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The definitive guide to the world's hidden wonders. Pre-order our latest book "Atlas Obscura: Wild Life" today!
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What color is hippo sweat? We’re glad you asked! Atlas Obscura: Wild Life hits shelves on September 17, and with it, wild answers to questions you never knew to ask. Pre-order now:
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Malabar giant squirrels are, native to India, are twice as large as your standard eastern grey squirrel, with bodies that span 3 feet, or 90 centimeters, from head to tail. They’re also gorgeously technicolored, with fur that ranges from brown and orange to maroon and purple.
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Paleoartists tend to "under-feather" drawings of dinosaurs based on fossils. Here's how swans would look if given the same treatment.
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No one ever engineered a holloway - erosion by human and animal traffic molded the land into tunneled roads. It’s hard to date them, but most are thought to go back to Roman times and the Iron Age. Many who walk through holloways don’t realize they’re retracing ancient steps.
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Just 16 years after the Choctaw Native Americans were forced off their land onto the "Trail of Tears," they raised $170 of their own money—worth tens of thousands of dollars today—in aid for people during the Irish famine. This monument in Cork, Ireland honors the Choctaw Nation.
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There's an unnamed island in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts that a local man once campaigned to name Busta Rhymes Island. It is currently searchable by that name on Google Maps
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About 10 percent of all internet traffic is kept secure by a wall of lava lamps. They're hooked up to a computer that converts their patterns into code
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A 9-ton sculpture is moved every year to mark the boundary, which changes with the fluctuating tilt of Earth's axis
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The city of London still pays rent to the Queen on land it leased in 1211. Nobody even knows where the land is located anymore. But over the past centuries, the city has paid the same flat rate: a knife, an axe, six oversized horseshoes, and 61 nails.
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The Baked Bean Museum of Excellence is a museum dedicated to baked beans located in the converted home of the bean-obsessed superhero who owns it. The man, whose legal name is Captain Beany, began his love of baked beans after he sat naked in a bathtub full of them for 100 hours.
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Galileo's middle finger sits in a glass egg in the Florence History of Science Museum. Whether the finger points to the sky, where Galileo glimpsed the glory of the universe, or if it sits eternally defiant to the church that condemned him, is for the viewer to decide.
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The kea is a rare, stately, olive-green parrot native to New Zealand’s South Island. They are fiercely intelligent, mischievous, and clever — and that impish spirit has got them in trouble. They’ve been redirecting traffic
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“I would argue, as would many other beeologists, that most bees are arguably cuter than most kids.”
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This mirrored, kinetic sculpture of Franz Kafka was meant to represent the ever-turning pieces of the writer’s mind, and his lifelong self-doubt and depression. Each layer is mechanized, using gears inspired by traditional Czech clockwork.
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A Chinese bookstore and library has mirrored floors and arched shelves, creating the illusion of a never-ending tunnel of books. That's the dream!
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Here's how a baboon skeleton might be interpreted by paleoartists who had never seen one
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Our world is full of animals with fatty bodies and all kinds of soft tissues unlikely to have survived in fossils
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In northern Japan’s coastal Niigata prefecture, after the rice is harvested and the grain extracted, a huge amount of rice straw is leftover, called wara. Instead of going to waste, locals use wara to create these giant animal sculptures
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In the late 1860s, steamboat tourists carried maps of the entire Mississippi—from the Gulf of Mexico all the way up to northern Minnesota—that stretched 11 feet long and just under three inches wide. They wrapped them around a spool and kept them in their pockets.
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When the Great Lakes get as cold as they are now, water transforms into unusual ice formations on the surface of the lakes. Ice boulders form when cold chunks break from ice sheets, and the movements of a lake’s waves sculpt those pieces into rounder shapes.
