British Alex Yee looks exhausted after the men's individual triathlon race at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, on Wednesday 31 July 2024 in Paris, France. (Photo by Tom Jenkins/The Guardian)
A Ukrainian serviceman stands on a flag of Russia's mercenary group Wagner near the Russian border in Sumy region, Ukraine on August 13, 2024. (Photo by Viacheslav Ratynskyi/Reuters)
People run for cover following an explosion in Beirut's port area, Lebanon on August 4, 2020. A mega-blast tore through the harbour in the heart of the Lebanese capital with the force of an earthquake, killing more than 100 people and injuring over 4,000. (Photo by Mohamed Azakir/Reuters)
A person looks on as lava and plumes of smoke rise from a crater of Mount Etna, Europe's most active volcano, Italy on July 15, 2024. (Photo by Giuseppe Di Stefano/Etna Walk via Reuters)
Our moon is a pretty big object. It's big enough to be a respectable planet in its own right, if it were orbiting the sun instead of the Earth. (Actually, it is orbiting the sun in a nearly perfectly circular orbit, that the Earth only slightly perturbs... but that's a topic for another day.) The Moon is a quarter the diameter of the Earth. Only Pluto has a satellite that is larger, in proportion to the size of the planet it orbits.
Every morning at 9:05 AM sharp, a strikingly dapper octogenarian saunters by Zoe Spawton's coffee shop on his way to work in the Berlin borough of Neukölln. That man's name is Ali. He is an 83-year-old Turkish tailor who has been living in Germany for the past 44 years. He has 18 kids, and an impeccable sense of style.
Billions of newly hatched locusts are spreading throughout Israel's South. The young locusts identified in the Negev Desert area are the offspring of locust swarms that entered Israel from Egypt in March. (Photo by Eliahu Hershkovitz/Haaretz)