Sherchan, back in 2009 at the age of 77. Photo: Mogens Engelund

It’s been 60 years since Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary made history as the first people to summit Mount Everest, but, despite an increasing number of people crowding the mountain each May, climbers still managed to set world’s-first records this year. The first Saudi woman, the first Pakistani woman and the first female double amputee all summited the mountain. Today, an 80-year-old Japanese man, Yuichiro Miura, set a record for the oldest person to scale the world’s highest peak. But if his 81-year-old Nepalese rival has anything to say about it, Miura won’t hold that record for long.

The Guardian reports:

As the Japanese climber celebrated, 81-year-old Min Bahadur Sherchan, who set the previous record when he climbed Everest aged 76 in 2008, was at base camp preparing his own assault on the peak early next week.

Miura’s successful ascent has reignited a rivalry that has captivated the climbing world since the pair arrived on the summit within a day of each other in 2008.

The drama began when 76-year-old Sherchan beat 75-year-old Miura to the summit by a day back in 2008. Now, the game is on once again, though Miura puts on a dismissive front when it comes to record-setting. “The record is not so important to me,” he told the Guardian last month. “It is important to get to the top.”

Miura, who has undergone four rounds of heart surgery, summited along with his son at 9 a.m. Nepalese time this morning. He’ll be able to bask in record-holding glory for at least a week. Down at base camp, Sherchan is preparing for his own ascent later next week. “I am fine and in good health. I am ready to take up the challenge. Our plan is to reach the summit within one week,” he told the Guardian.

But the favorable weather that shined on Miura’s climb is expected to deteriorate by the end of this week. Still, if Sherchan fails to oust his rival a second time, there’s always next season, which would add another precious year to Sherchan’s record-holding dominance.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Conquering Everest 
Mount Everest Climbers’ Waste Could Power Local Villages 

Image: Kwong Yee Cheng

There’s the China Art Palace, the size of New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. Just down the river there’s the Power Station of Art that, according to NPR, resembles the Tate Modern. There’s the China Fire Museum, and the Shanghai Museum of Glass. Since 2008, the Chinese have allocated something like $800 million to building new museums, and for the past few years, the country has opened about 100 each year, NPR says. In 2011 alone, 400 were built. China now has over 3,000 museums.

But while China might be booming in museums, the museums are not necessarily booming in visitors. Over half of the museums in China are free to visit. The others are relatively inexpensive. But when a big Andy Warhol exhibit opened up at the Power Station of Art, just 6,000 people came. The city boasts 23 million residents.

NPR reports that this statistic has a few explanations. First, The Power Station isn’t in an obvious place, sitting in an abandoned part of the old Shanghai Expo. Second, most people in China don’t know who Andy Warhol is. “When it comes to contemporary art, [Li Xu, deputy director of planning at the museum] says, most Chinese don’t know where to begin because cultural education has lagged far behind China’s economic boom,” NPR writes. Xu says that “one-third to one-half of artworks are hard for average visitors to understand if they didn’t receive sufficient art education. Chinese graduate students’ understanding of art only reaches the level of middle school students in the U.S.”

While most museum-curious people in the United States might immediately recognize Andy Warhol or Van Gogh or Georgia O’Keeffe, the average Chinese has never heard of them. (And, let’s be fair, do names like Liu Ye, Zhang Xiaogang, Yu Youhan, and Mao Xuhui—all artists China Daily calls “celebrated figures”—mean much to American audiences?)

The other problem with these booming museums is that they might not be sustainable. Even now, after just opening, many of the museums aren’t open regularly. “They might have a grand opening or a press conference with great photographs and government officials,” Jeffrey Johnson, an architect who studies Chinese urbanization told NPR, “but if you return to this museum, which officially has been open for three months, it … might be closed and locked.”

According to the China News Service, the government is ready to commit money and resources to keep these museums going: “In the next ten years, the cultural industries are expected to see a golden period of development in China, and more residents can expect museums near their homes,” the service reports. Other groups in China are trying to educate their residents about art, so they can recognize and appreciate exhibits better. But it has become clear that if you build them, people won’t necessarily come.

