Unplugged
Last May, then-Gov. Linda Lingle signed a memorandum of understanding with South Korean automaker CT&T, which pledged to build 10,000 electric vehicles in Hawaii. If that sounds too good to be true, well, it was. This week, the news broke that CT&T’s plans have officially stalled.
A rep for CT&T, which made similar promises to South Carolina and Pennsylvania, insisted in an AP dispatch that the ambitious plans “aren’t dead,” though as of this writing even the company’s Web site was unfinished.
According to KRX, the Korean stock exchange, CT&T’s stock has fallen almost 90 percent in the last year—or about 10 percent less than the hope of this deal ever coming to fruition.
Ship Happens
One story the media clearly didn’t know what to do with this week: the arrival in Hawaii waters of the USS Carl Vinson, the Navy ship that quickly and quietly disposed of Osama bin Laden’s body.
How to treat the news? With glee? Solemnity? Or some awkward combination of the two? Most outlets opted for the latter, including KHON, which quoted a woman who said she was “proud” the crew got “to be part of such an incredible piece of history” and a crewmember who said the mission was conducted “in a manner that I think brings pride and credit to the United States.”
The morality—and legality—of bin Laden’s assassination aside, there’s something undeniably morbid about celebrating a corpse getting dumped in the ocean. But then, these are morbid times.
This Just In: Tiger Sharks Are Good At Hunting
Scientists already knew that tiger sharks sometimes swim in a “yo-yo” pattern—repeatedly climbing and diving through the water—but they didn’t fully understand why. Perhaps not surprisingly, the likely reason is hunting.
That’s according to a study conducted off the west coast of the Big Island, in which researchers from Hawaii, Japan and Florida attached digital cameras and devices that record swimming speed and depth to the dorsal fins of adult tiger sharks. The “yo-yo” pattern, the study found, is not designed to conserve energy as previously thought, but rather to comb large areas for prey.
“These findings are exciting because they have given us unprecedented new insights into the behavior of these huge and difficult to study marine predators,” said Dr. Carl Meyer of UH Manoa’s marine biology department in a release. “Although we have long debated the reasons for the yo-yo diving, we have only recently developed tools allowing us to directly measure the behavior in sufficient detail to understand what these animals are actually doing.”
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