Author: Ms. R.

During the sixth century, the city of Ravenna was one of the most important cities of the Byzantine Empire. Today, many of the great buildings erected during that golden age are still standing. Just outside Ravenna, the hamlet of Classe was once the home port of the Roman fleet in the Adriatic Sea. The Basilica of Sant’Apollinare in Classe was built there, near the old seashore, which has migrated more than five miles away in the last 1,500 years…….

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For more than 40 years, Manaus, the largest city in the Brazilian Amazon, had a neighborhood that floated on the river. Located near the Meeting of the Waters, the Floating City was a labyrinthine maze of houses, churches, shops, bars, and restaurants, connected through precarious streets made of wood planks. At its peak, it had around 2,000 bobbing houses built on top of trunks, and a population of more than 11,000 people. If it hadn’t been destroyed, the Floating……

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In the Sherman Heights neighborhood of San Diego stands a red, Queen Anne–style mansion known as Villa Montezuma. It was built in 1887 for renowned composer Jesse Shepard (also known as Francis Grierson), who was heavily involved with Spiritualism. He was convinced to relocate there by the brothers William and John High, wealthy ranchers and members of the Spiritualist group to which Shepard belonged. They were also the ones who built the mansion, which was named after the ship……

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Tucked away behind the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a life-size bronze cast of a fisherman gazes out over the banks of the Schuylkill River. Designed by Ellen Fletcher, the sculpture titled “Celebration of Water” first assumed this precarious perch in 1989 to complement the Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center—a center that educates the public about the history of the Schuylkill watershed. Despite being a relatively new addition to the riverbank, this fisherman has already had a rather tumultuous experience……

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Imagine standing on the edge of a giant crater, knowing nothing about how this massive hole in the ground came to be. Or figuring out that a cataclysmic event like an asteroid hitting the Earth killed the dinosaurs, but having no visible evidence on the planet of a collision of that magnitude. Scientists and explorers have faced such puzzling moments in our history. They may have had inklings that giant collisions happened in the universe, but where and how……

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Farvardin Daliri, a sculptor who lives in suburban Brisbane, Australia, recently built an oversized, electrified laughing kookaburra that stands roughly 15 feet tall. Laughing kookaburras, formally known as Dacelo novaeguineae and native to Eastern Australia’s eucalyptus forests, are known for their calls, which ring out like peals of laughter at dusk and dawn. (Some mornings, when kookaburra cries clatter through the neighborhood, Daliri’s wife thinks that he has slipped outside and switched on the giant bird.) Daliri installed a……

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It was a clear, summer day in the Antarctic when Lizzie Meek saw the penguins lie down. All around the historic expeditionary hut at Cape Adare, penguins dropped to their stomachs, beaks pointed toward the wind. “So, it’s really quite obvious that they’re getting ready for something,” recalled Meek, a conservator for the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust (NZAHT). That something turned out to be a summer storm with winds that reached over 70 miles an hour. Meek and……

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If you’re traveling between Modlin and Warsaw, you might see something unusual on the road. A big, red object hidden into the bushes. There is decaying strawberry, and it is enormous.  Of course, it was not always in bad shape. The strawberry was a symbol of a massive farm called Sadpol, and once stood proudly next to the farm gate. Thousands of kilograms of strawberries were grown at the farm, and exported to other parts of Poland and across……

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Scott Wiener thinks that putting a pizza in a pizza box is a terrible idea. “It traps all the steam,” he complains. “It’s the same reason you don’t take fresh bread and put it into a plastic bag, because if you do that, you trap all the moisture and it gets soggy.” There’s a deep irony there, considering that Wiener owns the world’s largest collection of pizza boxes. He’s held the title since 2013, when the Guinness Book of……

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Many Roman bridges are still standing after two millennia, but the Bridge of Tiberius crossing the river Marecchia in Rimini is one of the very few that is still in use, and as integral a part of the road system as modern bridges. Construction on the bridge started in the year 14, at the end of the reign of Augustus. By the time it was completed in 21, Tiberius was the Emperor of Rome. An inscription on the bridge……

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In a remote region of the Sahara Desert, an impact crater was punched into the land less than 100,000 years ago. Measuring some 500 meters (1,640 feet) wide and about 70 meters (230 feet) deep, the Amguid Crater is located in southwestern Algeria. On satellite imagery, the white spot of the flat, sandy crater floor is clearly visible; the residue formed by millennia of sporadic rain running into the bowl and evaporating. The first known record of the Amguid crater……

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