Preservationists, though, are still sorting out the fate of ancient texts that had been housed at Timbuktu’s Ahmed Baba Institute.

The rebels torched the Institute as they fled the city, and many initial reports indicated that tens of thousands of priceless documents had been destroyed.

But reporter Vivienne Walt, who has been following the story for Time Magazine, says that her sources say many of the documents were safely taken out of the Institute before the rebels set fire to the building.

“I had been told for months that the documents were safe,” Walt says. “Last night, most of my sources were saying that they had hauled out almost all of the documents from Ahmed Baba Institute, and had hidden them in a safe house elsewhere.”

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Marco Werman: In Mali, residents of Timbuktu are celebrating the liberation of their ancient city. French and Malian troops reclaimed the city yesterday. It had been under the control of Islamist rebels for the past 10 months. Preservationists though continue to worry abut the fate of ancient texts that have been housed at Timbuktu’s Ahmed Baba Institute. The rebels torched in the institute as they fled the city, possibly destroying tens of thousands of priceless historical documents. Vivienne Walt is following the story for Time Magazine. There seems to be, Vivienne, conflicting reports about the fate of those documents. What are your sources telling you? Are they safe or are they destroyed?

Vivienne Walt: Most of my sources in Timbuktu have been telling me for months that they have hidden them away and although they don’t, they loathe to discuss this publicly and I vowed not to publish anything until Timbuktu had fallen, I really had been told for months that they were fairly safe. Last night, most of my sources told me that they had pulled out almost all of the documents from the Ahmed Baba Center, the major library in Timbuktu, and hidden them in a safe house elsewhere.

Werman: Now I’ve been hearing comments from the mayor of Timbuktu, who actually I believe is not there, he’s in the capital, Bamako, but he seems to believe that many of the documents were destroyed.

Walt: Well, I spoke to the mayor late last night after I’d spoken to the Timbuktu preservationists. Now, the mayor is, I must say, not been involved directly in the preservation efforts, nor was he involved in the rescue efforts. And he did concede that he knew that many of the manuscripts had been removed, although some of them had been left behind. As far as I could understand from my sources, some of them had been left behind partly because they were in such a rush to get them out of there and also because they didn’t want to make it look as if the center had been totally emptied deliberately.

Werman: Right, so any word on those documents that remained in the library? Because this is a new library built in 2010 and those documents that didn’t make it out presumably are they destroyed or do we just not know?

Walt: Nobody has actually taken an exact inventory. And part of the problem is that the telephone lines to Timbuktu are still cut. People are actually cycling to the nearest village where there is a telephone line so that they can call people in Bamako to tell them what they’re seeing. So they are going to need a few days to piece it all together, but I think we can safely say that yes, there certainly were documents that were destroyed, maybe hundreds of documents, but thousands nonetheless were saved thanks to the bravery and the determination of some of the Timbuktu residents who regard these documents as their most absolutely precious family heirlooms and local cultural history.

Werman: Now one thing many people in Timbuktu, in Mali, all over the world knew about these documents before the risk from the extremists came into Timbuktu was that there was a lot of neglect. They were not very well cared for. Do you think this incident, the risks that these documents faced and now they seem safe relatively speaking, will that neglect change? Will there be greater care taken now to preserve these documents?

Walt: Well it’s astonishing when you go to Timbuktu and you see really that 90% of them are being stashed away in rickety closets in somebody’s mud house in the middle of the desert. It’s just you know, one’s mouth drops open. And it’s gonna take a lot of money and in some ways political compromise to get these documents into the place where they really are properly curated and looked after as they would any other precious museum piece, which is what they are. The real problem is that the people of the North have absolutely no faith and no trust in the people in Bamako, and hence there was really a bit of a political battle as to where they should be housed. And they would never have gotten agreement from the people in the north to house them in Bamako, which of course, would be a lot safer.

Werman: Incredible. You know, here’s something I don’t quite understand and maybe you can help us out, Vivienne, knowing that fanaticism that doesn’t always make sense, I mean the Ahmed Baba collection contained numerous decades old Korans, some more than a century old. They include evidence that the Islamic world made important contributions to astronomy, and mathematics and history. Why would Islamic militants then burn them?

Walt: Honestly, there is no logical reason why the Jihadists would want to destroy these manuscripts. They are the Islamic history of Africa. They prove, in fact, that Africa had a very rich literary tradition at the height of the Renaissance era and even before, things which really Western historians have neglected for many years. So Africans and especially Muslim Africans have every reason to preserve and champion these documents. So I think that it’s more reflexive response really to the documents rather than any real logical reason why they should want them gone or destroyed.

Werman: Vivienne Wall with Time Magazine telling us what we know abut the ancient manuscripts at the Ahmed Baba Institute and Library in Timbuktu. Vivienne, always good to speak with you. Thank you.

Walt: You’re welcome.

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Consider it a kind of “warm-up.” In December, the nation is due to host the South East Asian Games. Those games take place every two years.

The host nation is always given some latitude when it comes to the events. But Burma is under fire for wanting to localize the sporting line-up a bit too much.

