It was hard to notice this in all the excitement when we were growing up, but you may notice as an adult that cast members at Disney World are “on” all the time.
By that, I mean that you never see Mickey taking a smoke break with his head off or hear Donald griping about his car payments while his smiling face stares at you.
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That’s because Disney has a very strict code for its employees not to break the illusion for any young visitors, but life itself doesn’t operate by the same rules.
So while you won’t often see a lot of the things on this list, it was obviously still possible to get pictures of them.
We always hate to see rust, but but it actually becomes quite beautiful if you look at it closely enough.
This is what it looks like under an electron microscope, which brings us the closest we can get to rusty metal without needing a tetanus shot.
Although it’s very rare, it is possible for a lizard to sprout three tails.
According to National Geographic , if a lizard’s tail only gets partially removed, its regenerative abilities can sometimes get a little out of whack and produce an extra tail or two.
It may be a little hard to identify this animal at first glance. After all, it looks like a rat, but it has a piggish nose.
And that’s because we’re actually looking an an albino raccoon. It really is amazing how hard it is to recognize without its distinctive colors.
Some people would start feeling scared if they saw these clouds in the sky, but their reasons aren’t entirely fair.
According to Forbes , these are known as mammatus clouds and although they’re commonly considered a herald of tornadoes, hail storms, or unusually strong winds, this isn’t necessarily true.
If you’ve ever been a little curious about what nuclear waste looks like, here’s a chance to find out without actually touching any.
Sadly, the real stuff lacks that bright green glow that we often see in cartoons. It just kind of looks like a muddy swamp.
Yellowstone Park has some amazing natural features, but some don’t fully dazzle until you see them from above.
The Grand Prismatic Spring in Wyoming almost seems unreal due to its array of colors, but this is actually what it looks like.
This seems like somebody made a really tiny ice sculpture, but it’s all natural.
Research has shown that in certain parts of Switzerland, it’s not unheard of for ice crystals to rain from the sky and for thin clouds of pure ice to form.
We may not have to worry about sea monsters, but it would’ve been a different story if we were around 518 million years ago.
According to Livescience , that’s how long ago this massive creature and its 18 mouth tentacles came to rest in what is now China.
It’s no surprise that astronauts might have a little trouble walking in their space suits when you see what else is in there.
In fact, this isn’t even the bulkiest a space suit can get. The ones that NASA issues apparently have a lot more parts to it than this slimmed-down Russian model.
It shouldn’t be hard to see why this flower is commonly known as the “duck orchid.”
Its real name is Caleana Major and it’s apparently found in eastern and southern Australia. It’s good to remember that not all of that country’s wildlife is so terrifying.
This is what a human heart looks like when all of its cells are removed.
As Houstonia reported , this is done to make room for a new host’s stem cells before a heart transplant. Once these stem cells grow, they can ensure that the heart pumps blood with a much lower risk of the body rejecting it.
This heat map is supposed to show all 13,000+ McDonald’s restaurants in the United States.
As FastCompany reported , it was created by Stephen von Worley, who used it, in part, to find out where you can go the longest distance without seeing one.
The answer is a patch of grassland between Meadow and Glad Valley, South Dakota. That point is a 145 mile drive from the nearest McDonald’s.
If you look at a sharply designed building like this from the right angle, it can seem like it’s two-dimensional.
This particular one is in Antwerp, Belgium, but similar buildings have been reported in Boston, San Antonio, and New York City.
With how volatile the past winter has been, it’s understandable that this would have some strange effects on certain bodies of water.
These ice sheets that look like a sea of broken glass were found in Lake Michigan when temperatures were starting to climb back up after an intensely deep freeze.
This is what happens when you leave a hot mug on a plastic table cover.
Although the resulting big bubble looks pretty cool, it’s still probably better to lay a coaster down first.
Unless you have a job that brings you up close and personal with the world’s largest animals, you probably won’t recognize this.
For the uninitiated, this is what an elephant’s tail looks like up close. It’s a lot hairier and coarser than most of us are used to seeing.
A tiger’s famous stripes don’t quite go away when you give it a haircut.
As some have noticed, the stripes that show on its skin make it closer in color to a zebra than many of its feline cousins.
The aviary at the zoo is normally just a place to see some interesting birds, but it takes on a character of its own in the winter.
And that period where the snow is finally starting to give way is also as about as close as this open-air enclosure gets to having a skylight.
If you can’t tell what this is supposed to be, that’s because there’s a pretty major piece missing.
Namely, it’s a cactus with no actual cactus parts. Those all decomposed, which left only the spines behind.
This also has the effect of making it look like some kind of prickly alien life form.
Thanks to one of the last photos taken by the Mir space station, we can see what a solar eclipse looks like from space.
According to NASA , this massive shadow moved across the earth at about 1,200 miles per hour and also shows why different parts of the world experience eclipses differently.
This newspaper is almost entirely printed in Braille.
The publishing information is apparently in ink so the sighted can file it away and the Braille is printed on both sides.
Given how it’s spaced on this page, the reason for that seems self-explanatory.
The light just happened to hit this butterfly so that it was able to shine through.
There aren’t a lot of ways we could possibly make a butterfly more beautiful, but somebody just found one.
