There’s always a risk involved when grabbing the latest software update for a device as soon as it’s released. You want to try out all those new features, but there’s bound to be a bug or two discovered as the masses get their hands on it. That gamble didn’t pay off for some Apple Watch Series 4 users, who discovered that watchOS 5.1 bricked their fancy new wearables.

As 9to5Mac first reported, a small number of Apple Watch Series 4 owners have turned to Twitter and Reddit to share details of a bug that leaves their smartwatch indefinitely stuck on the boot screen, with the Apple logo displayed, after installing the watchOS 5.1 upgrade that was released alongside iOS 12.1 yesterday.

Apple has since temporarily removed the watchOS 5.1 update, and according to TechCrunch as well as other outlets, the company acknowledged the bug in a statement and said it’s “pulled back the software update as a precaution [...]” Apple encouraged users affected by the problem to contact AppleCare, but also assured Apple Watch Series 4 owners not to worry if the update was installed successfully. According to the BBC, affected Apple Watch owners have been asked by Apple to send their devices away for repair or replacement.

“We are working on a fix for an upcoming software update,” Apple said. We’ve reached out to Apple for more information.

[TechCrunch, 9to5Mac]

When Marshall Cordell started buying human bones in the late 1970s, he says a full skeleton from India cost “probably $199.” Back then, almost all real human skeletons came from India, and companies there sent him catalogs listing everything from skulls to finger bones for sale.

“They were literally like an auto parts shop, only with real skeletons,” Cordell, who turned 71 this year, says today. “You could buy ear bones. You could buy human teeth.”

As the new owner of a medical chart company, the young college graduate with no background in medicine was entering the strange world of anatomical model sales. In the end, he would not only dominate the American fake skeleton market but change how we celebrate Halloween. He would become, in his own words, “the skeleton king of the world.”

In the 1990s, anatomical models sold by Cordell would appear in movies as casino decorations, and even on the back cover of a (later censored) Nirvana album. But in the beginning, he was just trying to grow the company he bought with $5,000 he borrowed from his dad.

“I was figuring out a way to expand the business beyond anatomical charts,” says Cordell, who saw potential in selling discounted skeletons by buying his bones direct.

The rise of plastic bones

Doctors and scientists were looking for easy access to skeletons long before Cordell entered the bone game. In 1543, father of anatomy Andreas Vesalius was already complaining that the traditional method of preparing human skeletons for scientific study was “time consuming, dirty, and difficult,” according to medical historian Anita Guerrini.

Well into the 19th century, Western physicians relied on body-snatching to get skeleton specimens, either paying grave robbers or doing the digging themselves. Countries tried to curb the practice by legalizing the seizure of so-called “unclaimed” corpses, but as the medical profession grew, demand for skeletons outstripped domestic supply. According to journalist Scott Carney, Britain began sourcing its skeletons from colonial India, which would become the world’s primary bone supplier in the 20th century.

“In India members of the Dom caste, who traditionally performed cremations, were pressed into processing bones,” writes Carney in The Red Market, his examination of the illicit body trade. “By the 1850s, Calcutta Medical College was churning out nine hundred skeletons a year. ”

More than a hundred years later, Cordell says, he became America’s largest importer of human skeletons by getting them directly from Indian suppliers by mail. After purchasing the Anatomical Chart Company from the widow of medical illustrator Peter Bachin in 1970, the Chicago-area native starting selling bones to doctors and universities that were already buying Bachin’s iconic images.

“We’d open the boxes and [the skeletons] would smell from mothballs because that’s how they kept them fresh,” says Cordell. “I never really knew who I was dealing with.”

It’s likely the origin of these bones was being kept intentionally vague. According to Carney, the Indian public was outraged in the 1980s by reports of criminals robbing graves and funeral pyres—or even committing murder—to get skeletons for the international market.

In 1985, India banned the export of human remains, effectively ending the world’s cheap access to real skeletons of dubious origin. Back in the states, Cordell found himself on a search similar to the one that had turned him to India in the first place.

