Interesting/awesome pictures

[Luckyme 41401]

I find that this picture below (from FB) does not belong to the " Funny Pictures", or " ..Lol Cat..." or " Puppies" thread, or any existing threads for that matter. It is cute, interesting, endearing and heart-warming. This thread should capture some incredible and interesting pictures you may find in the cyber space.

 

[Guest B**na***oy]

[Luckyme 41401]

 

I just love those little birdies!

[Phaedrus 209521]

 

And what's so special about that, you might ask?

 

It's the first discovered fossil of a mosquito that was still full of blood. Fascinating, but... ew.

[Luckyme 41401]

 

And what's so special about that, you might ask?

 

It's the first discovered fossil of a mosquito that was still full of blood. Fascinating, but... ew.

 

 

Fascinating!

 

Bad news for the Jurassic Park's fans though, no new T. rexes will result.

Researcher Yulia Goreva used a mass spectrometer to detect a blood protein in the mosquito's stomach.

 

Unfortunately for would-be dinosaur cloners, the mosquito flew long after dinosaurs went extinct, and its meal was probably blood from a dino descendant, a bird.

 

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/fossil-mosquito-yields-46-million-year-old-blood-1.2053945

[Phaedrus 209521]

 

This has just won a Wildlife Photography competition.

 

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24407#.Ul3ozazLfZQ

[qwertyaccount 15793]

 

For several hours, the noisy sounds of courtship and mating were all Joe was treated to as he sat, sweltering in the hot sun, in a boat on the Three Brothers River in Brazil's Pantanal. So when the female jaguar finally emerged from the undergrowth and walked down to the river to drink, Joe was grateful for the photo opportunity. But that was just a start. After slaking her thirst, the female flopped down on the sand. Then the male appeared. After drinking and scent-marking, he approached the female, who was lying in what appeared to be a pose of enticement. At least, that's what both Joe and the male thought. She rose, growled and suddenly charged, slamming the male back as he reared up to avoid her outstretched claws. His own claws were sheathed. "I couldn't believe the energy and intensity of those three seconds," says Joe. The pair then disappeared into the undergrowth to resume their courtship, leaving Joe with a sense of awe and a rare, winning image.

 

Source: Joe McDonald/ Wildlife Photographer of the Year

Connor's photography draws on the wilderness skills he acquired over a childhood spent largely outdoors. This female barred owl had a territory near his home in Burnaby, British Columbia. He watched her for some time, familiarizing himself with her flight paths until he knew her well enough to set up the shot. "I wanted to include the western red cedar and the sword ferns so typical of this Pacific coastal rainforest." Setting up his camera near one of the owl's favorite perches, linked to a remote and three off-camera flashes, diffused and on low settings, he put a dead mouse on a platform above the camera and waited for the swoop that he knew would come. "She grabbed the mouse, flew back to her perch and began calling to her mate. It is one of the most exciting calls to hear in the wild."

Source: Connor Stefanison/ Wildlife Photographer of the Year

"Anticipating the pounce, that was the hardest part," says Connor, who had come to Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, USA, in search of wildlife as much as the spectacular landscape. He had found this fox, his first ever, on his last day in the park. It was so absorbed in hunting that Connor had plenty of time to get out of the car and settle behind a rock. It quartered the grassland, back and forth, and then started staring intently at a patch of ground, giving Connor just enough warning of the action to come. When it sprung up, Connor got his shot. And when it landed, the fox got his mouse.

