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One Man’s Quest to Save the Most Colossal Fishes on Earth

Zeb Hogan with a giant freshwater stingray, which grows to over 16 feet long. Its barb is 15 inches long, and can penetrate not just flesh but bone. This is a gentle creature, though, and will only attack if seriously provoked

Zeb Hogan was already familiar with the legendary Mekong giant catfish. After all, he’d been studying the beasts, which grow to hundreds and hundreds of pounds, for years. But when a colleague in Thailand phoned him up in 2005 to say that fishermen had hauled a 646-pounder ashore, it seemed…unprecedented. So Hogan, a biologist at the University of Nevada, Reno, did some poking around. He found some records that showed that it was not only the biggest Mekong giant catfish, but the biggest recorded freshwater fish ever caught.

And it all got him thinking: Could there be even bigger freshwater fish out there? National Geographic apparently thought it was a good enough question to fund him, so cash in hand he set out to find the answer. On over 50 expeditions across six continents so far, Hogan’s been wading through river after river and hooking giant fish after giant fish—building a better picture of Earth’s little-understood freshwater monsters in the process. So far that 646-pound catfish stands as the world’s biggest, but in his quest Hogan has found that the picture he’s built ain’t pretty.

The giant Mekong catfish grows to over 600 pounds and 10 feet long. Here’s one in Cambodia. Sadly, a number of threats have rendered the catfish critically endangered.

“After working on this for about 10 years,” he says, “it turns out that there are about 30 species of freshwater fish that can get over 6 feet long or weigh more than 200 pounds, and they occur in large rivers and lakes all over the world and on every continent except Antarctica. And about 70 percent of them are threatened with extinction.” All manner of humanity’s shenanigans, from pollution to dam-building to overfishing, are imperiling these giants, to the point where some may vanish before science even gets to really know them.

But not if Hogan has anything to say about it.

Living Large

So, why do fish get so big in the first place? Most species grow throughout their lives, and as these aquatic monsters get bigger and bigger, at some point they can take on pretty much any prey in their habitat. After all, it’s clearly an advantage to be able to eat whatever comes your way. And they tend to swim in highly productive rivers, such as the Mekong, so there’s plenty of food about. As an added bonus, some fish eventually get too big to worry about being eaten themselves, Hogan says, “so most of these fish—giant catfish, sturgeon, giant stingrays—once they get to a very large size they don’t have predators.”

Up until fairly recently, these fish were dominating lakes and rivers across the planet, including the US—and they were going almost totally unnoticed. Even Arizona, not a place known much for its water, has its own variety of giant fish. Cutting through the state is one of the mightiest waterways on Earth, the Colorado River, and Hogan knows its power intimately: While on a survey of one of the Colorado’s tributaries as an undergraduate, a flash flood swept through, trapping his party in a canyon for two days. Swimming in these waters is a little-known giant: the Colorado pikeminnow. Minnows may be typecast as the runts of the fish world, but this pikeminnow can grow to 6 feet long—back in the early 20th century, when the fish wasn’t yet endangered, anglers were using rabbits as bait to snag it.

The central irony of the world’s biggest freshwater fishes is this: For all their enormity, they sure are hard to find. I’m willing to bet, for instance, that while you’ve probably heard of the sawfish, with its long snout studded with teeth, you’ve probably never heard of its cousin, the largetooth sawfish, which grows over 20 feet long. And what about the 16-foot stingray of Southeast Asia, whose toxic, serrated barb grows to 15 inches long—a creature that’s been known to drag fishing boats up and down rivers for hours, with men working in shifts to reel it in?

Many of these critters have only been officially described recently. The enormous whipray of Australia, for example, can grow to 10 feet across, yet wasn’t described until 2008. “And the short-tailed river ray down in Argentina in the Parana River, I’ve never seen any study of it at all except for reports that came from fishermen, reports that were in newspapers,” Hogan says. There’s so little information on these creatures, it’s difficult to tell whether they’re endangered or just hard to find.

A formidable alligator gar from Texas. It can grow to over 300 pounds and live for almost a century.

It’s this information that Hogan is after. In the meantime, scientists can say one thing with relative confidence: These giant fish are living for a very, very long time, perhaps as long as a century. As a general rule in nature, the bigger you are, the longer you tend to live. A blue whale, for instance, will far outlive your typical fruit fly (though there are exceptions like the hydra, a tiny invertebrate that may actually be immortal). Living for so long also means that giant freshwater fish take a very long time to reach sexual maturity. And that’s a huge problem when you’re living in a world ruled by the human race.