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The singular pronoun "they" was popular in the English language for centuries, employed by writers from Austen to Shakespeare. It wasn't until the late 18th century when people began criticizing its use, popularizing the "generic 'he'" to make English more like Latin
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This gorgeous place is the Starfield Library in Seoul. The library’s giant shelves are packed with over 50,000 books. What’s your favorite library or bookstore in the world? 📸: Photo via Instagram user
@anniepwanderlust
.
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In 1991, Paisley Abbey in Scotland underwent restoration work, and 12 of its 13 gargoyles had to be removed. A masonry company replaced the carvings with newer models, and, well, someone had some fun creating them.
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Puzzlers just got a little closer to solving Gravity Falls' final mystery
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Albuquerque, New Mexico doesn't get much snow, so every year the Albuquerque Metropolitan Arroyo Flood Control Authority builds an enormous snowman out of the city’s ever-present tumbleweeds to celebrate the holiday season.
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Based on the size of its skull, the scientists believe the dog must have been roughly the size of a large collie and had features similar to a European grey wolf. Either way, it's still a good dog.
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In 1964, a team of more than 100 people built a miniature model of all of New York City. The model, currently on display at the Queens Museum, now contains over 895,000 individual structures, including every building in the city that was standing before 1992
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At the L.A. bookstore The Last Bookstore, the shelves are placed every which way throughout the shop, and sculptures have been built from overstocked or damaged books. A section of hardcovers is even arranged by color. The store itself is housed in an abandoned bank
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Did your college math textbooks have moving parts? From 1524 on, a famous German cosmography book came with 5 volvelles! Peter Apian (later knighted for a different book), opted for a novel, tactile-visual teaching style for all earthly and heavenly measurements.
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After this tunnel in Helensburgh, Australia, was abandoned, a colony of glow worms—one of the largest in all of New South Wales—moved in and made its home on the roof, illuminating it like a constellation of blue-green stars.
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Hotel Belvédère is an abandoned hotel in the Swiss Alps. Once the perfect spot for travelers to explore the stunning Rhone Glacier, its traffic slowly trickled to a halt as the glacier melted, forcing the hotel to close.
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One tool significant in early hacking technology was, of all things, a toy from Cap'n Crunch boxes. The Bo’sun whistle, in cereal boxes in the 1960s, happened to play easily at 2600Hz, the frequency necessary to bypass AT&T’s analog system and get free long-distance phone calls.
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From the 17th to 19th centuries, macaroni, which was the term used for all forms of pasta, was a street food. And, like any proper street food, macaroni was eaten not with a fork, but with one’s bare hands.
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In the history of colonialism, Australia is considered a relatively late European “discovery.” But a 13th-century manuscript shows that, indirectly, Europeans had contact with Australia hundreds of years before they landed there. The evidence? A cockatoo.
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In 1991, Paisley Abbey in Scotland underwent restoration work, and 12 of its 13 gargoyles had to be removed. A masonry company replaced the carvings with newer models, and, well, someone had some fun creating them. This one strongly resembles Xenomorph from the "Alien" franchise.
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At the L.A. bookstore The Last Bookstore, the shelves are placed every which way throughout the shop, and sculptures have been built from overstocked or damaged books. A section of hardcovers is even arranged by color. The store itself is housed in an abandoned bank
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About 10 percent of all internet traffic is kept secure by a wall of lava lamps in San Francisco. They're hooked up to a computer that converts their patterns into code.
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In 1991, Paisley Abbey in Scotland underwent restoration work, and 12 of its 13 gargoyles had to be removed. A masonry company replaced the carvings with newer models, and, well, someone had some fun creating them.
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Thousands of glowworms hang peacefully in this cave in Waitomo, New Zealand, forming a bioluminescent cosmos. Today, many of the tour guides that offer trips into the caves are the descendants of Maori Chief Tane Tinorau, one of the men who first discovered the cave back in 1887.
