Say WOW

Suborbital space tourism finally arrives | FCC prepares to run public C-band auction | The big four in the U.S. launch industry — United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman — hope to be one of two providers that will receive five-year contracts later this year to launch national security payloads starting in 2022. | China’s launch rate stays high | The International Space Station is the largest ever crewed object in space.

How a 400-Year-Old Cheese Got Its Groove...

“We’re about to run out of cheese!” Catherine Mead exclaims with a mixture of panic and pride as she steps out of the dairy and into the cheese shop on her farm in Cornwall. “It takes us months to make each truckle of Cornish Yarg. And we’re almost out!” Ripened in a coating of hand-foraged stinging nettles, Cornish Yarg is a semi-hard cow’s milk cheese with a distinctively crumbly texture and a creamy, mushroomy taste. Inspired by a rediscovered……

This content is for Member members only.
Log In Register

Read More

National Philharmonic performs ‘The Planets’ with music...

The National Philharmonic is partnering with NASA for a pair of out-of-this-world concerts. “The Planets” comes to Strathmore this Sunday, and Capital One Hall on Feb. 13. “There’s a massive screen above the stage where the imagery will be projected and the orchestra underneath,” Music Director Piotr Gajewski told WTOP. “It’s a very large orchestra, maybe 90, almost 100 musicians because there are some very special instruments: harps, celesta, lots of different percussion, English horn, contrabassoon.” The program opens…

Read More

The Unsolved Murder That Haunted a Beloved...

Twelve miles from the Adriatic Sea, near the town of Cesena, Italy, a mosaic horse marks an unsolved 19th-century murder. The colorful artwork, made from enameled Venetian glass pieces, stands near a narrow rural motorway that cuts through a haphazard patchwork of tilled farmland, auto wrecking yards, industrial chicken hatcheries, and centuries-old estates. The monument commemorates the assassination of Ruggero Pascoli, father of Italy’s celebrated poet, Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912). Ruggero was gunned down at the location on August 10,……

This content is for Member members only.
Log In Register

Read More

Janakpur Women's Development Center in Janakpur, Nepal

Just south of the Kuwa district of Janakpur is an unassuming compound that houses an exceptional group of women with a noteworthy goal. The Women’s Development Center is dedicated to advancing women’s empowerment through the promotion of the 2,800-year-old Mithila artistic tradition. Sometime after the 9th-century in the Videhas Kingdom of Nepal, the distinctive two-dimensional Mithila style of art began to emerge. Originally, the artwork was painted on the mud walls of homes in the Terai region—as it still……

This content is for Member members only.
Log In Register

Read More

Ureka in San Antonio de Ureca, Equatorial...

From the moment you get out of your car and see that first waterfall tumbling down the cliff until you’re swimming beneath another waterfall deep within the jungle, you know you’re somewhere special. A two-hour drive to the south of Bioko Island, Ureka is a hidden world. Seeing that first waterfall you might wonder if you should bother to go any further. You could spend the day right there, like the locals do, on the beach, barbecuing and paddling……

This content is for Member members only.
Log In Register

Read More

DuBignon Cemetery in Jekyll Island, Georgia

There are five graves in this walled cemetery: three belong to members of the DuBignon family, which ran Jekyll Island for four generations, and two honor locals who drowned on the same day in 1912. Strangely, none of these five people are actually buried in the cemetery. In 1792, wealthy French royalist Christophe Anne Poulain DuBignon escaped from his homeland during the French Revolution. He and his family sailed all the way to the Georgia coast. By 1800, DuBignon……

This content is for Member members only.
Log In Register

Read More

Podcast: Boulders Beach Penguin Sanctuary

Listen and subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, we visit Boulders Beach in Simon’s Town in South Africa, where sunbathers, tourists, and penguins share the beach—and parts of town. 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…….

This content is for Member members only.
Log In Register

Read More

A New Home for Hundreds of Photographs...

