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World

Experts examine bottom of big ship that was stuck in Suez

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CAIRO (AP) — Divers inspected the underside of a colossal container ship that had blocked the Suez Canal, spotting some damage to the bow but not enough to take it out of service, officials said Wednesday.

The dives were part of a continuing investigation into what caused the Ever Given to crash into the bank of the canal where it remained wedged for six days, blocking a crucial artery of global shipping, before it was dislodged on Monday. The vessel is now anchored in the Great Bitter Lake, a wide stretch of water halfway between the north and south ends of the canal.

The blockage had halted billions of dollars a day in maritime commerce.

Two senior canal officials said the vessel’s bulbous bow had suffered slight to medium damage. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to reporters.

One of the officials, a canal pilot, said experts were studying the extent of the damage, but he said it is unlikely it would impede navigation. He said the ship’s next movements would depend on “several legal and procedural” measures that the canal authority would discuss with Ever Given’s operator.

When blame gets assigned, it will likely lead to years of litigation to recoup the costs of repairing the ship, fixing the canal and reimbursing those who saw their cargo shipments disrupted. The vessel is owned by a Japanese firm, operated by a Taiwanese shipper, flagged in Panama and now stuck in Egypt, so matters could quickly become complicated.

Since the canal reopened for traffic on Monday afternoon, convoys of ships have been moving through the waterway which links the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.

A maritime traffic jam had grown on both ends of the canal during the six days of blockage. From the reopening to noon Wednesday, more than 160 vessels had passed through the canal.

Lt. Gen. Ossama Rabei, head of the canal authority, said Wednesday they would work around the clock to clear the backlog on either end of the canal.

Dislodging the Ever Given was a moment of triumph for the members of the salvage team. Some broke into tears, many hugged each other as the vessel’s bow was rooted out from the eastern side of the canal.

“We saw it on television, and it is completely different than when you see it in front of you,” said on of the men, Mostafa Mohamed.

The unprecedented canal shutdown had added to the strain on the shipping industry, already under pressure from the pandemic.

The six-day closure would “create a domino effect of delays for goods to be delivered and for the backlog of shipments to be processed through, said Diego Pantoja-Navajas, an expert in supply chain logistics and vice president of WMS Cloud Development, Oracle.

“Over 144 hours lost in the supply chain network,” said Pantoja-Navajas, “will create a domino effect of delays for goods to be delivered and for the backlog of shipments to be processed through.”

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Associated Press video journalist Mohammed Wagdy in Ismailia, Egypt, contributed to this report.

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Sports

Obi Toppin hits Knicks rock bottom as Kevin Knox looms

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Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau is finally dropping hints he’s close to removing rookie lottery pick Obi Toppin from the rotation – likely for Kevin Knox.

Tuesday’s blowout win over Washington could have been the final straw for the Dayton dunker who is regressing instead of progressing.

“We’ll see how it goes,” Thibodeau said after blowing out the Wizards, 131-113. “It’s not unusual for rookies to go through things like this. We just want him to continue to work. He’s been real good in practice. He’s actually played very well in practice. He just has to continue to work. He’ll learn, he’ll grow. He’ll get better.”

The lost-looking power forward is now scoreless in five straight games — against  Brooklyn, Philly, Orlando, Philly and Washington. The No. 8 pick in November’s draft is an aggregate minus-34 in those 35 minutes. On Tuesday, he was 0-for-2 in eight minutes, including an air-balled 3-pointer.

Toppin’s air-ball 3-pointers are becoming more commonplace than makes. But he’s also not looking at the basket as much – having taken just eight shots in the five games, missing them all.

Toppin, 23, missed March Madness last season because of the pandemic and now he’s going through a March maddening.

All-Star Julius Randle thought enough to console Toppin on the bench in the Wizards game after the out-of-the-rotation Knox was awarded the final 1:40 of garbage time.

“I’m just trying to instill confidence in him,” Randle said. “As a rookie it’s tough to learn the game, see the game, the ins and outs of what you have to do to impact the game. As a young player coming in, the big thing is, know who you are as a player and how you can help the team. He’s coming along, works extremely hard. He’s got to keep up his confidence, keep at it and he’ll be a really good player in this league.”

