Every year in Finland, 4,000 reindeer die from car strikes, causing an estimated e €15 million in damages.
In an effort to reduce the carnage, the Finnish Reindeer Herders Association has been applying fluorescent paint to the animals, which works well on fur but best on antlers, which can be seen from all angles.
“There are some problems with the durability and utility” says the Association, “but the product development continues.”
Terrifying scenes captured by AP photographer Noah Berger of California’s Sugar Fire, which has been growing in intensity since July 2nd.
Observed by a time-lapse camera inside a bird box near Loughborough, Leicestershire, an ultra-perfectionist female blue tit spends seven weeks perfecting her nest before laying a first egg.
Normally the process takes about a week.
Pfft. Cowboy builders.
There’s a whole YouTube channel devoted to the family here.
Icelandic photographer Jan Erik Weider’s portraits of molten rock flows from the Fagradalsfjall volcano who spent three days earlier this year getting as up close and personal as humanly possible. To wit:
I was absolutely blown away by how quickly the lava field changed. Apparently, cooled lava broke open, and thick, fresh lava flowed out and formed new shapes and “sculptures,” which were then destroyed again by new lava a few minutes later. This simultaneously beautiful but also brutal transience was the charm for me. A surreal landscape that in just a few minutes will no longer be visible to anyone.
Behold: a diabolical pareidolia captured earlier this month. To wit:
Atmospheric refraction flattened the solar disk and distorted its appearance in this telescopic view of an Atlantic sunrise on June 10. From Belmar, New Jersey on the US east coast, the scene was recorded at New Moon during this season’s annular solar eclipse. The Moon in partial silhouette gives the rising Sun its crescent shape reminding some of the horns of the devil (or maybe a flying canoe …). But at its full annular phase this eclipsed Sun looked like a ring of fire in the heavens. June’s annular solar eclipse followed on the heels of the total lunar eclipse of late May’s Full Moon. Of course, that total lunar eclipse was a dramatic red Blood Moon eclipse.
(Image: Madhup Rathi)
The metal insects and prehistoric organisms of Dr Allan Drummond – an associate professor of biochemistry at the University of Chicago.
Each biologically realistic ’specimen’ starts life as a 3D Blender rendering, later cast in bronze of silver with the help of jewellery designers, then assembled into meticulous, enlarged representations of the actual creatures.
You can follow his process here.
Behold: an Icelandic lighthouse being assimilated by the Borg. Not really. To wit:
Auroras usually occur high above the clouds. The auroral glow is created when fast-moving particles ejected from the Sun impact the Earth’s magnetosphere, from which charged particles spiral along the Earth’s magnetic field to strike atoms and molecules high in the Earth’s atmosphere. An oxygen atom, for example, will glow in the green light commonly emitted by an aurora after being energised by such a collision. The lowest part of an aurora will typically occur about 100 kilometres up, while most clouds exist only below about 10 kilometres. The relative heights of clouds and auroras are shown clearly in the featured picture in 2015 from Dyrholaey, Iceland. There, a determined astrophotographer withstood high winds and initially overcast skies in an attempt to capture aurora over a picturesque lighthouse, only to take, by chance, the featured picture including elongated lenticular clouds, along the way.
(Image: Daniele Boffelli)
A spectacular photograph taken by Laura Rowe last Sunday between Earth, Texas and Littlefield, Texas.
Not paintings, but the dreamy, otherworldly flower photography of Sunnyvale, California-based Xuebing Du – surreally lit at full bloom but only by the natural light of the sun.
