Digital technology is changing how people live and work. There are now so-called “digital nomads” who move from city to city as they explore new places and cultures while earning a paycheck.
…
Egypt’s foreign reserves reached over $36 billion in July, a record high, which the prime minister described as “good news” as it shows that the economy is recovering, the central bank said Tuesday.
The bank announced the increase in a brief statement saying that the figure is 4.7 billion dollars higher compared to the previous month. In December 2010, foreign reserves reached $36 billion.
Egypt’s Prime Minister Sherif Ismail hailed the increase of the foreign reserves saying, “this is an assuring message about the Egyptian economy and that we are capable of covering the needs of the Egyptian people.”
“This means that the Egyptian economy has recovered,” he said.
$12 billion loan from IMF
The rise comes after the government secured a $12 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund. In order to qualify for that loan, the government imposed a set of tough economic measures, including subsidy cuts and the flotation of its local currency.
The economic measures were hailed by the IMF but have left many Egyptians struggling with both reduced buying power and spiraling inflation while the government struggles to generate jobs in country with an official population of 92 million.
This summer, Egypt raised electricity prices by more than 40 percent and increased gasoline prices by up to 55 percent while doubling the price of the household staple butane canisters, used for cooking.
Measures benefit middle, lower classes
Ahead of the latest hikes, President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi approved a package of measures benefiting middle and lower class Egyptians, including income tax relief, bonuses for state employees, increases in pensions and ration card subsidies.
The government embarked on the economic reform program soon after el-Sissi took office three years ago. Egypt’s economy has been battered since the 2011 uprising and continues to face major challenges, including a rising Islamic militancy. Tourism, a major pillar of national revenue, was dealt a blow in 2015 when militants belonging to an affiliate of the Islamic State group downed a Russian airliner killing all 224 people aboard.
When it rains in Emusala village, a person sick with a fever can find it hard to get to the nearest health center, which requires a trip along the slippery footpaths that lead to the nearest main road some 10km (6 miles) away, in the heart of Western Kenya’s Kakamega County.
But if the fever spells the onset of malaria, rapid diagnosis and treatment are essential.
That’s where Nicholas Akhonya comes in. With the aid of a simple medical kit and his mobile phone, Akhonya, a trained community health volunteer, is able to diagnose villagers with malaria in their own homes, offer treatment, and refer acute cases and pregnant women to health facilities for specialized care.
Malaria cases are on the increase in Kenya, and experts attribute the upsurge to changes in the climate.
According to Dr. James Emisiko, coordinator for the Division of Vector Borne and Neglected Tropical Diseases in Kakamega County, mosquitoes breed particularly well in stagnant water in warm temperatures.
The females feed on human blood in order to produce eggs, and if a mosquito carrying the malaria-causing plasmodium parasite bites a person, it is likely to infect them.
Kenya’s recent drought — the harshest in East Africa since 2011— followed by sporadic rainfall in the middle of this year has created a perfect breeding environment for mosquitoes, Emisiko told Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The result is an upsurge of malaria cases, especially in the Western Kenya region and around Lake Victoria.
“The only way to control deaths from this life-threatening disease is to ensure that all fever cases are tested wherever the patients are, malaria-positive cases [are] treated and all complicated cases referred to nearby health centers,” the doctor said.
He said that parents in rural areas often initially give painkillers to children with fever. When families finally seek proper medical attention, it is often too late for those who have malaria to respond to simple anti-malarial drugs, and they require expensive hospitalization instead.
Calling in the Volunteers
To tackle the problem, for the past two years county governments in malaria-prone areas have worked with non-governmental organizations to train community health volunteers to diagnose the disease in patients’ homes, using rapid diagnostic kits.
The volunteers then treat those who test positive, and refer complicated cases to the nearest health center.
“In case of any complication, all I need is to have power on my mobile phone so that I can communicate with medical experts using the toll-free number for further advice,” said Akhonya, one of the volunteers.
The U.S.-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that there are 6.7 million new clinical cases of malaria in Kenya each year and 4,000 deaths, most of them in Western Kenya.
According to Moses Makokha, clinical officer in charge of the Bumala-A sub-county health center in Busia County, some malaria cases can be fatal little more than 24 hours after symptoms occur, especially in children below the age of five years and pregnant women.
In pregnant women, malaria can lead to miscarriage or other serious complications, Makokha said.
“It is always an easy disease to manage – but only if it is identified at the onset of the fever and treated immediately using the correct medication,” Makokha said.
Kakamega County’s government has trained 4,200 community health volunteers to manage simple malaria, working with Community Asset Building and Development (CABDA), a local NGO, and with support from Amref Health Africa, an international Kenyan medical charity headquartered in Nairobi.
The volunteers are supplied with test kits and basic drugs to treat the disease at no cost to patients.
Treating malaria at the village level, among other interventions, has helped reduce the prevalence of the disease in Kakamega County from 38 percent in 2013 to 27 percent in 2016, according to County Health Executive Peninah Mukabane.
“This is one of the success stories that we are all proud of,” Ephy Imbali, CABDA’s executive director, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Cash – and Status
Refresher questions from trainers keep the volunteers on their toes, and ongoing training helps to keep their skills sharp, said Imbali. Experts from county health departments visit frequently to monitor the program.
Each volunteer receives a monthly motivational stipend of 2,000 Kenyan shillings ($20).
“Apart from the stipend, I have learned so many things in terms of health interventions which are not just important for my immediate family but also to the community where I live,” said Miriam Opechi, one community health volunteer and a mother of three children.
“I feel very happy whenever a patient gets well after my intervention. It gives me a complete satisfaction, and makes me feel a valuable member of the society, commanding a lot of respect from the villagers,” she said.
According to Imbali, the program makes it possible for residents of rural areas to get access to medicines even on weekends and holidays when public health facilities are usually closed.
Emisiko, Kakamega County’s health official, said the volunteers’ efforts reduce crowding at local health facilities, making it easier for health providers to attend to other important ailments.
But the work of community health volunteers is not always limited to malaria.
Simon Ondeyo, who hails from Emusala, said in a telephone interview that community health volunteers had treated his children for malaria a number of times.
But Ondeyo is himself is a tuberculosis patient who had given up on an arduous treatment regimen until community health volunteers began visiting him daily to ensure that he took his drugs.
Today he feels fully recovered — though is still completing his course of treatment.
“Without the volunteers, I do not know if I would be alive today,” he said.
…
Some European oil majors have made inroads into the emerging U.S. offshore wind energy market, aiming to leverage their experience of deepwater development and the crowded offshore wind arena at home.
