A fossil found by an elk hunter in Montana nearly seven years ago has led to the discovery of a new species of prehistoric sea creature that lived about 70 million years ago in the inland sea that flowed east of the Rocky Mountains.

The new species of elasmosaur is detailed in an article published Thursday in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Most elasmosaurs, a type of marine reptile, had necks that could stretch 18 feet, but the fossil discovered in the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge is distinct for its much shorter neck — about 7{ feet.

“This group is famous for having ridiculously long necks, I mean necks that have as many as 76 vertebrae,” said Patrick Druckenmiller, co-author of the article and a paleontologist with the University of Alaska Museum of the North. “What absolutely shocked us when we dug it out — it only had somewhere around 40 vertebrae.”

The smaller sea creature lived around the same time and in the same area as the larger ones, which is evidence contradicting the belief that elasmosaurs did not evolve over millions of years to have longer necks, co-author Danielle Serratos said.

Elasmosaurs were carnivorous creatures with small heads and paddle-like limbs that could grow as long as 30 feet. Their fossils have been discovered across the world, and the one discovered in northeastern Montana was well-preserved and nearly complete.

Hunter David Bradt came across the exposed fossil encased in rock while he was hunting for elk in the wildlife refuge in November 2010, Druckenmiller said. He recognized it as a fossil, took photographs and alerted a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employee.

The refuge along the Missouri River is popular with hunters for its big game and remote setting.

“This is a vast, remote and rugged place that has changed very little since Lewis and Clark passed through these lands more than 200 years ago,” refuge manager Paul Santavy said.

Bradt, who lives in Florence, Montana, did not immediately return a call for comment.

It took three days to excavate the fossil, but much longer to clean and study it before the determination could be made that it was a new species, Druckenmiller said.

He and Serratos submitted their findings to the journal last year.

Druckenmiller said the inland sea that stretched the width of Montana to Minnesota and from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico was teeming with marine reptiles, but relatively few of their fossils have been excavated.

“It’s a total bias — just more people out there are interested in land-living dinosaurs than marine reptiles,” he said. “There would be a lot more known if more people were studying them.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Deep in the jagged red mountains of Oman, geologists are searching for an efficient and cheap way to remove carbon dioxide from the air and oceans — and perhaps begin to reverse climate change.

They are coring samples from one of the world’s only exposed sections of the Earth’s mantle to uncover how a spontaneous natural process millions of years ago transformed carbon dioxide into limestone and marble.

As the world mobilizes to confront climate change, the main focus has been on reducing emissions through fuel-efficient cars and cleaner power plants. But some researchers are also testing ways to remove or recycle carbon already in the seas and sky.

The Hellisheidi geothermal plant in Iceland injects carbon into volcanic rock. At the massive Sinopec fertilizer plant in China, carbon is filtered and reused as fuel. In all, 16 industrial projects currently capture and store about 27 million tons of carbon, according to the International Energy Agency. That’s less than 0.1 percent of global emissions _ human activity is estimated to pump about 40 billion tons a year into the atmosphere _ but the technology has shown promise.

Many efforts needed

“Any one technique is not guaranteed to succeed,” said Stuart Haszeldine, a geology professor at the University of Edinburgh who serves on a U.N. climate body studying how to reduce atmospheric carbon. “If we’re interested as a species, we’ve got to try a lot harder and do a lot more and a lot of different actions.”

One such action is underway in the al-Hajjar Mountains of Oman, in a quiet corner of the Arabian Peninsula, where a unique rock formation pulls carbon out of thin air.

Peter Kelemen, 61, a geochemist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, has been exploring Oman’s hills for nearly three decades. “You can walk down these beautiful canyons and basically descend 20 kilometers [12 miles] into the Earth’s interior,” he said.

The sultanate boasts the largest exposed sections of the Earth’s mantle, thrust up by plate tectonics millions of years ago. The mantle contains peridotite, a rock that reacts with the carbon in air and water to form marble and limestone.

“Every single magnesium atom in these rocks has made friends with the carbon dioxide to form solid limestone, magnesium carbonate, plus quartz,” he said as he patted a rust-colored boulder in the Wadi Mansah valley.

