Mr. Tesla held various electric engineering jobs throughout Europe before moving to the United States in 1884. Landing in New York City with just a few cents in his pocket, he found employment with Thomas Edison thanks to a recommendation letter that, if truly written, stands as one of the best in history—Charles Batechelor, a contemporary of Edison and a talented engineer and inventor, is supposed to have written to Edison:

“I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man.”

While working for Edison, Mr. Tesla made major contributions in engine and electrical generation and transmission technology. He and Edison had a falling out and he started his own company in 1886. He continued plowing through science, technology and engineering, making huge leaps in electricity generation (he was transmitting power wirelessly to street lights in a time when most of the world got around on foot or by horse), radio transmission (he built the world’s first transmitter), and computer science (he invented the AND gate, whose cousin the NAND gate forms the base of all that is possible with computers).

Volumes have been and will be written about the breadth and width of the contributions Nikola Tesla made to our world (a good case is brilliantly put forth here by The Oatmeal), but I’ll focus on a few of my favorites here (read a full list of his ~300 patents here). Here are three amazing things invented by Nikola Tesla.

The electronic logic gate
All digital technology, from the computer or smart phone that you’re using to read this to the microwaves that heat up our leftovers to the pacemakers that help regulate irregular heartbeats is built on a sea of 1s and 0s—the binary building blocks of our modern life. Zoom down far enough onto a circuit board and you find a network of connected “logic gates,” tiny little structures that pass and regulate electric current in different ways. You can imagine each gate having a gate keeper that allows the current through if the conditions are right. An AND gate will allow electricity to flow (which is seen as being “on” or 1) only if all of its inputs are flowing with electricity (no electricity is taken as “off” or 0). An OR gate will allow the electricity to flow if at least one of its inputs is “on.” In addition to AND and OR, there are also NOR, NAND, XOR, XNOR and NOT gates. These handful of logic gates can be assembled to do any kind of computation (in fact you can actually build any other gate using just the NAND gate) possible.

Computer chips can easily have billions of microscopic logic gates, all connected in a way that allows them to do the work we design them to do. Logic gates move the electric signals that we abstract our lives on to. As you are reading this article, an untold number of logic gates are clicking on and off to make it happen. There is a connection of logic gates between your eye and my typing fingers, an almost unimaginable number of OR, AND, and XOR gates channeling electric intention to drive the computer I am writing on, the servers and routers that channel my words around the internet, through to the computer, cell phone, or refrigerator that you’re reading this story on.

Tesla invented the logic gate as part of wirelessly controlled miniature boat that he unveiled in 1898. His invention, which he called a “teleautomaton,” was the first machine built capable of being controlled wirelessly with radio waves. His need to control the signals between the boat and the wirelessly connected driver lead him to devise a part that would toggle an electric signal one way or another depending on a set of prescribed circumstances (if all incoming signals are “on,” toggle “on,” else toggle “off”). Tesla’s logic gate was refined, shrunk and propagated throughout the world, but at the most abstract level it hasn’t changed a bit.

The wireless transfer of electricity and information
As the calendar clicked over from 1899 to 1900, Tesla was busy planning the design and construction of a tower that would, if it worked as he thought it would, revolutionize our world, bringing wireless communication and electricity to anyone on the planet more than a hundred years before the iPhone. Tesla was given 200 acres of land in Long Island by James S. Warden, a rich lawyer, banker and land developer, to use to build laboratories, work space and the Wardenclyffe Tower, his most ambitious project at the time. The Wardenclyffe Tower was designed to transmit both electricity and information through the air, allowing any device equipped with an antennae to operate without being physically plugged into the energy grid and to gain access to a worldwide communications network that sounds eerily similar to our modern day system. In an 1908 interview, Tesla described his proposed system:

As soon as completed, it will be possible for a business man in New York to dictate instructions, and have them instantly appear in type at his office in London or elsewhere. He will be able to call up, from his desk, and talk to any telephone subscriber on the globe, without any change whatever in the existing equipment. An inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of an eminent man of science, or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant. In the same manner any picture, character, drawing, or print can be transferred from one to another place. Millions of such instruments can be operated from but one plant of this kind. More important than all of this, however, will be the transmission of power, without wires, which will be shown on a scale large enough to carry conviction.

Tesla raised funds for his project from investors like J.P. Morgan and John Jacob Astor, then began construction. The Wardenclyffe Tower was nearly completed in 1904 when most of Tesla’s investors withdrew their financial support. Tesla was unable to raise more money and the facility was abandoned by 1911.

Wardenclyffe has been in the news recently thanks to a campaign lead by the popular internet cartoonist The Oatmeal, who is raising money through the crowdfunding site Indiegogo to purchase the Wardenclyffe grounds. The Oatmeal, responding to the possibility that the land could be commercially developed, rallied the fundraising campaign around the idea of turning it into a museum dedicated to telling Nikola Tesla’s story. As of the time of this article’s publishing, $TK has already been raised toward the $850 thousand goal (there is a matching state grant).

Tesla Oscillator
In 1898, Tesla claimed he had built and deployed a small oscillating device that, when attached to his office and operating, nearly shook down the building and everything around it. His oscillator was a small device weighing just a few pounds that would create countering force on a fune-tunable level (think of a free-standing piston popping back and forth that you could control with a dial). Tesla said that he was able to tune the timing of the oscillator to the natural harmonic frequency of the building in such of way that each small oscillator motion added just a little more energy to the wave of flex in the building. Given enough little pushes, even the largest structure could be shaken apart. Make the pushes big enough and maybe even the ground itself could be shaken apart.

That’s what Tesla said happened—his device produced waves of energy that spread to the buildings around his office, causing people to panic at the unyielding earth quake. Realizing the potential for large scale havoc, Tesla said he took a hammer to the oscillator to disable it, instructing his employees to claim ignorance to the cause of the tremors if asked.

Sadly, Tesla never properly demonstrated his oscillator (he told the story of the shaken building years after it was to have happened) and eventually sank into financial ruin as his health and mental clarity degraded with age.

The TV show “Mythbusters” spent some time exploring the idea of the Tesla Oscillator and were able to build a small, 6-lb. oscillating device that created strong vibrations throughout a large steel bridge. It’s not a hard jump to the idea of a larger device (what happens at 25 lbs., 50 lbs., 100 lbs.?) being able to shake loose the bridge. What would happen with a large, 1,000-lb. oscillator? 10,000 lbs.? A better question might be “how much does the oscillator have to weigh in order to cause a proper earthquake?”

