China’s new heavy-lift ship is one of the biggest ever built

By Dyllan Furness Published November 10, 2017

Even if you’ve been a commercial fishing rig or a giant cruise ship before, it’s still a bit difficult to grasp just how enormous Cosco Shipping Co. Ltd’s “Guang Hua Kou” is. Launched last month at Guangdong Shipyard International, the Guang Hua Kou falls into a class of vessels known as heavy lift semi-submersible ships and, at 98,000 tons, it’s one of the biggest in existence.

Heavy lift ships are designed to transport huge payloads — everything from other ships to oil drilling platforms and construction equipment– that are too big to carry on conventional shipping vessels. In order to load other ships, semi-submersible vessels like the Guang Hua Kou flood their ballast tanks to sink below the water’s surface and position their payload over the vessel’s submerged deck before pumping water out to lift the ship.

Recommended Videos

The Guang Hua Kou measures in at nearly 700 feet long and 225 feet wide, enabling it to carry even the largest offshore structures.

Dyllan Furness

Former Contributor

Dyllan Furness is a freelance writer from Florida. He covers strange science and emerging tech for Digital Trends, focusing…

Topics

Emerging Tech

Chinese startup claims its brain implant takes just 10 minutes to place, no skull surgery required

StairMed Technology's vein-based BCI could beat Neuralink's roughly two-hour surgery on speed, but the device still hasn't undergone human trials.

Brain implants, like the ones made by Elon Musk's Neuralink, typically involve open-skull surgery. But a Chinese startup says it can skip that step entirely, threading its device into the brain through a vein in a procedure that reportedly takes as little as ten minutes. According to the South China Morning Post, Shanghai-based StairMed Technology is one of several companies pursuing this approach, as the country pushes to expand its homegrown brain-computer interface (BCI) industry.

Faster than Neuralink, on paper

Emerging Tech

This bizarre email flaw is leaking corporate secrets to anyone who buys the right domain

Security researchers discovered companies are accidentally sending sensitive emails to domains that outsiders can register.

You don't always need to hack into a company's systems to get its secrets. Sometimes, the company will simply email them to you. A new report by WIRED's Matt Burgess has uncovered a bizarre email security problem in which companies are inadvertently sending sensitive information to domains that can be registered and controlled by outsiders. Security researchers Cory Solovevich and Mike Sheward discovered that seemingly harmless addresses such as noreply and deleteduser can become unexpected gateways to corporate information when the domains behind them aren't properly controlled.

The "hack" is buying the right domain

Emerging Tech

I found 3 ChatGPT features that turned out to be way more useful than I expected

I use ChatGPT pretty much every day, but somewhere along the way, I’ve also developed a habit of poking around and looking for features I haven’t tried yet. Some discoveries are genuinely useful, while others are the kind I’ll probably remember once every six months.

Every once in a while, though, I stumble across something that actually changes how I use ChatGPT. That happened recently with three features I’d somehow been overlooking. I’ve started using all three regularly now, and if you spend a lot of time in ChatGPT too, I think you’re missing out by not giving them a shot.