Late entrants to the offshore wind game in Europe, which began with a project off Denmark 25 years ago and is now approaching maturity, they are looking across the Atlantic at what they view as a huge and potentially lucrative new market.
Norway’s Statoil has won a license to develop a wind farm of the New York coast, is marketing its new floating turbine to California and Hawaii and is retraining some oil and gas staff to work in its wind division.
Royal Dutch Shell bid for a lease offshore North Carolina earlier this year while Denmark’s DONG Energy, a wind energy pioneer which agreed to sell its oil and gas business in May, is in a Massachusetts-based offshore wind consortium, holds a lease off the New Jersey coast and has opened an office in Boston.
Offshore wind generation began in the United States late last year, ironically after the election of President Donald Trump. He is skeptical about climate change, complains about subsidies for renewable energy and battled against an offshore wind farm near his Scottish golf resort.
However, a string of federal seabed leases were awarded before Trump took office and more are planned. The investment needed to get projects going is one of the biggest
obstacles.
“Undeniably, offshore wind is a big boys’ game because it requires large amounts of capital because scale is such an important cost driver,” said Samuel Leupold chief executive of DONG Energy’s offshore wind business.
While DONG has shifted decisively towards renewables, Statoil and Shell are still firmly rooted in fossil fuels and other major European oil companies, in common with their U.S. counterparts, have so far steered clear of U.S. offshore wind.
Washington estimates its potential at 2,000 gigawatts (GW), many times anticipated capacity in Europe of 25 GW by 2020, but U.S. federal subsidies expire at the end of 2019 and while they may be renewed by Congress, that is no means certain.
Costs in Europe have fallen to a level that enabled DONG to place a zero subsidy bid earlier this year, but offshore wind farms are still multi-billion dollar projects. A push into deeper U.S. waters and the bigger turbines needed to compete without subsidies will keep price tags high.
Early Days
Trump signed an executive order in March expected to roll back his predecessor Barack Obama’s plan requiring states to slash carbon emissions from power plants. There is also no carbon price mechanism across the United States like those in Europe and elsewhere, although there are two regional ones.
U.S. oil companies have some investments in solar and onshore wind, but when it comes to offshore wind, many say they are waiting for a time when government support is not needed.
“Chevron supports renewables that are scalable and can compete without subsidies,” said Morgan Krinklaw, a spokesman for Chevron, which owns an onshore wind farm.
A report from analysts at Lazard in December pegged the cost of U.S. offshore wind at $118 MWh, around twice as much as onshore wind or combined-cycle gas turbines.
Asked to comment on that figure, Statoil, which is building its first floating wind turbine park off the Scottish coast, said costs were coming down and it was working to drive them down further, partly by redeploying existing staff.
The company has about 1,000 employees in the U.S. oil industry, said Stephen Bull, senior vice president of the company’s wind business. “There’s scope for us to plug into our existing oil and gas supply chain,” he added, referring to existing contracts with equipment and service suppliers.
Statoil spokeswoman Elin Isaksen said she did not expect any of its offshore wind projects in the U.S. to have begun construction by 2019 and that it was too early to quote numbers for the New York project, while acknowledging there was, as yet, no supply chain.
“We expect to see – and will help – the supply chain evolve rapidly in step with the broader industry as offshore wind takes hold in the U.S. in the coming years,” she said.
In Virginia, where Spanish utility Iberdrola’s Avangrid has secured an offshore wind licence, a rich marine engineering heritage is expected to help local companies gain work. Smaller European oil and gas firms are also gaining work.
JDR Cable Systems, a British company that has traditionally supplied subsea power lines to oil and gas platforms, earlier this year won a $275 million contract to provide electric cables for the largest U.S. offshore wind farm off the Maryland coast.
“We are well placed to develop business in the U.S. because of the existing relationships we have in Europe,” said John Price, global sales director for renewables at JDR.
State level decision-making on electricity procurement, the next stage of getting offshore wind off the ground, is helping.
Massachusetts, where DONG has secured a seabed license, last year issued a law requiring its utilities to buy up to 1.6 GW of offshore wind power by June 2027, with a tender to be held later this year.
DONG’s North America wind power president Thomas Bostrom said it would bid in the Massachusetts power purchase tender in December and would not comment on costs ahead of that. He too, emphasized his company was playing the long game.
“As excited as we are for offshore wind in the U.S., we are still in the early days of the industry,” Bostrom said.
…
They are known as the “dark Web” — encrypted corners of the internet that promise anonymity to customers who want to buy or sell illegal drugs, weapons and other contraband.
But these futuristic marketplaces recently became much less anonymous after an international sting captured the addresses of thousands of users and shut down two of the biggest sites: first AlphaBay in early July, and then Hansa Market at the end of the month.
Now, many users are wary of joining the next secretive marketplace, and that’s exactly the point.
“Don’t be stupid and hop on the next big market,” one user wrote on the Reddit discussion forum where users openly trade tips on dark Web markets. “It will most likely be completely run by [law enforcement].”
U.S. and European law enforcement authorities say the closures of AlphaBay and Hansa Market were the largest dark Web criminal marketplace takedown in history.
To dark Web users, the message is clear, said Europol Director Robert Wainwright: “You’re not as safe, as anonymous, as you think you are.”
The takedown
AlphaBay and Hansa were two of the top three criminal markets on the dark Web, sites that sprang up in the wake of drug market Silk Road’s takedown in 2013.
Hansa’s users numbered in the five digits; AlphaBay had more than 200,000 customers and 40,000 vendors, making it 10 times as large as Silk Road. It generated nearly $1 billion in sales.
The operation to shutter AlphaBay and Hansa grew out of several independent investigations, according to U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
The investigation into AlphaBay appears to have started as early as 2015 when undercover agents posing as customers started making small purchases on the site. In one case, an agent bought an ATM skimming device; in another, an undercover officer purchased a small quantity of drugs.
In December 2016, investigators got a break when they came across a priceless clue: the site operator’s personal email address. In the days after AlphaBay’s launch in December 2014, investigators learned, the administrator included his personal email address — Pimp_Alex__91@hotmail.com — in AlphaBay’s “welcome email” to new users singing up for the site’s discussion forum.
It was the kind of gaffe that had exposed Silk Road’s founder and would lead to the downfall of AlphaBay’s creator.
Traced to website designer
The email address was traced to Alexandre Cazes, a French-speaking Canadian website designer from Quebec. Born in 1991, Cazes had posted the email address on a tech forum as far back as 2008 and later used it to create PayPal and LinkedIn accounts.
Meanwhile, Europol provided Dutch law enforcement authorities with a lead on Hansa Market that would allow them to identify the site’s administrators and locate its servers in Lithuania, Germany and the Netherlands.
