Say WOW

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.

 
Meet the Man on a Mission to...
The artist Matthew Willey used to instinctively avoid bees, as so many of us do—until one fateful day in 2008. “I was in my studio in the East Village and a little honeybee flew in and landed right in the middle of the rug,” Willey shares. “She was walking along the carpet, not flying around, so I had the opportunity to get down on the floor and really study this bee.” Leery but curious, he grabbed a magnifying glass...

Read More

What a Socially Distant World Would Really...
Pelle Cass is a street photographer—sort of. Since 2008, he’s been taking his camera and tripod to public plazas and tourist hubs in Boston, New York, and other major cities, where, over the course of an hour or more, he takes several hundred photos of a fixed point. Back in the editing room, he spends anywhere from 20 to 80 hours Photoshopping a single image, finding, masking, and layering the people that make it into the final frame—a “still...

Read More

Chapman State Park in Indian Head, Maryland
Chapman State Park is located along the Potomac River a 30-minute drive south of Washington, D.C. Until 1914, the grounds were owned by the Chapman family. The state of Maryland purchased the property in 1998 and turned it into a public park. Nathaniel Chapman, a wealthy Virginia planter, bought the land and plantation in 1751. On the property is Mount Aventine, a mansion built between 1800 and 1860 that served as the center of the plantation. For many decades, the...

Read More

 
Woodchester Mansion in Gloucestershire, England
Woodchester Mansion may appear complete on the outside, but on the inside it’s missing a large portion of its floors and rooms. But it hasn’t been demolished—the mansion was abandoned mid-construction in the 1870s, and has remained in this state ever since. Between the 17th and early 19th century, the estate of Woodchester Park was owned by the wealthy Ducie family, and in 1788 their manor house was visited by King George III. It was then sold to William...

Read More

Astrid Lindgrens Hem (Astrid Lindgren’s House) in...
Astrid Lindgren is one of Sweden‘s most famous authors. She wrote more than 30 books for children, and is best know for creating Pippi Longstocking, a book that has been translated into more than 75 languages and adapted into several movies and television series. Lindgren lived in this house in Stockholm form 1941 until her death in 2002. Since her passing, her family has decided to preserve the house in the state it was in before her death, and...

Read More

Castle of San Zeno in Montagnana, Italy
The small walled town of Montagnana, in Veneto, was an important city during the Middle Ages thanks to its strategic position in the middle of the countryside, halfway between the domains of Padua and Verona. Contested by many local powers, the area was conquered by the troops of the feudal lord Ezzelino III da Romano, who ruled most of Veneto during the 13th century. After conquering and pillaging Montagnana, Ezzelino III da Romano ordered the construction of a new...

Read More

 
Hatch the Mary Rose Dog in H...
In 1981, during the underwater excavation of the Tudor warship the Mary Rose, divers discovered the incredible well-preserved skeleton of the ship’s dog. When the Mary Rose sank in 1545, the pup died, along with many of the ship’s crew. The cause of the sinking remains a mystery. Because the skeleton was found near the entrance of the ship carpenter’s cabin, a sliding hatch door, the research team named him Hatch. Some have claimed that the dog passed away while trapped...

Read More

A Stately English Lawn Is Going Wild...
In one of England’s most iconic corners of history and intellect, a colorful and very modern transformation is taking place. After some three centuries as a perfectly manicured formal lawn, the grass behind the storied King’s College Chapel, at the University of Cambridge, has burst into the “glorious, Monet-style chaos” of a wildflower meadow—all in the name of biodiversity. Those are the words that the college’s head gardener, Steve Coghill, uses to describe the view from where he sits...

Read More

Sold: Isaac Newton’s Notes About the Bubonic...
Starting in the spring of 1665, an outbreak of bubonic plague devastated England. The disease was swift and brutal, leaving sufferers woozy with headaches, damp with fevers, and dotted with buboes—firm, tender lymph nodes that could swell to the size of a chicken egg. More than 7,100 Londoners died in a single week in September 1665, according to the National Archives, and by the time the outbreak subsided, around 15 percent of the city’s residents had perished. Those who...

Read More

 
Abbey of Santa Maria a Mare in...
The Tremiti Islands are a small archipelago in the Adriatic Sea, located off the coast of Italy‘s Gargano Peninsula. Sparsely populated and far from land, the islands have always been a place of confinement. One of the islands, San Nicola di Tremiti, was said to be home to a hermit during the fourth century. According to the legend, the Virgin Mary appeared to the hermit allowing him to find the legendary tomb of Diomedes, a hero in Greek mythology....

Read More

The Bright Blue Graves of Safed Cemetery
At a graveyard in northern Israel, pilgrims seek to spiritually ascend with the help of Jewish mystic holy men buried beneath bright blue graves. The cemetery is in Safed, which spent 500 years as a small Galilean settlement before becoming the world capital of Kabbalah, the best-known form of Jewish mysticism, during the 16th century. Thousands of graves and burial caves are carved in the rock. Some of the graves, painted blue, belong to the holy men, tzadikim. According...

Read More

Sesshōseki (Killing Stone) in Nasu, Japan
Near the famous Nasu hot springs in Japan, there is a stone that is rumored to kill anyone who comes in contact with it. In traditional Japanese culture, the kitsune or foxes are frequently depicted as mischievous spirits with shapeshifting powers. The most infamous of such creatures is Tamamo-no-Mae, who took the form of a beautiful woman to seduce the Emperor and become his mistress in the mid-12th century. Legend has it that Tamamo-no-Mae’s true identity was a nine-tailed fox, at least...

Read More

 
Lyells Ek (Lyell’s Oak) in Östermalm, Sweden
On the outskirts of Stockholm, there is an ancient oak tree that has been used to measure changes in sea level. During the last Ice Age, a layer of ice more than three kilometers thick covered the Nordic countries and Canada. All of this mass compressed the earths mantle, lowering the land by several meters. After the ice melted, the mantle started to puff back up slowly—very very slowly. Only by about half a centimeter a year, a negligible...

Read More

The Chagall Windows of St. Stephan’s in...
Established in the year 990, the Church of St. Stephan stood for centuries before suffering extensive damage in World War II. When restoration was finally completed in the 1970s, Klaus Mayer, the pastor, wanted to incorporate new symbols of peace into the rebuilt house of worship. Mayer reached out to the artist Marc Chagall, whose life had been shaped by wartime events, and invited him to design stained-glass windows. The participation of Chagall, a Jew who was born in...

Read More

Comecos Cemetery in Granite, Oklahoma
On the back roads of southwestern Oklahoma is the town of Granite, the latest home of the Comecos Cemetery a collection of fake headstones (made of real stone) with epitaphs that range from the silly to the goofy to the groan-inducing.   “I told you I was sick.”“If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” “Here lies John Yeast / Pardon me for not rising.” The funny cemetery was originally created by a veterinarian and his wife, Dan...

Read More