Rivers have been the lifeblood of human civilization throughout history, and yet we know surprisingly little about what lives in many of them—including the giant creatures that prowl their depths.
While we know the biggest animal in the ocean is the blue whale and the largest marine fish is the whale shark, the identity of the world’s largest freshwater fish species long remained a mystery.
Until 2022, that is, when fishers in Cambodia caught a giant freshwater stingray in the remote reaches of the Mekong River.
Weighing an astounding 661 pounds, the stingray surpassed by 15 pounds a giant catfish caught in Thailand in 2005 that had previously been considered the unofficial record holder.
The discovery marked a milestone in fish biologist Zeb Hogan’s more than two-decade quest to study and protect giant freshwater fish. As a group, these megafish are among the most endangered animals on the planet.
Before releasing the female ray back into the river, Hogan’s research team put an acoustic tracker on her. She has been sending back clues about stingrays’ elusive behavior ever since.
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Alligator gar can grow to gargantuan sizes. Zeb Hogan
One dusky June evening, two days before the 2022 Pennsylvania Firefly Festival, the biologist Sarah Lower sat on a back porch, watching the sky for a specific gradation of twilight. A group of Lower’s students from Bucknell University hung around her, armed with butterfly nets and stopwatches for counting the time between firefly flashes—a way to differentiate between the multiple lightning-bug species that live here at the edge of Pennsylvania’s Allegheny National Forest. This postindustrial expanse of second-growth trees and hills pimpled with oil wells also happens to rank among the world’s best places to see fireflies.
Once the cloudy sky blushed red from its last glimpse of the setting sun, I set out with Lower and her students toward the forest edge. Moving from habitat to habitat as the evening deepened, Lower narrated which species we saw and their different behaviors. Her students, meanwhile, netted their way down a wish list of research samples.
First up was Photinus macdermotti, a firefly species that emits two quick flashes. Just a few feet away, near a pond ringed by cattails where a beaver lazed face up, the students caught Photinus marginally, a quick single flasher. Males buzzed around one patch of goldenrod, blinking quick winks at the sitting females who deigned to flash back. Like other species of fireflies, males of P.marginellus typically flash in flight, while females wait below on blades of grass, shooting answering flashes at only the most compelling suitors.
At first, these early-evening species looked almost like pixels of static. But the darker it got, the more they came to resemble dust motes twinkling in invisible sunbeams.
FEBRUARY 8, 2019, BY CONTRIBUTED BY: AUGUST PASSANNANTE John Lee Love was an African American inventor, most known for his invention of the hand-cranked pencil sharpener, the “Love Sharpener,” and an improved plasterer’s hawk. Little is known about the early life of Love. His date and place of birth are unknown, but it is conjectured that he was born […]
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The unending heat this summer has kept the air conditioners in my apartment windows wildly busy. When I’m not taking guesses about what my electric bill might look like this month, I’ve been thinking a lot about how air-conditioning is the double-edged sword of climate technologies.
On one hand, temperatures are rising around the globe, shattering extreme heat records on basically every continent. That’s making air-conditioning less of a “nice to have” and more of an absolute necessity in some parts of the world.
On the other hand, air-conditioning is becoming a monster when it comes to energy demand. We might have to add a whole US electrical grid’s worth of new energy generation just to power all the air conditioners that will come online in the next few decades.
Cold take
Air-conditioning seems ubiquitous where I live in the US, to the point that I carry around a sweater in the summer in anticipation of over-cooled offices and restaurants.
But in many parts of the world, including some of the countries at highest risk for extreme heat, most people go without it. Roughly 5% of households in India have air-conditioning. Of the 2.8 billion people living in the hottest parts of the world, roughly one in 10 has access to AC, according to the International Energy Agency.
That’s expected to change in the coming decades, as the world’s largest AC manufacturers target growing markets in Asia and Africa. By 2050, over two-thirds of the world could have an air conditioner, and half those units will likely be in three countries, according to the IEA: China, Indonesia, and India.
Electric delivery vehicles are big business. These “last-mile” solutions from companies like UPS and Amazon are a way around restrictions on freight vehicle emissions in cities and provide green credentials at the point where customers interact with a service.
In Europe, electric van sales went up 74 percent over the first five months of 2023, with EV powertrains becoming the second-favorite propulsion behind diesel, leapfrogging gasoline. Delivery EV production is massively accelerating as companies head toward 2025 commitments for fleet transformation and Ford and Stellantis bring more vehicles to market. Nissan has even been using Nikola battery-electric heavy-duty car transports to deliver Ariyas to customers in California.
But these electric delivery vehicles not especially new. In fact, a very significant proportion of electric road vehicles for most of the 20th century were working in suburbs, small towns, and villages in the UK as “milk floats.”
Low-powered, slow, and silent, the British milk float was the most common electric road vehicle for most of the 20th century, until the demise of morning milk deliveries. Some other utility EVs, like electric forklifts (invented in 1923) or golf carts, have outnumbered them worldwide, but they were never intended to be driven alongside cars.
You bring me milk each morning?