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Deep in the belly of a giant fiberglass triceratops, eight rare bats have made a home
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Watch this Oregon gray whale shoot a full rainbow out of its blowhole
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After this tunnel in Helensburgh, Australia, was abandoned, a colony of glow worms—one of the largest in all of New South Wales—moved in and made its home on the roof, illuminating it like a constellation of blue-green stars.
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Stephen Hawking once threw a cocktail party for time travelers. He sent the invitations after it happened so that only people from the future would be able to show up. It's on June 28, 2009 if anyone's interested
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The avian homes built between the 15th and 19th century were designed with the care of birds in mind. These structures, with nicknames like “kuş köşkü” (bird pavilions) and “serçe saray” (sparrow palace), are fantastic examples of this (via
@mymodernmet
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Germany’s Rakotzbrücke is known as a “devil’s bridge,” due to the colloquialism that such bridges were so odd and unearthly they must have been built by Satan. Commissioned in 1860 by the knight of the local town, the bridge was built to create a circle with its reflection.
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To reapply their youthful energy to less potentially dangerous ends, NZTA has set up a “kea gym” by the roadside, with contraptions and puzzles to distract the birds from the road
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In 1975, a cat was listed as co-author on a physics paper because Jack H. Hetherington, the human author, had incorrectly used the royal "we" throughout it and didn't want to typewrite the whole thing again
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In 1562 map-makers thought America was full of mermaids, giants, and dragons
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Archaeologists found this sealstone, just over 1.4 inches long, carved with an intricacy never before seen in Aegean Bronze Age artwork—a discovery that could rewrite art history as we know it
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By using geothermal technology, the greenhouses of Fridheimar, located one hour east of Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, produce 370 tons of tomatoes throughout the year. That’s roughly a ton per day, even in the coldest of Iceland’s winter months.
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These opposing rows of beech trees were planted to create an impressive lead up to an estate in Northern Ireland. As they matured they began to bend over the road, and eventually formed a shadowy tunnel that's become known as "Dark Hedges." They even have their own ghost story.
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For half of each year, the sun, blocked by the surrounding mountains, never reaches the small town of Rjukan, Norway. Except for the light from Solspeilet, a computer-controlled array of three giant mirrors that adjust every 10 seconds to reflect sunlight from the mountaintop.
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This bookstore and library in Yangzhou, China is a bibliophile’s dream. Black mirrored floors shimmer beneath arched shelves that stretch to the ceiling, creating the illusion of a never-ending tunnel of books.
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For years, an 87 year-old known as “Grandpa Rainbow” painted the walls, doors, and ground of his small village in Taiwan. Some say he began painting to brighten up the drab surroundings, while others say it was to save his village from demolition.
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Just 16 years after the Choctaw Native Americans were forced out of their land and made to march on the "Trail of Tears," they raised $170 of their own money—equivalent to tens of thousands of dollars today—in aid for people during the Irish famine.
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For Japanese chef Takehiro Kishimoto, vegetables and fruits have the potential to turn into art. Kishimoto carves everything from radishes to avocados and takes inspiration from traditional Japanese patterns, which typically convey their own meanings and connotations
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A sweet little island with a nice hat, ruled by sheep.
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In 1905, a Russian cruiser, the Dmitri Donskoi, sank off the coast of a small island east of the Korean peninsula. Before leaving the ship, the crew scuttled it, leaving it at the bottom of the ocean with a rumored cargo of gold bars.
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Recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s largest bust sculpture, the Adiyogi statue depicts the Hindu deity, Shiva, in 500 tonnes of steel. The statue stands 112 feet tall in Coimbatore, India.
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In the mid-19th century when women were expected to look for a husband and practice needlepoint, Ida Lewis was busy swimming, rowing boats, and saving people from drowning. Once the U.S.'s highest-paid lighthouse keeper, she's said to have personally saved 25 lives.
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Enter your street address or ZIP code into the map’s search bar to discover whose traditional territory your home was built on.
