De Viron Castle is a castle in the town of Dilbeek in Flemish Brabant, Belgium. Commissioned by the de Viron family, which settled in Dilbeek in 1775, the castle was built in 1863 by Jean-Pierre Cluysenaar. The Renaissance Revival castle was built on the ruins of a 14th-century fortification that was destroyed in 1862. One of the medieval towers, the Sint-Alenatoren, can still be seen in the park surrounding the current building and is named after Saint Alena, who lived in Dilbeek. The castle has served as the town hall of Dilbeek and housed the offices of the municipality since 1923, and was listed as a Belgian protected monument in 1990. This photograph shows the facade of De Viron Castle with the surrounding park in the foreground.
InSight was an American spacecraft mission launched by NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, consisting of a robotic lander designed to study the deep interior of the planet Mars. Launched in 2018, the mission was active until late 2022, when contact with the lander was lost. InSight's objectives were to place a seismometer on the surface of Mars to measure seismic activity and provide accurate three-dimensional models of the planet's interior, and to measure internal heat transfer using a heat probe to study Mars's early geological evolution. This was intended to provide a new understanding of how the Solar System's terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) as well as the Moon formed and evolved. This 2015 photograph shows three technicians working on the InSight lander with its solar panels deployed during preflight testing in a cleanroom in Denver, Colorado.
The oyster dress is a high fashion gown created by British fashion designer Alexander McQueen for his Spring/Summer 2003 collection Irere. McQueen's design is a one-shouldered dress in bias-cut beige silk chiffon with a boned upper body and a full-length skirt consisting of hundreds of individual circles of organza sewn in dense layers to the base fabric, resembling an oyster shell. The dress originated as a reinterpretation of the "shellfish dress" designed by John Galliano in 1987, which McQueen had long admired and sought to emulate. Contemporary critical responses to McQueen's oyster dress were positive and it is considered an iconic piece of McQueen's work. Only two copies are known to exist, one held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and one by media personality Kim Kardashian. McQueen returned to the oyster dress concept several times over his career, most prominently in his Autumn/Winter 2006 collection The Widows of Culloden. (Full article...)
The Mount Edziza volcanic complex (MEVC) is a group of volcanoes and associated lava flows in northwest British Columbia, Canada. Located on the Tahltan Highland, the MEVC has a broad, steep-sided lava plateau; its highest summit is 2,786 metres (9,140 feet). Its volcanoes formed over the last 7.5 million years during five cycles of magmatic activity which spanned four epochs; the most recent eruptions took place in the last 11,000 years. Current activity occurs in the form of hot springs. The MEVC has warm summers and cold, snowy winters; snow and ice remain on the highest peaks year-round. Indigenous peoples have lived adjacent to the MEVC for thousands of years. Historically, the local Tahltan people used volcanic glass from the MEVC to make tools and weaponry. Animal species such as birds, rodents, bears, sheep, goats, moose and caribou inhabit the area. A large provincial park dominates the MEVC, which can only be accessed by aircraft or by a network of footpaths. (Full article...)
... that Romani Holocaust survivor Philomena Franz wrote about her deportation to Auschwitz, internment in Ravensbrück, escape from a camp near Wittenberge, and concealment by a farmer?
... that a large basin on Neptune's moon Triton may have once been filled with liquid water cryolava, similar to how liquid silicates fill lava lakes on Earth?
... that Inman Jackson played "as though he were born with a basketball in each hand"?
... that one member of the U.S. Army Air Corps was so unimpressed by the Estoppey D-8 that he stated that he would rather use "nails and a wire"?
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