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LIMA — Look out, blue whale — there’s a new contender for your heavyweight title.

A newly discovered whale that lived nearly 40 million years ago could be the heaviest animal to have ever lived, based on a partial skeleton found in Peru, scientists recently said.

The modern blue whale has long been considered the largest and heaviest animal ever, beating out all the giant dinosaurs of the distant past.

But Perucetus colossus — the colossal whale from Peru — may have been even heavier, according to a study published in the journal Nature.

Extrapolating from some massive bones found in the Peruvian desert, an international team of researchers estimated that the animal had an average body mass of 180 tonnes.

That would not take the heavyweight title by itself. The biggest blue whale ever recorded weighed 190 tonnes, according to Guinness World Records.

But the researchers estimated the ancient whale’s weight range was between 85 and 340 tonnes, meaning it could have been significantly larger.

The first fossil of the ancient whale was discovered back in 2010 by Mario Urbina, a palaeontologist who has spent decades searching the desert on the southern coast of Peru.

“There is no record of the existence of an animal as large as this, it is the first, that’s why nobody believed me when we discovered it,” Urbina told AFP in Lima. 

According to the researcher, this discovery “is going to cause more questions than answers and give the rest of the palaeontologists a lot to talk about”.

The remains were presented to the public for the first time during a press conference at the Natural History Museum in the Peruvian capital, where they are being displayed. 

The researchers estimate that the animal reached about 20 metres in length.

The researchers were careful not to declare the ancient whale had broken the record.

But there was also “no reason to think that this specimen was the largest of its kind”, study co-author Eli Amson told AFP.

“I think there’s a good chance that some of the individuals broke the record — but the take-home message is that we are in the ballpark of the blue whale,” said Amson, a palaeontologist at the State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart in Germany.

A total of 13 gigantic vertebrae — one of which weighed nearly 200 kilogrammes  — were found at the site, as well as four ribs and a hip bone.

It took years and multiple trips to collect and prepare the giant fossils, and even longer for the team of Peruvian and European researchers to confirm exactly what they had found.

They revealed it is a new species of basilosaurid, an extinct family of cetaceans. 

Today’s cetaceans include dolphins, whales and porpoises, but their early ancestors lived on land, some resembling small deer.

Over time they moved into the water, and basilosaurids are believed to be the first cetaceans to have a fully aquatic lifestyle.

One of their adaptations at that time was gigantism — they became very big.

But the new discovery indicates that cetaceans reached their peak body mass roughly 30 million years earlier than previously thought, the study said.

Like other basilosaurids, Perucetus colossus likely had a “ridiculously small” head compared to its body, Amson said — though there were no available bones to confirm this.

Lacking any teeth, it was impossible to say for sure what they ate. But Amson speculated that scavenging off the seafloor was a strong possibility, partly because the animals could not swim quickly.

The researchers were confident that the animal lived in shallow waters in coastal environments, due to the strange heaviness of its bones.

Its whole skeleton was estimated to weigh between five and seven tonnes — more than twice as heavy as the skeleton of a blue whale.

“This is — for sure — the heaviest skeleton of any mammal known to date,” as well as any aquatic animal, Amson said.

Perucetus colossus needed heavy bones to compensate for the huge amount of buoyant blubber — and air in its lungs — which could otherwise send it bobbing to the surface. 

But just the right balance of bone density and blubber allowed the giant animal to stay in the middle of around 10 metres of water “without moving a muscle”, Amson explained.

Felix Marx, a marine mammal expert at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa not involved in the study, told AFP that Perucetus colossus “is very different from anything else we’ve ever found”.

He cautioned that extinct sea cows had heavier bones than would be expected for their total body weight, potentially suggesting Perucetus colossus could be on the lower end of its estimated weight range.

WASHINGTON — A mile-thick ice sheet in Greenland vanished around 416,000 years ago during a period of moderate natural warming, driving global sea rise to levels that would spell catastrophe for coastal regions today, a study recently said.

The results overturn a long-held view that the world’s largest island was an impregnable fortress of ice over the past 2.5 million years, and instead show it will be far more vulnerable to human-caused climate change than previously thought.

“If we want to understand the future, we need to understand the past,” University of Vermont scientist Paul Bierman, who co-led the paper published in Science, told AFP.

The research relied on an ice core extracted 1,390 metres under the surface of Northwest Greenland by scientists at Camp Century, a secretive US military base that operated in the 1960s.

This almost 4-metre long tube of soil and rock was lost in a freezer only to be rediscovered in 2017.

