Hasta La Gadget!

Geologists have discovered possible evidence of ancient life in rocks that are over 3.7 billion years old. It’s an extraordinary find that, if confirmed, would make the fossils within the oldest we have on Earth.

Elephants in sub-Saharan Africa have been dying at a rate that staggered researchers who attempted to count them in a unique census. 

The savanna elephant population decreased by 30 percent between 2007 and 2014 in 15 countries, according to the Great Elephant Census released on Wednesday. A team of researchers estimated that there are only 352,271 such elephants in the counties surveyed. More than 1 million may have roamed the continent in the 1970s, according to the report published in the journal PeerJ.

Even more troubling is that the rate of decline is accelerating and rose to 8 percent in 2014, according to the survey.

“If we can’t save the African elephant, what is the hope of conserving the rest of Africa’s wildlife?” said Mike Chase, the principal investigator and the founder of Elephants Without Borders. 

So what’s killing Africa’s elephants? The drop-off is “primarily due to poaching,” according to researchers. Poachers slaughter the giants for their tusks, and much of the ivory gets illegally sold in China and the United States. The U.S. announced nearly a complete ban on the African ivory trade earlier this year.

Killing elephants for their ivory has become more common, especially in parts of eastern and western Africa, the researchers said. Poachers kill about 100 elephants per day, according to conservation groups. CNN traveled with Chase and encountered multiple elephant carcasses stripped of their tusks.

The loss of natural habitat for elephants also factored into the dramatic reduction in their numbers, the census report said. 

Areas colored red in the map below show pockets where the death of elephants has been most acute. Large threatened areas are in Tanzania, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Chad. Bands of green in Kenya, Zambia and other parts of Tanzania show places where elephants have increased. Botswana has a large region with a stable population. 

Attempts at conserving elephants have been stymied by limited and inaccurate information about their true population, the report said. Angola, one of the countries that was studied, had never counted its elephants, according to The Washington Post. Successful counts in South Sudan and the Central African Republic were impossible because of political violence. 

Census-takers looked for elephants by flying low overhead. The team spent 10,000 hours in the air. They concluded that they accounted for at least 93 percent of the savanna elephants in the 15 countries surveyed. Microsoft founder Paul Allen funded their work. 

“The Great Elephant Census is the most advanced and thorough assessment of elephant numbers ever,” according to National Geographic.

Most savanna elephants lived in protected areas, though wildlife parks are by no means a guarantee to their safety. At a game reserve in Tanzania and another in Mozambique, the elephant population has dropped by 75 percent in the last 10 years, according to CNN. Still, the census reported that 84 percent of the pachyderms live on protected ground and 16 percent are outside supposedly secure territory. 

Forest elephants, which dwell in central and western Africa, were excluded from the project because they’re too difficult to see.

Forest elephants are in dire straits too, however. It would take 90 years for their population to rebound from poaching and habitat destruction, according to a report published by the Wildlife Conservation Society.

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Book Review – Jackie K Cooper
DARKTOWN by Thomas Mullen

Some books educate, some books entertain, Thomas Mullen’s DARKTOWN is the rare book that does both. Mullen retraces the history of Atlanta in 1948 when eight black men were hire to be police officers. On that branch of history Mullen hangs a tale about a murder that occurs in the Negro section of Atlanta and the effect it has on two of the new policemen. It is a story that shocks as well as shames the reader.

Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith are police officers who are assigned to patrol the area of Atlanta known as “darktown.” The hiring of eight black men by the city of Atlanta as policeman has been celebrated by some as being a true step in the right direction, and it might have been if there had not been such harsh restrictions on what these men could do. They did not have squad cars; they had to operate out of the basement of the YMCA building; they had to enter the “real” police headquarters through the back door if their duties required them to come there, and they were constantly harassed by the white policemen.

Boggs and Smith accept all of this, or at least abide it, until they learn of the murder of a young black woman. They had seen her on a certain night when they had stopped the white driver of a vehicle which had rammed a street light. This young woman was in the car and looked like she had been beaten. The two men had ben unable to arrest the white driver but they did not forget the woman they had seen.

When they learn of her death they are determined to bring her killer to justice, a feat that is almost impossible. DARKTOWN presents the story of this investigation and its outcome. In doing so it highlights the horrors of being a person of color in the 1940’s South.

Mullen masterfully creates the world in which these two officers live. He brings to the reader the stinging heat, the bitter smells, the glare of the sun and the grime of the red dirt that is natural to this section of the country. Even better he gets inside the souls of the oppressed and the minds of the oppressors. You understand the hatred from both sides as the war for equality is fought. Power is in the hands of the whites but determination resides in the hearts of the blacks.

DARKTOWN is a novel that holds up a mirror to the vestiges of discrimination that remain alive and well today. It does this by forcing the reader to see all the blatant bigotry and casual heartlessness that dominated society in the late 1940’s. It is difficult to think this type of cruelty thrived in America just a few decades ago.

It is to Mullen’s credit he is able to show the harshness of the life Boggs and Smith endure, yet somehow imbues their story with a small glimmer of hope. That is what makes the reading of their story bearable, and also makes it impossible to put down.

You should read DARKTOWN in order to understand the past, but more importantly to understand the present.

DARKTOWN is published by Atria Books. It contains 384 pages and sells for $26.00.

Jackie K Cooper
www.jackiekcooper.com

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

The value of internet celebrity is hard to assess, but a new motion filed by the owners of the animal star known as Grumpy Cat seeks to do just that. In it, the holders of the “GRUMPY CAT” trademark have asked a court to triple a requested $600,000 award over alleged copyright infringement of a goddamn cat.

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According to multiple rumors, Apple is said to be planning on introducing 256GB as a storage option for its iPhones this year. This has been supported by the fact that Apple also recently introduced a 2TB tier to its iCloud plan, which would obviously go a long way for 256GB users who want to completely backup their device.

Now thanks to the folks at Techtastic.nl (via Apple Insider), they have managed to get their hands on what appears to be packaging information for the iPhone 7 Plus, and as you can see in the image above, it shows that the iPhone 7 Plus will come with a 256GB storage option. Now we’re not sure if this is just limited to the Plus model, but it would be unlike Apple to split up their products that way, so maybe not.

Also what’s interesting is that this packaging information also confirms that the iPhone 7 will be ditching the headphone jack. It also confirms that the iPhone 7 will come with new pair of headphones with a Lightning connector, as well as a Lightning to 3.5mm adapter, meaning that right out of the box you won’t be inconvenienced with a lack of compatible headphones, but you also have the choice of using your existing headphones without having to buy the accessory yourself.

Admittedly we are bit bummed that it did not come packaged with wireless earphones, but maybe that would have been a bit too expensive for Apple. In any case take it with a grain of salt, but check back with us next week for the official details.

iPhone 7 Plus Packaging ‘Confirms’ 256GB Storage Option , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.