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.

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.

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.

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 ...

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.

...

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.

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.

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 ...