Author: Ms. R.

Seventh-century princess and abbess, Saint Frideswide is now known as the patron saint of Oxford. Running from King Algar of Mercia who sought to marry her, she ended up in Oxford and left a few legendary marks across the city. One such place was Saint Margaret’s Well. A church dedicated to her was constructed in the neighborhood of Osney Island during the late 19th-century, designed by Gothic Revival architect Samuel Sanders Teulon. Although the church itself is beautifully constructed,……

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No one is pickier about rice than Guorui Chen. The 33 year old only accepts rice grains longer than 7 millimeters (1/4 inch), and they have to be white, clear, straight, and undamaged. Every day, he separates intact grains from broken ones with a winnowing basket and then spends hours examining their transparency under a light. But Chen won’t cook this rice. Instead, he turns it into art. He picks out three grains, glues them end to end into……

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Darwin and Wallace, a shop hidden within a high-end antique store, caters to oddity collectors and lovers of the natural world. Visitors to the shop will find several amazing specimens for sale, from dinosaur teeth to cultural and tribal items. There is also a huge array of mounted butterflies and other insects for guests to marvel at. The name of the shop pays homage to two of the greatest naturalists and explorers of their day, Charles Darwin and Alfred……

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For the archaeologist Jesse Casana, midnight is the best time to find things underground. “It’s always in the middle of the night, sometime between late and very late,” he says. Casana, an anthropology professor at Dartmouth, has been testing a new thermal imaging drone for archaeological research. “It’s a very weird kind of archaeology because usually we go and spend weeks and weeks working in the sun. In this case we just go in the middle of the night—once.”……

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The power plant’s origins begin with an electrical engineer named František Křižík. The inventor lit up Písek’s city center using arc lamps on June 23, 1887, making Písek the first Bohemian urban center with public electric street lighting. In 1888, after modifications were made to the Podskalský Mill so that its rudimentary water wheels could produce electricity and the power plant came to life.  In 1901, Písek’s Městská Elektrárna was equipped with Francis turbines, which used fixed blades to channel water……

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On a dry day in the middle of September, Josh Smith started digging. Sometimes, the three-person crew used a track excavator; other times, they wielded shovels. They dug all day, then a few more. They removed shovelfuls of fine sand so that their hole would have gently sloping sides, like an amphitheater or a bowl. They knew that if they dug straight down, the walls could collapse in on them. The town of Freeport, Maine, is known for outlet……

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While working on his upcoming cookbook, The Flavor Equation, food writer Nik Sharma packed up an array of salt, sugar, and spices and headed to the University of California, Berkeley. At the Biological Imaging Facility, he trained an AxioImager M1 microscope down at slides covered with brown sugar and kala namak, Indian black salt. With a ZEISS confocal laser scanning microscope, he peered down at bonito flakes and yeast suspended in vinegar. These powerful microscopes revealed the razor-like ridges……

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