The darker bird pictured above belongs to a family of trickster birds known as the cuckoo. The common cuckoo is notorious for creeping into other birds' nests and laying their eggs, leaving the hosts to raise the chick as their own. This mechanism is known as brood parasitism, and it is quite common in the animal kingdom. However, not all cuckoos are dead-beat parents, many do raise their own young. The cuckoo birds that do use this mechanism are obligate brood parasites, meaning that they only reproduce in this fashion.

The best-known example is the European common cuckoo (shown above). The shells of the eggs of brood-parasites are usually thick. They have two distinct layers with an outer chalky layer that is believed to provide resistan ...

Not one to be outdone by the dynamic trio of Alvin, Simon, and Theodore of Alvin and the Chipmunks, the least chipmunk (Eutamias Minimus) is the smallest of all chipmunk species (shown above). Least chipmunks range over most of western North America occupying the widest geographic and altitudinal range of any chipmunk. These tiny rodents possess a long, narrow but fairly bushy tail, and have soft, dense fur which is moulted twice a year - the summer coat being brighter in color than the more greyish winter coat. Like other chipmunks, this species has relatively short ears which are covered in short hairs and pouches inside the cheeks which are used to carry food. Interestingly, the female least chipmunk may be slightly larger than the male ...

The crane fly is the world's most misunderstood insect that looks like a mosquito, but is actually a fly. Although it might look like the daddy longlegs of mosquitos, it is actually harmless and doesn't suck your blood. In fact, some sources suggest that this insect eats other bugs and mosquitoes larvae, acting as natural form of pest control.

Even though being afraid of the dark sounds childish, our fear of the dark is an evolutionary trait that we picked up to survive real-life predators stalking the night. Researchers have hypothesised that this innate fear stems from a point of human history when we were nowhere near the top predators we are today. Humans only really became super predators with the advent of technology, which wasn’t that long ago.

Before technology, our ancestors were constantly on the look-out for predators that wanted nothing more than to chow down on human sandwiches. To make that even scarier, most of these predators hunted at night - a time of day when we are especially vulnerable to attack because of our relatively poor eyesight.  

This means that it was ...

That's a pickup line sure to get one's attention if he/she knew that all snowflakes are, in fact, one of a kind!

All snowflakes start off looking basically the same, but they are individually shaped by their environments as they form and fall. First, water vapor condenses and freezes on a dust mote. The snowflake starts as a six-sided prism - six sides because of the way water molecules arrange themselves into ice crystals. As it grows, its edges expand and create branches of ice that shoot out from its corners. Differences in temperature and wind conditions turn the branches into one-of-a-kind works of art: Some are long and thin, some are short and fat, and some are covered in dozens of tiny sub-branches.

Source: http://www.sciencemag.org ...

Shown above are vampire fish caught in Corona Falls, Guyana. Also called payara by locals, these Amazon Basin predators feed on other fish, especially piranhas, which they impale on their long fangs.

The 1977 HP-01 digital calculator was arguably the very first smart-watch to hit the market nearly 38 years before the Apple Watch. The watch was a marvel for its time. Not only could it perform basic calculations, the watch could do dynamic time and date calculations, algebra, and even function as a stopwatch and alarm clock. The watch in perfect condition can be found on eBay from time-to-time, for a price ranging up to $14 500 on eBay.