While we're talking about Halloween, this is the Atlantic wolffish (Anarhichas lupus), very appropriately and otherwise known as the ‘devil fish’. The hefty fish grows up to 1.5 metres long and over 20kg, and they’re named for those unmistakable fangs. If they're not scary enough, their throats are also lined with a spattering of small, serrated teeth.

Meet the green jumping spider (Mopsus mormon), Australia’s largest—and perhaps cutest—jumping arachnid. These spiders hunt in the day time, moving fast to attack their prey, and camouflaging against green leaves. If you see one, leave it alone. Although their bite won’t kill you, it’s extremely painful.

These are the Cuevas de Mármol, or Marble Caves, found on the shores of Lake General Carrera - a remote glacial lake surrounded by the Andes mountain range and spanning the Chile-Argentina border. Formed over 6,200 years as countless waves crashed against a huge peninsula of calcium carbonate, that distinct, swirling pattern reflects the lake's bright blue colours, which can change in intensity and hue depending on the time of year.

This butterfly is half female, half male. It's suffering from bilateral gynandromorphism, which is a rare genetic disorder that afflicts insects, arachnids, crustaceans and birds, and it could be caused when two sperm enter the egg. Humans are not at risk. ...

Apes manage their emotions much in the same way as humans do. Socially and emotionally competent young bonobos recover quickly from upsetting experiences and are more likely to comfort other young apes, a new study has shown.

These are the ‘pillownauts,’ and they just got out of bed for the first time in 21 days. The paid volunteers for the European Space Agency laid with their feet up in a medical facility while scientists poked and prodded them to try to understand the effects of spaceflight on astronauts’ bodies.

One of the subjects who took part in this investigation said: “The first days of each session were the worst. The body needs to adapt and I had migraines and backaches."

This is the Green vine snake (Ahaetulla nasuta), a slender tree snake found in India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.

The snake is mildly venomous, and its bite causes swelling and pain. They feed on frogs and lizards. There is a widespread myth in parts of southern India that the species uses its pointed head to blind its human victims!

With up to one million hairs per square inch of its body, the sea otter has the densest fur in the animal kingdom. (To put this in perspective, you’ve probably only got 100,000 hairs or less on your whole head!) Together with a huge lung capacity, this makes these water-loving creatures extremely buoyant. The pups are born so buoyant, they're incapable of diving underwater, and are often left bobbing on the surface in a sea kelp bed while their mothers hunt for food nearby.

Exposure to cold and eating chili peppers both appear to increase the activity of brown fat cells, which burn energy, rather than store it as typical "white" fat cells do, a study has found.

The sweat is actually about the consistency of mucus. It helps regulate body temperature and acts as an effective sunscreen.

It’s raining diamonds in Jupiter and Saturn. Dr. Kevin Bates from the University of Wisconsin-Madison said that lightning storms in these two planets turn methane into soot. As it falls, soot hardens into chunks of graphite and then diamonds. Bates speculates that about 1,000 tonnes of diamonds are produced on Saturn every year.

The deadliest substance known to man is a recently discovered type of botulinum toxin (botox). The scientists who discovered it haven’t found an antitoxin yet, so they have decided not to publish the gene sequence due to security concerns. The toxin comes from the bacterium Clostridium botulinum and blocks the chemical signals that makes nerves work, causing botulism and death by paralysis. The image shown above is the protein structure of botulinum toxin.

Engineers led by sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson have unveiled plans for the tallest building in the world. Tall Tower would be 24 times the height of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, considered the tallest building in the world, and would double the maximum heights for commercial airspace, as the designers believe the tower could also be used to launch rockets into space. A building this high poses many structural issues, and we don’t know if it will ever be built.

Could someone talk some sense into the five people that have bid on this item, please?

According to the description, this is one litre of bottled air from the area affected by the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

This is Trapezia rufopunctata, a small and brightly coloured species of crab native to the lagoons and coastal reefs of the Maldives, Polynesia and the Indo-Pacific region. Also known as a guard crab, it lives symbiotically with corals, feeding on their discarded tissue and mucus while defending them from predators. ...

Researchers studying a group of wedge-capped capuchin monkeys that live in tropical forests of central Venezuela have discovered that the monkeys protect themselves against the annual merciless onslaught of mosquitoes exactly as humans do: by rubbing themselves with mosquito repellent.

But while humans may reach desperately for spritzers or bottles or laughably overhyped ''protective'' skin-so-softeners, the capuchins have learned to poke around in tree bark or termite mounds to extract a wriggling specimen of Orthoporus dorsovittatus, a millipede rich with powerful defensive chemicals called benzoquinones.

The capuchin monkey will then proceed to anoint itself head to foot with the repellent secretions by massaging the four-inch-long millipe ...

This is the happy face spider, a spider in the family Theridiidae. Their "smile" keeps predators away.

New data shows alpine swift can spend up to 200 days in the air.

It is a mystery how the birds are able to physiologically accomplish this feat. While their diet is relatively straightforward, they feed on airborne insects, how they rest in midair is not known.

Introducing the Honduran white bat, a tiny bat (reaches up to 4.7 cm in length) found in Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama that has superb construction skills. These bats build tents from waxy leaves, creating a waterproof shelter that also helps them camouflage from predators.

Otherwise known as the Door to Hell and the Darvaza gas crater, the crater is found in Turkmenistan and is 60 metres wide and 20 metres deep. The hole was created when a Soviet drilling rig accidentally tapped into a massive underground natural gas cavern, causing the ground to collapse and the drilling rig to fall in. To prevent poisonous fumes from escaping into the atmosphere, the Soviet geologists decided to set the pit on fire, hoping the fire would use up its fuel in a few days.

This picture of a green and red aurora was taken on September 26, 2013, from the International Space Station. The colours of the aurora borealis depend on which atoms the solar storm excites. Green auroras appear when charged particles from the solar wind crash with oxygen atoms in Earth’s atmosphere and produce green photons; red auroras occur when the particles collide with nitrogen atoms or when there are lower-energy oxygen collisions, producing red photons.

This is the Giant Leopard Moth, a strictly nocturnal species native to parts of North America and Mexico. These moths start life as an incredibly black and bristly caterpillar, and once they grow into adulthood, they never eat, and instead focus on mating and passing their genes onto several clutches of eggs. ...

This is the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park - the largest hot spring in North America and the third largest in the world. The incredible colours are produced by pigmented bacteria that grow in microbial mats around the edges of the mineral-rich water. In summer, the mats are usually orange and red, and in winter they're are usually dark green.

The destructive power of humans.

A fascinating optical illusion can be found at the southwestern tip of Mauritius Island. If seen from above, this part of the island seems to be melting into the ocean, forming a spectacular underwater waterfall. We owe this to a runoff of sand and silt deposits (the light-coloured portion of the water) and the downward pull of the receding waves.