For instance, Burmese officials want to include chinlone, a game that is maybe best described as a mix of soccer, hacky-sack and tai chi.

Canadian filmmaker Greg Hamilton has done a documentary about chinlone called “Mystic Ball.”

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Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World. This past weekend Myanmar, also known as Burma hosted an international marathon. Consider it a “warm-up” of sorts. That’s because next December Burma is due to host the South East Asian games. The games take place every two years, and the host nation is always given some latitude when it comes to the events. But Burma is under fire for taking a lot of latitude, localizing the sporting line-up a bit too much. For instance, Burmese officials want to include a sport called chinlone. To find out more about chinlone I’m joined by filmmaker Greg Hamilton. He’s done a documentary on chinlone called “Mystic Ball.” And Greg, if mystic ball is one way to refer to chinlone I’m gearing up for a great tale here. Describe the sport for us. What is chinlone all about?

Greg Hamilton: Well chinlone is an artistic sport that originated in Myanmar. It’s played by a single team of six players. There’s only one team. There’s no opposing team. And we use the feet and the knees to pass a woven rattan ball around-¦inside of a circle. In essence chinlone is noncompetitive, but there’s also a more modern version of the game that is competitive.

Werman: Describe what happens in the circle with chinlone. I mean how team-like is it?

Hamilton: So what happens is we play inside of a 22-foot diameter circle. The six players form themselves around the outside of the circle, and we walk in a counter clock wise direction. We start to pass the ball around. And then, one of the players goes into the center of the circle and becomes the soloist. And then they’re supported by the other five players. There’s a couple of hundred distinct moves that one can draw from. So in a way it’s kind of like jazz in that sense.

Werman: Yeah, I was going to say there is a musical metaphor here. How did you find out about this sport?

Hamilton: I just happened to come across the Burmese men playing in a small park in Toronto, here where I live. And I was instantly fascinated with it. And then I started going over and learning how to play in Myanmar.

Werman: And so, how are they going to turn this into a competitive sport?

Hamilton: First off, just let me say chinlone is thought to be approximately 1,500 years old or older. Sometime during the ‘50s they made it into a competitive sport. I guess we can compare it to figure skating or something like that. Where it’s a little hard to explain but it’s the same basic structure of the game. It’s one team at a time. And there’s ways that they can judge points based on, for one thing, how often they drop the ball to the floor, for another thing, players have to do these various moves in sequence, which makes it extremely difficult.

Werman: It must take a lot of control?

Hamilton: It takes a lot of control, and especially takes a lot of focus. And it’s considered to be meditative in that respect.

Werman: Have you seen chinlone played competitively anywhere outside of Burma?

Hamilton: No, no, no, no, never. Inside Burma, yes. And even inside Burma, the competitive version is not as popular as the noncompetitive version. One of the things that I love about chinlone it’s the kind of game you can play throughout your whole life.

Werman: Do you see a lot of old and young playing together, or is it really the oldsters have their games and the youngsters have their games?

Hamilton: No, not at all. In fact one time at one of the chinlone festivals I saw a team that had a 72-year-old man and a 9-year-old boy playing together, same team, and they had a really great game. And mixed genders, men and women play together on the same team, but not in competitions. In competitions, the men play and the women play separately.

Werman: Greg Hamilton, chinlone expert and director of the documentary “Mystic Ball.” He joined us on the line from Toronto. You can see trailers and clips from “Mystic Ball” at theworld.org. Greg, thanks so much for your time.

Hamilton: Thank you.

Copyright ©2012 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

“I’m one of those people who loves playing PlayStation and Xbox, so with my thumbs I like to think I’m probably quite useful,” he said.

Video games are often mentioned when talking about drone pilots, too.

So what is it really like to fly one of the multi-million dollar machines?

To find out, the BBC recently spoke with former drone pilot Dave Cummins.

He originally flew traditional military aircraft in Britain’s Royal Air Force — but switched to drones a few years ago.

For a time, Cummins was stationed here in the US, at Creech Air Force Base outside Las Vegas.

He flew drones in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Cummins remembers driving from his house in Las Vegas to “the Box” — the place at the base where he and his two-man crew flew missions.

“It’s a good drive that one hour,” Cummins said. “It takes you from your house, the family, the dishes, the cleaning of the car. And it gives you time to adjust to where you’re effectively going to be entering a ground control station in a combat zone.”

Cummins said he could spend up to 12 straight hours flying, once he entered “the Box.”

“It’s fairly spacious, unlike most aircraft,” he said. “But we try to give the atmosphere of the aircraft. It’s dimmed, it’s dark. It has the normal running noises of computers in the background, and lots and lots of computer screens. The chat we try to keep to a minimal, like in any aircraft. You’re concentrating on the operation.”

Cummins told the BBC that it’s a strange feeling being so far removed from the action.

But he rejects the idea that flying an unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, is akin to playing a video game.

“In one sense, I equate a UAV to a sniper who is sitting two kilometers away on the hilltop,” he said. “We’re involved in the battle, we’re part of the battle, and I think in Afghanistan in particular, the threat to our friendlies, the IEDs — the remote detonations — meant that al-Qaeda had an unfair advantage if you like. And I think that unmanned systems went someway toward evening up that problem.”

