Bravo
The blue mutation of the Yellow-naped Amazon is a most incredible bird. Found naturally in the wild (Honduras) about 15 years ago, only a few birds were ever imported into the United States, but breeding has been fairly successful and young birds are available from time to time.
An Apache revolver is a handgun which incorporates multiple other weapons, made notorious by the French underworld figures of the early 1900s. Due to the lack of a barrel, the revolver's effective range is very limited, but since all of its component parts can be folded inward towards the cylinder, it was easily concealable inside a pocket.
The Bedaux Canadian subarctic expedition has been described as one of the strangest journeys in the history of modern exploration. The brainchild of Charles Bedaux, a French-born naturalized American millionaire, it centred on an implausible scheme to drive five Citroen half-tracks and fifteen tonnes of supplies--including bottles of champagne and candied fruits--through the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, following a trail that had not been attempted since Alexander Mackenzie in 1793. Bedaux was to be accompanied by an eclectic entourage that included: his wife, Fern; an Italian countess thought to be his mistress; an Academy-award winning Hollywood cameraman; a Swiss skiing instructor; a host of wranglers and cowboys; a dental student; an unemployed bush pilot; guides; geologists; and a British Columbia provincial surveyor.
Designed by Danish architects Claus Bonderup and Thorsten Thorup in 1967, the Semi pendant has become a design classic. Known for its curved, enamelled metal design based on a quarter circle, the Semi hangs beautifully without dominating a space.
The baobab tree is known as the tree of life, with good reason. It can provide shelter, clothing, food, and water for the animal and human inhabitants of the African savannah regions. The cork-like bark and huge stem are fire resistant and are used for making cloth and rope. The leaves are used as condiments and medicines. The fruit, called "monkey bread", is edible, and full of vitamin C.
Kate Bush is an English singer-songwriter, musician and record producer. Her eclectic musical style and idiosyncratic vocal style have made her one of the United Kingdom's most successful solo female performers of the past 30 years.
For nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, the Italian Renaissance was nothing less than the beginning of the modern world - a world in which flourishing individualism and the competition for fame radically transformed science, the arts, and politics. In this landmark work he depicts the Italian city-states of Florence, Venice and Rome as providing the seeds of a new form of society, and traces the rise of the creative individual, from Dante to Michelangelo. A fascinating description of an era of cultural transition, this nineteenth-century masterpiece was to become the most influential interpretation of the Italian Renaissance, and anticipated ideas such as Nietzsche's concept of the 'Ubermensch' in its portrayal of an age of genius.
Bataan Death March was the forcible transfer, by the Imperial Japanese Army, of 75,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war after the three-month Battle of Bataan in the Philippines during World War II, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of prisoners. The 97 km march was characterized by wide-ranging physical abuse and murder, and resulted in very high fatalities inflicted upon prisoners and civilians alike by the Japanese Army.
The Bijagós islands are some of the least-visited in West Africa. The Bijagós archipelago, comprising 18 major islands and dozens of smaller ones, covers 2,500 sq km of ocean. It belongs to Guinea-Bissau, a tiny former Portuguese colony wedged between Senegal and Guinea. Life on the islands, which have Unesco Biosphere Reserve status, seems to tick along much as it has done for hundreds of years. While the beaches are pristine and white, there's rarely anyone on them except the odd fisherman.
Brine pools are large areas of brine on the ocean basin. These pools are bodies of water that have a salinity three to five times greater than the surrounding ocean. Brine pools are sometimes called seafloor "lakes" because the dense brine does not easily mix with overlying seawater. The high salinity raises the density of the brine, which creates a distinct surface and shoreline for the pool. When submarines dive into brine pools, they float on the brine surface due to its high density. The motion of a submarine can create waves across the brine-seawater interface that wash over the surrounding "shoreline."