The horrors of war and the medical techniques used on the wounded in the battlefield are incomprehensible to those of us who have never donned a soldier's uniform. The National Museum of Health and Medicine, also known as the Army Medical Museum, puts these realities into context.

Founded during the Civil War as a center for medical study of gunshot wounds, amputations and other physical maladies, the museum was tucked away on the grounds of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., from 1971 until 2011. When the Walter Reed Center outgrew its facilities, a new building was built for the National Museum of Health and Medicine next to the Silver Spring, Maryland, annex of Fort Detrick. Its official opening was May 21, 2012.

Gallery: Objects from the National Museum of Health and Medicine

(Warning: Some readers may find the images in this gallery quite gruesome. View at your own risk!)

LEGOs – show me a man, woman or child who doesn't love these little plastic building bricks and I'll show you three exhibitions that will impress them to pieces this summer.

LEGO® Architecture: Towering Ambition
National Building Museum, Washington, DC
Through September 3, 2012
The LEGO exhibit "Towering Ambition" has been wowing visitors to Washington, DC's National Building Museum since 2010. On display is the LEGO artistry of Adam Reed Tucker, one of only 11 LEGO® certified professionals in the world, who re-created 15 of the world's most famous buildings and monuments out of toy bricks. See scale models of the Empire State Building, Gateway Arch and Dubai's Burj Khalifa, also known (for the time being) as the tallest building in the world. For the final months of this exhibition, three DC-area design companies have contributed equally intriguing LEGO builds of other iconic landmarks which collectively total more than 75,000 bricks.

Seeing NASA's Space Shuttle Program come to a conclusion has been tough on space travel geeks. Luckily, over the past few months, NASA has given us a few final treats as the shuttles make their way to their new museum homes.

The journey of Space Shuttle Enterprise has been particularly epic because of its barge trip on the Hudson River this week. In order for Enterprise to get to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, located on New York City's Hell's Kitchen waterfront, it had to sail down the river past some of the city's major landmarks. In case you missed it, here are some photos of that most unusual barge journey past the Statue of Liberty, the new Freedom Tower being built at the World Trade Center site and the buildings of lower Manhattan.

Gallery: Space Shuttle Enterprise Sails Up The Hudson

What do you want to be doing when the world ends in December? If your answer is exploring Mayan temples ruins, gazing upon volcanoes and waterfalls, and basking in Central America's warm autumn sun all from the seat of your mountain bike, then Tour d'Afrique has a pretty epic tour for you to consider.

Tour d'Afrique's Doomsday Ride is a 2,300-kilometer (1,429-mile) transcontinental bike expedition along the "Ruta Maya" timed to coincide with the end of the world according to the Mayan Calendar. The trek begins in San Jose, Costa Rica, on November 17, 2012, and follows a winding, but well-scouted, route through Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and Belize. It concludes at the Lamani Mayan Temple outside of Belize City, Belize, on December 21, 2012 – the supposed date of the apocalypse.

Along the way, participants will get to check out Mayan ruins at Tikal and Copan; the great colonial architecture in the city of Granada, Nicaragua's erstwhile capital; and villages, markets, rainforests, volcanoes, crater lakes and many other slices of life and nature off of the tourist track. If you can't take off for the full five weeks of the expedition, Tour d'Afrique offers three shorter sections that average between 10 days and two weeks.

To learn more about the tour, the route, rates and schedules, check out Tour d'Afrique's La Ruta Maya – the Doomsday Ride Blog.

Reserve your negative opinions about street art for a moment and consider this image of "Madonna and Child" spray-painted on the side of a who-knows-how-old building in Rome, Italy. Captured in the residential neighborhood of Trastevere by Flickr user AlexSven, the photo summarizes, at least for me, the living organism that is the Eternal City. The ancient and modern, the irreverent and the religious all co-exist in this magical city.

