In the week that it was announced that Rishi Sunak will be granting new oil and gas licences in the North Sea, new commitments to renewable energy are being made elsewhere in the world. The China Three Gorges Corporation just turned on a mega wind turbine with blades twice the size of a football pitch in the Taiwan Strait. The state-owned energy firm has activated the biggest wind turbine on the planet offshore in a move which could produce up to 16 megawatts of energy, and it’s now been connected and hooked up to the energy grid. The MySE 16-260 turbine stands at an incredible 500ft (152m) tall and it could power thousands of homes every year. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter In fact, it’s thought that around 36,000 homes will be served by electricity from the turbine. It’s not surprising given that each blade weighs around 54 tons and covers nearly 540,000 square feet when they rotate. Mingyang Smart Energy is the company that designed the turbine, and they released a message on LinkedIn making clear just how much wind the structure could deal with – stating that it can withstand “extreme wind speeds of 79.8 [meters per second]”. It’s a staggering feat of engineering and it’s thought that the turbine could save around 54,000 tons of carbon dioxide compared to coal power plants. More structures like one are being planned, too. Executive Director Lei Lei Zengjuan told the media: “In the next step, the 16 [megawatt] unit will be applied in batches in the second phase of the Zhangpu Liuao Offshore Wind Farm Project constructed by China Three Gorges Corporation.” It comes a few weeks after work was stopped on one of the UK’s largest offshore wind farms after its developer said that the cost of the project had soared by so much that it no longer made financial sense to push forward. Swedish energy giant Vattenfall, one of Europe’s biggest wind producers, shut down work on the development of the Norfolk Boreas site. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

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MIDDLETOWN, Conn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 16, 2023--

Frankenstein’s monsters aren’t just for Halloween, as a team of US scientists have recently discovered. The experts at Northern Kentucky University (NKU) were tasked with analysing the remains of a supposed mummified “mermaid”, and what they found was pretty gruesome. The mummy was brought to America from Japan more than 100 years ago after being donated it to the Clark County Historical Society in Springfield, Ohio. It arrived at the society in 1906 but documents supplied alongside the strange specimen suggest it dates back to the mid-1800s. This means that for some 170 years, the true identity of the wisened, 29-cm-long creature remained a mystery. However, thanks to modern technology, the team at NKU has finally worked out that the sinister-looking “siren” is, in fact, a ghoulish hybrid of monkey, fish and lizard. Joseph Cress, who led the project, told Live Science that he and his colleagues used X-ray and CT scans to investigate the creepy cadaver. "This allowed us to see [the mummy] in almost every dimension in the hopes to see what was inside it," he explained. They determined that that the “mermaid” consists of the head and torso of a monkey sewed onto the body of a fish, and its “hands” are the clawed legs of a lizard – most likely a Komodo dragon. The scans also revealed a pair of wooden stakes hidden inside the chimeric corpse – one running from head to tail and another across the shoulder blades — which were presumably inserted to keep the monster in one piece. Cress and his colleagues are currently trying to reconstruct a more detailed model of the mermaid and its individual components, according to Live Science. Once these models are complete, they plan to send them to zoos and aquariums to help confirm the different parts on a species level. However, jaw-dropping this specimen may be, it's not the only “mermaid” to be debunked in recent times. In March 2022, researchers analysed a similar example that was found in a hidden box in a Japanese temple. They also expected the creature, which was 30.5 cm long and dated back to the mid-1700s, to be a monkey-fish hybrid. However, tests conducted in February this year revealed that it was, in fact, predominantly made of cloth, paper and cotton. It had been painted with sand and charcoal and held together by metal pins, while various animal parts, including fish skin and mammal hair, had been stuck to it. Experts believe that the two “mermaids” were made to resemble "ningyo" — hideous fish-like creatures with human heads and sharp claws from Japanese mythology. According to legend, a nun named Yaobikuni lived for 800 years and retained the youthful appearance of a young woman, after eating a ningyo. Her immortality made the creatures a symbol of longevity, so it’s likely that fraudsters tried to recreate the mermaids to sell them to wealthy seekers of immortality. Still, at least the owners of these two examples didn’t make the mistake of trying to eat them. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings

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SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 8, 2023--

Travelling requires a lot of planning. You need to be prepared with a checklist of