This ultimate selfie will make you dizzy!

Extreme selfies have become a recent trend, with the most popular being taken from dizzying heights. Travel company owner Lee Thompson is the most recent person to take a newsworthy extreme selfie; he snapped his from atop the 124-foot high Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

The statue of Jesus Christ was completed in 1931 and sits on top of 700-metre (2,300 foot) Corcovado mountain overlooking the city of Rio. It is not only a religious symbol for Brazilian Christians, but is also a very popular tourist attraction.

Thompson didn't climb the statue illegally - he got permission from the tourist board of Brazil and was helped by guides.

It took 25 minutes climbing up "extremely hot, eerily quiet and claustrophobic" stairwells, but the view from the top was worth it.

"When I popped my head out of the top it took my breath away. The view really was incredible. It is the most fun selfie I've taken and one of my favourite photos," Thompson said. GoGo News-Internet

'Mega-Earth' rocky planet discovered

A massive planet that has been nicknamed 'Mega -Earth' has been discovered 560 light years away from Earth. The planet, Kepler-10 c, weighs 17 times more than Earth, which surprised astronomers who expected it to be a big ball of gas, like Jupiter.

It's been nicknamed Mega-Earth because it is much larger than other rocky bodies that have been discovered in space. It also circles a Sun-like star, but it does so every 45 days instead of the 365 days it takes Earth to circle the Sun.

"This is the godzilla of Earths! But unlike the movie monster, Kepler-10c has positive implications for life," said Dimitar Sasselov, director of the Origins of Life Initiative at Harvard University.

Kepler-10c tells scientists two key things: Rocky planets could form much earlier than believed, and it may host life. According to astronomers' calculations, Kepler-10c is about 11 billion years old, only 3 billion years younger than our universe!

"Finding Kepler-10c tells us that rocky planets could form much earlier than we thought," said Sasselov. "And if you can make rocks, you can make life," he said. GoGo News-Internet

This spider disguises itself as bird poop!

There are some pretty clever spiders out there, like the decoy-building spider of South America that uses small rocks and pieces of dirt to build a large spider in its web to confuse its predators. The orb-web spider (Cyclosa ginaga) camouflages itself as something a little less beautiful: bird poop.

It weaves a silky round decoration in the centre of its web that looks very similar to a dropping of white bird poop. Scientists believe the spiders do this to disguise themselves from hungry wasps looking for meal.

"These predators usually will form a search image to hunt for spiders, and [they] usually will not be interested in bird droppings," said I-Min Tso, the lead researcher behind the study of this spider. To test whether or not their bird-poop disguise was actually effective, scientists measured the colour contrast between the spider's body, its poop look-a-like web, and actual bird droppings against a natural background.

The results shower that the spider bodies perfectly blend in with their white web, making them just like real bird poop (which is dark in the middle and white on the edges) to a wasp.

The wasps were more likely to attack a spider when only its white web was blackened, which suggests that the spiders rely on their body and not just the silky web to complete the life-saving disguise.

GoGo News-Internet