Although this blog was created to point out the beautiful things that I see or that I hear about, it is hard not to mention the human catastrophe that occurred during Haiti’s earthquake on Tuesday, 12 January 2010. The 7.0 in magnitude earthquake struck a few kilometres from the capital city of Port-au-Prince. The initial tremor was followed by a series of fourteen aftershocks between magnitudes 5.0 and...

USA ■  The auto junkyard of Ayer, Massachusetts, was originally used to retrieve car parts. But with the development of recycling methods, dismantling and storing vehicles was abandoned and replaced by merely the retrieval of metals (steel, aluminum, copper, etc.). Such vehicule ramains deposits will not be put to an end anytime soon: in 2008 car manufacturers have globaly produced more than 70 million...

HONG KONG ■  Although recently constructed, buildings of the commuter town of Tseung Kwan of the New Territories must already be repaired through scaffolding. The Chinese administrative region of Hong Kong, which has 7 million people jammed into an area of less than 1,100 km2, has one of the highest population densities in the world. This trade capital has an excellent public transport network structured...

GHANA ■  The Agbogbloshie Market in Accra is a place where young men and children work by dismantling computers and other e-waste in search of spare parts to sell at the nearby open-air market. Those machines came mostly from countries of the European Union, where legislation prohibits the illegal discharge of that type of waste and are forced to recycle. Many Europeans are therefore donating their old...

Nudibranchs are molluscs recognized by their striking shapes and multicoloured appearance. Their land cousins being the snails, nudibranchs have gills that are not protected by a shell. One can believe that these creatures are very attractive to predators. But nudibranchs are very capable of defending themselves. Besides of having abrasive skin, they are equipped with a defensive mechanism that enables them...