Steeped in centuries of traditional tea drinking, Afghanistan is getting a little coffee buzz for a change. Hikmat Sorosh has more on this popular new trend from the Afghan capital, Kabul, in this story narrated by Michael Lipin, with additional reporting by Khalil Noorzaie in Herat.
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From: MeNeedIt

Researchers in Britain have shown that genetic manipulation can prevent or slow the symptoms of Parkinson’s, in the inherited form of the disease. That’s a minority of Parkinson’s patients, but the researchers are learning more about what causes nerve cells in the brain to die. Faith Lapidus reports.
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From: MeNeedIt

Lady Gaga will make history when she performs at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts festival this weekend, marking a decade since a solo woman has been billed as a headliner on the prestigious musical stage.

Beyonce had been slated to headline the festival in Indio, California, but backed out because she’s pregnant with twins. Bjork was the last solo female to headline Coachella in 2007, so it begs the question: Why has it taken so long?

Women have always performed at Coachella, which began Friday, since it was launched in 1999. In the last few years the number of female performers has grown, including acts that blend alternative and pop, such as Sia and Tegan & Sara, to mega genre-mashers like M.I.A., Janelle Monae and Santigold.

Coachella is known as the festival for cool kids — and musicians. That leaves little to no room for acts that dominate Top 40 radio, where women have a strong presence, from Katy Perry to Rihanna.

Halsey, the Grammy-nominated singer who is readying her second alternative album and had one of last year’s biggest pop hits with “Closer” alongside the Chainsmokers, performed at Coachella last year. The 22-year-old said women who perform alternative music are often billed as pop artists because of their sex.

“Festivals like Coachella, they pride themselves on being part of the counterculture, being tastemakers, upholding themselves to a certain standard of the artists that they include, and I think one of the problems is that female artists are so often tainted as pop artists even when they don’t necessarily intend to be,” Halsey said. “Female artists can put out the same style of a record as a male artist and when a male artist does it, it has a certain type of dignity, it has a certain type of edge … as soon as a woman puts out a record of the same caliber, it’s immediately filed as a pop record no matter what.”

Halsey said it’s something she’s experienced in her own career with the success of “Closer.”

“It was this giant pop record and immediately I was a pop artist even though I put out an alternative album, I played alternative festivals and I was on alternative radio,” she said. “As soon as [you] do one pop record it’s like the kiss of death for a female artist sometimes.”

Gary Bongiovanni, CEO of concert trade publication Pollstar, said he didn’t think the gap between male and female headliners at Coachella was calculated.

“I don’t see that there’s any sexism. There’s nothing more than trying to put together a bill of artists that the public wants to see. And we live in a world where a significant majority of the acts are either male or male-fronted bands versus females or female-fronted bands,” he said. “If you look at the level of business all of those artists do and you try to cobble together a lineup that’s going to be appealing, it’s difficult, and there are a lot of the female acts that may not lend themselves to performing in front of 60,000 or 80,000 people in an open field, versus headlining an area or more likely a theater.”

In last year’s Pollstar chart of the 100 top-grossing North America tours, women made up about 15 percent of the list, which was dominated by male acts and male-fronted bands. Only two women cracked the Top 10: Beyonce was No.1 and Adele came in fifth.

Coachella is sold out before the lineup is announced, so the festival has the luxury of picking performers instead of relying on acts to help sell tickets.

Along with Gaga, this year’s headliners include Radiohead and Kendrick Lamar, who released his hotly anticipated new album Friday. Some of the female performers include Lorde, Banks, Tove Lo, Kehlani, Nao, Kiiara and Bishop Briggs. Yukimi Nagano, who fronts Swedish band Little Dragon, is returning to Coachella for a third time.

Nagano said she was surprised that it’s been 10 years since a woman headlined the festival, adding: “I think it’s a really positive thing.”

