Greek philosopher Plato wrote of the legendary city of Atlantis, that sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Now photographer Andreas Franke has created a similar mythical underwater world for a new exhibition - but you can only see it with your scuba gear on. Divers can Only Access the Exhibition by Boat from Key West, Florida. Armed with his camera, Mr Franke dove down to the Vandenberg, a United States missile tracking ship that sunk in 2009 off the coast of Key West, Florida, and used the spectacular images he took as a canvas for a surreal civilization that never existed.
The Seven Wonders of the Natural World may have been named too quickly. Wonders like The Grand Canyon and Victoria Falls are certainly big, and anyone who sees them will surely be impressed—but sheer size isn’t enough to truly leave a person in awe. There are other places in this world, though, that are far stranger. Places that seem almost alien, as if they could only exist on a planet that evolved separately from our own. These are places that scientists have had to struggle just to understand how they ever could have been formed. Places that will truly make you wonder—not just because they’re beautiful, but because they seem to follow scientific laws that don’t exist anywhere else on earth.
Pfizer and Moderna are likely to be the first companies to see their respective vaccines authorized in the United States, possibly before the end of 2020. Though their journeys to a COVID-19 vaccine have been eerily similar, the companies themselves could not be more different. Pfizer is a multinational pharmaceutical giant, while Moderna is a small biotechnology company that has never brought a drug to the market. Yet when the COVID-19 pandemic began, both companies bet big on a brand-new vaccine technology called mRNA. Moderna had been working on the technology for years, while Pfizer partnered with a smaller German biotechnology company BioNTech for its mRNA research.
Is there a cure for disinformation, propaganda, and other offenses against the truth? Twitter’s answer has been to add fact-checks to misleading statements, a move that has led to a showdown with President Donald Trump. While this fight has been framed as an issue of free speech, ancient Greek philosophers, who worried deeply about what “fake news” meant for their own societies, would say it’s much more profound and more urgent than that. As technologically advanced as the fight between Twitter and Trump now seems, this dilemma is not new at all.
