Reddit users criticized a tourist after he accidentally crashed his drone into the world’s second tallest building, Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
The Chinese vlogger shared the mishap in a video uploaded to the Chinese video sharing website Bilibili on Sunday, which was then clipped and reposted on ther/Malaysia subreddit by a user named u/UniverseSphere on Tuesday.
In the full video, the man is surprised to see that the building is under construction, but he still pushes through.
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He walks around and finds two workers relaxing by the road. He then asks them for permission to fly his small aircraft.
After receiving the green light and arriving at his destination, the vlogger takes out his device and begins flying it hundreds of feet above the ground. The resulting video gives a spectacular view of the building, which is expected to open sometime in mid-2023.
Tragedy suddenly strikes, however, when the man loses connection to his drone. The small aircraft, with its video camera still recording, can be seen hurtling towards a window of the Merdeka 118 before falling to the streets below.
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Panicking, the man tries to run in an attempt to reconnect his remote to the device.
“Game over. This drone is going to be destroyed,” the man says in the video, as translated by video captions.
“Oh, I’m a real pig. It’s over. It’s over,” he adds while running. “I can’t connect my drone.”
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After the clip made its way to Reddit, several users condemned the man for his actions.
“Irresponsible drone pilot,” one user commented. “Should not be flying at that height over public places (with people underneath). This is the kinda shit that makes us other responsible pilots look bad. F*cking sh*t head.”
“Fallen objects from that height is no joke, someone could very easily die,” another Reddit user wrote. “F*cker thinks its a funny video, wait till someone rats him out to the authorities. Also im not sure how steady the window panels are vs the impact of the drone, but I cannot imagine the harm it will cause if the panel falls down.”
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To legally fly a drone in Kuala Lumpur, the person operating it must first obtain a permit from the Jabatan Ukur dan Pemetaan Malaysia, which costs 50 Malaysian ringgit (approximately $11.40).
Before applying for the drone permit, the operator must first receive permission from the landowner of the establishment. Failure to obtain a permit before flying may result in a fine of up to 50,000 Malaysian ringgit (approximately $11,440) or imprisonment for a maximum of three years.
A massive wave breaks. (Image credit: Shutterstock)
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In July 1958, an 8.3-magnitude earthquake at the Fairweather Fault rocked Alaska’s southern coast. The ground-shaking event caused a massive landslide at nearby Lituya Bay, which triggered a devastating tsunami that ripped through the narrow body of water and killed five people.
The colossal wave leveled trees on the steep slopes surrounding the bay up to a maximum height of 1,719 feet (524 meters) above sea level — higher than New York’s Empire State Building (which stands at 1,454 feet, or 443 m). This is known as the runup height, or the height the wave reaches after it makes landfall.
“It is the largest wave ever recorded and witnessed by eyewitnesses,” Hermann Fritz, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology who specializes in tsunamis and hurricanes, told Live Science. There have likely been larger waves in Earth’s history, which can be inferred from geological deposits, but these are open to interpretation, he added.
Fritz was the lead author of a study published in 2009 in the journal Pure and Applied Geophysics (opens in new tab) that recreated the Lituya Bay tsunami using a specialized 1:675 scale laboratory tank mimicking the shape of the bay. The team found that the maximum height of the wave responsible for leveling the trees was around 492 feet (150 m) tall, which makes it taller than any wave crest recorded on Earth.
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For the tsunami to reach this height, the landslide that triggered it would have likely dumped around 1.1 billion cubic feet (30 million cubic meters) of rock into Lituya Bay, the researchers estimated. But while the extreme scale of the landslide provided the force to create such a massive wave, the shape of the bay is the real reason why the wave was so tall, Fritz said.
An aerial photo of Lituya Bay. The stripped back treeline created by the wave is visible around the water’s edge. (Image credit: Getty Images)
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Lituya Bay is a fjord — a long and narrow coastal inlet with steep sides that was created by an ancient glacier. The bay is around 9 miles (14.5 kilometers) long and around 2 miles (3.2 km) across at its widest point. It has a maximum depth of 722 feet (220 m) and is connected to the Gulf of Alaska by a 984-feet-wide (300 m) opening. The landslide that triggered the 1958 tsunami occurred at Gilbert Inlet, at the end of the fjord furthest from the ocean.
