Since 2003, Chinese collector Wang Guohua has been amassing cigarette boxes, some of which he now keeps in a room in Hangzhou, in China’s Zhejiang province. The collection includes 30,000 cigarette boxes from more than 100 production areas spanning more than 10 countries. Click to see more…
Albert Einstein, the genius physicist whose theories changed our ideas of how the universe works, died 55 years ago, on April 18, 1955, of heart failure. He was 76. His funeral and cremation were intensely private affairs, and only one photographer managed to capture the events of that extraordinary day: LIFE magazine’s Ralph Morse. Armed with his camera and a case of scotch — to open doors and loosen tongues — Morse compiled a quietly intense record of an icon’s passing.
But aside from one now-famous image (below), the pictures Morse took that day were never published. At the request of Einstein’s son, who asked that the family’s privacy be respected while they mourned, LIFE decided not to run the full story, and for 55 years Morse’s photographs lay unseen and forgotten.
“After much consideration, I decided to get an atom tattoo. But what atom? Given that I’m an graduate student in organic chemistry at the University of Michigan, carbon seemed like the obvious choice. It also has the advantage of being small enough not to look too crowded. I went for a retro 50’s Jetsons sort of look. Believe it or not, the general shape (though not the coloring) is based on a piece of Microsoft Office clip-art.”
An anonymous reader writes, “The Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune in 1989 was one of the big events that really got me into science and astronomy.