In “Original Copies“, Bianca Bosker looks at a current trend in China to recreate some of human’s civilization greatest architectural achievements. Various elite suburbs in the country feature a variety of world wonders, from a 108-foot copy of the Eiffel Tower to picturesque Venetian scenescapes.
Two images, two different times, almost the same composition: Albert Square – a public square in the center of Manchester, England; on the left, as depicted in a 1910 oil painting by the French impressionist painter Adolphe Valette (13 October 1876 – 1942). The Albert Memorial (left) and Gladstone statue (right) can be seen in the foreground. On the right a photo of the same spot in 2018. In the contemporary photo, there’s a taxi iğnstead of the horse cart in the old painting. And in both images, a man pushing a handcart at the exact same spot, and a horse carriage/car parked in front of the Albert Memorial. Beautiful.
Hồ Thuỷ Tiên is an abandoned water park in Vietnam. It was built in 2004 in an edge of the Vietnamese city of Huế, to the tune of approximately $3 million dollars. The idea was to create a family water park with amusement rides, slides, pools, shows, and an aquarium. But when the park opened its gates to the public, it was only partially completed.
After its opening, an excited population of park-goers began flocking to the park. But, somehow, it wasn’t enough. Within just a few years after its opening, the business started to experience financial problems. It closed not too long afterward and everything that had been built on the site had just been left as it was.
The European Space Agency (ESA) occasionally posts high-resolution photos of space under the title of “week in images”. This amazing image of the Mont Saint-Michel from space, which was captured on 21 June 2017, is also featured on the ESA’s Earth from Space video programme, presented by Kelsea Brennan-Wessels from the ESA Web-TV virtual studios.
Iceland was extensively forested when it was first settled. When the Vikings first arrived in the 9th century, the Nordic island was covered in 25 to 40 percent forest, compared to 1% in the present day. In the late 12th century, Ari the Wise (Ari Thorgilsson, 1067-1148 AD), Iceland’s most prominent medieval chronicler, described it in the Íslendingabók (Book of Icelanders (see notes 1) as “forested from mountain to seashore”.
Planet.com, a team of analysts and rocket scientists, software engineers, creatives, environmentalists, and researchers, have published an amazing post on their Medium account, @planetlabs. In the post titled “Earth’s Wonders Like You’ve Never Seen Them Before”, you can see amazing aerial photos of some famous places.
Below, you can see an example of the amazing photos published in the post: “The Pearl-Qatar”.
How far away can you get from everybody else on Earth? The answer is “actually quite far”, there are a lot of extremely remote places left in the world and some of them have actually yet to be reached by anybody in all of history. The world is an enormous place. Here are the most remote places on Earth.
NASA astronaut Randy “Komrade” Bresnik, the commander of Expedition 53 (the 53rd expedition to the International Space Station) has published a beautiful video on his Twitter account titled “Through the eyes of a spaceman: One World Many Views”. In the video, Bresnik shared photos of places he’d visited on Earth alongside photos of the same locations he snapped from space. He also wrote: “You don’t have to be in outer space to experience the beauty of our home planet. Capture the beauty of a moment, or the excitement of an instant, and share it with others.”
Using a two-seater ultralight aircraft built by himself, Frenchman Christian Moullec flies with migrating birds since 1995. In that year, dubbed the “
Today, if the weather permits, he flies with birds almost every day and guides them through their journey. This stunning footage published by National Geographic shows Moullec, “the man who flies with migrating birds” guiding the flocks of vulnerable species in his ultralight and taking enthralled passengers with him. According to National Geographic, he takes tourists up to fly with birds from March through October.
On Sunday, January 07, 2018, the residents of Aïn Séfra, a small town in Algeria, experienced a rare phenomenon: snow in Sahara, the world’s hottest desert. In the video below, published by National Geographic, snow-dusted the desert’s sandy dunes. With temperatures touching 33.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 °C), this white blanket stayed briefly through the morning before melting away. However, a few residents found the opportunity to enjoy some winter fun.