NASA Astronaut Andrew Jay “Drew” Feustel, who is currently living and working aboard the International Space Station, published a photo on his Twitter account with a replica of the “Moon Landscape” drawing by Holocaust victim Petr Ginz to honor Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah). The replica of the painting was first flown in space by Ilan Ramon (June 20, 1954 – February 1, 2003), first Israeli astronaut for NASA. Ramon has died in the re-entry accident of STS-107, the fatal mission of the Space Shuttle Columbia. Ilan Ramon’s mother and grandmother were Auschwitz survivors, and his grandfather and other family members perished in Nazi death camps.
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Category Archives: History
The Oldest Surviving Aerial Photo was Taken in 1860
On October 13, 1860, the early American photographer James Wallace Black (February 10, 1825 – January 5, 1896) climbed into a hot air balloon (named Queen of the Air) with his camera, and photographed Boston from a hot-air balloon at 1,200 feet (around 365 meters). He was not the first person to do it: two years ago, French photographer (and also caricaturist, journalist, novelist, and “balloonist”) Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (6 April 1820 – 20 March 1910), known by the pseudonym Nadar, who photographed Victor Hugo on his death-bed in 1885, took photographs of Paris from a hot air balloon too. But the Frenchman’s photos were lost many years ago. On that day, Black took 8 plates of glass negative; 10 1/16 x 7 15/16 in, but only one good print resulted, which the photographer entitled “Boston, as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It”. Today, it remains the oldest surviving aerial photo.
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Top 10 Most Powerful Earthquakes in Recorded History
Here are the top ten most powerful earthquakes (by the Moment magnitude scale, MMS; denoted as Mw or M) in recorded history, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), a scientific agency of the United States government.
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Ancient carvings show a comet hit Earth 13,000 years ago
Ancient symbols carved into stone at Göbekli Tepe (an archaeological site in Turkey) tell the story of a big comet impact more than 13,000 years ago, scientists think. The devastating impact triggered a mini ice-age which drove many mammals weighing more than 40 kg to extinction.
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How Eratosthenes calculated the Earth’s circumference
In 240 BC, the Greek astronomer, geographer, mathematician, music theorist and librarian Eratosthenes of Cyrene (c. 276 BC – c. 195/194 BC) calculated the circumference of the Earth without leaving Egypt. Here’s how:
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Ava, the bronze-age woman
A woman’s face, who buried over 3,700 years ago in Northern Scotland has been reconstructed by a team of archaeologists and forensic artists led by Maya Hoole. It was the bronze-age at that time in the area.
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Top 20 Countries having most number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites
There are total of 1031 UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the world (as of June 2016 – 802 Cultural, 197 Natural and 32 Mixed). Here are the top 20 countries having most number of UNESCO World Heritage sites.
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Alternative Seven Wonders Of The World
The “Seven Wonders of the World“, describes seven great constructions known in the Hellenistic period – that’s why they are also known as the “Seven Wonders of the Ancient World”. In fact, in the Hellenistic era, each famous traveler had his own version of the list, but the best known and earliest surviving was from a poem by Greek-speaking epigrammist Antipater of Sidon, which he described in a poem composed about 140 BC:
“I have set eyes on the wall of lofty Babylon on which is a road for chariots, and the statue of Zeus by the Alpheus, and the hanging gardens, and the Colossus of the Sun, and the huge labor of the high pyramids, and the vast tomb of Mausolus; but when I saw the house of Artemis that mounted to the clouds, those other marvels lost their brilliancy, and I said, ‘Lo, apart from Olympus, the Sun never looked on aught so grand.'”
But, in fact, all “seven wonders of the world“ existed at the same time for a period of less than 60 years. And now, only the Great Pyramid of Giza still in existence. All the others somehow gone.
If Antipater of Sidon was living in the more recent times, say 19th century, he probably would prepare a very different list. Here are the alternative seven wonders of the world that still exist today (with the images and videos):
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What if a nuclear bomb hit your city?
On August 6, 1945, during the World War II, an American Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber named “Enola Gay” dropped the world’s first deployed atomic bomb codenamed “Little Boy” over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The bomb exploded with 15 kilotons of TNT (63 TJ) of energy and caused horrendous destruction to the city. Approximately 66,000 people were killed as a direct result of the blast, and 69,000 were injured to varying degrees. Within four months, the number of the fatalities would reach 90,000–146,000 people due to the acute effects of the atomic bomb.
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Seven Wonders of the World
The “Seven Wonders of the World”, also known as the “Seven Wonders of the Ancient World”, describes seven great constructions known in the Hellenistic period[1]. None of them but the Great Pyramid of Giza (Kheops Pyramid) do not exist today.
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