This is Peanut the turtle, shortly after being found in Missouri in 1993. She was taken to to a zoo in St. Louis where the six-pack ring was removed.

It seems that she was trapped in the plastic ring as a young turtle and was unable to free herself. Subsequently, her shell moulded itself to the plastic ring and she grew in the strange shape you see here.

Unfortunately the damage is permanent, but peanut is expected to live a long life and today she serves as a mascot for the fight against beach littering.

Please, always remember to clean up after yourself at the beach. ...

This is an Armadillo girdled lizard (Cordylus cataphractus). It is found exclusively in the deserts of southern Africa.

Termites are pretty astonishing creatures by anyone's standards -- their queens are thirty times the size of soldiers and they produce an amazing thirty eggs per minute.

Relative to their size, termites build the largest structures in the animal kingdom. Their towers can reach an incredible 25ft (7.6m) high and 40ft across (12.1m) - and that's just above the ground! They can burrow as far as 225ft (68m) below the surface.

No, I’m afraid that the quote above is a common misconception and one that this post aims to correct. I know that in previous posts I have emphasized the ambiguity of certain genetic lingo, but in this post I am to enforce the clarity of one such piece of lingo…Mutations.

All the ENCODE hype has certainly brought molecular genetics to the forefront of the scientific stage and such exposure inadvertently highlights some trivial mistakes. On numerous occasions, I have heard people (from all ranges of scientific backgrounds) use phrases very similar to that set at the top of this page. Phrases declaring that ‘he was unlucky to have the gene for Huntington’s disease’ or ‘it was just in h ...

"The ISS is the largest man made object in space. Here's how it compares to other notable objects, both real and fictional, all drawn to scale."

The ISS isn't just the largest space craft ever built, it's also the world's most expensive object. According the Government Accountability Office, it cost upwards of 100 billion dollars to complete.