The Australian Floating Hotel That Ended Up in North Korea
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 24, 2019
For little more than a year in the late 1980s, a seven-story five-star hotel floated over John Brewer Reef, about 70 km off the coast of Tow...
Showing posts with the label Featured
The Termite Mounds of Okavango Delta
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 23, 2019
The Okavango Delta is a place like nowhere else on earth. It’s a vast swampy inland delta where a river disappears instead of emptying into ...
Villa Girasole: The House That Rotates
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 21, 2019
In the hills of northern Italy near Verona stands an L-shaped house called Villa Girasole, which means “sunflower” in Italian. And just li...
Fata Morgana Mirage
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 19, 2019
The atmosphere plays unusual tricks with light in the polar regions, especially at sea, creating strange shapes like a looming island, a flo...
Döllersheim: The Village That Hitler Destroyed to Crush a Rumor
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 18, 2019
About one hundred km northwest of Vienna, in northern Austria, lies a small village called Döllersheim. Eighty years ago, this tiny Austrian...
The Hellfire Club And Caves
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 12, 2019
Throughout history men have formed clandestine clubs where rich young aristocrats met and indulged in drunken orgies, gambling and carousing...
Khuk Khi Kai, The Chicken Poop Prison
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 7, 2019
Chicken poop has a strong and suffocating smell of ammonia that’s hard to stand for more than a few minutes. The odor causes a variety of ad...
Inuit Snow Goggles
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 5, 2019
This man, wearing a pair of strange goggles is not trying to make a fashion statement. He is just getting ready for a trek across the froze...
The Mosaics of Villa Romana del Casale
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 4, 2019
Many Roman villas, private residences, as well as public buildings, were lavishly decorated with mosaic floors. Mosaics served as a symbol o...
Vladimir Lukyanov’s Water Computer
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 2, 2019
Early computers were mechanical machines built using gears and levers. These parts or components could be moved with precision and were conn...
Bomb Crater Garden
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 25, 2019
On September 20, 1940, just over a year after Hitler’s army invaded Poland triggering a six-year war, a German airplane dropped a bomb over...
Star Jelly: The Mysterious Phenomenon That Inspired ‘The Blob’
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 22, 2019
For hundreds of years, people have reported blobs of strange gelatinous substances on the ground that they presumed had fallen from the skie...
Hameau de la Reine: Marie Antoinette’s Pretend Village
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 21, 2019
Marie Antoinette, the last Queen of France, is often portrayed as a frivolous, selfish, and immoral woman whose decadent lifestyle emptied t...
Richard Trevithick And The Steam Circus
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 20, 2019
Twenty five years before Robert Stephenson decisively proved the superiority of steam locomotives over horse drawn carriages during the Rain...
The Zeppelin Spy Basket
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 19, 2019
One of the most perilous positions in the crew of a German Zeppelin during the First World War was that of the aerial lookout, whose job was...
The Rainhill Trials
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 13, 2019
Nearly two centuries ago, a small hamlet lying between Liverpool and Manchester became host to one of the strangest competitions ever held. ...
The Last Victim of Smallpox
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 12, 2019
In the summer of 1978, the World Health Organization stood on the brink of a remarkable achievement—smallpox, the disease that terrorized pe...
Kongo Gumi: The 1,400-Year-Old Company
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 9, 2019
Less than two months ago, the renowned British travel agency Thomas Cook laid off more than 21,000 employees the world over and liquidated i...
The Historic Hanford Reactor That Made Plutonium For The Nagasaki Bomb
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 7, 2019
Sitting squarely in the middle of the now decommissioned Hanford Site, a nuclear production complex on the Columbia River near Richland, Was...
The Legend of The Lost Cement Mine
Kaushik Patowary
Nov 5, 2019
Gold mining in California. Lithograph by Currier & Ives, 1871. Image courtesy: Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com Hundreds of million...
