Matt Silver-Vallance gets ready to fly across the sea from Nelson Mandela's apartheid island prison using helium-filled giant party balloons, on April 6, 2013 in Cape Town. (RODGER BOSCH/AFP/Getty Images) Traveling by balloons might look exciting, but with unpredictable wind conditions it can make for a bumpy ride. Matt Silver-Vallance floated from Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisonned for 18 years during apartheid, to the coast of South Africa -- using nothing but 160 helium-filled balloons and a paragliding...

Bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) underwater. (Tom Brakefield/Thinkstock) Taking pictures of the local flora and fauna while on vacation can be a good way to remember the trip, but a group of tourists in China went too far when they saw a dolphin in shallow water. An injured dolphin died off the coast of the Hainan Province in southern China after a group of tourists repeatedly hoisted it out of the water to take pictures with it. According to the Shanghai...

Gerard dAboville, captain of the world's largest solar boat, Switzerlands MS Turanor PlanetSolar, stands on the boat's solar panels on June 18, 2013 at North Cove Marina in New York. Solar panels cover more than 5,554 square feet of the ship's surface. (Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images) Boats have relied on the wind to travel around the world for hundreds of years, but last year was the first time that a vessel powered only by the sun completed the full circumnavigation. And...

The Frontier Drive-In located in Center, Colo. (Credit: Craig Deman) Santa Monica, Calif.-based photographer Craig Deman captures eerie yet stunning photos of deteriorating drive-in movie theaters that have been fashioned by the effects of weather over time in his photo series, “The Drive-In Project.” “Decades of heat, wind and rain ‘organically stylized’ the remnants of screens, ticket booths and projection booths in a distressed manner,” explained Deman in an interview with Weather.com. “Capturing the effects of these atmospheric conditions on...

An image from Viennese artist Andreas Franke's underwater art gallery on the USS Mohawk near Sanibel Island, Fla. (Andreas Franke) Austrian photographer Andreas Franke has taken his works of art underwater again, transforming the USS Mohawk CGC, now a living reef, into a below sea level art gallery. Franke and his team mounted 12 images inside the 165-foot World War II warship’s walls off the coast of Sanibel Island. According to Diver magazine, the Mohawk is the last remaining ship...

A Chinese worker tends to one of the endangered Giant Panda twins born at the Wolong Nature Reserve in China's southwest Sichuan province (STR/AFP/Getty Images) This slideshow has been edited to include more baby animals born at zoos; the meerkats appear after the newborn Giant Panda twins and a sloth bear making his debut at the Smithsonian National Zoo. Weighing less than a tenth of a pound, meerkats Fips and Luck were born on April 23 to fanfare at the...

A beached whale art installation by the Belgian collective 'Captain Boomer' lies on the shore of the river Thames at Greenwich on June 20, 2013 in Greenwich, England. (Oli Scarff/Getty Images) When a bottlenose whale swam up the Thames River and became beached on the shore in 2006, thousands of people came to watch in awe and horror as scientists struggled and failed to returned the animal to its natural habitat. Spectators may have felt similar emotions upon seeing another...

Japan's iconic Mt. Fuji and the historic monuments of Kaesong, North Korea are just two of 19 new sites officially recognizeda World Heritage Site, an honor for monuments, buildings, sites or natural features "of outstanding universal value,"at the annual UNESCO conference held in Cambodia. Mount Etna in Italy, the Al Zubarah Archaeological Site in Qatar, and the Hani Rice Terraces in China were also added to the prestigious list. (MORE: Incredible Rice Terraces of the World) The UNESCO (United Nations...

Passenger John Breech snapped this photo as the passengers got off the Delta flight. (John Breech for weather.com) WASHINGTON -- Officials say a plane leaving Reagan National Airport veered off the runaway and its wheels got stuck in the mud. (MORE:|) Delta spokeswoman Sarah Lora said Delta Flight 1763 bound for Minneapolis was trying to enter the runway when the right gear left the pavement. She said the gear was stuck in about 12 inches of mud. Lora says that...

(Thinkstock) The timing of this year's July 4th holiday will lead to a slight decline in travel, according to the 2013 AAA Independence Day Holiday Travel Forecast. AAA Travel projects that 40.8 million Americans will journey 50 miles or more from home during the Independence Day holiday, a 0.8 percent decrease from the 41.1 million people who traveled last year. The anticipated decline in holiday travel is largely due to a shorter holiday period, according to the organization. With the...

The New Century Global Center building behind an artificial lake in Chengdu, in southwest China's Sichuan province. (STR/AFP/Getty Images) The biggest building in the world is open for business, and it's so large, it has its own artificial sun. The New Century Global Center in Chengdu, China includes offices, shopping malls, a Mediterranean village, a water park, an ice-skating rink, and hotels. Located in the Sichuan province of southwestern China, the building is a whopping 1.76 million square meters, large...

This photo provided by the family shows, from left, Jolene, Janet and Gabrielle Dunnabeck at their home in Whitney, Texas on Monday, July 1, 2013. The Federal Aviation Administration said Monday it is investigating a close call between a Texas-bound Spirit Airlines flight they were aboard and a skydiving plane that forced the jetliner to dive sharply over Michigan on Sunday evening. (AP Photo) DETROIT -- The Federal Aviation Administration said Monday it is investigating a close call between a...