Free Republic

Call it the Skytanic. Engineers have unveiled plans for the world’s largest airplane, dubbed the WindRunner, which could revolutionize renewable energy by transporting gigantic wind turbine blades from point A to B. Designed by the Colorado-based energy company Radia, the behemoth cargo carrier measures a whopping 356 feet long and 79 feet tall with a wingspan of 261 feet. For reference, this castle in the sky is nearly as long as a regulation NFL football field and 127 feet longer than the Boeing 747 — the world’s largest passenger plane. With a potential carrying capacity of 80 tons, it will...

The 365m-long (1,197 ft) Icon of the Seas has 20 decks, and can house a maximum of 7,600 passengers on board. It is owned by Royal Caribbean Group. The vessel is going on a seven-day island-hopping voyage in the tropics. But environmentalists warn that the liquefied natural gas-powered ship will leak harmful methane into the air.

The largest free standing aquarium in the world, containing close to 1,500 exotic fish, exploded early Friday morning in Berlin, injuries at least two people. The explosion of the AquaDom aquarium caused a torrent of water, fish and debris to flood the street outside the building, Berlin emergency officials said, according to CNN. The AquaDom was housed in the main floor of the Radisson Collection hotel in Berlin’s DomAquarée business complex. "In addition to the unbelievable maritime damage... two people were injured by glass splinters," the city’s police tweeted. Over 100 firefighters were sent to the scene of the accident....

The destructive space rock was somewhere between 12.4 and 15.5 miles wide. The largest asteroid ever to hit Earth, which slammed into the planet around 2 billion years ago, may have been even more massive than scientists previously thought. Based on the size of the Vredefort crater, the enormous impact scar left by the gargantuan space rock in what is now South Africa, researchers recently estimated that the epic impactor could have been around twice as wide as the asteroid that wiped out the nonavian dinosaurs. The Vredefort crater, which is located around 75 miles (120 kilometers) southwest of Johannesburg,...

The Republican Party saw its most significant edge ever over Democrats in a September NBC News poll on the economy, crime, and immigration. The poll, conducted between September 9 to 13, found that Republicans held massive leads — the largest in the poll’s history — on key issues when the respondents were asked who would do a better job handling them, with less than two months left before the election. On the economy, 47 percent said they would trust a Republican to handle the economy compared to 28 percent who said a Democrat. This gives Republicans a plus 19, when...

The volume of goods transported around the globe by container ships has increased continuously in recent years. As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz details below, according to data from the Hong Kong Marine Department shows that ports in Asia, especially in China, are increasingly dominating the industry.Infographic: The World’s Biggest Shipping Hubs | StatistaIn 2005, there were still two European and one North American port in the ranking of the biggest shipping hubs in the world. In 2021, only Rotterdam remained in the top 10 – in the bottom rank.Asian ports have grown at a fast rate in recent years. In addition...

The bulky object—possibly the core of a failed gas giant—challenges what astronomers think about how planets form. About 730 light-years away, not far on the scale of our galaxy, an utterly bizarre planet orbits a sun-like star. Big, dense, and tightly tethered to its home star, the planet is unlike anything astronomers have yet seen—either in our own solar system or afar. The roasted world known as TOI-849b is the most massive rocky planet ever observed, with as much as 40 Earths’ worth of material crammed inside. Perplexingly, TOI-849b’s tremendous bulk suggests that it should be a giant, gassy world...

For all its vast emptiness, the universe is humming with activity in the form of gravitational waves. Produced by extreme astrophysical phenomena, these reverberations ripple forth and shake the fabric of space-time, like the clang of a cosmic bell. Now researchers have detected a signal from what may be the most massive black hole merger yet observed in gravitational waves. The product of the merger is the first clear detection of an “intermediate-mass” black hole, with a mass between 100 and 1,000 times that of the sun. They detected the signal, which they have labeled GW190521, on May 21, 2019,...

The Egyptian President, accompanied by religious, military and international dignitaries, witnesses ceremony to inaugurate the Nativity of Christ Cathedral and Al-Fattah El-Alim17:43 US President Donald Trump tweeted, "Excited to see our friends in Egypt opening the biggest Cathedral in the Middle East. President El-Sisi is moving his country to a more inclusive future!" 17:40 In a short video message aired before the attendees, Pope Francis, the head of the Roman Catholic Church, congratulated the Egyptian people, government and president on the inauguration of the new cathedral.17:30 Following the moment of silence, the celebration on stage started with a live performance of Islamic chants and Christian hymns...

