Japan cooks world's largest rice cracker

Japanese snack enthusiasts claimed on Wednesday to have set the record for the world's largest ever rice cracker.

Members of the world's largest rice cracker committee bake a 1.63-meter diameter rice cracker at Inzai city in Chiba prefecture, suburban Tokyo 

With a diameter of 5 feet 3 inches the cracker dwarfs the typical "senbei", a crunchy snack made from rice flour that is eaten widely in Japan.

For Michihiro Yamaguchi, a 63-year-old member of The World's Largest Rice Cracker Committee in Kioroshi, a town east of Tokyo, it was a moment of triumph.

"We made it. It's sweet revenge," he said, after a failed attempt to get into the record books last month with a cracker that fell three centimetres short of their target.

The group started making dough with 33 pounds of powdered rice on Tuesday and baked it for about an hour on Wednesday over an open fire, turning the giant snack every few minutes.

Once the cracker was measured and photos taken to prove their feat for an inaugural Guinness World Record largest rice cracker title, the soy-sauce flavoured snack was broken into small pieces and presented to townsfolk.

World's largest hotel?

The Palazzo at night 2009
Address	3325 Las Vegas Blvd Las Vegas, NV 89109
Opening date	December 30, 2007
Theme	Italian
No. of rooms	3,068
Total gaming space	105,000 sq ft (9,800 m2)
Permanent shows	Jersey Boys
Signature attractions	The Shoppes At The Palazzo Lamborghini Dealership
Casino type	Land-Based
Owner	Las Vegas Sands
Website	palazzolasvegas.com

The Palazzo (pronounced /pəˈlɑːtsoʊ/) is a luxury hotel and casino resort situated between Wynn and The Venetian on the Las Vegas Strip in Paradise, Nevada, a suburb of Las Vegas. It is the tallest completed building in Nevada (although the Fontainebleau Resort Las Vegas, whose construction is currently stalled due to financial problems, is already taller). Designed by the Dallas based HKS, Inc., the property's design is marketed as being reflective of a modern European ambiance and luxury living. The hotel and casino are part of a larger complex comprising the adjoining Venetian Hotel and Casino and the Sands Convention Center, all of which are owned and operated by the Las Vegas Sands Corporation.
This all-suite hotel offers the largest standard accommodations on the Las Vegas Strip at 720 square feet (67 m²) per guest room.
In its first year of eligibility, The Palazzo was awarded the AAA Five Diamond Award for 2009.

History

 Construction

As of February 27, 2006, the project had been under construction for over a year. Most of that time was spent digging the 4-story-deep hole to put in the underground parking structure. Then the building itself began gradually rising upwards. The steel fabrication and erection was supplied by Schuff Steel Company. By November 2006, the hotel tower had reached the 35th floor. Construction of the ground floors, including the parking garage and shopping center, were well under way.
As of March 2007, the hotel tower's elevator core was complete, and the rooms area was rising to the top. The façade and windows were being installed on the lower floors. As of August 2007, the lettering on the side of the tower was finished and is topped out.
As of December 20, 2007 the Palazzo was scheduled to open at least 1,000 rooms by December 28 in preparation for the Las Vegas New Year's celebration, America's Party. The casino and other areas of the Palazzo opened at 7 pm on Sunday, December 30, after a delay of several days due to the Clark County permitting process.
Upon its completion, The Palazzo (its total floor area covering 6,948,980 square feet (645,581 m²) displaced the Pentagon as the largest building in the United States in terms of floor space, by a margin of about 383,000 square feet (35,600 m²).
The structural engineering was done by Walter P Moore Engineers and Consultants. Parts of the resort were opened to the general public on December 30, 2007. The official grand opening took place on January 17, 2008.
Currently under construction, the 270-unit condominium tower addition The St. Regis Residences at The Palazzo will be the first residential offerings at The Venetian complex. The high-rise tower is being built on top of the 90,000-square-foot (8,400 m²) building that houses the Barneys New York apparel store. On September 4, 2008, Las Vegas Sands announced that it had come to an agreement with Starwood Hotels & Resorts to operate the condo tower as a signature branch of The St. Regis Residences with all hallmarks of the St. Regis brand offered to residents.

Design

Hanging umbrellas in the Palazzo

The $1.8 billion resort features a Lobby where guests from the street arrive beneath a 60-foot (18 m) glass dome with a two-story fountain. Those approaching from The Venetian make the transition through a towering octagonal structure and garden, itself topped by a glass-and-iron dome. Visitors to The Palazzo using the underground parking structure can take elevators or escalators from the underground garage and arrive in the center of the property's casino.
The Palazzo Casino, like some other casinos on the strip, operates under the license of a related casino—in this case The Venetian's license. The resort's 642-foot (196 m) high hotel tower features 3,068 all-suite rooms and 375 concierge-level suites.
The Palazzo is LEED Silver Certified—the largest LEED certified building in the nation.
The Palazzo is reported to be the sixth largest building in the world in terms of available floor space and is also currently the second-largest building in the Western Hemisphere.

