Pop-up orchestra performance on a delayed plane! Violinist Juliette Kang, violinist Daniel Han, violaist Che-Hung Chen, and cellist Yumi Kendall of The Philadelphia Orchestra were traveling from Beijing to Macao on tour. 

When their flight was delayed on the tarmac for three hours, they decided to play some uplifting music to pass the time: Antonin Dvorak’s “American” String Quartet No. 12 Finale.

You can read more about the quartet’s 2013 Residency & Fortieth Anniversary Tour of China at PhilOrch.org.

On a technology side note: How many phones and cameras can you count in the audience?

h/t ITN. 

Lifen Yang is owner and chef of Tusheng Shiguan, a small farm to table restaurant in Kunming, a city in Yunnan Province, China. In the wake of so many food-safety scandals in her country, Lifen is working to bring organic farming and healthy cooking practices into her community. Her parents’ farm and her restaurant are a part of a growing organic food movement in Kunming.

Video by The Perennial Plate.

Using his paraglider, photographer George Steinmetz flies above some of the most diverse and extreme deserts in the world… sand dunes, volcanic peaks, brightly colored hot springs, ancient cities, unusual farms, herds of wild animals… pattern upon amazing pattern. Look at them all online or find them in his book, Desert Air, after watching this video from National Geographic.

How fast do you think it takes to build a skyscraper? A Chinese construction company called Broad Sustainable Building (BSB) has built a 30-story building in just 15 days. 

And this time lapse video may be an example of how they might succeed in their next plan: they want to build the world’s tallest building in 90 days. 

When completed, the planned 220-story pre-fabricated building would be 838 meters (2749 feet 4⅛ inches) tall. That’s over 10 meters (or around 32 feet) taller than Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the current tallest building in the world. Time it took for the Burj Khalifa to be built: about 5 years. 

via Kottke.

A Giant Panda Breeding Research Base outside Chengdu, China has pandas. On a slide! All at the same time! Bonus: some tumbling and running!

via Metafilter.