Songjiang Shimao Hotel in China - Underground resort in China

Songjiang Shimao Hotel is a resort that includes extreme sports facilities, visitor centre and a five-star luxury hotel with some levels of the hotel situated under water.

The unique resort is being built into an abandoned, water-filled quarry.

 

A naturally-lit internal atrium incorporates the existing rock face, with its waterfalls and green vegetation.

 

The design solution for the resort includes the use of green roofing and exploiting the site’s geothermal heat to generate electricity and heating.

 

The resort includes extreme sports facilities, visitor centre and a five-star luxury hotel with some levels of the hotel situated under water.

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The Second and Last Transit of Venus of the century

The planet Venus made a slow transit across the face of the sun on Tuesday, the last such passing that will be visible from Earth for 105 years.Transits of Venus happen in pairs, eight years apart, with more than a century between cycles. During Tuesday's pass, Venus took the form of a small black dot slowly shifting across the northern hemisphere of the sun.Armchair astronomers watched the six-hour and 40-minute transit on the Internet, with dozens of websites offering live video from around the world.Closeup views from the Prescott Observatory in Arizona, fed into Slooh.com's webcast, showed a small solar flaring in the making just beneath Venus' sphere.Tuesday's transit, completing a 2004-2012 pair, began at 6:09 p.m.

This still from a NASA video shows the positions of Venus on the face of the sun at various stages during the transit of Venus on June 5, 2012, as well as on June 4, 2004.

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