ADVENTURE OF DISCOVERYS

Michael Wardian trail running in Marin, California Photograph by Tim Kemple, The North Face By Kate Siber Next: "Barefoot" Running Tips >> Runner Michael Wardian is a master of both road and trail running, with more than 150 marathons, 60 ultramarathons, and 20 triathlons under his belt. He has been the leading member of the U.S. 100K world championship team and has won races from the 50K North Face Endurance Challenge to marathons in San Francisco, Miami, Delaware, and Washington, D.C. He also holds the Guinness World Record for the fastest marathon run in a superhero costume, which he clinched as Superman in the 2011 Lower Potomac Marathon. 1. TRAIN FOR TRAILS Trail running takes a different skill set than jogging on roads, but it’s not hard to learn. “A lot of people say the only way to get good at running on trails is to run on trails, but a lot of us don’t l...

Hike the Zion Narrows, Utah Hiker take in the view along the Virgin River in the Zion Narrows. Photograph by James W. Kay, Aurora Photos By Kate Siber If any place has the power to inspire awe, it’s the Zion Narrows, southern Utah’s premier hike in Zion National Park. For 16 miles (26 kilometers), the canyon winds voluptuously through the crimson sandstone, in some spots stretching 2,000 feet (610 meters) high and narrowing to 20 feet (6 meters). Lush hanging gardens spring from the walls, stately ponderosa pines grow in nooks, and the water can turn a shade of turquoise that perfectly contrasts with the cliffs’ deep terra-cotta hues. The hike isn’t necessarily a cakewalk, however: For more than half the time, hikers walk in the Virgin River, which can be waist-high, and negotiate cobbles as large and slippery as bowling balls. Still, the appeal of the area is certainly no secret, and the Zion Narrows attract plenty of keen hikers. Though it’s possible to hike...

Location: North Carolina and Tennessee Established: June 15, 1934 Size: 521,896 acres The fact invariably stated about Great Smoky is this: It is the nation's busiest park, drawing more than nine million visitors a year, twice the number of any other national park. Most of the millions see the park from a mountain-skimming scenic highway that, on a typical weekend day during the summer, draws 60,000 people, bumper-to-bumper. Luckily, there is plenty of park, thinly laced by 384 miles of mountain roads. You can pull off the road, park the car, and stroll one of Great Smoky's many Quiet Walkways, quarter-mile paths into what the signs call a “little bit of the world as it once was.” Eight hundred miles of hiking trails, from a half-mile to 70 miles long, also give you that world. Relatively few visitors walk the trails; most prefer to stay in their cars. The park, which covers 800 square miles of mountainous terrain, preserves the world's best examples of d...

Neanderthals: Facts About Our Extinct Human Relatives Jessie Szalay, LiveScience Contributor   |   March 19, 2013 05:31pm ET Modern North Africans carry genetic traces from Neanderthals, suggesting their ancestors, too, interbred with humanity's closest known extinct relatives, report scientists online Oct. 17, 2012, in the journal PLoS One. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech View full size image Neanderthals (or Neandertals) are our closest extinct human relatives. There is some debate as to whether they were a distinct species of the Homo genus ( Homo neanderthalensis ) or a subspecies of Homo sapiens . Our well-known, but often misunderstood, fossil kin lived in Eurasia 200,000 to 30,000 years ago, in the Pleistocene Epoch. Neanderthals’ appearance was similar to ours, though they were shorter and stockier with angled cheekbones, prominent brow ridges, and wide noses. Though sometimes thought of as d...

by Charles Q. Choi, Live Science Contributor   |   May 20, 2015 02:08pm ET Sammy Lokorodi, a resident of Kenya's northwestern desert who works as a fossil and artifact hunter, led the way to a trove of 3.3 million-year-old tools. Credit: West Turkana Archaeological Project View full size image The oldest handmade stone tools discovered yet predate any known humans and may have been wielded by an as-yet-unknown species, researchers say. The 3.3-million-year-old stone artifacts are the first direct evidence that early human ancestors may have possessed the mental abilities needed to figure out how to make razor-sharp stone tools. The discovery also rewrites the book on the kind of environmental...

The most influential people in the world, from around the world The annual TIME 100 list of the world’s most influential people is out—and looking very international. Fifty-one selectees were born outside the U.S., ranging from national leaders like Tunisia’s Beji Caid Essebsi to financiers like Brazilian multi-billionaire Jorge Paulo Lemann to artists like the novelist Haruki Murakami—a favorite of mine, as I’ve been trying to get him on the list since around when the TIME 100 started in 2005. It’s a large and diverse list, hailing from five continents. But there are a few lessons we can draw from who made the TIME 100–and who didn’t: 1. Asia has a crop of strong leaders: China and India may be two of the most dynamic countries in the world, but for years their leaders were anything but. From 2002 to 2012 China was run by the colorless and cautious President Hu Jintao, though most decisions were made not by the president alone but through consensus among the top t...

New Country in Europe April 16, 2015 Liberland The flag of Liberland. Welcome to "Liberland" A Czech man is claiming to be the president of a new country he founded in Europe. Vit Jedlicka, a member of the conservative Party of Free Citizens in the Czech Republic, is the self-appointed president of Liberland, which he says sits on unclaimed terra nullius territory wedged between Serbia and Croatia. The 3 sq. mi. “country,” where taxes are optional and a military is nonexistent, does not “interfere with the territory” of the two states, according to Liberland’s website . Sign up for THE BRIEF and more view example “The objective of the founders of the new state is to build a country where honest people can prosper without being oppressed by governments making their lives unpleasant through the burden of unnecessary r...

List of countries and islands by first human settlement Map of human migration , based on studies of mitochondrial (matrilinear) DNA. Though fossils of hominids have been found dating back millions of years, the earliest known Homo sapiens remains are considered to be a group of bones found at the Omo Kibish Formation , near the Ethiopian Kibish Mountains. Though believed to be 130,000 years old at their discovery in 1967, recent studies have dated them as far back as 195,000 years old. [1] From this area, humans spread out to cover all continents except Antarctica by 14,000 BP . According to a recent theory, humans may have crossed over into the Arabian Peninsula as early as 125,000 years ago. [2] From the Middle East , migration continued into India around 70,000 years ago, and Southeast Asia shortly after. Settlers could have crossed over to Australia and New Guinea – that were united as one continent at the time due to lower sea levels – as early ...