Nature 306

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This strenuous construction process meant that workers only cleared inches a day; it took two and a half years to bore through the nearly 1,700ft-long tunnel at Donner Summit. Look closely, Hsu said, and "you can still see the drill marks".

"It took four men to hold a big iron bar to manually drill a hole into the granite," said Hsu, director of research for Stanford's Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project (CRWNAP), which seeks to shed more light on the experiences of Chinese railroad workers. "A fifth man would pound it with a sledgehammer. Then they would rotate the bar a quarter turn and pound it again, and so on. This was how they drilled the hole to then pack the black powder, light it and run. There were no hydraulics."

An international tribunal was formed in 1903 to solve the Alaska Boundary Dispute. Made up of six impartial jurists from the US, Canada and England, the group ended up setting Alaska’s eastern boundary 56km east of where the ocean touched the mainland coast.

Ucrainenii renunță la Crăciunul pe rit vechi și îl sărbătoresc „în avans”, pentru a se distanța de ruși - https://bit.ly/3Wn6OsE

The sheep may be the superstars of the island today, but their story is one of survival for both man and beast. In the 19th Century, the island was struggling with poverty when its main business of exporting kelp (the iodine-rich ashes of which could be used to make antiseptic balms, soap, glass and pottery) collapsed due to the influx of cheaper European iodine blocks. This led to rural unemployment, but the Laird, or landowner, of North Ronaldsay was quick to introduce a new economy in the shape of cattle.