Under Siege

Down in New Zealand there lives a creature called the longfin eel, which grows to 8 feet long. It has a rather epic life cycle: It’s born out at sea, migrates up rivers and into lakes, and spends up to 100 years there. Only near the end of its life does it head back down the rivers and out to sea to spawn. Waiting such an incredibly long time to spawn like other giant freshwater fish—relative to smaller fish that mature quicker and start getting busy earlier on—puts them at greater risk of getting picked off by humans before they can mate to propagate the species. Run out of sexually active adults, and you have a serious problem on your hands.

That is, if a longfin eel can get to its spawning grounds in the first place. New Zealand has come to rely on dams for electricity, irrigation, and maintaining water supplies. And these dams can make life a nightmare for migrating fish like the longfin eel. More and more dams are popping up on the lower Mekong as well. “You have Mekong giant catfish, sturgeon, longfin eel, the big catfish in the Amazon,” says Hogan. “These are all species that make long distance migrations to complete their life cycle.” And they may be running up against dams.

A white sturgeon from Canada. “This fish was caught, tagged, and released as part of an innovative partnership between recreational anglers and scientists,” Hogan says. “Data from the tagged fish have helped biologists estimate the population size of white sturgeon in the Fraser River.

Overfishing is also an issue, particularly in the Mekong, where humans have traditionally relied on large species like the giant catfish for food. Think of it as a top-down approach: The catfish, with their plentiful meat, are typically targeted first, then the next biggest species, then the one after that. This puts huge strain on the giants’ populations. “What you see is that those larger fish are becoming very rare, and it’s shifted and the smaller species are the staple food,” says Hogan. “But that’s an indication that that resource is being hit very hard, it’s being overexploited potentially to a breaking point.”

Invasive species threaten the fish too. While the 6-foot pikeminnow isn’t threatened by overexploitation in the Colorado River, it is a victim of its own hunger. Catfish are invasive here, and they don’t compete for the pikeminnow’s food—they are the pikeminnow’s food. But they come equipped with defensive spines, which lodge the catfish in the pikeminnows’ throats, choking them. Add to this the fact that the Colorado river has been engineered to the point of absurdity (for a great history on this, check out Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert), and you’ve got one fish in serious trouble.

A Khmer fisherman with a giant barb, a kind of carp that grows to 10 feet long and 600 pounds

Saving the Giants

So what can be done? “From my perspective,” says Hogan, “really the first step in the process, or at least what I’ve been doing, is raising awareness of the fact that these fish even exist. I think things are changing now, but 10 years ago people didn’t know what a Mekong giant catfish was.” To that end, the National Geographic Museum in DC now has an exhibit, “Monster Fish: In Search of the Last River Giants,”running until October, to showcase these beauties (well, not in the flesh, but they do have five lovely life-sized models on display).

The second step, Hogan says, is gathering enough information on giant freshwater fish to start making rational decisions about their conservation. The Mekong River alone, for example, is home to the giant Mekong catfish, the giant freshwater stingray, and the 10-foot giant carp. “In the Mekong there’s very, very little information known about the life cycle of most of the fish,” he says. “And so as people start to make decisions about where to build dams, they’re doing so without any information about how these dams are likely to affect fish.”

The 6-foot, 200-pound American paddlefish is just one of two paddlefish species on Earth

With enough information, scientists and local peoples can further tackle problems like overfishing. Hogan has seen success with this in Mongolia, where the six-and-a-half-foot, 200-pound taimen, or Eurasian giant trout, swims. Local communities realized it was more profitable for them to support catch-and-release fishing tourism, a practice that proved so successful that the Mongolian government passed a regulation making all giant trout fishing catch-and-release. And in the same vein, Hogan has in the past been able to intercept fishermen who’ve snagged giant Mekong catfish, pay them market value for the beasts, then tag the catches and set them free.

Sadly, though, there was nothing Hogan could do for that record-breaking 646-pound catfish 10 years ago. By the time he’d arrived on the scene a month later, it’d of course been butchered and sold. But these days, fishermen are simply coming up empty—last year in northern Thailand, for instance, records show just a single giant catfish landed. And so it seems that for some of these species of giant freshwater fish, it may well be too late.