More from Smithsonian.com:

China’s Artistic Diaspora
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The village of Gorak Shep. Photo: Frank Kehren

There is no plumbing on Mount Everest. When nature calls, climbers must use makeshift holes dug by sherpas, or use buckets as substitute toilets. With the ever-increasing number of climbers attempting to scale the mountain, containing all of that human waste is no small problem.

Currently, National Geographic reports, much of the excrement is carried in sealed containers on the backs of porters to the nearby village of Gorak Shep (which also lacks plumbing or sanitation facilities), where it is emptied into open pits. Up to 12 metric tons of the stuff can be hauled to Gorak Shep in a single year. But the village is running out of space for containing the mess, and last year researchers discovered that the refuse had contaminated one of the village’s two major water sources.  

Seattle climber and engineer Garry Porter witnessed the problem first hand when he attempted to scale Everest ten years ago. Since then, the image of all of that waste has stuck with him. ”I couldn’t shake the feeling that my final tribute to Nepal and the people of Everest was having my waste dumped in these open pits. It just didn’t seem right,” he told National Geographic.

Porter decided to found the Mount Everest Biogas Project as a potential fix, along with Everest guide Dan Mazur.

In biogas production, bacteria feed on organic waste (like feces) and produce several gases as a byproduct. One of these is methane, which is the primary component of natural gas and can be burned for heat and light, or converted to electricity. One cubic meter of biogas provides about two kilowatt-hours of useable energy. This is enough to power a 60-watt light bulb for more than a day, or an efficient 15-watt CFL bulb for nearly six days. A biogas reactor at Gorak Shep could address the fecal contamination problem while providing the perennially low-income community with a sustainable source of methane gas for energy, especially for cooking, Porter says.

The team plans to keep the biogas digester tanks warm (they stop working if temperatures drop below freezing) with solar panels.

In addition to getting rid of all the feces, the team hopes that the biogas project will relieve some of the pressure on Everest’s natural resources. All of those poop-producing climbers also need to eat, and cooking fuel often takes the form of native plants harvested around Everest, including an endangered species, the alpine juniper. If successful, the project will be the world’s highest elevation biogas reactor and could be introduced to other high altitude areas around the world.  

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Conquering Everest 

Photo: erictomer

Even the roof of the world is not immune to climate change. New research indicates that Mount Everest and its surrounding peaks are losing their ice cover, and that snowfall in the region has been declining since the 1990s amidst warming temperatures.

Over the past 50 years, the snow line has receded nearly 600 feet up the mountain and glaciers in the region have shrunk by 13 percent, the researchers report. Smaller glaciers, less than half a square mile, are melting the quickest and have shrunk by about 43 percent since the 1960s. Most glaciers in the national park, they found, are shrinking at an increasing rate.

The team arrived at these findings by surveying around 700 square miles surrounding Mount Everest and comparing the current conditions to past images reconstructed from satellite imagery and maps. They relied upon data collected by observatory stations and Nepal’s Department of Hydrology and Meteorology for calculating temperature fluctuations throughout the years. Since 1992, they found, the Everest region has increased in temperature by nearly two degrees Fahrenheit while snowfall decreased by almost four inches during that same period.

While the researchers cannot definitively link the changes seen on Mount Everest and its surroundings to increases in human-generated greenhouse gases, they strongly suspect climate change is the culprit behind their observations.

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Photo: Immigration and Customs Enforcement

The U.S. government has decided to return looted national treasures to their respective countries. Mongolia will get a 70-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus bataar (a slightly smaller cousin to T. rex) skeleton back, and Cambodia will receive two life-sized 10th century Khmer statues called the Kneeling Attendants.

The reconstructed skeleton, which is 8 feet tall and 24 feet long, was unearthed in the Gobi desert in 1946 by a Soviet and Mongolian team, Reuters reports. In 2010, the skeleton arrived in the U.S. from the U.K. along with a customs document that falsely stated that the fossils originated in Britain and that they were only worth $15,000. 

