12 June 1817. The earliest form of bicycle without pedals, known as the “Dandy Horse” was driven in public by its German inventor Baron Karl von Drais before a crowd in Mannheim. He completed an 8-9 mile round trip in a quarter of the usual walking time.
There is a tree in Japan that has stood for over 1,000 years.
At Sairenji Temple in Ibaraki Prefecture, this ancient ginkgo bursts into brilliant gold each autumn, transforming the temple grounds into a breathtaking sea of yellow.
📹Syoo. Jp
The Dirty Dozen was controversial upon its release due to its level of violence and the theme of "prisoners recruited for suicide missions"—a rather daring move for war films of that era.
To enhance realism, many training and action scenes were filmed with high intensity, creating a tense atmosphere among the actors on set that felt more like a real military setting than a typical entertainment film.
🎬 The Dirty Dozen (1967)
The famous Fibonacci spiral pattern shows up everywhere in nature including flowers, pinecones, hurricanes, and even huge spiral galaxies in space.
Here's a nice (partial) visual recap of where you can find the "secret code of nature".
[🎞️ xamantracura]
Who could have imagined that this microscopic robot, within all of us, would evolve from the primordial chaos of the ancient Earth?
V-ATPase: a spinning molecular motor in every cell, billions of years old. This tiny rotary machine (part ATP-powered engine, part proton pump) acidifies organelles, powers neurotransmission, enables bone building...
From our ancient prokaryotic ancestors to the neurons firing right now in your brain, this conserved nanomachine keeps the primordial spark of life humming. Nature's engineer was way ahead of us.
I created this image by adapting the image here: https://t.co/NPcE1Vus4U
On this day in 1966, a routine photo op turned into one of the most devastating tragedies in military aviation history. Here's a short video of what happened to Prototype No. 2 of the North American XB-70 Valkyrie.
A telescope ranch in Texas lets people store high-end telescope setups under dark skies, where the roofs roll back at night and owners can remotely control their equipment from anywhere in the world to avoid light pollution.
The rise of remote astronomy has reshaped amateur astrophotography, allowing enthusiasts to capture deep-space images without ever leaving home. Facilities like these are typically placed in exceptionally dark regions—often Bortle Class 1 or 2 skies—where the Milky Way can cast faint shadows and the night sky reveals thousands more stars than are visible from suburban environments.
Many telescope ranches now offer infrastructure such as high-speed internet, automated weather systems, backup power, and robotic mounts capable of tracking celestial objects with extreme precision for hours at a time. Users can remotely schedule imaging sessions and collect data on distant galaxies, nebulae, and star clusters while located hundreds or even thousands of miles away.
A fully equipped astrophotography setup can easily surpass $20,000 once telescopes, cameras, mounts, filters, and observatory access are included. For dedicated imagers, operating under consistently dark skies often produces far superior results compared to using identical equipment in light-polluted cities.
Today, more than 80% of the global population lives under light-polluted skies, and roughly a third can no longer see the Milky Way from where they live.
A fight between two mice on a London Underground platform
The photo, taken by Sam Rowley, won the Wildlife Photographer of the Year People's Choice Award in 2020
Belgian visual artist Carole Louis is the creator of "Through Thousands," a sculpture constructed from thousands of plastic straws.
Like fiber optics, basically thousands of tiny “straws” guiding light across huge distances at near-light speed.
My father was photographed standing outside this very building in 1962, he was attending the TUC conference in Blackpool.
In a few minutes time I will walk on to the main stage and address water industry workers and delegates at the GMB Union annual Congress. @GMB_union
He would have been very proud.
There is a forest in China made of stone.
The Stone Forest (Shilin) in Yunnan province is an extraordinary landscape where thousands of towering limestone pillars rise from the ground like a petrified woodland, some reaching heights of 20 to 50 meters.
Approximately 270 million years ago, this area was a shallow tropical seabed where thick layers of limestone formed from marine life. Tectonic uplift later exposed the rock, and over millions of years, mildly acidic rainwater carved the stone through a slow dissolution process known as karstification.
The result is one of the world’s most spectacular examples of pinnacle karst topography a surreal “forest” of jagged, majestic stone formations