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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 Fight Between Cataphiles and Underground Police...
“If you’re brave enough to try, you might be able to catch a train from UnLondon to Parisn’t, or No York, or Helsunki, or Lost Angeles, or Sans Francisco, or Hong Gone, or Romeless.” China Miéville’s fantasy novel Un Lun Dun is set in an eerie mirror version of London. In it, he hints that other cities have similar doubles. On the list that he offhandedly rattles off, Paris stands out. Because the City of Light really does have...

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Make Orange-and-Black-Licorice Ice Cream This Halloween
In Canada’s ice cream parlors from the 1950s to the 1970s, tiger tail burned bright. Consisting of orange ice cream shot with ribbons of black licorice, tiger tail attracted kids with its appealing colors and name, and people of all ages with its unusual combination of ingredients. However, after the 1970s, tiger tail was supplanted by other ice cream flavors. Today, it’s primarily confined to southern Ontario, where it clings on as a recognizable and beloved piece of vintage...

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The Unsettling Legend of Maryland's Native Cryptid,...
On an unrelentingly hot day in August, I drove out to the borderlands between Maryland and Pennsylvania to see a museum that does not yet exist, devoted to a creature that never has. Sarah Cooper’s day job is as a travel ER nurse, but in her spare time she travels to various festivals and conventions with her collection, what she calls the American Snallygaster Museum—her goal being to open up a permanent site devoted to Western Maryland’s strange cryptid....

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Our Spooky Snaps Photo Contest Winners
Earlier this month, we asked readers to help us celebrate Halloween by sharing photos of places they encountered that gave them the chills. At Atlas Obscura, we have always been fascinated by the histories and science that infuse mysterious locations—and some that aren’t so mysterious at first glance, like a haunted grocery store. So we wanted to know: What places haunt you? We were delighted and terrified by the influx of mournful cemeteries, derelict buildings, and shadowy landscapes! A...

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White Nancy in Bollington, England
Just outside the pretty Cheshire village of Bollington, you can hike up to the top of the nearby Kerridge Hill. At the summit, visitors are met by a bizarre structure that seems out of kilter with its rural surroundings. This is the White Nancy, a 200-year-old Georgian folly. The Nancy is an 18-foot-tall white cone, topped with a simple black finial. The folly was made from sandstone rubble, which was later rendered and painted white. The local Gaskell family built...

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Wonder Is Everywhere: The World’s Oldest Trees,...
Wonder is everywhere. That’s why, every other week, Atlas Obscura drags you down some of the rabbit holes we encounter as we search for our unusual stories. We highlight surprising finds, great writing, and inspiring stories from some of our favorite publications. In Search of the World’s Oldest Trees by Jared Farmer, BBC Future There are about 140,000 species of trees, shrubs, and vines on the planet. Of those, about 30 are known to live more than 1,000 years....

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A Haunted Chamber, a Quivering Blade, and...
London is a ghost hunter’s dream, dotted with potentially haunted sites like mass graves of plague victims and the pub where Jack the Ripper’s final victim was last seen alive. But in the early 2000s, one of its most reliably spooky locations was the front room of a ground floor flat in north London. People reported feeling a supernatural presence, dizzying sensations, and even abject terror. The apartment wasn’t the site of anything grisly or nefarious that could explain...

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New Strange Recordings Allow Us To Hear...
On a hillside in Utah’s Fishlake National Forest is a tree, and if you listen very carefully, this aspen is talking to us. This one plant actually looks like a forest of 47,000 genetically identical trees, which are effectively branches of the same organism connected by a massive root system. Each stem or ramet is a clone of the original tree, called trembling aspen (species Populus temuloides), all emanating from a single seed that sprouted over 9,000 years ago....

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World's First McDonald's Drive Thru in Sierra...
McDonald’s is famous for having served billions and billions of burgers throughout the course of the franchise’s history, but until January 24, 1975, no McDonald’s burger had ever been served in quite this way before. It was on that day that the first drive-through opened in Sierra Vista, Arizona, forever changing one’s ability to eat Quarter Pounders in their car. To be clear, drive-through restaurants were not a new innovation–many restaurants have a claim to the first drive-through burger,...

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World's Largest Pumpkin Water Tower in Circleville,...
First given its now iconic orange paint job in 1997, this water tower stands as a symbol of Circleville, Ohio’s gourd obsessions. Circleville is known for its annual Pumpkin Show, a harvest season celebration that includes contenders for the world’s largest pumpkin pie, the world’s largest pumpkin, and other superlative squash.  Since kicking off in 1903, the Circleville Pumpkin Show—an event organized to connect rural farmers with the city’s downtown—has grown to proportions nearly as impressive as their water...

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Martin Luther King Jr Memorial in Norfolk,...
Standing tall at the intersection of Brambleton Avenue and Church Street, the Martin Luther King Jr Memorial pays tribute to the great civil rights leader.   This site was chosen due to its history as the center of business and culture for Norfolk’s Black community dating back to the early 1900s. Conceived in 1975 by Councilman Joseph A. Jordan, Jr., the monument is designed to inspire future generations to learn about King and live their lives according to his...

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National Gallery Of Historical Firemen in Mantua,...
The National Gallery of Historical Firemen (in Italian, Galleria Storica Nazionale dei Vigili del Fuoco) was founded in 1991 by Firefighter Commander Nicola Colangelo. Although this appellation is the most common in the English language, a more accurate translation of the name of this museum would be the Historical National Gallery of Firefighters. The gallery consists of four interconnected rooms in a beautiful Renaissance building in the Palazzo Ducale complex. These rooms used to be the royal stables.  The...

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Leesburg Lime Company Kiln in Leesburg, Virginia
The Leesburg Lime Company appeared in the latter half of the 19th century as one of many businesses that spawned around the W&OD railroad.  Leesburg Lime Company was one of the largest employers of Black Americans in the area following the American Civil War, with between 30 to 50 Black employees on the roster. Quarriers used dynamite to break up limestone inside the pits, then utilized a steam-powered winch to transport stone out of the pits. The stone was...

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The Salem Witch Trials Actually Happened in...
On a crisp late April morning in 1692, Benjamin Hutchinson was on his way to a local tavern in the quiet New England farming community of Salem Village, Massachusetts, when he was stopped by 11-year-old Abigail Williams. Frantically, Williams gestured to a “little black” figure in the form of the area’s former local reverend, George Burroughs. Hutchinson could not see the specter, but trusted Williams—a “visionary girl” who’d already identified several witchcraft suspects tormenting local girls. Without hesitation, Hutchinson...

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The Three Brujas in Taos, New Mexico
Among the stately granite tombstones in a quaint historical cemetery are three unmarked concrete graves. Local legend says that these graves hold the remains of three witches (or brujas) who inflicted some kind of horrible evil on the community, although it seems that no one living can remember exactly what that was. Whatever they did must have been bad though, because supposedly the graves are covered in concrete in order to seal off the spirits from the physical realm,...

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