“I had customers, I had orders, so there was no alternative except to find suppliers of plastic,” says Cordell. This would bring him to Germany, where plastic anatomical skeletons were developed in the grim aftermath of the Nazi era.

“After the second world war, we started to ask in Germany about where the skeletons in universities came from,” says Otto H. Gies, former president of 3B Scientific Group, which created the first plastic skeleton and continues to be a worldwide leader in the anatomical skeleton market. “There were many, many issues about that because nobody wanted a skeleton in his teaching room that came from a concentration camp. And that is why they started to replace those with only plastic skeletons.”

Cordell, who is Jewish, says he was initially intimidated about going into business with Germans, but suppliers like 3B welcomed him and soon he was selling fake skeletons at a scale far beyond that of the real thing.

Skeletons go seasonal

The story of Cordell’s bone business, which, like many anatomical companies at the time, had to reckon with the troubling truth about real human skeletons, might end there if it wasn’t for Cordell’s talent for promotion.

“I had broken [plastic] skeletons, things I couldn’t sell for professional use, so I rented a booth at a Halloween show,” says Cordell. “I put a pile of bones that said ‘two dollars a pound.’ Broken skeletons that were no good were perfect for haunted houses, and the market just took off.”

Timing was everything. In the late ‘80s, people were beginning to decorate their yards for Halloween as they did for Christmas, according to Cordell, and his business became the primary vendor for serious bone fans in need of fake skeletons. Gies says one American company—which sounds a lot like Cordell’s—began having Christmas and Halloween sales promoted with skeletons wearing Walkmans.

“We had to do the glowing-in-the-dark skeleton and all these kind of gimmicks which they could sell for Halloween in America,” says Gies. “At that time for us, that was very exciting and we did that. And then the very conservative professors and teachers here in Germany were upset about us.”

Around the same time, Cordell began selling his own line of bargain-priced artificial skeletons, including the full-sized “Budget Bucky,” a miniature model called “Tiny Tim,” and a three-foot skeleton marketed as “Mr. Thrifty,” which sold for less than $90.

“Otto was really jealous when I came up with this three-foot skeleton,” claims Cordell. “That became a huge, huge market. I would bring those in by the container-load.”

“A dream come true”

As Anatomical Chart Company began selling fake skeletons to customers outside the medical field, Cordell himself was entering the public eye. He remembers Good Morning America interviewing him from his “bone room” on Halloween morning and a print story headlined “Someone Has to Do It.”

Soon, the company was branching into the educational toy market with the Brainstorms novelty catalog and stores like BareBones in the Mall of America, which was run by Cordell’s now-ex-wife Katie Malone. “We had a store in there the day it opened” in 1992, recalls Cordell. “We had skeletons embedded in the exterior of the store.”

A newscast from opening day calls BareBones, which sold a variety of anatomical models and charts, “by far the most unique store you’ll find” in the enormous mall. Among its fans were Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain and Babes in Toyland’s Lori Barbero, who told Gigwise in 2015 that she brought the Seattle band there knowing Cobain “would love it.”

“It’s really great, I bought all these fetuses, anatomy men, and charts and stuff, it’s like a dream come true,” Cobain told Canadian TV station MuchMusic in 1993. “I just went on this rampage of buying all this stuff, and I think I’ve overused it for pictures for the album.”

The “pictures” for that album, In Utero, would end up being a problem. Kmart and Walmart refused to stock the record, which had a photo of flowers and fetus models on the back cover. Eventually, the band released a version of In Utero with the fetuses cropped out, so that “kids who don’t have the opportunity to go to mom-and-pop stores” could buy the record.

According to Cordell, Anatomical Chart Company products were also admired by Hollywood prop masters, who used his wares in movies like Patch Adams, where Robin Williams famously makes a plastic skeleton talk. His artificial skeletons even made into Las Vegas’ Treasure Island Hotel & Casino, where they were given gold chains and tricorn hats in line with the casino’s pirate theme.

