World's Most Beautiful Trees Photography - One Big Photo. The Portland Japanese Garden is a traditional Japanese garden occupying 5.5 acres (22,000 m²), located within Washington Park in the west hills of Portland, Oregon, USA.
Photo by: unknown Huge 750 years old sequoia tree, California. Photo by: Michael Nichols Kiss under a cherry blossom tree. Photo by: Korri Crowley Yellow autumn in Central Park, New York. Natural tree tunnel, California. This is not a painting, dead trees park, Namibia. Amazing angel oak tree, Charleston. Black roots on red leaves. Why the mantis shrimp is awesome. Guess which one.
SCORE 123 Wisdom. SCORE 154 The passive aggressive door-holding game. SCORE 87 Other comb-over options. Jacob's Well, Wimberley, Texas. Jacob’s Well is a significant karstic spring, the largest perennial spring in the Texas Hill Country.
It flows from the most extensive underwater cave in Texas, opening in the bed of Cypress Creek, a few miles north of Wimberley, Texas.The twelve foot (four meter) diameter mouth of the cave serves as a popular swimming and water recreation spot for the local land owners whose properties adjoin Cypress Creek. From the opening in the creek bed, Jacob’s Well descends vertically for about thirty feet (ten meters), continuing from there at an angle as a series of chambers separated by narrow, often deeply silted and unstable necks, ultimately reaching a depth of at least one hundred and twenty feet (forty meters). From the dawn of recorded history until the modern era, the Trinity Aquifer-fed natural artesian spring gushed water from the mouth of the cave and as much as thirty feet (ten meters) into the air.
At least eight divers have lost their lives while exploring Jacob’s Well. Vast fossil bed found in Rockies. What intrigued Jean-Bernard Caron was the way the dark stone sparkled in the sunlight.
What thrilled him was the reason: every sparkle was the glint of an ancient eyeball shining back at him across half a billion years of time. The abundance of those eyes, along with the preserved remains of thousands of specimens that come with them, speaks to the spectacular richness of a newly documented fossil site in the Canadian Rockies. “This is a new motherlode,” said Dr. Rumblings From the Massive Black Hole at the Center of our Galaxy.
Rumblings at the Galactic Center Left to themselves, black holes are almost completely inert.
They turn ferocious only when they encounter any outside material, which gets swept into a rapidly orbiting swirl, or accretion disk, just outside the event horizon. As that disk spirals inward, it grows tremendously hot and radiates intensely. The fact that Sagittarius A* is currently so dim indicates that it must be on a starvation diet, with only a trickle of material leaking in. But what happens, Clavel wondered, when it is feeding time at the galactic center? In a new paper published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, Clavel identified those flickers as “light echoes” of some long-ago event.
By meticulously analyzing the changing pattern of illumination, Clavel and company deduced that Sagittarius A* had experienced not one but two separate outbursts in the past few centuries. America's Wildlife Resource. 670107main_van_gogh_from_space. The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Sewanee’s Forest. The western escarpment of the Cumberland Plateau, seen from Piney Point, Sewanee, TN. David Haskell observed one square meter of forest here. Specifically, this small patch of forest sits on the slope at the center of the photo, just around the ridge. (credit: David G. Haskell) Thoreau went to the woods to suck out all the marrow of life.
I went to the forest seeking a new way to experience the natural world. So, I watched a small patch of leaves and jumbled rocks tucked in a notch on a wooded slope. The Forest Unseen, published by Viking/Penguin. On almost every visit, the forest surprised me with interesting creatures (scuttling shrews, waddling salamanders, peculiar mushrooms) or ecological interactions (bees covered in pink pollen, writhing parasitic worms, ants wrestling with caterpillars).
The Urban Gardens Daily. 6 Wild Tricks of Earth's Complicated Atmosphere. Dry, gusty Santa Ana winds fanned a four-day wildfire in Southern California in 2008, contributing to this tornadolike fire whirl that appeared near homes in Yorba Linda.
Fire whirls arise when superheated air above a wildfire drives strong updrafts and downdrafts that get sheared by the wind, causing them to twist into a vortex that funnels flames upward. Fortunately, most of these infernal twisters die out quickly, although some—such as the “dragon twist” that ripped through Tokyo in 1923 in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake, killing 44,000 people—can grow lethally large. For more than a century, witnesses have reported nighttime sightings of brief, glowing tendrils, halos, and streaks around clouds. Scientists were skeptical until a group of researchers captured one on camera in 1989. As it turns out, weird glows—now known as transient luminous events, or TLEs—really do happen above thunderstorms.