Google has finally finished work on the cameras it hopes will digitize the world’s art collections. Fittingly called the Art Camera, the extremely high-resolution robots will be lent out to museums for free, and photos taken with them will appear on Google’s online Culture Institute.

For design nerds, the Sheats-Goldstein residence is well-known as one of the most triumphant works of renowned architect John Lautner. For hard-core basketball fans, it’s the home of James Goldstein, the flamboyant courtside fixture at Laker games. And for everybody else, it’s known as Jackie Treehorn’s house.

In the last 50 years, the preservationist movement has become powerful—maybe too powerful in a place like New York City, where a third of the buildings are now protected. But the buildings we think of today as landmarks inevitably replaced older structures, ones we tend to forget were demolished in the path towards…

It only took more than a century, but we now know how tall the Washington Monument really stands thanks to—you guessed it—science. Oh, and we know the exact location, too. Finally.

London's Cross Bones Graveyard dates back to the medieval era, and is the final resting place for some 15,000 paupers, prostitutes, and other "outcasts," including children and infants. Despite a colorfully decorated gate, the run-down lot hasn't been accessible to the public. That's about to change.

Here's one for the history buffs: the Washington Post has some gorgeous, poignant, frozen-in-time photos of a room last occupied in 1918, by a 22-year-old soldier who died in World War I.

Roman ruins. Byzantine villages. Umayyad architecture. The relics of the Hittites, Assyrians, Arabs, Mongols, Mamelukes, and Ottomans. Syria has some of the most remarkable cultural history in the world—and now, National Geographic reports that Syrians are using archaeological first aid to save it.

Saqqara, in Egypt, is the oldest stone complex ever built by humans—and within it sits the oldest pyramid in Egypt. It's a piece of irreplaceable history that's been crumbling for 4,600 years. But according to one local report, it's currently being destroyed by the company hired to "restore" it.

Los Angeles ponders the ethics of slip-and-sliding in a drought. UNESCO is being blamed for killing the cities it protects. Ebola is slowly decimating village by village in Africa. It's this week's look at What's Ruining Our Cities.

Once upon a time, CDs were a shiny new technology with a promise of lasting (nearly) forever. In those halcyon days of the 1990s, museums and symphonies began transferring their archives to CDs—a decision that in retrospect may not have been so wise. The catch is that some CDs are durable and others are not; we just…

It probably seemed like a good idea at the time: Instead of fragile paper or clunky disks, why not save your data to a shiny, secure CD? Fast forward a few decades and those CDs (and the data they hold) are suffering from something called "CD rot" — and researchers aren't quite sure why.

Cleopatra's Needle is New York City's oldest outdoor monument; it's been around for a whopping 3,500 (!) years, and has spent the past 133 of those in Central Park. This spring, it's getting gently blasted with laser beams—all in the name of conservation.

Digital movies are becoming more and more popular, but some people are saying the move could destroy movies as we know them. But it's not issues of film quality that have them worried — it's film preservation.