“There’s about a billion tons of CO2 in this mountain,” he said, pointing off to the east.

Rain and springs pull carbon from the exposed mantle to form stalactites and stalagmites in mountain caves. Natural pools develop surface scum of white carbonate. Scratch off this thin, white film, Kelemen said, and it’ll grow back in a day.

“For a geologist, this is supersonic,” he said.

Drilling project

He and a team of 40 scientists have formed the Oman Drilling Project to better understand how that process works and whether it could be used to scrub the Earth’s carbon-laden atmosphere. The $3.5 million project has support from across the globe, including NASA.

Carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse gas driving climate change, which threatens to cause meteorological, agricultural and political problems worldwide, according to the U.N. climate body.

Natural carbon levels have risen from 280 to 405 parts per million since the Industrial Revolution, and current estimates hold that the world will be 6 degrees C (42.8 degrees F) hotter by 2100.

In 2015, 196 nations signed the Paris climate accords, agreeing to curb greenhouse gas emissions to levels that would keep the rise in the Earth’s temperature to under 2 degrees C.

That has injected new urgency into the work underway in Oman, where Keleman’s team recently spent four months extracting dozens of core samples, which they hope to use to construct a geological history of the process that turns carbon dioxide into carbonate.

“It’s like a jigsaw puzzle,” said Nehal Warsi, 33, who oversees the drilling.

About 13 tons of core samples from four different sites will be sent to the Chikyu, a state-of-the-art research vessel off the coast of Japan, where Keleman and other geologists will analyze them in round-the-clock shifts.

They hope to answer the question of how the rocks captured so much carbon over the course of 90 million years — and to see whether there’s a way to speed up the timetable.

A cycling of carbon

Kelemen thinks a drilling operation could cycle carbon-rich water into the newly formed seabed on oceanic ridges far below the surface. Just like in Oman’s mountains, the submerged rock would chemically absorb carbon from the water. The water could then be cycled back to the surface to absorb more carbon from the atmosphere, in a sort of conveyor belt.

Such a project would require years more of testing, but Kelemen hopes the energy industry, with its offshore drilling expertise and deep pockets, will take interest.

“Ultimately, if the goal is to capture billions and billions of tons of carbon, that’s where James Cameron comes in,” he said, half joking, referring to the “Titanic” and “Avatar” director who has also pioneered undersea technology. Cameron himself piloted a submersible to the deepest point on Earth in 2012 and retrieved samples while filming “Deepsea Challenge.”

“He hasn’t responded to my messages yet,” Kelemen said.
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From: MeNeedIt

Every night, the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, Maryland glistens with an array of lights from the waterside restaurants and shops, creating lovely water reflections. But during the Light City festival, illuminated sculptures and colorful interactive light displays add to the beauty along the waterfront.
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From: MeNeedIt

After years of experimenting and refining, robotic devices that could help disabled people walk may soon be available to rehabilitation centers. The Japanese auto company Toyota says that before the end of this year, elderly and infirm people in Japan will be able to have therapy sessions with a walk-assist robot.
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From: MeNeedIt

President Donald Trump plans to revive the hobbled Export-Import Bank of the United States, his office said, a victory for American manufacturers like Boeing and General Electric which have overseas customers that use the agency’s government-backed loans to purchase their products.

Trump first told the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday he would fill two vacancies on the agency’s five-member board that have prevented the bank from having a quorum and being able to act on loans over $10 million. Trump’s picks must gain approval from the Senate, which blocked nominees by former President Barack Obama.

Trump told the Journal that the bank benefits small businesses and creates jobs, a reversal of his earlier criticism of the bank being “featherbedding” for wealthy corporations.

Bank offers loans to foreign entities

The Export-Import Bank, an independent government agency, provides loans to foreign entities that enables them to purchase American-made goods. For example, it has been used by foreign airlines to purchase planes from Boeing and farmers in developing nations to acquire equipment.

The bank’s acting chairman, Charles “CJ” Hall, was not immediately available for comment.

The bank has become a popular target for conservatives, who have worked in Congress to kill the bank, arguing that it perpetuates cronyism and does little to create American jobs.

