Amusing Planet

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NO, NOT THAT KIND OF 'HIGH'

8 diggs Amusing Planet
High in the Peruvian Andes, far above the tree line, lies an old gold-mining camp that has, over the years, grown to the status of a city. Over 30,000 people live in La Rinconada, five vertical kilometers up in the air.
FOUNDATIONAL UNTRUTHS

14 diggs Amusing Planet
A historic building in London’s Covent Garden, violently slashed through the middle, floats mysteriously in the air. A terraced house in Margate has its entire redbrick front slipped away from its frame and lies slumped in its own front garden. Welcome to the magical world of Alex Chinneck, a British artist known for his large-scale, mind-bending architectural illusions.
NOT WHAT BEYONCÉ WAS SINGING ABOUT

12 diggs Amusing Planet
In the summer of 1963, the United States successfully put a gigantic ring around the earth. But unlike Saturn, earth’s ring was not made of dust, rock, and ice, but thin hair-like strands of copper wires — half a billion of them.
THERE'S NO THERE THERE

14 diggs Amusing Planet
Agloe was designed by the General Drafting Co. as a copyright trap — and when Rand McNally released a map that featured Agloe, General thought the trap had worked. Except Agloe had somehow come into existence after the original map was made.
IN THE DARK

9 diggs Amusing Planet
What appears to be an ordinary rabbit hole in a farmer's field in Shropshire, England is actually the humble entrance to a large underground cave whose origins are shrouded in mystery.
A COMMUTE TO YOUR COMMUTE

30 diggs Amusing Planet
The Arsenalna, a station on Kiev's Metro, is located 105.5 meters below the surface, making it the deepest metro station in the world. If you made a vertical shaft on earth as deep, you could drop the entire Statue of Liberty into it and still have more than twelve meters of headroom left to drop other stuff.
RENEWABLE IS AS RENEWABLE DOES

7 diggs Amusing Planet
Turbine blades are made from glass or carbon-fiber composites. These materials are strong, lightweight and has a significant aerodynamic advantage, but they are nearly impossible to recycle. And they're massive.
WAVING HELLO

21 diggs Amusing Planet
Fifty years before dots and dashes killed the messenger, for a brief period, there was another kind of telegraph in Europe — the optical variety, based on the same principle of flag waving that the Navy still use today. It was called the semaphore, and relics of this amazingly efficient 19th century network can still be found around Europe.
TRAIN OUT YER DEAD!

5 diggs Amusing Planet
It was a difficult time to be alive in 1848 London, and worse still to be dead. A cholera epidemic had just swept through the city killing nearly 15,000 of its inhabitants, and bodies were literally pilling up besides churches waiting to be buried. But there was one problem: there was no space to bury.
BACK TO THE STONE AGE

3 diggs Amusing Planet
Built more than one hundred sixty years ago, the sculptures in London's Crystal Palace Park were the first ever attempt anywhere in the world to model dinosaurs as full-scale, three-dimensional creatures. Although the sculptures are wildly inaccurate by modern standards, they are still an important part of history.
NOT LOOFIN' AROUND

10 diggs Amusing Planet
The entire Greek sponge industry was centered on a string of islands in the Aegean Sea, called the Dodecanese Islands. For generations, young men and their fathers and their forefathers earned their living by diving for sponges.
THEY DON'T GET 'KNOCK KNOCK' JOKES

19 diggs Amusing Planet
In the remote Indian village of Shani Shingnapur, crime is a concept so alien that villagers here have stopped guarding their houses, their properties and their valuables.
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