During a typical landslide-generated tsunami, the resulting wave radiates out in a fan shape. But the narrow shape and steep slopes of Lituya Bay, as well as the point of origin, meant that the full power of the wave was channeled in one direction. And because there was nowhere else for the water to go, it was pushed up the surrounding slopes, which is why it had such a massive runup height, Fritz said.
In 2019, a study published in the journal Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences (opens in new tab) created a visual simulation of the wave using computer models (see below).
(Image credit: José Manuel González-Vida et al. 2019)
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This type of extreme wave is known as a megatsunami — a term initially coined by the media that refers to extremely large waves caused by landslides or volcanic island collapses, Fritz said.
Landslide-generated tsunamis are much rarer than tectonic tsunamis, which are caused by disruptions to the seafloor due to the movement of tectonic plates (such as the 2011 tsunami in Japan) and make up more than 90% of all tsunamis, Fritz said. Landslide-generated tsunamis are much more short-lived than tectonic tsunamis, he added.
“Landslide-generated tsunamis can be very large near the source but decay rapidly,” Fritz said. On the other hand, tectonic tsunamis start as small waves only a few feet high that travel enormous distances and increase in height when they reach the coast, he noted.
During the Lituya Bay tsunami, the wave had reduced to a height of less than 328 feet (100 m) by the time it reached the narrow opening of the fjord and did not radiate much further into the Gulf of Alaska, Fritz said.
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The 1958 tsunami was not the first of its kind in Lituya Bay. Geologists had previously discovered evidence of smaller tsunamis that occurred there in 1853, 1854 and 1936, but all evidence of these was washed away by the much bigger megatsunami, according to a report by the Western States Seismic Policy Council (opens in new tab) (WSSPC).
Wave damage on the south shore of Lituya Bay. (Image credit: U.S. Geological Survey )
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A handful of people managed to survive the tsunami despite being on boats in the bay when the landslide occurred, either by riding out the wave or fleeing through the mouth of the bay, according to WSSPC. After the wave had dissipated, it took three weeks before the site was deemed safe enough for researchers to survey, and when it was finally considered safe, researchers described millions of uprooted trees floating in the bay.
Other record-breaking waves
On Oct. 29, 2020, Portuguese surfer António Laureano broke the record for the tallest wave ever surfed when he rode a 101.4-foot-high (30.9 m) wave at Nazaré, a town in western Portugal. The waves were so big they were visible from space and were photographed by Landsat 8, a satellite operated by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey, Live Science previously reported. (This record is not officially recognised by the World Surf League (WSL) because no WSL officials were on hand to confirm the height of the wave.)
A satellite image of massive 7-story waves crashing into the Portuguese coast near Nazaré on Oct. 29, 2020. (Image credit: Lauren Dauphin/NASA Earth Observatory/Landsat 8)
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The official largest open-water wave ever recorded measured 62.3 feet (19 m) and was detected by a buoy in the North Atlantic on Feb. 17, 2013, according to the World Meteorological Organization (opens in new tab).
On Nov. 17, 2020, a buoy near Vancouver Island, British Columbia, recorded the most extreme rogue wave ever. (A rogue wave is an unusually tall wave more than twice as high as the surrounding swells that spontaneously appear in the open ocean.) This wave was 58 feet (17.6 m) tall, making it more than three times as tall as surrounding swells, which researchers described as a “once in a millennium” occurrence, Live Science previously reported.
The world’s largest tidal bore — a phenomenon in which an incoming tide reverses the current of a river and forms a wave, or waves, of water that travel up the river — occurs in China’s Qiantang River during the eighth month of the lunar calendar, where the wave normally reaches around 29.5 feet (9 m) high, according to The Atlantic (opens in new tab). However, on Aug. 22, 2013, an additional surge from a typhoon caused the wave to reach around 65.6 feet (20 m) high and injured 30 spectators, according to Sky News (opens in new tab).
The largest artificial waves ever made by humans are generated at the Delta Flume wave generator in the Netherlands, which opened in 2015. This 984-foot-long (300 m) tank, which holds 2.4 million gallons (9 million liters) of water, creates waves with a maximum height of 16.4 feet (5 m), according to the BBC (opens in new tab).
It’s no secret that Mount Everest, the jewel in Nepal’s Himalayan crown, is the world’s premier mountain. It’s one of those facts embedded in childhood, like knowing that Neil Armstrong was the first person to walk on the moon or that blue whales are the largest animals ever to have lived.
You may be surprised to hear, then, that other peaks could conceivably be considered Earth’s tallest; it just depends how you measure them.
