- このトピックは空です。
-
投稿
-
Cute baby animals bring visitors to zoos and aquariums. What happens when they grow up?
[url=https://t.me/traffictemnik]арбитраж трафика с нуля[/url]
One of the best things that can happen to a zoo or aquarium is for one of their resident animals to go viral.Just look at the multi-hour-long lines to see Moo Deng, a pygmy hippo in Thailand who has become an internet sensation following her July 2024 birth. The sassy animal is now a full-on brand, with Khao Kheow Open Zoo selling Moo Deng merchandise and even releasing a single “by” the hippo in multiple languages.
Meanwhile, Pesto — a baby king penguin who was eating more fish than his parents by the time he was a few weeks old — is also an online celebrity, with human stars like Olivia Rodrigo and Katy Perry stopping by to meet him.
But what happens when these cute animals become, well, less cute? The Sea Life Melbourne aquarium has already been planning for the next phase of Pesto’s life — and answering questions from the public about his changing appearance.
It’s normal for king penguins to lose their feathers by the time they’re about a year old and become confident swimmers. As a result, a spokesperson for the aquarium says, guests have started asking why Pesto looks different — or why they can’t find him at all.
“We are getting a few guests thinking we have moved him off display completely,” says the spokesperson. “Most of the team’s time is spent pointing him out to guests because he looks so different now.”
The bottom line is that cute baby animals make money.Admission tickets are only the beginning. Many zoos and aquariums offer special “behind the scenes” or “zookeeper for a day” packages at much higher prices. At Sea Life Melbourne, standard entry tickets for adults start at $51, while the Penguin Passport — which include a 45-minute tour of the birds’ area and a look at how their food is prepared — is $199.
The real jackpot, though, is merchandise. Stuffed animals, T-shirts, fridge magnets, keychains, kids’ books and other branded products are a major way for zoos and aquariums to make money.
Astronomers briefly thought Elon Musk’s car was an asteroid. Here’s why that points to a broader problem
[url=https://kra27c.cc]skraken зеркало[/url]
Seven years after SpaceX launched Elon Musk’s cherry red sports car into orbit around our sun, astronomers unwittingly began paying attention to its movements once again.Observers spotted and correctly identified the vehicle as it started its extraterrestrial excursion in February 2018 — after it had blasted off into space during the Falcon Heavy rocket’s splashy maiden launch. But more recently, the car spawned a high-profile case of mistaken identity as space observers mistook it for an asteroid.
Several observations of the vehicle, gathered by sweeping surveys of the night sky, were inadvertently stashed away in a database meant for miscellaneous and unknown objects, according to the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center.An amateur astronomer noticed a string of data points in January that appeared to fit together, describing the orbit of a relatively small object that was swooping between the orbital paths of Earth and Mars.
The citizen scientist assumed the mystery object was an undocumented asteroid and promptly sent his findings to the MPC, which operates at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a clearinghouse that seeks to catalog all known asteroids, comets and other small celestial bodies. An astronomer there verified the finding.
And thus, the Minor Planet Center logged a new object, asteroid “2018 CN41.”
Within 24 hours, however, the center retracted the designation.
The person who originally flagged the object realized their own error, MPC astronomer Peter Veres told CNN, noticing that they had, in fact, found several uncorrelated observations of Musk’s car. And the center’s systems hadn’t caught the error.