Main image credit: Rex Herbert; logic gate credit: Stefan506; Wardenclyffe remains credit: Americasroof; oscillator credit: FreeInfoSociety.com

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And yet, as terrible a thing that war, and the military institutions that support it, has been for humanity and the world-at-large, it remains a truth that many important discoveries have been made in pursuit of a better way to kill the guy on the other side of the battlefield. A lot of medical innovations arose from the carnage of the American Civil War as doctors searched for ways to fight infection and successfully treat scores of horrific wounds. World War 2 provided a huge boost to our understanding of physics as some of the world’s richest nations poured rivers of money into splitting the atom. That same war provided a similar boost to research into computers as many of the field’s top minds threw themselves into projects like cracking the German’s secret Enigma code.

Here are four good things that we can thank war for.

Microwave popcorn
The microwave oven was invented just after World War 2 when engineer Percy Spencer noticed that a chocolate bar had melted in his pocket after he stood in front of a magnetron, a piece of equipment used in radar. Modern day radar can be traced back to American Robert M. Page, who was working for the Navy when he first demonstrated a working model in 1934. Radar was further fined throughout the war to the point when Spencer made his discovery. One of the first foods that Spencer tried heating by microwave was popcorn. It took a couple of decades for the microwave oven to find its way into middle class homes, but by the time it did, microwave popcorn was right there alongside.

Second Law of Thermodynamics
The laws of thermodynamics (there are four of them) are fundamental ideas that describe how temperature, energy, and entropy behave under different conditions. They are form the base of much of our understanding of How Things Work while operating quietly all around us.

The second law of thermodynamics states that temperature, pressure, and chemical potential tend to equalize towards entropy in systems not in thermal equilibrium—put a hot block of wood next to a warm block of wood and the heat will “move” from the hot block to the warm as the system trends towards entropic equilibrium, or when both blocks are the same temperature.

This fundamental law was developed by Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, a French military engineer who has been called the “father of thermodynamics” for his contributions. He noticed that, in a thermodynamic system, like an engine, heat is always created (and lost) in the process. That heat represents the energy that transitioned from a higher state of order (when it was trapped as fuel) to a lower state (the heat). He found the process to be irreversible and formalized it into writings that lead to our more refined understanding of the second law of thermodynamics today.

GPS
The Global Positioning System, better known as GPS, is made up of a network of satellites sitting in geosynchronous orbit around the earth and allows users to accurately pinpoint their location using compatible devices. GPS has become an indispensable cog in the complex system that is our modern world. Airlines rely on it to orchestrate their routes, shipping companies use it to track and manage their cargo, and I used it last week to find my way to a friend’s wedding.

GPS was built by the U.S. military upon a technological backbone that included systems they developed during World War 2. The military was experimenting and using satellites for navigation since the 60s. In 1994, the 24th satellite of the first GPS system available to civilians was launched and we’ve been using it to find our way around the world ever since.

Synthetic Rubber
The world’s cars ride on a sea of synthetic rubber. Every tire in the world is made using one form of synthetic rubber or another, a technology that developed by Allied scientists during World War 2. By 1944, twice as much synthetic rubber was being made in U.S. factories as all of the world’s pre-war production of natural rubber (made by processing sap from the rubber tree). By the end of the war, synthetic rubber was the go-to material for tires.

The use of synthetic rubber permeates our lives today and can be seen in the nose pads of eye glasses and in the and hinges of medical equipment. We use it to make wet suits and spatulas, playgrounds and sporting equipment.

Main photo credit: Steven Depolo/Flickr; popcorn photo credit: Howard Cheng; thermodynamics graphic credit: アリオト; GPS photo credit: Guyver8400; rubber photo credit: The Car Spy

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But whether it’s been a few years or a few decades since your last math class, it’s never too late to polish up your number skills. Besides the mental workout that running through a good math problem can provide, knowing a few simple tricks for how to manipulate values in different wants can help make everyday tasks quicker and easier. Spend a little time reading over our list and practicing the techniques (practice makes perfect!) we highlighted so you can bypass the calculator the next time you need to pull some numbers together.

Math!

Multiply any number by 11

This trick is great because it doesn’t require any multiplication—with just a few simple additions, you can calculate the product of any number and 11. Grab a piece of paper and a pencil and run through this process a few times with some numbers until you have it down.

- Step one, write down the problem. Let’s do this one with 11 x 81,775.

“11 x 81,775″

- Start by writing down the last number in the larger number.

“5″

- Now add the last two numbers in the larger number. Write the sum down next to the previously written number.

“7+5 = 12″

- Since there the answer is two digit, we’ll carry the one over to the next summation. Write the “2″ from the “12″ down next to the “5″ you just wrote down.

1             <- “1″ carried over from the “12″
“25″

- Now add the next pair to the left in the larger number. In 81,775, that’s “77″.

“7 + 7 = 14″

Add the 1 carried over from the previous summation.

“14 + 1 = 15″

- Once again, write the “5″ from the “15″ down next to the previously written down “25″ and carry the “1″.

1             <- “1″ carried over from the “15″
“525″

- Keep repeating this process until you get to the first two digits in the larger number.

- The next pair of numbers in “81,775″ after “77″ is “17″.

“1 + 7 = 8″

Add the 1 carried over from the previous summation.

“8 + 1 = 9″

Write the “9″ down next to the previously written “525″.

“9525″

- The next pair of numbers in “81,775″ after “17″ is “81″.

“8 + 1 = 9″

Write the “9″ down next to the previously written “9525″.

“99525″

- Once you hit the last pair to the right, in this case, “81″, you just need to add the first digit of the large number (“8″ in the case of “81,775″) onto the previously written down “99525″ for your final answer.

“899,525″

81,775 * 11 = 899,525

Problems to try yourself:

• 11 x 2,394

• 11 x 847,332

• 11 x 1,295,372,983

Square a two digit number ending in 5

Multiplying a two digit number by itself is super easy when it ends in 5.

- Start by writing down the number you want to square.

“35″

- Take the digit in the tens column, in the case of “35″ it’s “3″, and add 1 to it.

“3 + 1 = 4″

- Multiply the sum you get by the digit in the tens place (“3″).

“4 x 3 = 12″

- Write down “25″ after the product you just got and you are done!

“1225″

“35 x 35 = 1225″

Problems to try yourself:

• 25 x 25

• 95 x 95

• 75 x 75

Multiply large numbers together (up to 20 x 20)

This is a great trick that you can do in your head by keeping track of just a few numbers and running some easy single digit multiplications. If you want to multiply any two two-digit numbers together, just follow these steps.