Biggest Tree

General Sherman

General Sherman tree before the loss of its largest branch in early 2006

The General Sherman is a giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) tree located in the Giant Forest of Sequoia National Park in Tulare County, California. By volume, it is the largest known living single stem tree on Earth. The General Sherman Tree is neither the tallest known living tree on Earth (that distinction belongs to the Hyperion tree, a Coast redwood),  nor is it the widest (that distinction belongs to the Sunland Baobab, a baobab tree), nor is it the oldest known living tree on Earth (that distinction belongs to the Methuselah tree, a Great Basin bristlecone pine). With a height of 83.8 metres (275 ft), a diameter of 7.7 metres (25 ft), an estimated bole volume of 1,487 cubic metres (52,513 cu ft), and an estimated age of 2,300 – 2,700 years, it is however among the tallest, widest and longest-lived of all trees on the planet.

History

In 1879, it was named after American Civil War general, William Tecumseh Sherman, by naturalist James Wolverton, who had served as a lieutenant in the 9th Indiana Cavalry under Sherman. In 1931, following comparisons with the nearby General Grant tree, General Sherman was identified as the largest tree in the world. One result of this process was that wood volume became widely accepted as the standard for establishing and comparing the size of different trees.

Current

In January 2006 the largest branch on the tree (seen most commonly, in older photos, as an "L" or golf-club shape, protruding from about a quarter of the way down the trunk) broke off. There were no witnesses to the incident, and the branch—with a bigger circumference than the trunks of most trees, a diameter of over 2 metres (7 ft) and a length of over 30 metres (98 ft)—smashed part of its enclosing fence and cratered the pavement of the walkway surrounding the sequoia. The breakage, however, is not believed to be indicative of any abnormalities in the tree's health, and may even be a natural defense mechanism against adverse weather conditions. The branch loss did not change the General Sherman's status as the largest tree, as its size has been calculated using measurements of trunk volume, excluding branches.

Dimensions

Base of the tree, September, 1962

Height above base	274.9 ft	83.8 m
Circumference at ground	102.6 ft	31.3 m
Maximum diameter at base	36.5 ft	11.1 m
Diameter 4.5 ft (1.4 m) above height point on ground	25.1 ft	7.7 m
Diameter 60 ft (18 m) above base	17.5 ft	5.3 m
Diameter 180 ft (55 m) above base	14.0 ft	4.3 m
Diameter of largest branch	6.8 ft	2.1 m
Height of first large branch above the base	130.0 ft	39.6 m
Average crown spread	106.5 ft	32.5 m
Estimated bole volume	52,508 cu ft	1,487 m3
Estimated mass (wet)	2,105 short tons	1,910 t

World's Biggest Pig

The Liaoning Provincial Agricultural Museum is appealing to the Guinness Book of Records to recognise a 900 kg (1984 pounds) pig which died on February 5 as the biggest pig ever. When the pig died it was 2.5 metres long, had a waistline of 2.23 metres and a tusk of 14.4 centimetres long. According to XU Changjin, a farmer of Wafangdian city, the pig was only 5 years old. He kept his pig in a good built sty and gave it quality food all its life.

World's largest book

The world's largest book stands upright, set in stone, in the grounds of the Kuthodaw pagoda (kuthodaw, "royal merit") at the foot of Mandalay Hill in Mandalay, Myanmar (Burma). It has 730 leaves and 1460 pages; each page is three and a half feet wide, five feet tall and five inches thick. Each stone tablet has its own roof and precious gem on top in a small cave-like structure of Sinhalese relic casket type called kyauksa gu (stone inscription cave in Burmese), and they are arranged around a central golden pagoda.

Royal merit

Kuthodaw pagoda, view from the middle enclosure (south)

One of the stone inscriptions, originally in gold letters and borders, at Kuthodaw

