#Alan Yuhas

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The bear stands on its hind legs with what some might call suspiciously good posture. With its front two paws in the air, back erect, the creature looks from side to side across a crowd of zoo visitors. On its rear, folds of skin bunch together in a way that resembles a human wearing baggy pants.

Captured on video last week, this scene at the Hangzhou Zoo in China has launched an internet rumor that spread like wildfire: that the bear was actually a human in disguise.

In response, the zoo issued a statement in the voice of the bear, which is named Angela.

“Some people think I look too human when I stand up,” read the statement, per the New York Times’ Alan Yuhas and Chang Che. “It seems you really don’t understand me. Previously, some visitors even thought I was too petite to be a bear! I want to emphasize again: I am a Malayan sun bear! Not a black bear! Not a dog! A Malayan sun bear!”

In the past, keepers at Chinese zoos have dressed in giant panda costumes while tending to those animals, a choice meant to calm the bears. In other cases, some zoos in China have faced criticism for dyeing dogs to look like wolves or replacing a lion with a Tibetan mastiff, per NBC News’ Larissa Gao.

But the bear in question is definitively not a human, experts say. A zoo employee told a Beijing TV station that “a human in a leather and fur suit would pass out in a few minutes” in the 104-degree-Fahrenheit summer heat of Hangzhou, per the Washington Post’s Lyric Li.

As for the skin folds on the bear’s behind, they protect the animal against predators—it could shield them from deep bites or help them escape from a fight more easily.

The whole viral controversy goes to show how little people actually know about these animals, wildlife biologist Wong Siew Te, founder of the Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Center in Malaysia, tells the Post.

“Not enough people know about sun bears—they are a very forgotten species,” Wong says to CNN’s Heather Chen, Wayne Chang and Mengchen Zhang.

Indeed, among all eight bear species on the planet, Malayan sun bears are the least studied. But they’re also highly threatened, put at risk by habitat destruction and illegal poaching.

With rumors and speculation circulating online, take a moment to check out these real facts about Malayan sun bears.

1. Malayan sun bears are the smallest bears in the world.

The four- to five-foot-long bears grow to weigh only 60 to 150 pounds. For comparison, black bears might weigh up to 550 pounds, grizzly bears could weigh more than 700 pounds and the largest polar bears clock in at a whopping 1,700 pounds.

Sun bears earned their name for the white or yellow patch of fur on their chests, which can be interpreted as a bib, a crescent or the rising sun. Among these bears, each individual’s marking is unique, according to the Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Center.

2. Their tongues are the longest of any bear.

At nearly ten inches, a Malayan sun bear’s tongue is “almost comically long,” writes National Geographic. This makes it the lengthiest tongue of any bear, and the species even holds the Guinness World Record for this feat.

The gangling appendage comes in handy for pulling honey out of bee hives. As a result of this skill, the species has been nicknamed the “honey bear,” or “beruang madu,” in Malaysia and Indonesia, per CNN.

Beyond honey, these omnivorous mammals nosh on fruits, such as figs and berries, as well as insects, including termites, beetles and ants.

3. Sun bears play a role in maintaining forest health.

As fruit-eaters, sun bears disperse seeds, helping plants to take root in new locations. And by gobbling up termites, they control the insects’ population—a benefit to trees.

They have claws that can exceed four inches in length, which they use to root through dirt in search of invertebrates, or to tear through trees in search of honey. Once a sun bear opens a hole in a tree, other animals might move in and make a nest, such as flying squirrels or hornbills.

4. Illegal trade and poachers have decimated sun bears’ numbers.

The Malayan sun bear is vulnerable to extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. Its numbers are decreasing, but the size of the wild adult population is unknown.

Though the bears still populate several countries in south and southeast Asia, their population has dropped dramatically: In the last 30 years, conservationists think the bears’ numbers have dropped by 30 percent, according to the World Wildlife Fund. They have gone locally extinct in Singapore, and their presence is not certain in China, per the IUCN.

Deforestation is a major threat to the bears, and poachers hunt them for their lucrative body parts. Sun bears’ gall bladders are used in some Chinese folk medicine, and their paws are a high-end delicacy. Another major threat to the bears is the bile trade in China and Vietnam, which extracts the digestive fluid from the live animals for use in lotions, eye drops or injected medicines. Sometimes, mother bears are killed and cubs are taken for the pet trade.

However, sun bears have some hope—conservationists work to raise awareness about the animals’ plight, as well as rescue and rehabilitate individual bears. The Bornean Sun Bear Conservation Center is currently caring for 43 of the bears, per CNN.

5. Sun bears do not hibernate. (Or go into torpor.)

Unlike the brown bears and black bears in North America, sun bears do not hibernate for the winter. (Or, since bears don’t technically hibernate—their body processes, such as their heart rate, do not decrease enough to qualify them as hibernators—it’s more correct to say that sun bears don’t go into torpor.)

