World’s Strangest

The aye-aye, an odd-looking lemur indigenous to Madagascar, has a very unusual extra-long middle finger that it uses to forage for food. Scientists have discovered that the unusual finger is even more unusual, as the [...]

Do you have five minutes to see what Earth really looks like? You need to watch the time lapse video below. It shows spectacular low-Earth-orbit views of our planet — the northern (and southern) lights are patches of swirling electric-green fog, our cities look like patches of fire, and thunderstorms flicker and twinkle [...]

Tonight, prepare to be a little grossed out: videos of carnivorous plants eating stuff. Not for the faint of heart! Sundew vs. Fruit Fly Timelapse Taken over six hours. Venus Flytrap vs. Slug The audio is just buzzing, making it even more bizarre. Venus Flytrap vs. Fly Tense. Audio is bad/unimportant. Venus Flytrap vs. Butterfly and Frog That might actually [...]

Just try to navigate this massive stone forest in Madagascar.The Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park in Madagascar is home to a number of critically endangered lorises, which might actually be a good thing -who is going to brave traveling though this terrifying area just to poach a loris? Link

The following is an article from Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader. Here at the BRI,  we’re huge fans of Richard Zak’s books. They’re great bathroom reading. He has a new book coming out: The Pirate Hunter-The True Story of Captain Kidd. Here’s a teaser from his masterpiece, An Underground Education. WORKIN’ FOR THE MAN While the popular [...]

Self-proclaimed “recreational mathemusician” Vi Hart has posted an excellent short film explaining the science and mathematics of sound, frequency, and pitch. Basically Hart shows us how the chromatic scale was originally measured, how musical instruments work, and how we hear sound. It’s playful and smart — exactly what you need to watch right [...]

There’s an amazing collaboration between man and insect on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, a cloth woven purely from the silk of over a million Golden Orb spiders. This magnificent textile, naturally golden in color and seemingly imbued with it’s own luminescence, took over four years to make after eighty gatherers spent five [...]

Thanks to the animated film, Madagascar, most children and their parents are familiar with the Ring-Tailed lemur. But there are many species–most endangered–that deserve a little attention, too. BTW, “group” is the official collective noun for lemurs, but I think it should be something different, like “prank” or “chatter”. How do I go about getting [...]

Photo: Piotr Naskrecki – via LifeScience Image of the Day Talkin’ bout the devil – here’s a picture of the Satanic Leaf-Tailed Gecko (previously on Neatorama): The satanic leaf-tailed gecko (Uroplatus phantasticus) is the smallest of 12 species of bizarre-looking leaf-tailed geckos. The nocturnal creature has extremely cryptic camouflage so it can hide out in forests in [...]

“Flowers wilt. Chocolates melt. Roaches are forever.” That’s the advice offered by the Bronx Zoo in conjunction with their limited-time Valentine’s Day offer: How better to express your appreciation for that special someone than to name a Madagascar hissing cockroach after them? Naming a roach in honor of someone near and dear to your heart shows that [...]