Hawaiī

As It Happens6:291st images humpback whale sex is between 2 malesWhen biologist Stephanie Stack first saw the photographs of two humpback whales mating in the warm waters of Hawaii, she says her mind was "completely blown.""When I realized that it was two males, it was not what I was expecting," she told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. "I thought, oh my gosh, this is incredible."Stack, chief biologist at the Pacific Whale Foundation in Maui, says this is the first time humpback whale sex has been documented. She…

Photo: Stefan Wermuth/Bloomberg (Getty Images)Last week, it was revealed that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff had been buying up lots of land in Hawaii at an accelerating clip. Benioff, who is worth billions and billions of dollars, has procured approximately $100 million in land parcels throughout the Big Island via a series of nondescript LLCs. He’s been quite cagey about what most of this land is for and was more than a little bit hostile with the NPR journalist who broke the story about it. Now, in what really seems like…

As It Happens6:13More than 100 possible new marine species discovered in a single deepsea expeditionDuring a research expedition off the coast of Chile, Erin Easton says her colleagues were constantly showing her some amazing new sea creature they'd just discovered."It would just be, like, 'Erin, Erin, Erin, look!'" Easton, a marine scientist at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal."It is beyond my wildest dreams of what we could have expected. It felt like every time we went…

Photo: Hawaii Department of Transportation Hawaii’s first National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program EV charging station just came online on Maui. The Aloha State follows Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania in opening its NEVI-funded DC fast charging station to the public. It’s at the Kahuui Park & Ride lot near Kuihelani’s intersection with Puunene Avenue. It features four EV Connect 150 kW DC fast chargers with CCS and CHAdeMO ports. (Teslas can also charge here…

While normal, middle-class Americans struggle to buy starter homes or even just afford rent, American billionaires are busy buying up huge tracts of land all over the world for nebulous reasons. Case in point: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who is estimated to be worth over $10 billion, is said to be buying up huge chunks of land in Hawaii. Why? Nobody knows and Benioff won’t say why.Prepping the Sandworm Scenes in Dune: Part TwoNPR was the first to report that the billionaire had recently bought “at least 38 parcels of…

The first private spacecraft to softly land on the moon carries a Canadian instrument that will test the possibility of building an observatory at the Lunar south pole.The phone booth-sized lander by Intuitive Machines, named Odysseus, launched on Feb. 15 and touched down on Thursday near a small impact crater about 300 kilometers from the moon's south pole.It was a stressful event with navigation and communication issues, but 15 nail-biting minutes after it landed, mission control confirmed that they were receiving a…

A magnitude 5.7 earthquake shook a remote part of Hawaii’s Big Island on Friday. No tsunami is expected, the National Weather Service’s Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said. An earlier estimate calculated the earthquake as magnitude 6.3. It was felt as far away as Honolulu, more than 200 miles away, reports said.At least 10 aftershocks of magnitude 2.5 and higher had been recorded within an hour and a half of the initial temblor, about one every 10 minutes.The earthquake, which occurred on the southeastern flank of Mauna…

Five years and 2,500 miles apart, fires devastated thriving communities — and major U.S. utility companies stood at the center of the infernos.It's a story increasingly familiar in the energy industry: Some utility companies don't properly assess the risks wildfires pose to their operations. A failure to mitigate these risks can have disastrous consequences for both fire victims and utility investors.Through interviews with experts and a review of public records, CNBC found evidence of safety shortcomings in the utility…

The remarkable Seaglider promises a clean revolution in coastal transport; the convenience of an electric boat meets the speed and comfort of an aircraft, at unparalleled efficiency and range thanks to hydrofoils and the wing-in-ground effect. It's a modern-day, high-tech repackaging of the old Soviet Ekranoplan idea – when an aircraft flies extremely low, within its own wingspan of the surface below, the ground effect provides a kind of cushion of air for it to ride on, giving it additional lift and squeezing extra miles…

Tragedy hit over Christmas weekend as a Hawaiian influencer was killed by her alienated husband in front of her eight-year-old daughter.Theresa Cachuela, a 33-year-old mother-of-three, was fatally shot in the head and killed Friday morning (December 22) in the parking lot of the Pearlridge Center in Waimalu, Hawaii, during the Christmas shopping rush. Theresa’s youngest daughter witnessed the entire crime and confessed to the police that her father, 44-year-old Jason Cachuela, held the gun and pulled the trigger.Theresa…