Engineers in China have designed a novel new transportation method in the form of an enormous elevated bus which may make traffic jams a thing of the past.
The innovative vehicle, dubbed the ‘Transit Elevated Bus,’ would cruise along Chinese highways passing over cars and trucks that are driving below it.
Propelled via rails embedded in the road, the giant bus is designed to seat an incredible 1,200 passengers in its three massive carriages.
The engineer tasked with implementing the project contends that construction of the bus should cost a fraction of what it would take to build a new subway and accrue considerably less maintenance costs as well.
And, despite its futuristic appearance, the jaw dropping vehicle looks to be comparatively easy to construct as Chinese officials expect to begin testing the first ‘mega bus’ later this year.
Provided the trial period goes well, the Transit Elevated Bus could be in widespread use throughout Chinese cities sometime in the next year or two.
Whether the unique vehicle makes it way over to America in the future remains to be seen, but we’re hopeful that it does, because it looks like an incredibly fun way to travel and an awesome way to beat the traffic.
Also known as Nordstrom Tower. At 1,550 feet, it has the highest roof height of any building in the United States, surpassing the Willis Tower by 100 feet (30 m). The building is also the tallest residential building in the world both by roof height and architectural height. Construction was delayed in 2015 and resumed in 2017. Topped out in September 2019. The building is listed as having 99 floors. Other sources put it at over 100 floors.
WEEHAWKEN, NJ – OCTOBER 2: The sun sets on the Deutsche Bank Center, Central Park Tower, the Steinway Tower, 432 Park Avenue and buildings along Billionaires’ Row in New York City on October 2, 2021 in Weehawken, New Jersey. (Photo by Gary Hershorn/Getty Images)
Pig on the loose! Pensacola police capture runaway pig after hour-long chase near downtown.
A Pensacola Police Department officer apprehends a runaway pot belly pig on Spring Street on Tuesday.
At least five officers from the Pensacola Police Department spent about an hour Tuesday morning chasing a runaway pig just north downtown Pensacola.
“No warrants on the pig, don’t know why he’s running or where he came from,” PPD spokesman Officer Mike Wood said in a text message.
At least five officers from the Pensacola police Department spent about an hour Tuesday morning chasing a runaway pig just north downtown Pensacola.
“No warrants on the pig, don’t know why he’s running or where he came from,” PPD spokesman Officer Mike Wood said in a text message.
A runaway potbelly pig eludes capture as Pensacola police, animal control and code enforcement officers try to capture the animal Tuesday on Spring Street.
The five officers were joined in the chase by at least two animal control officers and two code enforcement officers.
“What we were trying to do is keep him north of Garden Street because if the pig ran out on to Garden Street, it could cause all sorts of problems,” Wood told the News Journal. “Garden Street is a busy street, and if he ran out onto Garden, the pig could get hit. So we were trying to keep him north of Garden until Animal Patrol could get there.”
The chase began at about 7:15 a.m. near the intersection of West Jackson and North Coyle streets. It ended when a field training PPD officer leapt onto and apprehended the pig at about 8:15 a.m. near the law offices of Ferry & Ferry close to the intersection of North Spring and West La Rua streets.
As of Tuesday morning, Wood said the pig was being kept in “protective custody.” The owner of the pig is asked to contact PPD at 850-435-1901.
“It wouldn’t make sense for a natural formation to be black like that in such a shallow, small atoll/island”
PHOTO BY GOOGLE MAPS
Theories abound as Redditors speculate over an ominous ‘black hole’ in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
This page of more than 40,000 members discuss all things Google Maps, Google Earth and Google Street View, where such occurrences aren’t particularly unfamiliar. Google has been known to blur out sensitive locations such as military bases, prisons, islands, nuclear facilities, among other confidential sites.
“This looks nothing like an island,” said the original poster kokoblocks on the subreddit.
While some netizens offered satirical theories, one internet sleuth provided additional information on the tiny piece of land. “It’s an island called Vostok Island that belongs to the glorious Republic of Kiribati, what you see as black is actually very dark green, it’s a very dense forest made up of Pisonia trees.”