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Secretly Living Outside of Society

Back in 1993, Julian and Emma Orbach purchased a large piece of land in west Wales’ Preseli Mountains. Ultimately, the then-soon-to-be camouflaged area became home to more than twenty like-minded people, all of who wished to live outside of the confines of what passes for society. They constructed grass-covered, wooden buildings, and became very much self-sufficient. In some respects, their story is not unlike that presented in M. Night Shyamalan’s 2004 movie, The Village.

For all intents and purposes, they created a self-enclosed community, the existence of which very few, if indeed hardly any, had any inkling. That the secret village resembled something straight out of the Middle Ages or – as the media noted, when the story broke – Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings, only added to the engaging and near-magical nature of the area.

Astonishingly, the Orbachs, and the rest of their number, lived in blissful peace and stealth for no less than five years before anyone in authority even realized what was going on. In fact, the only reason why the story, and the facts behind it, ever surfaced was because, in 1998, a survey aircraft in the area happened to take aerial photographs of the village.

This was most unfortunate for one and all that called the place their home, as their cover was finally blown. The result: it wasn’t long at all before tedious, humorless automatons of government descended on the colony, all determined to stick their meddling noses into the situation.

With no planning permission having ever been obtained for the village, the government was adamant that the buildings, along with each and every bit of the little, isolated locale, had to be destroyed. Or else. And, as a result, thus began a years-long campaign in which the unsmiling men in black suits sought to just follow orders, while those that called the Narnia-like area their home, fought to remain there, untouched and unspoiled by officialdom and the aggravating presence of the Nanny State. At one point, bulldozers were even brought onto the scene, ready and waiting for the cold-hearts of officialdom to give the green-light to flatten the eight buildings that comprised the secret village.

Fortunately, it did not come to that. Finally, in 2008 – which was a full decade after the existence of the village first became public knowledge, and fifteen years after the first steps to create it had been taken – the government caved in. It was a good day for the people of that little village. As it always is when citizens can publicly raise their middle finger to government and still come out on top.

The situation was helped by the fact that, come 2008, the government of the day was far more mindful of green issues than in previous years. So, the minions of officialdom agreed that providing the villagers followed certain rules and regulations – and could demonstrate that they were improving the biodiversity of the area and conserving the surrounding woodland – they could remain intact and free of bureaucratic busybodies. Sometimes, sanity and commonsense actually do prevail, even within government, as amazing as such a thing might sound!

It’s also notable that this near-unique colony managed to avoid detection, in the wilds of Wales, for half a decade. Wales is part of the United Kingdom (along with Scotland, England, and Northern Ireland), a sovereign state with a population in excess of 60 million people. And still they managed to hide under the radar. And I say good for them. In a world where personal privacy is going out the window by the day, it’s always good to see someone doing something to counter Big Brother in a positive fashion.

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Ben Affleck Will Direct The Batman Movie, and Geoff Johns Will Write It

It’s been rumored for a while, but now Warner Bros. has finally managed to roll a big enough wheelbarrow full of cash convinced Oscar-winning director Ben Affleck to direct and star in the first new stand-alone Batman movie of the new DC cinematic universe, from a script by DC Comics’ Geoff Johns.

Johns is of course DC’s Chief Creative Officer, the guy they put on all the big comic titles (including Justice League and Superman), and an occasional scriptwriter for several DC shows including Arrow and The Flash. He also developed CBS’ Supergirl series, so in terms of live-action DC entertainment, he’s on a bit of a roll. Plus, he and Affleck are BFFs—from Deadline:

My studio sources tell me that Affleck and Johns are well in synch and have more than found their rhythm. In fact, they are likely to turn in a script before the end of the summer, prior to Affleck going off to direct Live By Night in November. Affleck postponed that pic to star in Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice. The Batman movie would shoot after he finishes Live By Night, and the plot would reflect the Batman character that emerges after Batman V Superman and Justice League, the latter of which comes out November 17, 2017. DC and Warner Bros have set a long list of superhero movies that take the Marvel formula of interspersing characters from one film to the next, so it’s unclear when Affleck’s Batfilm will be slotted.

But it will clearly take priority and other movies might have to move to get out of its way.

A Batman movie directed byAffleck? The executives at Warner Bros. have to be high-fiving each other with cocaine-covered hands over this. My concern is that Affleck likes dark and gritty crime stories way more than Nolan ever did—could he possibly bring something new to the chaarcter that we haven’t seen in theaters?

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The Global Warming 'Pause' Never Actually Happened

There’s been much debate these past few years over the cause of the so-called global warming “hiatus” — a pause in the overall uptick up of Earth’s temperature due to cooling at the surface of the Pacific Ocean since the early 2000s. Did climate warming stop? Nope, we just weren’t looking deep enough.

