The Costs of Replicating Ancient Architectural Wonders Today

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.

Albert Square, Manchester [Historical Painting vs Contemporary Photo]

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 …

Hồ Thuỷ Tiên, an abandoned water park in Vietnam

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 …

Mont Saint-Michel, France, From Space

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 is growing new forests for the first time in 1,000 years

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 …

Earth’s Wonders Like You Have Never Seen Them Before

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: …

7 Most Remote Places on Earth

How far away can you get from everybody else on Earth? A video, published by RealLifeLore channel on YouTube answers this very question. 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. …

Astronaut shares photos of places he’d visited [alongside photos of the same locations he snapped from space]

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 …

The Man Who Flies With Migrating Birds

Using a two-seater ultralight aircraft built by himself, Frenchman Christian Moullec flies with migrating birds since 1995. In that year, dubbed the “birdman“, Moullec, saw that lesser white-fronted geese were struggling with their migration from Germany to Sweden. Inspired by the work of the famous Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz (see notes 1), known as “the …

Snow In Sahara, World’s Hottest Desert

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 …