Scientists were stunned to learn it contained not just sediment but leaves and moss — irrefutable evidence of an ice-free landscape, perhaps covered by an ancient forest that woolly mammoths would have roamed.

A green Greenland

Though researchers were deprived for decades of access to the precious sample, Bierman said in some ways it was “providential”, as the cutting-edge techniques used to date the core are very recent.

Key among these is “luminescence dating”, which allowed scientists to determine the last time that sediment buried beneath the Earth’s surface was exposed to light. 

“As sediment is buried beneath the surface, background radiation from soil fills in the little holes or imperfections in minerals like quartz or feldspar, and builds up what we call a luminescence signal over time,” co-author Drew Christ told AFP.

In a dark room, scientists took interior strips of the ice core and exposed them to blue-green or infrared light, releasing trapped electrons that form a kind of ancient clock that shows the last time they were exposed to sunlight, which erases the luminescence signal.

“And the only way to do that at Camp Century is to remove a mile of ice,” said Tammy Rittenour, a co-author of the study at Utah State University. “Plus, to have plants, you have to have light.”

Luminescence dating provided the end point of the ice-free period, with the start point coming from another technique.

Inside the quartz from the Camp Century core, rare forms — called isotopes — of the elements beryllium and aluminium build up when the ground is exposed to the sky and cosmic rays.

Looking at the ratio of the normal forms of these elements to the rare isotopes, the scientists could derive a window for how long the rocks were at the surface versus how long they were buried. 

They found the sediment was exposed for less than 14,000 years, meaning this was how long the area was ice-free.

Coastal cities imperilled

This took place in a time of natural warming called an interglacial period, when temperatures were similar to today, around 1-1.5ºC warmer than the pre-industrial era.

The team’s modelling showed that the ice sheet melting would have caused between five and twenty feet of sea level rise at that time. 

This suggests that every coastal region of the world, home to many global population centres, are at risk of submersion in the coming centuries.

Joseph MacGregor, a climate scientist at NASA who was not involved in the study, noted that the interglacial period that warmed Greenland during this period lasted tens of thousands of years, much longer than what humans have induced so far.

But even so, “We’ve far surpassed the magnitude of the greenhouse gas forcing back then,” he said. 

Atmospheric levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide are currently 420 parts per million (ppm) against 280 ppm during Greenland’s ice-free period, and this will remain in the skies for thousands of years.

“We’re doing a giant experiment on Earth’s atmosphere, and we don’t know the results of that experiment,” said Bierman. “I don’t take that as ‘Oh my god the sky is falling,’ I take that as we’ve got to get it together.”

YOKOHAMA, Japan — Dressed up and ready for battle, around 10,000 Pokemon fans have descended on Yokohama in Japan this weekend, looking for fun but also collector’s item cards potentially worth serious money.

Since the launch of Pokemon cards in 1996 following the hit computer game of the same name — meaning “pocket monsters” — an astounding 53 billion cards have been printed.

Almost 30 years on, the card game remains hugely popular as contestants take each other on with cards representing the monsters and their different attributes.

The Pokemon World Championships, being held this weekend in Japan for the first time ever, will see the world’s best players of the video and the card game battle it out for cash prizes at an event attended by thousands.

“I have been playing since I was a kid,” Ajay Sridhar, 33, who travelled halfway around the world from New York to attend with his cards, told AFP as he explained why he was hooked.

“It’s just the competition, it’s the community... A lot of my oldest friends I’ve met through Pokemon,” he said.

“It’s kind of like chess, where if you didn’t play chess and you were watching a high-level chess match, you wouldn’t know what was going on,” said Gilbert McLaughlin, 27, from Scotland.

“But once you get to a certain skill level, there is a lot of depth and complexity to it.”

Ranging from Pikachu the mouse to Jigglypuff the balloon to the jackal-headed Lucario, there are now more than 1,000 different characters, with new “generations” released every few years.

While they have always been swapped and collected, the cards’ value has exploded in recent years, not just among fans of the game but also among investors with little or no past interest.

Factors determining value include the cards’ rareness, the character [Mew, Mewtwo, Pikachu and Charizard tend to be more valuable] and the artist, who is indicated on the card.

Websites have sprung up dedicated to helping people understand the dizzying array of different cards and their myriad markings, complete with charts showing their value over time.

The most expensive ever sold was in 2021 when US YouTuber Logan Paul paid $5.28 million for a supposedly unique, mint-condition “PSA Grade 10 Pikachu”.

Fisticuffs

Hiroshi Goto is an expert in Pokemon cards who has written a book with advice on how to make money from them.

