For decades it has been assumed that the first nation to land on Mars will be the US or Russia, but China may have seized the advantage
A powerful new short film highlights the brutal realities facing a species struggling for survival, seen through the eyes of the people who are dedicating their lives to halting the unthinkable.
Vertical farming gets a conceptual boost in a design that reconnects urban residents with nature.
Belgian photographer Maroesjka Lavigne on the ghostly quality of a poignant, serendipitous shot in Namibia’s Etosha National Park.
If global shipping were a country it would be the sixth biggest producer of greenhouse gases. We talk to the pioneers in the race to make boats more environmentally friendly.
To what extent does Libya’s former dictator continue to extend the tentacles of power eight years after his death?
Playwright David Greig describes how he grappled with turning one of the most famous survival stories of all time into a gripping psychological drama.
The master of alternative perspectives talks about bloodsucking, Brexit and the prophetic power of storytelling.
This year's forest fires in the Amazon marked an environmental catastrophe, but a Rolex-award-winning scheme to save its largest fish spells hope for the future.
Under the Soviet Union a disastrous irrigation programme turned the Aral Sea into a toxic desert. Photographer Laurent Weyl visited the fishermen of Tastubek to document their story.
A shift in the balance of world power means that China and Russia are currently more aligned than at any point since the 1950s. Ed Pulford takes a journey along the border between two superpowers.
Chichu means “under the earth” in Japanese; a particularly apt name for this unusual gallery which sits almost entirely underground.
Once again the fate of the Kurds hangs in the balance after the crucial role they played in the US-backed onslaught against ISIS in Syria. This little-known story of a formidable Kurdish female tribal-leader from more than a century ago is a reminder of their long and fraught relationship with the West.
A breathtaking new restaurant combines stylishly sustainable seafood dining with apocalyptic architectural ambition.
At the end of last year Vladimir Putin declared war on Russia’s rappers. Yet hip hop’s obsession with machismo and dominance on the world stage finds inevitable echoes within the political establishment.
Sophy Roberts travels to the Republic of Congo to meet meet Brazzaville’s sapeurs – the men who see style and elegance as an ideology.
The opening of a major new centre for the study of wildfire in London this year is the latest admission of the impact it is having on society and the environment.
An abandoned modernist fairground in Lebanon came to epitomise both the worst excesses of war and hopes of renewal afterwards.
Last December Louis Rudd became the first Briton to cross Antarctica using muscle power alone. Here he describes in precise detail how the 925 mile crossing impacted on each part of his body.
The writer, thinker, and former politician Michael Ignatieff talks about going night-fishing on Tito’s yacht, his friendship with Bruce Chatwin, and the challenges of fighting for democratic freedom in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.
Shining a light onto Jadwiga Grabowska-Hawrylak, a remarkable Polish female architect whose work defined a bold new era.
The 50,000BC Jacket is the latest offering from Vollebak, the radical pioneers of technology-enhanced clothing.
In March 2015, Boko Haram pledged allegiance to ISIS and tried to establish a Caliphate. Photojournalist Benedicte Kurzen describes travelling with the Nigerian army as they retook the land held by insurgents.
The gaucho has been an iconic figure for centuries, emblematic of South America’s untamed landscapes. Yet a shift in farming culture combined with new economic demands means that now extinction threatens.
Egyptian photographer Nader Saadallah documents the eerie beauty of one of the most dangerous occupations in the world.
Advances in marine bioacoustics are revolutionising the way that scientists can understand the dynamics of life underwater.
Paris-based photographer Gael Turine captures a highly visible symbol of inequality in the Peruvian capital.
Matthew Henson was one of the greatest Arctic explorers of his time, yet prejudice forced him to live in obscurity.
The one-time Nirvana and Soundgarden guitarist went to war yet outlived the frontmen from both bands. He discusses a life in music and the military, and the lessons learnt from the original Renaissance Man, Cellini.
A short film following UK climber James Pearson as he journeys to Japan to take on waterfall climbing – or ‘Sawanobori’ – for the first time.
Photographer Bernhard Lang on the contradictions between the aesthetic beauty of mass sea farms and their more controversial aspects.
‘You feel like superman. No matter what insecurities you have it makes you fulfilled for that short space of time.’ Former Olympian Blake Aldridge on forging a career jumping off cliffs.
Explorer Benedict Allen explains why a pencil wrapped in gaffer tape, a postcard of the Queen, and condoms have all proved crucial for his jungle survival kit.
Photographer Viktor Mácha fell in love with the ‘dark mysterious world’ of the steel industry when he was fourteen – a world that is rapidly disappearing. Here he recounts some of the stories behind his extraordinary images.
Edward Burtynsky’s shot captures the ancient method of providing one of the most basic elements of our diet, salt.
