Bought from a pet shop, Alex the parrot was the subject of a 30-year experiment by psychologist Irene Pepperberg, who demonstrated that language, communication and intelligence are not just the result of a large primate brain; “lesser” animals also possess high cognitive ability. Alex could count, knew more than 100 words and even understood syntax. When he died, his last words to Pepperberg were: “You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you”

Some species of lutung monkeys from Southeast Asia are born with bright orange coats. Called natal coats, they're thought to have evolved to stop adult males killing young males. In a rare subspecies, the golden coat is sometimes retained into adulthood.

Physicists have figured out how colossal rainstorms are formed in the Sun's atmosphere, and it's surprisingly similar to how we get our rain. It turns out that plasma rain falls on the sun at 200 000 km/h. Each raindrop is the size of Ireland!

Lingcods are sometimes found with amazing, edible blue flesh. A bile pigment called biliverdin seems to be the cause, but exactly how it gets into the flesh of the fish remains a mystery.

This was the sky over Guam earlier this week. The effect is caused by antisolar rays - rays of sunlight that converge at a point in the sky exactly 180° from where the Sun is.

Beautiful people make more daughters, according to a study.

Why? It is more genetically advantageous for females to be attractive, as (in a heterosexual relationship anyway) males are more likely to choose a female partner who is attractive for both short and long-term mating, while a female partner is less likely to choose an attractive male for the long-term. Thus, for procreation among attractive people, it is less necessary to make males.

Lake Baikal in eastern Siberia is the oldest freshwater lake on Earth, and one of the largest and deepest, containing around one-fifth of the world's freshwater. In winter, it freezes over, and these beautiful transparent, turquoise masses of broken ice appear momentarily in March, caused by the unequal structure, temperature and pressure in the main body of the packed ice.

Scientists identified sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon -- some of the key chemical ingredients for life -- in the powder Curiosity drilled out of a sedimentary rock near an ancient stream bed in Gale Crater on the Red Planet last month.

450 years for a plastic bottle, 50 for a Styrofoam cup, and 10 to 20 years for a plastic bag.

On 24 December 2012, an amazing double helix cloud was spotted just outside Moscow in Russia. While it's still up for debate, a pilot's perfectly timed barrel roll could have been the cause.

Arachnophobes - stay indoors. Heavy rain and flooded farmlands have caused millions of spiders to swarm over Jordan Valley Road in Hikurangi, New Zealand.

Researchers discover that bees and flowers communicate using electric fields.

"It turns out flowers have a slight negative charge relative to the air around them. Bumblebees have a charge, too.

The plant's electric field is changed by the proximity of that positively charged bee. And once the bee leaves, the field stays changed for 100 seconds or so. That's long enough for the altered field to serve as a warning for the next bee that buzzes by. She won't stop to investigate a flower that's already been visited." ...

The happiest animal in the world: The Quokka! It can be found on some smaller islands off the coast of Western Australia.

This is what eyeball stitches look like after a cornea transplant. Beautiful and terrifying all at once.

You see those embedded spirals of green, pink and blue? The green and blue spirals are actually the exact same colour.

When the green and pink colours are placed side-by-side, they enhance each other’s darker tones, making them look like completely new colours. How we perceive colours is dependant on the light and shadow surrounding them and on the placing of contrasting colours side by side.

The two marmosets - small, New World monkeys - had been a closely bonded couple for more than three years. Then, one fateful day, the female had a terrible accident. Her partner left two of their infants alone in the tree and jumped down to apparently comfort and mourn her. Humans mourn their dead, of course, and some recent studies have strongly suggested that chimpanzees do as well. This new observation suggests that mourning is more widespread among primates than previously thought.

These are the ultimate retro pants—and they are depicted to be 3,000 years old! They were found by archaeologists working at the Yanghai cemetery, in western China.