WILLIAMSON COUNTY, Ill. -- A hunter in Williamson County could be in the running for one of the largest bucks ever shot in America. (snip) ...conservation officers told him they think the buck is 7 to 9 years old, weighs around 265 pounds alive, and could have as many as 51 scoreable points.

The colossal Stratolaunch carrier plane rolled out of its hangar at the Mojave Air and Space Port in Mojave, California, today (May 31) to undergo fueling tests. It's the first public look at the full craft —which is designed to launch rockets into orbit from the sky — since construction began. "We're excited to announce that Stratolaunch aircraft has reached a major milestone in its journey toward providing convenient, reliable, and routine access to low-Earth orbit," Stratolaunch Systems Corp. CEO Jean Floyd said in a statement. "This marks the completion of the initial aircraft-construction phase and the beginning of the...

Key Highlights from the Vault 7 release so far:   "Year Zero" introduces the scope and direction of the CIA's global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of "zero day" weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.   Wikileaks claims that the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized "zero day" exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more...

We all know that a billion is a lot and a trillion is a lot more, but what do you call numbers that are even bigger? A Googol is bigger: it's 10 to the hundredth power—but it's not the biggest. In this well-researched 19 minute film, master explainer Sharkee takes us through ever larger numbers. He applies three rules. The largest number cannot be a number plus 1. The number must be useful in some way. And infinity doesn’t count, because it isn't actually a number. VIDEO explaining how they arrive at these really big numbers (Googolplex is nothing) --...

A new photograph of galaxy NGC 4889 may look peaceful from such a great distance, but it’s actually home to one of the biggest black holes that astronomers have ever identified. The Hubble Space Telescope allowed scientists to capture photos of the galaxy, located in the Coma Cluster about 300 million light-years away. The supermassive black hole hidden away in NGC 4889 breaks all kinds of records, even though it is currently classified as dormant. So how big is it, exactly? Well, according to our best estimates, the supermassive black hole is roughly 21 billion times the size of the...

Feverishly hot ocean surface waters potentially reaching more than 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius) may have helped cause the greatest mass extinction in Earth's history, researchers say. "We may have found the hottest time the world has ever had," researcher Paul Wignall, a geologist at the University of Leeds in England, told LiveScience. The mass extinction at the end of the Permian Era about 250 million years ago was the greatest die-off in Earth's history. The cataclysm killed as much as 95 percent of the planet's species. One key factor behind this disaster was probably catastrophic volcanic activity in...

Video of Garrett McNamara. from Haleiwa, Oahu has surfed what is considered to be the biggest wave ever. The Hawaiian big wave rider caught the huge monster in Praia do Norte, Nazaré, Portugal, during the ZON North Canyon Project 2011.

Journalists walk on the 450-meter (1,476 feet)-high observation deck of the Tokyo Sky Tree during a press preview in Tokyo Tuesday, April 17, 2012. The world's tallest freestanding broadcast structure that stands 634-meter (2,080 feet) will open to the public in May. (AP Photo/Itsuo Inouye)

Lon Feia didn't know how big a black bear he had until he saw the carcass. He knew there were bears on his property, which borders Willow River State Park in the town of Hudson, Wis., and started setting out bait in July. Soon he began getting "hits." "Then, finally, on Aug. 24, he started coming in," Feia said. "And in pretty short order he claimed the bait, so (all the other bears) went away." It was the evening of Oct. 9 when Feia took a shot that brought down the bear - an animal that measured 7 feet, 2...

Largest state unions won't seek recertification by Thursday deadline Madison - By the end of Thursday, the major state employee unions covering tens of thousands of workers will have effectively lost their official status. Top leaders for those unions say they won't seek to meet the high hurdle for keeping that current status laid out in Gov. Scott Walker's union bargaining law. With a deadline set for the close of business Thursday, so far only four smaller state unions have said they'll seek to keep their status by winning a difficult recertification election. Marty Beil, executive director of the 23,000-member...