So, judging by different parameters — including tallest by altitude, tallest from base to top and tallest based on being the farthest point from Earth’s center — what is the tallest mountain in the world?
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Mount Everest, located deep in the Mahālangūr Himāl subrange of the Himalayas, is undoubtedly the most famous — and alluring — of all our planet’s mountains. Also known as Chomolungma, meaning “Goddess Mother of the World” in Tibetan, Everest was first scaled on May 29, 1953 by Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa of Nepal, and New Zealander Edmund Hillary, and has since been successfully climbed by around 4,000 people. The mountain has also claimed the lives of over 300 since records started being kept in 1922, according to the Guardian.
Researchers have measured Mount Everest many times over the past few decades, but the latest assessment, announced in November 2021, puts it at 29,031.69 feet (8,848.86 meters) above sea level, which is almost 5.5 miles (8.8 kilometers) tall. It’s a pretty impressive height, but it does raise a question: Why do we use “above sea level” when determining the world’s tallest peak?
“In order to have comparability in measurements, it is necessary to have a consistent baseline,” Martin Price, a professor and founding director of the Centre for Mountain Studies at the University of Highlands and Islands in Scotland, told Live Science.
“Historically, and even now, elevation is usually given as height above mean sea level,” Price told Live Science in an email. “However, this has to be with reference to a standard mean sea level, which has to be defined. Sea levels are different in different parts of the world, and they’re changing due to climate change.”
As a result, “elevation is now measured in relation to the mathematically defined geoid of the Earth,” he said. The geoid is, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “a model of global mean sea level that is used to measure precise surface elevations.” This average is used to ascertain the height of mountains, a process that sometimes requires an aeroplane to fly “back and forth over a mountain in a series of parallel lines to measure how much gravity pulls down on its peak,” according to GIM International. These measurements, in conjunction with GPS readings, provide incredibly accurate elevation readings.
The observatory on Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. (Image credit: Westend61 via Getty Images)
So, all mountains are measured from sea level, predominantly for convenience and consistency, but what if measurements were simply taken from base to peak? Would Everest still top the charts?
The answer is a mountainous “no.” That honor would go to Mauna Kea, an inactive volcano in Hawaii. Although its peak is 13,802 feet (4,205 m) above sea level — which is less than half the height of Everest, according to National Geographic — the majority of Mauna Kea is hidden below sea level. When measured from base to peak, Mauna Kea is 33,497 feet (10,211 m) tall, according to the United States Geological Survey, which puts it heads and shoulders above Mount Everest.
Should we, therefore, regard Mauna Kea as the tallest mountain on Earth?
“It all depends on the perspective you take,” Price said. “If there were no oceans on our planet, there would be no debate! You could draw comparisons to the highest mountains on other bodies in our solar system, which have no oceans.”
Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador sits very close to the equator. (Image credit: boydhendrikse via Getty Images)
Meanwhile, another contender, Mount Chimborazo in Ecuador, boasts a peak that is the farthest point from Earth’s center.
Chimborazo isn’t the tallest mountain in the Andes — it’s not even in the top 30 — but its proximity to the equator is what makes all the difference. Earth is not a perfect sphere — technically, it’s an oblate spheroid — and it bulges along the equator. This is a result of the force created by Earth’s rotation. As a result, it means there is a difference of 13.29 miles (21.39 km) between the planet’s polar radius (3,949.90 miles/6,356.75 km) and its equatorial radius (3,963.19 miles/6,378.14 km), according to the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
Chimborazo is just 1 degree south of the equator, where Earth’s bulge is most prominent; this geographical quirk means Chimborazo’s summit is 3,967 miles from Earth’s core, making it 6,798 feet (2,072 m) farther away from the planet’s center than the peak of Everest.
So, which of these three contenders for tallest mountain should take home first prize?
Mount Everest is the tallest mountain above sea level, while Mauna Kea can certainly claim to be the world’s tallest mountain (when sea level isn’t taken into account). It would be difficult to make a case for Chimborazo being the tallest, but “it’s all a matter of perspective,” Price admitted.
Regardless of the mountain you choose, its height will pale in comparison with Mars’ Olympus Mons, the largest known volcano in the solar system. It has a height of around 16 miles (25 km), according to NASA, which is almost three times taller than Everest, and a base of 374 miles (601.9 km) in diameter, which is about the same distance separating San Francisco and Los Angeles (383.1 miles/616.5 km).
