The Three Gorges Dam spans the Yangtze River in China and is the largest power generating plant in the world. While much of China’s vast countryside is only covered by low-res imagery, Google recently released new high-res images of the…

Freemasonry is the world’s largest and oldest fraternity. It’s also sort of hard to define. It’s a fraternal organisation, but it’s also bound up with ideas of morals, charity, and social gatherings.1 For centuries, Masons have taken pride in constructing…

This gleaming expanse of white marble is the Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi. It is particularly gleaming, and spectacularly white, because the $2billion no-expense-spared project entailed shipping in the purest white stone known to man, all the way from…

As we all know, the general theory of relativity states that a black hole is a region of space from which nothing can escape – including light. Astronomers have identified lots of places where black holes may exist, but apparently they…

The Global Vipassana Pagoda, found north of Mumbai in India, is a copy of the Shwedagon Pagoda visited by Google Sightseeing a couple of years ago, though somewhat more restrained with regards to the ‘bling’ factor. The reduced attention to…

If heat and dryness are the hallmarks of a good desert, then the Lut Desert in Iran might just be the most deserty of the lot. Covering more than 50,000sq km in the southeast of the country, this region (also…