Jason White, executive vice president of marketing at Beats by Dre, said the company is purposely, and exclusively, giving attention to women at the festival: Their space at Coachella will only feature female performers, including Erykah Badu, DJ Kiss, Ana Calderon, JCK DVY and Jasmine Solano.

“I think it really meshes incredibly well with what’s going on with Coachella because you do have Gaga, we’re excited about seeing Kehlani [and] there’s some really solid performers this year,” he said.

Halsey, who spoke over the phone Thursday as she drove to the desert to watch Coachella as a fan, said she was thrilled to see Gaga take the stage. She said the recent Super Bowl halftime performer is one of those pioneering female acts that haven’t been boxed into a genre, though she knows “the extremes [Gaga] has to go to maintain that counterculture are much greater than that of what a male artist has to do.”

“Drake is still considered a rap/rhythm artist even though he is essentially a pop artist when you look at the decisions that he makes and the climate that kind of surrounds his projects,” Halsey said.

“And when you have a female artist in the same lane, they get written off as a pop artist simply because they’re female, simply because the conversation with them, it goes to fashion, makeup or whatever, and those are questions and comments that don’t surround the brand and surround the career of a male artist.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Julian Lennon is looking to nurture a new generation’s commitment to the environment, with a little help from a white feather.

The firstborn son of the late John Lennon has co-authored “Touch the Earth,” a picture book for kids as young as 3 about the world’s water problems, from polluted oceans to the need for clean drinking water in the developing world.

Out later this month, the book from Sky Pony Press has a group of kids loaded into a plane called the White Feather Flier as they span the globe and learn about the need for filtration, irrigation and ocean life protection. With illustrations created both by hand and computer, it’s the first of three children’s books he plans, in line with the environmental and humanitarian work of his White Feather Foundation.

“We’ve failed miserably in looking after our environment. I think this is a great way to approach children into realizing what’s at stake, and to help educate and help them make decisions about the right things to do for the future,” Lennon said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “It’s for those with inquiring minds who are asking why?”

Lennon has taken on environmental issues in song, including his 1991 “Saltwater,” and in film, including the 2006 documentary “Whaledreamers,” covering a gathering of indigenous and tribal leaders that explores connections among whales, dolphins and humanity.

Appealing to the next generation of prospective eco-warriors grew out of his friendship with co-writer Bart Davis after the two put aside plans — for now — for the 54-year-old Lennon to write a biography. But he hasn’t completely abandoned the idea.

“I feel time’s marching on, you know. A lot of my friends and people I know are popping their clogs,” Lennon laughed. “You know, who knows what’s next. It’s in the cards in the next few years, absolutely, before it’s too late.”

So what’s up with the white feather for Lennon, the former Beatle’s son with his first wife, Cynthia? He shares the story at the back of the book.

“On the odd occasion when I saw dad he mentioned once that should he ever pass, a way he would let me know that he was OK, or that we were all going to be OK, would be in the form of a white feather,” Lennon explained. “I thought that quite peculiar. I told mum about it, too, and we just sort of went on with life.”

Later, while on tour in Australia, he was presented with a white swan feather by an aboriginal tribal elder of the Mirning people.

“It was a freaky moment, but one I took to heart immediately,” he said. “I realized that this was about stepping up to the plate now and, you know, I can sing all I want about this stuff but am I actually going to do something about it? So I spent 10 years making a documentary about the Mirning people.”

It’s also when he established his foundation, visiting Ethiopia with the head of a clean water initiative and touring schools and health clinics in Kenya. A portion of the books’ proceeds will go the foundation, which now does a range of work, including providing scholarships for girls in Kenya.

Lennon’s father was shot to death in 1980. His mother died two years ago of cancer at age 75. Her loss remains tender. Lennon dedicates the book to Cynthia, and he established the Kenya scholarships in her name.

