Author: Ms. R.

About a kilometer and a half from the historic center of Viggianello, you find the Sorgente del Mercure (Mercure Wellspring), the birthplace of the Lao river, also known as the Mercure river in the Basilicata region. The wellspring has a flow of 2,000 liters per second and a temperature of a cool nine degrees Celsius (48 degrees Fahrenheit). Thanks to a settling tank built in the 1920s, the crystal clear water basin flows to a hydroelectric power plant through a covered……

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“We started hearing a noise, like breaking, or coins falling,” says Marco Tedesco, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. He makes a loud, sustained crunching sound, recreating what he and his team heard, years earlier, while doing fieldwork on the Greenland Ice Sheet. Below the surface of the ice near where they were standing, a flood had begun. “The water below starts to move but you still have snow on top,” Tedesco says of the phenomenon…….

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On December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103, originating from Frankfurt, Germany, departed from Heathrow Airport in London, bound for New York City. Forty minutes into the flight, the plane exploded over the sky, above Lockerbie, Scotland. All 259 passengers and crew aboard were killed, as well as 11 Scots on the ground, who were struck by falling debris. The passengers and crew on Flight 103 hailed from 21 different countries and included 189 Americans, 15 of whom were……

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A subway station in a skyscraper-studded metropolis might seem like an unlikely place to grow leafy greens, but that’s exactly what South Korean tech startup Farm8 has been doing since September 2019. Situated in Sangdo Station on Line 7 of the Seoul Metro, the company’s Metro Farm is a sleek, glass-encased plant nursery housing rows upon rows of hydroponic growing trays.  Under the glow of LED lights and the attention of an automated tech network, 30 varieties of organic……

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Tucked into an alleyway off Najafi Street in Mosul’s Old City is a small red and gold sign advertising a bookstore: Maktaba al-Sham. Not long ago, it was one of countless bookstores along the wide avenue lined with arched windows and doorways. Since the early 1900s the street has been a bustling cultural hub where intellectuals meet to sip tea, debate friends, and buy books. But today Najafi Street is in ruins, burned by the ISIS fighters who occupied……

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Today the area around Moenave, Arizona in the Navajo Nation is a dusty, windswept expanse with breathtaking desert landscapes but not a tree or drop of water in sight. About 200 million years ago, however, the area was a marshy riverbed that preserved hundreds of footprints from the dinosaurs that trod across it. The preserved tracks are from the early Jurassic period. Geologists visiting the site hypothesized that there was likely shallow water flowing over the area when the……

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Sometime after midnight on June 23, 2000, a fire broke out at the historical Palace Hotel Backpackers Hostel in Childers, Queensland. Black smoke billowed from the second story, and flames engulfed the main stairwell and back courtyard, blocking the exits. While most of the first-floor residents managed to escape with only minor injuries; residents on the second floor struggled to get out, hampered by blocked doorways and safety bars on the windows. Some crawled underneath the smoke and down……

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Today, southwestern Saskatchewan is a rugged swell of prairie. But in areas along the Frenchman River, the topography crumples into hilly bluffs and grass gives way to badlands built of layered gray and greenish-brown rock. To paleontologists, these cemented bands of clay and sandstone offer a window into the last days of the dinosaurs, some 66 million years ago. The Frenchman Formation is a bonanza of late Cretaceous fossils. Iconic species, such as three-horned Triceratops and armor-clad Ankylosaurus, have……

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One of the most famous visionaries in history spent his final 20 years in Salon, France, the town of his second wife, the rich widow Anne Ponsard. The reputed physician and astrologer lived in a tumultuous time—a time in which the plague wreaked havoc and free thought ended in the fire of heresy.  Nostradamus was born in 1503 in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence and was one of nine children. In Salon, he wrote his prophecies about the future called Centuries. These predicted……

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