Anyone old enough to remember milk floats in Britain will know them as trundling vehicles that were the bane of morning commutes, impossible to pass thanks to the flatbeds that made them just long enough to be a moving obstacle. But they were also an institution. According to a 2017 Independent article, there were 1,200 being made a year. Most milk floats on the roads must have been pushing 10 years old, so that tells you how in-demand they were.
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Milk float in Earlsfield in London, England, United Kingdom. In Britain, a milk float is a vehicle specifically designed for the delivery of fresh milk.
Share Scandinavian heavy metal: Why Earth’s happiest place makes the darkest music on LinkedIn
Scandinavian countries consistently rank as the happiest in the world, and for good reason. Their societies are trustful and homogenous, with high GDPs per capita, long life expectancies, and reliable infrastructure. Even their prisons, which emphasize rehabilitation over punishment and allow inmates to cook their own meals and grow their own gardens, seem relatively pleasant.
But there is another, lesser-known statistic concerning Nordic countries, one that initially appears to contradict the first: their fondness of heavy metal music. A 2016 survey by the Czech linguist and mathematician Jakub Marian found that, while the United States only had around 72 metal bands for every million citizens, Sweden had more than 428. Finland came out on top with a grand total of 630. Iceland and Norway, which had 341 and 299 per million citizens, respectively, still ranked well above the 69 bands of the United Kingdom, heavy metal’s historic birthplace.
It’s hard to say why heavy metal is so popular in Scandinavia, not in the least because this clean, content, and prosperous corner of the globe has so little in common with the place where the genre is believed to have found its voice: the dirty, overworked factory floors of post-war Birmingham. Over the years, anthropologists and music historians have proposed many theories, the most convincing of which are discussed below.
The origins of Scandinavian metal
Nordic or Scandinavian metal is more melodic than its American and British counterparts. First emerging in the 1980s, it can be divided into sub-genres specific to each country. Swedish death metal, epitomized by bands like Meshuggah (known for songs like Bleed and New Millenium Cyanide Christ), is loud and boisterous. Its deep and growling vocals stand in sharp contrast to its high-pitched and more lyrical neighbor: Norwegian black metal, which is represented by bands like Mayhem (Falsified and Hated) and Emperor (I am the Black Wizards). Similar comparisons can be made between Finland, Denmark, and Iceland.
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Meshuggah concert. (Credit: Andreas Lawen, Fotandi / Wikipedia)
In the world, human beings are facing various problems. People who are full of greed, anger, and ignorance are seen to be fighting with each other in words and deeds. As the fighting continues, various problems such as civil wars, wars of aggression, and wars of aggression are occurring. As world peace is being destroyed, humans are facing unbearable problems. Innocent children and women are not getting the rights they deserve and deserve. I can't think of one thing every time. What is it? The United Nations. If we look at the responsibilities and duties of the United Nations, I think it is not suitable for solving the problems that are happening in the world today. In fact, the United Nations and the World Security Council, such an organization must rule the world, must be able to give orders, and must have various ways to obey orders. There must be no organization that can influence more than that organization. There should be experts from each country. They can even dominate the superpowers like the US, China, and Britain. Only then will global peace be achieved quickly. Now, if a country with power develops more militarily, economically, or socially than its own country, then powerful countries will jealously seek out enemies and wage war. Or they will attack with fighter jets. In this, innocent people are losing their lives. No one understands the value of a life. You should think about how to achieve global peace by controlling these. If the US continues to be the permanent president of the UN, world peace will never be achieved. If you think carefully, no one sees that they are working for the common good, but for their own benefit, for the benefit of their own country. The permanent president of the UN and the Security Council has rejected this, As a young Rohingya, I have come to realize that only by electing the president and secretary from among the countries in the world through a secret ballot system and governing the world fairly can we achieve global peace. The United Nations and the Security Council are organizations in which any country must govern, give orders, and make them obey their orders. For example, only when a defendant is tried in court can we hold the leaders of the countries in check and control them, can we achieve global peace smoothly. Otherwise, it will not be easy for powerful countries to use various excuses to end this war every year, every year, for the benefit of themselves and their countries. No country's leaders pay any attention to the words of the United Nations and the Security Council. If we look at it in practice, look at the Rohingya issue. Myanmar is a small country. Even that country has been under siege for 8 years. What action can be taken? Why is the UN and the Security Council Powerless? Without such Power, how can the organization bring about global peace? Everyone should think about it. Whether there is a veto or a strong one, all countries in the world can only achieve global peace if they are subject to the UN and the Security Council. Seek peace in the quiet embrace of nature. Peace is an indispensable need of the human race. It is not as if one person can kill another person, and it is as if one country can attack another country, but instead of trying to build peace, we must try to destroy the peace now, and the world is getting hotter and is on the verge of collapse. I especially appeal to all the world experts to urgently try to bring about peace in all parts of the world. Mr, Noor Muhamed Arkhan Rohingya Youth Myanmar
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
Alligator gar can grow to gargantuan sizes. Zeb Hogan
Radim Schreiber
Milk float in Earlsfield in London, England, United Kingdom. In Britain, a milk float is a vehicle specifically designed for the delivery of fresh milk.
Meshuggah concert. (Credit: Andreas Lawen, Fotandi / Wikipedia)
