Author Archives: admin

Day 16 Wed July 5 I went to the Peking Capital airport on the metro – green line 8, blue line 2 to Dongzhimen Station, mauve line 13 Capital Airport Express 25¥. Stops first at the International Terminal 3 and … Continue reading →

Day 11 Fri June 30 Flight. China Eastern Yinchuan T3 – Taiyuan @11:30-13:00 MU9954 CA$171 (the train was a slow train, took 8 hours and was fully booked with standing room only, so my only real choice was to fly). … Continue reading →

Day 4 Thur June 22 I left Beijing from the Beijing South train station for the 30-minute high-speed rail trip to Tianjin. But there were no tickets until 17:30 and I had all day to kill. I could never have … Continue reading →

China June 19-July 28, 2023 China has a population exceeding 1.4 billion. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and borders fourteen countries by land, tied with Russia as having the most of any country in the world. With … Continue reading →

Africa’s diamond geyser How to get rich from commodities Tips from Botswana on how to avoid the resource curse Jun 8th 2023 ECONOMIST  Africa’s soil is studded with buried treasure. Half the world’s diamonds are mined there. The largest producers of cobalt, … Continue reading →

A 1904 painting by Kobayashi Kiyochika depicts a scene from the First Sino-Japanese war with sailors crippled by beriberi disease. Investigations into the source of beriberi ultimately attributed the illness to a diet heavy on white rice, which was deficient … Continue reading →

Petra lost and found In the early 1800s, a Swiss explorer tricked his way into Petra, the ancient oasis whose location had been a closely guarded secret for centuries. Known as Ed Deir—the Monastery—this building was a temple for the … Continue reading →

A raging river and frost-tipped dunes reveal watery history on Mars Both NASA’s Perseverance and China’s Zhurong rovers have recently found signs that Mars may have had more water than expected. NASA’s Perseverance rover on the 198th Martian day, or … Continue reading →

A reconstruction of Ötzi the Iceman, who lived and died in the European Alps some 5,200 years ago. His naturally mummified remains were discovered by German hikers on September 19, 1991. PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT CLARK, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION Ötzi … Continue reading →

Are dust storms getting worse? Here’s why they’re so destructive. We’ve known how to mitigate them for nearly a century, but these storms will likely grow in intensity as farming expands and climate change intensifies. A sandstorm rolls across the … Continue reading →