Source: Connor Stefanison/ Wildlife Photogrpaher of The Year

 

On 29 November 2012, Sergey received the call that he had long hoped for. Plosky Tolbachik, one of two volcanoes in the Tolbachik volcanic plateau in central Kamchatka, Russia, had begun to erupt. "I've gone to the area many times, but it had been 36 years since the last eruption," he says. "So I dropped everything and went." The only way to approach it was by helicopter, but extreme cold meant Sergey had to wait until it was warm enough for the helicopter to take off. Flying towards the volcano, the cloud of ash, smoke and steam was so thick that he couldn't see the crater. But every so often, a strong wind blew the clouds away, and he could see a 200-meter-high fountain of lava spouting out of the crater and fast-flowing, molten rivers of lava running down it (some of these would travel 10 kilometers, sweeping away everything in their path). As gusts of hot air buffeted the helicopter, Sergey worked fast, strapped to the open door. "I just kept shooting, kept changing lenses and camera angles, knowing I had this one chance, hoping that I'd take one image that might do justice to what I was witnessing." That was indeed his last chance. At 1am a new explosion happened, the ground rumbled, huge lava bombs threatened the campsite, and a heavy rain of ash and smoke made it impossible to take pictures. Says Sergey, "I have been to many places and I have seen many extraordinary things, but witnessing the Plosky Tolbachik eruption deeply impressed me."

Source: Sergey Gorshkov/ Wildlife Photogrpaher of the Year

 

One night, Udayan camped near a nesting colony of gharials on the banks of the Chambal River two groups of them, each with more than 100 hatchlings. Before daybreak, he crept down and hid behind rocks beside the babies. I could hear them making little grunting sounds, says Udayan. Very soon a large female surfaced near the shore, checking on her charges. Some of the hatchlings swam to her and climbed onto her head. Perhaps it made them feel safe. It turned out that she was the chief female of the group, looking after all the hatchlings. Though he saw a few more females and a male, they never came close. Gharials were once found in rivers all over the Indian subcontinent. Today, just 200 or so breeding adults remain in just 2 per cent of the former range. The Chambal River is the gharials last stronghold, says Udayan, but is threatened by illegal sand-mining and fishing.

Source: Udayan Rao Pawar/ Wildlife Photographer of the Year

 

The fact that most images of polar bears show them on land or ice says more about the practical difficulties faced by humans than it does about the bears' behavior. With adaptations such as thick blubber and nostrils that close, polar bears are, in fact, highly aquatic, and they spend most of their time hunting seals on sea ice and are capable of swimming for hours at a time. Paul took his Zodiac boat to Hudson Bay, Canada, in midsummer to rectify this bias. He scouted for three days before he spotted a bear, this young female, on sea ice some 30 miles offshore. "I approached her very, very slowly," he says, "and then drifted. It was a cat-and-mouse game." When the bear slipped into the water, he just waited. "There was just a flat, world of water and ice and this polar bear swimming lazily around me. I could hear her slow, regular breathing as she watched me below the surface or the exhalation as she surfaced, increasingly curious. It was very special." The light was also special, but for a sinister reason. The midnight sun was filtered through smoke from forest fires raging farther south, a symptom of the warming Arctic the greatest threat facing the polar bear. As more and more sea ice melts earlier and earlier every spring, it becomes harder for the bears to hunt the seals they depend on.

Source: Paul Souders/ Wildlife Photographer of the Year

 

Additional Comments:

The beaches of the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, near Cancun are traditional nesting sites for the endangered green turtle. But as Cancun has also grown as a holiday and dive resort, development has reduced the area available to turtles. Today, though, many nest sites are protected, there are turtle hatcheries to help numbers increase, and there is publicity to help local people and resort owners value the natural riches of the region. Luis earns enough from tourism photography to allow him time to document his beloved wildlife. "The turtles are so used to seeing people in the water that they think we're just part of the environment," says Luis, which means he has been able to get to know individuals, recognizing them from the markings on their faces. "This meter-long female, grazing on seagrass, took no notice of me, apart from glancing up briefly." Recently, Luis has noticed what he suspects may be a new threat: at certain times of the year, a yellowish alga covers some of the seagrass. The suspicion is that the algal growth is the result of sewage from the resort, which has already affected the coral. What is clear is that the turtles avoid eating it.

Source: Luis Javier Sandoval/ Wildlife Photographer of the Year

[Luckyme 41401]

[qwertyaccount 15793]

Bears are smart:

 

[Phaedrus 209521]

I want to go here.