Earth’s extra heat, you see, has spent the last 10 years sinking into the vast depths of the equatorial Pacific and Indian Oceans.

That’s the conclusion of a new study, conducted by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and published today in the journal Science. The study, which examines two decades of observational data, offers the most definitive evidence to date that Earth’s largest ocean has been massively redistributing heat since 2003. Specifically, cooling in the top 100 meter layer of the Pacific Ocean has been compensated by warming in the 100 to 300 meter layer of both the Pacific and Indian Oceans, which together cover over 40% of our planet’s surface.

The global average ocean surface temperature has been rising since 2003 by +0.001C per year, according to Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That temperature rise is notably slower than century-timescale warming of +0.006C per year since 1880. For the last few years, climate scientists have been trying to understand whether the hiatus was the result of a redistribution of heat within the ocean, or less overall heat uptake at the ocean’s surface.

Over the last few years, a likely scenario has begun to emerge. Modelling studies show that the cooling of the surface of the Pacific is probably being balanced by more rapid warming in deeper parts of the Atlantic or the Pacific. What’s more, a recent paper in Nature Climate Change used observational data and models to demonstrate increased heat transport from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean over the last decade. Clearly, the pathways by which Earth’s oceans process heat seem to be changing.

The new study, however, is the first to include a comprehensive analysis of real-world data from the past two decades. Similarly to modelling efforts, the researchers’ findings point to a redistribution of heat from the surface to the deep ocean. Taken together, however, Earth’s oceans and atmosphere have continued to absorb heat at the same overall rate since 2003:

Observational estimates provide a more accurate means of assessing oceanic temperature changes and show clear decadal signals that are robust across different analyses and clearly significant relative to observational errors. Our findings support the idea that the Indo-Pacific interaction in the upper-level water (0-300 m depth) regulated global surface temperature over the past two decades and can fully account for the recently observed hiatus. Furthermore, as previously shown for interannual fluctuations, the decade long hiatus that began in 2003 is the result of a redistribution of heat within the ocean, rather than a change in the net warming rate.

The scientific debate over global warming ended a long time ago. Misconceptions about the “hiatus,” however, have continued to add fuel to the woefully unscientific political debate that still rages in the halls of Congress. Hopefully, with this particular riddle now solved, again, we can all move on to the real task of reducing our fossil fuel emissions and preparing for a hotter future.

You can read the full Science paper here.

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James Bond musical heading to Broadway

Ready for a James Bond 007 singalong? James Bond: The Musical is on the way...

If you're one of those people who watches a James Bond movie, and thinks it could be enhanced by a big song and dance number every time 007 takes someone out, then this may yet be your favourite of every story we've ever run.

For plans are afoot for a James Bond musical, which is currently being targeted for a 2017 premiere on Broadway. The idea is that the musical will include classic villains, one or two new ones, a fresh Bond girl and a new James Bond. Well, unless Pierce Brosnan wants to build on his Mamma Mia! days.

The show currently goes by the title of James Bond: The Musicial, with Dave Clarke penning the book for the show. The music and lyrics will be the work of country music composer Jay Henry Weisz.

The aim is to have the show on stage in late 2017 or early 2018, and it may well be that it goes to Las Vegas before it gets near Broadway. Merry Saltzman, the daughter of the late Bond producer Harry Saltzman, is executive producing.

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Inside The Small Shop That Makes Fantastic Headphones The Old-School Way

For such a quaint shop that hasn’t advertised their headphones since 1964, Grado Headphones is a total powerhouse. Hypebeast took a tour to find out the story behind Grado and it’s fascinating to see how these old school makers of headphones compete with the excessive beaten industry of today.

It’s also great to find out the story of how they test their headphones, with Eric Clapton, Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald.

[NCPANTHERZFAN]

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I didn't think there could be anything better than having a hot chick sculpt an enormous model of my head out of clay, but...Hello! Chocolate beats mud any day. Lionel Richie. You lucky bastard.

Did you ever think the moment would come that you could purchase a 20-pound Lionel Richie head made of solid Belgian chocolate for under $1,000? And I'm talking authentic 1984 Lionel, none of this mustache-and-Jheri-curl-juice-less Lionel of the 21st century. This formidable edible sculpture takes 2 whole weeks to mold and chisel into the masterpiece you see before you. The detail of the soul legend's lower lip alone is so stirring I could almost take a bite out of it. Whoa. Did I really just say that? I mean, I've always been a fan of "All Night Long" and "Say You, Say Me," but I never thought it was to the extent that I would want to eat a piece of Lionel Richie's face.

