The European Investment Bank today formally agreed to provide €100m to the Irish government for capital investment in schools across Ireland over the next 2 years.
The initiative was launched in Dublin by Ruairí Quinn, TD, Minister for Education and Skills and European Investment Bank President Werner Hoyer.
The programme will build more than 550 new classrooms, and involve modernisation and construction in 35 primary and 12 secondary schools. The 25 year loan from the European Investment Bank, the long-term lending institution of theEuropean Union, will form part of the Irish government’s €219m school expansion programme to be managed by theDepartment of Education and Skills
Mr Quinns said, “The funding to be provided by the EIB will support the implementation of the five year construction programme which I announced earlier this year. The long-term loan provides a more efficient and cost effective means of funding this programme than would otherwise be possible. It is a very welcome development and is good news for the taxpayer, not to mention pupils and teachers across the nation.”
“Without a good education, Europe’s children will not be able to compete in a global economy. This new funding, to provide thousands of new places in Irish schools, will directly benefit children across Ireland and improve the quality of their education. The European Investment Bank is pleased to work closely with the Department of Education and Skills to address the pressing need to increase school capacity in Ireland to match increased pupil numbers.” said European Investment Bank President Werner Hoyer.
The scheme will significantly improve teaching conditions and provide new facilities for an 15,500 primary pupils and 6,650 secondary students.
Increased enrolment capacity is necessary given the baby boom over the last decade and expected need for 70,000 additional school places over the next seven years. The school investment programme will focus on ensuring additional capacity in areas of rapid population growth based on projections by the Department of Education’s Forward Planning Section.
Construction works supported by the initiative started in January and are expected to be completed by December 2014.
The funding has been agreed with the National Treasury Management Agency, NTMA, which acts on behalf of the Irish State as for all Exchequer borrowing. The Department of Education and Skills will managethe construction programme and supervise operation of the schools.
A high-level European Investment Bank is in Dublin for a two day official visit. This includes meetings with the Taoiseach and ministers of Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Education.
Tori the smoking orang-utan has to kick the habit
Tori is a teenager with a bad habit. The 15-year-old orang-utan has been smoking cigarettes at an Indonesian zoo for a decade, but she’s about to go cold turkey.
Zookeepers said on Friday that they plan to move Tori away from visitors who regularly throw lit cigarettes into her cage so they can watch and photograph her puffing away and flicking ashes on the ground.
The primate mimics human behavior, holding cigarettes casually between her fingers while taking long drags and blowing bursts of smoke out her nostrils to the delight of visitors.
Taru Jurug Zoo director Lili Krisdianto said the move was aimed to protect four endangered orangutans at the 14-hectare (35-acre) zoo in the Central Java town of Solo.
Results of a medical test are expected Saturday to determine how much Tori’s smoking has affected her health, said Hardi Baktiantoro of the Borneo-based Center for Orangutan Protection, which is helping to coordinate the intervention. A mesh cover will initially be placed over Tori’s cage, and later she will be moved to a small island away from the public, he said.
Several Indonesian zoos have come under scrutiny following animal deaths, including a giraffe that died in the long-troubled Surabaya Zoo in March with an 18-kilogram (40-pound) ball of plastic in its stomach after years of ingesting trash thrown into its enclosure by visitors.
Indonesia is also one of the last remaining countries where tobacco companies face few restrictions on selling, advertising and promoting products long banned elsewhere.
More than 60 percent of all men light up and a third of the country’s entire population smokes.
First feathered dinosaur found in Germany not closely related to birds
Fossilized bones of a gigantic theropod dinosaurs are put on display for the media in Beijing.
The discovery of a new species of feathered dinosaur in southern Germany is further changing the perception of how predatory dinosaurs looked.
The fossil of Sciurumimus albersdoerferi, which lived about 150 million years ago, provides the first evidence of feathered theropod dinosaurs that
are not closely related to birds.
are not closely related to birds.
1st feathered dinosaur not closely related to birds found in Germany
Fossilized bones of a gigantic theropod dinosaurs are put on display for the media in Beijing.
The discovery of a new species of feathered dinosaur in southern Germany is further changing the perception of how predatory dinosaurs looked.
The fossil of Sciurumimus albersdoerferi, which lived about 150 million years ago, provides the first evidence of feathered theropod dinosaurs that are not closely related to birds.
“This is a surprising find from the cradle of feathered dinosaur work, the very formation where the first feathered dinosaur Archaeopteryx was collected over 150 years ago,” said Mark Norell, chair of the Division of Palaeontology at the American Museum of Natural History and an author on the new paper along with researchers from Bayerische Staatssammlung fur Palaontologie und Geologie and the Ludwig Maximilians University.
Theropods are bipedal, mostly carnivorous dinosaurs. In recent years, scientists have discovered that many extinct theropods had feathers. But this feathering has only been found in theropods that are classified as coelurosaurs, a diverse group including animals like T. rexand birds.
Sciurumimus—identified as a megalosaur,nota coelurosaur— is the first exception to this rule. The new species also sits deep within the evolutionary tree of theropods, much more so than coelurosaurs, meaning that the species that stem from Sciurumimus are likely to have similar characteristics.
“All of the feathered predatory dinosaurs known so far represent close relatives of birds,” said palaeontologist Oliver Rauhut, of the Bayerische Staatssammlung fur Palaontologie und Geologie. Sciurumimus is much more basal within the dinosaur family tree and thus indicates that all predatory dinosaurs had feathers,” Rauhut stated.
The fossil, which is of a babySciurumimus, was found in the limestones of northern Bavaria and preserves remains of a filamentous plumage, indicating that the whole body was covered with feathers. The genus name of Sciurumimus albersdoerferi refers to the scientific name of the tree squirrels, Sciurus, and means, “squirrel-mimic”-referring to the especially bushy tail of the animal.
The species name honours the private collector who made the specimen available for scientific study.
“Under ultraviolet light, remains of the skin and feathers show up as luminous patches around the skeleton,” said co-author Helmut Tischlinger, from the Jura Museum Eichstatt.
Sciurumimusis not only remarkable for its feathers. The skeleton, which represents the most complete predatory dinosaur ever found in Europe, allows a rare glimpse at a young dinosaur. Apart from other known juvenile features, such as large eyes, the new find also confirmed other hypotheses.
“It has been suggested for some time that the lifestyle of predatory dinosaurs changed considerably during their growth. Sciurumimus shows a remarkable difference to adult megalosaurs in the dentition, which clearly indicates that it had a different diet,” Rauhut said.
Adult megalosaurs reached about 20 feet in length and often weighed more than a ton. They were active predators, which probably also hunted other large dinosaurs. The juvenile specimen of Sciurumimus, which was only about 28 inches in length, probably hunted insects and other small prey, as evidenced by the slender, pointed teeth in the tip of the jaws.
“Everything we find these days shows just how deep in the family tree many characteristics of modern birds go, and just how bird-like these animals were,” Norell said. “At this point it will surprise no one if feather like structures were present in the ancestors of all dinosaurs,” he added.
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