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Coober Pedy is at the center of Australia’s opal mining industry. Now the town, where 60% of its residents live underground, is becoming a leader in sustainable living.
Map-makers insert fake towns or trap-streets to catch out plagiarists. The most notable cartographic curiosity is Agloe, immortalized in John Green’s 2008 novel, Paper Towns. When its protagonist Margo disappears, she leaves oblique clues as to her whereabouts. The trail leads to somewhere and nowhere – Agloe.
His first commission documented the Compton Cowboys, a group of people who created a ranch in a notoriously violent part of Los Angeles. His latest Wrangler commission was in Marfa, Texas, where he was tasked with capturing the Wall of Death group – America’s original extreme motorcycle show.
Frederick Phiri is the junk-art king of central Africa: At just 22, he’s started to earn an international reputation for being able to make intricate and elegant sculptures from scrap metal found in his community.
From eco-friendly boutique hotels to green and cool accommodations, check sustays.com for the best sustainable hotels around the world.
Yuri Kozyrev and Kadir van Lohuizen travelled through 15,000km of the Arctic Circle, investigating the startling effects of climate change on the land and its indigenous communities. If temperatures continue to rise, scientists expect that the North Pole will be ice-free in summer by 2040.
Authorities believe the STS-50 operated illegally for 10 years or so and looted up to $50-million worth of the fish. Interpol had issued a purple notice for the vessel. But the vessel’s owners and captain had been evading authorities for years with a typical bag of tricks
German photographer David Altrath unveils the majestic underground tunnels and their stunning architectural and artistic detail that feature in Stockholm’s underground in his latest series, simply titled Metro.
As the Japanese populace shrinks and ages, and young people leave the suburbs and rural areas for cities, more and more communities are becoming ghost towns. The municipality of Okutama, on the outskirts of Tokyo, has come up with a novel solution: Give away houses to young families for free.
“Friend” by Paek Namnyong was first published in 1988 in North Korea where it became a bestseller and a television series. Thirty years later, Friend has become the first state-sanctioned North Korean novel to be published in English. It is, most surprisingly, a novel about love, marriage, and divorce.
Montenegro is the only country in the world to describe itself as “ecological” in its constitution. But the exploitation of its Adriatic coastline, where developers are given free rein, tells a different story.
We were listening to air escaping up through water. We were so close to the ice that this ancient fizz was surprisingly loud. Though we humans never hear it above the surface, this is the sound the Antarctic makes every summer. And as the planet heats, the sound is getting louder.
Huge nationwide protests against corruption have been making headlines, but these young millennials are taking on power in a different way, by celebrating beauty, fashion and rap. They’ve got millions of followers, but, as Unreported World finds out, fame can have deadly consequences.
We know that Earth will continue to warm. We know that the adverse impacts of climate change are disproportionately larger as we go to higher temperatures and that the risk of irreversible and disastrous changes increases. We know that sea levels will continue to rise and that melting of ice caps will continue.
In 1986, the city of Aksu in China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region began an ambitious tree-planting project that looked to turn swaths of desert into forest. The result was over 13 million acres of green that became the Kekeya greening project.
Step into the private kitchens of Basque country’s sociedades gastronómicas, where everything revolves around food. From the three-star restaurants to the napkins-on-the-floor pintxo joints, these culinary clubs, which have been around for about 150 years, still harbor some of the most interesting kitchens of all.
Africa is changing so fast, it is becoming hard to ignore. In the short term, the continent faces many problems, but in the long term, it could rival China’s economic might. By the end of this century, Africa is set to play a much bigger role in world affairs. The Asian growth miracle is likely to slow Africa’s rapid rise could be next.
In a valley in the Albanian countryside, a group of celibate Iranian dissidents have built a vast and tightly guarded barracks that few outsiders have ever entered. Depending on whom you ask, the Mujahedeen Khalq, or People’s Jihadists, are either Iran’s replacement government-in-waiting or a duplicitous terrorist cult.
Finland is the only country in the European Union where homelessness is falling. Its secret? Giving people homes as soon as they need them – unconditionally.
Ever since Roald Amundsen planted his flag on the South Pole, the issue of Antarctica’s ownership has been a thorny one. But in 1959, a pioneering deal was reached to preserve and help save the environment. This is the story and impact of the Antarctic Treaty and the pressures the continent still faces.
