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From today's featured articleThe megabat family, Pteropodidae, includes the largest bat species, some weighing up to 1.45 kg (3.2 lb) with wingspans up to 1.7 m (5.6 ft), as well as smaller species, some less than 50 g (1.8 oz). They are found in tropical and subtropical areas of Eurasia, Africa, and Oceania. Unlike other bats, they have dog-like faces and clawed second digits. Well-adapted for flight, megabats have sustainable heart rates of more than 700 beats per minute and large lungs. Most of them are active at night. They roost in trees or caves, sometimes in colonies of up to a million individuals. Most are unable to echolocate, relying instead on their keen senses of sight and smell to navigate and locate food, usually fruits or nectar. A quarter of all megabat species are listed as threatened, due mainly to habitat destruction and overhunting. Even though they can transmit a variety of dangerous viruses, they are a popular food source for humans in some areas. (Full article...)
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John Sherman (May 10, 1823 – October 22, 1900) was an American congressman and senator from Ohio during the Civil War and into the late nineteenth century. He was the principal author of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which was signed into law by President Benjamin Harrison. His brothers included General William Tecumseh Sherman, Judge Charles Taylor Sherman and banker Hoyt Sherman. As a Republican senator, he worked on legislation to restore the nation's credit abroad and produce a stable, gold-backed currency at home. Serving as Secretary of the Treasury in the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes, Sherman helped to end wartime inflationary measures and to oversee the law allowing dollars to be redeemed for gold. He returned to the Senate after his term expired, continuing his work on financial legislation, as well as writing and debating laws on immigration, business competition law and interstate commerce. In 1897, he was appointed Secretary of State by President William McKinley, but, due to failing health, he retired in 1898, at the start of the Spanish–American War. This picture is a line engraving of Sherman, produced around 1902 by the Department of the Treasury's Bureau of Engraving and Printing (BEP), as part of a BEP presentation album of the first 42 secretaries of the treasury. Engraving credit: Bureau of Engraving and Printing; restored by Andrew Shiva
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