In its early days, the internet was held up as a beacon of hope for an information sharing revolution, something that was going to make learning and education more accessible for everyone. Of course, it still does that, just with more pop-up ads and email scams and vapid influencer challenges to sort through than anybody expected.
Nevertheless, there’s just so much darn interesting and fascinating stuff out there, sometimes you can’t help learning. It just happens by accident. Check out these pics, and you never know, you might see something totally new.
RELATED STORIES
The black leopard’s spots can be seen at night.
Well, it’s really a melanistic leopard, one that has extra pigmentation in its fur, causing it to appear black. You’d think that would make it blend in more at night, and it generally does, but the camera’s flash brought those spots out beautifully.
Bears have a preference for certain kinds of honey.
“An agricultural engineer used this bear’s night raids as a test to determine which type of honey was the best,” wrote Reddit user T4C000. “In multiple, double-blind trials, ‘Big boy’ always preferred the rare, expensive anzer honey; followed closely by chestnut, flower, and pine-wood honey.”
Of course it has expensive tastes. Of course.
The amount of gold on the left has roughly the same monetary value as the stack of silver on the right.
With a silver to gold ratio of 110:1, it takes 110 ounces of silver to equate to the value of one ounce of gold; that’s about $5,000 worth of each metal.
When you sat in the driver’s seat of the ’86 Oldsmobile Incas, you didn’t exactly get behind the wheel.
Good news, it was just a concept car. Can you imagine trying to learn to steer with joysticks instead of a wheel? Or sharing the road with someone who’s driving this thing?
The town of Nordlingen, in Bavaria, was built in a crater.
The crater was formed when an asteroid struck the area 15 million years ago, and extends to about 25 km in diameter. The town is located in the heart of that crater.
This Rubik’s Cube uses Braille to represent the colors you’re supposed to line up.
It’s cool to see a classic toy made accessible like this, and it sure would ramp up the difficulty for anybody trying to solve it.
This butterfly’s metamorphosis didn’t quite work out.
It seems to have been an incomplete transformation as its head remained that of the caterpillar that entered the cocoon. Who knew that could even happen?
About 25,000 feet up, Mt. Everest has a layer of rock left behind by marine life.
The Yellow Band, as it’s known, contains an abundance of marine fossils, proof positive that the highest elevation of land on the planet was once below sea level.
Bald eagles have been spotted nesting in saguaro cacti for the first time in decades.
The last known sighting of such a thing, according to the Arizona Department of Game and Fish, was in 1937.
Norway’s stave churches are amazing creations, and this is the biggest of them all.
Stave churches were built without metal nails. This one, Heddal Stavkirke, dates back to the 1200s. It has been restored twice, once in the 1850s and again in the 1950s.
You can barely make out the second one in the shadows, but there are two helicopters in this pic.
The big one is the world’s largest helicopter, the Mi26, and next to it is one of the world’s smallest, the Robinson R22.
This mineral came by its nickname honestly.
Well, at least half of it. It’s called grape agate, and while it’s not a true agate, it’s easy to see where the “grape” part came from. They’re commonly found in Indonesia.
Solar storms are mind-bogglingly massive.
This one, for example, is roughly the same size as Jupiter. You could fit 1,300 Earths into Jupiter, just for reference.
Smoky, a Yorkshire terrier, was a decorated hero in WWII.
Smoky served as a mascot for the 26th Photo Reconnaissance squadron, during which time he flew in 12 missions, earned 8 battle stars, survived a typhoon, a kamikaze attack, and helped restore communications to a damaged airfield in the Philippines.
Russian cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev has a singular distinction in history.
Krikalev happened to be aboard the Soviet space station Mir when the USSR dissolved in 1991.
It was an awkward situation, to say the least, and some suggest he’s technically the last person to leave the Soviet Union because Mir was technically Soviet property.
If you can spot a pattern in jigsaw puzzle pieces, you can do things like this.
