The Frankincense Trees of Wadi Dawkah
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 11, 2017
For more than 5,000 years, the Arabs have traded two highly prized fragrances —frankincense and myrrh— obtained from trees that grow exclusi...
Semaphore: The World’s First Telegraph
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 11, 2017
Smoke signals and beacons have been used to relay messages over short distances since ancient times, but the only reliable way to send messa...
Rosalia Lombardo: The Mummy That Blinks
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 10, 2017
Rosalia Lombardo was only two years old when she died from pneumonia in 1920. Her premature death left her father so heartbroken that he app...
The Museum of Bad Art
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 7, 2017
On rare occasions, a thrift store or a pawnshop can yield items of extreme value, but these are hardly the places you can expect to bump int...
London Necropolis Railway: The Train For The Dead
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 6, 2017
It was a difficult time to be alive in 1848 London, and worse still to be dead. A cholera epidemic had just swept through the city killing n...
The Anti-Communist Dwarves of Wroclaw
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 4, 2017
Scattered throughout the city of Wroclaw, Poland, are hundreds of small bronze statues of dwarves. They began appearing in the streets in 20...
Casey: The Small Town of Big Things
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 3, 2017
At just over two square miles and with less than 3,000 inhabitants, the town of Casey in Illinois might be among the smaller towns of the Un...
The World's Smallest Monuments
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 3, 2017
The Russian city of Tomsk is home to the smallest public monument in the world —a tiny bronze frog, sitting on top of a smooth rock. The scu...
Venice Minus Water
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 2, 2017
For the second year in a row, low tides in Venice have sunk to such record levels that it has left the city almost entirely without water. V...
The Swing of Casa Del Arbol, Ecuador
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 2, 2017
For the past few years, Carlos Sanchez, a volunteer with the Military Geographical Institute, has been assisting a group of a volcanologists...
