Author: Ms. R.

For those who celebrate it, Christmas once again carried an air of uncertainty in 2021 due to the pandemic. But the residents of the Spanish island of La Palma had a notably different experience: release, relief, closure. “What I want to say today can be said with just four words,” said Julio Perez, the Canary Islands regional security chief on Christmas Day. “The eruption is over.” After three months of being besieged by an intense volcanic eruption, the best……

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Each year, at Cornell University, fall heralds the return of a most unusual vending machine outside of Mann Library near the Department of Horticulture. In lieu of the usual assortment of snacks, the popular fixture features nine apple varieties, all grown at Cornell Orchards’ two locations.  For the modest price of a dollar, students can snag a crisp, juicy Gala, Shizuka, Honeycrisp, McIntosh, or Ginger Gold. Which apples are on display, though, varies month to month. In late August,……

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Holt Collier is best known in American history as the guide to Theodore Roosevelt on a 1902 hunt near Onward, Mississippi that led to the creation of the first teddy bear. Collier was born in 1848 on the Home Hill plantation in Mississippi, where he and his family were enslaved. When he was around 10 years old, Collier was moved to the Plum Ridge plantation, and soon after killed his first bear. He became responsible for providing most of the……

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Funaoka onsen is not technically an onsen, since the water for the baths is heated in the building and not drawn from a geothermal spring. The Japanese government, however, allowed the bathhouse to use the word “onsen” in its name in 1933 due to the presence of the country’s very first electric bath.  Electric baths, while not originating in Japan, are used as therapeutic devices in many public bathhouses throughout the country. It serves well to memorize the symbol……

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There’s major league baseball. Then you have the minor and independent leagues. Then you have the teams that are so unserious, they play in actual clown makeup. Los Alamos in 1953 was a very serious town. While its existence to the world had been made known by this point, it was still a closed city, surrounded by security fences and guards. Lou and Lee Pierotti ran the local soda fountain and were looking for an entertaining way to pass……

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Said to have been established in the year 1396 when Naong Hyegeun—a royal consultant to the Goryeo Dynasty—dreamt that a sea god promised peace and prosperity in exchange for the construction of Haedong Yonggungsa. Built on a precipice with a mountain at its back and the sun and sea at its front, this temple is one of the few seaside temples in Korea. As you enter the temple grounds, you’ll walk past a dozen or so vendors dishing up……

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Virgilio Martínez knows Peruvian food very, very well. After all, he’s the award-winning chef at Central, a famed Lima restaurant that serves food from the widely varying microclimates across Peru. The result, he says, is cuisine inspired by “different territories, from the sea, to the coast, to the desert, to the Andes, to the vast Amazonia.” His tasting menus feature, among other offerings, artfully plated piranha, dishes containing four different kinds of ancestral corn, and cushuro, a water-dwelling, pearly……

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At first glance, there’s nothing remarkable about Mexico’s tequila splitfin fish. Only two and a half inches long, the fish aren’t colorful or poisonous. They aren’t particularly fast. They don’t change colors or exhibit other strange behaviors. In many ways, they are forgettable. So when the fish, endemic to only a single spring-fed river near the Tequila volcano in the Mexican state of Jalisco, went extinct from the wild in 2003, there was no international outcry or even an……

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