“I didn’t have any competition,” says Cordell, “so anyone that was looking for a skeleton, I was the one they went to.”

Legacy of a boneman

As the decade continued, however, these efforts to grow beyond the medical market began cutting into the main business’s bottom line. Skeletons were always just a minor part of the chart company’s sales, and in the second half of the ‘90s, Cordell closed the stores and sold off Brainstorms as the educational toy market wound down. Finally, in 1999, he says, he sold Anatomical Chart Company for $17 million

“It was a very, very difficult time,” says Cordell. “It wasn’t fun for me anymore.”

Since then, Cordell has moved into the theater business, finding success producing shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and as “the last investor” in Monty Python’s Spamalot, but his bony legacy lives on. In 2005, his son Adam Cordell entered the fake skeleton business himself as the president of Anatomical Worldwide.

“We still have legacy accounts that buy dozens and dozens of Buckys,” says Liz Huff, director of operations at Anatomical Worldwide. “All the Six Flags parks around the country buy either Bucky or our cheap Chinese one, [Bargain Basement] Barney.”

For anatomical model sellers, however, the Halloween market just isn’t what it once was. These days, according to Huff, even a decorative $40 skeleton from Party City or Walmart “looks pretty damn good.”

“Marshall really was a pioneer for increasing not just the use of skeletons in decor, but also the fidelity of the skeletons,” says Huff. “It’s really the hardcore guys that know they need that better detail, that better quality.”

Still, Huff says her company sees “a small uptick” this time of year. So if you find yourself admiring the fine quality or life-like detailing of a fake skeleton this Halloween, you have a Chicago kid who bought a medical chart company strictly as a business he “thought had potential” to thank.

Apple’s second press blitz of the fall delivered details on a bunch of new devices. But the company also made some announcements on the environmental front that are generating buzz and raising questions, particularly regarding the recycled materials some of its 2018 product line will use.

Specifically, Apple announced that the 2018 models of its MacBook Air and its back-from-the-dead Mac Mini are being built with a 100 percent recycled aluminum case, using a custom alloy that incorporates excess aluminum scavenged from the manufacturing process. Apple claims these changes, along with the incorporation of post-consumer recycled plastic into the Mac Mini, have reduced the two products’ overall carbon footprints by nearly 50 percent, and that the new MacBook Air is the “greenest Mac ever.”

It’s the latest in Apple’s ongoing effort to fashion itself as a company environmentally-conscious consumers can feel good buying from. Last spring, Apple announced that all its data centers, stores, and offices are now powered by renewable energy, and it debuted a second-generation version of an iPhone recycling robot that will somehow factor into the company’s ambitious long-term goal, first announced in 2017, of ending the mining of virgin materials altogether.

Devices made with “fine shavings of recaptured aluminum,” per the company, give us a more concrete glimpse of what a post-mining Apple could look like—or at least, an Apple that spends less time contracting others to blast the Earth for ore and more mining its own supply chain. But like Apple’s other recent environmental claims, it comes with important caveats and leaves plenty of open questions.

We don’t, for instance, know how much aluminum the company will continue to mine and refine for its other products, including its new iPad Pro and a range of legacy devices that use the metal for their enclosure. We don’t know how environmentally intensive its new alloy production process is, and it isn’t clear what numbers Apple did (and didn’t) include in its math to figure that recycled aluminum will cut the new devices’ carbon footprints in half. When reached for comment, Apple sent us quotes from its latest publicly-available environmental responsibility report that explain how the company seeks to recover aluminum both from manufacturing and from dead phones using its recycling robots.

We do know that aluminum is a big part of Apple’s environmental footprint—accounting for a full quarter of the company’s carbon emissions from manufacturing, per Apple’s own math—and that the company has made reducing this particular impact a priority. Aluminum is extracted from bauxite ore (which is mined in a wasteful and ecologically-destructive process) before being smelted into a pure compound. Apple is now attempting to mitigate this energy-intensive process by sourcing more metal smelted using hydroelectric power and less using fossil fuels. Recovering more metal from the manufacturing process so that there’s less need to mine the Earth for it should shave that footprint down further.

