Andrew Bales

It seems like every new technology tries its best to kill off the vinyl record.

From the nearest port in South Africa, it takes six days on a fishing boat to reach the small island of Tristan da Cunha. Fifteen hundred miles out into the South Atlantic, simple white homes with bright colored roofs sit in rows on green fields. A sign reads “Welcome to the remotest island,” and behind it Queen Mary’s Peak towers nearly 7,000 feet high.

The most remote inhabited island stayed mostly under the radar for two hundred years.

Horses get lonely, just like the rest of us. Left isolated, they become withdrawn and take on bad habits called stable vices.

The idea of the escalator has been around a lot longer than a working model.

Nathan Ames first patented “Revolving Stairs” in 1859, though he didn’t specify materials or have a practical use in mind.

Super Nintendo changed the gaming world, but not always for the better.

The 16-bit gaming boom took over the early nineties. It gave us classics like Super Mario World, but it also emboldened marketers to dream up spin-offs. In these crossovers, the best parts about pop stars, TV shows, and movies were often abandoned. The result was a string of glitchy maps and questionable plot.

The cereal aisle is run by kids. It’s their purchasing power that brings TV shows, movies, and even stranger products together with the barons of breakfast.

Mr. T cereal debuted in 1984 and was essentially T-shaped captain crunch. But it got a little more cool when it teamed up with Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.

When movies inspire cereals, the commercials sound like trailers. The kids become part of the action and eat like the stars.

California’s San Andreas fault is slowly shifting LA away from the mainland. But we don’t have to look to the future to imagine a disjointed coastline. Instead we can look to the past, to the maps of the 17th and 18th centuries that share a strange discrepancy: the inclusion of the Island of California.

If there's a pilgrimage for the industrialized world, it probably ends in the Amazon Rainforest, at the center of a abandoned town called Fordlandia.

Back in the seventies, Sesame Street’s Ernie sang to us about his favorite bath time buddy. But the rubber ducky has seen adventures far beyond the tub.

In 1992, three cargo containers leaving Hong Kong spilled into the Pacific Ocean. This released a shipment of 29,000 ducks, leaving them to bob along the open waters. But they didn’t sit idly by for long.

The pioneer duckies set out on separate paths, aimed at far-flung shores. Ten months and 2,000 miles later, they first made landfall in Alaska. Next, they washed onto the coasts of Australia and South America.

The lesser water boatman is an insect usually found feeding on ponds and lakes across Europe. Only a few millimeters long, they look a bit like a sunflower seed with big black eyes and paddling arms.

They're not known for their good looks, but rather the male's mating call, which brings them the status of the loudest animal alive, relative to body size. The call is nearly 100 decibels, equivalent to standing a stone's throw away from a roaring freight train.