 

[Luckyme 41401]

Dangerous curves on Tianmen Mountain (China)

[Phaedrus 209521]

Tsunami? Armageddon? No, just cloud on the mountains.

 

 

While I'm thinking about it - anyone who likes this thread and is on Twitter should probably follow @Earth_Pics #FF

[qwertyaccount 15793]

Did someone leave a light on?

 

[qwertyaccount 15793]

Soap bubble photographed by Haris Antonopoulos, Athens, Greece.

Butterfly tongue photographed by Kata Kenesei and Barbara Orsolits, Institute of Experimental Medicine - Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary.

 

The explosive dynamics of sugar transport in fat cells photographed by James Burchfield, The Garvan Institute, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

Young juniper shoot cross-section photographed by Igor Siwanowicz, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Janelia Farm Research Campus, Ashburn, Virginia, USA.

Silicon nanocrystals in silicon dioxide photographed by Jan Valenta and Benjamin Bruhn, Charles University, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Prague, Czech Republic.

 

Clione (Pteropoda:Gymnosomata) photographed by Liza Roger and Dr. Gareth Lawson, The University of Western Australia - Oceans Institute Perth, Western Australia, Australia.

Crystallization of tartrazine photographed by Frederic Labaune, Education NationaleAuxonne, France.

Annelid larva photographed by Christian Sardet, Department of Life Sciences, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Villefranche-sur-Mer, France.

 

Actinarctus doryphorus (marine tardigrade) photographed by Andreas Schmidt-Rhaesa, Corinna Schulze and Ricardo Neves, University Hamburg, Zoological Museum, Hamburg, Germany.

Dew on spider web photographed by Massimo Brizzi, Empoli, Firenze, Italy.

[Luckyme 41401]

 

A rare phenomenon: skypunch

[qwertyaccount 15793]

Earth from Endeavour:

 

[Phaedrus 209521]

The storm that hit northern Europe today.

 

[Phaedrus 209521]

 

This is a close-up of the hairs that make up the suction pad on the end of a beetle's leg. One of the winners of this year's Nikon-sponsored photomicography competition. You can see the rest of the winners here; they're worth a look.

[qwertyaccount 15793]

The Earth as seen from space:

 

[MightyPen 67414]

This, according to a combination of observed data and mathematical simulation, is the structure of matter in our universe -- the way mass is distributed throughout space on the very, very large scale. It's not uniform and boring; instead it's made up of unthinkably enormous filaments and clumps:

 

 

This isn't a picture of the whole universe, just the small fraction that the project was able to work on and simulate. And each of those individual pixels of light? they're not stars. Each one is a GALAXY.

[qwertyaccount 15793]

A witch appears to be screaming out into space in this new image of the Witch Head nebula from NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, released on Halloween:

[Luckyme 41401]

What a wonderful world!

[qwertyaccount 15793]

Normally, male jumping spiders in the genus Phidippus are the more colorful sex, but in the case of the Apache jumper, the female is the clear winner:

 

A male Phidippus insignarius jumping spider performs an elaborate courtship display for a female. During this part of the routine, he raises his body, lifts his front legs, and shuffles from side to side:

 

Orchid bees don't actually feed on orchids, but rather the males use their modified legs to scrape scents from the orchids onto their bodies. These fragrances attracts females:

This may not be the image that comes to mind when you hear glowworm, but this bizarre creature is the form taken by an adult male glowworm. The feathery antennae are used to detect the pheromones of females:

 

You can tell that this is a male luna moth by the large leathery antennae, which he uses to track the pheromones of females:

 

The Halloween Pennant is a common and widespread damselfly with beautifully colored wings. Here, you can see the details of the wing veins:

[qwertyaccount 15793]

Volcanic River in Iceland:

 

Peacock Feather Magnified:

 

Goat eye:

 

Horsetail Fall, California:

[Brad 49548]

Just enjoying the variety of the seasons (admittedly the fifth season is never as pretty...)