Dallas’ High Five Interchange

The High Five sees up to 500,000 vehicles pass through it each day, and while traffic flow may be smooth, the interchange is one of the most impossibly complex highway junctions you will ever see. Just try and make sense of the jumbled spaghetti from above!

Dallas’ High Five Interchange

Dallas’ High Five Interchange

The High Five sees up to 500,000 vehicles pass through it each day, and while traffic flow may be smooth, the interchange is one of the most impossibly complex highway junctions you will ever see. Just try and make sense of the jumbled spaghetti from above!
Switching to map view doesn’t clear things up very much; one can easily get lost in the maze of on-ramps, off-ramps, bridges, frontage roads, and U-turn routes.

The reason the interchange is called the “High Five” is that at its densest, it is literally five layers of road stacked on top of each other. It’s hard to capture something like this in Street View (usually because the view is blocked by another level of road), but we do manage to catch glimpses of the top four layers while viewing them from the fifth

In total, the interchange contains 37 different bridges, the highest of which is 120 feet (37 metres) above ground.

The Dallas High Five may be the largest and most spectacular five-level interchange, but there are plenty of such stack interchanges around the world. The rival Texan city of Houston alone has five interchanges with five levels. The most ragged-looking five-level, though, must certainly be the Gravelly Hill Interchange on the M6 in Birmingham, England.¹ Not only are there five levels of roadways, but there are two railways, two canals, and three rivers tangled up within. No wonder then that it’s known as “Spaghetti Junction”…

Dallas’ High Five Interchange

Ever wonder where the Windows XP default wallpaper came from?

One of the most famous wallpaper images is undoubtedly the default Windows XP image showing a blissfully relaxing vista of green rolling hills and a bluer than blue sky. The wallpaper, probably one of the most viewed images of all time, is aptly named ‘Bliss.’ Do a Google image search for just the word ‘bliss,’ and the first result is the Windows wallpaper.

For Dutch Windows users however, the name of the image is Ireland, which has mistakenly led many to believe that that’s where the image was taken.

BLISS

Have you ever stopped to wonder where the image was taken, or who took it? In fact, the image is so crisp you might have assumed it wasn’t real at all.
The man behind the camera  is American photographer Charles O’Rear. Don’t let his name fool you into thinking that the photo was in fact taken in Ireland. Bliss, as it turns out, is in California. In Sonoma County to be exact.

The photo was taken in 1996, years before Windows XP launched, and before the area was converted into a vineyard. In fact, a photo taken 10 years later from exactly the same spot where Bliss was shot, shows a disappointingly, dreary view:

The image has since made its way off of users’ computer and can be spotted in some of the most unexpected places. O’Rear himself has seen the image in the window of a restaurant in a Thai village and in the background of a TV interview with the Venezuelan president.

So how much did O’Rear get for taking what is considered one of the most famous photos of all time? A non-disclosure agreement prevents him from revealing the actual figure, but according to Napa Valley Register, O’Rear stated that it was:

“extraordinary” and second only to that paid to another living, working photographer for the photo of then-President Bill Clinton hugging Monica Lewinsky.

Taken with a medium format camera, the most surprising fact about the image is that O’Rear claims that it wasn’t digitally manipulated.
Either way, the present day reality is a far cry from the idyllic image that Windows abandoned with the advent of Windows Vista.

JW Van Wessel found the exact coordinates of the location, and thanks to Google Street View, you can get a 360 degree view of the area, and see exactly how it looks today:


Behind where O’Rear stood, you can see more vineyards:

 To give it a try yourself, just go to Google Maps and enter the following coordinates: 38.248966, -122.410269.

Remove DVD Scratches With A Banana

Himachal Pradesh  (India)

Meanwhile in Himachal Pradesh, India... world's most deadliest road !

Himanchal Pradesh , India

Every year millions of people die because of accidents on the roads. Most of these accidents are due to drivers who are drunk or careless.

Yungas Road (Highway of death in Bolivia)

Yungas Road , Bolivia

Yungas Road is one of the most dangerous roads of all world. It is placed in Bolivia, between La Paz and Coroico cities. Since this region is called as Yungas, naturally this road is named as Yungas Road.

Yungas Road , Bolivia

Brazilian Grape Tree (also known as Jabuticaba) does not use branches to grow fruits. It grows fruits (and flowers) directly on the trunk.


You might well take a step back if you come across one of these incredible trees while in Brazil. Known by locals as the ‘grape tree’, the reasons are immediately very obvious, given the fruits the tree develops. Strangely, not at the end of smaller branches, which one would expect as the norm, but straight from the trunk of the tree, a really peculiar sight.


This amazing little tree, native to the south-eastern area of the country, is the ‘jabuticaba’, and the large purple fruits could easily be mistaken for plums or grapes. By ancient local tradition, the sun-dried skins of the fruits are used in the production of an astringent medication to treat diarrhea, asthma, tonsillitis and other ailments. Each fruit is around one-and-a-half inches in diameter, containing four seeds surrounded by pulpy, sweet, rose-colored flesh.



This delicious fruit is a common sight on many Brazilian market stalls as they are usually eaten as fresh as possible. Probably on a par with the grape in popularity, at least in comparison to the western diet, these sweet treats begin to ferment in three to four days of being picked, so are also popular for making liqueurs, strong wines, some baked products and jams.

