Amazing & Funny

Amazing events in pictures

- on 3:54 PM

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Artist Harwinder Singh Gill displays a special new year message he carved into the tips of coloured pencils in Amritsar, India

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A man writes "2011" with a torch on a snow-covered field in Sieversdorf, eastern Germany

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An ice fisherman drills a hole in the ice covering Berlin's Weissensee (White Lake). With a 20cm sheet of ice covering the lake and temperatures well below zero, scores of amateur ice fishers were trying their luck at catching perch.

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Two employees of the Frankfurt international airport walk along a passageway dug through thousands of tons of snow piled up near the runway of the airport

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A skier checks the depths of snow on the slope at Arosa, Switzerland

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A security guard uses an escalator at an observation deck in Osaka, Japan

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Jon Benjamin walks through snow flurries with his son Judah on the Finger Rock Trail near Tucson, Arizona. The US National Weather Service issued a blizzard warning for eastern and southeastern Arizona.

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This squirrel has thought of a new way to gather food, by performing for an audience. The scene captured by Anvar Seifullin in Hyde Park, London, in autumn, shows American tourists bemused by the squirrel's performance.

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A keeper carries an anaesthetised golden-haired monkey to its new enclosure at the Chengdu Zoo, Sichuan province, China

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An aerial view of flooded areas of Rockhampton, Queensland, Australia, including what is left of the main runway at the airport

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A worker prints an image of The Black Nazarene on a T-shirt at a printing shop in Manila. The Black Nazarene (Nuestro Padre Jess Nazareno) is a wooden sculpture of Jesus Christ that came from Mexico and is believed to be miraculous. Thousands of Filipino devotees will join the procession of the The Black Nazarene on Sunday, and believe that whoever touches the Nazarene will be healed or receive a miracle.

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A vehicle drives down the flooded runway at Rockhampton Airport

Water DrOplets And Ink

- on 3:52 PM

These ingenious photographs show amazing multicoloured droplets of ink at the precise moment they impact with the surface of water.The stunning pictures show drops of red, green and yellow ink bouncing off the water to create mesmerising mid-air shapes not visible to the naked eye.Each image captures in startlingly sharp detail the droplets frozen in time and cascading as bright colours in all directions.

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Just a drop in the ocean: Tobias Braeuning has created these technicolour masterpieces by dropping droplets of ink into water. In one, the ink droplets combine to look like a transparent rainbow mushroom cloud. And in another, a red stemmed droplet bursts into purple-green life as it splashed blue ink in a circular pattern to create an astounding crest. The pictures were taken by full-time software engineer Tobias Brauening, 27, from Reutingen, Germany.

He said: 'The most fascinating aspect for me is that a water drop is such a simple thing which happens every day in nature. 'It's wonderful what nature can create, and I like to make this visible to others. 'They wonder how it is possible for the colours to get in there and how I can trigger the camera in the right moment.'

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Making waves: The software engineer uses three different valves which release the ink at exactly the point the shutter on his camera closes . The secret to Mr Brauening's success lies in his interest in technology, computers and photography.

He decided to study the little known subject of mechatronics, which combines all three subjects together to produce the outstanding and challenging images. . 'Because I learned something about electronics and microcontrollers while studying, I bought a microcontroller board, built some electronics and started with great success.

'I used three new special valves, experimented with making them drop to the same point and my new images were born.'

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Dazzling: The setup is manipulated using a microcontroller and different light filters to ensure the image is perfect

First he fills a plastic tank with shallow water. He then adds a different colour to each of the three valves and uses three flashes with contrasting colour filters for the background.

Mr Brauening then sets up his microcontroller and camera, adjusts his three valves and pushes the trigger.This activates both the valves and the camera shutter, which are synchronised to capture the vital moment.'But even with all the technical help, sometimes it takes hours until I get the shape and colours that I wish for,' he added.

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Frozen in time: Mr Braeuning said it still takes him several hours before he is happy with the images he creates

'A collision of three drops needs accurate timing in a range of a few milliseconds. The other issue is the lighting, which needs some practice around the reflections on the water, background, colour filters and the position of the flashes