🐤 A whale of a tale

🏦 Markets: Apple’s quarterly earnings report showed a decline as fewer people are buying the tech giant’s slate of products. Its stock value dropped pretty substantially as a result, leaving its market cap at about $2.86 trillion after topping the $3 trillion mark earlier this year.

Taking a look at the broader market, investors have had a chance to process the recent downgrade of the U.S. credit rating and the major indexes ended the week on a sour note after making some gains earlier in the day on the strength of a fairly positive July jobs report.

🏈 The Bigs get bigger: Buckle up college football fans, conference realignment isn't done yet and the latest target is the Pac-12. The Big XII and Big Ten have already claimed eight of the twelve Pac-12 members. The Big XII is taking Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah while the Big Ten is taking USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington. These moves have put the Pac-12's future in doubt, which only has four members remaining: Washington State, Oregon State, California, and Stanford. It's uncertain at this time what the remaining members will do, but the financial benefits and stability offered by the larger conferences is very enticing.

🏥 Hospital attack: Cyber security is important for all businesses, but healthcare facilities in multiple U.S. states recently learned how pivotal it can be. A cyberattack disrupted computers at multiple hospitals within the Prospect Medical Holdings system beginning on Thursday. As a result, some emergency rooms were forced to close and ambulances had to be rerouted to other facilities in certain cases. The issue was still causing disruptions as of Friday.

🆕 New leader: For the fourth time since its inception about nine years ago, the Islamic State terrorist organization confirmed that its leader has been killed. Abu al-Hussein al-Husseini al-Qurayshi reportedly died while fighting a group in Syria linked with al Qaeda. He had only been at the helm of the group since November. A spokesperson asserted that he had been “martyred” and announced that Abu Hafs al-Hashemi al-Qurayshi would take his place.

🏡 Leaving home: Controversial social media influencer Andrew Tate had been held in Romania under house arrest as he awaited trial on charges related to rape and human trafficking. A court granted his appeal on Friday, though, and he will now be allowed to leave his home. He’ll still be prohibited from leaving the country, but spokesperson Mateea Petrescu asserted that the “positive outcome gives us confidence that more favorable developments are on the horizon.”

When you think about the heaviest creatures in history, you might envision the age of the massive dinosaurs that once roamed the planet’s surface.

But dwelling deep down in the Earth’s oceans, the environment is perfect for allowing animals to get much larger than they could ever become on land. That’s where some experts believe the most enormous living being of all time once swam.

Now and then

In modern times, the heaviest animal is also aquatic. The blue whale can tip the scales at 190 metric tons!

But is it the biggest of all time? That’s been up for debate for years, and the discovery of some truly gargantuan fossils indicates that there was once a contender that would’ve dwarfed even the blue whale’s enormous size.

Researcher Alberto Collareta was on the team that unearthed the ancient bones during a dig in a Peruvian desert. Just one vertebra was the size of a boulder.

“I was in front of something unlike anything I had ever seen,” he explained, noting that he couldn’t figure out how something so immense could have even moved around when it was alive.

Size matters

The long-extinct creature has been dubbed Perucetus colossus and has already sparked some fierce debate within the scientific community.

If it was truly as heavy as some experts believe — as much as 340 metric tons — then scientists will have to rethink how animals are able to grow. But there’s still some doubt that Perucetus colossus was actually bigger than modern-day blue whales.

That’s due in large part to the absence of a skull, which would provide lots of important clues about its size and how it managed to get so big.

Paleontologist Nick Pyenson suspects it wasn’t truly the biggest animal ever, but acknowledged: “Clearly, it is really big.”

Why did the scarecrow win an award?

Because he was outstanding in his field!

Few construction projects on earth are as instantly recognizable as the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Dating back to the late 1800s, just about anyone who visits the French capital stops to pay it a visit.

But have you ever thought about what it takes to keep this tower looking so photogenic decade after decade? As it turns out, there’s a pretty simple answer.

Every seven years

Since the Eiffel Tower was initially created out of puddle iron components, it’s inherently vulnerable to oxidation and rust. That’s why it’s so important to maintain fresh coats of paint on all of its surfaces.

Its designer, Gustave Eiffel, knew this from the very start, writing in 1900: "We will most likely never realize the full importance of painting the Tower, that it is the essential element in the conservation of metal works and the more meticulous the paint job, the longer the Tower shall endure."

And that advice has carried through to this day. The tower has undergone 19 separate paint jobs since it was first unveiled, which comes out to approximately once every seven years.

Changing the colors

The whole process is done by hand, and here’s what it entails:

• Roughly 50 fearless painters
• About 60 tons of paint
• More than 34 miles of safety line

While you might think that the tower has looked the same since it was first erected, the use of paint allows it to take on different hues from one generation to the next. Although it’s mostly taken on a brownish-bronze appearance, there have been applications that ramp up the reds, yellows, and other colors.

And when new paint is applied, its shading is adjusted all the way up so that it appears to be the same color against its natural Parisian background.

You might think you have a pretty firm grasp on the law of gravity. It causes us to stay planted on the ground most of the time and it’s why apples fall straight down from the tree, as Sir Isaac Newton famously determined.

There’s also some pretty common knowledge about how gravity is proportional to mass, which is why astronauts bounced around when they landed on the much smaller moon.

But if you think gravity is just a standard concept here on Earth, there’s some fascinating evidence that will prove you wrong.

Falling faster (or slower)

We recently brought you a story about the so-called “gravity hole” in the Indian Ocean where the force is weaker and the water’s surface is about 300 feet lower than its surroundings.

Scientists have compiled data that shows there are many other places around the world where the force of gravity is either weaker or stronger than normal.

Since mass correlates with stronger gravity, huge mountains generally have a more robust gravitational pull than voids like valleys and ocean depths.

This means that if you were to drop an item on a mountain peak, it would fall slightly faster than the standard acceleration of 9.8 meters per second squared. By the same token, that item would fall more slowly in a deep valley.

Interesting … but unnoticeable

Of course, these changes are minuscule from our perspective. Nevertheless, scientists like Byron Tapley say that these discoveries allow us to better understand the interconnectivity of nature.

“The big issue is to try to understand how the oceans, the atmosphere, and the land areas are interacting,” he said. “They’re all coupled together essentially in the Earth’s system and trying to understand those interactions, how what happens to one influences another.”