The Turanor PlanetSolar, the world's largest solar-powered boat, travels on the Seine river near Paris after travelling over 60,000 km in 584 daysBENOIT TESSIER/Reuters
THE VOLCANO UNDER
Scientists say they have discovered the world's largest volcano in the lowest depths of the Pacific Ocean. A report by BBC News says the 310,000-square-kilometre volcano, named Tamu Massif, is comparable in size to Mars's sprawling Olympus Mons volcano, the largest in the solar system. The Tamu Massif volcano is situated two kilometres below the sea on an underwater plateau known as the Shatsky Rise, roughly 1,600 kilometres east of Japan. Long dormant, the Tamu Massif dwarfs the largest volcano on Earth, Mauna Loa in Hawaii, which measures 52,000 square kilometres.
REAL-TIME RACKET
Facebook wants to up its stake in the media business and it's using the Twitter playbook to get there. According to the tech-media website CNET, Facebook announced Monday that it will roll out a brand-new feature to "select" news organizations, including Slate and CNN, that will enable them to broadcast real-time insight. In turn, those news organizations can broadcast comments from Facebook users about the same event. The move echoes the game plan of Twitter, which has become the go-to location for developing news and topics. Facebook also released some juicy statistics to promote the new feature, most notably the fact that between 88 million and 100 million of its U.S. subscribers are logged on between the prime-time hours of 8 and 11 p.m. The biggest day of the year for Facebook was Super Bowl Sunday last February, when the social network recorded 245 million shares in a single day.
WEDDING CRUISERS
The real reason people attend friends' weddings? To find their own soul mate. A recent survey by the online dating site Cupid.com talked to more than 1,000 men and women to glean their feelings on other people's nuptials. Over half the single women (55 per cent) and three quarters of single men (77 per cent) admitted they were on "high alert" for other singles from the moment they arrived at the wedding, the site said in a release. And gents looking to impress the ladies are hereby advised to get out the hankies: 84 per cent of the survey's female respondents say they just love it when a man cries at a wedding.
THOUGHT DU JOUR
"Baseball breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone."
A. Bartlett Giamatti, Major League Baseball commissioner (1938-1989)