Getting the week off to an upbeat start.
Dare-devil fans of bungee jumping will be delighted to hear that the world's highest platform has just opened in China. Straddled between two cliffs in Hunan province, visitors to the Zhangjiajie Grand Canyon Glass Bridge can take a leap from a height of 853ft, a stomach-churning way to take in the views of the surrounding Wulingyuan wilderness, a UNSECO World Heritage site.
Achieving happiness: Imperfection, impermanence and incompleteness is the meaning behind the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi. In this traditionally Buddhist country, accepting the transience of life and embracing things in their most natural state leads to contentment. This could be appreciating the beauty in chipped pottery, an aging face or fleeting cherry blossoms.
The nascent field of tidal turbines has gained a great boost as Scottish engineering firm Orbital Marine Power's 680-metric-ton tidal turbine, called O2, has started sending power to the grid and can power up to 2,000 homes. The marine machine, which Orbital Marine Power describes as "the world's most powerful" tidal turbine is now connected to the grid at the European Marine Energy Centre in Orkney, an archipelago of islands off the northeastern coast of Scotland.
It’s no secret that aerobic exercise can help stave off some of the ravages of aging. But a growing body of research suggests that swimming might provide a unique boost to brain health. Regular swimming has been shown to improve memory, cognitive function, immune response, and mood. Swimming may also help repair damage from stress and forge new neural connections in the brain. But scientists are still trying to unravel how and why swimming, in particular, produces these brain-enhancing effects. OGN will let you know when they figure that out...
A live, 20-foot long killer whale stranded on a rocky Alaska beach refloated back to sea when the tide came in. Luckily for the orca, there were people on hand to keep him hydrated in the meantime, spraying him with a hose pipe and throwing buckets of cold water on to the stricken creature.
Following OGN's recent survey of the various creative ways countries are incentivising people to get their vaccine jab, including Washington State's Joints for Jabs, it's now the turn of the UK to offer young people the relatively lacklustre incentives of free taxi rides, pizzas and trips to the cinema if they agree to have a coronavirus vaccine as the Government tries to boost uptake.
If you know what a black hole is, you're probably aware that it can contain as much mass as billions of stars, compressed into a much smaller space, and have such a powerful gravitational pull that even light can't escape its grasp. But even though it's not possible to see into a black hole, it is possible to see light that's coming from behind one. No wonder that scientists are getting wildly excited by the first-ever observation of light apparently being emitted from the far side of a supermassive black hole located in I Zwicky 1, a galaxy 800 million light-years away from Earth.
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South Pole
Extraordinarily beautiful time lapse film capturing the magical skies created by the Aurora Australis in Antarctica.