The internet contains (conservatively) about 52 gajillion photographs. When there’s so much to consume, it’s easy to gloss over these pics without thinking about them. But really, photos can serve as an educational tool (well, some of them can).
So sit back, relax, and let these pics provide some mental stimulation.
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1. The U.S. Navy comes in all sizes.
Yes, there are plenty of nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers and black ops stuff we don’t even know about. But the Navy’s vast fleet also includes adorable little tugboats like the one seen here.
2. Life, uh, finds a way.
You’re looking at a deer’s rib cage. Amazingly, an arrow penetrated the ribs, but bones grew around it. The deer’s dead now (I mean, obviously) but it was pretty clearly a survivor during its lifetime.
3. A honey of a honey melon.
So some random customer bought a honey melon, took it home, and brought it back to the store later that day looking like this. *cough* show-off *cough* Meanwhile I can’t even fold a napkin correctly.
4. Welcome to New Delhi.
It looks like a close-up of a sidewalk, or maybe the surface of the Death Star, but this image is actually an aerial photo of New Delhi, India. I’m going to look at this photo any time I feel like I’m lacking personal space.
5. It’s cheaper than security cameras, too.
I don’t know what kind of black magic tomfoolery is going on here, but somehow these curtains project an image of the street below onto the ceiling.
6. Just never park on the diagonal lines.
Sometimes they’re for a loading bay, sometimes they’re for accessible parking. Point is, there’s a good reason for them being there, as illustrated here.
7. Big bird.
This handshake is taking place between a human (you might have guessed that) and a juvenile crowned eagle. Yes, juvenile. That means this crazy dinosaur-bird is actually going to get bigger.
8. War’s long shadow.
This shows what was once idyllic French countryside, more than a century after World War I ravaged the area. Mortars, trenches, and explosions still scar the landscape a century later.
9. Looking good.
This Redditor shared before and after pics. On the left, you see him in the midst of a crippling drug addiction. On the right, you see him after four years of sobriety. Well done!
10. Some cells are big.
We think of living cells as being microscopic, and usually they are. But in the case of Valonia ventricosa, otherwise known as bubble algae, a single cell is massive.
11. Summoning the mystic meownergy.
I guess it makes sense that this is what it looks like when a cat touches a plasma sphere. Pretty cool to see those toe-beans get electrified, though.
12. There’s perfect composition, and then there’s this.
I mean, I could make a photo collage that looks like this, but actually taking this pic in the real world is on another level entirely.
13. Desert diversity.
After driving through the desert, I thought it was miles and miles of sandy nothingness. I wasn’t wrong, but this shot of different sands of the Sahara Desert shows just how diverse deserts can be.
14. I think I visited this place in Skyrim.
It’s actually an 800-year-old church in Norway. It’s not quite old enough to be the place where Vikings trained, but I can certainly tell myself that.
15. Paging John Hammond.
Usually stuff from 90 million years ago is fossilized and indistinct. But this wasp is perfectly preserved thanks to amber. Somebody clone an Indominus rex out of this thing.
16. Together forever.
Grover Krantz agreed to donate his body to science so long as handlers would allow his dog to stay close to him. Now on display at the Smithsonian, they kept their promise.
17. This is Australia?!
We usually think of it as a place full of sunny beaches, surfers, and deadly reptiles, but apparently the Land Down Under gets its share of ice, too. Who knew?
18. Ditto the Sahara.
Yeah, this is the Sahara Desert, so famous for its towering sand dunes, dry air, and scorching temperatures — and of course that diverse sand. And yet, not only did it get some rare precipitation, it got snow .
19. Lake Reschen isn’t that deep.
Italy is home to a famously submerged bell tower on Lake Reschen, leftover from the town of Graun before it was abandoned for the artificial lake. But part of the lake was drained temporarily, showing that the water line on the tower doesn’t go that far up.
20. Unicorns aren’t just in fairy tales.
Well, sort of. This is an elasmotherium , a huge, shaggy, one-horned beast that roamed Central and Eastern Asia as recently as 29,000 years ago, and it was probably closer to a rhino than a unicorn.
21. Blue lava is naturally occurring.
Yeah, there’s such a thing as blue lava, and we’re not talking about pie filling. Indonesia’s Kawah Ijen volcano spews blue lava, a coloring it gets from igniting sulfuric gas.
22. These seem…optimistic.
Aren’t you glad the stair climbers at the gym don’t have this setting? These are the vertical stairs at Mount Huashan , in China. There’s a teahouse at the top, but you really have to want to get there.
23. Now that’s some camo.
And it’s not even a chameleon. Turns out a gecko can put nature’s most renowned disguise artist to the test. If you couldn’t make out the thing’s toes, toward the bottom left, you wouldn’t even know it was there.
24. Wings flap faster than cameras.
By the time the phone’s rolling shutter managed to move from one side of the image to the other, the bird’s wing position changed, so it looks like it’s in two different frames at once.
