Here is the article featuring the hairless bears. While the original post I saw highlighted them as “Shaved”, the bears are actually suffering a genetic mutation in their winter-coat genes. This mutation has only recently appeared in a population of female bears in a zoo in Germany.Personally, I think they’re cute in the way sphinx cats are cute.
This photographer was attacked by a polar bear while shooting a documentary for the BBC in Norway!
Fortunately, he was in a pod that let him see out.
You can now add polar bear selfie to your photo bucket list.
Photographer Captures What a Polar Bear Attack Looks Like
via Reddit
Consider the world around you. You are holding a book made of paper, the crushed pulp of a tree. Trees are machines able to take a supply of atoms and molecules, break them down and rearrange them into cooperating colonies composed of many trillions of individual parts. They do this using a molecule known as chlorophyll, composed of over a hundred carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms twisted into an intricate shape with a few magnesium and nitrogen atoms bolted on. This assembly of particles is able to capture the light that has travelled the 93 million miles from our star, a nuclear furnace the volume of a million earths, and transfer that energy into the heart of cells, where it is used to build molecules from carbon dioxide and water, giving out life-enriching oxygen as it does so. It’s these molecular chains that form the superstructure of trees and all living things, the paper in your book. You can read the book and understand the words because you have eyes that can convert the scattered light from the pages into electrical impulses that are interpreted by your brain, the most complex structure we know of in the Universe. We have discovered that all these things are nothing more than assemblies of atoms, and that the wide variety of atoms are constructed using only three particles: electrons, protons and neutrons. We have also discovered that the protons and neutrons are themselves made up of smaller entities called quarks, and that it is where things stop, as far as we can tell today. Underpinning all of this is quantum theory.
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The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen by physicist Brian Cox and University of Manchester professor Jeff Forshaw (via ikenbot) |
Pesticides have domino effect on bees
Bees are vital because they account for 80 percent of plant pollination by insects. Without them, many crops would be unable to bear fruit.
Incredibly Small: Best Microscope Photos of the Year
(Click each image for short details)
Every year for nearly four decades, Nikon has received hundreds of entries in its Small World microscope photography contest. Every year, the images are more amazing, and this year’s winners — selected from nearly 2,000 submissions — are undoubtedly the best yet.
Super-close-ups of garlic, snail fossils, stinging nettle, bat embryos, bone cancer and a ladybug are among the top images this year. The first place winner (above) shows the blood-brain barrier in a living zebrafish embryo, which Nikon believes is the first image ever to show the formation of this barrier in a live animal.
“We used fluorescent proteins to look at brain endothelial cells and watched the blood-brain barrier develop in real-time,” the winners, Jennifer Peters and Michael Taylor of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, in Memphis, said in a press release. “We took a 3-dimensional snapshot under a confocal microscope. Then, we stacked the images and compressed them into one – pseudo coloring them in rainbow to illustrate depth.”
Here are the top 20 photomicrographs from the 38th Nikon Small World competition, selected for their originality, informational content, and visual impact by a panel of scientists, journalists and optical imaging experts. — Continue over at WiredScience
