New About

In the spring of 1917, when the United States entered the First World War, the need for more sailors and marines became paramount. In order to spark interest among young men and convince them to volunteer for the war, the US Navy decided to erect a huge wooden replica of a battleship in Union Square, in the heart of New York City.

In Orlando township in the urban area of Soweto, in the city of Johannesburg, South Africa, stands two cooling towers of the decommissioned Orlando Power Station. Visible from miles around, the 100-meter tall twin towers have been an iconic landmark of Soweto for the past seventy years.

The Library of Congress has over 160 million items in its collection, including 23 million books, and more than 1.1 million films, and television programs ranging from motion pictures made in the 1890s to today's TV programs. It has the original camera negatives of 1903’s  The Great Train Robbery  and Victor Fleming’s  Gone With The Wind . It even has all the sequels of  Scary Movie  and modern hit TV shows such as  Judge Judy . The library also holds nearly 3.5 million audio recordings of public radio broadcasts and music, representing over a hundred years of sound recording history. It has films and audio on nearly all formats, from cylinders to magnetic tapes to CDs. It’s the Noah’s Ark of the creative history of the United States.

It is said that Tommy Tucker fell from a tree one fine afternoon in 1942 in the backyard of the Bullis’ house, in Washington, D.C., while he was still a blind and hairless baby. Zaidee Bullis, a childless mother and wife to a dental surgeon, adopted the tiny squirrel and made him a family pet. She fed him, bathed him, and put him to sleep on a tiny bed. But what Mrs. Bullis liked the most was dressing him up. Tommy Tucker had about thirty different costumes, and although Tommy was a boy, all his outfits were female for the simple reason that his tail would not fit in pants.

Belgian filmmaker Vincent Bal has made four feature films and numerous commercials, but the long creative process filmmaking requires often left him frustrated. Combining a love for comic strips with a bit of creativity, his quick doodles incorporating shadows have become an unexpected creative outlet. By using a variety of objects, Bal is able to find a form within the shadow cast, deftly taking his pen to fill in what's missing.

Trou de Bozouls, or “the hole of Bozouls”, is a large horseshoe-shaped canyon located near the commune of Bozouls in the Aveyron department in southern France. The meander was dug out in the limestone by the erosive action of running water of the Dourdou river as it flows through the large limestone plateau of Causse Comtal in Massif Central. The canyon is 400 meters across and more than 100 meters deep. The most striking feature of this natural monument is the town of Bozouls perched right at the edge of the bend. Bozouls's geographical location, high above one of the bends of the Dourdou river, gives the town a naturally defensive stronghold.

Deep below the surface, inside the water filled caverns of Cenote Zapote in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, stalactites grow into strange shapes. Instead of their typical pointed tips, the stalactites hanging down from the roofs at Cenote Zapote have a blown out mouth like that of a bell. They have been called variously as hell’s bells, elephant feet, shower heads or trumpets.

The American heartland was once dotted by thousands of ceremonial and burial mounds. They occurred over a large area that stretched from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and from the Mississippi River to the Appalachian Mountains. When Europeans first landed on America and found that even the natives had no knowledge of their origin, they thought that some lost civilization unrelated to the Native Americans were responsible for their creation, because they assumed that the natives were too uncivilized and too unsophisticated to create such lasting monuments. These mysterious architects came to be known simply as “mound builders”.

The ancient Lycian city of Simena, often referred to as Kekova-Simena, once straddled the long and narrow island of Kekova in the Mediterranean Sea near the Turkish coastline. In the olden times, Simena was a small fishing village and was later an outpost of the Knights of Rhodes.

Flooding has been a part of Venice since ancient times. Between autumn and spring, the city is affected by bouts of periodic flooding known as aqua alta, or “high water”, caused by a combination of astronomical tides, seasonal rain and strong winds, that pushes flood tides into the Venetian lagoon from the Adriatic sea submerging the lowest parts of the city for three to four hours. During these periods, wooden benches are placed end to end to create temporary raised walkways, and business block their doorways until the waters subsides. Although the city has adapted to flooding remarkably well, their instances have become more frequent and more severe in the last few decades. Partly at blame are rising sea levels, but the city itself is sinking.