Australia is testing glow-in-the-dark roads! 🇦🇺✨
This trial in Victoria uses photoluminescent coating that absorbs sunlight by day and lights up lines at night. It improves rural driving safety and saves energy without needing streetlights. 🛣️🦉
Schlierbach Abbey is a Cistercian monastery located in the state of Upper Austria, famous for its baroque architecture, its glass painting workshop and its traditional ecological cheese factory.
Someone ordered more than 200 people executed and buried in the foundations of this temple. We have no idea who.
That is the strangest fact about Teotihuacan. A city of perhaps 200,000, one of the largest on Earth in its day, with pyramids, avenues, and this serpent-covered temple built around 200 AD on a bed of sacrificed warriors, their hands bound, buried with obsidian points and shell armor at the cardinal points of the structure.
Every comparable Mesoamerican power left us its rulers. Maya kings carved their faces on their monuments and lay in treasure-filled tombs with their names.
Teotihuacan left none. No royal portraits. No king lists. No confirmed royal tomb. Even the city's real name is lost, since Teotihuacan is what the Aztecs called the ruins centuries after everyone had gone.
The most terrifying display of power in ancient America was staged by someone who left no face.
To save this temple, engineers did something almost unbelievable. They picked up a mountain, moved it, and had to realign it with the sun itself.
For over 3,000 years, the rising sun pierced 60 meters into Abu Simbel twice a year to light the gods in the sanctuary, a feat of ancient astronomy Ramesses II's architects calculated by hand.
Then in the 1960s the Aswan Dam threatened to drown it. So between 1964 and 1968, a coalition of nations sawed the temple into more than 1,000 blocks, lifted it 65 meters up the cliff, and rebuilt it inside artificial mountains.
The terrifying question was whether the sun would still find its way in. On the morning of October 22, 1968, weeks after reassembly, the world watched. The light entered, crossed the sanctuary, and lit the gods exactly as before.
Humanity moved an ancient temple and kept its 3,000-year-old appointment with the sun.