Mongolia demanded that the U.S. return the T. bataar skeleton after it was auctioned for $1.05 million last spring by Floridian Eric Prokopi. Here’s how the auction house described the item:

This is an incredible, complete skeleton, painstakingly excavated and prepared, and mounted in a dramatic, forward-leaning running pose. The quality of preservation is superb, with wonderful bone texture and delightfully mottled grayish bone color. In striking contrast are those deadly teeth, long and frightfully robust, in a warm woody brown color, the fearsome, bristling mouth and monstrous jaws leaving one in no doubt as to how the creature came to rule its food chain. Equally deadly and impressive are the large curving claws, with pronounced blood grooves. The body is 75% complete and the skull 80%…

Because of the kerfuffle, the sale was eventually canceled. Charges have since been filed against Prokopi, and the skeleton was returned to Mongolia on Monday. An official from the U.S. Immigration and Customers Enforcement told Reuters that this “is one of the most important repatriations of fossils in recent years.”

Cambodia, likewise, will soon be reunited with its missing relics. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City received the two sandstone statues, which came as separate broken heads and torsos, as gifts in 1987 and 1992, Archaeology reports. But over the years, evidence mounted that the statues had been looted from Cambodia’s Koh Ker temple during the tumultuous Cambodian Civil War in the 1970s. Witnesses, Archeology writes, can remember seeing the statues in the temple up until 1970 but that they were gone by 1975.

According to the New York Times, the museum assured Cambodia in a letter last month that the statues will be returned as soon as appropriate transit arrangements can be sorted out, though no timeline has been set.

The Met’s decision reflects the growing sensitivity by American museums to claims by foreign countries for the return of their cultural artifacts. Many items that have long been displayed in museums do not have precise paperwork showing how the pieces left their countries of origin. In recent years, at the urging of the Association of Art Museum Directors and scholars, many museums have applied more rigorous standards to their acquisitions.

Cambodian officials have asked the Met to examine another two dozen artifacts that may have been looted, and, according to Reuters, the U.S. is also helping to return additional fossils to Mongolia.

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Photo: jnissa

In Mozambique, it seems to be game over for rhinos. A wildlife warden in the Great Limpopo Transfrontier park—the only place where rhinos were still surviving in the southern African country—told AP that the last of the animals have been killed by poachers.

Elephants also could become extinct in Mozambique soon, the warden, Antonio Abacar, warns. He says game rangers have been aiding poachers, and 30 of the park’s 100 rangers will appear in court soon. “We caught some of them red-handed while directing poachers to a rhino area,” Abacar says.

In Asia, the hacked-off horns can fetch a price equivalent to more than their weight in gold. Traditional Chinese medicine holds that the ground horns have curative properties. (Science holds that they do not.) In China and Vietnam, the horns are also used as decorations or as aphrodisiacs.

Mozambique’s rhinos have been living on the edge of extinction for more than a century, when big game hunters first arrived and decimated populations. Conservationists there have painstakingly built the population up over the last few years, but poachers—who often have significantly more funding, manpower and resources than wildlife wardens—seem to have finally stamped out the country’s rhinos for good. Mozambique’s conservation director remains hopeful that a few stray rhinos may still exist, however.

For many wildlife wardens, the lure of money and the lack of legal deterrents, often proves too much to resist. AP describes the typical case:

A game ranger arrested for helping poachers in Mozambique’s northern Niassa Game Reserve said on Mozambican Television TVM last week that he was paid about $80 to direct poachers to areas with elephants and rhinos. Game rangers are paid between $64 and $96 a month, and though the guilty ones will lose their jobs, the courts serve as little deterrent to the poachers: Killing wildlife and trading in illegal rhino horn and elephant tusks are only misdemeanors in Mozambique.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Mozambique’s government is still working on legislation first drafted in 2009  which would impose mandatory prison sentences for people caught shooting wildlife.

