Friday, February 22, 2008

999-meter-long wedding dress on display in Dalian




999-meter-long scarlet wedding dress is displayed in a shopping mall in Dalian, Northeast China's Liaoning Province, February 21, 2008. The hand-knitted dress features 2,008 pieces of jade, 29 golden phoenixes and 880 peonies that took dressmakers three months to finish.

Global Cooling: Amazing pictures of countries joining Britain in the big freeze


A waterfall frozen mid-air in China




A cafe in northern Greece were left decked in a thick coating of ice as temperatures plummeted and heavy snowfalls cut off villages




A row of benches at a lake in Greece glisten after temperatures dropped to minus 15C



Walkers gingerly edge along a bridge over the frozen Valaste waterfall in Estonia

The fish that is a little ray of sunshine



Looking like Casper the Friendly Ghost's distant undersea cousin, he is one of a dozen baby thornback – or roker – ray fish born as part of a captive breeding programme, hatching from eggs known as 'mermaid's purses' at the Blue Reef Aquarium in Southsea, Hampshire.

The baby rays are being looked after in a special nursery tank but, when they are large enough, they will join adult thornbacks and several sharks in a large pool.

Digging for Nazi Treasure










Has the Amber Room, the 18th-century chamber decoration the Nazis stole from the Soviet Union in World War II, finally been found? German treasure hunters say they may have solved the decades-old mystery.

Treasure hunters in Germany claim they have found hidden gold in an underground cavern that they are almost certain contains the Amber Room treasure, believed by some to have been stashed away by the Nazis in a secret mission in the dying days of World War II.

The discovery of an estimated two tonnes of gold was made at the weekend when electromagnetic pulse measurements located the man-made cavern 20 meters underground near the village of Deutschneudorf on Germany's border with the Czech Republic.

The team, which used heavy digging equipment, hasn't been inside the room but analysis of the electromagnetic test has led it to believe that the cavern contains gold.