- Start by writing down the problem you want to do. We’ll go with “14 x 19″ in this example. Always frame the problem with the larger of the two numbers being multiplied together on top of the smaller number.

19
x 14

-  Highlight the top two digits on the number on top and the ones digit on the number on bottom.

19
x 14

to get “19″ and “4″. Add those numbers together.

“19 + 4 = 23″

- Add a zero to that sum.

“23, add a 0 = 230″

- Multiply the two digits in the singles spaces together. From “84″ we get “4″ and from “23″ we get “3.

“4×9 = 36″

- Add the sum you get to the “870″ from above for your final answer!

“36 + 230 = 266″

“14 x 19 = 266.”

Problems to try yourself:

• 16 x 12 =

• 18 x 19 =

• 14 x 16 =

Multiply any number by 9

9 is my favorite number and you can do some really fun things when you multiply it by other numbers. Here is a quick and easy way to multiply any single digit number by 9 (in case you don’t have it memorized, which you should).

- We’ll go with “9 x 7″ for this example. Start by subtracting 1 from the number you are multiplying by 9.

7 – 1 = 6.

- Write that down as the tens digit for your answer. To get the ones digit, just subtract the digit in the tens place from 9.

“9 – 6 = 3″

- Write down the answer in the ones spot and you’re done!

“9 x 7 = 63″

Problems to try yourself:

• 9 x 9 =

• 9 x 8 =

• 9 x 4 =

Another cool property of a summation of any number by nine is that the digits of the answer, when summed up themselves down to a single digit, will be either 3, 6, or 9. For example,

9 x 4,934 = 44,406.

44,406—>  4 + 4 + 4 + 0 + 6 = 18 (Note, 18 is divisible by 9)

18—> 1 + 8 = 9

Let’s do another.

9 x 238,763,895,675 = 2,148,875,061,075

2,148,875,061,075 —> 2 + 1 + 4 + 8 + 8 + 7 + 5 + 0 + 6 + 1 + 0 + 7 + 5 = 54

54 —> 5 + 4 = 9

Multiply any number by 5

5 is half of 10, which gives it some interesting properties that can be used to multiply any number against it. We’re going to show two examples—the first with an even number, the second with an odd number. Our first example is “244 x 5″.

- Start by dividing the number you’re dividing by 5 in half.

Half of 244 is 122.

- Add a zero on the end of the number and you have your answer.

122, add a 0 —> 1220

“244 x 5 = 1220″

- If you’re multiplying an odd number by 5, you just need to make one simple change to the process. Let’s multiply 489 x 5. Start by subtracting 1 from the number you are multiplying by 5.

“489 – 1 = 488″

- Now that you are dealing with an even number, you just need to repeat the process from above. Take half of 488 and add a zero.

“Half of 488 is 244. Add a zero to get 2,440.”

- To get the final answer, just add a five to that number (to compensate for the 1 in the first step “489 – 1 = 488.

“2,440 + 5 = 2,445″

488 x 5 = 2,445

Problems to try yourself:

• 96 x 5 =

• 248,469 x 5 =

• 997 x 5 =

Test whether a number is not prime

A prime number is one that only has itself and 1 as positive divisor (it can only be cleanly divided by 1 and itself). Composite numbers, in addition to being divisible by 1 and itself, can be divided by other prime numbers. 7 is prime (7 can only be divided by 7 and 1), 9 is composite (9 can be divided by 1, 9, and 3).

23, prime (23 can only be divided by 1 and 23).

65, composite (65 can be divided by 5 and 13

37, prime (37 can only be divided by 1 and 37).

120, composite (120 can be divided by 1, 120, 2, 5, and 3)

There is no quick and easy way to test if a number is a prime number, but there are a few ways that you can test whether any given number is not a prime.

This trick doesn’t really come up much in everyday life, but it still stands as a cool thing to know.

The first easy way to test if a number is not prime is whether it ends in an even number (meaning it can be divided by 2), a 5 (it can be divided by 5), or a 0 (it can be divided by 2 and 5). If your number ends in one of those numbers, you know it’s not a prime number.

If you have a number that ends any other number, you can apply this quick test to learn if your number could be a prime number or that it definitely is not.

- Is your number in the form of 6k plus or minus 1, where k = any positive whole number? If it’s not, it is not a prime. Every prime number greater than 3 is in the form 6k+1. If the number you are testing can’t be expressed in as 6k+1, then it is not a prime. It’s important to note that while every prime number is in the form 6k+1, not every number that is in the form 6k+1 is prime. For example—23 is prime and as such, can be expressed as 6k+1 (k = 4: 23 =  6 x (4) – 1). But 25, which can be expressed as 6k+1 (k = 4: 25 =  6 x (4) + 1) is not prime.

So by testing a number to see if it can be expressed as 6k+1, you can tell if a number is definitely not a prime or whether it is possibly a prime.

Problems to try yourself:

• Could 96 be prime?

• Could 631 be prime?

• Could 7,001 be prime?

Main image credit: Teo Romera/Flickr; 11 image credit: Clive Darr/Flickr; 5 image credit: Jules Antonio/Flickr; large numbers image credit: Rich Bowen/Flickr; 9 image credit: yoppy/Flickr; multiply by 5 image credit: Silke Blaschek/Flickr; prime image credit: Tom Purves/Flickr

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Things started to perk up a bit around Europe after a few chaotic centuries. The High Middle Ages, which began around 1000 AD, was a time marked by population growth and advances made in the worlds of art, science, business and technology. Stone castles sprung up across the land and engineers were hired to build clever machines of war for wealthy lords and leaders. The nobility expanded their financial support of scholarly and artistic work while the growing commercial sector helped drive many technological jumps in their pursuit of a better bottom line.

It’s easy to forget the debt we owe to early society for the work they did in advancing human knowledge. We wouldn’t have computers if we hadn’t figured out how to measure the passage of time. We couldn’t have sent a man to the moon if we never invented glasses. Take a little time now and read over six really important inventions of the Middle Ages.

The Heavy Plough
The plough was a major breakthrough in the history of humankind and allowed people to greatly expand their fields and grow crops in soils too hard for hand digging. Early ploughs were, more or less, a pointy stick dragged behind a draft animal, cutting lightly through the soil. A farmer would walk along with the plough and lift the plough blade so that it didn’t get caught on rocks or roots. These ploughs were fine for lighter soils but had trouble in harder soils.