Some, however, are not convinced of this explanation. “It almost seems deliberately altered,” questions user cartoonsandbeers . “It wouldn’t make sense for a natural formation to be black like that in such a shallow, small atoll/island,” added user Jazzlike_Log_709.
A 2012 report by The Secretariat of the Pacific Community discussed how the land mapping of Vostok Island using GeoEye featured a clear aerial image of the small land mass, making users more skeptical of Google’s choice to keep the image dark.
According to a Cambridge University publication, the island, with the coordinates of 10.06 ° S, 152.31°W, was first sighted in 1820 by the Russian explorer Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, who named the island for his ship Vostok, which means East in Russian. It is an uninhabited coral island in the central Pacific Ocean, part of the Line Islands belonging to Kiribati.
While no geographical expert has clarified the confusion surrounding Google Maps’ rendering of Vostok Island, this is not the first, nor the last subject of the company’s satellite imagery mysteries.
This conspiracy theory should be easy to debunk: it is biologically impossible for viruses to spread using the electromagnetic spectrum. The latter are waves/photons, while the former are biological particles composed of proteins and nucleic acids. But that isn’t really the point — conspiracy theories are enticing because they often link two things which at first might appear be correlated; in this case, the rapid rollout of 5G networks was taking place at the same time the pandemic hit. Cue a viral meme linking the two, avidly promoted by anti-vaccine activists who have long been spreading fears about electromagnetic radiation, egged on by the Kremlin.
It’s worth repeating, as the World Health Organization (WHO) points out, that viruses cannot travel on mobile networks, and that COVID-19 is spreading rapidly in many countries that do not have 5G networks. Even so, this conspiracy theory — after being spread by celebrities with big social media followings — has led to cell phone towers being set on fire in the UK and elsewhere.
Bill Gates as scapegoat
Most conspiracy theories, like the viruses they resemble, constantly mutate and have several variants circulating at any one time. Many of these plots and subplots seem to involve Bill Gates, who became a new target of disinformation after gently criticizing the defunding of the World Health Organization. According to the New York Times, anti-vaxxers, members of QAnon and right-wing pundits have seized on a video of a 2015 Ted talk given by Gates — where he discussed the Ebola outbreak and warned of a new pandemic — to bolster their claims he had foreknowledge of the COVID pandemic or even purposely caused it.
A recent variant of this conspiracy theory, particularly beloved by anti-vaccination activists, is the idea that COVID is part of a dastardly Gates-led plot to vaccinate the world’s population. There is some truth in this, of course: vaccinating much of the world’s population may well be the only way to avoid an eventual death toll in the tens of millions. But anti-vaxxers don’t believe vaccines work. Instead some have spread the myth that Gates wants to use a vaccination program to implant digital microchips that will somehow track and control people. The spread of misinformation has meant that ID2020, a small non-profit that focuses on establishing digital IDs for poorer people around the world, has had to call in the FBI. (The Cornell Alliance for Science is partly funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.)
The virus escaped from a Chinese lab
This one at least has the benefit of being plausible. It is true that the original epicenter of the epidemic, the Chinese city of Wuhan, also hosts a virology institute where researchers have been studying bat coronaviruses for a long time. One of these researchers, Shi Zhengli, a prominent virologist who spent years collecting bat dung samples in caves and was a lead expert on the earlier SARS outbreak, was sufficiently concerned about the prospect that she spent days frantically checking lab records to see if anything had gone wrong. She admits breathing a “sigh of relief” when genetic sequencing showed that the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus did not match any of the viruses sampled and studied in the Wuhan Institute of Virology by her team.
However, the sheer coincidence of China’s lead institute studying bat coronaviruses being in the same city as the origin of the COVID outbreak has proven too juicy for conspiracists to resist. The idea was seeded originally via a slick hour-long documentary produced by the Epoch Times, an English-language news outlet based in the United States with links to the Falun Gong religious cult that has long been persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The Epoch Times insists on calling COVID “the CCP virus” in all its coverage. The theory has now tipped into the mainstream, being reported in the Washington Post, the Times (UK) and many other outlets.
