This beautiful mosaic of leaves is caused by a mysterious natural phenomenon known as 'crown shyness'. Seen here in a cluster of Kapur trees in Malaysia, scientists suspect that it occurs when young shoots become sensitive to touch, and stop growing once they graze other leaves.

Two days ago, I streamed history being made for the first time ever online, and witnessed the Philae lander's touchdown on Rosetta's comet. The journey took 10 years, 6.4 billion kms away from here, and a 7 hour long landing.

Unfortunately, it was an awkward landing where Philae landed approximately 1km away from its intended landing site that currently, one of its 3 legs is not on the surface of the comet and it itself is oriented in a way that no sufficient sunlight is being recieved enough to charge its batteries ever 12 hour rotation.


At the moment, plans to try to "hop" the robot back into a position for enough sunlight are being studied, hopefully in time to execute them before Philae dies out sometime between next Friday and Saturday. ...

This strange little guy is the aptly named pig-nosed turtle. Native to the Northern Territory in Australia and parts of New Guinea, it uses that odd, piggy snout just like a double-barrelled snorkel.

The average termite queen will produce 30,000 eggs PER DAY. And considering these morbidly obese baby-making machines will often live till they're 20 years old, that means 219,000,000 eggs in single a lifetime.

This might be painful to watch for some viewers, but as tattoos become more popular, you might need this done to you one day.

The 570 foot San Jacinto Monument in Texas is taller than 3 Statues of Liberty.

No one wants to be sad. So why do we love listening to sad songs so much? New research suggests that we're drawn to sad songs because they evoke mostly positive emotions, which is great for our mental health.

According to the study published by the journal PLOS One, researchers found that "a wide range of complex and partially positive emotions, such as nostalgia, peacefulness, tenderness, transcendence, and wonder," were brought out in the participants that took part in the study by sad music. These are emotions are all healthy, feel-good emotions. The researchers concluded that "Music-evoked sadness plays a role in well-being, by providing consolation as well as regulating negative moods and emotions."

Source: http://www.plosone.org/article ...

You might think that it's better to be well-fed rather than starving when you're trying to make a big, life-changing decision, but new research suggests quite the opposite.

According to a research study conducted by Utrecht University in the Netherlands, people who were hungry because of having fasted overnight perform better on a complex decision task than sated people. (Click here to read the research). This provides a first piece of evidence that the hot state of hunger improves, rather than compromises, advantageous decision making. Their experimental evidence suggests that the "hot state of hunger promoted rather than compromised complex decisions with uncertain outcomes that are advantageous in the long run as hungry participants were ...