Enter the heavy plough, which uses wheels to support a heavier blade. The exact place and time of the first use of the heavy plough are not known, but it’s safe to peg its introduction to somewhere in Asia around 200 AD. The Romans were rocking the heavy plough not too long after that, and by roughly 600 AD, the rest of Europe was on board. Farmers were able to open up extensive new fields thanks to the heavy plough, boosting crop yields and population numbers (aka all of our distant relatives).

Water Mills
Water mills use a turning wheel spoked with water-catching paddles to generate power for operating machines like grinders and saws. These mills were developed by the Greeks before being used throughout the Roman empire. Though they were invented hundreds of years before the Middle Ages, their numbers exploded during this time. By around 1000 AD there were tens of thousands of mills harnessing river and tidal power throughout England, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. The technology invented by the Greeks was further refined during the Middle Ages and was used to power tanneries, blast furnaces, forge mills and paper mills which evolved into the machinery used in today’s factories and facilities.

The Hourglass
The exact origins of the hourglass aren’t clear, but it’s generally accepted that it was widely adopted in Europe by the end of the High Middle Ages (~1500 AD). The hourglass was a popular choice for sailors who used it to mark the passage of time which allowed them to determine their longitude (location east to west). The hourglass was preferred over earlier water clocks because their sands were unaffected by the rocking motion of an ocean-bound ship. They were used on shore to measure time for church services, cooking, and work tasks.

Mechanical clocks supplanted the hourglass, though it wasn’t until the 18th century that a suitable marine replacement was found.

Liquor
Distillation describes the separation of different liquids within a mixture, usually through the application of heat. It’s an important technique used in science and industry (oil refineries distill crude oil into a large number of components like gasoline, kerosine, paraffin wax and plastic-base) but has also given the world the gift (or curse, depending on how you look at it) of liquor. Whiskey, brandy, gin, rum and vodka are all produced by distilling mashed grains, potatoes, molasses, wine or fruits.

Distillation was first worked out by the Greeks and Egyptians but wasn’t used to produce distilled spirits until 1200 AD or so with the invention of liquors like Irish whiskey and German brandy. We had a pretty solid handle on distilling liquors by the end of the Middle Ages. Although modern distilleries are obviously more advanced than the ones used in the Middle Ages, the basic techniques haven’t changed much from “heat up the liquid and separate its components when they boil at different temperatures.”

Eyeglasses
As someone born with relatively bad eye sight, I am particularly thankful to 13th century Italians for coming up with the eyeglasses. They were first documented in the early 1300s with early models made to be held up by hand or pinched on the nose. It wasn’t until the 1700s that designs featuring arms that bent around the nose became widely used. Life for billions of people around the world (including the author) would be a dismal, blurry affair if not for the humble eyeglasses.

The Printing Press
Unlike the other items on this list, the origins of the modern printing press can easily be tracked to one man and one place: Johannes Gutenberg from Mainz, Germany. Around 1440 Mr. Gutenberg developed his now famous press which allowed, for the first time, industrial scale printing. It’s hard to emphasize how important the invention of the Gutenberg press was to the development of the modern world. The press meant ideas could be spread through books and pamphlets, newspapers and journals. Science, technology and history all saw great leaps as institutional knowledge began to accrue around the world. Without Gutenberg, there would be no internet. And without the internet you wouldn’t be reading this article right now. Also, no pictures of funny cats and bacon.

Main image credit: Bbadgett; heavy plough credit: Wien/Vienna pd-us; water mill credit: Andreas Trepte; hourglass credit: Brian Jackson/Shutterstock; liquor credit: Ziko; eyeglasses credit: Brenda Gottsabend/Flickr; printing press credit: artnet.com

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But a lot can happen in a thousand years. In a few thousand years entire landscapes can change completely. There was a mile of ice over where I sit now in Maine just 10,000 years ago.

So it’s understandable how easy it is to look at something as huge as a mighty desert and assume that it’s always been there. Some of the world’s largest deserts can stretch for thousands of miles and cover millions of square miles of area. It’s hard to imagine that they have been anything other than vast stretches of dry sands and rocks (or ice in the case of a few deserts). Yet, for every huge desert you show me, I can show you an area that was covered with life sometime in the not-too distant past (again, relative to the age of the planet). It might not be a bad idea, considering the rate that humanity is dumping climate changing greenhouse gases into the environment, for us to take as many lessons as possible from the study of how once verdant areas turned into deserts. If we know exactly how it happens, we stand a better chance of finding a way to slow down or reverse the process.

Here are seven desert that used to be verdant fields and forests.

Sahara Desert
The Sahara Desert covers 3.6 million square miles of Northern Africa (that’s bigger than the continental United States) and is the largest hot desert in the world. The Sahara has all of the stereotypical desert features and is covered with towering sand dunes, packed with camels and scorpions, and dotted with the occasional oasis (palm trees and all).

The Sahara is not a forgiving environment—temperatures regularly creep over three digits while strong winds whip up sand storms that darken the sky and choke the lungs of anything caught out unprepared. But it wasn’t always that way. The Sahara was actually a pretty lush place as recently as six thousand or so years ago. If you extend your range of view out into the hundreds of thousands of years (and farther), you see the area cycle through periods of wet and dry, each brought on by larger changes to the climate. Early humans left behind cave art showing crocodiles and large dinosaur fossils suggest an environment lush enough to support 20-foot long animals.

Great Victoria Desert
The Great Victoria Desert is found in the southwest quadrant of Australia and is one of the least populated (by humans) areas on the planet. Aboriginal people called its wind blasted dunes and sand prairies home before westerners sailed in and conquered the continent. In the 50s and 60s the Australian government evicted many of the remaining Aboriginals and used the area for testing nuclear weapons.

Australia has been a relatively dry mass of land for the last hundred thousand years or so, but if you go back a few million years, you’d find it lush and green, covered in rainforests and large animals straight out of an Avatar casting call. Today’s Australian rainforests are the distant relatives of these ancient forests, pushed to the continents outer fringes by deserts like the Great Victorian Desert.

Gobi Desert
The Gobi Desert, covering a little over half a million square miles of China and Mongolia, is a diverse, though generally dry, landscape with high elevation plateaus abutting grassy (at least in the wet season) steppes running into sandy dunes. It is a cold desert where winter temperatures generally run below zero. The bone dry air means there is little snow, though frost is a constant winter companion.

