Free Republic

SEA SHELL CITY WAS SET up in 1957 and relocated in 1963 to its current location. The kitschy shop has been selling seashells since. Though none of the shells are native to the area, the shop sells an incredibly wide variety. The crown jewel of the shop is The Man Killing Clam, a bleached shell of a Giant Clam (Tridacna Gigas) that sits proudly along the back wall of the shop. The shell is more than 500 pounds and is ivory in color. There’s a light installed inside the clam to illuminate the maw of the shell. The clam’s image...

In desperate circumstances people are often driven to perform feats of mythical proportions. In the late 1100s the medieval kingdom of Georgia was resisting the onslaught of the Mongol hordes, the most devastating force Europe had ever seen. Queen Tamar ordered the construction of this underground sanctuary in 1185, and the digging began, carving into the side of the Erusheli mountain, located in the south of the country near the town of Aspindza. When completed this underground fortress extended 13 levels and contained 6000 apartments, a throne room and a large church with an external bell tower. It is assumed...

A new discovery has revived an old theory about ocean water gobbling up ships in the Bermuda Triangle—if, that is, the Bermuda Triangle even exists. Researchers from the Arctic University of Norway say they’ve spotted large craters apparently created by methane buildups off Norway’s coast, Atlas Obscura reports. “Multiple giant craters exist on the sea floor in an area in the west-central Barents Sea … and are probably a cause of enormous blowouts of gas,” they tell the Sunday Times. “The crater area is likely to represent one of the largest hotspots for shallow marine methane release in the Arctic.”...

For the past couple of years, a young woman known only as “Bionerd23” has been making strange, dangerous videos in and around one of the most infamous nuclear zones on Earth—the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Nothing is too radioactive or risky for her. She has shown herself getting injected with the radionuclide technetium, eating radioactive apples from a tree in Chernobyl, being chased by a possibly rabid fox, and picking up fragments of the nuclear plant’s reactor fuel with her bare hands. When a freakishly large catfish appears on camera, she calmly explains that it’s probably not a mutant—“They are just...