COVID was created as a biological weapon
A spicier variant is that COVID not only escaped from a lab, but it was intentionally created by Chinese scientists as a biowarfare weapon. According to Pew Research, “nearly three-in-10 Americans believe that COVID-19 was made in a lab,” either intentionally or accidentally (the former is more popular: specifically, 23 percent believe it was developed intentionally, with only 6 percent believing it was an accident).
This theory that the Chinese somehow created the virus is particularly popular on the US political right. It gained mainstream coverage thanks to US Sen. Tom Cotton (Republican, Arkansas) who amplified theories first aired in the Washington Examiner (a highly conservative media outlet) that the Wuhan Institute of Virology “is linked to Beijing’s covert bio-weapons program.”
This theory can be easily debunked now that there is unambiguous scientific evidence — thanks to genetic sequencing — that the SARS-CoV-2 virus has entirely natural origins as a zoonotic virus originating in bats. The Examiner has since added a correction at the top of the original piece admitting the story is probably false.
The US military imported COVID into China
The Chinese government responded to the anti-China theories with a conspiracy theory of its own that seeks to turn blame back around onto the United States. This idea was spread initially by Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, who Tweeted “it’s possible that the US military brought the virus to Wuhan.” These comments, according to Voice of America news, “echoed a rumored conspiracy, widely circulated in China, that US military personnel had brought the virus to China during their participation in the 2019 Military World Games in Wuhan last October.” For China, as the Atlantic reported, this conspiracy theory, and an accompanying attempt to rename COVID the “USA virus,”’ was a transparent “geopolitical ploy” — useful for domestic propaganda but not widely believed internationally.
These two look like your typical Trump supporters.
GMOs are somehow to blame
Genetically modified crops have been a target of conspiracy theorists for years, so it was hardly a surprise to see GMOs blamed in the early stages of the COVID pandemic. In early March, Italian attorney Francesco Billota penned a bizarre article for Il Manifesto, falsely claiming that GM crops cause genetic pollution that allows viruses to proliferate due to the resulting environmental “imbalance.” Anti-GMO activists have also tried to blame modern agriculture, which is strange, since the known path of the virus into the human population — as with Ebola, HIV and many others — was through the very ancient practice of people capturing and killing wildlife.
Ironically, GMOs will almost certainly be part of any vaccine solution. If any of the ongoing 70 vaccine projects work (which is a big if), that would be pretty much the only guaranteed way the world can get out of the COVID mess. Vaccines could be based on either GM attenuated viruses or use antigens produced in GM insect cell lines or plants. If GMOs do help save the world from the curse of COVID, maybe they’ll stop being a dirty word.
COVID-19 doesn’t actually exist
According to professional conspiracy theorists like David Icke and InfoWars’ Alex Jones, COVID-19 doesn’t actually exist, but is a plot by the globalist elite to take away our freedoms. Early weaker versions of this theory were prevalent on the political right in the notion that the novel coronavirus would be “no worse than flu” and later versions are now influencing anti-lockdown protests across several states in the US. Because believers increasingly refuse to observe social distancing measures, they could directly help to spread the epidemic further in their localities and increase the resulting death rate.
The pandemic is being manipulated by the ‘deep state’
Some believe that a “deep state” of America’s elite is plotting to undermine the president — and that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the face of the US coronavirus pandemic response — is a secret member. Fauci’s expression of disbelief when the deep state was mentioned during a press briefing supposedly gave the game away.
COVID is a plot by Big Pharma
Many conspiracy theory promoters are in reality clever actors trying to sell quack products. Alex Jones, between rants about hoaxes and the New World Order, urges viewers to buy expensive miracle pills that he claims can cure all known diseases. Dr. Mercola, a quack anti-vax and anti-GMO medic who has been banned from Google due to peddling misinformation, claims that vitamins (and numerous other products he sells) can cure or prevent COVID. NaturalNews, another conspiracist site, sells all manner of pills, potions and prepper gear. These conspiracists depend for their market on getting people to believe that evidence-based (i.e. conventional) medicine doesn’t work and is a plot by big pharmaceutical companies to make us ill. Big Pharma conspiracies are a staple of anti-vaccination narratives, so it is hardly surprising that they have transmuted into the age of the coronavirus.
