Bear Cubs Play 'Ring Around The Rosie,' And We All Fall Down From Cuteness Overload (PHOTOS)

This family of baby brown bears is making our wildest fairytale dreams come true. Just look. These three siblings -- two little guys and their sister -- were photographed playing a game of "Ring Around The Rosie."

Valtteri Mulkahainen, a 52-year-old PE teacher, spotted the bears while traveling in Finland, according to Solent News. He watched the cubs hold each others' hands and dance around in a circle, while Mama bear chaperoned from just a few feet away.

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Leopard group seeks crowdfunding for new camera system

The Ingwe Leopard Research has launched a crowd funding project to help fund a new camera trap system for their work in South Africa. The new system will allow images from the cameras to be sent to citizen scientists to take part in the research and help sift through the data gained.

The group need $30,000 to put in place the developments and framework needed to get the system up and running.

The Ingwe Leopard Research has put the proposal together because they want to stop the hunting of leopards and increase their protection in South Africa. They believe that the figures for population number held by CITES is an overestimate and they want more research carried out into the population levels to find out just how many leopards are still free living in the country.

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Nature Studies: Could we one day see pine martens in the woods of southern England?

The radical idea that we should bring back to Britain the large carnivores we long ago wiped out – lynx, wolf, even brown bear – is increasingly being discussed as part of the topic of “rewilding” the impoverished natural world of our country; and it is provoking a fair amount of heated debate. Just a fortnight ago, Paul Lister, the multimillionaire heir to the MFI furniture fortune, told The Independent that he wanted to bring back all three – yep, bears included – to his large private estate in the wilds of northern Scotland.

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Merseyside red squirrels show signs of pox resistance

Red squirrels at a National Trust reserve in Merseyside have shown signs of resistance to the pox virus that has blighted the species, say researchers.

Scientists from the University of Liverpool have studied the squirrels at the Formby site for four years.

They found that 10% of its squirrels had pox antibodies in their blood.

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Canada's refusal to protect polar bears comes under scrutiny

Canada's closest allies and neighbours have called for a formal investigation into the government's refusal to offer full protection to polar bears threatened with extinction because of climate change.

The secretariat of the Commission for Environmental Co-operation (CEC) said this week there were "central open questions" about Canada's decision to offer only limited protection to polar bears. The CEC, which was set up by America, Canada, and Mexico under the North America free trade agreement, went on to call for an investigation.

Canadian officials may not have given enough importance to research predicting the loss of two-thirds of the world's polar bears by 2050 due to melting of Arctic sea ice, the secretariat suggested. The 2007 study by US Geological Survey researchers said a number of polar bear populations inside Canada would disappear entirely, or be severely decimated.

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