Primary school students write Chinese character “Ren”, meaning “human being”, during the First Writing Ceremony, a traditional education activity, on September 6, 2023 in Qingdao, Shandong Province of China. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)

Queen Elizabeth II (as Princess Elizabeth) writing at her desk in Windsor Castle, Berkshire. (Photo by Lisa Sheridan/Studio Lisa/Getty Images). 30th May 1944

A member of the United Arab Emirates armed forces gestures as the first batch of UAE military personnel returns from Yemen in Abu Dhabi, November 7, 2015. (Photo by Reuters/United Arab Emirates News Agency WAM)

Rougine, a 19-year-old female Arab fighter among the Syrian Democratic Forces, made up of US-backed Kurdish and Arab fighters, stands in fatigues embracing another colleague near the village of al-Torshan, 20 km on the outskirts of Raqa on February 6, 2017. (Photo by Delil Souleiman/AFP Photo)

These Arab recruits line up in a barracks square in the British Mandate of Palestine, on December 28, 1940, for their first drill under a British solider. Some 6,000 Palestinian Arabs signed up with the British Army during the course of World War II. (AP Photo)

Canoeists are framed by the tail of a breaching whale in Antarctica in April 2023. The photographer, from California, writes: “It was probably a once-in-a-lifetime moment”. (Photo by Jiahong Zeng/Solent News)

A Ukrainian soldier inspects a destroyed Russian APC after recent battle in Kharkiv, Ukraine, March 24, 2022. The writing made by Ukrainian soldiers reads: “Not to War”. (Photo by Efrem Lukatsky/AP Photo)

“Cassowaries are large, flightless birds related to emus and (more distantly) to ostriches, rheas, and kiwis”, writes Olivia Judson in the September issue of National Geographic magazine. How large? People-size: Adult males stand well over five foot five and top 110 pounds. Females are even taller, and can weigh more than 160 pounds. Dangerous when roused, they’re shy and peaceable when left alone. But even birds this big and tough are prey to habitat loss. The dense New Guinea and Australia rain forests where they live have dwindled. Today cassowaries might number 1,500 to 2,000. And because they help shape those same forests – by moving seeds from one place to another – “if they vanish”, Judson writes, “the structure of the forest would gradually change” too. (Photo by Christian Ziegler/National Geographic)