Things just fly below your radar most of the time. Let’s face it, we all only have so much attention we can possibly give to everything from day to day.
So, if any of the following flew under your radar, don’t feel too badly. It’s just a consequence of life. We didn’t realize what was going on right under our noses either. But hey, at least they make sense!
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Clever veggies.
Plants tend to sprout up in a funnel shape, which channels rainfall down to the roots.
This video shows how it works with corn, but most other plants will do likewise and especially those that grow in more arid climates, like the desert rhubarb for example.
Large, but polite.
I don’t know if elephant seals tend to shake hands in the wild but this one is displaying some good manners for sure.
But what’s startling is just how large it is, much bigger than just seeing one pictured on an ice floe would suggest.
Not sure what I expected.
Before they end up in a big sack at the grocery store, potatoes are stored in gigantic warehouses like this. It’s just one big Scrooge McDuck vault of starch.
They know their audience.
This might not look like the most appetizing way to sell fish but there’s a method to it. In Turkey, flipping the gills out is a way of showing customers how fresh the catch is.
Redder gills mean a fresher catch, while pale gills mean it’s been sitting there for a while.
Well designed.
The artists at Pixar just don’t miss a beat, do they? Check out the hillsides in this image from Cars .
They’re made to look like the front ends of old cars. And that butte on the right greatly resembles a hood ornament, doesn’t it?
What an odd handful.
Apple trees can used for the ancient art of bonsai and as this image shows, despite all the trimming and shaping, they might still bear fruit.
When they do, the fruit is almost as big as the tree.
That doesn’t seem right.
You’d think a shovel full of holes would be next to useless but it depends on what you’re trying to do with it.
This one is designed for digging into mud. The holes allow you to dig without getting stuck in the sucking muck.
Seafood’s seafood?
There’s no real way to know if your meal just had a meal before it was caught when you’re talking about mussels, so it’s not impossible to find something like a little crab in there.
Oddly, despite getting bonus meat for free, it’s not any more appetizing, I don’t think.
An interesting bonus.
Likewise, oysters are going to be oysters so don’t be too shocked if a little pearl shows up in your meal.
And if one does, here’s hoping it doesn’t cause you a disturbing dental bill to go along with the meal tab.
I guess you could try that.
But there’s a good reason why you see many iceberg climbers out there, as this video shows.
You wouldn’t think a couple of puny humans could have much of an effect on something as massive as an iceberg but obviously, they can.
Sprouting like a champ.
Strawberries have their seeds on the outside, which automatically makes them interesting.
But when you see the seeds sprouting, it’s something else entirely. The process is called vivipary and it can happen in fruits that have their seeds inside as well, such as tomatoes.
I guess it wasn’t going anywhere.
These are the remains of an old glass furnace. Presumably, when this factory shut down, it would have been terribly costly and difficult to remove all this safely so it was just left there.
However, all that glass was still there even when it was running, just molten.
Okay, that’s weird.
Okay, this one kind of goes against the grain of making sense: an island that’s bigger in surface area than the lake it’s in.
In Quebec, René-Levasseur Island sits in the middle of Lake Manicougan and it was all formed by a meteorite impact about 212 million years ago. However, the lake around it only became a single lake when a reservoir joined up two crescent-shaped lakes back in 1970.
It’s cold for them, too.
You don’t really imagine that sea life used to living in cold climates would be susceptible to the same look as bearded folks caught out and about on a nasty winter’s day, but there we are.
Frosted follicles. Winter whiskers.
Movin’ on and truckin’.
While road trains like this wouldn’t make much sense in the U.S., they do for Australia where great distances to serve remote communities make hauling lots of goods at once more reasonable.
Of course, you’re not going to see one of these in downtown Sydney but out in the great wide open, they’re pretty common.
We’ve been had.
Hollywood basically has two modes when depicting Africa on the big screen: sand or savannah.
Well folks, this is Morocco, as lush and green as any sight you’ll see in North Africa. It’s so out of tune with how we’re used to seeing it portrayed.
Yep, that checks out.
I don’t know why but I wouldn’t have thought that fire hydrants would be planted so deep in the ground.
But considering the pressure of water firefighters need them to put out, you want them to be sturdy. There are some serious forces involved and some high stakes in a fire.
“In Australia we give crocodile feet as treats.”
Which seems odd, but then again, it’s not uncommon in North America for dogs to get pig’s ears as treats.
I guess if crocs are as plentiful Down Under as pigs are stateside, there’s no reason why croc feet shouldn’t be a thing.
Sensible on a couple of levels.
Microsoft had an interesting idea for one of its data centers: put it under water for some free cooling for its servers.
Naturally, it accumulated a nice layer of barnacles and algae in the two years it was below the surface but hey, it worked.
An unusual playground.
When you’re talking about the tiniest fractions of matter, you wouldn’t think such a large chamber would be needed to manipulate them but this is the inside of an old particle accelerator.
“The scale was pretty incredible, I am almost 6ft tall and felt miniscule to all the remains of the large coil around me,” the guy pictured here exploring it wrote on Reddit.