He said that when he ran a shop selling the cards in the 2000s, his customers were mostly “schoolkids with their dads taking part in tournaments together”.

But since the 20th anniversary in 2016, “the perception of cards evolved into being not just toys for children but also items appreciated by adults, collector’s items with a tangible value”.

Demand is such that the Pokemon Company has had to increase production.

in Japan and the United States there have been instances of physical fights, including one outside a shop in the Japanese city of Osaka in July that went viral on social media.

There have been cases of shops selling Pokemon cards being broken into in normally low-crime Japan in recent months.

The gold-rush has also sparked a boom in fake cards. 

Bargains

On the sidelines in Yokohama, collectors were busy swapping and selling their cards, including Jeffrey Ng, happy after buying 10 cards for $1,700. He now hopes to sell them for a profit.

“Conventions like this one are a good place to meet other collectors,” he told AFP.

All cards are painstakingly conceived and designed in the same place, the Tokyo offices of Creatures Inc., which along with Nintendo and Game Freak own the Pokemon Company.

Creatures executive Atsushi Nagashima said while the firm was “very happy” about the success of the cards, “that doesn’t change how we do our job”.

Creatures employs 18 testers who spend their working days playing Pokemon to make sure that the new cards fit harmoniously with the vast number of existing ones.

“[But] we never hire people from competitions,” said Kohei Kobayashi, another manager at Creatures. “We want to leave the good players where they are, there where they shine.”

Renault’s answer to the big near-luxury front-wheel-drive saloon with greater appeal in ‘world’ markets, the Talisman is a stylish and smooth contender that walks a fine line between the attainable and the premium.

A far cry from French car makers’ sometimes more unique, innovative and even quirky big saloons of yesteryears, the Talisman is instead a more conservatively mainstream and “safe pair of hands” effort developed in collaboration with Renault’s South Korean subsidiary, and also marketed as the Renault Samsung SM6. 

Subtle style

A big, comfortable and quick combustion engine saloon, the Talisman was first launched in 2015 and mildly refreshed in 2020 for certain markets. The Talisman may have ceased production for certain markets as of this year, but nevertheless seems to remain listed and presumably available in others ­—  including Jordan — as a last chance opportunity for a more individualistic and modern petrol powered premium saloon, before it is might be succeeded by some high riding crossover or electrified vehicle, if at all.

A long, low and sleek design with flowing lines, rakishly arcing roofline and high waistline, the Talisman is very much a product of its era and rather conservatively sporty design this is one of smooth understatement and flowingly discrete style rather than bland obscurity. With long snouty bonnet, bold grille and slim heavily browed headlights, the Talisman cuts a assertive stance that is reflected with subtly prominent sills, short and pert rear deck and a dramatic, and well grounded rear fascia treatment.

Smooth sprinter

Offered with a variety of compact, comparatively powerful and fuel efficient petrol and diesel engines for various markets, the top spec Middle East Talisman TCE190 version is powered by a turbocharged 1.6-litre direct injection four-cylinder engine producing 188BHP at 5,750rpm and 192lb/ft torque at 2,500rpm. Driving the front wheels through a slick, smooth and quick shifting 7-speed automated dual-clutch gearbox, the Talisman TCE190 carries its 1,444kg mass through the 0-100km/h sprint in just 7.7-seconds and onto a 225km/h top speed.

Quick spooling and responsive from standstill and at lower engine speeds for a small turbocharged engine mated to a big car, the Talisman’s engine is smooth and willing right to its peak power and rev limit. It is at its best in its muscular mid-range torque sweet spot. Flexible throughout its mid-range plateau, the Talisman’s on-the-move versatility allows for 6.6-second 80-120km/h acceleration and confident motorway overtaking. The Talisman TCE190 meanwhile returns frugally low claimed 5.88l/100km combined cycle fuel efficiency.

Confident comfort

A smooth and sophisticated drive on motorways, the Talisman TCE190 is a natural, refined and stable long distance cruiser, with low CD0.27 aerodynamics helping to keep it quiet and efficient. Underneath it rides on front MacPherson struts as expected in its segment, and more surprisingly, a torsion beam set-up at the rear, more common to smaller and less luxurious cars. Nevertheless, the Talisman avails itself well in terms of driving dynamics — for its segment — as well as ride comfort.

