The Golden Tortoise beetle is found in the Americas. They feed on the leaves of plants related to the sweet potato, including the morning glory and bindweed, though they rarely eat enough to cause serious damage to the plant.

Varieties of the inky cap mushroom can be around the world. While they are edible, ingesting alcohol while eating the mushrooms increases symptoms of nausea and vomiting, and can even cause a heart attack.

After the mushroom has released its spores, the cap begins to liquefy. The thick black liquid that is seen dripping from the edges is how the inky cap got its name.

This is bismuth, a brittle metal with a white or silver-pink hue and an iridescent oxide tarnish that produces a rainbow of colours from yellow to blue. It is the most naturally diamagnetic metal in the world, which means it can create a magnetic field in opposition to an externally applied magnetic field. ...

Demodex folliculorum and Demodex brevisare are parasitic mites that particularly favour the hair follicles of eyebrows and eyelashes and measure a mere fraction of a millimeter long. They crawl about your face in the dark to mate and then crawl into the pores to lay their eggs and die. Healthy adults have around one or two mites per square centimetre of facial skin, though people with the condition rosacea can have 10 times more. Demodex does not have an anus and therefore cannot get rid of its faeces. Instead, their abdomen gets bigger and bigger, and when the mite dies it decomposes and releases its faeces all at once into the pore. ...

This 22-year-old man had a car accident last year and as a result his nose became infected and deformed. Doctors weren’t able to repair it, but decided to take cartilage from one of the young man’s ribs to grown a new nose. The nose, which is temporarily attached to his forehead, has been developing for 9 months and is ready to be transplanted.

The aye-aye lives in the forests of Madagascar. Despite looking like a very scared rodent, the aye-aye is a kind of lemur with a bushy tail and super-thin, elongated middle fingers that they use to dig grubs out of hollow branches. Aye-ayes also have huge lower incisors to chew through wood and bamboo—and in captivity they’ve been known to chew through concrete cinder blocks ...

A must see introductory video about paradise birds. This video reveals the astounding beauty of 39 of the most exquisitely specialized animals on earth. After 8 years and 18 expeditions to New Guinea, Australia, and nearby islands, Cornell Lab scientist Ed Scholes and National Geographic photojournalist Tim Laman succeeded in capturing images of all 39 species in the bird-of-paradise family for the first time ever.

Carpenter ants (Camponotus cylindricus) are found in Borneo and expel the lethal sticky substance to defend their colony. Both ant and invader are killed in these attacks; they fall from the canopy as a pair into the leaf litter below, to eventually be eaten by something. Most of the bodies of the south-east Asian Camponotus cylindricus ants are for storage of the deadly secretion. The insects react quickly - when researchers lightly touched them with forceps their abdomen walls ruptured. ...