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Wildlife Managers Are Poisoning Rhino Horns to Stop People From Eating Them 
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A species of still-surviving clouded leopard closely related to the now-extinct Formosan clouded leopard. Photo: Tambako the Jaguar

Scientists in Taiwan threw in the towel this week on the Formosan clouded leopard (Neofelis nebulosa brachyura), a subspecies of big cat native to the island. For more than a decade, zoologists from Taiwan and the U.S. have been trying in vain to locate any evidence of the leopard’s presence in Taiwan, and they say there is little chance that Formosan clouded leopards still survive there. Focus Taiwan reports: 

In the search for the leopard that typically weighs 10-20 kilograms, the researchers set up some 1,500 infrared cameras and scent traps in the mountains but no evidence was found to suggest that the endemic clouded leopard still exists, according to Chiang.

English naturalist Robert Swinhoe first described the Formosan clouded leopard in 1862. In just over one hundred years, however, the species had all but disappeared. Hunters reported the last confirmed sighting of the animal in the Taiwan’s mountainous region in 1983. In the 1990s, researchers got their hopes up when they saw territorial markings near a national park that could have been made by a clouded leopard, but the animal itself remained elusive. Illegal hunting and development on the island most likely led to the big cat’s demise, they concluded.

Today, two clouded leopards do live in the Taipei zoo, but they are both straight-up Neofelis nebulosa, a species that hails from the Himalayas. The only know specimen of Formosan clouded leopard, which has a tail about half the length of its mainland relatives, sits on a shelf at the National Taiwan Museum.

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Three Decades After Last Sighting, Japanese River Otter Declared Extinct 
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In places where malaria thrives, mosquito nets are used to keep the bugs away from people as they sleep. Photo: Matt Handy

In 2010 alone, malaria infected 219 million people, largely in tropical regions in Africa, South and Central America, Asia and the Philippines. That year, the disease, caused by a parasite carried by mosquitos, killed 660,000 people. Objectively, that’s a high number of deaths, but compared to the number of infections, it’s relatively low. Right now, powerful anti-malarial medication protects those millions of infected people. But, says the BBC, a new strain of the parasite has been found in Cambodia that resists the leading class of anti-malarial drugs.

The new strain, first identified in 2008, is resistant to artemisinin, a “frontline drug in the fight against malaria,” the BBC writes. Since it was first discovered, the resistant version of malaria has spread around Southeast Asia. Health organizations are working hard to contain the spread of the drug-resistant variety: if the drugs are rendered ineffective, the consequences could be dire for millions of people.

This isn’t the first anti-malarial to be rendered useless, either. “The history of antimalarial medicine,” says the Mayo Clinic, “has been marked by a constant struggle between evolving drug-resistant parasites and the search for new drug formulations.”

Modern political history is already intertwined with the history of anti-malarial medications, and if drug-resistant strains of malaria continue to spread, they could prompt far-reaching changes. The advent of the first anti-malarial, says Glencoe World History, enabled European imperialism into tropical regions worldwide.

“Before 1850, the fear of disease was a major factor in keeping Europeans from moving into Africa. Especially frightening was malaria, an often fatal disease spread by parasites. …By 1850, European doctors had learned how to treat malaria with quinine, a drug that greatly reduced the death rate from the disease. Quinine is a bitter drug obtained from the bark of the cinchona tree, which is native to the slopes of the Andes in South America.”

Malaria is most common in tropical and sub-tropical regions where the mosquitos that carry the parasite live. Photo: CDC

Cinchona trees were transplanted from South America to India, and a steady supply of the drug enabled Europeans to move across Africa.

“By the beginning of the twentieth century, more than 90 percent of African lands were under the control of the European powers. A drug found in the bark of Latin American trees, which were then grown in Asia, had been used by Europeans to make possible their conquest of Africa.”

Since then, multiple generations of anti-malarial medication have come and gone (and researchers are still announcing promising new leads). But any time a drug-resistant strain like the one in Cambodia develops, it’s worth keeping an eye on.

