Acoustic Kitty was a 1960s CIA project intended to turn an ordinary cat into a mobile listening device. Technicians equipped the animal with a microphone, transmitter and an antenna concealed in its fur, hoping it could approach conversations between Soviet agents without attracting attention. The electronics worked; directing a cat through real streets did not. The project was abandoned in 1967 as operationally impractical.
The Cashew of Pirangi in northeastern Brazil is a single tree covering approximately 8,500 square metres—the area of around 70 ordinary cashew trees. Its branches grow outward, bend beneath their own weight and form new roots wherever they touch the ground. These rooted branches become additional trunks, which produce further branches and continue the process. What appears to be a small forest is therefore one organism. The original trunk is now difficult to distinguish from the rest.
Colvillea is a genus containing a single species, Colvillea racemosa, a tree native to the seasonally dry regions of western and southern Madagascar. Its feathery leaves can approach a metre in length, but the main event is its hanging clusters of orange-red flowers, which resemble burning pinecones.
Reaching the 1912 Stockholm Olympics required Shizo Kanaguri to travel for 18 days by ship and the Trans-Siberian Railway, followed by five days of rest. Thirty kilometres into the marathon, he stopped at a house for water, lay down on a couch and awoke the following morning. Ashamed, he returned to Japan without formally withdrawing and was considered missing in Sweden for decades. In 1967, aged 76, he returned to complete the race. His final time of 54 years, 8 months, 6 days, 5 hours, 32 minutes and 20.3 seconds remains the slowest in Olympic marathon history.
Introduced in 1946, the Dodge Power Wagon was the first mass-produced four-wheel-drive medium-duty truck offered by a major American manufacturer. Derived from Dodge’s wartime vehicles, it retained their flat fenders, upright cab and general expectation that the bridge ahead might be missing.
Sheikh Hamad bin Hamdan Al Nahyan is an Emirati royal and car collector better known as the Rainbow Sheikh, after ordering seven Mercedes in the colours of the rainbow. His collection contains hundreds of vehicles, including a giant Willys Jeep, a three-times-scale Hummer H1, a ten-wheeled SUV and an enormous Dodge Power Wagon with living quarters inside. Many are fully functional. For Sheikh Hamad, the boundary between an automobile and a building appears to be an unnecessary technicality.
Puya raimondii, the Queen of the Andes, is the world’s largest bromeliad. It spends between 60 and 100 years growing a vast rosette of spiny leaves before producing a flower spike up to six metres long, bearing more than 100,000 flowers and millions of seeds. After this single performance, the plant dies, leaving its enormous stalk standing for years. A lifetime of preparation followed by a rather excessive finale.
Dioscorea elephantipes is a South African yam that grows from an enormous, deeply fissured stem resembling an elephant’s foot or tortoise shell. From this armoured base emerges a slender vine with heart-shaped leaves, which disappears during the hot summer and returns in winter. One wild specimen was estimated to weigh 365 kilograms. It is essentially a delicate climbing plant attached to a small geological event.
The labyrinth at Villa Pisani was designed around 1720 by Girolamo Frigimelica. Nine concentric rings of boxwood and numerous dead ends surround a central tower topped by Minerva, goddess of wisdom—an optimistic choice for anyone still trying to reach her. Its design has remained largely unchanged for three centuries.
Villa Silvio Pellico is an eighteenth-century villa on a hillside outside Turin. In the late 1950s, Russell Page transformed its steep grounds into a formal garden of terraces, staircases, clipped hedges and reflecting pools, arranged to frame views across the Po Valley toward the Alps. Two enormous Lebanon cedars stand at its entrance, reportedly more than four centuries old.