For Women’s History Month, Atlas Obscura is living on the edge with Women of Extremes, our series dedicated to those who dared to defy expectations and explore the unknown. A woman in a red parka and a knitted cap wanders calmly along. Except for the lava spewing behind her, she could be walking in the park. The woman has a hand raised, as if against the heat, but seems otherwise unperturbed. She turns to watch the molten rock flow……
Just west of Coulee City, Washington, highway US-2 crosses a dike holding back a sizable reservoir, Banks Lake, in a wide canyon, the Grand Coulee. (In Washington, “coulee” is a localism for a flat-bottomed canyon with steep sides). Banks Lake resembles several storage reservoirs in the arid lands of the American West. It even has the usual recreational infrastructure such as marinas, boat-launch ramps, and bait shops. However, it is unusual, indeed unique, in a fundamental way: Grand Coulee……
During World War I, a grandmother in Belgium knitted at her window, watching the passing trains. As one train chugged by, she made a bumpy stitch in the fabric with her two needles. Another passed, and she dropped a stitch from the fabric, making an intentional hole. Later, she would risk her life by handing the fabric to a soldier—a fellow spy in the Belgian resistance, working to defeat the occupying German force. Whether women knitted codes into fabric……
Despite Matthew Shepard’s murder being one of the most impactful and memorable crimes in American history, there are no memorials marking the event besides this small plaque on a bench. The bench is outside the Arts and Sciences building on the University of Wyoming campus, where Shepard was a student. Often the bench has flowers and mementos left by people coming to pay their respects. A plaque on the bench reads: “Matthew Wayne Shepard December 1, 1976 – October……
Having long been a landmark atop of the old Liberty shoe factory, on the way to Leicester City’s old Filbert Street ground, this replica of the Statue of Liberty disappeared when the building was demolished in 2003. It reappeared five years later on a large roundabout very close to its former home near the western entrance to the Swan Gyratory. The statue was inspired after a visit to New York by the directors of the Lennards Liberty shoe factory……
Passersby in Preston Market are invited to sit with these two claymation legends. Sporting the iconic “techno trousers” featured in the duo’s second film, The Wrong Trousers, a bronze likeness of Wallace balances clumsily behind long-suffering Gromit who is reading a newspaper featuring references to the characters and actors of the Oscar-winning films. The paper also features local humor relating to Preston, the hometown of their creator Nick Park. Designed by Park himself in collaboration with Aardman Animation and local……
Listen and subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, we visit Yorkshire, England, where farmers take years to coax their rhubarb plants into a world-renowned delicacy, using a century-old technique. 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 way you’ll meet some fascinating people and hear their stories…….
Andrea Henshall, a retired major in the U.S. Air Force and current MIT PhD student, has completed seven tours of combat, two years of aerial circus performance, and three higher education degrees (so far). But throughout each step of her journey, all roads seemed to point to MIT. Currently working on her doctoral degree with an MIT master’s already in her toolkit, she is quick to attribute her academic success to MIT’s open educational resources. “I kept coming back……
Peter “Pete” Griffith ScD ’56, professor emeritus of mechanical engineering at MIT and a pioneer in heat transfer and fluid mechanics, passed away at age 94 on Saturday, March 5. Griffith was born on Sept. 23, 1927, in London but was raised in Huntington, Long Island. He spent a lot of his time in the woods and on the beach by his childhood home. Those closest to him knew that Griffith spent his time making forges and tinkering with……
Sitting atop a hill at a commanding height above its surrounds, facing out to the Savu Sea to the north and across the Indonesian border to the west, in years past the Balibó Fort was a vital strategic holding for Portuguese colonists. The Balibo Trust estimates the fort to be 350-370 years old, and it is believed to be the second-oldest such fort in East Timor. According to the trust’s website, the fort was built by the Portuguese, who……
It’s almost hard to imagine all the things women once weren’t allowed to do, by custom or by law: smoking in public, wearing pants, owning property. But for every forbidden act, there was one woman who stood up to be the first to do it anyway. There was the 16th-century Italian nun Plautilla Nelli, the first woman to paint a scene of the last supper; Bessie Coleman, the first Black woman to earn a pilot’s license; and 67-year-old Emma……
For Women’s History Month, Atlas Obscura is living on the edge with Women of Extremes, our series dedicated to those who dared to defy expectations and explore the unknown. In 1845 Captain Sir John Franklin led the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror to navigate the Northwest Passage. Both ships promptly disappeared and the 128 crew and their captain were never heard from again. It was a mystery that gripped the Western world and demanded an explanation. Charles Francis Hall……
PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. (AP) — The scoring was so low at Kapalua that it was easy to overlook the name in the record book. The play was so bold, bordering on fearless, at the TPC Sawgrass that Cameron Smith was impossible to ignore. Those two victories, different in so many ways, are a big reason Smith is No. 6 in the world. He has a comfortable lead over Rory McIlroy and Justin Thomas behind him in the ranking…
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a new law on Monday that stops one of the most prestigious U.S. universities from being forced to turn away thousands of students from its incoming freshman class. Just 11 days ago, the state Supreme Court ordered the University of California, Berkeley, to reduce its enrollment. The court sided with a neighborhood group that had sued the school, arguing university officials did not consider how adding more students would affect…
Walking on a sunny afternoon in the City Life area of Milan, you can make a slight detour on Viale Berengario to meet the famous Castello Pozzi. Walking among the buildings, you will be amazed to suddenly encounter a huge house of cards that stands triumphantly in front of the front facade of the building. The large installation is the work of Rinaldo Denti, owner of the castle, and Elio Fiorucci, the well-known stylist, and is presented as a……