What's that, ma'am? Oh. The UPS delivery woman at my office just said she would tear into Lionel's entire face. And even better if it's made of chocolate.

Twenty pounds of milky Lionel begins as 20 pounds of milk chocolate, melted and poured into a 3D-printed mold of the singer's face. According to vendor Firebox, the sculpture is then "lovingly hand-finished by a blind art student." Ahh, even more reason to Add to Cart.

Problem or Concern?

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Twenty pounds of milky Lionel begins as 20 pounds of milk chocolate, melted and poured into a 3D-printed mold of the singer's face.

Problem or Concern?

Yeah... 20 Pounds of Lionel means around 35 pounds to your waistline

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Check Out The New Batman V. Superman Trailer, Starring Wonder Woman

So she’s only on screen for a few seconds of the over three and a half minute long Comic-Con trailer for next year’s Batman V. Superman. They are the best seconds.

It’s an impressive trailer, both visually and lengthwise. Lex Luthor’s wig gets a lot of play, and we get to see more of why brooding Bruce is brooding. Nothing pits two heroes against each other like hundreds dying in a collapsing building and holding a crying child, especially when the one dealing with the crying is the world’s most famous crying child himself, Bruce Wayne.

But yes, I am most excited for Wonder Woman, as I’ve seen several movies starring the other two big heroes here but none featuring the third element of the holy trinity. Gal Gadot looks much more angry and powerful than I’d imagine she’d be so I stand corrected.

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Ash vs Evil Dead Trailer Sees Bruce Campbell At His Boomstick Best

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unnLg1TPCYM

With San Diego Comic-Con on this weekend, we’ve been spoiled with trailers galore. First the Star Wars reel, then Batman v Superman and now, for all you Bruce Campbell fans out there, the new Starz TV series, Ash vs Evil Dead. And yes, Campbell is reprising the titular role.

It’s not quite on the same scale as Jedis and comic book superheroes, but for followers of Sam Raimi’s films, it’s up there as the best news to come out of SDCC.

Set 30 years after the events of Army of Darkness (in the reality where the world doesn’t end), we find Ash Williams has been fighting psychological demons rather than real ones, thanks to his horrific experiences, though that quickly changes when the undead do what they do best.

Of course, there’s only one chainsaw-armed, boomstick-wielding man for the job.

Along with several fresh faces, the show will feature Lucy Lawless of Spartacus, Battlestar Galactica and Xena fame, and is produced by Campbell and Raimi. At the moment, it’ll debut on Starz on the entirely fitting date of 31 October, with a ten-episode run planned. Hopefully it will be both good and successful — you can never have too much Bruce Campbell.

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Star Wars: The Force Awakens Behinds The Scenes Reel

The Star Wars hype is real. It’s only going to get more real as December approaches and we once again explore a time long ago in a galaxy far away. Only fitting then we’d get a taste of behind the scenes deliciousness, straight from San Diego Comic-Con and boy, I think I might need to change, well, all of my clothes.

The video was shown at this year’s SDCC, with pretty much all the major characters in attendance. Not that you had to be there to see it.

If you though the first trailer was exciting, well, time to prepare your body again. Why? Mark Hamill says it best:

Real sets. Practical effects. You’ve been here, but you don’t know this story. Nothing’s changed really… I mean, everything’s changed, but nothing’s changed.

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The World's Largest Indoor Vertical Farm Is Being Built In The US

This week, a former steel factory in Newark, New Jersey began its transformation into a new life as a vertical farm that will feed millions of people — it will grow up to 907 tonnes of kale, arugula and romaine lettuce per year when it’s finished.

The farm is one of many industrial buildings in the Ironbound community of Newark where former factories and warehouses are being rehabilitated into new uses. When finished, the 6410m² space will be the largest indoor vertical farm in the world.

The technology for the farm will come from a company called AeroFarms, which uses tall towers of LED-lit aeroponic trays to grow herbs and leafy greens. AeroFarms claims that their method is 75 times more productive than a traditional outdoor farm would be per square-foot. And because it’s indoors, it uses no pesticides.

But perhaps the most important claim about the benefit of this method is that AeroFarm’s techniques claim to use 95 per cent less water. That’s an incredible decrease in the amount of resources needed to grow food, especially in light of the drought crippling California.

