Africa

This. Is. Earth... 335 million years ago. I wasn’t around then, but there’s just one supercontinent, Pangaea. See? Let’s watch it shift around in fast-forward. Ok here we go, it just split into two huge pieces! Australia goes this way, North and South America go that way. Africa, Asia, Europe, forming, forming... and there we go, the planet as it is today. Let’s keep going, I mean, the continents are always on the move! Over time, some of them will crash into each other, others will break apart. But that’ll take about 100 million years! Better put it on super fast-forward! 100 years from now. Humans keep spitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and the planet’s already warmed up a bunch. The world’s ocean levels have risen about 4 feet. The Bahamas? They’ve totally disappeared! 200 years from now. The Earth’s population is about 19 billion people. The climate’s gotten even warmer, we’re packed in like sardines over here! New medical tech makes it possible to live to 180! But why? Fossil fuel reserves of oil and gas... long gone. Oh, and the continents have drifted over 16 feet!

You take off from Earth and park your spacecraft somewhere near the Moon. You’re now almost 240,000 miles away from your home planet. That’s almost 100 widths of the United States. Now, you take out a giant hammer and an enormous chisel using the robotic arms of your spaceship. You place the chisel at the Earth’s North Pole and strike its head with the hammer. Earth splits open like an eggshell, and you see it... Another planet.It’s Theia. And it’s hiding inside our planet like a yolk in an egg. You’d need to go back in time 4.5 billion years to find out how it got there. This beautiful nebula will soon become our Solar System. Colored dust and various space debris are slowly coming closer toward the common center. Soon this jigsaw puzzle of debris becomes too heavy and dense. The temperature inside the giant is rising. Soon, it gets so high that it triggers a nuclear chain reaction.

Well, it’s that time of year again: Spring cleaning! Making your way outside, you grab the duster and broom to get rid of all those cobwebs on your windows. They don’t stand a chance this time! Removing one cobweb after the other, you suddenly notice some weird shaped mud stuck under the eaves and porch! What’s this?It suddenly dawns on you: these have to be Mud Dauber Wasp nests! You’re probably thinking there’s a swarm of them around with so many nests being side by side! Luckily, Mud Dauber Wasps are solitary insects. Phew! All those little mud huts are filled with paralyzed spiders. Sometimes, even up to 500 spiders can be trapped in these lockers, just waiting for the wasp young to hatch.

Ostriches lay the biggest eggs on earth. Officially. On average, one ostrich egg is about 6 inches long and 5 inches wide and weighs roughly two times the weight of a Basketball. Yikes! Makes you wonder, does the Ostrich hen ever complain?

In 2016, scientists decided to visit the widest part of the Atlantic Ocean, between Africa and South America. It’s kind of lonely there. They went days without seeing a single plane or ship. It was mostly just dolphins and whales swimming by. They were in the middle of nowhere, so why?They were floating right above one of the most important geological spots on Earth, the mid-Atlantic ridge. It’s where two monster tectonic plates meet. Tectonic plates are massive jigsaw pieces that are constantly moving, even though we usually can’t feel them. They form Earth’s crust and, in this case, meet beneath the Atlantic Ocean.

If you were to look at Earth from the International Space Station at night, you’d be able to see the light of the cities from space! That’s how big our impact as a species is. There are huge multicultural cities all around the world. We’ve built buildings SO high, they nearly disappear out of sight. Cities are built from the ground up for thousands and thousands of people to live in.

Henna has a rich history spanning over 5000 years in Pakistan, India, Africa, and the Middle East. Originally used for its cooling properties in hot desert regions, a paste made from henna was applied to the palms and soles. Later on, henna’s temporary staining effect led to its widespread use as a decorative art accessible to people from various socioeconomic backgrounds. And it wasn’t long until this form of art became popular amongst the western world and our favorite stars.

Have you ever noticed how insects seem to get bigger in certain parts of the world? Take Australia and the Amazon rainforest, for example. They’re notorious for having some of the largest and creepiest crawlies around. What’s the deal with these hotspots of insect activity? Warmth plays a part in insect growth, but it’s not the only factor at play. You won’t get bugs that large out in the desert, for instance, despite the heat. The real secret lies in their access to water. In tropical and subtropical environments, there’s usually plenty of moisture to go around, which means a year-round supply of delicious snacks.

You find yourself in Africa. Land of unique wildlife, home to a great variety of cultures and languages, and, first and foremost, host to the world’s largest hot desert: the Sahara.

Ever wanted to taste a salad from space? Well, you might be able to one day. Scientists have taken soil from the Moon and successfully grown plants in it! Back in the late 1960s and early 70s, it was the first time in our history we set foot on a surface that wasn’t Earth. During the several trips to the Moon in the Apollo program, astronomers brought back some rocks and soil to study. Some scientists knew it would be a good idea to preserve this soil, stick some seeds in it, and see what would happen. They didn’t do anything at first, aware that decades into the future, they’d have more advanced equipment to conduct these studies. The researchers named the lunar soil “regolith” and used the seeds of a particular plant called blah-bah-blah-baa — you can read it here [Arabidopsis thaliana] which is found in Asia, Europe, and parts of Africa. It’s similar to such veggies as cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and broccoli. Yum.

