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The bleeding tooth fungus
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The bleeding tooth fungus grows in Europe and North America. While young, the fungus looks like it is oozing blood. The red liquid is actually an anticoagulant. It lives on the roots of conifer trees and exchanges nutrients in a mutually beneficial relationship. And, if you're wondering, they are inedible.
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2418 |
savio |
10 years ago |
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5142 |
savio |
10 years ago |
A beautiful Egyptian vulture
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Egyptian vultures not only feed on dead animals, but are opportunists who will also eat small or injured animals, and will even steal eggs of other birds and crack them open. The vultures are listed as endangered by the IUCN. In Asia, they have lost about a third of their population each year since the turn of the century. Hunting and accidental poisoning (ingesting insects that have been treated with a pesticide) are two of the main causes for their decline.
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2485 |
savio |
10 years ago |
Meet the black swallower
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This is the aptly-named "black swallower" ( Chiasmodon niger), a fish known for eating bony fish up to 10x its mass and 2x its length. It's found worldwide in tropical and subtropical waters at a depth of 700-2,745 meters. Most specimens of this fish have been collected after one attempted to swallow prey too large for it to handle, and the prey could not be digested before decomposition set it. The release of gases forces the black swallower to the surface. This particular specimen was found washed up on the shore in 2007. The black swallower measures 19 cm long. The fish in its stomach is a snake mackerel measuring 86 cm. ...
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2885 |
savio |
10 years ago |
The Bushveld rain frog
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The Bushveld rain frog is found in Southern Africa. When threatened, it puffs itself up to ward off potential attackers. The frogs are sexually dimorphic, and the male is too small to mount the female properly to reproduce. The white secretion you see on the back of the frog is actually an adhesive that holds the male in place during copulation.
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3556 |
savio |
10 years ago |
This fish looks like it can perform hypnosis
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Stargazer fish have their eyes situated on the tops of their heads and can bury themselves in the sediment with only their faces sticking out. Some species lure prey with a worm-shaped projection that comes out of their mouths. They are toxic and some can deliver a 50 volt shock!
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3910 |
savio |
10 years ago |
Colorful trees
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These are rainbow eucalyptus trees ( Eucalyptus deglupta) and they hail from the Philippine Islands. The trees get their name from the striking colours observed on their trunks and limbs. Although it may look like someone took a paintbrush to them, these colours are entirely natural. Unlike most trees, the rainbow eucalyptus does not have a thick, cork-like layer of bark on its trunk. The bark is smooth and as it grows it 'exfoliates' layers of spent tissue. This exfoliation technique occurs at different stages and in different zones of the tree. Once a layer is shed, a new fresh green bark is exposed. As this new bark ages, we can see the tissue change colour to dark green followed by a bluish colour, then to purple and pink-orange and then f ...
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4069 |
savio |
10 years ago |
Nature's kiss
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Check out this beautiful flower. At first glance, it looks like a set of lips, but in actually, these are the flowers that are produced by Psychotria elata, a plant that grows in Central and South American tropical forests.
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4064 |
savio |
10 years ago |
A parrot with a wicked hairstyle
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This is a Palm Cockatoo, also know as the Goliath Cockatoo. Palms are distinguished by their size, huge beak (second only to the Hyacinth Macaw among psittacines and largest proportionate to size), solid black feather coloration, large open crest, bare red cheeks, and red and black tongue. You have to see their tongues to believe the coloration. It's amazing. Palm Cockatoos are severely threatened. They are CITES Appendix I birds and are protected in Australia. As a testament to their rarity, typical prices in the U.S. for Aterrimus Palms are around $8000 and Goliaths around $14,000. Perhaps contributing to their rarity is the fact that, according to both Low and Forshaw, they lay only one egg per clutch. ...
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5917 |
savio |
10 years ago |
Pellagra
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In the early 1900s, the disease pellagra was widespread in the United States, especially in southern states. Individuals with pellagra were weak, and they developed diarrhea, a skin rash, and mental confusion. Each year, thousands of Americans died from this dreaded illness. In 1914 the U.S. surgeon general assigned Joseph Goldberger, a physician who worked in a federal government laboratory, to study pellagra. Most medical experts thought pellagra was an infectious disease because it often occurred where people lived in close quarters, such as prisons, orphanages, and mental health institutions. Goldberger knew from his previous research that infectious diseases usually spread through a population by close physical contact. While investiga ...
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2808 |
savio |
10 years ago |
Here's what low levels of melanin leads to
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This is a rare baby Golden Brushtail Possum that was born at Wild Life Sydney last year. Golden Brushtail Possums are one of Australia’s largest tree-dwelling marsupials but they're rarely seen in the wild, being found mostly in small pockets of Tasmania. Their unique appearance is the result of low levels of melanin in their skin.
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3677 |
savio |
10 years ago |
An animal we'll never see again
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Australia's iconic Tasmanian Tiger was hunted to extinction in the 1930s - but it may have already been doomed by an extremely small gene pool, according to a new study that stresses the fragility of isolated species.
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3804 |
savio |
10 years ago |
How a stent works
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A stent is a small mesh tube that's used to treat narrowed or weakened arteries in the body. Arteries are blood vessels that carry blood away from your heart to other parts of your body. You may have a stent placed in an artery as part of a procedure called angioplasty. Angioplasty restores blood flow through narrowed or blocked arteries. Stents help prevent the arteries from becoming narrowed or blocked again in the months or years after angioplasty.
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3088 |
savio |
10 years ago |
Ever seen a potoo?
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Potoos are a small New World family of solitary and nocturnal birds. Most are so poorly known they seem more fiction than substance, their gruff or wailing cries ghostly delusions of the dim nocturnal world they inhabit.
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2736 |
savio |
10 years ago |
A cratered inferno
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Mercury's surface looks similar to our Moon's. Each is heavily cratered and made of rock. Mercury's diameter is about 4800 km, while the Moon's is slightly less at about 3500 km (compared with about 12,700 km for the Earth). But Mercury is unique in many ways. Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, orbiting at about 1/3 the radius of the Earth's orbit. As Mercury slowly rotates, its surface temperature varies from an unbearably cold -180 degrees Celsius to an unbearably hot 400 degrees Celsius. The place nearest the Sun in Mercury's orbit changes slightly each orbit - a fact used by Albert Einstein to help verify the correctness of his then newly discovered theory of gravity: General Relativity. The above picture was taken by the only sp ...
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2712 |
savio |
10 years ago |