Touching video of an Asian elephant birth and new mum raising her calf at Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia. Taronga Zoo sez, “The elephant calf Luk Chai can be seen most days out in the paddock with his mum Thong Dee. They are usually bathed in their barn mid-morning and sometimes visit the waterfall in the afternoon, especially if the weather is fine.”
(via Arbroath)
News from Borat country:
On April 16, Russia announced that it would henceforth launch military satellites at the Pletsnesk cosmodrome in northern Russia, ending the practice of launching satellites from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. This shift will deprive Kazakh children of the chance to watch some satellites take off, though Baikonur will remain the launchpad for commercial “birds” and manned missions. As these photos show, it will also spare Kazakhs the fallout, literal and otherwise, that occurs in a launch’s wake.
All space-bound rockets consist largely of fuel tanks and booster stages that fall back to earth when spent, never reaching orbit. In landlocked Baikonur, Russia’s primary launching complex in Kazakhstan, these spaceships crash to earth. This photo essay visits the areas where the supporting rockets land, and shows the people living under the flight paths who contend with flaming spaceship wrecks several times each month.
Apart from the fear of having a spaceship crash through their roofs, residents in the area complain of the ill effects of leftover toxic rocket fuel. With the relocation of Russian military launches, more than half of which currently take off from Baikonur, these people may get some relief. However, one group of people is probably sorry to see Baikonur lose business; the region’s scrap metal dealers are getting rich trading metal from the rockets’ titanium alloy hulls.
KAZAKHSTAN’S SPACESHIP JUNKYARD
The first few seconds of the this video gave me a case of the sads. Then, well… you’ll see!
(via Arbroath)
Jon Rawlinson, producer, cameraman and editor based in Vancouver, Canada, shot this beautiful piece of video at Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium in Japan. Jon says:
The main tank called the “Kuroshio Sea” holds 7,500-cubic meters (1,981,290 gallons) of water and features the world’s second largest acrylic glass panel, measuring 8.2 meters by 22.5 meters with a thickness of 60 centimeters. Whale sharks and manta rays are kept amongst many other fish species in the main tank.