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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.

 
The Ancient House in London, England
The Ancient House is one of a few likely candidates for the title of “oldest house in London.” Its location in Walthamstow, fairly distant from the core of the city means that there are some challenges to this distinction. A building on Cloth Fair is almost certainly the City’s winner, while the other contenders include Sutton House in Hackney and Bromley Hall in Tower Hamlets. All of them date from either the 15th or 16th-centuries, with more modern renovations...

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Húsafell Lifting Stone in Húsafell, Iceland
If you feel a sudden need to test your strength while in the vicinity of Reykjavík, you’re in luck. There is a 186-kilogram (410-pound) basalt rock that exists to be lifted.  Before it was a vacation destination for tourists exploring western Iceland’s natural beauty, Húsafell was a farm and church estate. When Snorri Björnsson, who was pastor from 1756 to 1803, built a rock-walled pen for shearing sheep and milking goats, he placed this large basalt stone, known as...

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Podcast: Leimert Park
Listen and subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, producer Baudelaire Ceus travels to Leimert Park, a unique neighborhood in Los Angeles characterized by its historical relationship to Black liberation. 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....

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How Preserving Agave Could Help Save an...
This piece was originally published in Yale E360 and appears here as part of our Climate Desk collaboration. At the southeast tip of a large valley in the northern Sierra Madre Oriental is the small Mexican town of Estanque de Norias, some 200 miles west of the Texas border at Laredo. Mountains rise up around the scrubby, treeless terrain like undulating brown walls. The star of this parched landscape is Agave asperrima, whose rosettes of impressive thick, blue-gray leaves...

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Dunchraigaig Cairn and Baluachraig Rock Art in...
Dunchraigaig Cairn and Baluachraig Rock Art is only a small part of a much bigger collection of monuments spread across the Kilmartin Glen and it is worth exploring the surrounding area to get a more complete picture of how important this place was. No other place in Scotland has such a high concentration of prehistoric carved stone surfaces, and Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments. The first location you come to is Dunchraigaig Cairn, a mound of cobbles about 30...

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The Tricky Business of Saving a Baby...
It was an unusually calm day in Cook Inlet, Alaska, on September 30, 2017, when Carrie Goertz got a call that made her heart sink: a baby beluga whale was stranded on a nearby mudflat. Noah Meisenheimer, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) officer, had spotted the calf from a helicopter. At first, he thought it was already dead. The body was in just a few inches of water, getting tossed around by the surf. But then, Meisenheimer...

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Centenary of Gold Discovery Monument in Ballarat,...
Ballarat is the third-largest city in the Australian state of Victoria. The main reason for this is the fact it has been built on the profits of gold. European settlement in the area began as miners in tents searching for their riches, armed with pickaxes and buckets. Gold was first discovered in Ballarat in 1851, and the town grew from there. This monument was erected to celebrate both the centenary of gold discovery and the birth of Ballarat. It...

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Soda Lakes in Fallon, Nevada
Although Nevada’s geologic history is replete with volcanic activity, evidence of recent historical activity is absent—except for the Soda Lakes craters. They certainly have erupted since Pleistocene Lake Lahontan, as they’re cut into Lahontan sediments, and recent evidence suggests they may have erupted within the last 1,500 years. Big Soda Lake (or just “Soda Lake”) is about 0.7 by 0.9 miles (1.1 x 1.5 km) across, while Little Soda Lake, to the southwest, is about 1,000 feet (300 m)...

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Spitalfields Charnel House in London, England
Though London is now a modern metropolis, the city is filled with reminders that for millennia it has been place to live—or die, for that matter. One of those places is this medieval charnal house located in the city’s northeastern district. As excavation work was underway in the late 1990s, workers discovered the remains of a building that once housed the corpses of unfortunate souls who passed away in large numbers, due to either famine or plague. What they...

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Indios Verdes (Green Indians Monument) in Mexico...
A pair of sculptures by Alejandro Casarín represent two tlatoani, rulers of the Aztec/Mexica empire. They are Ahuizotl and Itzcóatl, and they were intended to represent Mexico at the 1889 Universal Exhibition in Paris. However, due to their weight, the statues were never shipped to France. Instead, the bronzes stayed in Mexico, and like the Statue of Liberty, slowly acquired a now-defining green patina. Since the term indios (Indians) was still commonly used to refer to Indigenous people, the sculptures...

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What are the Top Hotel Benchmarking Tips...
Question for Our Hotel Marketing Expert Panel As a hotelier, or an advisor to hoteliers, how and what do you currently benchmark? How do you benchmark your hotel competition? What changes are you planning to make in your 2022 benchmarking strategy? (Question proposed by Andrew Kavanagh) Our The post What are the Top Hotel Benchmarking Tips and Strategies for 2022? appeared first on Revfine.com.

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Sword of Okomfo Anokye in Kumasi, Ghana
On the grounds of a teaching hospital in south-central Ghana, a legendary sword is buried in the ground. It is said to have belonged to Okomfo Anokye, a leader of the Ashanti people who plunged it into the earth hundreds of years ago. Kwame Frimpong Anokye, popularly known as Okomfo Anokye, was a traditional priest and leader of the Ashanti people of Ghana. He helped establish new laws and customs to help reduce the influence of old traditional customs...

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Mosteiro de Santa Maria de Seiça in...
Mosteiro de Santa Maria de Seiça is an abandoned monastery located in Paião, a parish in the Figueira da Foz municipality. The first mention of this monastery in a document dated 1162. Given that it was founded by D. Afonso Henriques, who was the king of Portugal from 1143 to 1185, it is safe to speculate that it was founded between 1143 and 1162. D. Afonso Henriques was heavily involved in the Crusades and the Templar Order, thus combining...

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Case a Igloo in Milan, Italy
Northern Milan, where the urban fabric stretches towards Greco Pirelli and the old industrial area of ​​the city, hides one of the most curious residential experiments ever built in Italy: Mario Cavallè’s igloo houses. We are in via Lepanto, Maggiolina district, close to the so-called Journalists’ Village, housing and social housing for the Milanese small and medium bourgeoisie designed by the engineer Evaristo Stefini and built by a cooperative— mainly composed of journalists, publicists, and lawyers—between the 1909 and...

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Podcast: Quarantine at Malta Lazaretto
Listen and subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, writers Geoff Manaugh and Nicky Twilley take us inside the Malta Lazaretto, a crumbling, centuries-old quarantine facility, to explore the history and future of quarantine. 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...

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