The internet is such a double-edged sword. With more or less the entirety of human knowledge at your fingertips, it’s easy to imagine that you’ve seen it all. And hey, after a few sleepless nights going down the Wikipedia rabbit hole, it’s only natural to think there’s little more out there to see.
But the internet does manage to find new and fascinating things all the time because the world is just an endlessly interesting place. Check it out!
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Not quite the teddy bears’ picnic.
But also still a bears’ picnic, amirite? Although you generally think of bears as snacking down on things like salmon and honey, this is proof positive that they love a good apple as much as anybody else. Dig in, you fuzzy fellows.
It’s amazing it hasn’t been demolished, honestly.
You’re looking at one of the most famous abandoned places on the planet, a spot that everyone would love a closer glimpse of if they didn’t have to actually be there: the control room at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
You know what, I’d be fine with it.
If a firefighting helicopter needed water badly enough to stop to fill its bucket from my pool, by all means. Really, just to get an up-close view of the precision operation, like this, would be well worth it.
I knew there was something familiar about that.
So, the default silhouette that you’d see before plugging your personal photo into Microsoft Outlook had a pretty appropriate source: Bill Gates’s mugshot. Back in 1977, Gates was arrested in New Mexico on a traffic offense.
Where the river flows from.
This is where Croatia’s Cetina River, one of the most important in the area, just kind of…starts. It’s a giant, 150 meter deep spring and, although it looks like a lake, it’s not the sort of place where diving is recommended.
The colors.
Who knew fossils could be so vibrant? This specimen, an ammolite discovered in Alberta, is about as radiant as they come. Couldn’t you just stare into that thing for a few hours and get lost?
And more colors.
At least because of Saturn you can tell that these are planets, but they’re not in their more typical form because these images have been taken by Hubble’s UV camera. Clockwise from top left, that’s Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and Mercury.
A bona fide hero.
Hey, this rat earned the little medal hanging around its neck. This is Magawa , an African Giant Pouched Rat that has been trained to find land mines. He can smell the explosives inside the mines but is too light to set them off himself. So far, he has detected 39 land mines and 28 pieces of unexploded ordnance, saving dozens of lives.
It seems like an odd place for a temple, but it makes sense.
The locals around the Temple of Valadier in Genga, Italy often took to the nearby caves for safety when marauding armies were passing through the area. The temple serves a similar purpose, acting as a “refuge for sinners” and a pilgrimage site for seekers of forgiveness.
That’s a pretty cool project.
The euro bank notes were originally designed with a different bridge on each note, none of which actually existed in any country but that represented different architectural styles. So, Dutch designer Robin Stam decided to build all the bridges, all in the town of Spijkenisse.
Do not forget anything at the bottom.
If you’ve been hitting the stair climber at the gym and want to tackle a real-life challenge, you could do worse than this set of stairs. It’s at Varosa Dam in Portugal, if you think your quads are mighty enough for the climb.
Just a little liberty.
New York’s famous Statute of Liberty has a twin, and it’s not in Vegas. This much smaller version stands at the Pont de Grenelle in Paris, and it has been situated to face the larger statue across the Atlantic Ocean.
That’ll get some attention.
Dragon Bridge in Da Nang, Vietnam has a much more dramatic display than a Statue of Liberty replica: a fire-breathing dragon. It’s a half-decent clock, too because every Saturday and Sunday at 9 am and 9 pm, the dragon puts on a fire-breathing show.
A little light reading.
You don’t always know what’s right behind you, and that proved true for Tibet’s ancient Sakya Monastery . Although it was built in the 11th century, a massive library containing 84,000 scrolls was discovered hidden behind a wall in 2003. They are thought to have been sealed up for hundreds of years.
Caught in time.
You know, it’s not unusual to see the odd fish frozen just below the surface of a lake. It’s definitely odd to see an entire school of fish just frozen en masse like this, however.
So that’s how they did it.
NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building sure comes by its name honestly, and its size as well. When the shuttles were in action, they needed a whole lot of room to put everything together ahead of a launch, and they would pass through the tallest doors in the world.
Smoothest ride ever.
I don’t know how they do it, but you can barely notice the bullet train between Beijing and Shanghai is moving if you don’t look out the window and see the landscape racing by at 350 km/h (217 mph). That’s amazing engineering.
Crazy lifesaver.
“This thing was in my vein for 4 months,” the uploader of this pic explained . “It’s called an IVC filter. They inserted it through my jugular vein when I had a big ole’ blood clot in my leg. It protected me from getting a pulmonary embolism (when a piece of the clot breaks off and then travels to your lung) while the clot dissolved.”
Minimalist living.
Just try getting your furniture into this house in Dokkum, The Netherlands. It’s not even one meter (three feet) wide. I think I’d get claustrophobic in a house like that, personally.
So, skunks can do handstands.
Which already puts them ahead of me. This one was caught on a trail cam at Saguaro National Park, which is good because handstands are the first step they’ll take before deploying their spray, and nobody needs to experience that up close and personal.
