Author: Ms. R.

The Janiculum has become a memorial park dedicated to the legacy of the Roman Republic, a short-lived republican government that took over the city of Rome from the Papacy in the years of the Italian Risorgimento. This led to the unification of the country in 1861. Since 1849, this hill has been adorned with several busts and equestrian monuments.  Among the great Italian and foreign names who spilled blood for the republican cause, a small monument celebrates the tragic……

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The Tasmanian Devil Unzoo is the first of its kind in the world: a zoo with no boundary walls or enclosures, allowing its animals to roam freely and come and go as they please. Owned and operated by the Hamilton family since 1979, the attraction was originally called the Tasmanian Devil Park and ran as a conventional zoo, featuring several orphaned Tasmanian devil pups as the main attraction. By the early 2000s, the devil facial tumor disease—an incurable transmissible cancer……

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Flush an average toilet, and you’ll hear a wet woosh, as if someone is dumping a pot of water on the ground. Flush one of three toilets in a science building at South Korea’s Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, and it will sound a lot different—just a tiny trickle of water, nearly drowned out by whirring. “We use a vacuum,” explained Jaeweon Cho, the mastermind of the toilets and an environmental engineer at the university, in a……

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Despite their name, the bodies of water in New Mexico‘s Bottomless Lake State Park are neither bottomless nor lakes. The park is home to nine sinkhole-formed lakes, otherwise known as cenotes. These cenotes were made from limestone caves that eventually collapsed due to erosion from the Pecos River leaving what we see today. While they do have bottoms, they are located far beneath the surface—the deepest comes in at about 90 feet. The name “Bottomless Lakes” comes from a……

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Designed by Italian architect Luigi Moretti with input from Hungarian-born developer Nicholas Salgo, this fountain was constructed between 1964-1971. The elaborate fountain in Watergate East, with its bidirectional, multi-tiered, oviform cascades of white—complete with a stoic, water-spewing lion, is a picture-perfect complement to the complex.  Watergate East is the first of six buildings and the largest of the three residential buildings that make up the Watergate Complex. While the name Watergate typically conjures up visions of the break-in that……

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At the edge of the road there is a heap of about 200 spruce logs, each approximately 30 feet long, all felled by a recent, severe winter storm. It’s late spring, but the wood is still covered with a dusting of snow. A middle-aged man on his knees, wearing hiking boots, jeans, and a waterproof jacket, is examining a section of one of the trunks, looking for mold or knots. He calls out to the operator of a crane,……

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