“When we knew the FBI was working on AlphaBay, we thought, ‘What’s better than if they come to us?’ ” Petra Haandrikman, leader of the Dutch investigative team that brought down Hansa, told cybersecurity blogger Brian Krebs.
Investigators then coordinated the timing of the two sites’ takedown. A plan was hatched: The Dutch would move in first, followed by the Americans.
On June 20, as German police arrested Hansa’s two German administrators in Germany, Dutch law enforcement authorities moved to seize control of the site. The takeover was seamless.
On July 4, the FBI took AlphaBay offline but made it look like an outage. Unaware that the FBI was on his tail, Cazes swung into action to bring the site back online.
When Thai police, assisted by FBI and U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents, raided Cazes’ house in Bangkok the next day, they found he’d contacted AlphaBay’s server host to request a reboot and was logged into its forum to answer comments by AlphaBay users.
On his unlocked, unencrypted laptop, agents found passwords for AlphaBay, its servers and other online identities associated with the site.
As rumors swirled that AlphaBay operators had absconded in what is known as an “exit scam,” authorities sought to quell the talk: AlphaBay was down for maintenance and would be up again soon, they posted on Reddit on July 6.
In the days that followed, the number of users on Hansa jumped 800 percent as AlphaBay users streamed in, according to Wainwright of Europol. To cope with the flood of orders, authorities temporarily closed registration to new users.
“There was a lot of frustration from ex-AlphaBay users that weren’t allowed to register on the site,” Haandrikman said.
Then on July 20, authorities pulled the plug. The Dutch shut down Hansa, putting up a banner saying the site had been “seized and controlled” since June 20. A nearly identical FBI banner went up on AlphaBay.
U.S. and European authorities went public with the news. Attorney General Jeff Sessions called AlphaBay’s seizure “the largest dark Web criminal market takedown in history.” Wainwright of Europol said the criminal dark Web had taken “a serious hit” and that there were “more of these operations to come.”
Intelligence yield
The intelligence yielded by the Hansa operation “has given us a new insight into the criminal activity of the darknet, including many of its leading figures,” Wainwright said.
Dutch authorities said that 10,000 foreign addresses of Hansa Market buyers had been identified and shared with Europol. Over 500 deliveries were stopped in the Netherlands alone. Europol sent “intelligence packages” on drug shipments to law enforcement agencies in 37 countries. Wainwright said the identified users would be subject to follow-up investigation by Europol and partner agencies.
Joseph Campbell, a former assistant FBI director, said the intelligence — users’ names and phone numbers, email and IP addresses, banking and wire transfer information — is invaluable to law enforcement authorities looking to dismantle criminal networks on the internet.
“They can utilize that to identify criminals, identify victims, identify sources of the contraband, sources of the funding, transiting of the currency, look for money laundering activities, where the funds coming from, are they going to offshore banks,” said Campbell, who is now a director at Navigant Consulting.
The next AlphaBay
Meanwhile, business is down on the dark web as shellshocked “AlphaBay refugees” lie low, waiting for the dust to settle. But sooner or later, they’ll find a new home.
“Just like a massive gang takedown in a city, some other group is going to come in, unless preventive activities take place, and fill that void even more,” Campbell said.
Still, he added, the operation is going to be “deterrent to some individuals.”
Law enforcement has long been criticized for playing catch up with criminals. Acting FBI Director Andy McCabe acknowledged the criticism but said that was “the nature of criminal work.”
“It never goes away,” McCabe said at a July 20 news conference. “You have to constantly keep at it. And you’ve got to use every tool in your toolbox. And that’s exactly what we’ll do.”
For the FBI, cybercrime represents “a high-priority threat,” Campbell said.
“So they’re going to continue to target their resources against this threat and work to identify where activities are taking place that are that are victimizing people,” he said.
…
Scientists searching for everything from oil and gas to copper and gold are adopting techniques used by companies such as Netflix or Amazon to sift through vast amounts of data, a study showed Tuesday.
The method has already helped to discover 10 carbon-bearing minerals and could be widely applied to exploration, they wrote in the journal American Mineralogist. “Big data points to new minerals, new deposits,” they wrote of the findings.
The technique goes beyond traditional geology by amassing data about how and where minerals have formed, for instance by the cooling of lava after volcanic eruptions. The data can then be used to help find other deposits.
“Minerals occur on Earth in clusters,” said Robert Hazen, executive director of the Deep Carbon Observatory at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington and an author of the study.
“When you see minerals together, it’s very like the way that humans interact in social networks such as Facebook,” he said.
Hazen said the technique was also like Amazon, which recommends books based on a client’s previous orders, or by media-streaming company Netflix, which proposes movies based on a customer’s past viewing habits.
“They are using vast amounts of data and make correlations that you could never make,” he told Reuters.
Lead author Shaunna Morrison, also at the Deep Carbon Observatory and the Carnegie Institution, said luck often played a big role for geologists searching for new deposits.
“We are looking at it in a much more systematic way,” she said of the project.
Among the 10 rare carbon-bearing minerals discovered by the project were abellaite and parisite-(La). The minerals, whose existence was predicted before they were found, have no known economic applications.
Gilpin Robinson of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), who was not involved in the study, said the USGS had started to collaborate with the big data project.
“The use of large data sets and analytical tools is very important in our studies of mineral and energy resources,” he wrote in an email.
The DCO project will also try to collect data to examine the geological history of the moon and Mars.
…
Apple’s iPhone may be ready for its next big act — as a springboard into “augmented reality,” a technology that projects life-like images into real-world settings viewed through a screen.
If you’ve heard about AR at all, it’s most likely because you’ve encountered “Pokemon Go,” in which players wander around neighborhoods trying to capture monsters only they can see on their phones. AR is also making its way into education and some industrial applications, such as product assembly and warehouse inventory management.
Now Apple is hoping to transform the technology from a geeky sideshow into a mass-market phenomenon. It’s embedding AR-ready technology into its iPhones later this year, potentially setting the stage for a rush of new apps that blur the line between reality and digital representation in new and imaginative ways.
“This is one of those huge things that we’ll look back at and marvel on the start of it,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told analysts during a Tuesday conference call. Many analysts agree. “This is the most important platform that Apple has created since the app store in 2008,” said Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research.
There’s just one catch: No one can yet point to a killer app for AR, at least beyond the year-old (and fading) fad of “Pokemon Go.” Instead, analysts argue more generally that AR creates enormous potential for new games, home-remodeling apps that let you visualize new furnishings and decor in an existing room, education, health care and more.
