Open a familiar rectangular world map and something strange happens to the planet. Greenland appears enormous, sometimes looking almost comparable to Africa. Russia stretches across the top of the map like a continental giant without end. C...
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On the evening of October 29, 1969, a student programmer at UCLA began typing a word into a computer. The machine was connected over a network to another computer at the Stanford Research In...
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Draw a line from Miami to Bermuda, another from Bermuda to Puerto Rico, and a third back toward Florida, and you have the rough outline of one of the most famous imaginary places on Earth. T...
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In 1929, while scholars were cataloguing manuscripts in Istanbul's Topkapı Palace, they encountered a fragment of an extraordinary world map. Painted in vivid colors on parchment traditional...
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In 1901, divers working an ancient shipwreck near the Greek island of Antikythera recovered statues, ceramics, glass and a badly corroded mass of bronze. The wreck had carried valuable cargo...
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When sponge divers found an ancient shipwreck off the small Greek island of Antikythera around 1900, they brought up the kinds of objects archaeologists expected from a wealthy vessel of the...
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There is a place in the South Pacific where the horizon contains nothing but water and the nearest scraps of land are roughly 2,688 kilometers away. No island marks the spot. There is no lig...
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Stones that float on water? Sounds impossible—unless you’re in Rameswaram, India. Here, ancient stones defy gravity, floating on the surface like driftwood. Linked to one of Hinduism’s gr...
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Perched off the coast of Normandy, Mont-Saint-Michel is one of the most surreal places in Europe. At first glance, it looks like a medieval village rising out of the sea — complete with an a...
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In the northernmost part of Japan lies Iturup Island, part of the Kuril Islands chain. But the true mystery surrounds the nearby island of Okinoshima, which locals call the "Island Where No...
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