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San Francisco’s first tech boom wasn’t about silicon, but steel. Steel cable that triggered a revolution in urban transportation. Scotsman Andrew S. Hallidie, an experienced maker of wire rope (steel cable), employed his expertise to invent the cable car on Clay Street in San Francisco, with the first run on August 2, 1873. Hallidie said he wanted to surmount hills in the City too steep for horse-drawn streetcars.

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In a decision steeped in controversy, Japan started releasing radioactive water from its Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean on Thursday.
In South Korea, protests and panic sales of sea salt have continued for months, while Hong Kong and Macau have issued their own bans on Japanese seafood from ten regions. China and read more

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The Self-Driving Cars Wearing a Cone of Shame
There’s a brilliant campaign to stop San Francisco’s autonomous vehicles in their tracks. Self-driving cars have met their match in the form of the humble traffic cone: a viral video of disabling autonomous Cruise and Waymo vehicles by placing bright orange traffic cones on their hoods.

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Canadian wildfire smoke reaches Europe as Canada reports its worst fire season on record
(CNN) Canada has officially marked its worst wildfire season on record, with smoke from the blazes crossing the Atlantic Ocean and reaching western Europe, with at least 19,027,114 acres already charred across the country. Wildfire activity in Canada typically peaks from June to August, leaving read more

Phantom of the Opera fans can now spend the night inside the opulent Parisian opera house that inspired the beloved musical and novel.
Airbnb and the Opéra National de Paris have teamed up to transform one of the Palais Garnier’s chambers, the Box of Honor, into a lavish bedroom. While the box is typically reserved for visiting dignitaries, two lucky read more

The Year of the Rabbit: An illustrated guide to Lunar New Year
Grab your favorite red shirt; it’s time to celebrate the Lunar New Year, also known as Spring Festival. Saying goodbye to the Tiger, we enter the Year of the Rabbit on January 22, 2023. Millions of families worldwide are preparing celebrations for one of the year’s biggest festivals. If you’re a Lunar New Year newbie, read more

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You probably wouldn’t win a staring contest with it, though you’d be hard pressed to look away. Taller than a mailbox, with an eight-foot wingspan, the shoebill is quite a kick to observe! This hefty bird with its lesson-in-gray plumage is endemic to swamps and wetlands of Central and East Africa. Solitary in nature, even when paired with another, the birds like their space and will feed at opposite ends of their read more

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A photographer snapped snow-capped Stirling Castle shrouded in mist as he compared it to something out of Harry Potter. Scotland has been in the grip of an icy cold snap all week, with temperatures plunging to -17C in Braemar in the Highlands. Twenty years ago, Harry Potter author JK Rowling actually transformed Stirling Castle into her famous school of witchcraft and wizardry, Hogwarts.

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Qatar welcomes M-E’s first pandas ahead of World Cup
Qatar is the 20th country in the world that has the giant pandas. The public will have the opportunity to visit the giant panda park at the time of the launch of the World Cup 2022. (Ging Ging) Panda meaning in Chinese language Shining Crystal, is the male panda. It was born on Sep. 19, 2018, it given the read more

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Floridians are facing devastating scenes after Hurricane Ian, one of the strongest storms ever to hit the U.S., swept across the state.
The storm, which made landfall in southwest Florida as a powerful Category 4 hurricane Wednesday, flooded numerous buildings and streets, ripped off roofs, left people trapped in their homes and knocked out power to millions of read more

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Every year, a wonderful event celebrating the beauty of nature and humanity’s connection with it takes place over a weekend in Scotland.
The European “Land Art” Festival and Stone Stacking Championships were held for the fifth time in Dunbar on the shores of Scotland. Organized originally as the “John Muir Stone Stacking Challenge,” taking the name read more

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Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (14 September 1769 – 6 May 1859) was a German polymath, geographer, naturalist, explorer, and proponent of Romantic philosophy and science. He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). Humboldt’s quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography. read more

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In the 1930s, a group of archaeologists and explorers looking for the remains of the Mayan civilization went deep into the rainforest, where they did not find the remains of the Mayan civilization, but unexpectedly discovered many tunnels. Most of these underground tunnels are distributed in Brazil and Argentina. At the same time, there seems to be no unified construction standard for these tunnels. read more