According to National Geographic, the painterly picture above is actually a photograph.

Tinted orange by the morning sun, a soaring dune is the backdrop for the hulks of camel thorn trees in Namib-Naukluft Park.

Remarkable.

(NatGeo via Kottke.org | Photographer’s page)

If National Geographic wanted to get us interested in their Mythbusters-sounding new series How Hard Can It Be?, mission accomplished: As a promotional stunt, they managed to take a 16x16x18′ house aloft using 300 8′ helium balloons. The house reached an altitude of over 10,000 feet and flew for about an hour.

More pics and video below:

Does this guy look familiar? Did you go to highschool with him, or maybe you saw him on the street with one of those yappy little dogs. No, wait, he works with your dad; you’ve totally seen him there.

Odds are that you’ve probably seen someone like this man. With the revelation that the Earth now houses 7 billion human beings, National Geographic set out to determine the most typical person on the planet. According to their research, the most typical person is (among other things) a 28-year-old, right-handed, Han Chinese man, with a cellphone, and no bank account.

Armed with the knowledge of world’s most average man, NatGeo wanted to give him a face. Researchers took 190,000 images and created a composite image that should, more or less, represent most of the human population. Think of it this way, if aliens picked a point on the Earth and landed there, odds are this is the first person they’d see.

Was that the sound of your paradigm shifting? Don’t be too surprised. We all live in our own little worlds, based off our past experiences, or families, our friends, upbringing, and geographical area. We’re a myopic species. Maybe this guy isn’t what you think of when you imagine a composite human, but it probably should be. However, that will be changing. NatGeo goes on to say that by 2030, the most typical human will be from India.

The good folks at NatGeo have compressed their research into a fun video with some catchy music, embedded below. Take a look. and change your view on humanity.

National Geographic‘s amazing video on human population milestones in 2011 took us by surprise.

After all, the world’s population reached 6 billion when I was in middle school.  That wasn’t that long a-

Oh god it was more than ten years ago.

(By the way, we highly recommend watching in HD and fullscreen.)

(via Sociological Images.)

No, this isn’t a teaser poster for a Minecraft or Cave Story movie. This is a picture taken within the Vietnamese cave, Hang Son Doong, the world’s largest cave. Even though it’s the world’s largest cave, it was only discovered around twenty years ago, and features a segment inside that can fit a half-mile block of 40-story buildings. The cave also features an underground jungle, which you can check out past the break.

Koro is a new (well, old) language discovered in 2008 by a couple of field linguists, doing research in northeastern-most state of India. They announced their findings, along with their efforts to date to preserve it against its eventual extinction yesterday. Koro is spoken by only about 800 people in Arunachal Pradesh, and the most striking thing about it is its uniqueness.

According to Gregory Anderson, the director of the nonprofit that funded the research:

Their language is quite distinct on every level—the sound, the words, the sentence structure.

The researchers themselves said it was “as distinct from [the languages] spoken by other villagers as English is from Russian.”

National Geographic cameraman Bob Poole was in Mali filming elephants when he encountered much bigger game in the form of a massive dust storm. The dust storm blocked out the sun for more than four hours, making the world within darker than night at its height, then bathed in freakish red light on its way out. Poole: “It seems like we’ve been transported to Mars.” He’s not exaggerating.

(National Geographic via PetaPixel)

No, we’re not talking about a Syfy Channel exclusive movie. National Geographic has posted footage taken from a zoo aquarium tank where keepers decided to introduce some Spiny Dogfish Sharks. According to the narrator, they were hoping that their sharks, despite their omni-carnivorous diets, wouldn’t decided to make a meal of their Giant Pacific Octopus.

And then shark corpses kept showing up at the bottom of the tank. Understandably eager to know what was killing their animals, the keepers set up some cameras, and the footage they captured is below.

Read on...

A new look at Saturn‘s satellite reveals that beneath its icy crust and lakes of liquid methane is a slushy mixture of ice and rock.

This new data is suggested by readings of Titan‘s gravity field made by very precise measurements of its effect on the movements of NASA‘s Cassini Orbiter. Scientists say this means that Titan “never got hot enough to separate out into a core, mantle, and crust.”

We only have one question. Blue-Raspberry?

Photographer Nick Nichols struggled with the problem of trying to photograph the entirety of a giant redwood without the dense forest that surrounded it getting in the way.The results involved raising gyroscope-balanced cameras up into the forest canopy that were mechanically able to move themselves along their rigging lines.

His photo, a fraction of which was used for the October ’09 cover of National Geographic, can be found here. National Geographic’s video on the making of the photo after the jump.