There is also an impact crater called Rheasilvia on the asteroid Vesta, which is part of the asteroid belt 100 million miles from Earth. At the center of this crater is a peak that scientists believe could be anywhere between 12 and 15.5 miles (20 and 25 km) in height, meaning it may be the tallest mountain in the solar system, according to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The new CoStar complex, as seen in this rendering, would have two buildings, including what would become Virginia’s tallest.
Commercial real estate data giant CoStar Group is ready to make a larger splash in Richmond with a commercial real estate project of its own.
The D.C.-based firm announced Friday morning plans to construct a new office complex along the downtown riverfront next to its current main local office at 501 S. 5th St.
The campus, which CoStar CEO Andy Florance described as the company’s “HQ2,” would span 750,000 square feet and include a 26-story office building and 6-story multipurpose building.
A rendering of the project as displayed at this morning’s announcement.
The project amounts to a $460 million investment and would bring 2,000 additional jobs to Richmond over the next few years, adding to the 1,000 employees CoStar has here already. That would make it the company’s largest office.
Florance said about 1,000 of the newly created jobs will be in software development and that CoStar also is planning to devote resources to its residential real estate divisions following its recent acquisition of Norfolk-based Homes.com.
The new building would be not only the tallest building in the city, but also in the entire state. At 510 feet, CoStar’s tower would barely edge out the commonwealth’s current tallest building, the Westin Virginia Beach Town Center, which per high-rise database SkyscraperPage, reaches 508 feet.
The architect on the project is Pickard Chilton, the same firm that designed the new Dominion Energy office tower downtown. CoStar spokespeople said a general contractor has not yet been selected.
A 3D model of the future CoStar campus in Richmond.
The project may receive some public funding. An announcement from the Governor’s office states that up to $15 million would be invested into infrastructure around the complex, including upgrades to pedestrian access, road and traffic improvement and utilities.
The infrastructure investment is subject to approval from the General Assembly’s Major Employment and Investment Project Approval Commission.
Once completed, CoStar will occupy around 1 million square feet of office space in downtown Richmond. It is currently the main tenant in the nine-story former WestRock building on 5th St., which it bought earlier this year for $130 million.
The new complex would be constructed on a 4-acre parcel at 600 Tredegar St. that CoStar bought last summer for $20 million. Florance said they’ve acquired all the land needed to build the complex, but noted the company is under contract on an unidentified Richmond building that it will use for swing space until the new buildings are completed.
The company also this year leased the entire 13,000-square-foot Pattern Building at 470 Tredegar St., and subleased 51,000 square feet on the ninth, tenth and eleventh floors of Riverfront Plaza’s east tower.
Florance said the new complex will include more than office uses.
“We are bringing Tredegar Street alive by bringing some restaurants and art galleries and retail down (at ground level),” Florance said.
The green space is set to become the final pieces of CoStar’s Richmond campus.
He added that it’ll also have an indoor event venue and outdoor amphitheater that will be able to host concerts, particularly during the Folk Festival.
CoStar is looking to break ground between mid- and late-2022, and Florance said he’s hoping for a 2024 delivery.
“There’s a lot of work to do but that’s our goal,” Florance said.
The announcement was made Friday morning in conjunction with the governor’s and mayor’s offices, at what Gov. Ralph Northam said was likely one of the last economic announcements of his term. Mayor Levar Stoney was also in attendance.
BizSense reporter Michael Schwartz contributed to this story.
Although height has increased over the last 100 years, the study showed Dutch men born in 2001 were 1 cm shorter than their 1980 counterparts. For women, the difference was more pronounced with a difference of 1.4 cm.
The 1980 generation may have been the tallest ever, benefiting from a huge increase in height.
Dutch men born in 1980 stood at an average height of 183.9 cm, and were 8.3 cm taller than those born in 1930. Women born in 1980 were also significantly taller at 170.7 cm, compared to 165.4 cm for those born in 1930.
The study by Statistics Netherlands, municipal health service the GGD and the National Institute for Public Health, the RIVM, analyzed 719,000 Dutch-born individuals aged between 19 and 60 who self-reported their height, and used the average height at age 19 as a benchmark.
The reason for the height decrease is partly related to increased levels of immigration from shorter population groups, according to researchers. However, growth also tapered off for individuals whose parents were both born in the Netherlands, and for those whose four grandparents were all Dutch-born.
Dutch men with no family history of migration did not show any increase in height, while Dutch women without any migration in their family got shorter.
