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.

These are the first photos ever taken of the clearest lake in the world. In the water of Blue Lake in New Zealand's South Island you can see for around 76 metres - in distilled water you can see 80 metres.

Scientists have worked out why your eyes move when you’re dreaming. Scientists have known for decades that the rapid eye movements (REMs) that occur during sleep signal that we’re dreaming, but what do the individual eye motions really represent? It’s long been hypothesised that each movement of the eye reflects new visual information in our dreams, and now for the first time researchers have demonstrated that this is actually the case. According to a new study by researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel, each flick of the eye that occurs during REM sleep accompanies the introduction of a new image in our dream, with the movement essentially acting like a reset function between individual dream "snapshots".

Source: http://www.sciencealer ...

Sometimes it pays to have big, bad neighbors! Tiny black-chinned hummingbirds (shown above) have learned to build their homes near hawk nests. The hawks are too big to be interested in teeny hummingbird eggs, and they scare off the medium-sized birds that are.

According to the study, of the 342 hummer nests studied over three years, 80% were near hawk nests - and for good reason. The researchers monitored hummingbird egg and fledgling survival near six active and six inactive hawk nests. Those hummers unlucky enough to be near inactive nests lost all but 8% of their young, while those in a “good” neighborhood had a 70% success rate, they report.

Source: http://news.sciencemag.org/plants-animals/2015/09/why-hawk-hummingbird-s-best-friend ...

"I'd better check......one more time.....just let me make sure.....I'd better go back...." In isolation these comments might come from anyone wondering whether the headlights are turned off on the car. But as the mantra of people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) these thoughts plague their daily lives. Whether its washing one's hands 25 times a day (above, scene taken from The Aviator (2004)) or checking to make sure the stove burner is off every hour on the hour, OCD can severely hobble one's peace of mind.

More rightly, it may be a piece of brain that produces these intrusive thoughts. UCLA's Jeffrey Schwartz and his colleagues used PET scans to study the brains of obsessive-compulsive patients. They found that the orbita ...

In 1995 a group of NASA scientists repeated and refined some earlier tests on the effect that various drugs have on the web building abilities of the common garden spider. They tested the the effect of caffeine, benzedrine, marijuana and chloral hydrate and as you can see the results were pretty extreme!

According to a new study conducted out of Italy, staring into another individuals eyes could induce hallucinogenic effects. The experiment is simple: get two individuals to look into each other's eyes for 10 minutes while they are sitting in a dimly lit room. The sensations that ensue resemble mild "dissociation" - a rather vague psychological term for when people lose their normal connection with reality. It can include feeling like the world is unreal, memory loss and odd perceptual experiences, such as seeing the world in black and white

Healthy participants said they'd had "... a compelling experience unlike anything they'd felt before", they scored higher on a dissociative states questionnaire than control participants, and 75 per cent ...