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Image: Richard Herrmann

California authorities are trying to crack down on smugglers shipping fish bladders across the border. That’s right, fish bladders are a thing that people smuggle.

In fact, they’re worth a ton of money. One bladder from the Totoaba macdonaldi fish can garner $5,000 in the United States and over $10,000 in Asia. The bladders are mainly used in Chinese food, like soups. Often the fish are simply stripped of their bladders and left on the beach, meat and all, since the traders don’t care about the meat, and being caught with it would be a liability.

Now, we’re not talking about the same kind of bladder that a human has. The prized organ on the totoaba isn’t full of urine. It’s the fish’s swim bladder, an organ that fills with gas to change the buoyancy of the fish, allowing it to ascend and descend in the water.

From the outside, the Totoaba macdonaldi isn’t a particularly striking fish. They’re big, weighing up to 220 pounds and getting up to 6.5 feet long. The species is endangered throughout its range, which spans the California coast, says NOAA, mostly because of fishing for this prized bladder. And the Chinese species of the same fish was eaten to extinction, which is why suppliers are turning to the U.S. population.

Scientific American reports that trade in U.S. totoaba bladders is heating up:

In the latest case that led to criminal charges, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer inspecting a car at the Calexico-Mexicali port of entry, about 130 miles east of San Diego, found 27 totoaba bladders hidden under floor mats in the back seat of a car, U.S. prosecutors said in a statement.

The Washington Post chronicles several other cases:

Jason Xie, 49, of Sacramento was accused of taking delivery of 169 bladders on March 30 in a hotel parking lot in Calexico, about 120 miles east of San Diego. Xie told investigators he was paid $1,500 to $1,800 for each of 100 bladders in February.

Anthony Sanchez Bueno, 34, of Imperial was charged with the same crime after authorities said he drove the 169 bladders across the downtown Calexico border crossing in three coolers. He told investigators he was to be paid $700.

Song Zhen, 73, was accused of storing 214 dried totoaba bladders in his Calexico home.

“These were rooms that didn’t have furnishings,” U.S. Attorney Laura Duffy said. “In every room, fish bladders were dried out over cardboard and papers.”

The bladders found in Zhen’s house could be worth over $3.6 million on the black market.

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Native Australians, 1939. Photo: National Archives of Australia

When Dutch explorers first arrived in Australia in 1606, they found they’d been beaten to it. But where did these indigenous Australians come from themselves? LiveScience:

Even the indigenous, or aboriginal, population in 1788 is a bit of a mystery, with estimates of the population ranging from 250,000 to 1.2 million. Further back, the story of Australia’s human population is shrouded, though gene studies suggest a relatively large founder population would have been necessary to result in the genetic diversity seen today.

Now, new research indicates that between 1,000 to 3,000 people originally made the trek some 50,000 years ago. And rather some chance encounter with the continent down under, researchers think that the original migrants set out to deliberately colonize Australia.

To arrive at the new discovery, researchers used nearly 5,000 radiocarbon isotopes from 1,750 ancient cooking, burial and settlement sites around the contient to reconstruct the past migration events. ScienceNOW explains what they found:

Relying on the radiocarbon-date database, Williams worked out the rates at which the population changed over time. Then he back-calculated from the aboriginal population at the time of the first European settlement in 1788. He found that for the aboriginal population to reach the estimated 770,000 to 1.2 million at the time of settlement (it’s roughly 460,000 today), the founding population that arrived in Australia roughly 45,000 years ago must have been between 1000 and 3000 people.

In other words, the researcher told ScienceNOW, Australia’s original migrants weren’t just a family or two who got shipwrecked on the continent.

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Indians Made it to Australia More than 4,000 Years Before the British 
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Photo: Kevin H.

In South Africa, lion bones are selling for around $165 per kilo (2.2 pounds). That’s about $5,000 for a full skeleton. The skull is worth another $1,100, according to the Guardian.