However, the Dutch have stood head and shoulders above the rest of the world for their height increases over the last 70 years, with the streets of the Netherlands showing a very different picture in 2020 compared to the early 1950s, according to researchers.
While around 3% of the 1930-34 generation were at least 190 cm tall, in 2020 more than 20% is at least 190 cm, with 7% at more than 195 cm. In the 1950s, 42% of young men were shorter than 175 cm — but in 2020, that figure is just 12%.
For the same generation of women, less than 2% of the 1930-34 cohort reached a height of 180 cm. Among those born in 1980 however, nearly 10% are at least 180 cm tall.
The picture isn’t uniform across the Netherlands, with large differences between the north and south of the country. Those from Limburg are the shortest, while Friesland natives are between 3 and 3.5 cm taller.
Researchers emphasized that the Dutch have not lost their title of world’s tallest people, with those born at the turn of the millennium still claiming this status. They estimated the late 1950s generation to be the first to stake this claim to fame.
For years, researchers have tried to find out why the Dutch are so tall — with studies suggesting that it could be down to natural selection and taller people having more children, passing on their tall genes.
This year’s discovery is not the first to suggest growth is tapering off or that height is decreasing, with previous studies suggesting it could be due to an increased focus on plant-based diets and the stabilization of “growth-promoting environmental factors.”
It is, perhaps, with just a hint of satisfaction that the Dutch office for national statistics has confirmed that the men and women of the Netherlands remain the tallest people on the planet. But the government’s statisticians have had cause to report a further potentially humbling twist: the Dutch are shrinking.
For the last six decades, the people of the lowlands have stood imperiously at the top of the world height league table, with the latest data suggesting the average 19-year-old man stood at just over 6ft tall (182.9cm) in 2020, while women born in the same year measured in at 5ft 5in (169.3cm).
The finding by the Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (CBS), a government institution, means the Netherlands maintains its lofty spot, which it has held since 1958, excusing a blip in 1967 when the men born that year came in at a miserable second place in the rankings.
But based on surveys of 719,000 people aged 19 to 60, the CBS has had to report that after a period of stagnation and now clear contraction, Dutch men born in 2001 are on average 1cm shorter than the generation born in the Netherlands in 1980, and Dutch women are 1.4cm smaller. And further analysis suggests it cannot all be explained by people coming into the Netherlands from other countries.
“The decrease is partly related to the increased immigration of shorter new population groups and the children born from these populations in the Netherlands,” the government statisticians explained.
“But growth also stagnated in the generations in which both parents were born in the Netherlands, and in the generations in which all four grandparents were born in the Netherlands. Men without a migration background did not get any taller and women without a migration background show a downward trend.”
Scientists have been quick to offer possible explanations, and even remedial solutions to the country’s height crisis.
Dr Gert Stulp, at the University of Groningen’s faculty of behavioural and social sciences, said that while theories at this point were merely speculative, he would be interested to see whether the economic crash in 2007 might have had an impact.
“Perhaps things like the financial crisis have meant that some children grew up in poorer conditions than in earlier cohorts,” he said. “Or perhaps inequality has risen: we know inequality affects average height, poorer childhood conditions lead to less growth in the vertical direction.”
The discovery of a similar trend in the US suggests that the related increased consumption of unhealthy fast food could be a factor, he suggested.
“Diets may have changed,” Stulp said. “Perhaps diets in the last years had fewer nutrients important for growth. This is believed to be the reason why the Americans are shrinking; poorer diets, more calories, but fewer nutrients. Even more speculatively, the decrease in height could be due to more people leaving out animal products in their diets. But again, there is no evidence for that.”
Stulp did not, however, rule out a switch to healthier food helping the Dutch maintain their table-topping record – and growing again. “Although there will of course be a physiological limit,” he said. “People are really not going to grow to an average height of three metres.”
The data is nevertheless a sober reminder for the Dutch that nothing stays the same for ever. More than a century ago, the tallest people were still mainly in North America and northern Europe, with Sweden and Norway standing proudly above all.
It was only in the first half of the 1900s that the Netherlands enjoyed a stunning growth spurt, hitting the heights in the 1950s.
Dutch men born in 1930 had reached an average height of 5ft 7in (175.6cm). Those born in 1980 topped 6ft (183.9cm) – a growth of 8.3cm in 50 years. The generation of women born in 1930 reached an average of 5ft 4in (165.4cm) while those born in 1980 reached 5ft 6in (170.7cm), almost 5.3cm extra in height.