“I talk to her every night, pretty much,” Lennon said. “She has given me the strength to carry on. Where I’m at at the moment, I feel very strong, very zenlike. I just want to do the right thing. To try to continue to be the best that I can be. That was all based around wanting to make her proud. I try to continue all the work that I do in her name.” 
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From: MeNeedIt

More than a decade after it was proposed, India’s most ambitious tax reform measure is set to roll out in six weeks following the passage of a law that will replace a plethora of confusing levies with a single, nationwide tax.  

The new goods and services tax (GST) will unite the world’s fastest growing economy into a common market of 1.3 billion people.

The measure is seen as a major achievement for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who struggled for two years to build a political consensus.

 The government says the GST will be implemented from July 1 after state legislatures ratify it.   

 The new tax is expected to make it vastly easier to do business as it dismantles tax checkpoints at every state border. Businesses have often complained that India’s complicated tax system leaves them grappling with a mesh of separate duties levied by each of the country’s 29 states, and goods are often stranded for hours or even days at state borders as payments are worked out.

 By making distribution more efficient and less expensive, Ankur Bisen at New Delhi based consultancy, Technopak, sees big benefits for consumer-oriented businesses, which have to move goods across state lines in the vast country. 

Another huge benefit will be increased transparency. “It will have implications on corruption because taxation regime will not be vague anymore, it will be very clearly defined,” says Bisen.

For the government, the GST is expected to improve tax compliance and draw more people into the tax net in a country where tax evasion is common. It will also make India more attractive for foreign investors by simplifying rules for a huge and increasingly attractive market.

The government estimates the new tax will boost economic growth by about half a percentage point in its first year of implementation and in the long run by as much as 2 percent.

However several economists say that the political compromises that had to be struck win approval of the new tax mean the sweeping benefits India had hoped to see may not accrue in the short run.  

Taxes will be levied at four levels – five, 12, 18 and 28 percent. Many say the 18 percent and 28 percent tax rates are too high.  

 “It could potentially have been a transformative measure if the structure of GST would have been characterized by a large base and low and single rate,” says D.K. Srivastava at consultancy Ernst and Young. But, he says, “it is going as a multiple-rate system and some of the rates are very high and the tax base is still narrow. Therefore it is a kind of a fragmented GST. ”

Despite the shortfalls, Srivastava says that “given the complications of the size of the Indian economy, it might be useful to start off with a functioning model and then go on reforming it as matters progress.”

Many also warn against a hasty implementation, saying that rushing ahead with a July 1 deadline could make it difficult to handle the transition in a country which has always struggled with bureaucratic ineptitude.

Many businesses, which had long clamored for such a tax, are asking the government for more time to prepare for the switch, saying six weeks is too little. They worry that the tax rates for various products have still be to be decided.

Others point out that the GST will be serviced by state-of-the-art technology and an electronic portal where taxpayers can register, eliminating the conventional and discretionary role of tax authorities.
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From: MeNeedIt

Texas has a wealth of oil and gas production facilities, hundreds of ranches … and 14 national park sites that protect and preserve some of America’s most precious natural, cultural and historic land and waterscapes.

National parks traveler Mikah Meyer, who’s on a mission to visit all of the more than 400 sites within the National Park Service, crossed into Texas via its eastern border, eager to begin his ambitious adventures across the vast state.

Magical moments

First stop, Big Thicket National Preserve, which protects almost 45,780 hectares (113,121.96 acres) of land and water spread over seven counties in southeast Texas.

Mikah enjoyed the quiet beauty of a swamp cypress tupelo forest as he glided through one of its many rivers on a small boat. The dominant trees in most of the Big Thicket swamps are bald cypress and water tupelo which look primeval in appearance.

“There was something mystical and magical about the place even though it didn’t have the big sweeping vista that other parks might have,” Mikah observed.

Timeless beauty

Mikah found more natural beauty at Padre Island National Seashore near Corpus Christi, which protects 112 kilometers (70 miles) of coastline, dunes, prairies, and wind tidal flats, teeming with life.