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Unlike albinism, animals with leucism may display ghostly traces of their normal patterns
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Burg Eltz is a Medieval family castle overlooking the Elzbach river, left intact over centuries and still looking much as it was hundreds of years ago. Completed between 1490-1540, the 80-room castle is still occupied today, and has remained in the same family for 33 generations.
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Oddly enough, tiger tail ice cream (an orange-flavored ice cream base with a swirl of black licorice) is almost impossible to find outside of Canada. It doesn’t call for rare ingredients foraged from the Canadian Rockies, it just doesn’t seem to appeal to anyone except Canadians.
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Turnips were the original canvas of choice for jack-o-lanterns, as they were sturdy, abundant, and deeply horrifying.
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About 10 percent of all internet traffic is kept secure by a wall of lava lamps. They're hooked up to a computer that converts their patterns into code
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Portugal was responsible for shipping 4.9 million people from Western Africa to Brazil, by far the largest amount of human cargo transported during the Atlantic slave trade. Tourists don't focus on this—so one tour guide decided to do something about it
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Every spring, the Kawachi Fuji Gardens in Kitakyushu, Japan are full of graceful hanging flowers on winding wisteria vines. The “Fuji Matsuri,” or “Wisteria Festival" takes place in late April or early May when the garden's tunnel is in full bloom
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When you first walk into the massive, four-story John K. King bookstore, an employee will hand you a map. If you want to find your way around, you’ll need it. But if you’re just browsing, there’s nothing better than getting lost in the neverending stacks of over a million books.
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While black-and-white images can be hard to relate to, adding color evokes empathy. In recent years, a community of artists has emerged online who meticulously colorize old photographs.
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The island of Socotra is one of the most alien-looking places on the planet. Part of an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, it is so isolated that a third of its plant life is found nowhere else on the planet. Particularly notable are the trees that look like flying saucers.
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Shiratani Unsuikyo Ravine is the magical, mossy forest that inspired Princess Mononoke. It’s dense with greenery and very quiet, with sound absorbed by the thick moss. Lead artist Kazuo Oga was said to have spent many hours sketching the forest in preparation for the film.
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When Echidnas mate, they form long, waddling processions called “love trains”
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This 500-year-old grocery list was written and illustrated by Michelangelo. The menu consists mostly of vegetables, fish, wine, and bread. The list is owned by the Casa Buonarroti museum in Florence, Italy, and is one of the few bits of ephemera we have from Michelangelo's life.
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At the L.A. bookstore The Last Bookstore, the shelves are placed every which way throughout the shop, and sculptures have been built from overstocked or damaged books. A section of hardcovers is even arranged by color. The store itself is housed in an abandoned bank.
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Diehard Monty Python fans will recognize the images decorating the pedestrian underpass near the Eindhoven Central Train Station in the Netherlands. The tunnel is a tribute to John Cleese, the star character in the “Ministry of Silly Walks” sketch.
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What sort of dreams would you have, surrounded by more than 150,000 books? Gladstone's Library is the only library in the UK that lets you sleep among the books, with 26 guest bedrooms on site.
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This Halloween, try carving turnips instead, which are considered to be the original sources for the jack-o’-lantern. Irish legend holds there was an actual man named Jack who tried to trick the devil and was doomed to forever roam the earth with a light inside a turnip.
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Just 16 years after the Choctaw Native Americans were forced off their land, they raised $170 of their own money—worth tens of thousands of dollars today—in aid for people during the Irish famine. This monument in Cork, Ireland honors the Choctaw Nation.
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In 1991, Paisley Abbey underwent some restoration work, and twelve of its 13 gargoyles had to be removed. A masonry company replaced the carvings with newer models, and well, it looks like at least one of them had a bit of fun with their creation.
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Founded in 1990, Japan's Zao Fox Village is home to more than 100 foxes which roam free on the grounds. While the traditional Japanese Red Fox definitely rules the roost (so to speak), there are also black foxes, platinum foxes, and arctic foxes.