The Office for National Statistics in the UK does not routinely collect data on height, but the latest special study in 2010 suggested the average height of a man in England and Wales was 5ft 9in (175.3cm) and a woman was 5ft 3in (161.6cm).
Research has suggested that beyond enjoying a better diet than in previous centuries, the Dutch experience was driven by natural selection: the people who had the most children were tall men, and women of average height. Compared to counterparts in other countries where they often tended to have fewer children, taller Dutch women in the Netherlands also reproduced more.
There is, however, a remarkably large difference in height between people from the north and south of the Netherlands. Men from Friesland, in the north, have consistently enjoyed a 3cm to 3.5cm advantage over their compatriots in Limburg in the south. It is mirrored among women, where the difference has been about 3cm.
Vovkovinskiy was 7 feet, 8.33 inches tall, according to Guinness. He died in a hospital from heart disease with his mom and brother by his side, according to a Facebook post on Saturday by Svetlana. Just hours before his death, Vovkovinskiy was able to spend time with his brother’s family and had his last dinner, which was a piece of Kyiv cake and Fanta, his mother said.
Vovkovinskiy moved from Ukraine to Rochester, Minnesota, in 1989, for medical treatment, according to his Facebook page. He was born with pituitary gigantism, according to a TV segment he did on “The Dr. Oz Show” in 2010.
During that segment, Guinness World Record officials measured Vovkovinskiy’s height and crowned him the new Tallest Living Man in America. He was 27 years old at the time and beat out the previous record holder, Virginia deputy sheriff George Bell, by a third of an inch, according to Guinness.
“It feels good to finally have proof that I am the Tallest Man in America,” said Vovkovinskiy in 2010. “Everyone is always asking me if I’m certain that I’m the tallest and I was never able to prove it. Now that I have this certificate to hang on my wall, I could finally show it!”
He wore a shoe size 24 10-E, said Guinness, and faced daily challenges of fitting into cars and finding comfortable shoes.
His funeral home online obituary stated that the enjoyed spending time with friends and family, occasionally fishing and traveling. A memorial service will be on Saturday with a burial at a later date.
Guinness says the tallest living man in the world is Sultan Kosen from Turkey, who measures 8 feet, 2.8 in tall. The tallest man in medical history for whom there is irrefutable evidence is Robert Pershing Wadlow, according to Guinness. Wadlow was from Illinois and measured 8 feet, 11.1 in tall. He died in 1940.
Starship SN20 as it’s being lifted to the top of the Super Heavy booster. Image: Elon Musk/SpaceX
Earlier today, engineers with SpaceX ever-so-carefully placed a Starship second-stage rocket atop a Super Heavy booster, resulting in the tallest rocket ever built, albeit a rocket that has yet to leave Earth’s surface.
At 394 feet tall, the newly constructed Starship system is taller than NASA’s Apollo-era Saturn V rocket (362.9 feet) and also NASA’s upcoming SLS rocket when stacked in the Block 2 cargo configuration (365.1 feet). SpaceX CEO Elon Musk proudly displayed images of the impressive structure on Twitter, describing it as “Starship Fully Stacked.”
The booster, BN4, was moved to the orbital launch mount on August 3. A stunning photo shows the bottom of the rocket shortly after all 29 Raptor engines were installed. The top and bottom components of the rocket are both 30 feet (9 meters) wide, with the Super Heavy measuring 230 feet (70 meters) tall and Starship measuring 160 feet (50 meters) tall.
SpaceX has since removed the top rocket, SN20, and returned it to the hangar for further work. The private company is hoping to launch the stacked pair later this year, though a firm date has not been established.
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But there’s still plenty of work to do before this giant takes to the skies and beyond. SpaceX still needs to conduct ground tests of the system, including fueling, pressurization, and static firing. And then there’s that pesky environmental review currently being prepared by the U.S Federal Aviation Administration, which, until the results are known, means the entire project is in a state of limbo.
The fully stacked Starship system. Image: Elon Musk/SpaceX
This uncertainty hasn’t stopped Musk, who recently tweeted, “Starbase is moving at Warp 9,” in reference to construction work currently underway at the Boca Chica launch facility. The company is building the Orbital Launch Site (OLS), from which the Starship system is expected to both launch and land. The tempo of work at the Texas facility has increased dramatically in recent weeks, with hundreds of workers brought in from other SpaceX sites across the country, as NASASpaceflight reports. That SpaceX was selected by NASA to build a Moon lander for the upcoming Artemis missions might have something to do with the frenetic pace.
