Beautiful animal and nature photographs that’ll put a smile on your face – Part 2

Stop and smell the roses? Sometimes is helps to take the time to recognize the beauty of the world that we live in. Here is a collection of nature photographs that will surely put a smile on your face.

NASA published this stunning photograph today featuring the road that connects the Northern Cross and Southern Cross – the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy. Taken from Laguna Cejar in Northern Chile by Nicholas Buer, the photo was shot in October, just after sunset. Included in the photo are the Moon, Venus (above/left of…

This festive little critter knows how to party. It’s fancy name is Maratus volans but we prefer the more descriptive term, peacock spider (or “gliding spider”), a species of jumping spider with colorful red, blue, black, and green flap-like extensions on its abdomen that it raises for display during mating. The colorful little showboat’s artistic…

Three days ago, a white dwarf exploded in the nearby M82 galaxy (aka Messier 82, Starburst Galaxy, or the Cigar Galaxy), the closest galaxy to our own. The explosion created the closest, and brightest, supernova seen by man in over a quarter of a century. In fact, the explosion is so bright, backyard astronomers are…

Kawah Ijen, part of the Ijen volcano complex, is a group of stratovolcanoes in East Java, Indonesia. With an active crater that’s over 200 meters deep, the volcano complex is also home to the world’s largest turquoise-colored acidic lake, full of sulfuric acid, that produces a highly-unusual effect on the volcano’s lava flows. Instead of…

In 1961, during a highway construction project in northeastern Mexico, less than 200 miles from the Texas border, a pair of tracks, one left and one right, were uncovered in the Chihuahuan Desert. The tracks were excavated and taken to a local museum (Saltillo’s Museo del Desierto) for study. Now, over 50 years later, researchers…

Seemingly impossible, the idea of a nested star has been proposed before – it’s just nobody has ever found an example of the cosmic oddity. That may be about to change though. Scientists are keeping the name of the star a secret right now – at least until their peers can validate their findings –…

For the first time in history, confirmed dinosaur fossils have been found in Saudi Arabia. Rare in the Arabian Peninsula, the finding of the 72-million-year-old tail-bones of the plant-eating titanosaur and a fossilized teeth of a sharp-toothed theropod were discovered in the Adaffa formation, a pile of sandstone and conglomerates deposited during the Late Cretaceous…

New research has shown that it may be possible for information to be inherited biologically through chemical changes that occur in our DNA, possibly explaining “past memories” or reincarnation claims reported by some people. During the tests, researchers demonstrated that mice can pass on learned information about traumatic or stressful experiences, in this case avoiding…