Attracting a mate can be serious business—just ask a male elk or caribou, after a round of rack-jousting and head-butting—but it can also be all about beauty and care.  Consider this five-inch pufferfish swimming gently about, crafting a seven-foot mandala of love, an irresistible spawning ground.  

If the sheer wonder of the video isn’t enough for you, well, then go ahead and read about it.

Designer and data visualizer John Nelson thought it would be fun to stitch together a bunch of NASA’s “Visible Earth” images through the seasons.  Once he did, he realized: it’s breathing. “All of a sudden I see a thing with a heartbeat,” he says, “I didn’t expect to be so mesmerized. . . I can’t look away.”  (give it a bit of time to load all the frames, then it’ll run smoothly)

See John’s blog here, and a couple of good articles about this from NPR and Nat’l Geo.  All these links also include a view that shows the subtler dance of green across the southern hemisphere, and John’s page offers views in much larger sizes as well!