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The Sammezzano Castle in Florence was built over the course of 40 years for the Marquis Ferdinando Ximenes Panciatichi. No two rooms are alike, and among the most jaw dropping are the the Room of the Stalactites, the Room of the Mirrors, and the Room of the Peacocks.
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The world is filled with remarkable restrooms. Some of them are no longer open to the public, such as the Stufetta del Bibbiena, a small bathing chamber with erotic-art-covered walls in the Vatican’s Papal Apartments.
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In churches around Europe these jeweled skeletons have been almost forgotten. They were found in catacombs beneath Rome in 1578, but when the Enlightenment came around they were embarrassing for the amount of money they represented, and were hidden away.
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Ángeles Rodríguez Hidalgo attended a rock concert with her grandson at age 70, and she never missed a chance to attend a metal show again. She became an icon of the Madrid '80s rock scene known as "la abuela rockera." There's a statue of her in Madrid
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Nevada's Clown Motel is decorated with thousands of clowns, and sits on the edge of the desert next to an abandoned graveyard. No big deal.
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In the early 1900s, women used hatpins to defend themselves against harassment from men. They were so effective that within a decade, proposed legislation to curb these accessories to assault had bubbled up across the United States
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The Brazilian fruit, jaboticabas, may be nicknamed “tree grapes,” but it is far from your typical grape. The tree is known as a cauliflory, meaning that its fruits grow directly out of its trunk. Depending on the variety, tastes may range from blueberry yogurt to grape candy
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Fang-od Oggay, 101 years old, was the first female tattoo artist in the province of Kalinga in the Philippines. For over eight decades, she's been single-handedly keeping the traditions of the Butbut tribe alive in her village of Buscalan through unique hand-tap tattooing.
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This fish is the salema porgy. In Arabic, it is known as “the fish that makes dreams.” A single meal of salema porgy may contain a toxin that causes several days of vivid, sometimes frightening hallucinations, which scientists equate with the effects of taking LSD.
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Photographer Camille Seaman has spent seven years storm chasing, and she tracked down and captured images of a supercell: a rotating thunderstorm that can generate hail, high winds, lightning, rain, and, occasionally, tornadoes.
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Carl Barnes, a part-Cherokee farmer from Oklahoma, liked to experiment with ancestral corn varieties. After breeding several varieties together, the result was vibrantly-colored kernels. Though Barnes passed away in 2016, seed companies worldwide still sell his jewel-like corn.
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According to local lore, the Mathematical Bridge was built in the mid-18th century by Sir Isaac Newton as an exemplary example of physics.
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The first known photographic sequence ever taken of Stonehenge was recently made public by the photo research company TimePix. The photos were taken in 1867, featured in a book called "Plans and Photographs of Stonehenge," which was released by the U.K.’s Ordnance Survey.
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This surreal sight is found below the Russian city of Yekaterinburg. The swirls are caused by layers of the mineral carnallite, which can be yellow and white or even red and blue. They paint rivers of color across the walls of this abandoned mine and date back millions of years
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The inverted pyramid design of this station stands out amid Bratislava's urban landscape.
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The display is available to the public, and visiting in person can even help cybersecurity efforts. External disturbances like human movement make the random code even harder to predict. There couldn’t be a groovier way to keep the internet secure
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Two oddities-loving artists have created their own “people pot pies.” They’re totally edible (and no humans were harmed): They’ve got cherry orbs for the eye sockets, skin-like crust, and fruity goo oozing from the nostrils.
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Norway is a place of exquisite beauty, it’s true. Even their rest areas are beautiful! This is the Ureddplassen, a rest area situated along the Norwegian Scenic Route that overlooks the fjords and the open sea. Public restrooms have never looked so good.
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In the coastal cliffs beneath Tintagel Castle lies an echoingly atmospheric cave. And if the stories of old are to be believed, the cave may once have been home to Merlin, the wizard of Arthurian legend.
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The rules for passport photos used to be a lot less strict
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