Josh Lepawsky, a geographer at Memorial University of Newfoundland who studies the environmental lives of our electronics, said Apple should be applauded for this effort. While coverage of the tech industry’s environmental impact often focuses on the mountains of e-waste we produce, in reality, the bulk of the emissions and pollution our devices generate comes from their production rather than end-of-life. This, Lepawski argues, is the real e-waste problem, and it’s not an easy one to fix. Simply tracking down thousands of raw material suppliers—say nothing of reducing waste and environmental impact throughout a supply chain—presents a wicked challenge for a company like Apple.

“It is actually kind of easy to poke holes in their argument and there are really important holes,” Lepawsky said. “But I think it’s really important for us as consumers to understand what they are trying to do is really, really hard.”

Of course, time will tell how much of an impact a recycled aluminum case here and a recycled tin logic board there will have on the planet. Lepawsky noted that even if Apple stopped purchasing new aluminum altogether, that wouldn’t necessarily curb demand across the market, as the metal the company used to buy would suddenly be available to others, perhaps at a lower price-point. “Individual companies or even sectors can reduce their demand but that doesn’t necessarily mean aggregate demand ends up going down,” he said.

What’s more—as many environmentalists have noted—if Apple truly wanted to do the planet a solid, it’d make devices that last longer and are easier to take apart, it would let recyclers take its devices apart rather than making them shred everything, and it would stop fighting independent repair companies and right to repair laws that enable users to prolong the life of their Apple devices.

Greenpeace, a leading watchdog of the electronics industry’s environmental impact, told Earther in an emailed statement that Apple’s effort to source recycled aluminum for its products is “welcome, especially given the carbon intensity of aluminum and the dire impacts of climate change.”

“However, to truly be the greenest laptop ever, Apple must prioritize design features that extend product life, including replaceable batteries and the ability to upgrade and repair more easily,” the statement continues.

These next steps, of course, could cut into Apple’s bottom line. And as much as Apple wants to be seen as an environmental leader, it probably doesn’t want to compromise its status as the world’s richest company in order to do so.

Special effects makeup artist Bill Turpin made this deflated-body-like shape out of silicone for the Form Follows Function project.

Kai Bastard photographed the project using a large-format camera suspended 3 meters above the form.

This photograph is titled "Birth of Venus" and does oddly resemble Sandro Botticelli's iconic painting.

The photographs were taken using white and black backdrops, which Bastard says "allows the work to reflect back onto different sexual orientations, creating different dynamics while still giving precedence to and focus on the sculptural form itself."

Turpin used a wig made of human hair, making the figure look super realistic.

Form Follows Function intends to deconstruct the the ways people are conditioned to appreciate bodies, to "present the human form in a new and alien view," Bastard says.

"The thickness of the sculpture had to be thin enough to be flexible, but at the same time strong," photographer Kai Bastard says.

The images in Form Follows Function are unsettlingly beautiful.

"Capturing a moment in time allows the viewer to continuously reflect," Bastard says. "We want our work to resonate with the viewer [by] putting them into a state of self-reflection, denial, or shock."

Bill Turpin hand-painted the figure and added hair to the body.

You walk alone through a foggy forest with nothing but your day bag and binoculars. Birds and insects call quietly as they fly above and creep below. Suddenly, you hear a piercing, metallic alarm like nothing else in nature, followed by an even higher squeal—it sounds like microphone feedback, and it only grows louder as you continue walking.

Then, you spot it. A creature with an unsettlingly wide-open mouth and flaps of flesh dangling from its face. It’s a being that would be at home in a Silent Hill video game.

This thing is neither spook nor spirit. You’ve found the three-wattled bellbird, the haunted-looking denizen of Central American cloud forests and possibly the loudest bird in the world. But what is this creature? Why and how does it make its ear-shattering, soul-chilling sound?

“Some people mistake its call for carpentry work,” Debra Hamilton, executive director of the Monteverde Institute in Costa Rica, told Gizmodo. “Tourists complain to [hotel] receptionists.”

