Mark B. Gilgam @MarkGilgam

Sounds different but Good

@GadSaad

The Spitzhäuschen in Germany was built in 1416 and is over 600 years old. This beautiful old house still stands today.

On the Tibetan plateau, three to five thousand metres up, there is a line above which the air thins, the cold turns murderous, and every crop a human has ever sown simply gives up and dies. A lowlander dropped there without warning would be gasping within the hour. Below the line, a little barley clings on. Above it, across the entire roof of the world, one animal reigns. The yak. A miracle of engineering that no laboratory could design and no factory could ever build. Start with the body. It carries a heart around three times the size, for its frame, of a lowland cow's, with lungs to match. Its blood runs thick with red cells and grips oxygen far more tightly than yours, hauling enough of it out of air that holds barely half what you are breathing right now. Its lungs refuse to clamp shut in the thin atmosphere the way an ordinary animal's would, sparing it the fluid and the heart failure that kill lowland cattle dragged up too high. It is sealed inside a shaggy double coat over a dense woolly down, shrugging off forty below as a minor inconvenience, because it scarcely sweats and scarcely needs to. Millions of years of evolution went into an animal that treats the most lethal inhabited ground on earth as home turf. Now watch what it does with all that. It walks out onto a landscape that offers a human being precisely nothing, crops the sparse, frozen, good-for-nothing grass that grows where value goes to die, and converts it, inside the four-chambered furnace of its gut, into the entire material foundation of a civilisation. Milk so rich it is churned into butter that lights the lamps of every monastery and is folded into the tea that keeps a body alive against the wind. Meat, dried iron-hard in the cold to carry a household through a six-month winter. A fine, warm down spun into the clothes on their backs and the black tents over their heads, and a coarse outer hair twisted into the ropes that lash the whole thing down. Hide for leather and for boats. Bone for tools. And dung, dried into bricks, the one and only fuel for heat and cooking in a world with no wood left to burn. For thousands of miles it was the engine too, the single animal strong and sure-footed enough to haul a loaded caravan over passes that sit higher than the summit of Mont Blanc. One animal. Food, fuel, clothing, shelter, fire, transport, and trade, drawn out of frozen grass at an altitude that would put you flat on your back in a hospital. Fourteen million of them still hold up the lives of dozens of mountain peoples today. So take the yak off the plateau and be honest about what remains. A corpse-cold silence where no human has any business standing, and a grass nobody can eat rotting back into the permafrost. There is no vegan Tibet, and there never could have been one. The grass up there is poison to your gut, and the magnificent, grunting, oversized-hearted creature that turns it into life is the only reason a single soul has ever drawn breath on the roof of the world. The mountain sets the cruellest terms on earth. The yak meets every last one of them, and then carries an entire people across the top of the planet on its back.

La plus grande tapisserie du Moyen Âge a servi à couvrir des chevaux. La Tapisserie de l'Apocalypse, au château d'Angers. 1375. Louis Ier d'Anjou, frère du roi Charles V, commande une œuvre démesurée. Il veut illustrer l'Apocalypse de saint Jean, ce texte qui annonce la fin du monde. Nous sommes en pleine guerre de Cent Ans, la peste noire vient de tuer un Français sur trois. Le sujet parle à tout le monde. Sept ans de travail. 140 mètres de long. 6 mètres de haut. Des centaines de scènes tissées fil par fil, à Paris. Le roi René la lègue à la cathédrale d'Angers. Puis on l'oublie. Vient la Révolution. La tapisserie n'intéresse plus personne. On la découpe. On en fait des couvertures pour les chevaux. On protège des orangers avec. On bouche des trous d'écurie. Au XIXe siècle, un évêque la retrouve en lambeaux et décide de la sauver. Il en reste 100 mètres sur les 140 d'origine. Aujourd'hui, elle est inscrite à l'UNESCO. On marche le long de ses 100 mètres comme dans une bande dessinée vieille de 650 ans. La plus belle œuvre tissée du Moyen Âge a failli finir en chiffon. Vous la connaissiez, celle-là ?

Brilliant!🤣

The Lost City You’ve Probably Never Heard Of… Hidden deep in the mountains of southern Peru lies Choquequirao—an ancient Inca city many call the “sister” of Machu Picchu, yet far fewer have ever seen it. There are no crowds here, no easy roads—only a long, quiet journey through wild landscapes. And maybe that’s why it feels so different. Almost untouched. Stone terraces cling to steep hillsides. Empty plazas sit in silence. Every corner feels like it’s holding a secret from centuries ago. Built in the late 15th century, this vast city is still mostly unexplored. What’s still hidden beneath the earth? Some places you visit… others make you feel like you’ve discovered them first.

Ancient Engineering You Won't Believe!

Each sphere is moving in a straight line, but the final motion is circular

The Royal Gate of the Palace of Versailles in France was designed by architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart for King Louis XIV as a symbol of royal power and grandeur.

Well, if you're going to do fireworks you may as well go all out! This is The 4-Shaku Firework Shell (Yonshakudama or 四尺玉) Japan's pyrotechnics magic! A year to create and prepare weighs over 925 lbs, about 4 feet in diameter, and launches 800m/2400 ft apx, into the air. Wait til you see the bloom this thing makes! Fabulous!

When HMS Victory entered service, she was the most powerful warship on Earth. When she was launched in 1765, she represented the absolute peak of British naval engineering. Built from around 6,000 oak trees, carrying 104 guns across three gun decks, and crewed by more than 800 men, Victory was less a ship and more a floating fortress. At 227 feet long and weighing over 3,500 tons, she was one of the largest and most heavily armed warships of her age. Her hull was so vast that it took six years to build and decades more to fully equip and maintain. Then came Trafalgar. On 21 October 1805, under the command of Horatio Nelson, HMS Victory led the British fleet directly into the combined French and Spanish line. The battle changed European history. Britain’s victory secured command of the seas for more than a century and confirmed the Royal Navy as the dominant naval force on Earth. More remarkably, HMS Victory still survives today. Over 260 years after her launch, Nelson’s flagship remains in Portsmouth, a reminder of what England once built in oak, iron and ambition. Few nations have ever produced ships with this level of craftsmanship, power and grandeur. Follow @oaksandlions as we explore the heritage, traditions and enduring spirit of England. #England #EnglishHistory #EnglishHeritage #RoyalNavy #HMSVictory

François Monthoux , a Swiss sculptor spent years building a terracotta town hidden deep within the forests near Bière, Switzerland. Using clay collected from a dried riverbed, he built: towers, walls, arches, miniature structures that look like forgotten ruins…

Wieliczka Royal Salt Mine, Poland. NOTE: chandeliers are sculpted from rock salt

This is Norway's largest stave church. Heddal stavkyrkje was built entirely out of wood in the 1200s and it is still in use today.

sorry it blew up, but for explosion fanatics, this is an all-time explosion caught on camera x.com/SawyerMerritt/…

If you put a broken water balloon through a colander, it becomes a work of art.

Voici ce qu'un kagou (oiseau néocalédonien en voie d'extinction) dit à ses semblables de plus en plus rares, lorsqu'il les rencontre...😳 La nature est magnifique. Préservons-la !

The baby dog on his first day working as a sheepdog, getting help and understanding from the sheep

The rooftop of Milan Cathedral is almost a monument of its own. Construction of the Duomo di Milano began in 1386, and its roof reveals the cathedral’s Gothic complexity up close: marble spires, flying buttresses, carved pinnacles, and statues rising above the city. At the highest point stands the Madonnina, the gilded statue of the Virgin Mary placed in 1774 — one of Milan’s most enduring symbols.