During late autumn, Central Asia’s saiga antelopes adapt to plunging temperatures. Their summer fur turns into a woolly, white or pale coat, insulating against the cold and camouflaging them in snowy landscapes.

This transformation helps protect them from predators across their habitats in countries like Kazakhstan, Russia, and Mongolia. As spring arrives, they shed this coat, returning to their lighter summer fur.

📸 Klaus Nigge, Tim Flach, Pavel Sorokin, Karenina, and Gilev Additional credit goes to: rawrszn

One of the hundreds of elongated skulls that were discovered in 1928 at Paracas Peninsula in Peru. Cranial deformation was practiced by the Paracas civilization (800-100 BCE) by tightly wrapping the head in cloth, during the first few years of life, in order to elongate the cranium

Our Sun is a 4.5 billion-year-old yellow dwarf star – a hot glowing ball of hydrogen and helium – at the center of our solar system. It’s about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) from Earth and it’s our solar system’s only star. Without the Sun’s energy, life as we know it could not exist on our home planet.

The Sun formed in a giant, spinning cloud of gas and dust called the solar nebula. As the nebula collapsed under its own gravity, it spun faster and flattened into a disk. Most of the nebula's material was pulled toward the center to form our Sun, which accounts for 99.8% of our solar system’s mass. Much of the remaining material formed the planets and other objects that now orbit the Sun. (The rest of the leftover gas and dust was blown away by the young Sun's early solar wind.)

The Sun doesn’t have a solid surface like Earth and the other rocky planets and moons. The part of the Sun commonly called its surface is the photosphere. The word photosphere means "light sphere" – which is apt because this is the layer that emits the most visible light. It’s what we see from Earth with our eyes.

Although we call it the surface, the photosphere is actually the first layer of the solar atmosphere. It's about 250 miles thick, with temperatures reaching about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit (5,500 degrees Celsius). That's much cooler than the blazing core, but it's still hot enough to make carbon – like diamonds and graphite – not just melt, but boil. Most of the Sun's radiation escapes outward from the photosphere into space.

Like all stars, our Sun will eventually run out of energy. When it starts to die, the Sun will expand into a red giant star, becoming so large that it will engulf Mercury and Venus, and possibly Earth as well. Scientists predict the Sun is a little less than halfway through its lifetime and will last another 5 billion years or so before it becomes a white dwarf.

Ruyi Bridge (如意桥 - Rúyì qiáo) is a footbridge in Taizhou, Zhejiang, China, made up of three bridges. It is a pedestrian bridge which was built to cross the Shenxianju Valley and it features a glass-bottomed walkway. The unusual curved walkways are designed to look like a Chinese ruyi (a kind of scepter).

Abuna Yemata Guh is a monolithic church located in the Hawzen woreda of the Tigray Region, Ethiopia. It is situated at a height of 2,580 metres (8,460 ft).

It is suggested that this church was built in the 6th century. Not much is known about it. The paintings in the church are original and the dry air and lack of humidity have preserved them.

To access it, a person needs to climb a steep cliff with hand and feet holes carved into it. It is one of 35 churches in Ethiopia that is built into a high place like this.

On April 1 2023 NASA’s Curiosity rover uncovered a bizarre-looking rock formation, a images of what closely resembles dragon bones.

Curiosity successfully landed in Gale Crater on Mars on August 6, 2012, as the largest and most capable rover at the time. Since, it’s made numerous breakthroughs, such as discovering evidence of past water on Mars, as well as organic molecules that are essential for life. Both being huge first steps in finding out if Mars once had life.

Although its declining condition and the launch of the more advanced Perseverance rover have put Curiosity’s heyday behind the 11-year-old robot, it continues to capture our imagination with rock formations that look all to familiar.

"In 20 years of studying Mars, that’s the most bizarre rock I have ever seen", said Nathalie Cabrol, prominent Astrobiologist, and TED speaker. She explains that the structure gained its unique ripples “after lots of erosion,” presumably from wind.

WoodSwimmer is a new short film by engineer and stop-motion animator Brett Foxwell, who has built armatures for films such as Boxtrolls and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Created in collaboration with musician and animator bedtimes, the work follows a piece of raw wood through a milling machine, capturing its unique growth rings, knots, and weathered spots through a series of cross-sectional photographic scans. Due the speed at which the images are animated, the log’s grains begin to flow like granules of sand—shifting, mixing, and flowing in a vibrant dance that seems completely removed from its rigid material.

“Fascinated with the shapes and textures found in both newly-cut and long-dead pieces of wood, I envisioned a world composed entirely of these forms,” Foxwell told Colossal. “As I began to engage with the material, I conceived a method using a milling machine and an animation camera setup to scan through a wood sample photographically and capture its entire structure. Although a difficult and tedious technique to refine, it yielded gorgeous imagery at once abstract and very real. Between the twisting growth rings, swirling rays, knot holes, termites and rot, I found there is a lot going on inside of wood.”

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