The thigh bone of a giant dinosaur was found this week by French paleontologists at an excavation site in southwestern France where remains of some of the largest animals that ever lived on land have been dug up since 2010.The two-meter long femur at the Angeac-Charente site is thought to have belonged to a sauropod, herbivorous dinosaurs with long necks and tails which were widespread in the late Jurassic era, over 140 million years ago.”This is a major discovery,” Ronan Allain, a paleontologist at the National History Museum of Paris told Reuters. “I was especially amazed by the state of preservation of that femur.””These are animals that probably weighed 40 to 50 tons,” he said.Allain said scientists at the site near the city of Cognac have found more than 7,500 fossils of more than 40 different species since 2010, making it one of the largest such finds in Europe. …

American cities including Atlanta, Miami and New Orleans that set goals to slash planet-warming greenhouse emissions are lacking the data to measure their progress, scientists said in a new report.Some 40% of U.S. cities that committed to cutting emissions are unable to assess their programs because costly tallies of their emissions are inadequate, said the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE), a nonprofit organization.”City resources are always tight,” said David Ribeiro, the report’s lead author and a senior research manager at ACEEE.The lack of data could also be due to emission-cutting goals having only recently been adopted, or to insufficient political will, Ribeiro said.Of the 75 cities surveyed, just over 20% had pledged to cut emissions and were able to measure advances with recently produced evidence.Cities account for two-thirds of the world’s energy demand and 70% of energy-related emissions, the report said, citing cited International Energy Agency data.Plans to …

Claude Mabowa Sasi had lost his mother, a brother and a sister to Ebola. Instead of fearing death when he, too, was diagnosed with the disease, the young man had a different worry: How would he complete his college entrance exams?It had been his mother’s greatest hope that Mabowa would go to college. To do so would require passing the secondary school baccalaureate, or “bac.”But the exams are held only once a year in Congo, and the 21-year-old Mabowa was being held in medical isolation, unable to sit in the same room with other test-takers.So the medical staff members caring for him at an Ebola treatment center run by the Alliance for International Medical Action, or ALIMA, came up with a solution.They found a school official willing to proctor the exam as Mabowa took it safely behind a window. The papers were passed to Mabowa without touching him. After finishing, …

Patients are about to be enrolled in the first study to test a gene-editing technique known as CRISPR inside the body to try to cure an inherited form of blindness.People with the disease have healthy eyes but lack a gene that converts light into signals to the brain that enable sight.   The experimental treatment aims to supply kids and adults with a healthy version of the gene they lack, using a tool that cuts or “edits” DNA in a specific spot. It’s intended as a onetime treatment that permanently alters the person’s native DNA.Two companies, Editas Medicine and Allergan, will test this in up to 18 people around the United States, including Massachusetts Eye and Ear in Boston, starting this fall.   …

A Beijing-based rocket developer sent two satellites into orbit Thursday, becoming China’s first private company to successfully complete an orbital launch, state media said.   The launch took place from a satellite center in northwest China on Thursday afternoon, Xinhua state news agency reported. Xinhua said the SQX-1 Y1, a four-stage small commercial carrier rocket, was developed by the firm i-Space. i-Space said in a statement about the launch that it marked a “new chapter” for China’s private commercial space industry. “i-Space was formed in the era of the nation trying to become a space power,” the statement said.   China’s space program has developed rapidly. When it conducted its first crewed mission in 2003, it became the third country – behind just Russia and the U.S. – to put humans into space using its own technology.   Another Beijing-based firm, Landspace, attempted to deploy a private satellite-carrying rocket last October, but …

Updated on July 25, at 12:56 am EDT.Elton John on Wednesday hosted a celebrity-packed gala that raised more than $6 million to fight HIV/AIDS in Kenya, thanks partly to auctions of a luxury car and an autographed piano used in the singer’s “Rocketman” movie musical.The British singer-songwriter, on a break from his farewell world tour, welcomed the likes of Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, The Who guitarist Pete Townshend, actress Joan Collins and Taron Egerton, who plays John in “Rocketman,” to a villa in Cap d’Antibes in France.”We’re here for the Elton John AIDS foundation, our first south of France fundraiser, hopefully to raise money for people who desperately need it in our fight against HIV and AIDS,” John told reporters.Martin performed “Viva La Vida” and was joined on stage by John for a performance of “I’m Still Standing” and “Rocketman.” Guests bid on auction items ranging from a limited-edition luxury …

Scientists at IBM’s Zurich-based research lab and the University of Zurich have used machine learning to analyze millions of cells from breast cancer tissue of 140 tumors, creating what they describe as an ‘atlas’ of these tumors. Faith Lapidus reports. …

