Author: Ms. R.

This article is adapted from the November 20, 2021, edition of Gastro Obscura’s Favorite Things newsletter. You can sign up here. As a food-obsessed child, I always elbowed my way into the kitchen before Thanksgiving to “help.” The frazzled adults often set me to folding napkins or rinsing glasses. What I really wanted was to help make my uncle Gary’s top-secret sausage stuffing, or assist my aunt Sharon in the laborious, all-morning task of baking the family specialty known……

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Excerpted from Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal About Earth and the Worlds Beyond. Copyright (c) 2021 by Robin George Andrews. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. The science is in: Lava, while molten, is bad for life. It flambés it to death. But microbes can thrive in conditions most animals would find abhorrent. The same is true for much of the East African Rift, with watery pools home to all……

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Upon a quick first glance, Plaza Primero de Mayo looks like any other small square in Buenos Aires. There are games for children, a traditional carrousel, a bocce court, a small soccer area, some chess tables, trees, bushes, and benches. If you go there on a  Saturday, you may find the kiosks of a wet market selling things like fish, vegetables, and cheese. But only a careful inspection of the old fence that separates the square from some 80s……

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Out of a darkened room at the Galerie Neue Meister looms an unspeakable scene that assaults the viewer with the intensity of a fever nightmare. The Dresden triptych, which measures four meters by two meters, was the product of three years of continuous work (between 1929 and 1932) by the artist Otto Dix and is widely considered to be his magnum opus.  Under a bleak sky a solitary figure, his humanity obscured by a gasmask, surveys a bomb-ravaged quagmire littered with……

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Ballard Estate is an area in Fort, the prime business district of Mumbai. The area is full of old buildings, with a lot of offices and wonderful tree-lined roads. At a major road junction at Ballard Estate stands a beautiful sandstone column. It is shaped like a lamp post and is decorated with winged lions. It has three sides and all of them are adorned with brass plaques, which serve as a reminder of how important the docks of……

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Beginning in the early 1960s, Minuteman 1B missile launch sites were installed in several locations throughout the central and upper United States. Their purpose was to deter Russia from launching a nuclear strike against the United States. At one time there were 1,000 active Minuteman missiles arranged in six wings. The Minuteman II replaced the earlier models beginning in the 1970s. Some even featured multiple warheads inside one missile. Each Minuteman II missile had an explosive yield of 1,200,000 tons……

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The island of Grimsay, in Scotland‘s archipelago of the Outer Hebrides, is home to the community of Kallin (Ceallan in Gaelic). Kallin is one of the bases of Namara, a seafood company whose main business is based off the nearby island of North Uist. For the Kallin shop, scallops are among their best sellers, which is abundantly clear in the midden that surrounds their store. Middens are large collections of shells, which are discarded after the meat of the……

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This piece was originally published in Wired and appears here as part of our Climate Desk collaboration. Off the coast of California lies an underwater forest of giant kelp, a kind of seaweed that grows to 100 feet tall at the rate of a foot a day. Just as a terrestrial forest sucks carbon dioxide out of the air, all that rapidly growing seaweed soaks up carbon from the water, playing an incredibly important role in climate mitigation. “With……

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In the 1940s, the Wellsboro division of Corning Glass Works became the largest manufacturer of Christmas tree bulbs, stepping up to fill the need when imports from Germany were disrupted.  When Corning was to hold its annual service dinner in 1946 to honor returning World War II veterans, they wanted an extra special backdrop to the dinner. Design engineer Ellsworth C. Brown, also a returning vet, was asked by the plant manager D. J. Carr to design something both……

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The Sierra Leone railroad system was built in 1897, with one line to Daru in the eastern part of the country (and a small branch to Makeni the largest town in the north). The railroad system operated until 1974, then shut down due to a combination of increased car traffic and country policy. Since that year, some of the locomotives were bought and shipped to Wales, the others were kept in the capital city of Freetown. They were stored……

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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 follow a long set of wooden stairs deep underground, to a sea cave with a mysterious and colorful past, and a spectacular, hidden view of the Pacific Ocean. 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……

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