The three-wattled bellbird can be found in Costa Rica, Panama, Nicaragua, and Honduras, breeding in the mountain cloud forests but found at lower altitudes throughout the year. The forests really are foggy: “Some people would call it that creepy fog you always see at a haunted house—it rolls in and surrounds you,” said Hamilton.

It appears that the males of this species use their piercing calls to defend their territories, much like a dog might growl, as well as to attract female mates to their high perches, explained Hamilton. The wattles—those unsettling flesh flaps—are used in courtship displays and may continue to grow throughout the bird’s life.

The bird might take seven years to achieve its chestnut-and-white, three-wattled look; it appears brown-and-olive streaked until maturity. When one male lands on another’s perch, the defender will push the challenger to the edge of the branch and shriek directly into his ear. If the challenger can withstand the loud bonk and continues returning to the perch, he can overtake the branch and win the territory.

These birds are hard to spot, though easy to hear, as their loud shouts can carry for at least a kilometer during breeding season. They continue calling several times per minute, opening their mouth wide and heaving as if they’re about to vomit before emitting their immense bonk, a high pitch squeak, or a third, soft, washing machine-like noise.

The bird’s strange internal anatomy is probably responsible for the calls. Unlike humans, who have larynxes near the top of their tracheas, birds have a system called a syrinx at the bottom of their trachea, where it splits into either lung. Air vibrates as it passes a piece of cartilage at the base of the syrinx as well as its walls, creating noise.

“The syrinx of bellbirds is unique,” Richard Prum, evolutionary ornithologist at Yale, told Gizmodo. “The tracheobronchial junction,” where the trachea splits into the bronchi that lead to the lungs, “is a nearly spherical chamber that is covered with complex intrinsic musculature.” Though it’s still unclear how this structure creates the bonk, the three-wattled bellbird is the best-studied of the four bellbird species. You might find the calls of the white bellbird or bearded bellbird equally as strange.

But the bellbird isn’t born with its booming bonk, and scientists have studied how the three-wattled bellbird’s call changes as the bird ages. “You can hear young birds making inappropriate vocalizations that sound like an adolescent’s voice breaking,” said Prum.

The bird’s calls seem to be changing as a group, too. The third component of bellbird calls in Monteverde used to sound like a “chk chk chk,” but now the birds have all begun to add a more vocal quality. And birds in different regions make noises with different dialects, implying that they’re learning from one another and changing together, explained Hamilton.

This horror movie-esque creature is an essential resident of the cloud forest. These birds eat wild avocados, then spread the seeds by regurgitating them, though puking up an avocado seed perhaps adds to its freakiness.

And, like many other species, the three-wattled bellbird is at risk, as they lose their habitat to human development on the Pacific Ocean side of the mountains. They’re listed as vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list, though experts are concerned that their numbers are low enough to be considered endangered.

Sure, there are other birds who kill, who use tools, and who attack humans. But few have the unsettling appearance and spooky call of the three-wattled bellbird. And for that, they should be respected.

“This is not science fiction,” said Hamilton. “They’re the keepers of the forest.”

Ten years ago today, someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto sent an academic paper to a cryptography mailing list proposing a form of digital cash called "Bitcoin." The pseudonymous Nakamoto, whose true identity remains unknown, described an idea for "mining" a limited amount of this virtual currency through a peer-to-peer scheme that wouldn't depend on a bank, government, or any other central authority. Once people started using bitcoin, it would be impossible for a government to pull the plug, as happened with previous attempts to create digital money like E-Gold.

Today Bitcoin is a global phenomenon. Individual bitcoins sell for thousands of dollars. The price has dropped steeply from its peak of nearly $20,000 in December 2017; but recall that at the beginning of 2017, one bitcoin sold for less than $1,000. Meanwhile, hordes of other "cryptocurrencies" have launched, though none has attracted quite as much interest from users or investors as bitcoin, and venture capitalists pour millions into startups looking to capitalize on the underlying technology.