Jazz musician Terje Isungset on why a trumpet made from a Greenland glacier will sound different to one made from a polluted frozen lake.
Girls play chess better than boys at primary school, so why do so few make it to the top? A look at how challenges facing female players have changed from the medieval era to the twenty-first century.
Last May, Eli Avivi, the founder of Akhzivland – a boho country within a country in Israel – died, leaving his wife as the sole inhabitant. As a tribute, we celebrate the phenomenon of the micronation with this guide to the world's smallest countries.
From the brutalities of life in the gulag to crossing the Pacific on a raft, Avaunt guides you through the precipitous terrain of survival literature’s great classics.
An attempt to reach out to aliens becomes a retro-hit more than four decades after its launch.
In one of the greatest adventures in horological history, Captain Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard took the 1960 Rolex Deep Sea Special 10,916 metres below the sea.
Far-flung objects of desire: pursuing knowledge to the edges of the world.
The ever-growing bank of genomic data we have is radically transforming our world, and as with all revolutions it will spark both positive and negative consequences.
A data graph that loosely resembles a planetary environment micro-dosing on LSD maps the complex inner workings of a new ‘IPU’ chip.
Perched on the edge of the Tibetan plateau, one of the largest religious institutes in the world lives under the threat of demolitions by the Chinese government.
A collaboration between Inuit of Baffin Island and Canada Goose has elevated recycling into a dynamic tool for community building.
Taking its cue from T.S. Eliot’s quote “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time”, Life. Limitless. is a collaboration between Clarks and Land Rover.
Afrofuturism first emerged as a challenge to why there were so few black science fiction writers, yet the movement has grown in range and strength to ask fundamental questions about the way we structure our world.
A revelatory exhibition at New York’s MoMA displays both the vision and the volatility of Yugoslavia during the Cold War.
Remembering the fierce five-foot Parisian who became the first Western woman to meet the Dalai Lama and whose writing inspired the likes of Kerouac and Ginsberg.
These stunning feats of ‘living engineering’ predate literacy in this remote corner of Northeast India.
Vertiginous thrills and geometrical ingenuity combine in state-of-the art cabins designed for those seeking the call of the wild.
British designer’s Stephen Hawking-influenced structure will use artificial intelligence to generate poetry.
A request for more ‘importance’ is just one of Steve McQueen’s scribbled demands from producers in the script that went on to seal his reputation.
Cultivating jellyfish in labs is difficult, so scientists have searched for years for a way to collect deep sea samples without hurting them. This origami-like robot could be the eureka moment.
Freediving on its own presents extraordinary technical challenges – which are inevitably added to when that diving takes place in sub-zero temperatures. Avaunt heads into the deep with Magali Côte.
Unrefined beauty: photographs taken from a small plane with its door removed reveal Rotterdam’s ore deposits and oil refineries to be an unexpected wellspring for an imposing abstract series.
It has become part of skateboard lore that once upon a time a man called Oliver Percovich travelled to Afghanistan to continue his career as a research scientist but found his hobby could be put to better use.
At the turn of the twentieth century a team of illustrators created their futuristic vision of the birth of the twenty-first century.
A technique combining 8,000 images per picture. Photographer Levon Biss reveals insects as never seen before.
Last year Francois Pachet was poached by Spotify as one of the world’s foremost pioneers in applying AI to music. As he pushes computers closer to the Holy Grail of composing their own works, should musicians fear or celebrate him?
Great escapes and the fearlessness of flying: A love affair with helicopters. Avaunt meets a distinctly British maverick.
Last September the long-distance cyclist broke the record for cycling around the world. Here he gives an inventory of the kit that sustained him through his most challenging expedition.
Experts are proclaiming that wood is the answer to the global housing crisis. Michael Green, arguably the most ambitious and visionary architect working in this medium, explains how it’s possible to recreate the Empire State Building in wood.
A thread that can stop a plane mid-air: Luke Edwards on tech’s nature-inspired future.
If these stones could talk: the Institute for Digital Archaeology deploys the latest technology to recreate monuments ravaged by war and destruction. Here the team members explain their vision.
A highly risky operation by the CIA to get information from an abandoned Russian drift station in the Arctic involved a helium balloon, an aircraft with horns protruding from its nose, and a flying pig.
In the third century, thousands of Desert Fathers abandoned the cities on the Nile to seek out the paneremos – or inner desert. William Atkins contemplates the ancient Christians who founded the first monasteries.
Will Smith is one busy man. Medical Director for the US National Park Service, he is on hand for anything from treating lightning strike victims to dealing with the aftermath of a moose attack.
Stately pleasure domes: the palatial architecture of the underground stations of Tashkent are inspired by everything from Central Asian Emperor Tamburlaine the Great to the Soviet cosmonauts.