The facility will open in phases with the first phase completed by October of 2015. Time will tell if the farm is indeed as efficient as the predictions have made it out to be, but if so, this could be a great model for other cities — not just a way to reclaim former industrial infrastructure, but also as a very smart way to feed more people with very little water.

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These Alternate Jurassic World Endings Would Have Made A Lot More Sense

Jurassic World was plenty entertaining and all (seriously, it’s a movie about a genetically modified raptor-rex on a murderous rampage! how could it not be?) but nevertheless, fans and science fiction bloggers alike have spotted a few, well, inaccuracies.

This excellent short animation by the YouTube channel ‘How It Should Have Ended‘ fixes most of them; showing us what actually happens when you roll a gyrosphere through a stegosaurus litter box or try to outrun a T-rex in heels, and why digging giant motes around your GM-predator pen is always, always a good idea. Enjoy.

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Solar Impulse Fried Its Batteries On Historic Five Day Flight

The Solar Impulse 2 trucked so hard on its record breaking, non-stop flight from Japan to Hawaii, it seems to have overheated its lithium ion batteries. The plane is now grounded for the next two-three weeks while engineers work to fix the damage and determine whether new parts will be needed to get the Impulse airborne once more.

The delay makes it less certain that the Solar Impulse 2 will be able to complete its round-the-world journey, which begins and ends in Abu Dhabi, in 2015. The vehicle’s slow speed, light weight, and 72m wingspan mean that it can only fly under very specific meteorological conditions. If Solar Impulse can’t make it to the East Coast by August, meteorologists believe its windows of opportunity will become few and far between this year.

Whether or not the Impulse completes its global tour as planned, it’s already smashed aviation records. Earlier this month, pilot Andre Borschberg flew nearly 7240km in 118 hours, using nothing but the power of the sun. Pilot Bertrand Piccard is due to take over for the next leg of the mission, from Kalaeloa, Hawaii to Phoenix, Arizona. We should know within the next few days whether the Impulse will be able to continue on schedule. Fingers crossed!

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Boeing Dreams Of An Engine Powered By Lasers And Nuclear Explosions

Boeing has aspirations to build a jet engine powered by lasers and nuclear explosions.

At least, that’s what Boeing’s recently approved patent application with the US Patent and Trademark Office would suggest.

Modern aircraft such as the Boeing Dreamliner are powered by turbofan engines, which use a series of fans and turbines to compress air and ignite fuel. The newly proposed engine — which at the moment lives only in patent documents — would work pretty differently, using high-powered laser beams to vaporise nuclear material within a thruster, causing nuclear fusion reactions.

The high-energy neutrons released by these small explosions would propel the aircraft forward, while the excess heat would be harnessed to power a turbine to recharge the laser system — in essence creating a self-powered engine.

In the future, Boeing hopes the new design may be used to power rockets, missiles, and spacecraft. If we really can’t have warp drive (still an open question!), it’s comforting to know that our rocket scientists are busy cooking up other awesomely science fictional propulsion systems.

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Denmark's Wind Energy Output Just Exceeded National Demand

When it comes to renewable energy, Denmark is officially kicking arse. Yesterday, Denmark’s wind farms produced 116 per cent of national electricity demands, allowing the country to export power to Norway, Germany and Sweden. According to The Guardian, that figure had risen to 140 per cent by early Friday morning.

“It shows that a world powered 100 per cent by renewable energy is no fantasy,” the European Wind Energy Association’s Oliver Joy told The Guardian. “Wind energy and renewables can be a solution to decarbonization — and also security of supply at times of high demand.”

Denmark has long been a global leader in renewable energy. With almost unanimous political consensus, the 5.6 million-strong Danish population has in recent years pushed aggressively for the installation of new wind farms across the country, with the goal of producing half of its electricity via renewable sources by 2020. And in 2014, Denmark announced to the world that it aimed to end burning fossil fuels entirely — not just for electricity, but for transportation — by 2050.

This week’s wind energy milestone places what sounded to be a very audacious set of goals within reach for the small Nordic nation. The latest wind energy figures can be found on the Danish transmission systems operator website energinet.dk. The site, The Guardian notes, showed that Danish wind farms weren’t even operating at their full 4.8GW capacity at the time of the recent peaks.

Keep on truckin’ Denmark. You’re giving the rest of us hope.

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Ancient Roman Concrete Was Inspired By Volcanic Chemistry

In 1982, the ground beneath the historic port city of Pozzuoli began to rise like a cake in the oven. Within two years, the swell had exceeded 1.8m. Then the earth started shaking — first, a swarm of microquakes. When the first magnitude four quake hit, Pozzuoli became a ghost town overnight.