What's more, the word "graffiti" is an Italian word meaning "illicit scribblings or drawings on the surface of a public place" and is a type of art and protest that has been in practice since the days of the Roman Empire. So this street artist (or vandal, depending on which side of the debate you are on) is continuing a tradition that has lasted thousands of years.

Share your best travel images with us by adding them to the Gadling Flickr photo pool for a future Photo of the Day.

After having traversed Russia no fewer than 16 times by bike, what's next? For 71-year-old grandmother Yulia Mikhailyuk, the next step is a bicycle journey from the western Russian city of Tver to Paris, France.

According to Russia Today, Ms. Mikhailyuk, a former physical education teacher, took up biking only after her 50th birthday as something to do after retirement. Since then, she has cycled her way across the largest country in the world 16 times, riding from dusk until dawn, stopping only for half-hour meal breaks and to sleep in a tent along the roadside.

The trip to Paris is a new challenge for the senior cyclist, who is making the trek to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Russian victory over France in the Napoleonic War of 1812. Ms. Mikhailyuk expects the 2,867-kilometer (1,781-mile) Tver to Paris bike trip to take approximately two months to complete.

Far inland from the heavily toured bazaars of Marrakech and Essaouira lies a part of Morocco that many travelers know little about. The Todra Gorge, located in the remote High Atlas Mountains, is a sort of mini Moroccan Grand Canyon with 1,000-foot rock walls that have been carved out over thousands of years by the Todra and Dades Rivers.

In the video trailer above, we see an assemblage of four adventurers called Somewhereelseland as they attempt to highline across the gorge. Highlining is the newest extreme sport, which requires thrill-seekers to cross an inch-wide nylon line suspended in the air. Think of it as slacklining at altitude or like tightrope walking in which the rope is merely a string and the walker carries no balance pole.

"No one has ever highlined in Morocco before," says Faith Dickey, Somewhereelseland's female highliner. Indeed, the location and the precarious nature of the sport leave us with a desire to watch beyond the three minutes featured in this video.

Hate traveling with a bulky, plastic bike helmet? Say hello to the Hövding Bike Helmet, an ingenious invention out of Sweden that takes up only a sliver of space in your luggage and activates only upon impact, much like a car's airbag.

Reminiscent of the zippered collar of an athletic jacket, the scarf-like Hövding contains a folded-up "invisible" nylon hood whose trigger mechanisms are controlled by sensors that pick up on the abnormal movements of the bike rider wearing it. The sensors are charged via USB port.

Quick! What's the first thing you think about when you think about Sweden? If it's not IKEA, smorgasbords, or cold winters, then it's probably Absolut, the vodka brand whose bottle inspired 850 works of Pop art from 1986 to 2004. Now, 70 of the best of those works of art are to be featured at the Spiritmuseum.

California dessert and pastry school Qzina has just broken the Guinness World Record for the World's Largest Chocolate Sculpture. Modeled after the Kukulcan Mayan pyramid in Chichen Itza, Mexico, the chocolate pyramid took more than 400 hours to construct and weighs 18,239 pounds.

Qzina's chocolate "architects" built an exact scale model of the Mayan temple to celebrate the school's 30th anniversary and to pay homage to 2012, the supposed end of the world according to some interpreters of the Mayan calendar. Measuring one-thirtieth the size of the original Mayan temple, the solid chocolate replica stands at six feet tall with a symmetrical base of 10 feet by 10 feet. Every last detail, from the number of steps up the sides of the temple to tiny figurines modeled to look like Mayan tribesmen, was created out of chocolate. More amazing photos of the chocolate pyramid are available in this Flickr set.

The chocolate sculpture goes on display on June 4, 2012, in the Qzina product showroom in Irvine, California, and will be destroyed on December 21, 2012, the last date on the Mayan calendar. "The method for destruction is yet to be determined," according to the Qzina website.

By the way, the previous world record for a sculpture made of chocolate was held by Italian chocolatier Mirco Della Vecchia, who built the Duomo of Milan out of 10,736.5 pounds of chocolate.