Over the past several months, officials in South Africa have noticed a steady increase in the number of permits they’re issuing for export of lion bones from certified trophy dealers. Such establishments breed lions for the express purpose of allowing wealthy tourists to engage in a controlled lion hunt. After killing the animal, if the patron does not want its body or bones, the breeders can then turn a large profit by stripping the lion down and selling its parts to Chinese and Southeast Asian dealers. The Guardian explains:

In 2012 more than 600 lions were killed by trophy hunters. The most recent official figures date from 2009, certifying export of 92 carcasses to Laos and Vietnam. At about that time breeders started digging up the lion bones they had buried here and there, for lack of an outlet.

In China, Vietnam and some other Southeast Asian nations, lion bones serve as a stand-in for tiger bones. Practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine believe the bones help with allergies, cramps, ulcers, stomach aches, malaria and a host of other ailments. As with many other purported traditional Chinese medicine “cures,” tiger bones ground into a powder and mixed with wind is also said to boost a man’s sexual prowess.

Despite the lack of scientific proof this potion is very popular, so with tiger bones increasingly scarce, vendors are replacing them with the remains of lions. Traders soon realised that South Africa could be a promising source. It is home to 4,000 to 5,000 captive lions, with a further 2,000 roaming freely in protected reserves such as the Kruger national park. Furthermore such trade is perfectly legal.

But just because trade in legally-sourced lion bones is given the green light from the South African government does not mean illicit activities are not underway. One investigator told the Guardian that he estimates that the legal market only contributes half of the lion bones currently leaving the country. That means poaching is responsible for the rest.

More from Smithsonian.com:

State Department Takes on Illegal Wildlife Trade 
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Image: Wikimedia

When she was three, Shakuntala Devi’s father noticed that she could memorize the numbers on cards and figure out card tricks. A trapeze artist, Devi’s father brought his daughter to the crowds to wow them with her amazing brain. By age six, Devi was calculating huge numbers in her head to impress visitors. But by the time she reached adulthood, Devi’s mental math would wow not just circus-goers, but computers and mathematicians all over the world.

In 1977, Devi faced off against a computer in a speed calculation race. She won twice. First, by calculating the cube root of 188,132,517. (It’s 573.) The second time, she beat the computer even more impressively. It took Devi 50 seconds to think of the 23rd root of a 201 digit number (91674867692003915809866092758538016248310668014430862240712651642793465704086709659 3279205767480806790022783016354924852380335745316935111903596577547340075681688305 620821016129132845564805780158806771, if you want to work it out for yourself in your head). The computer—a UNIVAC 1108—took a full thirty seconds longer. In 1980, she multiplied 7,686,369,774,870 by 2,465,099,745,779 in 28 seconds.

All this complex math earned Devi the nickname “human computer.” She left behind several books, including Figuring the Joy of Numbers, that teach her methods, but her techniques for simplifying math were never really picked up by mainstream schools.  Her phenomenal calculation skills could also help her tell the day for any date in the last century, and Devi was, in her personal life, quite interested in dates. She doled out astrology predictions and wrote a book called Astrology for You. When asked where she got her human computer-like gifts, Devi answered “God’s gift. A divine quality.”

Devi passed away from respiratory problems at a hospital in Bangalore. She was 83.

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Photo: ChrisM70

You might be surprised at the number of people willing to pay a large sum of cash to drink elephant poop. Well, not poop, exactly, but coffee beans that have passed through an elephant’s digestive tract and have been expelled from the other end. USA Today explains the peculiar situation:

In the lush hills of northern Thailand, a herd of 20 elephants is excreting some of the world’s most expensive coffee.

Trumpeted as earthy in flavor and smooth on the palate, the exotic new brew is made from beans eaten by Thai elephants and plucked a day later from their dung. A gut reaction inside the elephant creates what its founder calls the coffee’s unique taste.

Stomach turning or oddly alluring, this is not just one of the world’s most unusual specialty coffees. At $500 per pound, it’s also among the world’s priciest.