Trump’s about-face on the export bank comes after meeting on Tuesday with former Boeing Chief Executive Officer Jim McNerney, who left the company last year but oversaw the corporation’s aggressive lobbying effort in support of the bank in 2015.

Trump also met at the White House on Feb. 23 with GE CEO Jeff Immelt and Caterpillar Inc CEO Mark Sutton, both vocal supporters of the bank.

It is not known if they discussed the bank at those meetings.

Bank helps level playing field

Large American corporations that do significant amounts of exports say other countries have similar agencies and the export bank levels the playing field.

“This is an encouraging development on a key competitive issue for U.S manufacturers and their extensive supply chains,” Boeing spokeswoman Kate Bernard said in statement to Reuters.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, which includes companies like Ingersoll-Rand, United States Steel and Pfizer, cheered the move.

“Manufacturers are encouraged by President Trump’s vocal support for the bank,” said NAM Vice President of International Economic Affairs Linda Dempsey in a statement.

A 2015 fight to shutter the bank led by conservatives in Congress allowed the bank’s charter to expire for five months.

After overwhelming bipartisan support emerged to renew the bank’s charter, which is needed for it to operate, conservatives blocked nominees to the board, preventing it from financing large exports like aircraft and power turbines.

Groups work to shut down bank

Freedom Partners and Americans for Prosperity, two groups funded by the Republican donor Koch brothers, worked aggressively for years to kill the bank. Brothers Charles and David Koch have opposed the bank for what they call damaging interference into the free market by government.

Nathan Nascimento, Freedom Partners vice president of policy, called the bank on Wednesday “the epitome of what’s wrong with Washington.”

“Reopening the flood gates to Ex-Im’s corporate welfare is a bad deal for hardworking taxpayers and a bad deal for American businesses,” he said.

The Club for Growth, which spends heavily in electing conservative candidates and was one of the few groups to campaign against Trump during the Republican primary in 2016, also lamented the change in position.

“Ex-Im has a long history of cronyism and corruption that is well-known to many in the Trump Administration, and while we hoped it would be done away with, the administration now has taken on the almost impossible challenge of reforming a federal agency whose mission has been to pick winners and losers with taxpayer dollars,” spokesman Doug Sachtleben said in a statement to Reuters.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

Science and science fiction intersected recently when 1,000 people took part in a brain experiment while watching a movie about what happens when the human brain is connected to a computer. The results of the experiment will help scientists better understand how the human mind works, what makes us similar, and different.
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From: MeNeedIt

At least 489 people have died from a meningitis outbreak in Nigeria, according to Nigeria’s Minister of Health Isaac Adewole.

During an emergency health meeting in the Nigerian state of Kaduna, Adewole said most of the victims are children aged 5 to 14.

Local and international health workers met with traditional rulers from Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim northern region to discuss how to contain and stop the outbreak.  Northern Nigeria’s traditional Islamic rulers wield enormous influence.  Many people trust them over government officials. These rulers have been instrumental in dispelling false myths about the polio vaccine, helping to eradicate polio in the north.

More than 4,000 meningitis cases have been recorded since the outbreak began in December, hitting the country’s poor northern region the hardest.  While meningitis outbreaks are not uncommon in Nigeria, this C strain of the disease is fairly new, according to the head of Nigeria’s Center for Disease Control, Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu.

“Meningitis C was fairly rare in our context until 2013, 2014, thereabouts.  Meningitis A was the dominant group by a lot, a huge margin all over West Africa,” Ihekweazu tells VOA.  “As far as Meningitis C, it’s probably the worst we’ve seen.  It’s a fairly serious one.  This particular strain we’ve found it in five states only.”

The disease is killing people who live in communities where access to hospitals is low and poverty is high.  In poor northern neighborhoods families are usually polygamous with several children.  Relatives are packed into small homes with little ventilation.  Meningitis A and C are bacterial infections spread by saliva and close physical contact.

Vaccinations in Abuja

The Nigerian capital, Abuja, in central Nigeria has reported six suspected Meningitis deaths, and Niger state, which neighbors Abuja, has reported 16 cases.  Health authorities in Abuja have administered more than 70,000 doses of Meningitis A and C vaccine.