For the moment, though, we’re basically stuck with demos created by developers, including a “Star Wars”-like droid rolling past a dog that doesn’t realize it’s there; a digital replica of Houston on a table ; and a virtual tour of Vincent Van Gogh’s bedroom.
Augmenting the iPhone
At Apple, the introduction of AR gets underway in September with the release of iOS 11, the next version of the operating system that powers hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads around the world
Tucked away in that release is an AR toolkit intended to help software developers create new AR apps.
Those apps, however, won’t work on just any Apple device — only the iPhone 6S and later models, including the hotly anticipated next-generation iPhone that Apple will release this fall. The 2017 iPad and iPad Pro will run AR apps as well.
Apple isn’t the only company betting big on AR. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg talked up the technology at a company presentation in April, calling it a “really important technology that changes how we use our phones.” Apple rivals such as Google and Microsoft are also starting to deploy AR systems .
Waiting for Apple’s Next Big Thing
Apple has been looking for something to lessen its dependence on the iPhone since the 2011 death of its co-founder CEO Steve Jobs, the driving force behind the company’s innovation factory.
Cook thought he had come up with a revolutionary product when Apple began selling its smartwatch in 2015, but the Apple Watch remains a niche product.
For now, the iPhone remains Apple’s dominant product, accounting for 55 percent of Apple’s $45.4 billion in revenue during the three months ended in June. The total revenue represented a 7 percent increase from the same time last year. Apple earned $8.7 billion, up 12 percent from last year.
An AR Explosion … Maybe
Tim Merel, managing director of technology consulting firm Digi-Capital, believes Apple’s entry into AR will catalyze the field. His firm expects AR to mushroom into an $83 billion market by 2021, up from $1.2 billion last year.
That estimate assumes that Apple and its rivals will expand beyond AR software to high-tech glasses and other devices, such as Microsoft’s HoloLens headset.
For now, though, nothing appears better suited for interacting with AR than the smartphone. Google already makes AR software called Tango that debuted on one Lenovo smartphone last year and will be part of another high-end device from Asus this month.
But it will be years before Tango phones are as widely used as iPhones, or for that matter, iPads. Most of those devices are expected to become AR-ready when the free iOS 11 update hits next month.
Nearly 90 percent of Apple devices powered by iOS typically install the new software version when it comes out. Assuming that pattern holds true this fall, that will bring AR to about 300 million Apple devices that are already in people’s hands.
Beyond the iPhone
If the new software wins over more AR fans as Apple hopes, analysts figure that Apple will begin building AR-specific devices, too.
One obvious possibility might be some kind of AR glasses tethered to the iPhone, which would allow people to observe digital reality without having to look “through” a phone. Once technology allows, a standalone headset could render the iPhone unnecessary, at least for many applications.
Such a device could ultimately supplant the iPhone, although that isn’t likely to happen for five to 10 years, even by the most optimistic estimates.
…
Dozens of employees at a Wisconsin technology business were implanted with microchips Tuesday at the company’s headquarters.
Three Square Market, also known as 32M, said 41 of its 85 employees agreed to be voluntarily microchipped during a “chip party.” The chip, about the size of a grain of rice, was implanted into each person’s hand using a syringe.
Company officials said the implants were for convenience. The radio frequency identification chip provides a way for staffers to open doors, log into computers, unlock things and and perform other actions without using company badges or corporate log-ons.
The chip is not a tracker, nor does it have Global Positioning System capability in it, so the boss can’t track worker movements, company officials said.
Three Square Market said it was the first company in the United States to offer staff the technology similar to that used in contactless credit cards and in chips used to identify pets.
The implants, made by Sweden’s BioHax International, are part of a long-term test aimed to see whether the radio frequency identification chips could have broader commercial applications.
…
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization has called an emergency meeting this Wednesday in South Africa of all countries in the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) following an outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI). Aid workers are concerned what this could mean for food security in the region, where a fall armyworm invasion and drought have decimated crops in recent years.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says besides Zimbabwe, the other countries in the region hit by the avian influenza outbreak are the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa.
While officials haven’t released figures for the numbers of birds affected, the FAO said the outbreak is currently concentrated in one province of Zimbabwe and three in South Africa. Earlier this year, the FAO issued a warning to the SADC regional bloc, after the virus was detected in the Lake Victoria area in East Africa.
David Phiri, the head of FAO in Southern Africa, told VOA it is urgent to contain the outbreak.
“Avian influenza is a trans-boundary pest and disease, and it can move from one country to another, from one site to another. So there is a possibility, very easily that it could spread in those particular countries or even beyond the borders. For this reason, we need to control it and to also ensure that there is also prevention measures – both by the countries affected and other countries that have not been affected….”
“Poultry is what a lot of families depend on for protein. It is the cheapest protein. It [The outbreak] is also coming in the backdrop of two years of heavy droughts, last being affected by El Nino. That was a disaster itself for the sub-region. More recently, we have had an outbreak of fall armyworm which has affected some farmers very, very badly. So we cannot afford another very serious outbreak that could reduce food security and livelihoods in the sub-region,” he said.
Dr. Unesu Ushewokunze-Obatolu, chief veterinary officer of the Zimbabwe Ministry of Agriculture, has this advice for farmers.
“Just make sure that birds that are produced do not have contact with anything from outside that is not well-managed. Sometimes in traditional systems, people receive poultry as gifts and they put it among the poultry that they are having at home. That is very dangerous. Normally, some of these viruses can cause diseases in people, but this one is a bit different. That gives a bit of joy, but it is not easy to deal with because it spreads very quickly and it kills birds. So those doing businesses with high numbers of birds are very, very susceptible,” said Obatolu.
In recent years, African countries have responded to avian flu outbreaks by closing their borders to poultry imports and culling large numbers of exposed birds.
…
Senegal’s tech scene has been slow to get off the ground due to a lack of qualified coders. But a locally run company is trying to change that, while also helping young people find jobs.
Local tech start-ups are tackling day-to-day conveniences in the capital, Dakar. Firefly, a digital advertising company, places TV screens in public buses, but has struggled to find qualified web and mobile app developers in Senegal.
“They are trained in technologies we do not work with,” explains Mafal Lo, the co-founder of Firefly. “For example, all engineering schools in Dakar work in Java. We work mostly with PHP and Python, with new front-end technologies like Bootstrap. These are not things they learn in school.”
Until recently, that is.
At Volkeno, students learn web development, digital marketing or graphic design. At the end of the one-month training program, they will spend two months interning with a local company.
The classes are free. Volkeno is supported by companies like Firefly in exchange for hiring interns. At least 15 of those interns have landed full-time contracts.
CEO Abdoul Khadre Diallo initially set up Volkeno to provide tech services to local entrepreneurs. The training program was launched later when he realized none of his interns were sufficiently qualified.
