At the end of every quarter the Sifter highlights the top 25 “Pictures of the Day“, culminating in an epic Top 100 at the end of the year (check out the Top 100 POTDs for 2014!). It’s hard to believe we’re already 1/4 of the way through 2015. I can’t wait to see what…
In the desert landscape of northeastern Saudia Arabia you will find Qasr al-Farid aka “The Lonely Castle”. Built in the first century A.D. the Lonely Castle rises four stories; an unfinished tomb carved out of a solitary sandstone outcrop. Because the tomb was never completed, we can see how the façade was chiseled from…
Last summer, reddit user MisterBrick found a collection of photos from WWII of his hometown of Dijon, France. As a photo project, he decided to reshoot the pictures to show what the places look like today, 70 years later. If you’re digging this series, you can find many more “then and now” projects featured…
A CT scan has recently revealed that a Buddha statue is actually a tomb, containing the mummified remains of what scholars believe is the body of Buddhist master Liuquan, a monk who lived in the 1100’s. The statue is currently on display at Drents Museum in Assen, Netherlands (exhibit info here). The exhibit marks…
Photograph by Howard Hollem, Edward Meyer or MacLaugharie In this poignant photograph, people at Times Square in New York City are seen reading a news ticker about D-Day (Normandy landings), the largest seaborne invasion in history. D-Day occurred on 6 June 1944 when Allied forces targeted a 50-mile (80 km) stretch of Normandy, France…
Jade is an ornamental rock applied to two different metamorphic rocks that are made up of different silicate minerals: nephrite and jadeite. Last May, the Metropolitan Museum of Art released a collection of 400,000 high-resolution digital images. Be sure to check out the incredible collection here. The Sifter went through the MET’s amazing archive…
Since 2009, Shaun Usher has curated the incredible blog, Letters of Note; a collection of fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes and memos throughout history. Usher has carefully catalogued nearly 1000 letters and going through the archive is a recurring ritual for the Sifter. Last year, 125 of the most entertaining, inspiring and unusual letters…
The Antonov An-225 Mriya is a cargo aircraft that was designed by the Soviet Union’s Antonov Design Bureau in the 1980s. It is powered by six turbofan engines and is the longest and heaviest airplane ever built, with a maximum takeoff weight of 640 tonnes. It also has the largest wingspan of any aircraft…
Photograph by NASA/Goddard/SDO An instrument on NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captured its 100 millionth image of the sun. The instrument is the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, or AIA, which uses four telescopes working parallel to gather eight images of the sun—cycling through 10 different wavelengths—every 12 seconds. This is a processed image of SDO…
Artist, photographer and baker extraordinaire Christine McConnell (christinehmcconnell.com) has recreated six generations of her ancestors portraits, following her maternal line back nearly two hundred years to hear Great-great-great-grandmother Martha, who was born in 1821. The attention to detail in this photo series is fantastic as McConnell successfully recreates the look, feel and wardrobe of…
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