So, how is it? ”Very interesting,” tells one brave taste-tester to USA Today. “Very novel.”

Elephants are not the only animals whose excrement people can pay to have the privilege to sip on. Civets – a type of nocturnal small carnivore – are also used to such purposes in Southeast Asia, especially in Vietnam. The Economist describes:

Three years ago Mr Hung and three partners started Legend Revived, a high-end brand in Ho Chi Minh City that sells chon beans in Vietnam, Britain and Norway at $500 per kilogram (“The finest gift from Vietnam”).

Today most chon merchants don’t look in the wild for manure, but rent out farms for their cats to roam, chew (often less than a fifth of the ripest beans) and then let nature take its course. After farmers collect and wash the droppings, they dry them in the sun for weeks until the outer skin falls off. Brewers then use one of several methods for roasting the beans. One popular approach involves dashing the beans with sugar, salt and butter, and then giving them a medium or light roast over some coffee-tree wood (a heavy roast would cause the sugary beans to lose their natural taste).

But the story doesn’t end with elephants and civets helping coffee connoisseurs get their caffeine fix. From elephant poo coffee now comes elephant poo beer. The beer is made from those same coffee beans, which have been fermented into the alcohol. In Japan, apparently, the elephant poo brew is becoming a big thing, where it goes by the name ‘Un, Kono Kuro.’ The Drinks Business reports: 

The Sankt Gallen brewery called the beer a “chocolate stout”, despite it not containing any chocolate.

Mr Sato, from Japanese website RocketNews24.com, tasted the beer and said: “After taking my first sip there was an initial bitterness that got washed over by a wave of sweetness. Following that, a mellow body rolled in and spread out through my mouth.

“Usually people talk about aftertaste when drinking beer but with Un, Kono Kuro the word afterglow is much more appropriate.

“After downing the last drop, slowly rising from my throat and mouth was that afterglow. The combination of bitter and sweet stayed fresh and lingered in my head. It was a familiar aroma that accompanied me through the entire beer.”

The bottles quickly sold out on the brewery’s website, but the company promises that the elephant beer will soon be served on tap at their Tokyo location.

And not to be outdone, the civets also offer their own version of digested coffee bean beer. From Eating Goodly:

Last week, my friend, Charles, gave me a really cool Danish beer for my birthday: Mikkeller’s Beer Geek Brunch (Weasel).  It’s an Imperial Oatmeal Stout “brewed with one of the world’s most expensive coffees, made from droppings of weasel-like civet cats.”

It was without a doubt one of the wildest beer’s I’ve ever had.  It poured like liquid lead, eliciting an “Oh my god.” from my roommate.  The mouthfeel matched the appearance – thick, thick, thick.  It felt like cool mocha syrup.  Flavors were just as dense – mostly rich coffee with dark chocolate, butterscotch, and a good amount of clean (and much needed) bitter acidity on the back and sides of the tongue.   This beer was huge in body, flavor, and concept.  I’m not sure if I’ll ever crave a beer like this, but going along for the ride was awesome.

More from Smithsonian.com:

The Most Exclusive Coffee in the World Is Harvested from Elephant Poo 
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Photo: reed_sandridge

If you’ve enjoyed a bowl of pho or a banh mi sandwich lately, or just wanted to kick up your taco, pizza or fries a notch, you’ve likely reached for the fiery red bottle with the rooster on it. Sriracha hot sauce, an ubiquitous staple of Vietnamese joints across the States, did not in fact originate in Vietnam. Rather, it is the delicious vision of a southern Vietnamese refugee named David Tran who introduced his culinary baby in the 1980s. The Los Angeles Times tells Tran’s story.

When North Vietnam’s communists took power in South Vietnam, Tran, a major in the South Vietnamese army, fled with his family to the U.S. After settling in Los Angeles, Tran couldn’t find a job — or a hot sauce to his liking.

So he made his own by hand in a bucket, bottled it and drove it to customers in a van. He named his company Huy Fong Foods after the Taiwanese freighter that carried him out of Vietnam.

