Showing posts from January, 2018

Yaodong: China’s Pit Houses

Jan 30, 2018

For more than four thousand years, on the Loess Plateau in northern China, people have been residing in caves known as yaodong, which is Chi...

Women Who Become Men: The Sworn Virgins of Albania

Jan 29, 2018

In the remote mountains of northern Albania are villages where there are women who live and act like men. They have short hair, wear baggy p...

Rainbow Colored Mountains

Jan 27, 2018

Soil is typically brown, but when mixed with the right minerals in right quantities, it can yield a fascinating range of colors. You can see...

Fore-edge Painting: Hidden Artworks on The Edges of Books

Jan 26, 2018

The following video created by an archivist at Cornell University’s Library, New York, shows a 1925 copy of Rudyard Kipling's "Kim...

The House That Was Moved Across The Atlantic

Jan 25, 2018

Sometimes a house just needs to be moved no matter what’s the cost. Usually, these are historic structures that are in danger of demolition ...

Tipu Sultan’s Mechanical Tiger

Jan 24, 2018

The sun is the hottest when the clock strikes one in the small town of Seringapatam, not far from the city of Mysore, in present day Karnata...

Stuckie The Mummified Dog

Jan 22, 2018

Fifty years ago a dog went up a tree chasing a racoon or something. He never came down. Fast forward twenty years. A group of loggers cut d...

The Negro of Banyoles

Jan 22, 2018

It’s one thing to keep the mummified body of a thousand year old pharaoh or a monk in a glass case in a museum, and another to stuff the dea...

Tianducheng: A Fake Paris in China

Jan 20, 2018

These two photographs of the Eiffel Tower look very similar, but they aren’t the same, which you can probably tell from their different surr...

Netherlandish Proverbs

Jan 18, 2018

Hanging at the Gemäldegalerie art museum in Berlin, Germany, is an unusual painting. Measuring 64 inches by 46 inches, this 16th century oil...

London Railings Made From World War 2 Stretchers

Jan 17, 2018

Many housing estates throughout London are surrounded by black steel and mesh railings with peculiar notches around the edges. Although at f...

The Legacy of Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid

Jan 16, 2018

A two-hour bumpy ride from Uyuni across Bolivia’s high plains will take you to the small town of San Vicente. At the entrance to this remote...

Fort Conger: Robert Peary’s Arctic Hut

Jan 13, 2018

In 1899, when famous arctic explorer Robert Peary reached Ellesmere Island, in Canada, he found the ruins of a hut erected by a previous arc...

The Witches’ Market of La Paz, Bolivia

Jan 11, 2018

Along a narrow cobblestone street in an old quarter of La Paz , in Boliva, old women dressed in traditional Andean garb of colorful ankle-le...

Elbphilharmonie: A Spectacular New Concert Hall in Hamburg

Jan 11, 2018

Exactly one year ago, on January 11, 2017, a new concert hall opened in Hamburg, Germany. Like a ship on dry dock, the new glassy constructi...

Athabasca Sand Dunes

Jan 9, 2018

Stretching for approximately 100 kilometers along the southern edge of Lake Athabasca, in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, are some of...

The Soledar Salt Mines

Jan 9, 2018

Some 250 million years ago, a part of Ukraine was under a shallow ocean. When the ocean dried up, it left behind a huge deposit of salt whic...

Honoring Animals Used in Research And Testing

Jan 8, 2018

The United States’ National Academies of Sciences estimates that as many as 22 million vertebrate animals are used every year in the United...

Akademgorodok: Siberia’s Silicon Valley

Jan 3, 2018

Tucked away in a remote forest of birch and pine in the heart of Siberia, 3,000 km away from Moscow, at a place where winters are six months...