During the planned inaugural orbital test of the stacked Starship system, the BN4 Super Heavy booster will fire for 169 seconds before the second-stage Starship section separates. The booster will then fall and splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico some 20 miles (32 km) from the launch site. Starship will resume the journey, enter Earth orbit, and re-enter prior to making a full revolution. Starships SN20 will splashdown in the Pacific Ocean near the Hawaiian island of Kauai.
Once complete, the stainless steel rocket will be the most powerful launch vehicle ever built, capable of lifting 150 tons to orbit. The booster will run on sub-cooled liquid methane and liquid oxygen propellant, and exert 72 meganewtons of force (16,190,000 pounds of force) during liftoff.
The eventual plan is to have both components perform autonomous vertical landings. SpaceX finally managed to land a Starship prototype on May 5, 2021 after several failed attempts to do so. But those were suborbital tests; Starship will need to survive speeds reaching Mach 25 and the associated heat during orbital re-entry, and then perform a landing. The Super Heavy is designed to land on six legs, but SpaceX is moving ahead with an alternate scheme to catch the booster at the OLS tower.
The Super Heavy booster—and its 29 Raptor engines—being lowered to the orbital launch pad. Image: Elon Musk/SpaceX
SpaceX envisions Starship as a reusable system for transporting passengers and cargo to Earth orbit, the Moon, and Mars. SpaceX is currently under contract with NASA, for which they plan to demonstrate a modified crew-rated Starship vehicle for use during the upcoming Artemis lunar landings.
More: SpaceX lays out plan for first Starship orbital test flight.
The outline of the Steamboat and Cistern plumbing systems with two viewing angles. The structure, color-coded by the depth, delineates the observed seismically active area during the eruption cycles. The solid star, solid square, and open triangles denote Steamboat, Cistern, and station locations on the surface, respectively. Credit: Courtesy of Sin-Mei Wu/University of Utah
When Steamboat Geyser, the world’s tallest, started erupting again in 2018 in Yellowstone National Park after decades of relative silence, it raised a few tantalizing scientific questions. Why is it so tall? Why is it erupting again now? And what can we learn about it before it goes quiet again?
The University of Utah has been studying the geology and seismology of Yellowstone and its unique features for decades, so U scientists were ready to jump at the opportunity to get an unprecedented look at the workings of Steamboat Geyser. Their findings provide a picture of the depth of the geyser as well as a redefinition of a long-assumed relationship between the geyser and a nearby spring. The findings are published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Solid Earth.
“We scientists don’t really know what controls a geyser from erupting regularly, like Old Faithful, versus irregularly, like Steamboat,” says Fan-Chi Lin, an associate professor with the Department of Geology and Geophysics. “The subsurface plumbing structure likely controls the eruption characteristics for a geyser. This is the first time we were able to image a geyser’s plumbing structure down to more than 325 feet (100 m) deep.”
Meet Steamboat Geyser
If you’re asked to name a Yellowstone geyser and “Old Faithful” is the only one that comes to mind, then you’re past due for an introduction to Steamboat. Recorded eruption heights reach up to 360 feet (110 m), tall enough to splash the top of the Statue of Liberty.
“Watching a major eruption of Steamboat Geyser is quite amazing,” says Jamie Farrell, a research assistant professor with the University of Utah Seismograph Stations. “The thing that I remember most is the sound. You can feel the rumble and it sounds like a jet engine. I already knew that Steamboat was the tallest active geyser in the world, but seeing it in major eruption blew me away.”
Unlike its famous cousin, Steamboat Geyser is anything but faithful. It’s only had three periods of sustained activity in recorded history—one in the 1960s, one in the 1980s and one that began in 2018 and continues today. But the current phase of geyser activity has already seen more eruptions than either of the previous phases.
Near Steamboat Geyser is a pool called Cistern Spring. Because Cistern Spring drains when Steamboat erupts, it’s been assumed that the two features are directly connected.
“With our ability to quickly deploy seismic instruments in a nonintrusive way, this current period is providing the opportunity to better understand the dynamics of Steamboat Geyser and Cistern Spring which goes a long way to help us understand eruptive behavior,” says Farrell.
