The British Library has announced that the Klencke Atlas will have its first-ever public showing this summer as part of a map exhibition.
It is almost absurdly huge – 1.75 metres (5ft) tall and 1.9 metres (6ft) wide – and was given to [Charles II] by Dutch merchants and placed in his cabinet of curiosities.

Felix Baumgartner to jump from the edge of space
This man—looking as badass as Ed Harris in The Right Stuff—is Felix Baumgartner. He actually has The Right Stuff: The cojones to reach the edge of space in a weather balloon. Up to 120,000 feet—and then jump. Video and pic)
 

68 wingsuit skydiving in formation over Lake Elsinore, California
Almost 70 skydivers took part in the ‘Largest Wingsuit Formation Dive’ in US history, after spending months perfecting the stunt.  The 68 skydivers had to qualify in order to be part of the jump over Lake Elsinore, California.
 

Stacks of money at the Federal Reserve in San Francisco
Wall Street firms aren’t the only banks that had a banner year. The Federal Reserve made record profits in 2009, as its unconventional efforts to prop up the economy created a windfall for the government.
 

1.4 million turn out to take post-graduate exams
China’s three-day national post-graduate examination started Saturday, attracting 1.4 million registered applicants in total, a record high number since 2001 and a 13 percent increase over 2009.
 

Gary Duschl has made the world’s longest chewing gum wrapper chain out of 1,370,166 gum wrappers
What do a 990lb colossal squid, the first map of the human genome, and sprinter Usain Bolt have in common? They have all been voted in as the top 10 Guinness World Records of the decade. (Pics)
 

World record set for paper plane
It’s a world flight record even though it only lasted 26.1 seconds. Not your usual record, because it’s origami, and it was achieved by the president of the Japan Origami Plane Association. Takuo Toda just missed matching his personal best of 27.9 seconds, but that one was with a plane [...]

SkyPark
The Italian SkySpark plane is totally electric, eerily quiet and has just broken the world record for emission free flight speed, humming through the air at 250 km/h using some Lithium Polymer batteries and a 75–kW engine. The team’s goal is to build a plane which will fly for over 500 kms at an average speed of 300 [...]

Bloodhound SSC
British engineers have started building what they hope will be the world’s fastest car – capable of reaching 1,000mph.  The Bloodhound SSC (Supersonic car) will be powered by a jet engine from Eurofighter Typhoon being positioned above a hybrid rocket. This combination should produce 135,000 horsepower — equivalent to the power of 180 Formula [...]

  
Teeny Ted from Turnip Town by Malcolm Douglas Chaplin is, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the world’s smallest book. Each page measures about 11 by 15 microns:
The Robert Chaplin/SFU Nanobook project was produced using a focused-gallium-ion beam with the assistance of Dr. Li Yang, and Dr. Karen L. Kavanagh of Simon Fraser [...]

Oasis of the Seas
The world’s largest cruise liner, the Oasis of the Seas, has set sail for Miami from the Finnish shipyard where it was built. (Pics)

The world’s smallest working model train set has been unveiled – measuring just 1/8th of an inch by 1/4 of an inch.
At 1-35200 scale to the real thing, the five-carriage train travels around an oval route including a ride through a tunnel.
Created by New Jersey model train enthusiast David Smith, the model was built using [...]

A South African information technology company on Wednesday proved it was faster for them to transmit data with a carrier pigeon than to send it using Telkom , the country’s leading internet service provider.
Internet speed and connectivity in Africa’s largest economy are poor because of a bandwidth shortage. It is also expensive.
Local news agency SAPA [...]

Artist’s rendering, Qatar-Bahrain Friendship Causeway
The Qatar-Bahrain Friendship Causeway, a 40km long marine causeway featuring a 22km bridge and 18km embankments connecting the west coast of Qatar to the east coast of Bahrain, is scheduled to begin construction in 2010.   The $3 billion project was originally scheduled to begin last year in May 2008, however in [...]

The 2,000-megawatt complex similar to this will be built
in Ordos City, Inner Mongolia, China by 2019

First Solar, a leading maker of solar panels, based in Tempe, AZ, has announcedthat it will build an enormous, 2,000 megawatt solar power plant in China, starting next year. Bloomberg reports that it will be the largest solar power plant in the [...]

Ukraine’s Antonov An-225 has emerged from an overhaul in Kiev to claim a record airlift at Frankfurt Hahn Airport.  Antonov Airlines’ An-225 is the sole example of the heavy-lift freighter, the world’s largest operational aircraft.
 

Fame on four wheels

A century old record has been broken after Inspiration, a twin-finned car that looks like a prop from Thunderbirds, achieved an average speed of 139.84mph on two runs over a measured mile, at Edwards Air Force Base, California. That may not sound fast when a car has already broken the sound barrier, [...]

Fun at 1600 meters!

A tightrope walker in China has broken a world record after crossing a wire suspended 1,607 meters above sea level.
As if that isn’t hairraising enough, this video also captures the moment Ahdili Wuxiuer broke a second world record by climbing over his pupil Saddar in the middle of the wire.
(video after jump…)

China to build largest amphibious airplane
The development and production of the Dragon 600, intended to be the world’s largest amphibious aircraft, has received government approval, AVIC General Aircraft Company Ltd. said Wednesday.

Tiny teenager: Despite being just 2ft tall and weighs 10lbs, Khagendra
cannot claim the title of smallest man until he turns 18 in October this year
“At just two-feet-tall, Khagendra Thapa Magar is just four months away from being named the world’s smallest man. Excitedly awaiting his 18th birthday in October of this year, Khagendra and his [...]

Mega yacht ”Eclipse” 
Roman Abramovich’s most-awaited mega yacht “Eclipse,” touted as the world’s biggest yacht, has finally made a preliminary launch at the Blohm & Voss shipyard in Hamburg, Germany where it was built secretly for more than two years. The 170-meter yacht (557.6 feet) will feature 2 heli-pads, 20 water jets, a pool with large Havana [...]

Winter to visit every Starbucks in the world 
A software engineer from California is on a mission to visit every single Starbucks coffee shop on the planet. 
Winter, 37, has spent 12 years drinking coffee in 9,100 chain stores. He estimates he has 3,000 left.

Possibly the world’s largest cave passage, Hang Son Doong was discovered in the heart of the Vietnamese jungle by a British caving team.
A British caving team believe they have discovered the world’s largest cave passage in the heart of the Vietnamese jungle. (Pics)

When he was 16 years old and despite having no formal training, Adrian Mann of New Zealand decided that he was going to build a piano. Not just any piano – but the world’s largest and longest grand piano, built from scratch entirely by hand. Four years later, he completed his masterpiece …

Diving to New Depths

A woman from London has set a new freediving world record after swimming 96m (318ft) below the surface of the ocean and back in a single breath. Sara Campbell, 37, from Wandsworth, spent 3min 36sec submerged off an island in the Bahamas.
The dive in the Vertical Blue contest took her down the [...]