To get to Padre Island, he had to travel through Houston, the most populous city in Texas, (which has no national park sites), and he said he couldn’t help but notice the contrast between the urban environment and the natural one.

“It was interesting to contrast this state that is so well known for oil… and then just to the southeast of this city known for oil production there’s the world’s longest undeveloped barrier island.”

“What I’m learning about the seashores is that what really makes them unique is that they present the opportunity to experience our coastal land as it was before human development,” Mikah said.

Timeless journeys

That seems to be the recurring theme as Mikah travels across the country from one national seashore to another.

“Everything from Cape Cod National Seashore to Canaveral National Seashore, Gulf Islands National Seashore and now Padre Island National Seashore — the consistency is that they offer the opportunity to experience undeveloped beaches,” he emphasized.

Near the park’s visitor center is an area where the tides come together, bringing with them literally tons of trash, which get swept up onto the beach. The park service uses that naturally occurring event as an opportunity to teach school children about conservation.

“They give them a trash bag and the kids can go out and pick up trash and they talk about conservation and taking care of the earth,” Mikah explained. “So it’s a cool way to see how the National Seashore is trying to involve the next generation in preserving and taking care of these lands,” he added.

A mammoth discovery

When people hear the name Waco, Texas, many associate it with the deadly siege carried out by federal agents of a compound belonging to the Branch Davidian religious group in 1993.

But the city was famous long before then for something a little more appealing.

As Mikah describes it, in 1978, two young friends, Paul Barron and Eddie Bufkin, were looking for old Native American arrowheads in the area near their homes when they found a bone sticking out of the ground. “So they started digging around it and it turned out to be a mammoth tusk,” Mikah explained.

The young men removed the bone and took it to Baylor University’s Strecker Museum (predecessor to the Mayborn Museum Complex) for examination. Museum staff identified the find as a femur bone from a Columbian mammoth. This extinct species lived during the Pleistocene Epoch (more commonly known as the Ice Age) and inhabited North America from southern Canada to as far south as Costa Rica.

That stunning discovery launched a massive archaeological dig “that produced the largest — and what I think is the only — find ever of an entire herd of mammoths,” Mikah said.

A lost world

Strecker Museum staff quickly organized a team of volunteers and excavation began at the site. The crews slowly excavated a lost world. Between 1978 and 1990, they uncovered the fossil remains of 16 Columbian mammoths. Their efforts revealed a nursery herd that appears to have died together in a single natural event. Six additional mammoths as well as the fossil remains of many other animal species have been excavated in the years since, including the tooth of a juvenile saber-toothed cat and a camel that lived approximately 67,000 years ago.

Waco Mammoth National Monument was designated as a new unit of the National Park System by President Barack Obama in 2015.

“When you hear the word Waco you think of compounds and biker gangs, so you know it’s good that they have some things a little less controversial to be known for,” Mikah observed.

Mikah invites you to join him as he continues his journey across the Lone Star state by visiting his website, Facebook and Instagram.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

Three university engineering graduates in Uganda are taking on one of the leading killers of young children in Africa – pneumonia. They say the prototype of their invention, a “smart jacket”  they have named Mama’s Hope, can diagnose the illness faster and more accurately than the current medical protocol.

Four-month-old Nakato Christine writhes on a hospital bed, breathing fast. On the other end of the bed is her twin sister, in the same condition.

Nakato coughs as Senior Nurse Kyebatala Loy adjusts the nasal gastric tube.

“They have been put on oxygen because they have difficulty in breathing and the feeding is also difficult because of their fast breathing,” Kyebatala said.

Since January, 352 babies have been admitted with pneumonia to pediatric ward 16 at Mulago National Referral Hospital in Kampala.

Pneumonia is the leading infectious cause of death for children under five years of age in Africa and south Asia, according to the World Health Organization. In 2015, pneumonia killed nearly a million children worldwide.

