Just another normal day on the job, doing your usual tasks, sawing some wood, when suddenly the chainsaw you're using gets out of control and attacks your neck. That usually ends in tragedy, but for James Valentine of Pennsylvania it ends in everyone thinking you're a total badass. He survived.

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Trees in cloud forests get plenty of fog to go around, but rainfall that actually saturates the ground can be rare. According to researchers from the University of California Berkeley, the trees that populate those forests have found an evolutionary workaround -- rather than depending solely on their roots to absorb water, they have developed the ability to drink in the water vapor in the clouds that surround them through their leaves.

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Remember how we had all those droughts all over the country last summer, and all over the world the summers before that? Well, it turns out rather than "economically crippling worldwide drought," you may just want to start referring to that situation by its new name: "Summer." According to a study in the journal Nature Climate Change, the droughts of the last several years could just be the new normal if climate change predictions pan out. If that's the case, say researchers, forests could become a thing of the past. So, y'know, if those are your thing, I guess take a picture now?

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This map is the result of years of research by NASA, the National Geological Survey, and the U.S. Forest Service. It shows, in staggering detail, the total of woody biomass (read trees) across these United States. Presenting the entire nation at a 30 meter resolution, with 4 pixels representing an acre land, it's one amazing map. While impressive in its own right, this tree map aims to help keep a record of the amount of carbon being held in Earth's plant matter. With concerns over carbon's role in climate change, surveys like this are invaluable tools. See the full map, after the break.

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While walking through a forest in the winter, 7th grader Aidan Dwyer thought he saw a pattern in the way leaves and limbs grew from trees. Some photography, measurements, and investigating the work of other naturalists confirmed that plants produce new growth following a Fibonacci sequence. This pattern, where the previous numbers are added together to make the next number in sequence (1+1=2, 2+1=3, 3+2=5, 5+3=8, etc.), and its corresponding golden ratio have been observed all over the nature world. This got Dwyer thinking about why trees grew in this way, and if there was an evolutionary advantage in doing so. He knew that trees, like all plants, use their leaves to photosynthesize and decided to make that the focus of his investigation. To do so, he constructed a "tree" using the sequence of leaves found on an oak tree. Except on his tree, Dwyer placed photovoltaic cells instead of leaves.

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This tree in Lewisburg, Tennessee has way too much pollen, which, as we all know, is going to make everyone freeze in place before they commit mass suicide.

(via BuzzFeed)

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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.

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