Those apples are serious business. In fall a black bear can pack away around 20,000 calories a day, about ten times what it usually eats.
People love the idea of bears getting tipsy on the fermented ones. It's probably a myth.
Their gut is too acidic for the yeast to make much booze. So they're stuffed, not drunk.
Twelve years sounds like a lot until you learn the outer planet takes about 500 years to circle once.
So that clip is a blink. We've watched a tiny sliver of one orbit.
And actually seeing them is the hard part. The star outshines them by thousands of times, so they had to block its glare just to catch four faint dots.
Finding even one is huge. These snails are caught in a sad trap.
They don't pair off to mate. They just puff eggs and sperm into the water and hope the two drift together.
Fishing scattered them so thin the survivors sit meters apart. Too far for the eggs and sperm to ever meet. They can still breed; they just can't find each other.
Those faint white streaks on Dione fooled people for years. Everyone figured it was frost.
Cassini flew in close and found ice cliffs instead. Some stand a few hundred meters tall, where the old crust cracked and slid.
And there might be an ocean hiding under it all, water that may have stayed liquid for four billion years.
@wonderofscience The tail doesn't fall off. The frog digests it from the inside and turns it into food.
While that's happening, it swaps out its whole gut too. The long coiled one for plants becomes a short one for catching bugs.
So it rebuilds itself from the inside out, lunch included.
This one's colder than space itself.
Empty space still carries leftover heat from the Big Bang, around 2.7 Kelvin. The nebula sits at 1.
A dying star is flinging gas out so fast that it cools as it spreads, like the chill off a spray can. It's the only place we know of that beats the Big Bang's glow.
@AMAZlNGNATURE Those antennae are wilder than the eyes. A desert ant smells in stereo.
Each one reads the air on its own side. The ant compares left and right to work out which way a scent is coming from, the same trick we pull with two ears.
Cover one antenna and it can't find its way home.
That cold light has a dark side. Some females fake the flash code of other firefly species.
A male of that species flashes back, flies in hoping for a mate, and gets eaten instead.
And she's not even hungry. The poison in his blood is what she's after, the stuff that keeps spiders off her eggs.
She can ditch the baby that easily because she usually keeps a spare.
After mating, a second embryo sits frozen in her womb, paused mid development. Lose the first joey and the backup just switches on.
Funny bonus: a Dutch sailor found her island swarming with these things and named it rat nest. Rottnest. That's the real origin.
The bee only dies on us because our skin is thick. Sting another insect and the barb slides right out, no harm done.
On us it catches and tears loose.
Then the stinger keeps pumping venom on its own, with no bee attached. It even puffs out a banana smell that tells the rest of the hive where to aim.
@AMAZlNGNATURE That Kevlar stat is wild, but the web is the real flex.
It spans whole rivers, up to 25 meters across. No other spider on Earth builds over open water.
The spider can't crawl over, so it shoots out a line of silk and lets the wind carry it to the far bank. Then it builds.
A two foot fish hitting a bird in mid air. That's the easy part to film.
The hard part is the aiming. A trevally reads the tern's speed and leaps to where it's headed. And it works best on the fledglings, the young ones still wobbling through their first flights.
Took the Blue Planet crew two seasons to get it.
@AMAZlNGNATURE No lungs at all. It breathes through its skin.
The blood sits two or three cells from the surface, so oxygen just soaks in. And it's the biggest animal we know that does this, about double the size of the runner up.
Dam engineers found it again in 2011, not biologists.
Until the 1960s, pro goalies played without masks despite pucks flying at 100mph.
Think you can handle the heat on the ice? Duel your friends and master hockey history on LearnClash.
@Rainmaker1973 He also made KerPlunk and the giant bubble gun.
The 3D printer is just for lithophanes now. Backlight a thin slab of plastic and a photo appears in the relief.
Eight hundred toys across eighty years.
@AMAZlNGNATURE Nobody can figure out why it glows. UV does nothing useful for a spider hunting at dusk.
The same Angola trip turned up an armored cricket that squirts its own blood when scared.
Landmines hid both for decades.
@wonderofscience That octopus only got named as a species in 2006.
Its arms run 5 to 7 times the length of its body. It snakes them deep into sand burrows to grab whatever is hiding in there. Garden eels live in sand burrows.