A key problem is the challenge involved in diagnosing the disease. The sooner the sick children start receiving antibiotics, the better their chance of survival. But health workers armed with stethoscopes and thermometers can miss the infection in its early stage. Dr. Flavia Mpanga of the U.N. Children’s Fund in Kampala says other methods, like the respiratory timer, can lead to misdiagnosis.

“If you see the respiratory timer, it’s got a ticking mechanism that confuses the community health workers. When they are taking the breathe rates, they confuse the ticking sound of the respiratory timer with the breathe rates and every child is almost diagnosed with pneumonia,” said Dr. Mpanga.

She says over-diagnosis means some children are taking antibiotics they don’t need, which is also a public health problem.

A trio of recent university engineering graduates in Uganda think they have an answer. They have been working with the Mulago School of Public Health to test a prototype of their invention, the smart jacket, called Mama’s Hope.

Two of the inventors, 26-year-old Beseufekad Shifferaw and 25-year-old Brian Turyabagye, gave VOA a demonstration.

“Ahh so…[zipper sound]… the jacket…is placed on the child…first, this goes around the child and then the falcon fastening is placed, and then the flaps are placed…[fade out]”

“This jacket will simply measure the vital signs of pneumonia. That is the breathing rate, the state of the lungs and the temperature,” said Turyabagye. “Now those signs are transmitted to our unit here, through which a health worker can read off the readings, which include cough, chest pains, nausea or difficulty in breathing. With those additional signs and symptoms, they are coupled with the result that has been measured by the jacket and it gives a more accurate diagnosis result.”

For now, it is just a prototype. But the inventors say their tests have shown that the smart jacket can diagnose pneumonia three times faster than traditional exams.

UNICEF has put the team in touch with its office in Copenhagen in charge of innovations to help them advance in the pre-trial stage. Dr. Mpanga sees potential.

“My only hope is that this jacket can reach a commercial value and be regulatory-body approved so that it can help the whole world,” said Dr. Mpanga.

Dr. Mpanga says taking the guess work out of pneumonia diagnosis could save countless lives in the developing world.
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From: MeNeedIt

People living in arid, drought-ridden areas may soon be able to get water straight from a source that’s all around them — the air, American researchers said Thursday.

Scientists have developed a box that can convert low-humidity air into water, producing several liters every 12 hours, they wrote in the journal Science.

“It takes water from the air and it captures it,” said Evelyn Wang, a mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and co-author of the paper.

The technology could be “really great for remote areas where there’s really limited infrastructure,” she said.

The system, which is currently in the prototype phase, uses a material that resembles powdery sand to trap air in its tiny pores. When heated by the sun or another source, water molecules in the trapped air are released and condensed — essentially “pulling” the water out of the air, the scientists said.

A recent test on a roof at MIT confirmed that the system can produce about a glass of water every hour in 20 to 30 percent humidity.

Companies like Water-Gen and EcoloBlue already produce atmospheric water-generation units that create water from air.

What is special about this new prototype, though, is that it can cultivate water in low-humidity environments using no energy, Wang said.

“It doesn’t have to be this complicated system that requires some kind refrigeration cycle,” she said in an interview with Reuters.

An estimated one-third of the world’s population lives in areas with low relative humidity, the scientists said. Areas going through droughts often experience dry air, but Wang said the new product could help them still get access to water.

“Now we can get to regions that really are pretty dry, arid regions,” she said. “We can provide them with a device, and they can use it pretty simply.”

The technology opens the door for what co-author Omar Yaghi called “personalized water.”

Yaghi, a chemistry professor at University of California, Berkeley, envisions a future where the water is produced off-grid for individual homes and possibly farms using the device.

“This application extends beyond drinking water and household purposes, off grid,” he said. “It opens the way for use of [the technology] to water large regions as in agriculture.”

