The fabled “Doomfish” has reappeared in California.
The rare and long ribbon-shaped oarfish, often seen as a sign of impending disaster, has washed ashore on a California coast for the second time this year.
Alison Laferriere, a doctoral candidate at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, found the nearly 10-foot-long oarfish on a beach in Encinitas, Southern California, last week.
Oarfish are mysterious creatures that reside in the mesopelagic zone, deep underwater where sunlight cannot reach, often up to 3,300 feet below the surface.
These enigmatic fish, reaching lengths of up to 20 feet, have not been extensively studied by scientists, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Because of their unusual appearance and legendary status, with myths dating back for centuries, oarfish are sometimes referred to as the “fish of the end” due to their supposed ability to predict natural disasters and earthquakes.
The legend of the “earthquake fish” resurfaced in 2011 when 20 oarfish washed up before Japan’s largest recorded earthquake, resulting in a devastating tsunami.
According to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, only 21 oarfish have been documented washing up on California beaches since 1901.
Researchers speculate that changes in ocean conditions and a possible increase in the oarfish population are contributing to the rise in sightings.
This year, a 12-foot-long oarfish was seen by kayakers and snorkelers in La Jolla Cove, north of downtown San Diego, and later taken to NOAA’s Fisheries Science Center for further examination.
Studies are ongoing to unravel the mystery surrounding oarfish sightings and their potential links to seismic events.
A 2019 study found no solid evidence linking oarfish to earthquakes, leaving the interpretation open to speculation.
aIn Valve’s Half-Life 2, the seminal first-person shooter that celebrates its 20th anniversary this month, taciturn scientist Gordon Freeman finds himself trapped in a dystopian cityscape. Armed soldiers patrol the streets while innocent civilians wander around dazed, without purpose or future. Dr. Wallace Breen, Freeman’s former boss at the scientific “research center” Black Mesa, looks down from a giant video screen and defends the virtues of humanity’s benefactors, an alien race known as the Combine.
Freeman stumbles through the first few levels of Half-Life 2, as players become accustomed to the terrifying future unfolding before them. It’s not the most cheerful atmosphere, but there are some friendly faces (guards Barney, Alix, and Eli Vance), and a beaked face named Lamar, Dr. Isaac Kleiner’s pet. There are even moments of humor, such as an eating alien running amok in a lab. I feel safe. It will make you feel happy. It feels nostalgic. There’s also a crowbar! And that omen. “That’s the old passageway to Ravenholm,” Alix Vance tweeted during a tour of Freeman’s Chapter 5 Black Mesa East facility. “We’re not going there anymore.” I feel a shiver run down my spine. you know You’ll end up going there.
“[Ravenholm] It was a completely different environment than anything players had ever been in before,” said level designer and member of the unofficial City 17 Cabal, a group within Valve that worked on Half-Life 2’s most famous levels, Dario Casali. “This is an outlier in the map set that survived from a very early build of the game, and was born out of the need to give the newly introduced Gravity Gun a place to shine.”
“Ravenholme was a completely different environment to anything the players had been in before.” Photo: Valve
The lack of ammunition for Freeman’s traditional weapons is what propels Ravenholm and Half-Life 2 into the realm of horror games. Ravenholm, an old mining town previously hidden from the Combine, is now a desolate place, shrouded in darkness and its inhabitants corrupted by the heavy bombardment of Headcrabs (face-eating aliens). “We used the confined space to slow down the zombies. [headcrab-afflicted people] It can actually get closer to you,” Casali reveals. And players will no longer be able to blow them away with machine guns or pistols. You will have to rely on your heavy gravity gun to pick up whatever is around and throw it at the monsters that are closing in on Freeman. Pots of paint, pieces of wood, and even corpses became ammunition for players.
Like most of Half-Life 2, Ravenholm is a cinematic experience, taking cues from horror films like Saw and 28 Days Later. When the Combine forces attack Black Mesa East, Freeman escapes through a dark tunnel leading to Ravenholm. Immediately, a sudden change in atmosphere hits the player like a chill. A gloomy set of dark buildings, faint and almost non-existent music, two crashed headcrab rockets, and the sound of something swinging from a barren tree. When I looked closely, I discovered the lower half of my body, which had been pecked by a crow.
A headcrab zombie appears out of nowhere and screams in pain. But soon, Freeman has little to worry about. Designed to fit within the map, Ravenholm’s “fast” zombies climb drainpipes and run across rooftops, leaving adventurous scientists with little safe haven. Freeman also has to contend with hunched creatures that throw poisonous headcrabs at him.
“A desolate place.” Photo: EA
Fortunately, Freeman is not without help. Soon, he encounters Father Grigori, responsible for Ravenholm’s saw-like traps, and passionately redeems his “flock” with a shotgun. Casali said: “In my opinion, this man was slowly losing his mind due to the Headcrab and the zombification of his followers. Ravenholm was so isolated that he didn’t even know about the Combine invasion. , I imagined they thought the devil had come to town. Father Grigori and the zombie horde were the perfect excuse to double down on the creepiness.”