COVID death rates are inflated
Another far-right meme is the idea that COVID death rates are being inflated and therefore there is no reason to observe lockdown regulations or other social distancing measures. Prominent in promoting this myth is Dr. Annie Bukacek, whose speech warning that COVID death certificates are being manipulated has been viewed more than a quarter of a million times on YouTube. Bukacek appears in a white lab coat and with a stethoscope around her neck, making her look like an authoritative medical source. Dig a little deeper, however, as Rolling Stone magazine did, and it turns out she’s actually a far-right anti-vaccination and anti-abortion activist, previously noted for bringing tiny plastic fetuses into the Montana state legislature. Her insistence that COVID death rates are inflated has, of course, no basis in fact. More likely the current death toll is a serious under-count. T0 further clarify the issue, the Centers for Disease Control has published information about excess deaths associated with COVID-19.
Many people will believe almost anything. Covid 19 conspiracy theories demonstrates this. Believers in this nonsense get their information mainly from social media. They don’t fact check the info, they just blindly believe it.
That moron Trump started a lot of this lunacy with his “fake media” diatribes. Don’t believe mainstream media (ie NY Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC to name a few) just believe media outlets that support your already embedded opinions, namely Fox News.
Trump and his propaganda has deeply divided the United States. The country is in ideological turmoil. Covid-19 has caused many Americans, who believe Trump’s insane assertions, to believe the conspiracy theories no matter how ridiculous and crazy.
Newly released footage from a Los Angeles Police Department helicopter suggests that the mysterious ‘jetpack man’ spotted near LAX on multiple occasions over the last year may have actually just been an errant balloon. The curious case began back in the summer of 2020 when a pilot approaching the airport reported to air traffic controllers that there was a “guy in a jetpack” flying around the area. This was followed by a subsequent sighting in October of last year as well as a third such encounter with the unidentified flying individual that took place this past July. An investigation by the FBI indicated that they suspected that the aerial anomaly was, in fact, a balloon, and now newly released materials reportedly released by the LAPD lend considerable credence to that theory.
Captured in November of last year, but only coming to light this week, the footage as well as some photos show what is clearly a sizeable human-shaped balloon floating at a high altitude above the city of Los Angeles. Specifically, it is believed that the object is a seven-foot-tall inflatable depiction of the character Jack Skellington from the hit film Nightmare Before Christmas. Given the time frame of the video, it is suspected that the balloon may have ‘escaped’ or was released from a residence where it had been used as a Halloween decoration. While this particular piece of footage was not captured during one of the three aforementioned ‘jetpack man’ sightings, authorities believe that it serves as a proverbial proof of concept that explains the seemingly inexplicable incidents.
To that end, the FBI says that their investigation into the series of events has failed to yield any additional ‘jetpack man’ witnesses nor any video footage from the three encounters that spawned headlines and led to authorities looking into the matter. For their part, the FAA issued a statement saying that the department “has worked closely with the FBI to investigate every reported jetpack sighting” and stressed that “so far, none of these sightings have been verified.” So while the case may not technically be closed, the LAPD footage is the best evidence yet that the ‘jetpack man’ was not an ill-advised prankster making trouble, but a balloon that was only briefly spotted by the bewildered pilots.
IMAGE SOURCE,SIMA DIAB / GETTY IMAGES Image caption,An installation entitled Together, by Lorenzo Quinn, is displayed close to the Great Pyramid of Giza in Cairo. The exhibition, Forever Is Now, features sculptures around the Giza plateau, with works by Egyptian and foreign contemporary artists.
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IMAGE SOURCE,SIMA DIAB / GETTY IMAGES Image caption,An installation entitled Together, by Lorenzo Quinn, is displayed close to the Great Pyramid of Giza in Cairo. The exhibition, Forever Is Now, features sculptures around the Giza plateau, with works by Egyptian and foreign contemporary artists.
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