A philosopher president who did more than any other individual to translate the anarchic avant-garde spirit of ’68 into political reality.
Photographer Christoffer Rudquist explores the temples and tunnels of Tokyo’s vast network of storm drains. Built between 1996 and 2003, this $3 billion structure deploys ingenious architecture to guard against catastrophic flooding.
Photographer Aleksey Kondratyev on the generations of Kazakh men who brave temperatures that often reach forty degrees below zero in the hope of catching fish beneath the ice.
‘It’s quicker to get back from the moon than from the depths we work at’: Inside one of the world’s most isolated jobs.
Shot over the course of five months in and around Tulum, in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, Flows leads viewers on a journey never before taken.
Richard Waters on risking his life to chase the story of the Hmong people, persecuted since their fight against communism in the Secret War.
Sylvia Cook tells the story of how she rowed across the Pacific with adventurer John Fairfax in 1971: surviving shark attacks, a cyclone, a broken rudder and being washed up on a coral reef.
Avaunt heads to Talkeetna, situated some 115 miles north of Anchorage on the southern edge of the Denali National Park, to discover the essential role of aircraft in everyday Alaskan life.
Photographer Matilda Temperley has been documenting the lives of tribal peoples in the Omo Valley, Ethiopia, since 2007. She reflects on how modernisation here often comes at the expense of the inhabitants.
Avaunt meets one of the greatest living mountaineers, Jake Meyer, to discuss what motivated his return to K2, the infamous mountain that defeated him seven years ago.
Jolyon Webber turns an eye to 1960s France and puts Queneau and le Lionnais’ ‘workshop of potential literature’ – the radical literary movement marrying poetry and mathematics – into action.
From groundbreaking scientific discovery, swashbuckling on the high seas to the man who inspired James Bond, we handpick six books for armchair adventuring.
'Pollution is nothing but the resources that we are not harvesting yet' claims the man behind the concept – one of the few innovators whose ultimate hope is that his invention will become obsolete.
An extract from the Swiss photographer’s diary describes a dawn ascent of the Alps and highlight his lyrical relationship with the landscape, and his existential and humanist interests.
Children play on abandoned planes at Goma Airport during a rare time when no security forces, or the UN, were stationed there, in this series by Magnum photojournalist Michael Christopher Brown.
A short film about how an archipelago high within the Arctic Circle became increasingly linked to developments in climate science, and climate change.
Scientists are explorers too, especially those that rely on remote fieldwork to bring back the data necessary to advance their research.
It’s the longest aircraft in the world, ready to set more records than Concorde yet its presence is bashful, modest, perhaps embarrassed by its own simplicity. Avaunt discovers the future of aeronautics.
In early 1914 Sir Ernest Shackleton’s office posted an advertisement worded: Men wanted for hazardous journey. The overwhelming response was not limited to men, but the reply to Shackleton’s office to these ‘three sporty girls’ was one of regret.
Photographer Klaus Thymann recalls diving the perilous underwater cave systems of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.
Iridescent scales, exotic patterns, fluorescent fins: the jewels of the ocean. Ali bin Thalith’s passion for marine photography, kindled by his wish to capture a shot of the rare crystal octopus, has lasted for over 10 years
Shot here by Irving Penn in 1947, we commemorate the life of the Danish explorer, author, journalist and anthropologist who discovered Inuit culture, resisted the Nazis and won 'The $64,000 Question'.
In 1985 Jacques Cousteau visited Cuba. He stepped off his legendary ship, Calypso, and into the welcoming arms of Fidel Castro. From the Plaza de la Revolución to the bottom of the sea, Paula DiPerna looks back on the months she spent with the unlikely pair.
In practice, picking up gravitational waves is an almost hopeless task; fortunately, physicists love a hopeless task. Avaunt explores the science behind the search.
At the age of 26, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to have flown in space. Avaunt considers her meteoric rise from textile factory worker to hero of the Soviet Union.
Let us consider the companionship and hardiness of three men who, trekking through the pitch-black Antarctic winter, survived temperatures of -60°C,
crevasse falls and frostbite.
No glitz, no glamour; just pain and passion. Street fighting in Bukom, Ghana – a small, poor fishing village renowned for its remarkable ability to produce world champion boxers.
Remembering the last blast of the Jazz Age: an epic round-the-world journey for the German airship, Graf Zeppelin, packed with adventurers, an actress, caviar, booze, jazz and even a cat.
Photographer Christopher Herwig recounts the epic Central Asian road trips he took over 12 years, covering 30,000km, to document the unique and architecturally experimental Soviet bus stops.
Anabasis, from the Greek word ana, meaning to step or march, is an expedition from a coastline up into the interior of a country. Tobias Harvey explores the Maunsell Forts and surrounding coast with various autumn/winter collections.
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