Individually, the photographs Gordon Parks produced during his long and storied career are iconic: Ella Watson, Park’s own American Gothic, posed stoically in front an American flag with a broom and a mop; Muhammad Ali, up close, his head bowed in contemplation; an unnamed Black family in Shady Grove, Alabama, waiting for ice cream at the “colored” window. But taken together, says curator Melissa Barton, the impact is overwhelming. “It is so moving to be able to see all……

This content is for Member members only.
Log In Register

Read More

3 Questions: Women’s rights and rising threats...

To Ada Petriczko, being born a woman can be a matter of life or death. Hailing from Poland, she reports on sexual violence and gender injustices around the globe. As a human rights journalist, her mission is to amplify the voices of women who have been systematically silenced by their communities and governments. Their stories have to be heard, she argues, in order to reshape our societies. This includes reporting on her home country, where democratic stability and women’s……

This content is for Member members only.
Log In Register

Read More

Sergeant Stubby Statue in Middletown, Connecticut

While training for combat deployment at Yale University in 1917, Private J. Robert Conroy discovered a stray puppy on the campus field. He named the dog Stubby (because of his short tail) and introduced him to the other men of his unit, the 102nd Infantry Yankee Division. Stubby became the mascot of the 102nd and greatly boosted their morale. He quickly took to follow the daily training routine alongside his owner, even learning to salute by raising his right……

This content is for Member members only.
Log In Register

Read More

Engineers develop surgical “duct tape” as an...

A staple on any engineer’s workbench, duct tape is a quick and dependable fix for cracks and tears in many structural materials. MIT engineers have now developed a kind of surgical duct tape — a strong, flexible, and biocompatible sticky patch that can be easily and quickly applied to biological tissues and organs to help seal tears and wounds. Like duct tape, the new patch is sticky on one side and smooth on the other. In its current formulation,……

This content is for Member members only.
Log In Register

Read More

Salt-Loving Microbes Make Vivid, Massive Abstract Art

Munich-based photographer Tom Hegen has seen some salty places. Over the past several years, he has traveled from Africa to Australia capturing the brilliant colors and unexpected patterns that result from the evaporation processes that make sea salt. For the third installation of his “Salt Series,” Hegen visited Utah’s Great Salt Lake, the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere (only Iran’s Lake Urmia and Tunisia’s Chott el Djerid are larger globally). The scale was unlike anything he had……

This content is for Member members only.
Log In Register

Read More

Marquess of Londonderry Statue in Durham, England

“The horse” is a frequent meeting place for people heading to Durham Market Place. But many people, even lifelong locals, don’t know who the double-life-sized equestrian statue represents. That ends here: The chap on the horse, clad in military regalia, is Charles William Van Stewart, the 3rd Marquess of Londonderry. The Marquess was a cavalryman in both the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic wars. He led a brigade of hussars (light cavalry) and served as the right-hand man……

This content is for Member members only.
Log In Register

Read More

Temple Gardens in Redcliffe, England

If one were to walk from Temple Meads Train Station to the center of Bristol, they just might pass a 12th-century church with connections to the Knights Templar. From across the road on Victoria Street, visitors will notice that the tower has a rather severe lean. The steeple was a later addition and was most likely built during the 14th-century. The original structure was meant to be a round church built by the Knights Templar, this was to provide……

This content is for Member members only.
Log In Register

Read More

Bitcoin Mining Report Shows Network’s Emissions Account...

During the last year, Bitcoin — the cryptocurrency network that leverages proof-of-work (PoW) to process transactions and secure the protocol — has received a lot of criticism about its environmental impact. This week, the cryptocurrency firm Coinshares published a report that shows talking points condemning the network’s electrical consumption have been greatly exaggerated. According to Coinshares’ data, Bitcoin’s mining infrastructure accounts for 0.08% of the world’s carbon dioxide (CO2) production today. Despite ESG Critics, Studies Show ‘Bitcoin Mining Acts…

Read More