The world will get a little darker today as a total solar eclipse sweeps across parts of Greenland, Iceland and Spain. (A partial eclipse will be visible across parts of the northern US from Alaska to North Carolina, notes NASA.) If you're planning to make some photographs of the celestial event, you might be interested in knowing that the first successful image of a total solar eclipse was taken on July 28, 1851 by a little known Prussian photographer named Johann Julius Friedrich Berkowski. His daguerreotype is still revealing "the mysteries of the sun," noted Smithsonian recently.

  If you missed watching the Marcel Duchamp birthday chess playoff at MoMA last month (above, with Chess Master Susan Polgar), you can get your own game on this summer, starting with an evening of chess at the Noguchi Museum and Garden tomorrow night. Scroll down for info. Readymade inventor Marcel Duchamp encoded the ultimate Dada strategy when he stated, in 1923, that he was quitting art and devoting himself to playing chess. The artist who championed wordplay, absurdity, and gender-ben...