The pagoda itself was built as part of the traditional foundations of the new royal city which also included a pitakat taik or library for religious scriptures, but King Mindon wanted to leave a great work of merit for posterity meant to last five millennia after the Gautama Buddha who lived around 500 BC. When the British invaded southern Burma in the mid-19th century, Mindon Min was concerned that Buddhist dhamma (teachings) would also be detrimentally affected in the North where he reigned. As well as organizing the Fifth Buddhist council in 1871, he was responsible for the construction in Mandalay of the world's largest book, consisting of 729 large marble tablets with the Tipitaka Pali canon of Theravada Buddhism inscribed on them in gold. One more was added to record how it all came about, making it 730 stone inscriptions in total.
The marble was quarried from Sagyin Hill 32 miles north of Mandalay, and transported by river to the city. Work began on 14 October 1860 in a large shed near Mandalay Palace. The text had been meticulously edited by tiers of senior monks and lay officials consulting the Tipitaka (meaning "three baskets", namely Vinaya Pitaka, Sutta Pitaka and Abhidhamma Pitaka) kept in royal libraries in the form of peisa or palm leaf manuscripts. Scribes carefully copied the text on marble for stonemasons. Each stone has 80 to 100 lines of inscription on each side in round Burmese script, chiselled out and originally filled in with gold ink. It took a scribe three days to copy both the obverse and the reverse sides, and a stonemason could finish up to 16 lines a day. All the stones were completed and opened to the public on 4 May 1868.

Assembly and contents

The stones are arranged in neat rows within three enclosures, 42 in the innermost, 168 in the middle and 519 in the outermost enclosure. The caves are numbered starting from the west going clockwise (let ya yit) forming complete rings as follows:

Two rows of kyauksa gus with their new htis

Enclosure	Cave number	Pitaka
inner	1 - 42	Vinaya Pitaka
middle near	43 - 110	Vinaya
middle far	111 - 210	111 Vinaya, Abhidhamma Pitaka 112 - 210
outer nearest	211 -309	Abhidhamma
outermost perimeter	310 - 465	Abhidhamma 310 - 319, Sutta Pitaka 320 - 417, Samyutta Nikaya 418 - 465
outermost next in	466 - 603	Samyutta 466 - 482, Anguttara Nikaya 483 - 560, Khuddaka Nikaya 561 - 603
outermost near	604 - 729	Khuddaka

Thirty years later in 1900, a print copy of the text came out in a set of 38 volumes in Royal Octavo size of about 400 pages each in Great Primer type. The publisher, Philip H. Ripley of Hanthawaddy Press, claimed that his books were "true copies of the Pitaka inscribed on stones by King Mindon". Ripley was a Burmese-born Armenian brought up in the royal court of Mandalay by the king and went to school with the royal princes including Thibaw Min, the last king of Burma. At the age of 17 he fled to Rangoon when palace intrigues and a royal massacre broke out after the death of King Mindon, and he had the galley proofs checked against the stones.

Annexation, desecration and restoration

Kuthodaw Paya from Mandalay Hill

The British later invaded the North, the gems and other valuables were looted, and the buildings and images vandalised by the troops billeted in the temples and pagodas near the walled city and Mandalay Hill. When the troops withdrew from religious sites after a successful petition to Queen Victoria, restoration work began in earnest in 1892 organised by a committee formed by senior monks, members of the royal family and former officers of the king including Atumashi Sayadaw (Abbot of Atumashi Monastery), Kinwon Min Gyi U Kaung (chancellor), Hleithin Atwinwun (minister of the royal fleet), Yaunghwe Saopha Sir Saw Maung (a Shan prince), and Mobyè Sitkè (a general in the royal army). In the tradition of the time, when something needed repair, it was first offered to the relatives of those who had originally made the dana (donation) and they came forward and assisted in making repairs. The public was then asked for help, but the full original glory was not achieved.
The gold writing had disappeared from all 729 marble tablets, along with the bells from the hti (umbrella or crown) of each of the small stupas, and they were now marked in black ink, made from shellac, soot from paraffin lamps and straw ash, rather than in gold, and few of the gems still exist. Mobyè Sitkè also asked permission from senior monks to plant star flower trees (Mimusops elengi) between the rows of kyauksa gus. The inscriptions have been re-inked several times since King Thibaw had it done for the second time in gold. The undergrowth amongst the caves was cleared and paved through public donations appealed for in the Ludu Daily in 1968. The words of the Buddha are still preserved in this place which is therefore a popular destination for devout Buddhists as well as scholars and tourists.

Hercules – the Biggest of Big Cats

Hercules is a 900-pound-heavy, 6-feet-tall and 12-feet-long liger who holds the Guinness World Record for the largest cat.
Born from a lion father and tiger mother, Hercules grew into an impressive creature, able to run at speeds of up to 50 mph and eat 100 pounds of food in one sitting. Ligers have been known to be fat and unhealthy cats, but Hercules is an exceptional specimen that got the best from both feline races.
During a recent photo-shoot, Hercules’ caretakers wanted to show his enormous size by placing him against popular English symbols, like an old double-decker bus or a black cab. He was actually able to climb the bus to receive a tasty treat. It might look like the world’s biggest cat is actually in London, but he’s really quite close to home, at Freestyle Music Park in Myrtle Beach, Southern California.
Despite his gigantic size, Hercules is very tame and Dr. Bhagavan, one of the liger’s caretakers, says looking into his eyes is “like looking into God’s own eyes”.