“Here, young people are not encouraged to be interested in these skills. Most schools remain too classical. The training is too classical. You see schools where in five years, there is no decent practical training, in my opinion,” says IT professor Babacar Fall who taught the workshop in St. Louis.
There are efforts to change that. At a coding workshop in the northern city of St. Louis, high school students are introduced to coding and web development.
The Next Einstein Forum’s Africa Science Week is held in 13 African countries to promote interest in STEM fields, science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
“For me, the problem lies in the content of university courses,” Fall says. “Because you can start by teaching HTML, but then you evolve and teach HTML5. For me, we must simply update everything.”
Volkeno has registered more than 40 functioning start-ups in Dakar, all of which operate through websites and mobile applications.
“If you are trained in technology, you can find work after you graduate,” explains Fatim Sarah Kaita, a digital marketing trainee at Volkeno. “Because it is very difficult to find internships and everything here, and your relations play a big role. But for example, if you learn programming you can set up your own project, create an application. If you know digital marketing, you can do all the promotion yourself, so it is important to get training.”
The founder of Senegal’s next big start-up may be sitting right here in this room.
…
A report released this week found that climate change is part of the reasons why Indian farmers are increasingly destitute and committing suicide.
Each year, 130,000 people die by suicide in India, many of them farmers in significant debt. This review of three decades of weather and suicide data marks the first effort to quantify the role that climate change may play in this crisis in India, where the suicide rate has doubled since 1980. And it is one of the first attempts to study the relationship between suicide and climate change.
Tamma Carleton, a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote the report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She found that nearly 70 additional suicides would occur for each day and each degree Celsius of temperature rise. It’s important to note that the effect only occurred during the growing season.
In total, Carleton estimates that climate change has contributed to 59,300 deaths in India over the past three decades, and accounts for 6.8 percent of the increase. The report is a stark reminder that humans have already begun to see the effects of climate change.
There have been previous attempts to quantify death toll from climate change, which is generally harder to quantify than effects like displacement due to sea-level rise. A 2015 report commissioned by the governments of 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations concluded that climate change was already killing 400,000 people each year though impacts like heat waves, communicable disease, flooding, and decreased crop yields.
But most of these efforts have either been focused globally or on developed countries, says Marshall Burke, assistant professor at Stanford University, who was not associated with the study. “One of the nice contributions here is that it’s a broad scale look at the country that’s going to have the largest global population,” he told VOA.
In examining the data, Carleton looked for signals that farmers were able to adapt in any way. For example, if they were more sensitive to short-term warming than long-term warming, that could indicate that farmers had been able to adapt over the long-term. But she found no evidence of any adaptation, and says there is a larger lesson to be learned from this.
“There’s a lot of optimism often about the future of climate because there’s sort of an assumption or a hope that we will adapt as the temperatures gradually warm,” she told VOA. “It hasn’t looked like it’s been easy to adapt in the past and so it’s concerning when we think about what this might mean for the future.”
Burke said researchers have looked for adaptation in other ways and that those results were consistent with what Carleton found.
While researchers have extensively investigated the effect that climate change has on the environment, this report is one of the first to consider how climate change may be affecting human populations. “There’s a lot of basic things about human responses to changes in climate that we still don’t understand, and that’s why I think papers like this are so important,” said Burke.
In 2015, an Indian farmer died after hanging himself outside a protest in New Delhi, drawing national attention to the issue and forcing a response by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Protesters have since returned to the capital saying that campaign promises of crop insurance and loan forgiveness have not been met.
Carleton comes from a long line of farmers and as a child, most of her food came from the garden. “Growing my own food has been something that I’ve absolutely enjoyed… and it’s really heartbreaking to see that in many other parts of the world this occupation is so difficult and so stressful that some are choosing to commit suicide.”
…
The last time a total solar eclipse blacked out the sun in Oregon nearly 40 years ago, Gene Brick was working in a timber mill that refused to shut down for the spectacle.
The World War II veteran and amateur astronomer was devastated when his friends raved about experiencing a pitch-dark sky in the middle of the day.
“Everyone who was outside got to see it, and they enjoyed telling me all about it — and I was hurt by that,” said Brick, now 92. “But work is work, you know.”
Brick will get another chance to witness history this month, when a total solar eclipse begins its path across the U.S. in Oregon.
Coast to coast event
The one he missed in 1979 covered the Pacific Northwest and parts of Canada. This total eclipse will be visible from coast to coast across the nation — something that hasn’t happened in 99 years.
Brick plans to watch the event with his son using two telescopes: a fancy new one and one the two crafted together 53 years ago in their basement.
The men will peer at the sun through both during the eclipse’s totality, when the moon’s shadow completely covers the sun for just over two minutes. They also will use special filters to photograph the eclipse through the newer machine.
For Brick, who survived a kamikaze attack on the USS Drexler during the Battle of Okinawa, the opportunity is the experience of a lifetime.
“I always loved to look at the moon,” he said, after peering through the telescope the pair crafted in 1964. “I still do.”
Prime location for viewing
The Bricks will have a prime location for their father-son moment. The town of Madras, in central Oregon, is in the high desert, where summertime skies are often clear and cloudless. Up to 100,000 people are expected to flock to the town and surrounding Jefferson County for the Aug. 21 event, creating worries about overcrowding and traffic.
Brick’s son, Bartt Brick, is on the Madras City Council and will be on call during the eclipse. But taking the time to watch the event with his father is important to him. The elder Brick got the last four credits he needed for his high school diploma by signing up for the U.S. Navy and never attended college — but even in his 90s, he’s studying particle physics.
The pair decided to build the telescope when the younger Brick was 14, after finding a piece of glass in his late grandfather’s garage that was hand-ground into a concave lens for a telescope. Gene Brick worked long, hard days cutting logs at the mill then stayed up into the night working on the project with his teenage son.
“We’d bought ourselves a book on telescopes and a new dictionary, and after about — what — four or five months, we had a telescope,” Bartt Brick recalled on a recent summer day.
“I’d sleep about half the night,” his father added with a chuckle.
Spotted Ring Nebula
The two dragged the telescope outside on the night they finished, aimed it toward the heavens by propping it on a stepladder, and peered into the night sky until they spied the Ring Nebula, a dying star in a constellation about 2,000 light years from Earth.
“We were so excited, we ran in and told Mom. But at 2 o’clock in the morning, she wasn’t as thrilled as we were,” the younger Brick said.
Over the years, the telescope got a lot of use from the family and from a string of neighborhood children who lined up most evenings to peer at the moon.
But when the 1979 total solar eclipse came along, the elder Brick was working, the younger Brick no longer lived at home, and the telescope went unused.
