The Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail is America’s first water-based national historic trail. It consists of the combined routes of Smith’s historic voyages on the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries in 1607-1609. Designated by Congress in December 2006, the trail stretches approximately 3,000 miles up and down the Bay and along tributaries in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and the District of Columbia.
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posted by netbros
on Apr 16, 2011 -
5 comments
After completing it's
final mission in March, Space Shuttle Discovery has been returned to the Kennedy Space Center's Orbiter Processing Facility, where it is being dissembled for cleaning and decommissioning. Spaceflight Now has
pictures of the process.
posted by helloknitty
on Apr 11, 2011 -
49 comments
Where's Tyche, the 10th 9th planet? Getting the full story. John Matese and Daniel Whitmire of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette recently made the news when they announced the possible discovery of a gas giant planet they named
Tyche in the Oort Cloud, at the extreme edge of the Solar System (
previously). Now ars electronica breaks down the evidence behind the announcement, what can be done to confirm or disprove its existence & how long it could take.
posted by scalefree
on Mar 3, 2011 -
17 comments
Gocta Falls, Peru In 2005 Stefan Ziemendorff came across a waterfall in Northern Peru that didn't appear on any map, despite a village of 200 people being at its base. He returned the following year to measure its height. At 2,350 feet tall, Gocta Falls are now known to be the 3rd highest in the world.
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posted by jontyjago
on Feb 16, 2011 -
17 comments
Curt Teich (1877-1974) was a printer who immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1896. Curt Teich & Company, opened in 1898 in Chicago, was the world's largest printer of view and advertising postcards. Teich is best known for its "Greetings From" postcards with their big letters, vivid colors, and bold style. Flickr user amhpics has archived nearly 2000 Teich linen postcards in his set
Vintage Curt Teich linen postcards 1930s-1950s.
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posted by netbros
on Nov 28, 2010 -
5 comments
Web of stories - "There are few things more interesting or more pleasurable than to watch someone tell a good story. And one story always leads to another."
posted by unliteral
on Aug 24, 2010 -
5 comments
A letter by Rene Descartes, stolen in 1840s, recovered in 2010 by online detective work. The letter was stolen by Guglielmo Libri, inspector general of the libraries of France, who stole thousands of valuable documents and fled to England in 1848. Since 1902 it's been in the collection of Haverford College, its contents unknown to scholars, and nobody there realized that it was an unknown letter. But because they had catalogued it and recently put their catalogue on line, Dutch philosopher Erik-Jan Bos found it "
during a late-night session browsing the Internet". (A Haverford undergraduate thirty years ago had translated it and written a paper on it, in which he recognized that the letter was unknown -- but nobody followed up and the letter had sat in the library since then until it was listed online.) The letter includes some last-minute edits to the Meditations, and some thoughts on God as causa sui.
Haverford, whose president was a philosophy major, is returning the letter to the Institut de France.
posted by LobsterMitten
on Feb 26, 2010 -
21 comments
Hadji Muhiddin Piri Ibn Hadji Mehmed, ( 1465–1554/5) was an Ottoman-Turkish Admiral, Privateer, Geographer and Cartographer more commonly known as Piri Reis. In 1521 he finished his
Kitab-I Bahriye or Book of Navigation
This is an exquisite C17th - C18th revised and expanded version.
(
scroll down and click the icons which can then be magnified. )
Marvel at the gold leaf and coloring of the map of the
Bay of Salonica
or the wonderful
map of Rhodes.
(
click addittional information button below map to get further information.)
However Piri Reis
is more famously known for this map dated 1513 which is one of the oldest surviving maps to show the Americas. In the
marginalia are the accounts of the pioneer seamen who have taken part in the discovery of the places shown on the map.
Piri Reis at The
Map Room
and
wiki
and
related.
posted by adamvasco
on Nov 27, 2009 -
6 comments
A companion to one of Europe's most eminent prehistoric monuments has been discovered just a mile away.
Bluehenge has the same rough configuration as its sister site, Stonehenge, but with 27 stones instead of 56. It is speculated that the stones of Bluehenge may have been moved to aid in
the making of Stonehenge.
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posted by Hardcore Poser
on Oct 3, 2009 -
43 comments
Decades after it was written on the eve of World War II, a lost Poirot story by Agatha Christie has been found. Today it is published in the Daily Mail for the first time:
The Capture Of Cerberus (scroll half way down the page).
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posted by lioness
on Aug 21, 2009 -
19 comments
NYC Grid is a photo blog dedicated to exploring and discovering The City of New York block by block and corner by corner. Updated every weekday, each post covers a new block with a focus on the mundane and ephemeral. An optimistic snapshot of New York as it is now.
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posted by netbros
on Aug 1, 2009 -
8 comments
On April 23, 2009 Natalia Rybczynski, Mary R. Dawson, and Richard H. Tedford published their paper "
A semi-aquatic Arctic mammalian carnivore from the Miocene epoch and origin of Pinnipedia" in the journal,
Nature, detailing their 2007 discovery of the species they have named
Puijila darwini.
The carnivorous marine mammal,
which lived about 21 to 24 million years ago, was discovered practically by
accident, but as a "transitional fossil" is
re-writing our understanding of pinniped evolution. It could also be noted that it was most likely
cute as all get out, and is already the star of it's
own mini documentary.
posted by vertigo25
on Apr 29, 2009 -
28 comments
A Day of Discovery. Now Taylor and Sillett planned to push deeper into Jed Smith, beyond New Hope Tree, to try to explore valleys where they had never gone before. It seemed unlikely that anyone had gone there in many years, and they would discover, once they got into the valleys, that the U.S. government maps of the area were inaccurate and could not be used for guidance. For all practical purposes, the center of Jed Smith was a blank spot on the map of North America. A couple of guys out for a walk discover an unknown grove of redwoods.
posted by LarryC
on Apr 2, 2007 -
24 comments
