China has sent its first woman into space on a mission to dock with an orbiting station, the latest step in an ambitious programme to go to the moon and on to Mars.

Photo: China's first female astronaut Liu Yang, waves during a sending off ceremony before she departs for the Shenzhou 9 spacecraft rocket launch pad at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Jiuquan, China, Saturday, June 16, 2012. China will send its first woman and two other astronauts into space Saturday to work on a temporary space station for about a week, in a key step toward becoming only the third nation to set up a permanent base in orbit. (Photo by Ng Han Guan/AP Photo)

Memory Suitcases is a thought-provoking series by Israeli artist Yuval Yairi that uses old, worn suitcases as canvases for nostalgic landscapes. Like scenes out of one's memory, the propped up traveling cases feature a range of sepia-toned settings. The series presents the objects as though they are relics of a civilization from yesteryear, each with their own story to tell.
There's something both heartbreaking and sentimental about the images. It appears to tell a number of stories of leaving one lifestyle for another. The suitcases hold within them a picture show of memories from a life-altering journey. Like a number of his other works, Memory Suitcases "mimics the natural process of memory."

How sure are you of your geographical knowledge? Buzzfeed recently put Americans’ geographical knowledge to the test with a survey in which participants had to write in countries’ names on a blank European political map. Unfortunately, they didn’t fare too well, but some of their responses are hilarious (or hilariously mis-informed). But don’t be so quick to judge Americans – when Buzzfeed posted a similar survey testing Brits’ knowledge of the 50 United States, they also came up short. On the one hand, knowing a country’s states is different from knowing independent countries, but on the other, some U.S. states are larger than some European nations, and some U.S. states have larger economies than some European nations.

“Solar Impulse is a European long-range solar powered plane project being undertaken by Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg. The project eventually hopes to succeed in the first circling of the earth with a piloted fixed-wing aircraft using only solar power. The first aircraft, bearing the Swiss aircraft registration code of HB-SIA, is a single-seater, capable of taking off under its own power, and intended to remain airborne up to 36 hours. This aircraft first flew an entire diurnal solar cycle, including nearly 9 hours of night flying, in a 26-hour flight on 7–8 July 2010”. – Wikipedia


Photo: Workers prepare the Solar Impulse airplane HB-SIA for a first runway test on November 19, 2009 in Dubendorf, Switzerland. Solar Impulse chairman Bertrand Piccard, psychatrist and aeronaut, who made the first non-stop round-the-world balloon flight, and CEO and former fighter pilot Andrй Borschberg plan a round-the-world flight, driven only by solar energy, for 2012. (Photo by Johannes Simon/Getty Images)

REUTLINGEN, GERMANY - NOVEMBER 17: Students hang out finished parchment leather at the LGR (Lederinstitut Gerberschule Reutlingen) tannery school on November 17, 2010 in Reutlingen, Germany. Even in early antiquity and up their hair or dried goat and sheep skins were used as material for documents. In the small Asian city Pergamon these skins were processed in large quantities for this purpose, so they formed the main trading arm of the city, of which the name is parchment is derived. In medieval times, reached the parchment is of great importance, it was such as France's production under the supervision of the University of Paris. Even now, important documents, placed on their unlimited shelf life as possible large value (eg diplomas, addresses, memory, writings, documents for primary and keystones) written on parchment...

Ethnic Cham Muslim people pass the time near their boats on banks of Mekong river in Phnom Penh July 29, 2013. About 100 ethnic Cham families, made up of nomads and fishermen without houses or land who arrived at the Cambodian capital in search of better lives, live on their small boats on a peninsula where the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers meet, just opposite the city's centre. The community has been forced to move several times from their locations in Phnom Penh as the land becomes more valuable. They fear that their current home, just behind a new luxurious hotel under construction at the Chroy Changva district is only temporary and that they would have to move again soon. (Photo by Damir Sagolj/Reuters)

Isabel Schmalenbach, an environmental scientist with the Helgoland Biological Institute (Biologische Anstalt Helgoland), part of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, holds a one-year old baby European lobster (Homarus gammarus) raised at the institute on August 3, 2013 on Helgoland Island, Germany. Later in the day Schmalenbach and her colleagues released a total of 415 one-year old lobsters into the North Sea as part of an effort to repopulate the lobster population around Helgoland (also called Heligoland). In the 19th century local fishermen caught up to 80,000 lobsters a year in the surrounding waters, combined with the heavy allied bombing of the island during and after World War II, as well as other environmental factors, decimated the lobster population. (Photo by Sean Gallup)