Archive
Pieces
The lost colony of Roanoke vanished, leaving only a single carved word
At the end of the sixteenth century, England attempted to establish its first permanent settlement in North America, on a small island
The Rosetta Stone cracked the secret of hieroglyphs after 1,400 years of silence
In 1799, soldiers from the Napoleonic army in Egypt were working to reinforce a fort near the town of Rosetta, in the
The Voynich manuscript, undeciphered for a century despite the best cryptographers
Among the precious collections of Yale University's Beinecke Library sits one of the most enigmatic documents ever studied by historians and cryptographers:
Antarctica, not the Sahara, is the largest desert in the world
When we hear the word desert, the collective imagination almost automatically conjures images of scorching dunes and unbearable heat, like the Sahara,
This town's border is so tangled that houses change country room by room
Straddling Belgium and the Netherlands, the small town of Baarle forms what is arguably the most complex border configuration on the planet,
The world's largest artificial islands are visible from space
Off the coast of Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, stand artificial archipelagos whose scale defies imagination: millions of tons of sand
The world's shortest international border is under 100 meters long
When you think of an international border, you generally picture long lines running across entire continents, separating countries over hundreds, even thousands
DID YOU KNOW this Brazilian island has up to one deadly viper per square meter
Off the coast of the state of São Paulo, in Brazil, lies a small piece of land that, seen from the sky,
The world's narrowest street is only 31 centimeters wide at its tightest point
In Reutlingen, a small city in southern Germany tucked not far from Stuttgart, one of Europe's most improbable urban curiosities is hiding