“When we heard, we started collecting and we starting vaccinating.  We are very careful, because this is national federal capital territory.  People are coming in and out.  It’s about 9.5 percent growth rate.  It’s really a peak place where infections can be transferred easily,” says Dr. Rilwanu Mohammed, the executive secretary of the Federal Capital Territory Primary Health Care Development Board.

The immunization campaign is targeting high-risk populations, like people who have fled their homes in northeastern Nigeria in fear of Boko Haram.  About 65,000 of them are living in camps across Abuja.  Health workers are also targeting motor parks, the prison that sits on the outskirts of the city, and Nigerian military barracks.

Vaccine running short

It’s a robust immunization aim, but there is not enough vaccine.  Health workers are facing the reality of a global shortage of Meningitis C vaccine.  

The allocation given to Abuja by the federal government of Nigeria ran out about a week ago.  This year, the World Health Organization gave Nigeria 500,000 doses of the Meningitis A and C vaccine, but that stock is nearly gone.  An additional 800,000 doses of conjugate Meningitis C vaccine from the British government is expected soon, most to sent to the northwestern state of Sokoto.

Zamfara state, where the outbreak began, says it needs three million doses.

“If we had all the currently available global stock of vaccine, it will not be enough to provide immunity for Nigeria alone. We really need to plan more aggressively but we need the world to help us.  We need to increase global production and reduce prices.  The best vaccine we have at the moment, the polyvalent conjugate vaccine cost close to $50 a dose,” Dr. Ihekweazu says.

Ihekweazu says it’s unaffordable for Nigeria and other West African countries.  He suggests strong global advocacy to reduce the price.

A treatable disease

Dr. Ikekweazu says Meningitis is a bacterium that lives with people in West Africa, where nearly 20 percent of the population carrys a Meningitis strain in the respiratory tract.  But people don’t always get sick.  When someone does get sick the disease inflames tissue around the brain and spinal cord. Meningitis is treatable, but survivors may live with long-term or even permanent medical disabilities, such as visual impairment and neurological dysfunction.  The World Health Organization says the disease is fatal in 50 percent of cases, if untreated.

Meningitis rates are highest in a region stretching from Senegal in westernmost Africa to Ethiopia in the east.

The 2015 outbreak of Meningitis C killed 1,100 people and sickened more than 10,000 in Nigeria and neighboring Niger.  More than 2,000 people died from the A strain of the disease in 2009.  In 1996, more than 1,000 cases were recorded, mostly in northern Nigeria.

Nigerians have turned to social media for public health advocacy.  The hashtag Meningitis is trending in Nigeria’s Twitter space as public officials and concerned citizens discuss how to handle the epidemic.

Health Minister Adewole used Twitter to denounce the actions of health workers who are charging people for the Meningitis C immunization.  Adewole says the immunization is supposed to be free of charge, provided by the Nigerian federal government.
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From: MeNeedIt

Bill O’Reilly is taking a vacation from his Fox News Channel show amid sponsor defections triggered by sexual harassment allegations.

Announcing the break at the end of Tuesday’s show, O’Reilly made a point of saying it was planned and long in the works. He said he will return April 24.

Around this time of year, “I grab some vacation, because it’s spring and Easter time. Last fall, I booked a trip that should be terrific,” he said.

His vacation announcement comes as about 60 companies said they won’t advertise on his show. The exodus followed a recent report in The New York Times that five women were paid a total of $13 million to keep quiet about harassment allegations.

The amount of advertising time by paying customers on “The O’Reilly Factor” has been cut by more than half since the Times report, according to an analysis issued Tuesday by Kantar Media.

But O’Reilly, cable TV news’ most popular personality, hasn’t been abandoned by his audience. His show averaged 3.7 million viewers over five nights last week, up 12 percent from the 3.3 million he averaged the week before and up 28 percent compared to the same week in 2016.

“O’Reilly Factor” drew an average of just under 4 million viewers for the first three months of 2017, his biggest quarter ever in the show’s 20-year history.

On Tuesday, the host offered his audience some general advice.