It all fits perfectly together, but a nonsensical image is created because the pieces have a diagonal symmetry.
They don’t come around often, but we can sometimes see rainbows form around the sun like this in what’s called a solar halo.
According to NASA , this happens when light refracts from ice crystals in the atmosphere in the right way.
Similar rings can be seen around the moon or even Venus in the night sky, and it’s not unusual for that to happen in the same day when a solar halo was spotted.
It’s not so unusual for a tree to split up as it grows, but this is the first time I’ve seen such uncertainty in that move.
Here we can see a tree that has split and rejoined only to do both all over again before finally committing to the split.
I wonder what happened there?
This decorative and expansive library in Cincinatti is widely beloved and fondly remembered in the city, but that only seemed to be true after it was already torn down.
The Old Main stood from about 1870 to 1955, but was considered outdated and inconvenient towards the end of its life as the books were stacked well beyond people’s reach and the building had poor ventilation.
However, it now seems that John Fleischman was right when he wrote, “Yet when the doors closed forever … and wise heads declared that Old Main would never be missed, they were wrong.”
Here we see a shy, adorable pygmy hippo that differs from its larger cousins in more ways than size.
According to the San Diego Zoo , it has fewer incisors, longer legs, and differently placed eyes than larger hippos.
It also doesn’t spend as much time in the water, but its thinner skin can make it dehydrate easier in the sun. For that reason, the pygmy hippo is known to ooze out a pink fluid known as “blood sweat” that protects its skin from sunburn.
We know that water floats in bead-like formations like this in space, but that doesn’t change when you add some color to it.
When a drop of blue coloring was added to this water globule, the whole thing almost instantly turned blue.
And while it took a little longer for it to turn green when red coloring was added to the mix, it’s still wild to see that happening while the water is floating through the air.
This is apparently what it would look like if Jupiter were the same distance away from us as the moon is.
On one hand, it seems like it should be larger, but this really does go to show just how far away the moon is from us.
There are apparently over 1,000 scarecrows in this field in Finland, but that’s not because the region has a big crow problem.
As Atlas Obscura reported , they were moved to the side of Highway 5 from their original spot in Helsinki’s Senate Square.
The display was apparently set up by artist Reijo Kela, who has not offered a word of explanation because he wants us to let our own perceptions define it. Some think it’s cute, others think it’s scary, while still others think it’s a haunting tribute to those who died in Finland’s Winter War with Soviet Russia.
We can see that the roots of these trees mostly stand above the sand, but that could be the best way to ensure their survival.
According to The Biology Of Coastal Sand Dunes , it’s not unusual for trees to die when their roots are fully buried in the sand due to the lack of access to oxygen.
While many restaurants price kids’ meals by the age of a diner, this Japanese eatery does things a little differently.
Instead, they reduce prices for these meals by a child’s height, which presumably comes from the impression that smaller children won’t eat as much.
This object is so old that you’ll probably have a pretty difficult time recognizing it.
What we’re looking at here is a rubber band that’s somehow managed to stay intact for 81 years. It’s hard to tell whether it got particularly dirty or if they just tended to make them in this color back then.
“An area of forest that was struck by lightning.”
When you think of lightning striking a forest, you think of giant forest fires starting, right? Well, that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes just a tiny stand of trees is affected.
This baby chameleon didn’t get the news yet that it has hatched.
And, amazingly, you can see how these little things get packaged into their shells before they hatch.
It’s not supposed to happen this way, and this little one did actually puncture its own shell, and survived despite not wanting to leave its shell.
This fawn thinks it’s hidden.
“When nervous, fawns’ instinct is to lie down in the grass and keep an eye on threat,” explained the uploader of this pic. “But sometimes, they’ll do it in plain sight and think they’re hidden.”
This submarine is the world’s largest.
The Dmitri Donskoi is a former Soviet Typhoon class sub – yes, the same kind as featured in The Hunt for Red October . It was launched in 1980, and it’s still in use 40 years later.