When Bartt Brick moved back to Madras three years ago, the stars aligned for another crack at a shared celestial show.
Three generations will gather
On Aug. 21, three generations of Bricks will assemble. They’ll have a sleek black, new telescope equipped with a remote control and a USB cord for snapping photos through a computer.
But they’ll also have on hand the unassuming, unmounted metal cylinder they worked on so long ago.
“Dad’s had a message for me ever since I was 2 years old, and it was, ‘Be curious,’” Bartt Brick said. “And boy, did I learn how to be curious with this.”
…
Qatar filed a wide-ranging legal complaint at the World Trade Organization on Monday to challenge a trade boycott by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and United Arab Emirates, the director of Qatar’s WTO office, Ali Alwaleed al-Thani, told Reuters.
By formally “requesting consultations” with the three countries, the first step in a trade dispute, Qatar triggered a 60-day deadline for them to settle the complaint or face litigation at the WTO and potential retaliatory trade sanctions.
“We’ve given sufficient time to hear the legal explanations on how these measures are in compliance with their commitments, to no satisfactory result,” al-Thani said.
“We have always called for dialogue, for negotiations, and this is part of our strategy to talk to the members concerned and to gain more information on these measures, the legality of these measures, and to find a solution to resolve the dispute.”
The boycotting states cut ties with Qatar — a major global gas supplier and host to the biggest U.S. military base in the Middle East — on June 5, accusing it of financing militant groups in Syria, and allying with Iran, their regional foe. Doha denies these allegations.
The boycotting countries have previously told the WTO that they would cite national security to justify their actions against Qatar, using a controversial and almost unprecedented exemption allowed under the WTO rules.
They said on Sunday they were ready for talks to tackle the dispute, the worst rift between Gulf Arab states in years, if Doha showed willingness to deal with their demands.
The text of Qatar’s WTO complaint cites “coercive attempts at economic isolation” and spells out how they are impeding Qatar’s rights in the trade in goods, trade in services and intellectual property.
The complaints against Saudi Arabia and the UAE run to eight pages each, while the document on Bahrain is six pages.
No reaction
There was no immediate reaction from the three to Qatar’s complaint, which is likely to be circulated at the WTO later this week.
The disputed trade restrictions include bans on trade through Qatar’s ports and travel by Qatari citizens, blockages of Qatari digital services and websites, closure of maritime borders and prohibition of flights operated by Qatari aircraft.
The complaint does not put a value on the trade boycott, and al-Thani declined to estimate how much Qatar could seek in sanctions if the litigation ever reached that stage, which can take two to five years or longer in the WTO system.
“We remain hopeful that the consultations could bear fruit in resolving this,” he said.
The WTO suit does not include Egypt, the fourth country involved in the boycott. Although it has also cut travel and diplomatic ties with Qatar, Egypt did not expel Qatari citizens or ask Egyptians to leave Qatar.
Al-Thani declined to explain why Egypt was not included.
“Obviously all options are available. But we have not raised a consultation request with Egypt yet,” he said.
In its WTO case, Qatar would also draw attention to the impact the boycott was having on other WTO members, he added.
Many trade diplomats say that using national security as a defense risks weakening the WTO by removing a taboo that could enable countries to escape international trade obligations.
Al-Thani said governments had wide discretion to invoke the national security defense but it had to be subject to oversight: “If it is self-regulating, that is a danger to the entire multilateral trading system itself. And we believe the WTO will take that into consideration.”
Aviation group
Qatar also raised the boycott at a meeting of the U.N. International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) on Monday, al-Thani said.
In comments to Qatar-based Al Jazeera television later Monday, Qatar’s transport and information minister said the boycotting countries had discriminated against Doha in violation of an international agreement guaranteeing overflights.
“These countries have used this right arbitrarily and imposed it on aircraft registered only in the \state of Qatar,” Jassim bin Saif al-Sulaiti said.
Qatar in June asked Montreal-based ICAO to resolve the conflict, using a dispute resolution mechanism in the Chicago Convention, a 1944 treaty that created the agency and set basic rules for international aviation.
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain said Sunday that they would allow Qatari planes to use air corridors in emergencies.
…
When Luxembourg’s new law governing space mining comes into force on Tuesday, the country will already be working to make the science-fiction-sounding mission a reality, the deputy prime minister said.
The legislation will make Luxembourg the first country in Europe to offer a legal framework to ensure that private operators can be confident about their rights over resources they extract in space.
The law is based on the premise that space resources are capable of being owned by individuals and private companies and establishes the procedures for authorizing and supervising space exploration missions.
“When I launched the initiative a year ago, people thought I was mad,” Etienne Schneider told Reuters.
“But for us, we see it as a business that has return on investment in the short-term, the medium-term, and the long-term,” said Schneider, who is also Luxembourg’s economy minister.
Luxembourg in June 2016 set aside 200 million euros ($229 million) to fund initiatives aimed at bringing back rare minerals from space.
While that goal is at least 15 years off, new technologies are already creating markets that space mining could supply, said Schneider.
He said firms could soon make carrying materials to refuel or repair satellites economically feasible or supply raw materials to the 3-D printers now being tested on the International Space Station.
Lifting each kilogram of mass from Earth to orbit costs between 10,000 and 15,000 euros ($11,000 to $18,000), according to Schneider, but firms could cut these costs by recycling the debris of old satellites and rocket parts floating in space.
The small European country, best known for its fund management and private banking sector, will on Tuesday begin the work of making such deals, with the security of a legal framework in place, said Schneider.
Luxembourg has already managed to attract significant interest from pioneers in the field such as U.S. operators Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries, and aims to attract research and development projects to set up there.
A similar package of laws was introduced in the United States in 2015 but only applies to companies majority owned by Americans, while Luxembourg’s laws will only require the company to have an office in the country.
“I am already in discussions with fund owners for more than 1 billion euros which they want to dedicate to space exploration over here in Luxembourg,” Schneider said. “In 10 years, I’m quite sure that the official language in space will be Luxembourgish.”
…
Securing petrochemical plants and keeping chemicals out of the hands of terrorists were the topics of discussion at a recent Chemical Sector Security Summit in Houston, Texas. Security experts say the countries that are producing chemicals are shifting and that is one of many reasons developed and developing nations need to share best security practices. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee reports from Houston, a petrochemical hub in the United States.
…
Online searches about suicide and suicide methods spiked in the weeks following the release of Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why, a show that dramatizes the suicide of a teenage girl, according to a U.S. study released Monday.
Google searches about suicide were 19 percent higher than average in the 19 days following the show’s release on March 31, translating into 900,000 to 1,500,000 more searches, researchers reported in the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) Internal Medicine.