“If you can possibly take two good trips a year, it will refresh your life. We all need R&R. Put it to good use,” O’Reilly said.
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From: MeNeedIt

Musician J. Geils, founder of the J. Geils Band, known for such peppy early ’80s pop hits as “Love Stinks,” “Freeze Frame” and “Centerfold,” has died in his Massachusetts home at age 71.

Groton police said officers responded to Geils’ home about 4 p.m. Tuesday for a well-being check and found him unresponsive. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

“A preliminary investigation indicates that Geils died of natural causes,” police said in a statement.

The J. Geils Band was founded in 1967 in Worcester, Massachusetts, while Geils, whose full name was John Warren Geils Jr., was studying at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The band, whose music bridged the gap between disco and new wave, released 11 studio albums before breaking up in 1985. They reunited off and on over the years.

The band had several Top 40 singles in the early 1970s, including a cover song “Lookin’ for a Love” by the family group the Valentinos and “Give It to Me.”

Their biggest hits included “Must of Got Lost,” which reached No. 12 on Billboard’s Top 100 in 1975, and “Love Stinks,” a rant against unrequited love, the title song on their 1980 album. Their song “Centerfold,” from the album “Freeze Frame” was released in 1981 and eventually charted at No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 in February 1982. It stayed there for six weeks and was featured on MTV.

When news of Geils’ death broke, fans turned to social media to offer condolences and to reminisce about the band’s songs and concerts.
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From: MeNeedIt

It’s been years since Isabell Meggett Lucas has been inside the tiny house she was born in, a former slave cabin where her ancestors sought refuge from the hot South Carolina sun.

But the 86-year-old woman never envisioned that when she finally returned, the wooden two-room house would be viewed by millions of people inside the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture as an example of what home life was like for slaves in the South.

Visiting the new museum, open for a little over six months now — gave Lucas and her family, a chance to share with museum curators a first-hand glimpse of how descendants of African slaves lived in the post-Civil War and Jim Crow South, their joys and pains and how they survived a hardscrabble life without electricity or other modern comforts.

“It’s my home. We all lived there together and we were happy,” said Lucas, speaking softly as she stood outside the weatherboard cabin used during slavery at Point of Pines Plantation on Edisto Island, South Carolina.

Smithsonian officials scoured the countryside looking for representations of slave cabins for years before choosing the Meggett family cabin on the coast of South Carolina, curator Nancy Bercaw said.

Lucas, her sister-in-law Emily Meggett and their family viewed the cabin Monday and Tuesday, where it was rebuilt as part of the “Slavery and Freedom” exhibition in the museum almost exactly as it was when the last occupant lived there in 1981. It is believed to be one of the oldest preserved slave cabins in the United States, and although the exact age of the cabin is not known, it sat on the Point of Pines Plantation from 1851 until it was moved plank by plank to the museum.

But Lucas, who lived there from birth until age 19, remembered something about the cabin that isn’t in the exhibit.

“It had a big long porch on the outside,” she said. “My momma would sit on that porch. The cool wind would be getting ready to blow off the rivers and such. The wind would blow and we’d sit on the porch … when we would get tired, everyone would lay on that porch under blankets and quilts and go to sleep.”

That’s the importance of having access to the people who lived in the house, because the porch was gone by the time the Smithsonian officials first saw the cabin, Bercaw said. People often think of history to be just about objects and things, when there’s so much more they can learn, she said.

“They can give us such insight to what life was like on Edisto Island,” Bercaw said. “Objects hold meaning within them, and as far as we’re concerned, that meaning comes from the family” that lived there.

The museum is still collecting information about the cabin, including the oral history of the Meggett family, recorded during their trip to Washington.

For example, the 84-year-old Meggett said she remembered coming over before she married Lucas’s brother, and remembered Sunday afternoon games of hopscotch, jump rope and baseball in the nearby grass, where a base would be an old brick, and the children could run free through the grass and fields.

But slowly, she said, people moved away and the cabin eventually was abandoned. Meggett said she would occasionally visit, however, and her last visit was only a month or two before they moved the cabin out of South Carolina.

