Dagestan
Dagestan has great ethnic diversity, with several dozen ethnic groups and subgroups, most of which speak either Caucasian, Turkic, or Iranian languages.
Peer Raben
Peer Raben was a composer best known for his work with German film-maker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In addition to Fassbinder, Raben composed music for Barbet Schroeder and Wong Kar-wai.
Ritz
Ritz was a British magazine focusing on gossip, celebrity and fashion. It was launched in 1976 by David Bailey and David Litchfield, who acted as co-editors.
Arcosanti
Arcosanti is an experimental town that began construction in 1970 in central Arizona. Architect Paolo Soleri, using a concept he calls arcology (a portmanteau of architecture and ecology), started the town to demonstrate how urban conditions could be improved while minimizing the destructive impact on the earth.
Kopi Luwak
Kopi Luwak is coffee made from coffee berries which have been eaten by and passed through the digestive tract of the Asian Palm Civet.
Immanuel Velikovsky
Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision, a book which asserts, among many other things, that the planet Venus did not exist until recently. Some 3500 years ago in the guise of a gigantic comet, it grazed Earth a couple of times, after having been ejected from the planet Jupiter some indefinite time earlier, before settling into its current orbit. Velikovsky (1895-1979), a psychiatrist by training, did not base his claims on astronomical evidence and scientific inference or argument. Instead, he argued on the basis of ancient cosmological myths from places as disparate as India and China, Greece and Rome, Assyria and Sumer.
Roy Chapman Andrews
Roy Chapman Andrews was an American explorer, adventurer and naturalist who became the director of the American Museum of Natural History. He is primarily known for leading a series of expeditions through the fragmented China of the early 20th century into the Gobi Desert and Mongolia. The expeditions made important discoveries and brought the first-known fossil dinosaur eggs to the museum.
Concrete ships
Concrete ships are built of steel and concrete instead of more traditional materials, such as steel or wood. The oldest known concrete watercraft was a dinghy built by Joseph-Louis Lambot in Southern France in 1848. Lambot's boat was featured in the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1855.
Bryce Canyon National Park
Despite its name, this is not actually a canyon, but rather a giant natural amphitheater created by erosion along the eastern side of the Paunsaugunt Plateau.
The Beale ciphers
The Beale ciphers are a set of three ciphertexts, one of which allegedly states the location of a buried treasure of gold, silver and jewels estimated to be worth over USD$40 million as of 2010.