TheLobotomist

An egg case or egg capsule, often colloquially called a mermaid's purse, is the casing that surrounds the eggs of oviparous sharks, skates and chimaeras.

Egg cases typically contain one embryo, except for big skate and mottled skate egg cases, which contain up to 7 embryos.

Oviparity in sharks can be categorized as single or retained. With single oviparity, the egg cases are extruded soon after fertilization. With retained oviparity, eggs are kept within the oviduct for a period of time before depositing outside of the body as an unhatched egg case.

It is thought that viviparity is the ancestral condition for sharks, and that it evolved through the elongation of retention time of retained oviparity.

Oviparous sharks are known to regularly produce unfertilized eggs when kept in captivity without males.

Thanks to its unique orbit, NASA’s Juno mission has now revealed some of Jupiter’s best-kept secrets.

The results, published in four papers in Nature, show that the planet has surprising “polygonal” shapes of cyclones at its poles – including a pentagon at the south pole – and that its banded structure persists to depths of 3,000km.

The 125 million-year-old fossil, found in China’s Liaoning province, shows the skeletons of a prehistoric badgerlike mammal attacking a larger dinosaur called Psittacosaurus.

Scale bar equals 10 centimeters.

Phidippus clarus, also known as the Brilliant jumping spider, is a species of jumping spider (family Salticidae) found in old fields throughout eastern North America.

P. clarus is a predator, mostly consuming insects, other spiders, and other terrestrial arthropods.

It often waits upside down near the top of a plant, which may be useful for detecting prey, and then quickly jumps down before the prey can escape.

The spider is one of 60 species in the genus Phidippus and one of about 5,000 in the Salticidae, a family that accounts for about 10% of all spider species.

Awesome photo by Aaron Avila

Gravity is the primary driving force for a landslide to occur, but there are other factors affecting slope stability that produce specific conditions that make a slope prone to failure. In many cases, the landslide is triggered by a specific event (such as a heavy rainfall, an earthquake, a slope cut to build a road, and many others), although this is not always identifiable.

Landslides are frequently made worse by human development (such as urban sprawl) and resource exploitation (such as mining and deforestation). Land degradation frequently leads to less stabilization of soil by vegetation.

Additionally, global warming caused by climate change and other human impact on the environment, can increase the frequency of natural events (such as extreme weather) which trigger landslides

Your little walls can't contain me, human!

The Library of Trinity College Dublin serves Trinity College. It is a legal deposit or "copyright library", under which, publishers in Ireland must deposit a copy of all their publications there, without charge. It is the only Irish library to hold such rights for works published in the United Kingdom.

Founded in: 1592 Size: c. 7,000,000 volumes

It's so elegant!

That's probably not very safe but i'm definetly impressed

The Union Flag was originally a Royal flag. When the present design was made official in 1801, it was ordered to be flown on all the King's forts and castles, but not elsewhere.

The Shuangfeng Forest Farm witnesses frequent snowfalls and is covered with snow for most of the year. The beautiful snow scenery here attracts many visitors from at home and abroad every year.