The only surviving leech house in the United Kingdom was a home for bloodsucking worms until the 1900s.

The roadway bend where highway painters practice their craft looks like expressionist art.

An abandoned quarry hides an open-air gallery of huge sculptures, some made from the rubble of 9/11.

This small group of sand dunes manages to pack in a strange rainbow of colors.

Hundreds of stone stairs and a winding medieval bridge connect this haunting Spanish island to the mainland.

This ancient village and its adjoining cemetery have a beautiful history of death and remembrance.

A fascinating little museum dedicated to the thousands of chemical substances concealed in our food.

This sprawling concrete suburb of Kraków was designed by the Soviet Union as the model proletarian city.

All that remains of Jacques Cousteau's 1960s underwater "village."

The thousands of shades on display — some toxic, others impossibly rare — are a library of more than just color.

Hans Christian Andersen for the postmodern world.

A series of five defunct panopticon prisons in Cuba.

This beautifully deceptive waterfall is something far different from what it appears to be.

A sculpture of a giant hand reaches for the stars in the middle of the Atacama desert.

This mountaintop lake bubbles and steams in a perpetual boil, thanks to its direct link to the Earth's interior.

Home of the "true" equator.

This "dead marsh" sits among the largest sand dunes in the world, a forest frozen in time.

This uninhabited volcanic island is the most remote in the world.

One man's extraordinary topiary garden in a small South Carolina town.

For 20 years, this whale skeleton has been slowly dripping oil on the floor of the museum where it hangs.

An archival collection of over 2,200 case studies which includes human brain specimens and tumor specimens.

A slingshot from this delightful collection is awarded each year to someone who has "pulled metaphorical slings in favor of the weak and marginalized."

Beautiful stained glass depictions of the history of human flight fill this surprising chapel.

Housed in the university planetarium, the thousand-strong collection of tiny towelettes includes a used one from the hosts of Car Talk.