The world’s longest suspension bridge stretches two continents and takes a matter of minutes to cross.

The soul-crushing daily commute is a factor of life many of us are all-too-familiar with, and according to INRIX, the average US driver spends 51 hours stuck behind the wheel every year, losing two days and wasting an eye-watering sum in fuel.

It’s no wonder many of us look to escape the rat race with a vacation or two, though a road trip while on holiday could be a little off putting if you feel like you waste too much of your life sat on the highway in your car.

But what if I told you there’s an incredible bridge that connects Europe with Asia and cuts journey times by a whopping 93 percent?

The 1915 Çanakkale Bridge in Turkey (Burak Akay/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

That’s what Turkish officials had in mind when they decided to construct the world’s longest suspension bridge, the 1915 Çanakkale Bridge, which stretches from northwestern Turkey across the Dardanelles Strait, a passage of water connecting the Aegean Sea and the Sea or Marmara.

The bridge connects Gelibolu, in the European side of Turkey, with the town of Lapseki found in the Asian region in the country.

This means it connects two continents with tarmac and abandons the need for the 90-minute ferry to get to the other side.

Now, backpackers, travellers and commuters can reach the other side in just six minutes.

Despite its ‘1915’ reference, construction on the bridge started in Mach 2017 and was open to the public on March 2022.

Not a sight you want to see (Getty stock Images)

Turkish officials used the historically significant date in the name of the bridge to honor an important Ottoman victory in the first world war which sparked a chain of events that ultimately led to the declaration of the Republic of Turkey in 1923.

And that’s not the only nod to Turkey’s history in the bridge as its 2,023 meter stretch pays homage to the year 2023, the year the country celebrated the centenary of the founding of the Turkish Republic.

Even the height of the bridge has some meaning behind it, with 318 meters symbolizing the date of March 18 when Turkey commemorates the soldiers killed during Gallipoli.

Anyway, as mentioned already, the suspension bridge spans 2,023 meters which means it surpasses Japan’s famous Akashi Kaikyo Bridge built in 1998 by 32 meters.

The Turkish bridge wasn’t exactly cheap to build either, with an eye-watering price of $2.7 billion.

Japan’s Akashi Kaikyo Bridge has been dropped down to the second largest suspension bridge in the world (Getty Images)

“Turkey has overtaken Japan, which has the longest bridge in the world in terms of the midspan, and has taken the first place,” said President Erdogan during the inauguration ceremony.

South Korean Prime Minister Kim Boo-kyum added: “The 1915 Canakkale Bridge will leave this history of collision and conflict behind and will be a bridge between East and West, starting a new era of peace and prosperity.”

If you’ve ever wondered why there are no bridges in other key points on Earth, experts have been weighing in.

For example, why don’t we have a bridge over the 4,000-mile long Amazon river?

Well, that’s not really a possibility, even though it would seem like an obvious decision to make.

Speaking to Live Science, Walter Kaufmann, chair of Structural Engineering (Concrete Structures and Bridge Design) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, said the explanation is simple: “There is no sufficiently pressing need for a bridge across the Amazon.”

Despite its length, many of the areas located near the river are sparsely populated. As a result, there aren’t any major roads for a bridge to connect to.

Donald Trump has issued a warning after a new Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) app brought havoc upon the US stock market.

The release of chatbot DeepSeek on January 20 has seen chip-maker Nvidia’s stock price fall by almost $600 billion.

Now, the US president has declared it a ‘wake-up call’ for American companies who must focus on ‘competing to win’.

It comes as Donald Trump last week confirmed plans for a $500 billion AI project called Stargate, backed by tech giants including Microsoft, Oracle, OpenAI and, somewhat ironically now, Nvidia.

How does DeepSeek work?

Powered by the open source DeepSeek-V3 model, its researchers claim the AI model was trained for around $6 million.

This is significantly less than the billions that have been spent by rivals.

What’s more, the Chinese company claims it uses eight times less the amount of specialized chips to do so.

DeepSeek was supposedly trained on 2,000 GPU chips compared to an estimated 16,000 for leading models.

OpenAI chief Sam Altman praised the business for its ‘impressive model, particularly around what they’re able to deliver for the price’, though he added that OpenAI would ‘obviously deliver much better models’ moving forward.

Nvidia has lost almost $600 billion in market value (Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Chip export ban

Back in 2022, the US restricted exports of these all-important chips to China, from companies including Nvidia and AMD.

The government claimed it was in an effort to mitigate national security concerns.

However, Wenfeng High-Flyer is said to have amassed a stockpile of Nvidia high-performance processor chips that are used to run AI systems.

Now, DeepSeek says its recent AI models have been built using lower-performing Nvidia chips not banned in China.

Not everyone is convinced though, with tech billionaire Elon Musk among those casting doubt.

Responding to a post which claimed DeepSeek actually has around ‘50,000 Nvidia chips that have now been banned from export to China,’ the Tesla CEO said: “Obviously.”

Why did DeepSeek cause Nvidia to lose market shares?

Being a new rival to ChatGPT is not enough in itself to upend the US stock market, but the apparent low cost for its development – and its use of chips not banned in China – has been.

Nvidia appears to have been hit the worst as its stock price plunged 17 percent in the space of one day, tumbling to $2.9 trillion from $3.5 trillion, as per Forbes.

The blow saw the chip maker slip from most valuable company in the world by market capitalization to third on, behind Apple and Microsoft.

So, DeepSeek has shown the US may not be the dominant market leader in AI many thought it to be, and that cutting edge AI models can be built and trained for less than first thought.

DeepSeek CEO Liang said in a July 2024 interview with The China Academy he was surprised by the reaction to a previous version of his AI model.

“We didn’t expect pricing to be such a sensitive issue,” he said. “We were simply following our own pace, calculating costs, and setting prices accordingly.”