In the next few years, Wang said, the developers hope to find a way to reproduce the devices on a large scale and eventually create a formal product. The resulting device, she believes, will be relatively affordable and accessible.
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From: MeNeedIt

At first glance, U.S. President Donald Trump and Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen may have little in common.

Yellen is an academic economist and veteran of Democratic administrations who is committed to an open global economy, while Trump is a real estate mogul with an electoral base suspicious of the economic order Yellen helped to create.

Yet the two may have interests in common now that Trump is president and both want to get as many Americans working as possible.

Since her appointment as Fed chair in February 2014, Yellen has kept interest rates low and she currently pledges to raise them only slowly even though unemployment, at 4.5 percent, is at its lowest in nearly 10 years.

Meanwhile, Trump’s election campaign promises to cut taxes, spend money on infrastructure and deregulate banking, have helped propel a surge in the U.S. Conference Board’s consumer confidence index to its highest level since the internet stocks crash 16 years ago.

Former Fed staff and colleagues who know Yellen said Trump’s surprising remarks this week in a Wall Street Journal interview, in which he did not rule out Yellen’s reappointment to a new four-year term next year, are not as outlandish as they may appear now that the president has a vested interest in keeping markets and the economy on an even keel.

And the same staff and colleagues say Yellen may well accept reappointment, despite Trump’s criticism of her during last year’s election campaign.

Many in Trump’s Republican party have called for tighter monetary policy and a less activist Fed, but “the president would not really find that useful,” said former Fed vice chair Donald Kohn.

If Trump fills three existing Federal Reserve board vacancies with people Yellen thinks she could work with, “it would be really difficult to turn down” a reappointment when her term as chair expires in February 2018.

“If she continues to do well, he’d be nuts to ditch her for an unknown quantity,” said University of California, Berkeley, economics professor Andrew Rose, a long-time colleague and co-author with Yellen of an oft-cited study of labor markets.

Yellen took over from Ben Bernanke as Fed chair in February 2014 with the U.S. economic recovery from the 2008 financial crisis still on shaky ground, and she has made no secret she puts a priority on growth in jobs and wages and a broad recovery in U.S. household wealth.

In a slow return to more normal monetary policy, Yellen has stopped the purchase of additional financial securities by the Fed and in December 2015 began raising short term interest rates for the first time in 10 years.

So far those policy shifts have been engineered with little apparent impact on job growth, and so mesh with Trump’s core election campaign promises to restore employment and earnings.

The slow rise in interest rates in the past year has also happened while U.S. stock prices have risen to record highs, though Trump has claimed the credit for himself.

Precedent for Fed Chair to Stay On

There is precedent for Trump to stick with a former president’s Fed chair appointment. Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, the three previous Fed chairs, served at least two four-year terms and were nominated by both Democratic and Republican presidents.

However it may be a more difficult step for Trump.

During last year’s election campaign, Trump accused Yellen of accepting orders from then President Obama to keep interest rates low for political reasons, and he said he would replace her as Fed chair because she is not a Republican party member.

In a particularly biting moment last year, in a campaign video advertisement, he labeled her as among the “global special interests” who had ruined life for middle America.

The Fed on Thursday said it had no response to Trump’s comments published on Wednesday on Yellen and or on whether Yellen would consider a second term.

Much Could Still Go Wrong

Some of Trump’s advisers and some Republican lawmakers want a more conservative Fed in which the chair has less power and would see a Yellen reappointment as yet another step away from his promise to “drain the swamp” of the Washington establishment.

There are also three current vacancies on the Fed’s seven member Board of Governors, and unorthodox new members could make it difficult for Yellen to manage policy or accept another four-year term.

But if the choice is her consensus style or someone unproven in their ability to manage public and market expectations, “he’d be wise to reappoint her,” said Joseph Gagnon, a former Fed staffer and Berkeley colleague of Yellen’s currently at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

“I don’t see what is in his interests to appoint someone who is going to jack up interest rates.”
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From: MeNeedIt

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