What species has the greatest combined mass? All the world’s African elephants, or the oceans’ stock of blue whales (respectively the largest land and sea mammals)? Neither. It is the Antartic krill, weighing in at just two grams and growing to six centimetres long. What the Antartic krill lacks in individual size it more than makes up in collective heft. It has a combined biomass of […]
Monthly Archives: December 2011
In the last months of the First World War, Parisians lived under the menacing shadow of a long-range German artillery gun, the Paris Gun. The French nicknamed it Big Bertha, after the powerful German howitzer, whilst the German’s gave it the sycophantic title of the Kaiser Wilhelm Geschütz (the Emperor William Gun). The original ‘Big Bertha’ (Dicke Bertha in German) was one of the most powerful guns built by the Krupp […]