Smithsonian has just announced the winners of their 12th Annual Photo Contest. The winners were selected from over 26,500 entries by photographers from 93 different countries. Pham Ty was awarded the grand prize for his photo of seamstresses sewing a fishing net in a small Vietnamese village. Six category winners were also selected along…
In 2001 John Bramblitt changed his epilepsy medication. Unfortunately his body had a bad reaction to the new medicine and his epileptic seizures got so severe that the damage caused his vision to go from 20/400 (double the limit for legal blindness) to complete blindness. While John maintained light perception he was no longer…
After the Fukushima nuclear disaster of March 2011, an exclusion zone was established and everyone within a 20 km (12 mile) radius was ordered to evacuate. Tomioka, a community of 16,000 people, was located inside the exclusion zone, a mere 13 km (8 mi) from Fukushima. The entire town was abandoned as people fled…
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…
In 2005 Chris ‘Brolga’ Barns set up a baby kangaroo rescue centre in central Australia’s Alice Springs. The centre was created to raise and nurture orphaned kangaroos whose mothers had been struck and killed by vehicles in Australia. Often Chris would find the orphans at the side of the road still in their mother’s…
Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner are a duo of characters from the Looney Tunes. The characters were created by Warner Bros., animation director Chuck Jones and they made their first appearance on September 17, 1949. To date, 48 cartoons have been made featuring these characters (including the three CGI shorts), the majority…
Even before his unfortunate passing last week, Leonard Nimoy has been receiving tributes by Canadian Trekkies in the form of currency doodles. Years ago someone noticed that with a few strokes of the pen, Sir Wilfrid Laurier—7th Prime Minister of Canada and face of the $5 bill—looked remarkably similar to Spock. Ever since, people…
Earlier this week, Martin Le-May’s photo of a weasel riding a woodpecker went viral. The photo has been seen millions of times around the world since. Whenever an image like this—that is so unusual and hard to believe—spreads, the reaction images and photoshops are not far behind. BuzzFeed put together a great compilation of…
The finalists of the 12th Annual Smithsonian.com Photo Contest have just been announced. Selected from over 26,500 entries, these photos were submitted by photographers from 93 different countries. Smithsonian’s photo editors selected ten finalists per category—Natural World, Travel, People, Americana, Altered Images and Mobile—and it is up to you to determine the Readers’ Choice…
Jeweller and reddit user nais_kong_ipamahagi recently shared a fascinating album of pictures that show the amazing restoration he did for a wedding ring that had gone through a garbage disposal. He uploaded the gallery to Imgur along with comments of the process throughout. Jewellery can hold a lot of sentimental value for some people…