It’s not hard to find places in the Gobi Desert that used to be green space—it is estimated that the desert eats up hundreds of square miles of grassland every year thanks to overgrazing, deforestation, and climate change. Walk to the current border of the desert and look around— a few years ago you would have been looking at grassy fields instead of dry barren expansions of tan sand and rock.

Kalahari Desert
Technically, the Kalahari Desert is a semi-desert, owing to the fact that seasonal rains regularly soak it, waking dormant grasses and other plants. Even still, when it’s dry, the Kalahari is every bit as much a desert as any place listed here. The name “Kalahari” is derived from a local word meaning “a waterless place.” Temperatures can climb above 110°F, driving away any clouds that find strength enough to form in the arid air.

Tens of thousands of years ago the Kalahari was covered in a huge (about as large as South Carolina) body of fresh water called Lake Makgadikgdi. As the centuries rolled by, the lake was slowly drained away after rivers feeding away from it pulled out more water than was being fed in. By roughly 10,000 years ago most of the lake had been bled out and the current-day Kalahari started getting drier and drier.

Arabian Desert
The Arabian Desert, also known as all of Saudi Arabia and part of Egypt, sprawls across almost a million square miles and is home to one of the largest contiguous bodies of sand in the world. It is one of the least biologically diverse places on the planet due to its harsh climate and damages from human activity (hunting, industrial pollution, military action) but was, just a few tens of thousands of years ago, home to a large number of shallow lakes which supported a diverse community of animals as large as hippos and water buffalo.

Mojave Desert
The Mojave Desert covers most of southern California and parts of Nevada, Utah, and Arizona and is, at only 47,877 square miles, a small fry compared to the other deserts on our list. The Mojave is both a hot and a cold desert, depending on the time of year, with temperatures running from as a low as 0°F in the winter to as high as 130°F in the summer.

Around 10,000 years ago, as the last ice age faded and melted away, the area that is today known as the Mojave Desert was a much wetter place. It was marked by lakes and streams fed by retreating glaciers and sustained by wetter weather patterns.

Antarctica
It’s sometimes easy to forget that Antarctica is a desert, receiving less than eight inches of precipitation each year. It’s a cold and forbidding desert that is covered in darkness for half of the year, but even it, too, was once a green and biologically dense land. In 1986, researchers from Ohio State University found evidence of a temperate rain forest dating from roughly three million years ago. If you go farther back than that, far enough to notice continental drift, you’d find an Antarctica enjoying the benefits of a more northern location, slowly on a march toward its current home hugging the South Pole, away in cold.

Main photo credit: Nomadz
Sahara photo credit: Fighting Irish 1977/Flickr
Victoria photo credit: Amanda Slater/Flickr
Gobi photo credit: Sander van der Molen
Kalahari photo credit: Winfried Bruenken
Arabian photo credit: Robin/Flickr
Mojave photo credit: David~O/Flickr
Antarctica photo credit: Michael Studinger/NASA

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You would think that we’d be more respectful to the ocean, considering the fact that it is a vital source of nutrition for around a third of people on the planet.

But it’s hard to fight against the lure of short-term financial gain and for every step made in protecting parts of the ocean, it seems that we fall two steps behind. For every new marine park established, there are a hundred oil-spills. For every recovery in one species, there are sharp declines in five others.

You can’t fight against that which you can’t see and it’s important to know your enemy. Take a little time and familiarize yourself with some of the biggest threats to the ocean.

Overfishing
Humans are too good at catching fish and other sea life. Technological advancements has given us the ability to scoop up hundreds of miles of floating nets, taking any fish, dolphin, whale, or shark caught within. Large fleets of towering fishing ships spend months at sea harvesting its life, docking with enormous floating factories that take in their catch to freeze and prepare for shipment to shore. History is strewn with historic fish stocks that collapsed after being overfished (and it’s continuing today). The problem is exacerbated by the shifting baseline phenomenon — people compare how things are now with how things were when they were young, failing to see that conditions had already degraded far from their natural state by the time they were born. We look at fish stocks now and compare them to how things were in the 1950s and 60s, not how they were hundreds and thousands years ago before widespread human exploitation.

We once thought that the ocean was too big for our activities to really have an impact. We’re seeing all over the world that that supposition is a stupid, short-sighted one. As we plunder the ecosystems and marine biospheres with our nets and hooks we rob ourselves of a future where we can feed ourselves from the sea. We’re racing to see who can pull out the last fish.

Habitat destruction
One of the things that makes protecting the ocean more challenging is that it’s hard to see underneath its waters. We don’t see the damage wrought by fishing trawlers which drag their bulldozer-like nets over the sea floor, scraping up and netting everything in their wide path. We don’t see the negative impact of the countless loads of trash and waste that are dumped into the seas every day (inadvertently or not). We miss the fields of dying coral and the seagrass and mangrove forests that get whittled away by chemical and oil spills.

Plastic
Plastic is, at once, one of the greatest and one of the worst of humanity’s inventions. It has facilitated a world of technological advancement and proven its utility by becoming virtually indispensable to modern life (look around where you are sitting right now and take note everything made of plastic, remembering that many of our clothes and fibers are made of plastic). But on the flip side, the very durability that makes plastic so valuable as a building material makes it an ecological monster — an immortal and invulnerable material that resists the pull of time and the biodegredation that return most natural materials back into biologically useful forms.

Our addiction to plastic has not been good for the ocean. As our use of plastic has risen, so too has the amount that has been dumped, blown, lost, or dropped into the worlds oceans and rivers (which tends towards the sea). You might have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area in the Pacific Ocean between the west coast of America and Hawaii that, due to the circular ocean currents surrounding it, collects and aggregates plastic waste. There are places within the garbage patch that have more plastic than plankton. Sadly, this phenomenon is happening all over the world wherever currents circle. Plastic in the waters leach chemicals and are often mistaken as food by marine wildlife. Instead of biodegrading, plastic just breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces, leaching toxic chemicals and invading food webs at every break.

Invasive Species
Like their land-based counterparts, invasive marine species have caused widespread damage to ecosystems all over the world. Species like the lionfish, shore crab, Asian clam, and even the humble starfish have disrupted food webs and driven native marine plants and animals to extinction. The loss of one species in an ecosystem is bad enough, but knock enough out of the picture and entire food webs can collapse. This is happening in oceans all over the globe and shows little sign of slowing down.

Sunblock
The danger posed by sunblock pales in comparison to the other four threats on our list, but I’m including it here because most people have no idea that the lotion they put on their skin ahead of a day in the sun can fatally damage coral reefs. A little sunscreen may not sound like a real threat, but when you multiply it by a few tens of millions of swimmers jumping into the oceans every day, you get thousands of tons of sunscreen polluting the waters. What’s an eco-conscious swimmer to do? Wear more clothes (think light and airy), buy ecologically friendly sunscreen, and wear a wide-brim hat.

