It looks like there’s a massive toxic bug in Yorkshire! Run for the hills!

On closer inspection I’d say that a massive toxic bug has been squashed on Yorkshire. Come back from the hills and help clean this mess up.

A previous bug in Google Earth was swiftly fixed by the development team. Perhaps I should file a bug report?

Thanks: Ben

Near the top of Italy’s heel, there’s a mysterious-looking structure – an absolutely huge circle, 4 kilometres across! You might guess that this is a particle accelerator, but in fact it’s a perfectly circular high-speed test track – The Nardò Ring.

The ring is 12.5 km in circumference (around 7.8 miles) and is banked all the way round to allow the cars to achieve their absolute maximum top speed; which in practice means that a driver often need not turn the wheel at all once they get going. Essentially, cars can drive in a continuous straight line and yet somehow always end up exactly where they started…

The official site and the Wikipedia page are a little lacking, but see our other post about the Super Secret Volkswagen Test Track if you found this interesting.

Thanks to Ben, Luca D, munehiro, wanten, Luca, Rob James, woowoowoo, Craig, Dave, nixx, Alice Rizzoli, Mark, Francesco, Patrick and finally Tom!

Here in sunny Cornwall, England, is an absolutely fanastic-looking environmental complex – The Eden Project.

Built inside an old china clay quarry, the complex includes two sets of giant interconnected transparent domes made of ETFE cushions¹ (each emulating a natural biome), that house plant species from around the world. The larger of the two biodomes emulates a tropical environment, and is 55 metres high, 100 metres wide, 200 metres long, and covers 3.9 acres – which makes it the largest greenhouse in the world!

Not intended as a theme park, the Eden Project instead aims to highlight today’s major environmental issues, and they set a good environmental example too – the project’s energy all comes from local wind turbines, their litter is all recycled, and the massive quantity of water they use (to create the humid conditions of the Tropical Biome), is all collected rain water.

There’s actually a concert stage here (which doesn’t seem to have been built yet in these images), which was the location of the “Africa Calling” part of the worldwide Live 8 concerts of 2005, and the biodomes also feature in the 2002 James Bond movie, Die Another Day.

You can read more about The Eden Project at Wikipedia, visit the offical site, or to see more biodomes, see our older posts on Île Sainte-Hélène, a Geodesic Dome and Biosphere 2.

Thanks to Tom and Anthony Houghton.

Last week I started working in the nearby town of Swindon, where I asked my colleagues about the local sights. The unanimous answer to the best Swindon has to offer was “The Magic Roundabout“.

It may be saying something negative about the town if its most notable feature is a traffic junction, but the Magic Roundabout is truly a wonder of the world. And by “wonder” I don’t mean “wow” I mean “I wonder why they built such a stupidly complex junction”.

You see, the Magic Roundabout is in fact 5 small roundabouts surrounding one large centre roundabout. For the benefit of our non-British visitors I shall do my very best to explain…

In the U.K. we drive on the left hand side of the road, so on approach to a roundabout you give way to traffic coming from the right hand side. You then go clockwise around the roundabout, exiting where you see fit.

The Magic Roundabout complicates matters in that the moment you leave one roundabout you are at the junction of another. So, by aiming right on each roundabout you would actually traverse the central roundabout in an anti-clockwise manner. At least that’s the idea.

The roundabout was officially renamed from “County Islands” in the 90s because no-one used it official name, and roundabout fans Swindonweb even sell “I survived The Magic Roundabout” T-shirts.

Wikipedia

Thanks: Sfac, Russ, Jonathan Rawle, Arno Beckmann, Luke Sleeman, Stephen, The Red Max, Hans, John DeRoo, AndrewAnorak and my workmates.

This is the fantastic Cerne Abbas Giant, a 55 metre (180 foot) high chalk figure carved into a hillside near the village of Cerne Abbas, England. In his right hand the giant holds a 36.5 metre long club, and of course it’s impossible to miss that the Cerne Abbas Giant is, uh.. giant in every way.

Like many chalk figures carved into the English countryside, the Cerne Abbas giant is often thought of as an ancient creation – however, its history can’t actually be traced back further than the late 17th century – making it (a relatively sprightly) 400 years old.

As for the Giant’s purpose, Wikipedia says:

for hundreds of years it was local custom to erect a maypole within the earthwork about which childless couples would dance to promote fertility and even today childless couples are known to visit the site in order to copulate in the hope that they might have a child.

Now that would have been an interesting find!

Thanks to PapaPenguin, Fred Bobardo, and Anthony Houghton.