After founding the company in LA’s Chinatown, he introduced his now famous creation soon after.

His Sriracha, a version of a hot sauce originating in Si Racha, Thailand, quickly spread through the San Gabriel Valley and eventually the nation.

Last year alone, Huy Fong Foods sold $60 million of the stuff. Revenue has been steadily growing at a rate of about 20 percent per year, and in June the company is moving out of its original location and to a new $40 million space. Tran told the LA Times that his American dream was never to become a billionaire; he just liked spicy, fresh chili sauce.

He’s turned down multiple lucrative offers to sell his company, fearing his vision would be compromised.

He intends to keep it a family business: His son is the president, and his daughter is vice president.

He has repeatedly rejected pleas to sell stock in the company and turned down financiers who offer him money to increase production significantly.

“If our product is still welcomed by the customer, then we will keep growing,” Tran said.

Rooster sauce seems welcome indeed. The Sriracha Rooster Sauce Facebook page has 285,000 likes, and fans gather there to share their favorite spicy creations and additions, leaving messages like:

My 10 year old takes this in his lunchbox everyday and puts it on ….. Everything!

Put this on egg noodles & chicken tonight and it was awesome!

I pratically drink this.. Lol

♥ ur my 1 and only spicy sauce

Photo: SCA Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget

Over the past two weeks a new type of bird flu, dubbed H7N9, emerged in China and began to spread. On March 31, authorities reported that two men, an 87- and a 27-year-old, died in Shanghai and that a third in a nearby town was seriously ill. On April 2, the total number of cases grew to seven. On April 7, the World Health Organization recorded 21 cases with six deaths. Now, says Bloomberg, the total number of confirmed cases has grown to sixty, with 13 deaths. Originally centralized in and around Shanghai, the BBC reports that the novel influenza strain has spread to Beijing, some 775 miles to the northwest.

Antiviral medication delivered early can help temper the damage, but “almost all of the 64 people diagnosed with the virus so far have been extremely unwell, with complications extending to brain damage, multi-organ failure and muscle breakdown,” says Bloomberg.

That’s still a relatively low number of cases, within a generally confined geographic spread. But there are a few key factors to H7N9 that make it worth paying attention to as a potentially very dangerous new strain of flu.

First, according to the Associated Press, though the influenza started in and is carried by birds, such as chickens and ducks, it doesn’t seem to actually make the birds very sick.

The scientists said that based on information from the genetic data and Chinese lab testing, the H7N9 virus appears to infect some birds without causing any noticeable symptoms. Without obvious outbreaks of dying chickens or birds to focus efforts on, authorities could face a challenge in trying to trace the source of the infection and stop the spread.

According to Helen Branswell for the Canadian Press, the bird flu is showing signs that it has adapted to better live in mammals. That being said, “health officials believe people are contracting the H7N9 virus through direct contact with infected fowl and say there is no evidence the virus is spreading easily among people,” says the AP.

Then, says Reuters, scientists think that H7N9, which only recently adapted to be able to infect humans, is still changing, “swapping genes with other strains, seeking to select ones that might make it fitter.”

“If it succeeds, the world could be facing the threat of a deadly flu pandemic. But it may also fail and just fizzle out.”

A more wide-ranging investigation, where health workers checked the neighbors and close contacts of those who showed up in the hospital with symptoms, found that some people are carrying the virus but aren’t—or aren’t yet—showing symptoms, says Bloomberg. Such “asymptomatic” cases mean that more people may have the disease than have been reported, increasing the potential for H7N9 to turn into a much bigger problem.

There is no guarantee that H7N9 will take off and become a wide-spread pandemic, but health authorities, including the U.S. and Chinese Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization, are watching very carefully. Health reporter Maryn McKenna has a number of tips on how to read the news and who to look to for the latest information.

More from Smithsonian.com:

How Weather Models and Google Could Help Forecast Flu Season
How to Give a Ferret a Deadly Flu
Why Is Flu Season in Winter?