Very few people are privileged enough to travel the world and even fewer can say they’ve set foot on all seven continents. Thankfully we have been blessed with photographers like Sean F. White, who has not only accomplished both, but chose to record the journey and share it via an amazing time-lapse recording. Click through for a magnificent six-minute trip around the world.
Yesterday NASA managed to capture the clearest-yet footage of a solar flare in process after magnetic fields on the Sun’s northeastern curve exploded in huge streams of plasma and sun stuff. The footage only accounts for about five seconds of explosion, but it’s very, very cool, both in and out of time-lapse.
Recently published photos have revealed what is believed to be the world’s first “strawberry” leopard. The big cat was discovered in South Africa’s Madikwe Game Reserve and is an incredibly rare find.
These pictures were taken in February at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya. An elephant was giving birth when a group of lions and hyenas mistook her newborn for a potential breakfast. But watch as the rest of the herd comes to the female’s aid by huddling around her until she delivers her calf.
Google Street View is pretty great! It lets me see rural villages, the National Gallery in London, post-crisis Fukushima, and your house. And soon, in collaboration with the Catlin Seaview Survey, it’ll be letting people explore Great Barrier Reef as part of the expanding ‘Seaview’ project.
For around two weeks each February, the sunset turns the Horsetail Falls in Yosemite Park, California into an incredible bright orange “firefall” that looks like flowing lava. And it’s happening right now – take a look at the video after the jump.
The Black Rhino Range Expansion Project recently successfully transported 19 black rhinos 1 500 kilometres across South Africa. They did this by airlifting each rhino by its ankles before carrying it upside down! Read exactly why they do it this way, and see some amazing images of this process, after the jump.
Of the 56 wild animals – including six black bears, two grizzly bears, nine male lions, eight lionesses, one baboon, three mountain lions, 18 tigers, and two wolves – that escaped their private wildlife sanctuary in Zanesville, Ohio, only six were rescued; the rest have been shot by local authorities.
Next time you’re on the beach (and frankly, given the current weather in Cape Town, that may be later today), bear in mind that there’s more to the scenery than meets the eye. Sand is ba-yoodiful, too – beyond what our human eyes can perceive. Have a look at these shots of tiny grains of sand magnified to 250 times their real size.
Human displacement aside, the floods in Pakistan have caused massive changes in the local ecology. With more than a fifith of Pakistan submerged, millions of spiders have escaped the rising waterline by moving into trees – quickly covering riverside treelines in cocoons of spiderweb. It’s creepy-looking.
Well I don’t know about you, but I think marine biology just got slightly more interesting. A 2005 paper observing a menage a trois coupling between right whales recently appeared online, with photos that are NSFW but only if your boss knows what you’re looking at or has a working knowledge of whale genitalia.
For every cute little kitten, there are at least a million other animals out there that will literally eat your face off. Why? Because nature is an asshole, that’s why. While things like parktown prawns, great white sharks and rain spiders scare the bejezus out of me, they are nothing compared to these 7 creatures that prove that nature hates us and we are all going to die.