Reproduced from an eighth-century Koran, a solid-gold book worth an estimated six million U.S. dollars was loaned from Russia to Iran in September 2007.
Islamists tried to blow up a statue of Buddha carved into a mountain in Pakistan on September 10. "Whether it is destroyed or not, it does not matter," said one villager. "It is just an engraving made by foreigners."
A Swedish gardener dug up a thousand-year-old hoard of silver coins collected by Norse seafarers from places as far as away as present-day Iraq and Uzbekistan.
Natural formations or 5,000-year-old city ruins? Scientists are still divided over the origin of mysterious stone structures off the coast of Japan's Yonaguni Jima.
Stone structures lying off a tiny Pacific island continue to draw controversy over whether they are natural formations or the ruins of a 5,000-year-old city.
A bear, a beheaded caribou, a cigarette-smoking deity, and other wild wonders stalk our selection of winning pictures from the latest Banff Mountain Photography Competition.
Experts are warning of a "global extinction crisis" of the world's languages and have identified five hotspots where tongues are vanishing most rapidly.