Main photo credit: Green Fire Productions/Flickr, overfishing photo credit: John Wallace/NOAA, habitat destruction photo credit: Bruno de Giusti, plastic photo credit: Falken, invasive species photo credit: OpenCage, sunblock photo credit: Victor Martinez/Flickr

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Some of the most well known invasive species were deliberate choices made by people hoping to provide a source of food (in the case of the rabbits) while others were established by accident, either by grabbing a ride on a passing ship (Quagga mussels of the Great Lakes) or escaping from human captivity (Asian carp and the burmese python).

It’s likely that most organisms that find themselves transported halfway around the world land in habitats that they are not suited for. Those organisms die a quiet death. The plants and animals we highlight here landed in environments that were perfect for them to grab a foothold in. They did that and more, and have pushed out native species and, in some cases, caused ecological havoc on their new ecosystems. These five invasive species are the ones that have won. They’re not going anywhere anytime soon.

I, for one, welcome our new invasive overlords.

Kudzu Vine
The kudzu vine is a native of Japan and China, where it enjoys a life of ecological balance, hemmed in by the other plant and animal species that it evolved alongside. It plays its biological part, fixing nitrogen out of the air and into the soil and helping to redistribute and diffuse nutrients and energy. The kudzu story would end there if it had stayed within its home range. Instead, the vine has taken on an almost mythological aura as it has spread and smothered a vast range of land in the southern United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The fast growing vine, in the absence of natural predators, blazes across forests, climbing and reaching for every bit of available sunlight. In the process it shades out and kills any native fauna unfortunate enough to be found underneath. The vines are prodigious growers and their advance has yet to be stopped in any meaningful way. There are efforts underway to develop specialized herbicides to combat kudzu and to use it as a source for biofuels, but for now, the vine marches on.

Burmese pythons
The Burmese python evolved in the warm tropical waters of Southern and Southeast Asia, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that they would feel at home in the Florida Everglades. The large predator (they can grow up to 20 feet long) is a popular choice for pet snake enthusiasts and was slowly introduced to Florida by well-meaning but irresponsible owners who let them go free when they were no longer wanted around the house. These released snakes slithered into the Everglades and found it to their liking. While they aren’t completely without predation — they are known to battle alligators — they had enough of a free hand to rip through the natural web of Florida wildlife. Researchers have watched as populations of small mammals have dropped across the board. Some species have seen drops as high as 95 to 100 percent in monitored locations.

There are tens, and possibly hundreds of thousands of Burmese pythons living in the Everglades. Hundreds of thousands of large, scary snakes living in dark, scary swampy water. Who’s ready to wade in there and start taking them out? Anyone? It’s hard to see how this story has a happy ending for anyone but the Burmese pythons.

Rabbits
When you think about rabbits, it’s likely that your mind springs to an image of a cute little fluffy bunny hopping through the forest and occasionally giving young children chocolates and jelly beans. Or maybe you think about a tasty roasted dish of rabbit and root veggies. Or maybe both.

But how about the image of rabbits as hungry invaders, advancing in never-ending waves of colonization? Rabbits, for as far as you can see, covering the proverbial horizon with their adorable twitchy little noses and their huge litters of fast-growing kits. Eating through everything. Eating, and having babies.

That’s the story of the rabbits in Australia. They were introduced by English settlers way back in the late 1700s as a source of food. Enough rabbits escaped captivity to gain a foothold that they haven’t let go of since. Australian newspapers were talking about the spreading scourge of rabbits in the 1800s and time has only allowed their advancement to spread. They are now firmly entrenched and have been blamed for the loss of innumerable native species. People have tried to stop the rabbits using fences, hunters and poisoning, but have not been able to do anything more than make small localized impacts that quickly get swallowed up by the harsh reality of the rabbits’ exponential growth.

Quagga mussels
Quagga mussels are native to waters of the Ukraine’s Dnieper River, which dumps into the Black Sea. Over the years they have been picked up and transported around the world by large cargo ships running between the Black Sea and the Great Lakes, where they have gained a foothold and spread to smothering proportions. There are enormous sections of the lakes bottoms that have been given over entirely to nothing but Quagga mussels.

The Quagga mussels muscle out native species a number of ways. Most obvious is their propensity to cover every available inch of habitat, leaving no space for native species to eat, sleep, reproduce and die. Secondly, they are filter feeders and strip the waters of phytoplankton, depriving any other species a vitally important food source. Their filter feeding also results in abnormally clear waters that are favored by aquatic plants whose spread further impacts and disrupts ecosystems.

By now the Quagga mussel has jumped beyond the Great Lakes and is becoming a threat to lakes and reservoirs all over the United States. They’re winning.

Asian carp
Asian carp is a term that is used to collectively refer to a number of invasive species of carp that are now dominating many lakes, streams and rivers in the United States. As their name implies, the different carp species are all native to Asia, China to be specific. They have been used in aquaculture for more than a thousand years and were originally imported to the United States to help clean waste water generated by farmed catfish. Large floods allowed enough of the carp to escape their containment ponds over the years and they quickly spread along waterways, eating their way through local ecosystems. They have now been found in all but one of the Great Lakes as well as the Mississippi River and countless smaller rivers and streams.

Besides the direct impact they have on local ecosystems, many of the species that fall under the term “Asian carp” are extremely skittish fish. Any loud or sudden noise can spook them into swimming and jumping out of the air (as far as 10 feet up). There are a plethora of videos on YouTube of boaters being hammered by huge schools of leaping carp. On one hand it’s an effortless way to catch a fish for dinner, but on the other hand it’s a brave soul who can stand up to a bombardment of flying fish that can weigh up to 100 pounds each and come at you from any direction at a high rate of speed.

Main photo credit: Lori Oberhofer/National Park Service, kudzu photo credit: Bill Sutton/Flickr, Burmese python photo credit: Mahbob Yusof, rabbit photo credit: Masteruk, Quagga mussel-covered shoe photo credit: Dan Bennett/Flickr, Asian carp photo credit: Asian Carp Regional Coordinating Committee

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Besides the vast buckets of cash that oil brings in, it can also provide a great deal of stability to those willing to play along with western powers. Western nations, chief among them the United States, have shown a preference for stability over human rights when faced with conflicts in oil rich, dictator-lead countries. American intelligence agencies seem particularly found of establishing relationships with leaders willing to open their oil fields up to corporate exploitation. It was oil, and the revenues it generated, that allowed Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak to stick around for as long as he did and it was one of the reasons the U.S. government had a great relationship with Iraq’s Sadam Hussein in the years leading up to the first Gulf War.