Celebrities often engage in humanitarian work to make a positive impact on the world. The non-profit work of movie stars serves to inspire and motivate others to contribute to meaningful causes and make a positive impact on the world. For a long time, Brad Pitt has been known as a great philanthropist, but one of his biggest acts of kindness went unnoticed for several years.

Our planet sure is full of mysterious, unbelievable places. But here’s a list of spots that look like they came straight out of a sci-fi movie. I bet you’ll be googling them later to see if they are truly real or not! If I asked you to think of the coldest place on Earth, you’d probably say it’s somewhere in Antarctica or the North Pole, right? But what if I asked you to name the coldest cities on Earth? One where people actually live. Well, think Winnipeg in Canada, which once got as cold as the uninhabited planet of Mars. It so happens that on one of its warmest days, Mars’ surface temperature reached a maximum of −20 F.

Poison dart frogs are one of the most toxic species on our planet. They come in a range of bright colors: blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. And that’s not just to show-off! It’s a kinda message to all the predators that might want to come after them — “I’m toxic so you better stay away and don’t try to eat me!”. The golden poison dart frog, for example, has so much poison it could finish 20,000 mice.

Alright. You’re scuba diving in the ocean, watching corals and colorful fish flitting by, when suddenly an enormous shadow appears above you. You look up and see a massive creature approaching you, its mouth a gaping abyss... Relax, just stay still and you’ll be fine.

Planet Earth is full of wondrous phenomena. I mean, can you imagine going for a midnight swim and suddenly finding yourself surrounded by a glowing blue haze? As if there were huge pillars of light coming out of the seabed directly toward the surface! This experience is rare, but it sure is magical.

Let’s try something together: open any world map you have available. It can be the one you find in your bookcase or even an online version. Take a look at the vast area covered by water. That’s 71% of the Earth’s surface! And all that is salt water in the world’s ocean. There aren’t any borders between the four oceans we’ve all come to know, but oceanographers and the world’s countries did traditionally split these waters into four distinct regions: the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, and Arctic oceans.

Amongst the swamps lives a strange bird with a Dutch clog for a beak. It screeches a high pitch whine, notifying other shoebills that this is its area when it comes to food. Its eerie calls add to the surrounding roars of dinosaurs in the distance. It’s not hunting dinosaurs, though, of course, but snakes, fish, lizards, and frogs amongst the reeds.

Babies are born without the ability to care for themselves and rely on their mothers for safety, nutrition, and emotional bonding. However, mothers also have responsibilities outside of caring for their children, such as working to support their families and communities. To reconcile these competing demands, mothers have developed various solutions throughout history and across cultures. That’s why mothers deserve our full appreciation. Let’s see how mothers handle things in the following 8 countries today.

Jon Bon Jovi is a legend and a human being who cares. He and his team were able to open 3 community restaurants that are there for people who are hungry and who can dine for free. In a past story, we covered the opening of 2 restaurants. The JBJ Foundation has not only helped people but also touched the hearts of citizens worldwide. Here are some of the latest updates about the foundation.

Ok, so right after being produced, plastic water bottles aren’t the size you buy at the store. Even a gallon water bottle starts its life as a small tube. Later, it gets heated, inflated, and shaped into the bottle you know. Boy, I can relate to the heated and inflated part.

BOOM! It was an epic space explosion that made scientists’ hair stand on end when they discovered it in February 2020! Its size and power are enormous even by cosmic standards...We set our destination to a group of galaxies in the Giraffe Constellation. If our rockets could fly at the speed of light — as fast as it takes the light from the bulb in your lamp to reach your eye when you switch it on (zoom, instant!) — it’d take 2.6 BILLION years to get to where this explosion occurred in space.2.6 billion years. A lot’s happened in that time here on Earth. That long ago, dinosaurs weren’t even around yet! Primordial life was just leaving the ocean and heading on land!

The world of nature never stops amazing us with its mind-blowing facts. For example, specific trees growing in Africa can warn each other of danger, goats have accents, and some buffalo can actually make decisions by voting. And besides these curious facts, sometimes nature even creates things that not only surprise us but also give us giggles.

We live in a very diverse world. If we talk numbers, scientists put the total number of species on Earth at 8.7 million and stated it would take us another 1,000 years to catalog them all. Of course, some of the creatures in the animal kingdom have such weird features, they might as well not be of Earth.

Researchers claim that the closer 2 countries are to each other, the more stereotypes they develop about one another. The fact that it seems as if we’ve acquired some sort of expectation about virtually every nation out there is probably telling how interconnected the world around us is. We hear those clichés so often that we eventually stop questioning them.