Freeman follows Grigori throughout Ravenholm until the final climactic battle in a (appropriate) graveyard. “I thought Ravenholme really needed an action-packed ending, worthy of a horror movie,” says Casali. “What better place to do that than in a cemetery?”
The final encounter between Freeman and Grigori, besieged by an army of zombies and headcrabs, releases some of the tension built up while exploring the spooky streets of Ravenholm, but this level is difficult to play It still leaves a lasting impression on those who did it. Changes in tone and style. This segment has essentially been around since the beginning of Half-Life 2’s long development (a version appeared in Valve’s famous 2003 E3 demo), and evolved into the final game’s ammo-starved spooky fest.
One of the standout games of the past 20 years, Half-Life 2 defined the future of video games with its innovative visuals and excellent physics engine. As part of the City 17 cabal, the activities of Casali and his colleagues were instrumental. “The desire to surpass the original Half-Life was so strong that we were constantly motivated by the quality of work other teams were doing,” he recalls. “It was magic.”
The people of Easter Island built hundreds of monolithic statues called Moai.
Stephanie Morcinek via Unsplash
The widely held claim that the ancient people of Easter Island experienced a social collapse due to overexploitation of natural resources is being called into fresh doubt: analysis of historical agricultural practices suggests that a small, stable population lived sustainably for centuries before Europeans arrived.
Famous for its towering stone statues, Easter Island (also known as Rapa Nui) in the Pacific Ocean is thought to have been inhabited by Polynesians as early as A.D. 1200. At the time, the island’s 164 square kilometers were covered in palm forests, but a combination of rats and over-logging soon destroyed them.
According to a narrative popularized by historian Jared Diamond, unsustainable resource use led to a rapid population growth and collapse before Europeans arrived in 1722.
The islanders made their living primarily from rock gardening, a type of agriculture common in areas with poor soil and harsh climates, by scattering stones throughout the fields to create micro-habitats and windbreaks, conserve moisture, and provide important minerals.
Previous studies have suggested that the rock gardens covered 21 square kilometers of land on Rapa Nui and supported a population of up to 16,000 people.
To learn more, Carl Lipo Researchers from Binghamton University in New York combined satellite imagery and machine learning models trained on ground surveys to generate estimates of rock gardening areas across the island.
They found that the largest rock gardens measured just 0.76 square kilometers. The researchers estimate that such a system could not have supported more than 4,000 people, roughly the estimated population at the time Europeans arrived. In other words, the population was remarkably stable, the team argues.
Robert DiNapoli, a researcher at Binghamton University in New York, inspects the rock garden.
Carl Lipo
Lipo says those who continue to use Easter Island as a case study of degradation and collapse need to see the empirical evidence: “The results we produce suggest that the island was never… [had] “Huge populations overconsumed resources,” he says, “and overall, the archaeological record shows no evidence of population collapse before European arrival.”
Instead, Lipo says, the increasingly popular theory is that the islanders modified their environment to enable sustainable livelihoods for generations: “Their small populations and scattered, low-density settlement patterns enabled them to reliably produce enough food for over 500 years before Europeans arrived.”
Dale F. Simpson The University of Illinois researchers say further research is needed to assess whether the precision and accuracy of the model calculations used in the study match the archaeological record.
“Overall, this is [study] Rapa Nui [people] “Rapa Nui is often portrayed as a culture that collapsed due to sociopolitical competition, overexploitation of ecosystems, and megalithic overproduction, but the argument is better served by recognizing Rapa Nui as a Polynesian island culture of adaptation and survival that thrived for almost a millennium,” Simpson said.
Many dogs have been seen in the night sky, but the most famous is Canis Major, also known as the Great Dog. To locate it, start by finding its master, the constellation Orion, specifically the three bands of stars at the center of that constellation. Extend the line downward and to the left (southeast) to reach the alpha star Sirius in the constellation Canis Major.
Sirius, also referred to as the Dog Star, is relatively close to the sun, 8.6 light years away (a light year is the distance light travels in a year, approximately 10 trillion kilometers).
It is the brightest star in the night sky due to its close proximity to Earth. Its light is affected by atmospheric turbulence, causing flickering and variations in color.
Canis Major represents the dog, with a lively animal imagined as running towards Orion. Sirius appears as a pointed head at the top left (northeast), a distorted rectangular body slanted to the bottom left, and even a small tail, but its appendages and hind legs are very low in the sky when viewed from England. Using binoculars, look below (to the south) of Sirius just below the field of view to find the beautiful open star cluster Messier 41 (M41) inside the dog’s body, if the sky is clear and dark.
How to identify the stars of the Big Dog (Canis Major) and the Little Dog (Canis Minor). – Source: Pete Lawrence
To find Canis Minor, also known as the little dog and relative of Canis Major, look upward (north) from Sirius and to the left (east) to a relatively sparsely populated area of the sky with only one bright star, Procyon. This constellation is not often identified as a dog and is basically formed by only two stars, Procyon and Gomeisa.
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