Here are six of the world’s top dictators holding onto power thanks to the sweet economic and political power of oil.

President Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria
The African nation of Algeria is heavily dependent on the revenues generated by the approximately two million barrels of oil that it pumps every day. Fossil fuel earnings make up nearly two thirds of the its operating budget and almost all of its export profits. The billions of dollars that are brought in every year has been the life blood flowing through the heart of its autocratic government, currently lead by President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Mr. Bouteflika served as the President of the 29th UN General Assembly back in the 70s and came to power in Algeria in 1999 after grabbing 74% of the votes, as reported by Algerian officials. He had the backing of the military and increased his vote tally to 85% in the 2004 election. In 2009 he garnered 90% of the vote. Nothing fishy about that at all. Not at all.

Bouteflika and his party hold a monopoly on all Algerian media, maintains a healthy security infrastructure, and was accused of brutally cracking down on protesters spurred on by the Arab Spring.

President José Eduardo dos Santos of Angola
Angola sits on the west coast of Africa and was established as a Portuguese colony before gaining independence in 1975 after a brutal war. The country was further torn by civil strife until 2002, when a cease-fire treaty was signed by the two main factions fighting for control. Angola sits on top of a large oil reserve and pumps almost two million barrels out of the ground every day. The money flowing in from the sale of oil has both allowed President José Eduardo dos Santos to maintain a tight grip on power while increasing social tensions due to the rising gap between the small pocket of rich people close to power and the vast majority pounded by poverty and lack of economic opportunity. A Human Rights Watch report found that 32 billion dollars has disappeared from government accounts in the three short years between 2007 and 2010. I wonder where it went.

Hugo Chávez of Venezuela
Hugo Chávez has served as the President of the South American nation of Venzuela since being elected in 1999. Before winning the office of the Presidency, Mr. Chávez was an active dissident against the established government and served two years in jail in the early 90s after a failed coup. As President, Mr. Chávez has pursued a socialist agenda that has nationalized key industries like oil and gas extraction. Venezuela has bountiful oil reserves and pumps out a little less than two and a half million barrels a day, most of which is exported to countries like the United States. Citgo, a familiar brand to most U.S. drivers, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., the Venezuelan national oil company.

Chávez has used the billions of dollars of oil revenue to fend off an attempted coup and to solidify his grip on power. In 2010 Amnesty International accused his administration of arresting political opponents while in 2008, Human Rights Watch reported that Chávez was suppressing freedom of the press, the impartiality of the courts, and the rights of workers to organize.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia
Vladimir Putin is easily the biggest of the oil-propped leaders found on our list. Mr. Putin has run Russia under a number of titles since 2000 and served as a security officer in the KGB before he entered politics in 1990. Russia is the third largest oil producing nation in the world and pulls a little over ten million barrels of oil out of the ground every day. This oil revenue was the primary driver behind Russia clawing out of a massive economic hangover left from the crumbling Soviet empire and helped Putin firm up his control of the country. A master of public relations, Putin has created a macho image for himself both at home and aboard by doing things like shooting whales with a tissue sample-collecting crossbow, riding bare chested on a horse, and helping to put a tracking collar on a polar bear. This macho image is reflected in his governing style which relies on controlling the media, intimidating his political opponents, and even (allegedly) poisoning them when they won’t shut up.

King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia
Abdulla bin Abdul Aziz, the King of Saudi Arabia, is the son of King Abdulaziz, the founding monarch of the oil-rich nation, and has been in power since 2005 after the death of his half-brother King Fahd. Saudi Arabia pulls more than eight million barrels of oil from their reserves every day. The money is used to support a large and powerful class of prince and princesses of the House Saud and to provide enough social services to Saudi citizens to maintain a stable rule. Saudi Arabia is infamous for their deplorable record on women’s rights and for their officially sanctioned vice police who brutally maintain their interpretation of Sharia Law. The House Saud has been in complete control of the country since King Abdulaziz carved out his kingdom back in the days before WW2, something only made possible by being in control of their oil fund purse strings. As long as the oil keeps flowing that should continue to be true.

President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakstan
Nursultan Abishuly Nazarbayev has ruled over Kazakhstan since the nation broke from Soviet rule in 1991. His long reign has been facilitated by the revenue generated by the million and a half barrels of oil produced in his nation every day. Like many of the other leaders on our list, Nazarbayev is a master campaigner and brought home more than 95% of the vote in the 2011 elections. In other words, he’s completely corrupt. Kazakhstan has a dismal record when it comes to human rights and has been accused of tightly controlling its population and suppressing and eliminating freedoms of the press, of speech, and religious practice. All thanks to oil!

Main photo credit: Dmitry Astakhov

Photo of Abdelaziz Bouteflika mural: Thierry Ehrmann/Flickr

Photo of José Eduardo dos Santos: Wilson Dias/ABr

Photo of Hugo Chávez: Martin Maddock, USN

Photo of Vladmir Putin: Politsurfer

Photo of King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz: Presidential Press and Information Office of Russia

Photo of Nursultan Nazarbayev: Ricardo Stuckert/PR

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In the insect world, some species have evolved remarkable abilities to accurately hurl themselves vast distances. Some of the jumping bugs I highlighted here throw themselves the equivalent of a human jumping hundreds of feet in the air over the length of a football field. Engineers have learned a lot about the mechanics of robotic jumping from insects (case in point- the “Sand Flea“) but haven’t really begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible when the mechanics of insect jumpers are translated to human engineered devices.

Here are four insects who have mastered the art of the jump. There is a lot to be learned here. Enjoy!

Froghopper

In 2003, researchers from the University of Cambridge in England declared a new champion in the world of insect jumpers—the froghopper. The small bug (0.2 inches long) uses a unique propulsion system to jump more than two feet in the air. Froghoppers use their bounding leaps to avoid predators and to search for food.

What’s maybe even more remarkable than the length and height of their jumps is what they have to endure to make them—froghoppers experience more than 400g’s when they jump. Humans pass out around five g’s.

The froghopper uses two large muscles to catapult itself around, literally locking its back legs down in such a way that they hold until their jumping muscles have generated enough energy to break the lock and send the insect flying through the air. This release of energy happens so fast that it proved difficult for scientists to capture it happening using a video camera capable of shooting 2,000 frames per second. The frog hoppers jump took up exactly two of those 1/000 second frames.