The World's Biggest Bird

Ostrich

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses, see Ostrich (disambiguation).

Ostrich Temporal range: pleistocene–present PreЄ Є O S D C P T J K Pg N ↓ Pleistocene to Recent
Male (left) and female (right)
Conservation status
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Subphylum:	Vertebrata
Class:	Aves
Superorder:	Paleognathae
Order:	Struthioniformes
Family:	Struthionidae
Genus:	Struthio Linnaeus, 1758
Species
Struthio camelus Struthio (camelus) molybdophanes
Distribution

The Ostrich is one or two species of large flightless birds native to Africa, the only living member(s) of the genus Struthio. Some analyses indicate that the Somali Ostrich may be better considered a full species apart from the Common Ostrich, but there is no consensus among experts about this. It is split here, however, as many recent sources (e.g. the IOC) recognize them as distinct.
Ostriches share the order Struthioniformes with the kiwis, emus, and other ratites. It is distinctive in its appearance, with a long neck and legs and the ability to run at maximum speeds of about 97.5 kilometres per hour (60.6 mph), the top land speed of any bird. The Ostrich is the largest living species of bird and lays the largest egg of any living bird (extinct elephant birds of Madagascar and the giant moa of New Zealand did lay larger eggs).
The diet of Ostriches mainly consists of plant matter, though it also eats invertebrates. It lives in nomadic groups which contain between five and fifty birds. When threatened, the Ostrich will either hide itself by lying flat against the ground, or will run away. If cornered, it can attack with a kick from its powerful legs. Mating patterns differ by geographical region, but territorial males fight for a harem of two to seven females. These fights usually last just minutes, but they can easily cause death through slamming their heads into opponents.
The Ostrich is farmed around the world, particularly for its feathers, which are decorative and are also used as feather dusters. Its skin is used for leather products and its meat marketed commercially.

Description

Head

Foot

Claws on the wings

Ostriches usually weigh from 63 to 130 kilograms (140–290 lb), with exceptional male Ostriches weighing up to 155 kilograms (340 lb). The feathers of adult males are mostly black, with white primaries and a white tail. However, the tail of one subspecies is buff. Females and young males are greyish-brown and white. The head and neck of both male and female Ostriches is nearly bare, with a thin layer of down. The skin of the females neck and thighs is pinkish gray, while the male's is blue-gray, gray or pink dependent on subspecies.
The long neck and legs keep their head 1.8 to 2.75 metres (6 to 9 ft) above the ground, and their eyes are said to be the largest of any land vertebrate – 50 millimetres (2.0 in) in diameter; they can therefore perceive predators at a great distance. The eyes are shaded from sun light falling from above.
Their skin varies in colour depending on the sub-species. The strong legs of the Ostrich are unfeathered and show bare skin, with the tarsus (the lowest upright part of the leg) being covered in scales – red in the male, black in the female. The bird has just two toes on each foot (most birds have four), with the nail on the larger, inner toe resembling a hoof. The outer toe has no nail. The reduced number of toes is an adaptation that appears to aid in running. Ostriches can run at over 70 kilometres per hour (43 mph) for up to 30 minutes. The wings reach a span of about 2 metres (7 ft) and are used in mating displays and to shade chicks. The feathers lack the tiny hooks that lock together the smooth external feathers of flying birds, and so are soft and fluffy and serve as insulation. They have 50-60 tail feathers, and their wings have 16 primary, four alular and 20-23 secondary feathers. The Ostrich's sternum is flat, lacking the keel to which wing muscles attach in flying birds. The beak is flat and broad, with a rounded tip. Like all ratites, the Ostrich has no crop, and it also lacks a gallbladder. They have three stomachs, and the caecum is 71 centimetres (28 in) long. Unlike all other living birds, the Ostrich secretes urine separately from faeces. Contrary to all other birds who store the urine and faeces combined in the coprodeum, they store the faeces in the terminal rectum. They also have unique pubic bones that are fused to hold their gut. Unlike most birds the males have a copulatory organ, which is retractable and 8 inches (20 cm) long. Their palate differs from other ratites in that the sphenoid and palatal bones are unconnected.
At sexual maturity (two to four years), male Ostriches can be from 1.8 to 2.8 metres (5 ft 11 in to 9 ft 2 in) in height, while female Ostriches range from 1.7 to 2 metres (5 ft 7 in to 6 ft 7 in). During the first year of life, chicks grow about 25 centimetres (10 in) per month. At one year of age, Ostriches weigh around 45 kilograms (100 lb). Their lifespan is up to 40 or 45 years.
A female ostrich can determine her own eggs amongst others in a communal nest.