Vaslav Nijinsky was a Russian ballet dancer and choreographer of Polish descent, cited as the greatest male dancer of the 20th century. He grew to be celebrated for his virtuosity and for the depth and intensity of his characterizations. He could perform en pointe, a rare skill among male dancers at the time
The model for all later American juvenile sports fiction, Merriwell excelled at football, baseball, basketball, crew and track at Yale while solving mysteries and righting wrongs. He played with great strength and received traumatic blows without injury.
The sport of gliding through the air using a wingsuit which adds surface area to the human body to enable a significant increase in lift. The modern wingsuit, first developed in the late 1990s, creates a surface area with fabric between the legs and under the arms.
Bayonne Ham is an air dried salted ham that takes its name from the ancient port city of Bayonne in the far South West of France.
In paleontology, a Lazarus taxon is a taxon that disappears from one or more periods of the fossil record, only to appear again later. The term refers to the account in the Gospel of John, in which Jesus is claimed to have raised Lazarus from the dead.
Moai statues are massive megaliths on Easter Island. The stone blocks, carved into head-and-torso figures, average 4 meters tall and 14 tons.
The procedures followed to cure the lard date back to the year 1000, and they have been handed down from generation to generation. The maturation takes place in marble tubs placed in caves or in cellars. To give the lard its unique flavour the tubs are rubbed with garlic and the pork lard is immersed in brine. Sea salt is added together with spices and herbs. The procedure must be repeated on each layer. Once the tub is full, it is covered with a wooden lid. The curing time goes from 6 to 10 months.
The Sumidagawa Fireworks Festival is an annual fireworks festival held on the last Saturday in July, over the Sumidagawa near Asakusa. Unlike fireworks displays in other parts of the world, the Sumidagawa Hanabi Taikai is a competition held between rival pyrotechnic groups. Each group tries to out-do the last, and the result is an incredible variety of fireworks, not just in different colors and patterns, but forming shapes as complicated as Doraemon, Pikachu, or kanji.
The Large Helical Device is a fusion research device in Japan and is the largest superconducting stellarator in the world.
Crepuscular rays are rays of sunlight that appear to radiate from the point in the sky where the sun is located. These rays, which stream through gaps in clouds or between other objects, are columns of sunlit air separated by darker cloud-shadowed regions. Despite seeming to converge at a point, the rays are in fact near-parallel shafts of sunlight. Their apparent convergence is a perspective effect, similar, for example, to the way that parallel railway lines seem to converge at a point in the distance.