Mercury – first of eight planets

Mercury is the first of eight planets and the smallest one. It is the closest planet to the Sun. It was named for the wing-footed Roman god. Mercury is visible to the naked eye from Earth. Mercury will either set within two hours of sunset, or rise no earlier than two hours before the Sun.
It is only slightly bigger than Earth’s Moon. Many different gases surround the planet. It has a very thin atmosphere of oxygen, potassium, and sodium vapors.
Planet’s hottest temperature is 400° C during a Mercurian day and its coldest is -173° C during a Mercurian night. This temperature variation is due to the fact that Mercury has essentially no insulating atmosphere.
More »

Coelacanth – Latimeria chalumnae

Biologists call the coelacanth a “living fossil”. This fish is the only living member of an order that was abundant 80,000,000 to 370,000,000 years ago.
The coelacanth grows to a length of 1.5 meters and can weigh up to 68 kilograms. It feeds on lantern fish, cuttlefish, and other reef fish.
A female coelacanth does not lay eggs, but gives birth to fully formed young after a gestation period of over 12 months. The female keeps the eggs inside her body to protect them. It gives birth to 5-26 offspring at a time. Young coelacanths probably live in caves and hunt at night.
More »

Unicorn – mystical beast or real creature

At the end of 2012, the North Korean news agency (only one in the country) made a strange statement, even for North Korea, that state archaeologists discovered a unicorn lair in the north of the country. According to the Koreans, the unicorn was a domestic animal of the ancient Korean king. The structure dates back 918-1392 AD (Kingdom of Korea). Nothing surprising in the news, archaeologists do their work, find antiquities. The main “but” is that unicorns never existed. The Guardian managed to find out that this was a subtle Sesame-Korean irony. Nevertheless, the message became an indicator of how firmly the myth of unicorns penetrated into the cultural code of the inhabitants of both Asia and Europe.
If you dig deep into the myth, the first documented mention of the unicorn was the epic Natural History of the Roman naturalist Pliny, written in 77 AD. The book was the first attempt to classify all living beings that lived on the planet. Pliny did not check the facts and included not only those animals that he saw with his own eyes, but also those about whom he was told. So, the unicorn came to the pages of a serious scientific publication.
More »

Soaring coffins

Wooden coffins hanging on the rocks are a scary view. However, this method of burial is known since ancient times in China.
High in the mountains, among the rocks there are coffins – the only reminder of the mysterious and almost disappeared people who lived in the south-western part of modern China. Bo people had always remained an ethnic minority of the populous country. But, despite this, they managed to create a bright original culture, which would develop further if it was not bloody war with the Ming Dynasty.
What made people to have such a strange tradition? How did they lift coffins, weighing up to 200 kilograms, 100-200 meters high?
More »

Baobab – Upside Down Tree

When the Europeans saw the giant trees that grew “upside down” they decided that they were the eighth wonder of the world! But the natives disappointed white people: it turned out, that baobabs served their sentences in hot African savanna…. Once upon a time the Creator planted the trees in the valley of the Congo River, but they began to complain about the dampness. Then the creator became angry and threw the baobabs on dry land. Since then, they grow upside down.
No other representative of the flora does not cling to life as fiercely as baobab. Fire can burn wood, but the tree will grow! When it is cut down new roots will grow. By the way, its roots are tens and even hundreds of meters long. The diameter of the trunks of the trees on the average reaches 10 meters and circumference – 30-40 meters! It is one of the thickest trees in the world. Baobab tree is a natural reservoir, which can contain up to 120 thousand liters of water! In times of drought the tree consumes the “gold reserves” and becomes a little thinner.
More »

Sable Island – Island of lost ships

Sable Island is in the North Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Canada, in a place where the warm Gulf Stream meets the cold Labrador Current. It is crescent-shaped island, 42 km long and 1.5 km wide. It is the most mysterious and the most dangerous island in the world.
Until now, no one knows exactly who has discovered this island. Norwegians say that the Vikings were the first. The French believe that the fishermen from Normandy and Brittany discovered it at the beginning of the XVI century.
But most modern geographers and historians agree that Sable was discovered by French traveler, who in 1508 sailed from Europe to the peninsula, which later was named the British Acadia and later – Nova Scotia.
More »

Hoover Dam – Boulder Dam

The Colorado River often left the coast during the melting of the snow in the Rocky Mountains and flooded many of the farms in Colorado and Utah. The idea to create an artificial reservoir for irrigation of the arid state of California and generate electricity was born in the US in the early 1920s. It was required to build an unusually powerful dam in the mountains.
The President of the United States, Herbert Hoover, showed keen interest in the dam project. There was no such a unique hydraulic structure in the world.
The US Congress allocated special funds for the construction of the dam. They decided to build it in the Black Canyon, on the border of Arizona and Nevada, 48 km southeast of Las Vegas.
More »