It all started with the white paper. When Nakamoto published the paper, many of the underlying concepts of Bitcoin already existed, including the idea of issuing digital money to people who devoted computing resources to a problem. But Emin Gün Sirer, a computer science professor at Cornell University, credits Nakamoto with a major breakthrough: a way to ensure that users trust one another, and the network, without relying on gatekeepers.

Bitcoin relies on a ledger called the “blockchain.” Every transaction is cryptographically signed and recorded in the blockchain, which is distributed to every participant in the Bitcoin network, preventing anyone from double-spending their coins.

Because it’s difficult, if not impossible, to tamper with the ledger, anyone can download the Bitcoin software and blockchain and participate in the network. There are no corporations that control entry into the network, or government bureaucrats demanding that you file paperwork to participate. Building a currency system without the need for gatekeepers wasn’t a problem many were focused on, but once it was solved, it moved the idea of decentralized digital currency from the academic fringes to the nightly news.

"Proving that this was possible was a major contribution to computer science," Sirer says. "Satoshi opened the door to revamping the entire finance industry.”

The rise of Bitcoin happened largely without Nakamoto, who disappeared from the internet in late 2010, leaving the Bitcoin software in the hands of some early collaborators. Attempts to track down Nakamoto have been at best inconclusive. They include a Newsweek cover story claiming that Nakamoto wasn’t a pseudonym but the real name of a retired engineer living in Temple City, California, which has been largely debunked, and WIRED’s reporting on Australian academic Craig Wright, who has claimed to be Nakamoto but been unable to prove it.

For all of Bitcoin's success, it hasn't lived up to Nakamoto's dream of a currency for day-to-day transactions, remaining largely a medium for speculators. In part, that's because transactions are incredibly slow. Sirer has estimated that Bitcoin processes around three transactions per second, a poor showing compared to Visa’s 3,674 transactions per second. Meanwhile, other problems have emerged, such as the Bitcoin network's alarmingly huge carbon footprint, which one report suggests is already on par with that of a small country.

Nakamoto’s successors on the Bitcoin project, along with the developers of rival cryptocurrencies, are working to solve these problems, but in ways that sometimes radically diverge from the original white paper. The Bitcoin project is considering an innovation called the Lighting Network that would speed up transactions by moving most transactions outside of the blockchain. Sirer, meanwhile, is working on new protocols that address both speed and environmental impact. Others have created new cryptocurrencies that try to address a whole host of Bitcoin issues, from performance to privacy.

"Technically, Satoshi has been outclassed in every imaginable way," says Sirer. "And for the issues we still face, [Satoshi’s writing] provides no solution."

That led Sirer to declare on Twitter in June that "Satoshi is dead." Sirer didn't mean that literally, but in the sense that Nietzsche wrote that "God is dead": even Satoshi wouldn't be able to resolve the sorts of disputes the cryptocurrency community now faces.

Jonathan Sidego, an executive at the hedge fund Numerai agrees with Sirer that Nakamoto’s paper has little guidance to offer on the problems now facing bitcoin and that the public will interpret Nakamoto’s writings in different ways.

But that's not to say that Nakamoto or the white paper are irrelevant. "The white paper is definitely worth reading for anyone interested in understanding the concepts that allow blockchains to work," Sidego says. "The paper is short and surprisingly readable, so definitely worthwhile."

Neha Narula, director of the MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative, agrees. Asked during a panel at WIRED's 25th anniversary event what what one book or paper on cryptocurrency she'd recommend everyone read, Narula picked the white paper. "It's amazing how the white paper still holds up," she says. "It's still the best way to understand how bitcoin works."

She also thinks that Nakamoto’s subsequent silence is a big part of the Bitcoin creator’s legacy. “One of the coolest things about Bitcoin is that the creator stepped away,” she says. “So many people feel like they have ownership over this thing. I think if the person who created it, who started it, was still around, people wouldn't feel like they could have a piece of it too.”

More Great WIRED Stories