The study did not examine whether the actual number of suicides increased following the series’ release, but researchers said the internet search trend is troubling.
Google search volumes for things like “how to commit suicide,” “commit suicide” and “how to kill yourself” all decisively spiked during the 19-day window after the show’s release. A 2009 study suggested “suicide search trends are correlated with actual suicides,” according to a letter accompanying the study in JAMA.
Many mental health experts concluded that Netflix acted unethically by releasing the series. In it, a high school girl leaves behind 13 cassette tapes that explain the decision to take her own life. The series, which some argue glamorizes suicide, has been renewed for a second season.
The San Diego State University researcher who led the study, John Ayers, called on Netflix to reconsider the show and the effects it is having on its teenage-skewing audience.
“Psychiatrists have expressed grave concerns because the show ignores the World Health Organization’s validated media guidelines for preventing suicide,” Ayers told VOA in an email. “Tragically, it is unsurprising then that we find the show has increased suicidal thoughts.
“The show’s makers must swiftly change their course of action, including removing the show and postponing a second season. If not, subscribers should consider canceling their subscriptions so not to support programming that can cause premature death. I am no longer a subscriber.”
Currently, the most violent episodes are prefaced with warnings. Netflix has also created a website equipped with suicide hotlines for each of the countries in which it can be streamed. In a statement, Netflix defended 13 Reasons Why, saying that the show has spurred an important conversation.
“We always believed this show would increase discussions around this tough subject matter,” Netflix said. “This is an interesting quasi-experimental study that confirms this. We are looking forward to more research and taking everything we learn to heart as we prepare for season two.”
The study analyzed Google trends between March 31, 2017, and April 18. They halted their research on that date because former National Football League player Aaron Hernandez committed suicide on April 19, a development that might have skewed the data.
Researchers used the period between January and March 2017 as a control to determine the expected volume of suicide-related Google search queries.
…
Evidence of the role that a healthy gut plays in overall human health, both physical and even mental, is growing every day. To strengthen gut health, food researchers are trying to incorporate live bacteria, called probiotics, into all kinds of products, even beer.
…
By the end of this year, scientists may be able to create a fully artificial genome of yeast. This rapid development of genetic engineering may lead to the creation of much more complex organisms, even humans. Scientists say they are aware of the risks but also the enormous benefits.
…
A proposed new law that would require carmakers to build alarms for back seats is being pushed by child advocates who say it will prevent kids from dying in hot cars.
The law also would streamline the criminal process against caregivers who cause the deaths – cases that can be inconsistent but often heavier-handed against mothers.
The latest deaths came in Arizona on triple-digit degree days over the weekend, with two baby boys found forgotten in vehicles in separate incidents.
More than two dozen child and road safety groups are backing the Senate bill introduced last week aimed at preventing those kinds of deaths by requiring cars to be equipped with technology that can alert drivers if a child is left in the back seat once the vehicle is turned off. It could be a motion sensor that can detect a baby left sitting in a rear-facing car seat and then alert the driver, in a similar way that reminders about tire pressure, open doors and seat belts now come standard in cars.
“The technology would help because if you’re in a vehicle, your child is in the back seat, and you ignore that alarm: Go jail. Do not pass go. You had a chance,” said Janette Fennell of the advocacy group Kids and Cars. “You talk to any of the judges, they’ll tell you, they’re beyond the hardest things they have to deal with.”
Police say 1-year-old Josiah Riggins was in the car for hours Saturday, discovered dead only after his father drove roundtrip, twice, between their suburban home and a Phoenix church to drop off the mother and a sibling.
Zane Endress, who was 7 months old, died Friday in Phoenix after being left in the car in the driveway at home, as his usual daycare drop-off routine was lost by his grandparents.
“A simple sensor could save the lives of dozens of children killed tragically in overheated cars each year, and our bill would ensure such technology is available in every car sold in the United States,” bill sponsor Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, said in a statement. “It can take mere minutes on a hot day for a car to turn into a deathtrap for a small child.”
No charges have been filed against the caregivers in either Arizona case, as police say the death investigations are underway. Detectives will determine criminality based on the caregiver’s neglect, intent and mindset, while also being sensitive to the family’s deeply felt loss of a child, Phoenix police Sgt. Mercedes Fortune said.
“Those are the very difficult questions. Each case is different. I can’t tell you there’s a set answer for any case because there really isn’t,” Fortune said.
Kids and Cars, which has tracked more than 800 children who have died in this way since 1990, said criminal cases vary greatly, even when the circumstances are identical. Fennell said 90 percent of cases involve pure accidents, most likely a child forgotten by an adult.
In this month alone, a Tennessee couple was charged in the death of their 11-month-old daughter. A nearly 2-year-old boy was found dead in his father’s BMW in south Florida.
The nonprofit’s analysis shows charges are filed about half of the time, though very rarely are the parents found guilty objectively because it was proven that the child was left behind to be harmed. There is also a noted gender bias: Mothers are more often charged than fathers, and among the convicted, women caregivers receive longer prison sentences than men, the study found.
“I think society feels sort of like moms are in charge, and they’re supposed to do everything,” Fennell said. “It’s also a defense mechanism. If I make monsters out of these people, then it could never happen to me.”
The crocodile industry in Australia’s Northern Territory, a new report says, is worth more than four times the previous estimate of US $80 million. Officials hope the findings will give poorer aboriginal communities the chance to develop crocodile farming industries.
The saltwater creature is the world’s largest reptile. In Australia, they were once hunted to the brink of extinction, mainly for their skins, which were used to make durable leather goods and clothes.
They have been a protected species since the early 1970s, and their numbers in Australia’s tropical north have soared.
Economic opportunities
The Northern Territory regional government now sees economic opportunities for indigenous communities, where officials want to see an expansion of crocodile egg collection programs.
The eggs would help to stock crocodile farms owned by aboriginal groups, or traditional owners of land, which would supply reptile skins to big fashion houses including Louis Vuitton and Gucci, as well as supplying crocodile meat.
“We are looking at direct investments into rangers to make sure that we see on country a growth in the crocodile industry, so the harvesting of eggs, the growing of the crocodile locally and remotely, which is a very important and valuable use of traditional country done by traditional owners,” said Michael Gunner, the Northern Territory’s chief minister.
Hunting for sport?
An independent Australian MP, Bob Katter, has said that as crocodile numbers increase, so does the threat to people. He believes big game trophy hunters should be allowed to shoot them for sport. Katter has argued that crocodile safaris would boost the incomes of indigenous communities.