With quick and responsive 2.8-turn steering and confident front grip, the Talisman is tidy and eager turning in for such a long and large saloon, but naturally, cannot compare with the agility and nimbleness, never mind the intuitive feel of some of its smaller and sportier Renault sister models, such as the outgoing Megane. But regardless, the Talisman well controls cornering body lean corners, and provides reassuring rear grip. Braking is meanwhile similarly confident, with decent pedal feel and fade resilience.

Classy cabin

A comfortable ride that is for the most part forgiving even with low profile 225/45R18 tyres, the Talisman dispatches most textural imperfections and bumps in its stride. It can, however, feel slightly firm over more jagged and sudden potholes and bumps. Settled in its ride quality, the Talisman recovers well from sharp crests and dips, especially compared to similarly sized Korean competitors. Refined inside, its driving position is meanwhile comfortable, well adjustable and supportive for its class, and with good front sightlines.

With a classy cabin ambiance and design, the Talisman incorporates mostly good material and textures with a sophisticated and visually spacious horizontally oriented design. Uncluttered and intuitively user-friendly, controls and instrumentation include a vertically aligned infotainment screen and big tachometer behind its sporty contoured steering wheel. Spacious in front, its rear seats are comfortable and fairly sized, with decent, if not outright generous rear headroom for taller occupants. Well-equipped with infotainment, convenience and safety features, the Talisman’s big boot meanwhile accommodates 515-litres luggage volume.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

• Engine: 1.6-litre, transverse, turbocharged 4-cylinders
• Bore x stroke: 79.5 x 80.5mm
• Compression: 10:1
• Valve-train: 16-valve, DOHC, direct injection
• Gearbox: 7-speed automated dual clutch, front-wheel-drive
• Power, BHP (PS) [kW]: 188 (190) [140] @5,750rpm
• Specific power: 116BHP/litre
• Power-to-weight: 130BHP/tonne
• Torque, lb/ft (Nm): 192 (260) @2,500rpm
• Specific torque: 160Nm/litre
• Torque-to-weight: 180Nm/tonne
• 0-100 km/h: 7.7-seconds
• 80-120km/h: 6.6-seconds
• Top speed: 225km/h
• Fuel capacity: 51-litres
• CO2 emissions, combined: 139g/km
• Track, F/R: 1,614/1,609mm
• Aerodynamic drag co-efficient: CD0.27
• Luggage volume: 515-litres
• Payload: 600kg
• Steering: Power-assisted rack & pinion
• Suspension, F/R: MacPherson struts/torsion beam, anti-roll bars
• Brakes, F/R: ventilated discs, 320 x 28mm/290 x 11mm
• Tyres: 245/45R18

By Dina Halaseh
Educational Psychologist

As parents, we sit and meet our children’s teachers and hear all sorts of feedback, some may be positive while most may be negative.

What to look for in a teacher’s feedback

We usually find that the main concern is related to a certain skill or a combination of some. In general, all of our skills work together, so a weakness in one area can manifest itself in many different ways. 

Here are some of the common sentences we might hear from a teacher at school:

•Your child needs extra time to finish a task. Usually when extra time is mentioned, this means that there is an issue with slow processing speed. Processing speed is how fast we can deal with information especially under stress. Some students may need more time in finishing tasks and might even struggle to finish exams on time

•Your child doesn’t write enough sentences compared to other classmates and full sentences are not used. Writing, reading and all literacy skills relate to auditory processing. This is our ability to analyse, blend, segment and manipulate sounds to master a language. Students struggling with auditory processing usually tend to struggle with reading, writing, spelling, comprehension, and in many cases, even speech!

•Your child is very smart if only there were more focus and effort put in. Your child is distracted while doing a task and always needs to be prompted. This is an obvious one, when discussing focus and being distracted and is clearly related to attention skills. There are many types of attention. Attention includes Divided Attention (the ability to focus on more than one thing at a time) and Selective Attention (the ability to focus on one thing and ignoring all distractions) and Sustained Attention (the ability to focus for a long period of time)

•It seems like your child didn’t study enough. Your child couldn’t recall the material. Recalling information goes back to our memory skills! Long-term memory and working memory both play a huge role in remembering information. In many cases, students tend to forget, even though they worked hard and really studied the subject thoroughly

•Your child is all over the place, personal items are not well organised and time management is an issue as well. Organisation and time management skills may be an indication of a weakness in Logic and Reasoning. The latter is needed to deal with abstract information and data analysis. It helps us build connections between different ideas, organise, plan and conclude different ideas from given information and data (the ability to focus on more than one thing at a time), Selective Attention (the ability to focus on one thing and ignoring all distractions) and Sustained Attention (the ability to focus for a long period of time)

•Your child struggles to understand visual graphs and information from visual graphics. Visual processing is the skill needed to understand graphics, visualise material, read maps, understand directions and much more. It can even affect their math skills when dealing with geometry and other related topics

•Your child is reading below grade level. Make sure you read a book on a daily basis. This also goes back to the child’s auditory processing skills, which can be enhanced! The brain can actually rewire itself in a way that a struggling reader can become a skilled one!