Tiziana Vanorio, a geophysicist at Stanford University, was a teenager when the seemingly apocalyptic events forced her family to flee Pozzuoli along with the city’s 40,000 other residents. Now, over thirty years later, Vanorio seems to have discovered what caused the 1982 phenomenon that first sparked her interest in geology: A fibre-reinforced, concrete-like rock, formed in the depths of the nearby supervolcano Campi Flegrei.

It gets weirder. The ‘natural concrete’ Vanorio found in Campi Flegrei is similar to the legendary concrete used by the ancient Romans to construct the Pantheon, the Colosseum, and numerous shipping ports throughout the Mediterranean. It’s so much of a coincidence, Vanorio now suspects the Romans invented their concrete came after observing the natural chemical reactions occurring around Pozzuoli.

Pozzuoli and Campi Flegrei both lie within a caldera — a large depression pockmarked by craters from previous volcanic eruptions. While ground swelling is a common sight at calderas around the world, including Yellowstone and Long Valley in the United States, the speed and size of the 1982 swell at Pozzuoli was unprecedented.

“It usually requires far less uplift to trigger earthquakes at other places,” Vanorio said. “At Campi Flegrei, the micro-earthquakes were delayed by months despite really large ground deformations.”

To learn why the Pozzuoli caldera was able to withstand such incredible strain without cracking, Vanorio and her colleagues examined rock cores collected during a 1980s drilling expedition. Within these cores, they quickly identified the caprock — a hard, volcanic-ash rock layer found near a caldera’s surface — and discovered that it was full of tobermorite and ettringite, two fibrous minerals also found in manmade concrete. These minerals, the researchers say, are what makes Campi Flegrei’s caprock so darn pliable.

What’s more, the researchers were able to show that these concrete-like minerals formed through a series of reactions known as decarbonation. That’s what happens when hot, mineral rich water interacts with limestone, forming carbon dioxide and calcium hydroxide gases. The ancient Romans might have observed a similar decarbonation process taking place near the surface surrounding Pozzuoli, and exploited it to form their famous concrete.

“The Romans were keen observers of the natural world and fine empiricists,” Vanorio said in a statement. “Seneca, and before him Vitruvius, understood that there was something special about the ash at Pozzuoli, and the Romans used thepozzolana to create their own concrete, albeit with a different source of lime.”

Vanorio believes that the same chemical reactions responsible for forming the caprock at Campi Flegrei probably triggered the 1982 swell. If decarbonation happens too quickly, excess CO2 and steam will rise toward the surface of the caldera, warming and swelling the rock. As soon as the ground begins cracking, these pent-up gases vent into the atmosphere and the swelling subsides.

So there you have it, folks: A 2000-plus year old mystery and a thirty year old mystery, solved in one fell swoop with a little geology. The ways in which nature can spark innovation never cease to amaze me. But the fact that complex geochemical reactions might have inspired one of the most iconic building materials in human history… well, I guess it’s no wonder Romans conquered the ancient world.

[MIKA27]

Quentin Tarantino Talks Western ‘The Hateful Eight,’ Retirement, and ‘Kill Bill 3’

Is Quentin Tarantino plotting retirement after his tenth movie?

“If I can’t shoot on film or release to some degree on film, I’ll leave it at ten,” the outspoken director vowed at Comic-Con, where he debuted a crowd-pleasing look at his violent Western The Hateful Eight—presented in “glorious 70mm” this Christmas, as star Samuel L. Jackson hammered home in a pre-taped message on Saturday.

Also at Comic-Con, Tarantino dropped the biggest movie geek news of the day: Ennio Morricone (The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly) is scoring Hateful Eight, marking the legendary 86-year-old Italian composer’s first Western score in four decades.

After hearing Hollywood’s No. 1 film geek wax ecstatic over celluloid and lament the demise of film projection, the retirement shocker prompted resounding cheers, not gasps, from the Tarantino faithful. Not that fans of the Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs helmer really believe he’ll ever stop making movies.

Hateful Eight—his eighth feature film—was dead just a year ago, after all. When the first draft of Tarantino’s talky R-rated Western leaked online he reacted by canning it himself, reducing the ensemble project to a one-time staged script read.

Seeing his script come alive with readings by Kurt Russell, Samuel L. Jackson, Tim Roth, Walton Goggins, Bruce Dern, and Michael Madsen only fortified Tarantino’s love for Hateful Eight. He made it anyway, “even though I kicked and screamed” over the leak controversy, he admitted.

