Swan Upping
Swan Upping is an annual ceremonial and practical activity in Britain in which mute swans on the River Thames are rounded up, caught, marked, and then released.
James Eads How
James Eads Howwas an American organizer of the hobo community in the early 20th century. He was heir of a wealthy St. Louis family, but chose to live as a hobo and to help the homeless migrant workers. The newspapers often referred to him as the "Millionaire Hobo".
Neptune Grass
In 2006 a huge clonal colony of Neptune Grass was discovered south of the island of Ibiza. At 8 kilometres (5.0 mi) across and possibly up to 100,000 years of age, it may be one of the largest and oldest clonal colonies on Earth.
Pando
Pando (or The Trembling Giant) is a clonal colony of a single male Quaking Aspen (Populus tremuloides) located in the U.S. state of Utah, all determined to be part of a single living organism by identical genetic markers and one massive underground root system, although whether it is a single tree is disputed, as it depends on one's definition of an individual tree. The plant is estimated to weigh collectively 6,000 tonnes (6,615 tons), making it the heaviest known organism. The root system of Pando is claimed by some to be among the oldest known living organisms in existence at 80,000 years of age.
Pacific Blackdragon
Female blackdragons are about 61 cm long and have fang-like teeth and a long chin whisker. The males are small, about 8 cm in length, and brownish in color. They have no teeth, no chin barbel and no stomach. Unable to eat, the male lives only long enough to mate.
Angel Falls
The height of the fall is so great that before getting anywhere near the ground, much of the water is evaporated or carried away as a fine mist by the strong wind.
British Lawnmower Museum
The British Lawnmower Museum is a museum dedicated to the history of the lawnmowers in northern England.
Grigori Perelman
Grigori Perelman is a Russian mathematician of Jewish descent, who has made landmark contributions to Riemannian geometry and geometric topology. In particular, he proved Thurston's geometrization conjecture. This solves in the affirmative the famous Poincaré conjecture, posed in 1904, which was viewed as one of the most important and difficult open problems in mathematics until it was solved.
Jean-Jacques Lequeu
Jean-Jacques Lequeu was a French draughtsman and architect. Lequeu's architectural career never took off. He spent time preparing the Architecture Civile, a book intended for publication, but which was never published. Most of his drawings can be found at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Some of them are pornographic and are kept in the Enfer of the library. They include a cow barn in the shape of an Assyrian bovine; an erotic garden folly called the Hammock of Love, replete with a copulating couple; a priapic fountain in a Gothic tabernacle and two self-portraits in drag.
Maginot Line
The Maginot Line, named after French Minister of Defense André Maginot, was a line of concrete fortifications, tank obstacles, artillery casemates, machine gun posts, and other defenses, which France constructed along its borders with Germany and Italy, in the light of experience from World War I, and in the run-up to World War II.