Kilo
Kawah Ijen’s Blue Fire is a natural sulfur fire inside a volcanic crater in East Java, Indonesia. Hot sulfur gases escape through cracks and ignite on contact with the air, producing electric-blue flames visible at night. Some gas condenses into liquid sulfur and continues burning as it flows downhill, creating the illusion of blue lava. By daylight, the blue disappears and the cooled sulfur is bright yellow.
Every twelve years, the floodplains of Prayagraj, India, become a temporary megacity for the Kumbh Mela, a Hindu pilgrimage centred on bathing where the Ganges and Yamuna meet. Tents, roads, hospitals and entire neighbourhoods are connected by floating pontoon bridges, serving millions of pilgrims over several weeks. Once the festival ends, the city is dismantled before the monsoon returns.
Above the abandoned mud-brick village of Kharanaq in central Iran stands a fifteen-metre clay minaret that can be made to sway by pushing against its upper walls. Wooden supports allow the entire tower to visibly tremble without collapsing. Its precise age and the reason for its unusual flexibility remain disputed. Below it, much of the rigid village has crumbled. The tower survives by moving.
Since 2013, several intersections in Kinshasa have been governed by eight-foot aluminium robots. Designed by Congolese engineer Thérèse Izay Kirongozi and built by the women-led cooperative Wotech, they rotate at the waist, raise their arms and flash red or green lights from their palms. Solar panels rise from their heads like enormous hats, while cameras in their eyes record motorists. They were introduced partly because traffic lights were unreliable and human officers could be ignored—or bribed. The robots cannot pursue anyone, but drivers reportedly obey them.
The Kuwait Water Towers are thirty-one enormous concrete mushrooms distributed across Kuwait City in five groups. Commissioned in 1965 as part of a modern water system, each tower stores 3,000 cubic metres of desalinated water. Swedish architect Sune Lindström varied their heights, numbers and geometric stripes so that every cluster became a neighbourhood landmark. A sixth location demanded something more spectacular and produced the better-known Kuwait Towers: three needles decorated with blue-green spheres. Together, the structures hold more than 100 million litres.
King’s lomatia is a sterile shrub hidden in the wilderness of south-west Tasmania. With three sets of chromosomes, it cannot produce viable seed. Instead, it survives by cloning itself: old stems fall over, take root and rise again. Fossilised leaves suggest this cycle has continued for at least 43,600 years.
Kris Kremo is a juggling legend.
Kuthodaw Pagoda is a Buddhist stupa in Burma that contains the world's largest book. It has 730 leaves and 1460 pages. Each page is three and a half feet wide, five feet tall, and five inches thick. It's made of stone.
Kaj Franck was a Finnish designer.
Ronald and Reginald Kray were English gangsters.