Giving the geyser a CT scan
For several years now, U scientists have been studying the features of Yellowstone National Park, including Old Faithful, using small, portable seismometers. The football-sized instruments can be deployed by the dozens wherever the researchers need for up to one month per deployment in order to get a picture of what’s happening under the ground. Each slight small movement of the ground, even the periodic swells of crowds on Yellowstone’s boardwalks, is felt and recorded.
And just as doctors can use multiple X-rays to create a CT scan of the interior of a human body, seismologists can use multiple seismometers recording multiple seismic events (in this case, bubbling within the geyser’s superheated water column) to build a sort of image of the subsurface.
In the summers of 2018 and 2019, Farrell and colleagues collaborated with the National Park Service and placed 50 portable seismometers in an array around Steamboat Geyser. The 2019 deployment recorded seven major eruptions, with a range of inter-eruption periods of three to eight days apart, each providing a wealth of data.
Plumbing the depths
The results showed that the underground channels and fissures that comprise Steamboat Geyser extend down at least 450 feet (140 m). That’s much deeper than the plumbing of Old Faithful, which is around 260 feet (80 m).
The results didn’t show a direct connection between Steamboat Geyser and Cistern Spring, however.
“This finding rules out the assumption that the two features are connected with something like an open pipe, at least in the upper 140 meters,” says Sin-Mei Wu, a recently graduated doctoral student working with Lin and Farrell. That’s not to say that the two features are totally separate, though. The fact that the pool drains when Steamboat erupts suggests that they are still connected somehow, but probably through small fractures or pores in the rock that aren’t detectable using the seismic signals the researchers recorded. “Understanding the exact relationship between Steamboat and Cistern will help us to model how Cistern might affect Steamboat eruption cycles,” added Wu.
Will scientists eventually be able to predict when the geyser will erupt? Maybe, Wu says, with a better understanding of hydrothermal tremor and a long-term monitoring system. But, in the meantime, Wu says, this study is really just the beginning of understanding how Steamboat Geyser works.
“We now have a baseline of what eruptive activity looks like for Steamboat,” Lin pointed out. “When it becomes less active in the future, we can re-deploy our seismic sensors and get a baseline of what non-active periods look like. We then can continuously monitor data coming from real-time seismic stations by Steamboat and assess whether it looks like one or the other and get a more real-time analysis of when it looks like it is switching to a more active phase.”
Seismic listening system offers new look at Old Faithful geyser
More information:
Sin‐Mei Wu et al, Imaging the Subsurface Plumbing Complex of Steamboat Geyser and Cistern Spring with Hydrothermal Tremor Migration Using Seismic Interferometry, Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth (2021). DOI: 10.1029/2020JB021128
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Scientists plumb the depths of the world’s tallest geyser (2021, March 15)
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If you’ve been following recent news about Resident Evil Village, the next game in the hit horror video game franchise, you may have heard about Lady Dimitrescu, a very tall woman / probably-vampire who has become very popular.
Seriously, she’s tall — just look at this GIF from Sony. Lady Dimitrescu towers over the other women / probably-vampires in this scene.
A lot of people have wondered exactly how tall Lady Dimitrescu is, apparently, and Kotaku’s Ash Parrish even went to great lengths to estimate that Lady Dimitrescu is 96 inches tall (8 feet). On Monday evening, though, the official Resident Evil Twitter account revealed that Parrish wasn’t even close.
If you include her hat and high heels, Lady Dimitrescu officially stands at a giant 2.9 meters tall, which equates to a height of approximately 9 feet and 6 inches, according to Tomonori Takano, Resident Evil Village’s art director.
Your love for Lady Dimitrescu is loud and clear.
Here’s a message from our RE Village art director Tomonori Takano, along with a very curious fact you may have wondered about: pic.twitter.com/Lj4m5pN2dJ
— Resident Evil (@RE_Games) February 2, 2021
That sounds terrifyingly tall to me — I’m nearly six feet tall, so I’d crane my neck trying to look her in the eye. (I guess that’s the perfect way to get me to expose my neck so she can chomp down on my jugular.)
But myself and a few of my colleagues wanted to get a better idea of just how tall that really is. Here are just a few comparisons:
Basically, she’s really, really tall. But I have just one more question — when Lady Dimitrescu takes off her hat and kicks off her shoes after a long day of hunting humans, how tall is she then? Guess we’ll just have to play Resident Evil Village to see if this very important mystery gets answered.
The game’s out on May 7th, so we won’t have too much longer to wait.