“There were five deer standing up there in the cabin,” she said. “When they saw us, they jumped and ran. We stopped and watched them, and then we went on down to the landing and came back. Then I heard all of a sudden they were going to move the cabin, and when I got back, it was already gone.”

People should know how they had to live in the past, Lucas said. “We had to work so hard,” she said. “I hated it. I hated all farmwork, but I didn’t have a choice.”

But there were good times as well, and wonderful food, she said.

“We ate grits and rice and cornbread, biscuits. When I got big enough I had to cook … one thing I learned was how to fix biscuits. We had a fireplace. You see the fireplace here, they would build a fire in the fireplace and they would cook biscuits,” Lucas said.

The matriarch said she tries to tell her younger relatives about what life was like back then, to share their family’s history. Having the cabin in the museum will help people learn about what life was like in the past, she said.

“People can look at that house and the pictures around it and know that everything didn’t come easy back then,” she said.
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From: MeNeedIt

President Donald Trump told a group of chief executives Tuesday that his administration was revamping the Wall Street reform law known as Dodd-Frank and might eliminate the rules and replace them with “something else.”

At the beginning of his administration, Trump ordered reviews of the major banking rules that were put in place after the 2008 financial crisis, and last week he said officials were planning a “major haircut” for them.

“For the bankers in the room, they’ll be very happy because we’re really doing a major streamlining and, perhaps, elimination, and replacing it with something else,” Trump said Tuesday.

“That will be the minimum. But we’re doing a major elimination of the horrendous Dodd-Frank regulations, keeping some obviously, but getting rid of many,” he said.

The many provisions of the Dodd-Frank measure were aimed at decreasing risks in the U.S. financial system. The White House is not unilaterally able to upend Dodd-Frank’s rules, almost all of which are implemented by independent regulatory agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve.

A sweeping change to the law would require congressional action, though in some cases regulators may also have wiggle room to make changes through a formal rule-making process.

Report on regulations

In February, Trump issued an executive order requiring Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to consult with U.S. regulators and submit a report outlining a proposal for possible regulatory and legislative changes that will help fuel economic growth and promote American business interests.

That report, due to be released in June, will most likely serve as a blueprint for possible changes down the road. However, congressional action on a Wall Street bill is not expected in the near term, as Congress focuses primarily on health care and tax reform.

Participants in the Tuesday meeting included Rich Lesser, chief executive of Boston Consulting Group; Doug McMillon, chief executive of Wal-Mart Stores; Indra Nooyi, chief executive of PepsiCo; Jim McNerney, former chief executive of Boeing; Ginni Rometty, chief executive of IBM; and Jack Welch, former chairman of General Electric.

The business leaders are part of Trump’s “Strategy and Policy Forum” that last met with him in February.

Trump also reiterated his criticism of the North American Free Trade Agreement between the United States, Canada and Mexico.

“NAFTA is a disaster. It’s been a disaster from the day it was devised. And we’re going to have some very pleasant surprises for you on NAFTA, that I can tell you,” he said.
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From: MeNeedIt

Another “Great Spot” has been found at Jupiter, this one cold and high up.

Scientists reported Tuesday that the dark expanse is 15,000 miles (24,000 kilometers) across and 7,500 miles (12,000 kilometers) wide. It’s in the upper atmosphere and much cooler than the hot surroundings, thus the name Great Cold Spot. And unlike the giant planet’s familiar Great Red Spot, this newly discovered weather system is continually changing in shape and size. It’s formed by the energy from Jupiter’s polar auroras.

A British-led team used a telescope in Chile to chart the temperature and density of Jupiter’s atmosphere. When the researchers compared the data with thousands of images taken in years past by a telescope in Hawaii, the Great Cold Spot stood out. It could be thousands of years old.

“The Great Cold Spot is much more volatile than the slowly changing Great Red Spot … but it has reappeared for as long as we have data to search for it, for over 15 years,” the University of Leicester’s Tom Stallard, lead author of the study, said in a statement.

Stallard said Jupiter’s upper atmosphere may hold other features. Scientists will be on the lookout for them while also studying the Great Cold Spot in greater detail, using ground telescopes as well as NASA’s Juno spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter, he said.

The study was published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
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From: MeNeedIt