Ever wonder what it would be like to work on a container ship, traveling across the Earth’s oceans and seeing its cities from a new perspective? Canadian photographer and sailor Jeffrey Tsang provides a window into world with videos like this one:

Spanning a month at sea, the sped-up images capture the barge’s journey from the Red Sea to Hong Kong. Around 80,000 photos shot in 4K depict “breathtaking views of quickly shifting skies, deep red sunsets, and brilliant blue lightening amidst ferocious storms,” per Colossal. For the full effect, enlarge it to full size, sit back and enjoy the ever-shifting weather and scenery.

Tsang has produced a huge collection of excellent videos detailing his life and work, giving viewers insights into the world of cargo shipping one container at a time with bridge tours, anchor demonstrations, safety explanations and reasons to (or not to) pursue a similar maritime career.

“Sailing in the open sea is a truly unique way to grasp how significantly small we are in the beautiful world,” the photographer says. “Chasing the endless horizon, witnessing the ever changing weather, and appreciating the bright stars and galaxies.”

His are not the only high-seas adventures out there for container fans and cargo lovers, however. Below is another documentary video worth a watch for those anyone interested in the inner working of these ocean-going behemoths.

New to cargo ships and how containers revolutionized shipping? Took a look at this explainer video from Vox and take a listen to the podcast series Containers produced by Alexis Madrigal.

A lone Ukrainian park bench has become the unlikely star of a decade-long drama, much more by chance than by design, thanks to a photographer’s unplanned project to document the lives of those who use it.

Yevgeniy Kotenko never meant On the Bench to be a series or body of work. He simply began to take pictures of people on and around a bench outside his parents’ window, capturing everyday scenes — people picnicking, children playing and old men sitting. He also photographed more fraught encounters —  lovers quarreling, drunks passing out and emergency service workers tending to an injured man.

“I wasn’t thinking of making a series or a project,” Kotenko told Colossal. “I didn’t select any particular time frame or set of situations to capture. Not until 2012 did my friends tell me that I should put together an exhibition of these photos.

“I never invested the photos with any particular intention or idea of what I wanted my audience to see,” Kotenko says. “They will see what they want to see. These photographs are more like a documentary.” And they document everything under the sun (and moon), showing what Kiev life is like from day to day and season to season.

In a way, the project recounts works of found or everyday-object art, or series like People of New York, where normal passersby become parts of a grander narrative about city life. Kotenko has since moved out of the neighborhood, but says that his experiences looking at the window and documenting life shaped his perspective growing up, showing him examples of who he might want to become, or not become.

This past Saturday, Trump supporters and counter-protesters from the left clashed violently in liberal Berkeley, all while one intrepid street painter captured the scene live on canvas. As reporters filmed and photographed the chaos, John Paul Marcelo biked his mobile painting station into place.

At Least 15 Arrested Amid Violence At Alt-Right Rally And Counter Protest In #Berkeley https://t.co/AC1uxsV9HT pic.twitter.com/TpPFilrz3l

— SFist (@SFist) April 15, 2017

https://twitter.com/shane_bauer/status/826980737446391808

The alt-right rally organizers and their opponents arrived ready for a brawl, variously equipped with shields, helmets, wooden poles, pepper spray and other weapons. “By mid-afternoon,” reports Blake Montgomery, “the dueling protesters were screaming insults at each other over a flaming pile of trash and using a dumpster as a battering ram.” In the end, dozens were arrested on both sides.

https://twitter.com/shane_bauer/status/853370341246226432

But in the midst of the mayhem (or at least: slightly off to one side) was perhaps the most unexpected sight of all — Bay Area street artist John Paul Marcelo standing his ground and calmly painting the chaotic scene as it unfolded before him.

My favorite Berkeley riot moment: the street artist who strives to capture the conflict between alt-right and black bloc, pepper bombs & all pic.twitter.com/Lqam1Ccasi

— Paige St. John (@paigestjohn) April 15, 2017

Marcelo is a fixtures of the San Francisco community, a fifteen-year resident who can be found painting ordinary street scenes as well as timely and tragic still lifes, like: a building just after a fire, burnt out and abandoned.

His artistic gear collapses on demand, folding neatly for transportation by bike to events unfolding in around the Bay or calmer, more everyday still-life subjects (below: Morning on Broadway and Telegraph in Oakland as seen in Cafe 817).

John Paul Marcelo studied graphic design and advertising, then started painting the urban decay of Chicago streets and decided to “reject modern technological mediums” and “paint exclusively en plein air, and migrate to the majestic California coastline.” And although he reports being “very content with painting existing idyllic scenes like Big Sur and Marin, past expeditions have brought him to places like post Katrina New Orleans and Cabrini Green housing projects.” His influences “include Claude Monet, James Nachtwey, and Ai Wei Wei.” (Images via AP, SfGate & KQED)

In an effort to raise awareness about the growing refugee crisis, Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei has wrapped six giant entry columns to a landmark concert hall in central Berlin with life jackets collected in Greece.

Weiwei has been living on and working from the Greek Island of Lesvos, a destination currently swamped with income refugees, many coming across Mediterranean Sea from Turkey.

He regularly shares images and videos of asylum-seekers from his stay on the island via social media accounts, but the installation takes things a step further, bringing the point home to those living inland on mainland Europe.

These 14,000 jackets are by no means a complete collection, and that is also part of the point: they are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, a sampling of the suffering and strife. Hundreds of refugees have also died trying to reach safety away from conflict (images via mompl and Frank Löschner / Konzerthaus Berlin).

Scientists and alien life seekers alike are all looking to solve the mystery of a distant star, activity around which, according to astronomers including Jason Wright of Penn State University, suggests a “swarm of megastructures” (images via SETI).

While no one has sighted little green men, the phenomenon is perplexing. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilisation to build,” says Wright. The puzzle centers around a series of dimming events around a star to which no conventional scientific explanation (such as dust clouds or passing planets) seems to apply. The star is in the wrong stage of maturity to be flickering as it appears to be without some external factor yet to be discovered.

Wright is not alone, and we may not be either. The anomaly was first spotted by citizen volunteers (Planet Hunters) drafted to look for planets around stars through the Kepler Space Telescope, then subsequently confirmed by observing scientists. “We are looking at [KIC 8462852,  near the Milky Way] with the Allen Telescope Array,” said Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California. “We’d never seen anything like this star,” says Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale. “It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”

One of the most fascinating things about this find is that this is all so difficult to visualize. We have no high-resolution imagery that would making the determination of ‘natural’ versus ‘artificial’ easy to make or the problem simpler to understand. Instead, we are left with theories and interpretations of data, which so far imply a non-natural space project that could be anything from an orbital solar array to a space colony under construction or even an outright attempt to reflect light in patterns in order to contact other civilizations. And while there are other possibilities, none of the current nature-centric suggestions hold up to scrutiny as yet. Given the history of such finds, one should expect to be disappointed, but for now the mystery remains a source of excitement for scientists and civilians alike.