Until his last breath, Salomon Nduhi Kambale insisted he had been poisoned by someone and that was the reason he was vomiting blood. The 30-year-old man wouldn’t give community health teams his phone number, and when they found it, he hung up on them.Health workers were desperate to persuade him to get vaccinated for Ebola after a friend fell ill with the lethal and highly contagious disease.But within days, Nduhi was dead. His widow and their four young children were given his positive Ebola test result and a chilling warning from a team of health workers: “If you don’t accept vaccination, you can prepare to die.”Deep distrust — along with political instability and deadly violence — has severely undermined efforts by public health authorities in Congo to curb the outbreak by tracing and vaccinating those who may have come into contact with infected people.Health experts agree the experimental Ebola vaccine …

Earth’s rapid warming in the late 20th century was far more widespread than any temperature variations during the previous 2,000 years, according to a study published on Wednesday that shows how profoundly humans have altered the climate.The study crunched data covering two millennia from almost 700 sources ranging from tree rings and coral to sediments and ice cores.Published in the journal Nature, it found that previous major climate events were confined to certain areas, and not global phenomena as scientists had previously assumed, said one of its co-authors, Columbia University climate scientist Nathan Steiger.”The main takeaway is that climate variability in the contemporary period is very different than what’s happened in the past 2,000 years,” he said.Natural phenomenon?Some people who question whether burning coal, oil and gas is causing global warming point to evidence of prolonged shifts in climatic conditions in past centuries to argue that today’s higher temperatures may …

Hundreds of Afghans, weary of war and unsure of the future, have joined a letter-writing campaign to share their feelings with the powerful few who will decide on peace with the Taliban and, with it, the fate of their country.The letters from different parts of Afghanistan express a tangled mix of confusion, resignation and fear.“I live in grief but I smile. People think I am brave but I have no choice,” wrote one unidentified person.The letters, part of a project called Dard-e-Dil (a painful heart) are addressed to U.S. diplomats, the Taliban and government officials.They are being written as high-level talks are underway to find a political settlement to end a war that has raged on for 18 years.“I am writing with a hope that we have a better life in Kabul, we live amidst so much tension, I can do nothing to change the situation but I am still …

Australian researchers are looking to Africa and the Middle East for drought- and heat-resistant crops as many grain farmers face another failed season.Key farming regions in southern Queensland are forecast to miss their third winter grain crop in a row. The national crop this year is expected to be about 10 percent below the 10-year average.Australia’s Grains Research and Development Corporation, the GRDC, is carrying out a global search for climate-proof grains. GRDC’s northern panel chairman, John Minogue, says crops in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East and Africa could be adapted to help farmers become more resilient in the face of a warming climate and less rainfall.”We have got people in Syria, in Africa, in all of the parts of the world, which have historically had these crops grown for thousands of years,” he said. “We have a lot of investments in people on behalf of the grain …

Brain scans show “significant neuroimaging differences” in 40 U.S. embassy employees affected by mysterious neurological symptoms in Cuba in late 2016, according to a study released Tuesday.The diplomats had significantly smaller amounts of white brain matter, and markedly lower levels of connectivity between parts of the brain responsible for sight and hearing, said the study, published by the Journal of American Medicine. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania performed the magnetic resonance imaging scans on the personnel between August 2017 and June 2018. They then compared the images to results from 48 controls.Employees at the time reported hearing loud buzzing, “piercing squeals” and “mechanical-sounding” noises, in what the Trump administration termed a “sonic attack.” Diplomats said they suffered persistent ear pain, headaches and problems with memory, concentration, balance, sleeping and more.Many were out of work at least briefly,  with half going on sleep or headache medication and three receiving hearing aids, according to …

Behind America’s late leap into orbit and triumphant small step on the moon was the agile mind and guts-of-steel of Chris Kraft, making split-second decisions that propelled the nation to once unimaginable heights.Kraft, the creator and longtime leader of NASA’s Mission Control, died Monday in Houston, just two days after the 50th anniversary of what was his and NASA’s crowning achievement: Apollo 11’s moon landing. He was 95.Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr. never flew in space, but “held the success or failure of American human spaceflight in his hands,” Neil Armstrong, the first man-on-the-moon, told The Associated Press in 2011.Kraft founded Mission Control and created the job of flight director — later comparing it to an orchestra conductor — and established how flights would be run as the space race between the U.S. and Soviets heated up. The legendary engineer served as flight director for all of the one-man Mercury flights …