It's Friday. As the weekend approaches, we've got a bevy of stories for you to share with your friends. Want to tell them about the rock houses that inspired Tolkien's Hobbit holes? We've got that. Or maybe you want to share more about the influential women from the Mughal Empire, including the sharpshooter empress, Nur Jahan? All that and more below—dig in.  Influential Mughal Women It was a cool fall day in 1619 when a group of local hunters begged for help—a man-eating tiger was stalking their home. In stepped the empress, Nur Jahan, a famed markswoman, felling the beast in one shot. Her skill with a gun wasn’t the only reason the empress stood out, however. For more than a decade, Nur Jahan co-ruled India alongside her husband, the fourth Mughal emperor. Though Nur Jahan was the only woman to rise to the status of co-sovereign, many other contemporary elite Mughal women rose to prominence and exercised political power in the Muslim empire that ruled much of India between the 16th and 19th centuries. READ MORE → Places of the Day San Sebastian Church Manila, Philippines In the middle of Manila, a soaring church with a green-painted gothic twin spire dominates the skyline. This is the San Sebastian Basilica, a minor basilica of the Roman Catholic Church in Manila. READ MORE → Fingal's Cave Isle of Staffa, Scotland This astonishingly geometric cave has inspired everyone from Jules Verne to Pink Floyd, but legend holds that the cave was once part of a bridge built by an Irish giant to fight his gigantic rival. READ MORE → Holy Austin Rock Houses Kinver, England These houses built into the sandstone rock at Kinver were the last occupied troglodyte dwellings in England, and may have inspired Tolkien’s Hobbit holes. READ MORE → Armenia’s Ancient Ovens In ancient Armenia, peasant homes always had a tonir, a small tandoor oven built from clay and stone into the ground. The tonir was essential to daily life, used for baking the every-meal staple of lavash bread, providing warmth, and even hosting sacred ceremonies such as marriages. While the tonir fell into disuse, a new generation of Armenians is giving the tonir a renaissance, both by modernizing old ovens and building new ones to cook both traditional Armenian and non-traditional dishes. READ MORE → The Coastal Guardians of the First Nations In the Great Bear Rainforest—a vast region of old-growth forest and icy fjords that harbor iconic animals including wolves, whales, and ghostly spirit bears—hands-on stewardship has always been a way of life for the Indigenous people who call it home. Now, thanks to a new co-management agreement with British Columbia, the first time a Canadian government has shared authority with any First Nation, that stewardship will have an even greater impact. READ MORE → A 52-Year-Old Burger Budget debates aren’t always the most interesting of processes. But a single throwaway gesture made in the middle of one, more than 50 years ago, led to one of the strangest items you’ll find inside a government library: a plastic-encased hamburger in the Alberta Legislature Building. READ MORE → Book Donkeys On the road to La Gloria, a village in Colombia’s countryside, you might run into Luis Soriano and two donkeys (named Alfa and Beto) carrying a lot of books. This is the Biblioburro, a traveling library that brings books to children in the area. Biblioburro started out with just seventy books, but today, thanks to book donations from around the world, Luis boasts a collection of more than 7,000 titles. READ MORE →