•Your child is struggling with mathematical concepts, especially multi-step questions and equations. A math weakness can relate to logic and reasoning, processing speed, or both at the same time! Children struggling in these areas might find math challenging and need extra time and effort to understand it

These are only some of the weaknesses you might be hearing about from your child’s teacher. All of these skills can be improved and turned into strengths when challenged and worked on! Make sure you find out the reason behind the weakness so you can target the areas needed for a better school year!

Reprinted with permission from Family Flavours magazine

PARIS — Scientists have identified the maximum mix of heat and humidity a human body can survive.

Even a healthy young person will die after enduring six hours of 35ºC  warmth when coupled with 100 per cent humidity, but new research shows that threshold could be significantly lower.

At this point sweat — the body’s main tool for bringing down its core temperature — no longer evaporates off the skin, eventually leading to heatstroke, organ failure and death.

This critical limit, which occurs at 35 degrees of what is known “wet bulb temperature”, has only been breached around a dozen times, mostly in South Asia and the Persian Gulf, Colin Raymond of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory told AFP.

None of those instances lasted more than two hours, meaning there have never been any “mass mortality events” linked to this limit of human survival, said Raymond, who led a major study on the subject.

But extreme heat does not need to be anywhere near that level to kill people, and everyone has a different threshold depending on their age, health and other social and economic factors, experts say.

For example, more than 61,000 people are estimated to have died due to the heat last summer in Europe, where there is rarely enough humidity to create dangerous wet bulb temperatures.

But as global temperatures rise — last month was confirmed as the hottest in recorded history — scientists warn that dangerous wet bulb events will also become more common.

The frequency of such events has at least doubled over the last 40 years, Raymond said, calling the increase a serious hazard of human-caused climate change.

Raymond’s research projected that wet bulb temperatures will “regularly exceed” 35ºC at several points around the world in the coming decades if the world warms 2.5ºC degrees above preindustrial levels.

‘Really, really dangerous’

Though now mostly calculated using heat and humidity readings, wet bulb temperature was originally measured by putting a wet cloth over a thermometer and exposing it to the air. 

This allowed it to measure how quickly the water evaporated off the cloth, representing sweat off of skin.

The theorised human survival limit of 35ºC wet bulb temperature represents 35ºC of dry heat as well as 100 per cent humidity — or 46ºC at 50ºC per cent humidity.

To test this limit, researchers at Pennsylvania State University in the United States measured the core temperatures of young, healthy people inside a heat chamber.

They found that participants reached their “critical environmental limit” — when their body could not stop their core temperature from continuing to rise — at 30.6ºC wet bulb temperature, well below the previously theorised 35ºC.

The team estimated that it would take between five to seven hours before such conditions would reach “really, really dangerous core temperatures”, Daniel Vecellio, who worked on the research, told AFP.

The most vulnerable

Joy Monteiro, a researcher in India who last month published a study in Nature looking at wet bulb temperatures in South Asia, said that most deadly heatwaves in the region were well below the 35ºC wet bulb threshold.

Any such limits on human endurance are “wildly different for different people”, he told AFP.

“We don’t live in a vacuum — especially children,” said Ayesha Kadir, a paediatrician in the UK and health adviser at Save the Children.

Small children are less able to regulate their body temperature, putting them at greater risk, she said.

Older people, who have fewer sweat glands, are the most vulnerable. Nearly 90 per cent of the heat-related deaths in Europe last summer were among people aged over 65.

People who have to work outside in soaring temperatures are also more at risk.

Whether or not people can occasionally cool their bodies down — for example in air conditioned spaces — is also a major factor. 

Monteiro pointed out that people without access to toilets often drink less water, leading to dehydration.

“Like a lot of impacts of climate change, it is the people who are least able to insulate themselves from these extremes who will be suffering the most,” Raymond said. 

His research has shown that El Nino weather phenomena have pushed up wet bulb temperatures in the past. The first El Nino event in four years is expected to peak towards the end of this year.

Wet bulb temperatures are also closely linked to ocean surface temperatures, Raymond said.

The world’s oceans hit an all-time high temperature last month, beating the previous 2016 record, according to the European Union’s climate observatory.