While the Northern Territory government supports crocodile safaris, the final decision rests with Australia’s federal government, which has refused to allow them. Conservationists have insisted that the shooting of iconic animals for profit in Australia is abhorrent and should never be allowed.
…
Apple, Inc. has confirmed that it is removing some applications providing virtual personal networks, or VPNs, from its China App Store, to comply with new Chinese regulations — a move critics say is capitulating to internet censorship.
Apple confirmed the move in an email to National Public Radio on Saturday, after several VPN providers announced that their apps had been removed from the China App Store.
Software made outside China can sometimes be used to get around China’s domestic internet firewalls that block content that the government finds objectionable. Critics call China’s “great firewall” one of the world’s most advanced censorship systems.
VPN apps pulled
“Earlier this year,” Apple said, “China’s MIIT [Ministry of Industry and Information Technology] announced that all developers offering VPNs must obtain a license from the government. We have been required to remove some VPN apps in China that do not meet the new regulations.”
App maker Express VPN said in a blog post that its app was removed from the China Apple Store, and it noted that “preliminary research indicates that all major VPN apps for iOS [Apple operating systems] have been removed.”
The statement continued, “We’re disappointed in this development, as it represents the most drastic measure the Chinese government has taken to block the use of VPNs to date, and we are troubled to see Apple aiding China’s censorship efforts.”
Another company, Star VPN, also announced it had been contacted by Apple with the same notice.
China successful
Golden Frog, a company that makes security software, told the New York Times that its app also had been taken down from the China App Store.
“We gladly filed an amicus brief in support of Apple and their backdoor encryption battle with the FBI, so we are extremely disappointed that Apple has bowed to pressure from China to remove VPN apps without citing any Chinese law or regulation that makes VPN illegal,” said Sunday Yokubaitis, president of the company.
The Times reports that this is the first time China has successfully used its influence with a major foreign technology platform such as Apple, to flex its muscle with software makers.
China is Apple’s largest market outside the United States.
…
Silicon Valley is the tech industry’s epicenter, but what is the epicenter of Silicon Valley?
It might just be Coupa Café in downtown Palo Alto, Calif.
For the tech community, this café is a meeting place of the who’s who of Silicon Valley, where the likes of the late Steve Jobs of Apple, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google co-founder Sergey Brin have all been spotted. Up-and-coming startup founders are able to buy their lattes with the digital currency Bitcoin before their pitch sessions with leading industry venture capitalists.
The café is so well known among techies that a cup with the Coupa logo was featured as a prop in the 2010 film The Social Network.
“I remember seeing Mark Zuckerberg sitting here and having meetings and people coming up,” said Eric Sokol, an associate professor of medicine at Stanford University.
While Silicon Valley is famous for companies such as Facebook, Twitter and other billion-dollar empires built in cyberspace, some folks in the valley still believe real-world human connections can make a difference.
Making connections
Just from frequenting the café, Sokol says, he became an adviser to a health care related startup and a new venture capitalist fund. Both came about when other patrons at the café overheard conversations he was having, he said.
That’s the kind of “crazy nest of connections” that can occur at Coupa, he said.
The Venezuelan-born Jean Paul Coupal founded the café with his mother and sister in 2004 with the hopes of bringing a bit of his homeland to Silicon Valley — Venezuelan coffee, crepes and Venezuelan arepas. The family puts its touch on all aspects of the business — Coupal’s sister and mother personally painted each of the eight cafés.
While the beautifully decorated walls and rich cuisine may be what initially attracted the tech community, the café’s tech focus has kept it in the vanguard of this café-saturated region.
In 2013, Coupa Cafe began accepting Bitcoins, a digital payment system, allowing customers to pay for their lattes and arepas with the currency.
“We want to be part of the technology,” Coupal said.
The pre-office
And there’s another perk: The café allows patrons to stay all day, which makes it attractive for entrepreneurs who are in the pre-office-space stage.
“A lot of the startups in the area come and they like to work at Coupa, coding all day,” Coupal said. “We’ve seen a lot of products that got developed at Coupa.”
With Stanford and other colleges nearby, the possibility of a life-changing chance encounter is not lost on local students interested in tech.
“I am currently teaching myself JavaScript here at Coupa right now,” said Katie Kennedy, a local community college student. “If someone happened to look over my shoulder and saw what I was doing, I would definitely not say no to any help.”
Now, there are eight Coupa Cafe locations. This one, the original on Ramona Street, is in a building from the 1930s.
“The food’s good, the coffee’s good,” Sokol said. “I wish I had stock, but I don’t in Coupa. And I don’t know, it just has the right atmosphere, the right mix of people. It’s got an energy about it, I guess.”
Cafe Coupa shows that being at the right place at the right time can change a café’s fate as much as a techie’s life.
…
The Illinois Department of Natural Resources is reintroducing a living fossil into its waterways. The alligator gar is a fish so old, it’s thought to have evolved during the Early Cretaceous period, more than a 100 million years ago.
Alligator gar are the second largest freshwater fish in North America. Illinois fisheries biologist Randy Sauer says they disappeared from the state’s waterways in the 1990s, although they continued to thrive in southern U.S. rivers.
“We want to restore the ecosystem because it is important to have top predators to balance the species below them in order to keep check on some more abundant species,” he said.
Beyond that, alligator gar make for great big game fishing. The diamond-scaled animals, which breathe both air and water, can grow up to 2.7 meters and weigh more than 136 kilograms. In fact, Sauer says, their large size is what did them in originally in the state.
“It was pretty much extirpated out of its range because of misconceptions about it eating sport fish,” he said. “People would target it and put bounties on it.”
Everything is on the menu
The alligator gar is an opportunistic feeder, meaning it will eat whatever it encounters — from an occasional turtle or small duck to invasive species such as Asian and silver carp. Sauer hopes the re-introduction program will help the state’s efforts to control the carp.
Because gar can live up to 60 years, this program is going to take decades to fully expand.
“The (female) alligator gar does not sexually mature until 11 years, and the male not till 6 or 7 years,” Sauer said, “so at the outset of this project we’re probably going to stock more heavily than 10 or 20 years down the road when hopefully these fish will find each other and start doing the job on their own.”
To date, 7,000 alligator gar fingerlings have been fitted with tiny transponder tags so that they can be tracked and then released into Illinois waterways. As it rains and floods, biologists expect some of the fish to follow the rivers all the way down to join other populations in Louisiana and Texas.
…
The Illinois Department of Natural Resources is reintroducing a living fossil into its waterways. The alligator gar is a fish so old, it’s thought to have evolved during the Early Cretaceous period, over a hundred million years ago. Erika Celeste reports from Kaskaskia River State Fish and Wildlife Area.
…