Author: Ms. R.

This story was originally published in Undark and appears here with permission. As Russian forces advanced this summer on Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, the façade of an eight-story apartment building in the Saltivka district suffered heavy damages from shelling, as did many other multi-family structures. Dozens of bullets scarred the gray front wall, and most of the upper windows were shattered. By August, only a few families remained. Some noticed dozens of bats trapped in the lower windows. The……

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Listen and subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, we journey high into the Andes in Argentina, to a toxic lake that is home to microbes that provide a window to our planet’s past—and a key to securing its future. Our podcast is an audio guide to the world’s wondrous, awe-inspiring, strange places. In under 15 minutes, we’ll take you to an incredible site, and along the……

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Among our crosswords and other puzzles, we’ll be featuring linguistic challenges from around the world from puzzle aficionado and writer Alex Bellos. A PDF of the puzzle, as well as the solution, can be downloaded below. In Estonia, there is no sex and no future. This has nothing to do with the very real decline in fertility rates in this European country of 1.3 million people on the Baltic Sea. Rather, it is about the Estonian language, which has……

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Ghetto Gastro,* the Bronx-based trio of designer Jon Gray and chefs Lester Walker and Pierre Serrao, formed in 2012 with a mission to tell their New York borough’s story through food. Although the Bronx is remarkable—it is hip-hop’s birthplace, it is incredibly diverse, and it features more greenery than any other borough—Gray says it gets less recognition than it deserves. And, due to lasting segregation, many of its residents are food insecure. For the last decade, the Ghetto Gastro……

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For more than 30 years, the CIA Museum has been one of the most mysterious collections of artifacts in the world. Housed in the George Bush Center for Intelligence in Langley, Virginia—one of the most secure buildings in the United States—the museum tells the story of the government’s clandestine undertakings from the Cold War through the CIA’s mission in May 2011 to kill Osama bin Laden to today. It has had an exclusive audience: only CIA officers and approved……

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The village of Odiham in Hampshire is closely associated with Britain’s Royal Air Force, as the base at RAF Odiham is the home of the iconic Chinook helicopter. The nearby town of Aldershot is considered the home of the British Army, for whom the nickname “Tommy” became synonymous over the 19th and 20th centuries. But the eponymous Tommy was born in Odiham. According to records, Thomas Atkins began serving in the British Army on August 31, 1815, as a private……

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