I saw this link to a Foreign Policy photo essay, and thought that the photos were both too startling and amazing to ignore. Brendan Corr's gorgeous images are all of a Bangladesh beach/port called Chittagong where half of the world's supertankers are disassembled. The reported facts are pretty insane: that over 200,000 Bangladeshis are employed by the work, that most of the workers don't have gloves or shoes and have to work extra-cautiously to avoid the razor-sharp metals and... READ ON

Neatorama had a ginormous post yesterday about the origins of photography. We've pulled some of our favorite facts (that's the world's first photomontage, above), but trust us, the whole article is a great read! In 1760, long before photography was invented, author Charles-François Tiphaigne de la Roche wrote a story about "a race of secret supermen in an imaginary wonderland who could fix a reflected image onto a canvas coated with a sticky substance." The French government bought Louis... READ ON

This week's contest has taught me two things about our readers: (a) You are funny. (b) You are smart. Approximately three milliseconds after I posed the initial question ("what is that thing?"), Drew Hicks wrote in to tell us it was: a picture of the rock Vesta. About 500 kilometers across, it orbits out past Mars. The image is a false color conglomerate made by the Hubble telescope. The small portion of the picture shown actually shows a large crater that covers pretty much its entire southern... READ ON

If you're the sort of book nerd who daydreams about card catalogs and the Dewey Decimal System, then we've stumbled across exactly the sort of internet filth you've been searching for: Library Porn. Billed as "full-frontal objectification of the library itself," (nudge-nudge, wink-wink) The Nonist has collected some truly gorgeous photography of libraries from around the world and they're definitely worth peeking at. I mean, if you're into that sort of thing. ... READ ON