Hagia Sophia has been the ‘apple of discord’ between the Greeks and the Turks, the ‘east’ and the ‘west’ for 567 years, but as history likes to repeat itself we are now witnessing a revival of this old dispute. A museum has been converted to a mosque.
Intrigued by the dedication of an airline crew who only fly to two destinations, photographer Arthur Mebius documents the experience of flying with North Korea’s Air Koryo. The photo series ‘Dear Sky’ offers an insight to Air Koryo’s aircraft and crew, from the perspective of Mebius as a passenger.
In central Finland, there is a small village, Yli-li, nestled against a river called Iijoki that is succumbing to the realities of life, like so many other places. It is a place that captured the interest of Finnish photographer Janne Korkko, who took pictures of the village and the river.
For decades, Nevada’s Area 51 Air Force facility has represented the eye of a conspiratorial hurricane that swirls around “evidence” that aliens exist and are hiding behind its walls. Books, TV shows, and even massive online “raids” have tried to glimpse beyond its stark signs warning against trespassers.
Photographer Michael Wolf spent years documenting the world’s busiest travel system, capturing a claustrophobic nightmare endured by millions traveling across Japan’s capital.
As Shenzhen companies look to Africa for new consumer markets, African entrepreneurs are turning to Shenzhen for manufacturing partners to turn their ideas into reality. How the movers and shakers in Ethiopia’s burgeoning tech startup scene are tapping into the open source manufacturing ecosystem of China’s most entrepreneurial city.
High up in the Andes, La Rinconada is a place where people go to seek whatever fortune they can muster in the gold mines nestled there. Photographer James Whitlow Delano describes it as a place with no running water or sewage system, populated by about 30,000 to 50,000 inhabitants.
Photographer Sushavan Nandy experienced the devastating effects of flooding first hand, as a child living in Jalpaiguri in North Bengal, India. This project shows the disruptive effects of climate change and flooding on individual lives.
Jon Enoch first visited Vietnam 15 years ago and was completely astounded by the motorbike and moped culture in the area. These vehicles are the workhorse of the city as they allow small businesses to operate.
Not only is ‘Je suis excité’ not the appropriate way to convey excitement, but there seems to be no real way to express it at all. “The French don’t appreciate in conversation a kind of positive, sunny exuberance that’s really typical of Americans”
“Thrilling” is the word repeatedly used by Jan Ramqvist to describe how he felt about participating in a nationwide mission to get all Swedish motorists and cyclists to change the habits of a lifetime and begin driving on the right-hand side of the road for the first time.
The 14 most popular last names in Vietnam account for well over 90 percent of the population. The 14 most popular last names in the US? Fewer than 6 percent. In Vietnam, the most popular last name is Nguyen.
National Geographic’s 100 best images of the year-curated from 106 photographers, 121 stories, and more than two million photographs.
Diego Garcia is a part of the British Indian Ocean Territories comprising the greater Chagos Archipelago. Its extreme isolation has made it a hotbed for unsubstantiated accusations of classified and even nefarious activity. The tent I lived in was supposedly part of a CIA “black site” for terrorist detainees.
His ease with people, his natural charisma — these things made him a vital piece of the underground foreigner scene in Taipei, a key component of the drug culture. But it was a dangerous game that Sanjay Ryan Ramgahan played, a game that can turn even the safest of places into the deadliest of traps. Once he fell into it, there was no charming his way out.
SIGNS, a new zine of pictures taken in Japan from Paris-born photographer Lucie Rox, is about the joy of exploring new places. It’s a series that encapsulates the feeling of traveling and “being taken by the novelty of the streets, objects and people living their everyday life in front you.”
As National Geographic showed us, sea levels would rise by 216 feet if all the land ice on the planet were to melt. This would dramatically reshape the continents and drown many of the world’s major cities.
Before the start of the Eocene Epoch about 56 million years ago–Antarctica was still joined to both Australia and South America. And it turns out that a lot of what we recognize about the southern hemisphere can be traced back to that time when Antarctica was green.
This is the story of the apartment in downtown Johannesburg that, between the late 1940s and early 1960s, became a hub of resistance against apartheid.
A short distance from Asmara, the capital of Eritrea, lies a “tank graveyard”—a field littered with thousands of stacked military tanks, rusting trucks, and worn-out cars, remnants of a devastating, three-decade conflict with Ethiopia. A massive military junkyard takes on new meaning.
