's Mugshots
People have always hated how they look in them.
science fiction
Spielberg's Forgotten 'L.A. 2017' Dreamt of Today's Dystopian Future
A wonderfully weird TV episode from the director's early days.
vatican
Ancient Purple Scroll Stains Turn Out to Be Caused by Marine Microbes
A mystery from the Vatican Secret Archives, solved.
wolves
African Wild Dogs Vote on Crucial Pack Issues by Sneezing
Democracy is a blessing.
survivalism
Herman the Sturgeon Has Survived Another Catastrophe
The 79-year-old fish is making it through the Eagle Creek Fire.
feats
The Ceiling for Unpowered Flight Just Went Up 2,000 Feet
The Perlan 2 glider team is aiming much, much higher, and doing science on the way.
latin
How Do You Decode a Hapax? (Also, What’s a Hapax?)
It's a word that only appears once in a work, author's oeuvre, or an entire language's written record.
autumn
Atlas Obscura's Fall Destination Staff Picks
From Kazakhstan to Vermont, these are our dream places to visit this autumn.
national monument
The Early Master Plans for National Parks Are Almost as Beautiful as the Parks Themselves
In the 1930s, park planning was pretty.
national monument
Found: The Forgotten Metal Markers of a 100-Year-Old Ecology Study
Eight plots in Alaska are now the longest-running study of plant succession in the world.
coral reefs
The Coral Reef Loss Data Hidden in Old Navigational Charts
In the Florida Keys, researchers have found an important new way to estimate what's been lost.