This means the bears are active year-round and able to mate and reproduce at any time. When they do, the female bear makes a ground nest and raises one or two cubs. These small, blind babies weigh just 11 ounces at birth—that’s only a little less than a can of soup.

Sometimes, mother sun bears pick up their young with their front two “arms” and walk around on their two hind “legs.” It’s a move that looks shockingly human—maybe enough to make someone think the creature is a person in disguise.

“I guess that’s why people get mistaken,” Wong tells CNN.

[antonio-velardo]

Antonio Velardo shares: Remnants of Sprawling Ancient Cities Are Found in the Amazon by Alan Yuhas and Jesus Jiménez

By Alan Yuhas and Jesus Jiménez Archaeologists, relying on laser technology and decades of research, mapped a cluster of ancient cities in eastern Ecuador. Their findings add to evidence of dense settlements in Amazonia. Published: January 23, 2024 at 10:11AM from NYT Science https://ift.tt/BeDsFmc via IFTTT

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"On the Map, Nothing. On the Ground, a Hidden Maya City." by Alan Yuhas via NYT World https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/20/world/americas/maya-city-yucatan-archaeology-ocomtun.html?partner=IFTTT

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By BY MARIA CRAMER, JOHNNY DIAZ AND ALAN YUHAS from U.S. in the New York Times-https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/18/us/spelling-bee-memories.html?partner=IFTTT For at least a century, spelling bees have been arenas of childhood triumphs and tragedies. What do you remember? What Are Your Spelling Bee Memories? New York Times

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By BY ALAN YUHAS from Technology in the New York Times-https://ift.tt/38cG1IR Calling the problems in service an “incident,” the communication company Slack said it was investigating and trying to resolve the issue. Slack Disruption Affects Workers Returning After Holiday New York Times

[outsidetheknow]

Mother of ‘Success Kid’ Demands Steve King Stop Using His Meme She fears the copyrighted photo of her son, now 13, will become associated with the “bigotry” of Representative King, an Iowa Republican who used it in a campaign fund-raising ad.. via NYT U.S.

[rptv-tolkien]

Loss of Christopher Tolkien (son of J.R.R. Tolkien) earlier this year.

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Information taken from a New York Times article by Katharine Q. Seelye and Alan Yuhas, published January 16, 2020. Article has been edited for brevity.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/16/books/christopher-tolkien-dead.html

Christopher Tolkien, Keeper of His Father’s Legacy, Dies at 95

Christopher Tolkien at his home in the South of France one week before his 95th birthday last year. For nearly 50 years after his father died in 1973, he worked to keep alive the world he had created. [photo Credit: Josh Dolgin]

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Christopher Tolkien, the son of the writer J.R.R. Tolkien, who guarded his legacy and brought forth monumental posthumous works, like “The Silmarillion,” based on his father’s writings, died on Thursday in Provence, France. He was 95.

His death was confirmed by Daniel Klass, his brother-in-law.

For nearly 50 years after his father J.R.R. Tolkien died in 1973, Mr. Christopher Tolkien worked to keep alive the world his father had created in “The Hobbit” (1937) and “The Lord of the Rings” (1949).  He edited or oversaw the publication of two dozen editions of his father’s works, many of which became international best sellers.

Mr. Tolkien was his father’s literary executor but played a far more expansive role than that title implies. While his father was writing “The Lord of the Rings”, his father was also creating a vast world of legends and mythologies that he hoped would accompany the book.  However, being a perfectionist (and a procrastinator), his father was not able to complete the work before he died.

Mr. Tolkien spent four years organizing and compiling his father’s myths and legends, publishing them in 1977 as “The Silmarillion.”

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J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Silmarillion" was edited by his son, Christopher, and published posthumously in 1977.

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But Tolkien fans and scholars wondered how much of “The Silmarillion” was the work of the father and how much was the work of the son, said Mr. Olsen, the president of the American online university Signum, which specializes in Tolkien studies.

In response, Christopher produced the 12-volume “The History of Middle-earth” (1996), a compilation of drafts, fragments, rewrites, marginal notes and other writings culled from 70 boxes of unpublished material. It showed that virtually everything he had published had come from his father’s hand.

Christopher Tolkien is also credited with creating the widely acclaimed 1954 map of Middle-earth, the land in which the sprawling stories were set; a copy is now held by the British Library.

“Without Christopher,” Thomas Shippey, a British professor who has been writing and lecturing on Tolkien for 50 years, said in an interview, “we would have very little knowledge of how Tolkien created his mythology and his own legendarium.”

His brother-in-law, Mr. Klass, described Mr. Tolkien as extraordinarily disciplined. He said he would lock himself in his office early in the morning and not emerge until lunchtime.

