atlasobscura.com

Can you imagine a crab the size of a cat scuttling around your backyard, climbing up trees, and quietly sneaking away with your shiniest pots and silverware? No? Then perhaps you’ve never had the privilege of meeting a coconut crab....

CAN YOU IMAGINE A CRAB the size of a cat scuttling around your backyard, climbing up trees, and quietly sneaking away with your shiniest pots and silverware? No? Then perhaps you’ve never had the privilege of meeting a coconut crab....

cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/15181516...

Is the Mongolian Death Worm Real?...

Museum in Germany Finds Skeleton That May Have Been Considered a Zombie...

Rabbits Are Creatures of the Underworld According to Ancient Fears...

Parthenogenesis Explains Why These Insects in Uruguay Are All Female...

ACCORDING TO INDONESIAN FOLKLORE, DEEP in the Sumatra highlands, among the monster flowers and sun bears, a 4-foot-tall primate known as the orang pendek, “tiny man,” walks on two legs. And beneath the calm waters of an almost circular lake, Congolese legend says an enormous, 50-foot crocodile, known as mahamba, devours...

From gazing at the night sky while sleeping on her family’s rooftop in Palestine, to buying her first telescope on eBay in seventh grade (for the sky-high bid of $100), to earning her degree in astrophysics and becoming a NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassador, Abuisnaineh has spent much of her life looking up. During the partial...

Eclipse chasers hope for clear skies, so here’s hoping for a good forecast for Monday, April 8. But if you are the kind of person who likes to plan way ahead, consider coming to the Mountain West in 21 years and four months. Colorado is known for more than 300 days of sunshine, and the August 2045 total eclipse crosses most of...

„ Słowenia jest silnie związana z pszczelarstwem” – mówi Peter Kozmus, jeden z czołowych w kraju i na świecie ekspertów w dziedzinie pszczół. „Historycznie rzecz biorąc, w każdej wiosce był przynajmniej jeden pszczelarz, który produkował miód dla siebie, swoich bliskich i sąsiadów”. Tradycja ta trwa do...

On a hot August afternoon in France, 1901, Miss Elizabeth Morison and Miss Frances Lamont, on holiday from England, took a trip to visit the Palace of Versailles, a former royal residence some twelve miles west of Paris. “We went by train,” they would later recall, “and walked through the rooms and galleries of the Palace...

Strange Things Happen at Point Nemo, the Most Remote Place on Earth...

Now there’s two words you don’t often see together. In fact, Google Trends lists zero occurrences of the phrase between 2004 and now. Even “German humor” produces a graph (albeit a rather flat one). But not only is there some evidence that Swiss comedy does exist, it might just be that being well-hidden is kind of its...

To halt the carnage, the sun god resorted to trickery. One version of the story recounts that Ra flooded a field of barley and allowed it to ferment, while another claims he simply poured out 7,000 jars of beer. In either case, Ra cleverly dyed the beer crimson using red ochre, a type of edible clay rich in iron oxide....

Un article de Frank Jacob sur Atlas Obscura - www.atlasobscura.com...

Interesting stuff!