Flea

Fleas are one of the more well-known of the jumping insects and is not a creature that most people like having around. Fleas are parasites that make a living sucking blood from their host animal. They use their mighty jumps to get around and to hurl themselves onto new host animals. It was discovered in the 70s that fleas store up energy in their body to make their jumps, but the exact mechanism wasn’t actually known until recently when faster high speed cameras showed that they actually push off with their “toes”, not their “knees”, as many entomologists had believed.

Grasshopper

The grasshopper is the insect that jumps to most peoples mind when you think of leaping bugs. Grasshoppers have long hinged legs that they use to both walk around and jump when needed. Although the Froghopper can jump farther than the grasshopper, relative to its size, the grasshopper is still highly respected (among those who respect insects for their jumping ability) for its prodigious leaps. The muscles they use to make their jumps have been shown to have ten times the raw power than the strongest human muscle cell. The only known muscles in the world that are stronger are the ones used by clams to shut their shells, and even then the grasshoppers muscles fire more rapidly.

Katydid

Katydids look a lot like grasshoppers though they are more closely related to crickets. Like grasshoppers, katydids have large hinged legs that it uses to make enormous jumps. Unlike the grasshopper, katydids typically have long antennae that can grow longer than the rest of their body. There are hundreds of species of katydids and many combine a great leaping ability with masterful camouflage, perfectly blending into their green and leafy surroundings, ready to jump away if necessary.

Photo credits: Header image, Froghopper, flea, grasshopper, & katydid.

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Thermal imaging, also known as thermography, captures infrared radiation and turns it into an image similar to standard photography, which does the same thing with light in the visible spectrum. Thermal imaging is an important tool for science because warmer objects emit more radiation, which translates on thermal images as brighter colors (the brightest possible value for a thermal image is pure white).

Thermal cameras are used in a wide variety of industrial and commercial settings in everything from parts manufacturing (to make sure things stay the proper temperature throughout the production run) to utility line repairs (faulty lines and switches show up hotter than they should). In the world of green, they are used by energy efficiency professionals to detect leaks in building envelopes.

One of my favorite applications of the technology is thermal images created of animals. I’m an armchair biologist and am fascinated by the mind-blowing morphological diversity created by evolution and natural selection. I am also a huge fan of biomimicry and know that there is an enormous amount that we can learn from the natural world to better inform how we design our own. At the very least, they’re really cool to look at.

Enjoy!

Ostriches

Ostriches are the largest bird in the world. They can weigh hundreds of pounds, stand more than nine feet tall, and run 40 miles per hour for over thirty minutes. In short, they’re totally badass. Ostriches are native to Africa and can be found throughout much of the continent. They need to be able to both vent heat during the hot days as well as conserving it during the cool nights. As the thermal images show, the giant bird throws a lot of heat off its legs and long neck. At night, when they settle down for sleep, they tuck their legs up underneath them, helping to preserve warmth. During the day their feathers reflect away heat while running around helps circulate cooler air over their skin.

Lion

Lions are enormous predators found in Africa and Asia that sit firmly atop their local food web (if you factor out humans). They are considered a vulnerable species and have seen their numbers plummet over the years to hunting and habitat loss. The estimated number of lions in Africa has fallen as much as 90% since the 1950s and has showed no signs of slowing over the last few decades. Conservation efforts have helped to carve out protected habitat for the King of the Beasts, but they are still an embattled species. You can learn more about the effort at the <a href=”">Lion Conservation Fund</a>.

In its natural range, the lion has to deal with the hot days and cold nights of the savanna and its thermal image shows how the thick mane of a male helps it retain warmth during the night while it pants off heat during the day.

 Vulture

Vultures describes any of the number of actual species of large scavenger birds and are found throughout the world. They don’t have a particularly sterling reputation but are actually a hugely important player in natural systems. India is currently suffering from a precipitous drop in their vulture population caused by the widespread use by farmers of a painkiller that soothes their cows but kills the scavenging birds. Without vultures  to eat and breakdown dead animals, the bodies are left to slowly rot away where they fell or are piled up in huge mountains of stink that attract and support roving bands of vicious dogs.

Dog

OK, this one is just adorable. Dogs (the non-corpse-eating ones) are awesome. That’s a good boy!! Who’s a good thermal boy!?

Snake

Snakes are known as cold-blooded for a reason—they barely show up in thermal imaging! While there are thousands of different kinds of snakes, they all share the trait of using external heat sources to regulate internal temperatures. Most exist in a spectrum between being cool and slow moving and warm and active and have evolved to efficiently retain any heat they pick up from the environment.

This image shows the striking contrast between the warmth thrown off by a small mouse and that of the heat-stingy snake.

Lizards

These lizards look like they’re having a great time lounging out on some very warm rocks.

Deer

Deer are found throughout the world and are made up of a huge number of individual species. I suspect that the kind of deer seen in this thermal image lives in a temperate environment where it’s valuable to be able to retain internal body warmth. Though it’s positively glowing around its mouth and eyes, the dark colors found on its body shows how well its fur retains heat.

Tarantula

Tarantulas have a unique circulatory system that uses a blood-like liquid called hemolymph to transport oxygen throughout its body. This tarantula’s morphology vents it heat almost entirely on the top of its abdomen.

Cat

Meow. This is the internet, had to have a cat in here somewhere. This image was taken through the sniper scope of a doberman assassin name Francois.

Polar Bear

Polar bears are masters of retaining body heat, as you can see in this thermal image. Millions of years of evolving in an arctic environment have perfect honed their ability to hold on to as much of their internally generated heat as possible. An interesting note about the polar bear is that their skin is actually black—their clear hollow hairs channel the suns rays onto their dark skin and reflect light away to give them their snowy white coloring.

Bats

The wings of this bat look like they’re doing a damn good job keeping it warm.

Eagle

“What, are you taking to me?”

Ring tailed lemur

Ring tailed lemurs are endemic to Madagascar and their range have been pushed to forests on the southern end of the island. It can get warm in Madagascar and as this thermal image shows, lemurs have evolved the ability to throw a lot of unwanted heat off their large tails.

Photo credits: Glowing cat face, Ostrich, Lion, Vulture, Dog, Snake around arm, Snake eating mouse, Lizards, Deer, Tarantula, Cat, Polar Berar, Bats, Eagle, & Ring tailed lemur.

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