While the elder Tolkien was a specialist in Chaucer and Anglo-Saxon sagas, the younger was an authority, above all, on the reams of writing that his father produced. “His life’s work was to convert this huge mass of material written on envelopes and napkins in his father’s unreadable handwriting,” Mr. Klass said.

Tolkien fans responded on social media to the news of Mr. Tolkien’s death with an outpouring of emotion. “Takes a humble man to dedicate his life to someone else’s work,” one person wrote on Twitter. “I think of all the books that might never have been published without Christopher’s input. Some of those books define how we now view the professor’s legacy.”

Christopher Tolkien was born in Leeds, England, on Nov. 21, 1924, the third and youngest son of J.R.R. and Edith Mary (Bratt) Tolkien.  Like his father, he was a sickly child, and often stayed home, giving him and his father a chance to develop a close working relationship.  Christopher Tolkien once said that he grew up in the world his father had created. “For me,” he said, “the cities of ‘The Silmarillion’ are more real than Babylon.”

Also like his father, he fought in one of the great wars.  During World War II, when Christopher was serving with the Royal Air Force in South Africa, his father mailed him parts of “The Lord of the Rings” for comment and editing.

Mr. Tolkien was also protective of his father’s legacy, suing Warner Brothers over the digital merchandising of characters from Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (accusing the company of “causing harm to the Tolkien legacy”).  The Tolkien estate also disavowed a film based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s life (saying the family did not approve, authorize, or participate in the project).

In his later years Mr. Tolkien became a French citizen and lived a private life with his second wife, Baillie Tolkien, in the foothills of the Alps in southeastern France.

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RPTV says: Thank you so much for all of your hard work, Mr. Christopher Tolkien. I had no idea how much of your time and energy you had put into organizing and compiling your father’s work, so I never appreciated it until now. Thank you for giving us Tolkien fans the greatest gift - more of your father’s stories, myths, and lore. Rest In Peace.

[nikmediaventures]

What is the Devin Nunes memo about and how does it affect Trump?

  This article titled “What is the Devin Nunes memo about and how does it affect Trump?” was written by Alan Yuhas, for theguardian.com on Sunday 4th February 2018 14.50 Asia/Kolkata

The memo was written by aides to Republican Devin Nunes, chairman of the House intelligence committee, a staunch defender of Donald Trump and a member of his transition team.

Related: Memo release is Trump’s…

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Antonio Velardo shares: Queen Margrethe II of Denmark to Step Down by Jasmina Nielsen and Alan Yuhas

By Jasmina Nielsen and Alan Yuhas Margrethe, the longest-serving monarch in Europe, announced during her New Year’s speech that she would abdicate her throne in January. Her eldest son, Crown Prince Frederik, will succeed her. Published: December 31, 2023 at 01:37PM from NYT World https://ift.tt/dA987bp via IFTTT

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"Heat Waves Grip 3 Continents as Climate Change Warms Earth" by Alan Yuhas via NYT World https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/18/world/extreme-heat-wave-us-europe-asia.html?partner=IFTTT

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What is the Devin Nunes memo about and how does it affect Trump?

  This article titled “What is the Devin Nunes memo about and how does it affect Trump?” was written by Alan Yuhas, for theguardian.com on Sunday 4th February 2018 14.50 Asia/Kolkata

The memo was written by aides to Republican Devin Nunes, chairman of the House intelligence committee, a staunch defender of Donald Trump and a member of his transition team.

Related: Memo release is Trump’s…

[wazafam]

By BY ALAN YUHAS from World in the New York Times-https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/22/world/australia/who-was-somerton-man.html?partner=IFTTT This week the police disinterred a body, found on a beach in 1948, that has puzzled investigators for decades. “There’s lots of twists and turns in this case, and every turn is pretty weird,” one said. Australia Exhumes the Somerton Man, and His 70-Year Mystery New York Times

[rajeshahuja]

What is the Devin Nunes memo about and how does it affect Trump?

  This article titled “What is the Devin Nunes memo about and how does it affect Trump?” was written by Alan Yuhas, for theguardian.com on Sunday 4th February 2018 14.50 Asia/Kolkata The memo was written by aides to Republican Devin Nunes, chairman of the House intelligence committee, a staunch defender of Donald Trump and a member of his transition team. Related: Memo release is Trump’s scramble…

[outsidetheknow]

Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, Sues Mail on Sunday Over Publication of Letter In a statement, the duchess’s husband, Prince Harry, said that the letter was published unlawfully and was part of a “ruthless campaign” by British tabloids.. via NYT World

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Names of Las Vegas victims emerge as police reveal gun stockpile – as it happened

Names of Las Vegas victims emerge as police reveal gun stockpile – as it happened

  This article titled “Names of Las Vegas victims emerge as police reveal gun stockpile – as it happened” was written by Matthew Weaver (now), Naaman Zhou, Sam Levin and Alan Yuhas (earlier), for theguardian.com on Tuesday 3rd October 2017 14.14 UTC

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