The thick, dark purple skins of the fruits are what make them stand out so dramatically on the trees. The flowers, which are white, grow straight from the trunk and branches, in what is known as a ‘cauliflorous habit’. In its natural state, the tree will only flower once or possibly twice in a year, but continuous irrigation and careful husbandry can ensure that the flowers appear far more often so that the fruit can be harvested all year round in tropical areas like Brazil.


The tree has, over millennia, evolved in its peculiar way to allow animals that are unable to climb the tree access to the succulent fruits by producing them in the way it does, thus ensuring that the seeds get scattered via animal droppings over the widest area of forest possible.

Since this type of tree is quite hardy, it will grow in almost any kind of soil, though it prefers a mildly acidic environment. This is actually not a tree that shoots up quickly, but one that makes slow progress toward maturity.



The real beauty of this amazing plant is that the fruits can be eaten straight from the trunk; and the trees are incredibly productive. The fruits are also now known to host several highly effective medicinal compounds, so the wonderfully refreshing summer fruit drink made from them are medicinal as well as sweet.

It is possible to grow one of these wonderful trees in the UK, if you have a continually heated greenhouse, but you may have to wait for many years before it becomes mature. Still, it would be worthwhile if only to show off to gardening friends the tree that looks for all the world as if some prankster had spent hours in sticking fruits in place. You could also mention that researchers hope to employ compounds from the fruits in the battle against cancer.

A photograph purporting to show a 55ft snake found in a forest in Malaysia has become an internet sensation. It was originally posted in a thread on the website of the People’s Daily, the official Communist Party newspaper in Malaysia.


The thread claimed the snake was one of two enormous boas found by workers clearing forest for a new road outside Guping city, Jiangxi province. They apparently woke up the sleeping snakes during attempts to bulldoze a huge mound of earth. “On the third dig, the operator found there was blood amongst the soil, and with a further dig, a dying snake appeared,” said the post. “At the same time, another gold coloured giant boa appeared with its mouth wide open. The driver was paralysed with fear, while the other workers ran for their lives. “By the time the workers came back, the wounded boa had died, while the other snake had disappeared. The bulldozer operator was so sick that he couldn’t even stand up.”
The post claimed that the digger driver was so traumatised that he suffered a heart attack on his way to hospital and later died.
The dead snake was 55ft (16.7m) long, weighed 300kg and was estimated to be 140 years old, according to the post.

Reticulated pythons are indeed the world’s longest snakes. These pythons vary in size, and can grow up to 23 ft (6.95 m), the largest witnessed was 29 ft (8.7 m). Sometimes, the claims made by animal parks and zoos are exaggerated when it comes to the measurement of these giant snakes, like a monster reticulated python in Indonesia that was first claimed to be nearly 49 foot (14.9 m) and weighing 990 pound (450 Kgs). This was later shown to be not more than 7 m in length and 100 Kgs in weight.

  
Public phones are outdated due to cellular phones so the phone booths were converted to Aquariums in Osaka, Japan.

The students at the Kyoto University of Art and Design in Osaka recently converted a series of phone booths into public aquariums. We previously showcased a similar "phone booth-aquarium" discovered in France. Now it's time to check out the overhaul in Japan. Hit the thumbs for a closer look at Japanese phone booths converted into awesome community aquariums. 

Top deck passengers aboard the Cabrio during his inauguration trip on the Stanserhorn mountain

The Swiss have taken cable cars to new heights with the launch of the world's first open-air doubledecker cable car system, offering spectacular views of the Swiss Alps.

The Cabrio, which soars up the Stanserhorn mountain near the city of Lucerne at a 1.9km (1.2mile) height, can carry 60 passengers at a time, with room for 30 on the open-air top deck.

The top deck of the Cabrio can hold up to 30 passengers

It comes in the same week that London launched the Emirates Air Line cable car which can carry up to 2,500 people an hour from the Greenwich Peninsula, on the south side of the river, to the Royal Docks on the north.

A young girl waves from the top deck of the Cabrio

The Emirates Air Line cable car towering at 90m (300ft) pulls the 'short straw' compared to its Swiss counterpart.

Boris Johnson takes a ride on the new Emirates Air Line

The US had been dropping depth charges near the submarine in an attempt to force it to surface, unaware it was carrying nuclear arms. The Soviet officers, who had lost radio contact with Moscow, concluded that World War 3 had begun, and 2 of the officers agreed to ‘blast the warships out of the water’. Arkhipov refused to agree – unanimous consent of 3 officers was required – and thanks to him, the world was saved from being scarred badly.

His story is finally being told – the BBC is airing a documentary on it.

Clothes Spray that can be removed, washed and worn again

From the outside it all looks real, the signs look real, the products inside look real, even the staff who work there (think) they are real Apple employees, working for Steve Jobs, however the Apple store in Kunming in the south-west of China is in actual fact a fake.


U.S blogger BirdAbroad who visited the store was convinced at first that it was a real store. Then she noticed that the signage said ‘Apple Store’ – and Steve Jobs’, something which would not be seen in a genuine official Apple store.

According to BirdAbroad, upon closer inspection, she noticed other things that weren’t quite right, she wrote on her blog: “The name tags around the necks of the friendly sales people didn’t actually have names on them – just an Apple logo and the anonymous designation ‘Staff’. Also, the stairs were poorly made and the walls hadn’t been painted properly. This was a total Apple store rip-off. A beautiful rip-off – a brilliant one – the best rip-off store we had ever seen. Even the salespeople genuinely thought they worked for Apple.”

BirdAbroad was convinced though that the products on sale looked genuine, even though they weren’t.

An Apple spokeswoman confirmed that BirdAbroad was absolutely correct, the store is a fake.