“When the Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something’s suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful.” – Barbara Bloom
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It’s official: There really was a giant, flightless bird with a head the size of a horse’s wandering about in the winter twilight of the high Arctic some 53 million years ago. The confirmation comes from a new study by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and the University of Colorado Boulder that describes the first and […]
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For centuries, explorers and treasure hunters have searched in vain for the ancient lost White City the legendary home of a long lost Central American civilization. Now American and Honduran researchers think they’ve finally found the pre-Columbian settlement deep in the Honduran rain forest. The ruins of La Ciudad Blanca were first identified in 2012 by an aerial survey that […]
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Scaphism was a method of torture that caused its victims to be eaten to death by bugs. It’s even more horriffic than it sounds. Scaphism, also called “the boats,” was an ancient Persian method of torture and, inevitably, execution. The victim would be placed in a boat, and then another boat would be placed on top. The victim’s feet, head […]
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An expedition team in Antarctica has successfully cleared away layers of thick ice from inside the hut of the famous Australian explorer Sir Douglas Mawson, revealing a century-old frozen bowl of peas, books on the shelves, candles, matches and “old-style woolen underwear”. The team used picks and chainsaws to remove the ice that had filled the main living quarters used […]
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Just before Christmas… November 1915, while camping on the thawing ice of the Weddell Sea, Shackleton and his men saw their ship, Endurance, going down into the waters of this sea. “She’s going, boys!” Shackleton shouted the evening of November 21, 1915. “She went down bows first, her stern raised in the air. She then gave one quick dive and […]
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