Tuesday at the Garden was Toppin’s rock bottom. The fourth quarter set up as a perfect stage for him to get minutes.

But Toppin lasted 4:28 before being pulled. He badly missed a 7-foot turnaround and committed two fouls, and Thibodeau put back Randle in the blowout. Knox mopped up at the end as Toppin sat.

Some NBA scouts believe Thibodeau has stuck this long with Toppin for political reasons — loyalty to president Leon Rose, who hired him. It would look bad not to play Rose’s prized lottery pick who is averaging 4.1 points.

In Toppin’s defense, he had no summer league or voluntary scrimmages a few weeks before training camp because of the pandemic. On the flip side, there is no saying if Toppin’s draft stock would have fallen if NBA scouts saw his holes in the Atlantic 10 Tournament or NCAA Tournament – both cancelled last March.

After the game, Thibodeau, when discussing Randle’s 3-point emergence this season, said, “having a stretch four is a necessity in today’s game.”

Struggling Knicks rookie Obi Toppin (l.) could lose his rotation spot to Kevin Knox (r.)
Pool via AP (2)

Toppin does not look like that type – and didn’t in college, either. His 3-point percentage is 29.8 percent. Worse, he has air-balled seven of his 20 attempted corner 3s.

Knox, the Knicks’ 2018 lottery pick, has been out of the rotation since late January. He was drafted by the old guard of former president Steve Mills, GM Scott Perry, former coach David Fizdale and Perry’s top scouts who were let go, assistant GM Gerald Madkins and personnel director Harold Ellis.

But now may be Knox’s time, even if, sources said, Thibodeau doesn’t like his motor on the defensive end.  

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Science

How do wombats poop cubes? Scientists get to the bottom of the mystery | Science

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A single cubic wombat dropping positioned by researchers on top of a rock

Yang et al. 2021

By Tess Joosse

Humans may be fascinated by cubes, but only one animal poops them: the bare-nosed wombat. This furry Australian marsupial squeezes out nearly 100 six-sided turds every day—an ability that has long mystified scientists. Now, researchers say they have uncovered how the wombat intestine creates this exceptional excrement.

“This study is really good,” says Sunghwan Jung, a biophysicist at Cornell University who studies the mechanics of animal movements and was not involved with the research. It shows, he says, that the guts of these animals “are very special.”

The bare-nosed wombat (Vombatus ursinus), which weighs up to 35 kilograms, lives in the grassy plains and eucalyptus forests of Australia, where it spends its nights grazing on plants and its days in underground tunnels. It’s a territorial animal, leaving its unusual droppings as a calling card. But how does such sharp-sided scat come from a round anus?

A female wombat with her joey

Yang et al. 2021

To get to the bottom of the mystery, scientists dissected a wombat that had died after being hit by a car. They examined the intestines and found that they contain two grooves where the guts are more elastic, which the team first reported in 2018.

In the new study, the researchers dissected two further wombats and tested the guts’ layers of muscle and tissue, finding regions of varied thickness and stiffness. They then created a 2D mathematical model to simulate how the regions expand and contract with the rhythms of digestion. The intestinal sections contract over several days, squeezing the poop as the gut pulls nutrients and water out of the feces, the team reports today in the aptly titled journal Soft Matter.

The stiffer portions are “like a stiff rubber band—[they’re] going to contract faster than the soft regions,” says David Hu, a biomechanics researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology and author on the study. Softer intestinal regions squeeze slowly and mold the final corners of the cube, the team found. In other mammals, the wavelike peristalsis of the intestinal muscles are consistent in all directions. But in the wombat, the grooved tissue and the irregular contractions over many cycles shape firm, flat-sided cubes.

That just leaves one mystery: why wombats evolved cubic poop in the first place. Hu speculates that because the animals climb up on rocks and logs to mark their territory, the flat-sided feces aren’t as likely to roll off from these high perches.

As for what the world is supposed to do with this new information, Hu admits that it’s “not going to replace the way we manufacture plastic.” But the wombat’s strategy could help engineers design better ways to shape valuable or sensitive materials, he says.

In the meantime, Hu also thinks this knowledge could help researchers raising wombats in captivity. “Sometimes their feces aren’t as cubic as the [wild] ones,” he says. The squarer the poop, the healthier the wombat.

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