With Hateful Eight back on, Tarantino insisted on shooting not just on film, but on 65mm. He turned to Panavision asking for the widest lenses they had—and ended up with the very same Ultra Panavision lenses that Ben-Hur was shot on.

At Comic-Con, Tarantino didn’t reveal how he pulled off the real trick of Hateful Eight: getting distributor The Weinstein Co. to release it in a limited 70mm roadshow release this Christmas. (He did reveal he came to the pop-nerd confab two years ago in disguise, walking the floor in a lucha libre mask: “If you see Blue Demon, it’s me.”) But it’s no secret that the Oscar-winning filmmaker is a bleeding heart champion of film.

“I am not a fan of digital projection,” he told fans. “By losing projection, to me, we’ve already ceded too much ground to the barbarians.”

Not even a split release, dropping a few token 35mm prints into rotation while the majority of theaters push a button on a digital projection, will satisfy Tarantino’s purist heart any more. “No. That’s not the movie industry I signed up for,” he declared.

Digital projection, he slammed, “is just HBO in public.” And with O.G. film stock and exhibition swiftly becoming extinct, Tarantino hinted at a move into television. “Maybe there’s ten movies and a mini-series,” he grinned, expressing interest in an 8-hour Quentin Tarantino TV project.

He also stoked hopes for the long-rumored third installment of his Kill Bill saga, which would pick up several years after Uma Thurman’s Bride dispatched ex-fellow assassin Vernita Green in front of Vernita’s young daughter.

“We’ll see,” he teased. “Never say never when it comes to Kill Bill 3. Uma would really like to do it… we’re still waiting for Vernita’s daughter to get old enough to kill her.“

Naturally, as soon as Tarantino announced his impending retirement he reconsidered a few seconds later. “I might just say the hell with that and make 15… but I like the idea of getting out, leaving you wanting a little bit more.”

[MIKA27]

SPHERICAM 2: 4K 360 DEGREE VIDEO CAMERA

Sphericam 2 is a 360 degree camera which allows users to capture everything around them in high resolution without any blind spots. The resulting videos give watchers the unique ability to move the camera to any view they’d like for the video they’re watching.

While the quality isn’t quite the best just yet, the technology is impressive and the Sphericam 2 is beaming without potential already. The camera is slightly smaller than a tennis ball and contains six cameras in total that each record in stunning 4K resolution (which is diluted when uploaded to YouTube, unfortunately). The device is WiFi capable and is able to stream content right to your desktop or smartphone. In fact, users can use the mobile app to start/stop recording, monitor the view while recording, transfer, view and edit their footage on-the-fly. The Sphericam 2 is also VR ready, so when Samsung Gear and other VR headsets become more popular, the device will be ready to capture footage. The Sphericam 2 is available for early backers on Kickstarter for $1,399. [Purchase]

[MIKA27]

PIKESVILLE RYE WHISKEY

The history of Rye Whiskey from Maryland goes all the way back to the Civil War. And although Pikesville Rye Whiskey is no longer produced in the Mid-Atlantic, the whiskey remains true to the pioneers that paved the way. At 110 proof, this brand new expression from Heaven Hill Distilleries falls in the sweet spot between Bottled-In-Bond and the barrel strength rye that is becoming more and more popular. It's aged for six years and unlike its predecessor will be available nationwide.

[Fuzz]

Check Out The New Batman V. Superman Trailer, Starring Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman looks anorexic. Not the powerful Amazon that she is.

[MIKA27]

Wonder Woman looks anorexic. Not the powerful Amazon that she is.

I don't really think she's all that bad actually.

If you look back at even the old Linda Carter shows, she didn't have that much of a figure either for the role.

And a lot of DC's latest comics have a thinner WM also. She's always been relatively slender albeit the obvious chest size(s) which tend to fluctuate from every iteration.

[Fuzz]

If you're gonna throw up Linda Carter's WW as an example, then let's take a look at Adam West's Batman! They modernized Batman, why can't they do the same with WW?

Somebody like Cory Everson, when she played Atalanta on Hercules: The Legendary Journey, would have been a great look for WW.

[MIKA27]

If you're gonna throw up Linda Carter's WW as an example, then let's take a look at Adam West's Batman! They modernized Batman, why can't they do the same with WW?

Because I'm not complaining mate

[helix]

ha ha Linda has hairy armpits.