Dave Cummins now works for a company working on civilian applications for drones.

He expects it to be a huge growth market in coming years.

The possibilities for drones, it seems, are endless.

But how did The Clash end up writing a song about Spain? Well, mostly it had to do with frontman Joe Strummer’s Spanish connections.

By the “London Calling” came out in 1979, he had developed an affinity for Spain. Or, at least an affinity for a Spanish woman.

“It goes back to his pre-Clash days squatting in the West of London,” says Nick Hall, a Barcelona based filmmaker Nick Hall is currently working on a documentary about Strummer’s Spanish connections.

“He ended up sharing a squat with two sisters from Southern Spain, and one of them ended up becoming his girlfriend.”

That girlfriend’s name was Paloma, who went on to become Palmolive, the drummer in the punk band The Slits.

And Strummer went on to form The Clash. “The Only Band That Matters,” as they were called at one point.

In 1981, The Clash actually played three concerts in Spain. And young people in the country, which was recovering from decades of authoritarian rule under Franco, were hungry for punk, according to Nick Hall.

“The Clash were huge in Spain. There was a really important scene at the time. Particularly in Madrid, but also in Barcelona … and there was a lot of post punk, new wave stuff influenced by British bands.”

But behind the scenes, as the saying goes, all was not well with The Clash. And in the early 80s, Nick Hall says, Strummer oversaw the disintegration of the band.

First, he fired his sidekick and co-writer, Mick Jones. Then, realizing he had made a colossal mistake, Strummer fled to Granada.

“The Granada thing is really an escape from all the problems he’s created in London,” Hall says. “He’s fleeing. And kind of goes to Granada for a bit of peace and quiet and to pick up old relationships that he has there.”

Strummer, you see, had once shared a different London squat with another Spaniard, a guy who had gone back to Granada, and become a medical doctor.

Joe Strummer (far left) producing 091′s album in Madrid (Screen grab from Nick Hall’s documentary)

Strummer ended up going to 091′s rehearsals, and then produced their second album.

To be honest, 091 didn’t last much longer as a band. Of course, neither did The Clash. They broke up for good in 1986.

Strummer, though, kept returning to Spain, and even ended up buying a house on Spain’s southern coast.

Strummer died of heart failure in 2002, and a year later, The Clash was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Granada, though, never forgot Strummer or his contributions to the music scene there.

Last year, a group of local friends and journalists petitioned the city to name a square in his honor. The measure is expected to be approved next month, according to a city official.

A local newspaper recently wrote: “Good ol’ Joe traveled to Granada seduced by stories of the Civil War, the killing of Lorca and the image of Granada.”

One might add: “And to get the hell away from The Clash.”

Plaza Joe Strummer will, if all goes according to plan, be just a few hundred yards from the Alhambra.

“We are extremely sorry for causing concern to the passengers, their families and those involved. We are sorry,” Shinobe said.

ANA’s fleet currently has 17 of the Boeing aircraft, which are commonly called Dreamliners. Japan airlines has seven Dreamliners. In all, around 50 are in service around the globe.

The incident in Japan is only one in a string of issues which have affected the Dreamliner since it began commercial service back in the fall of 2011.

An inspection of the aircraft found leaking and burn marks around the main battery, located under the cockpit. On January 7, a battery pack in an empty Japan Airlines 787 airplane caught fire at Logan Airport in Boston; US officials are still investigating that incident.

Some aviation experts say that the Dreamliner is just experiencing the “teething problems” that all new aircraft go through. But Thomas Ballantyne of Orient Aviation told the BBC: “This is more than that. There are too many things happening, and in different areas of the aircraft, to be simply teething problems.”

Aviation expert Chris Yates told the BBC that ANA and JAL made the right call in grounding their Dreamliners for now.

“Both of those airlines operate very long haul flights with the aircraft, typically trans-Pacific,” he said, noting that alternative airfields are “few and far between” when flying over the Pacific.

Just before Christmas, Rex died at the age of 11. He had already retired from active duty after being wounded during his last deployment. Rex had been adopted by his second handler, Megan Leavey.

Anchor Marco Werman finds out more about Rex’s life, and about the lives of other military working dogs (or WMDs, as they’re known) from Mike Dowling.

Dowling, and Rex, are also featured in a documentary called Always Faithful.

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Marco Werman: And here is another dog story. This one is about Rex – one of the military working dogs to be deployed to Iraq. Just before Christmas, Rex died at the age of 11. He had already retired from active service. Rex’s handler during his time in Iraq was Mike Dowling. Dowling wrote about his charge in the book “Sergeant Rex: The Unbreakable Bond between a Marine and His Dog.” Mike, in the short obituary you wrote for Rex “Once a Marine, Always a Marine… Semper Fi”, you explained how you first met Rex and the bond that you two developed, talk about that.

Mike Dowling: Sure. I met Rex in the fall of 2002. I was actually one of two handlers that took him to Iraq (I was the first one) and he made you earn his respect. He is a very proud dog. He’s a very, very good dog and beautiful dog but he’s trained to attack and he made you earn his respect and that’s exactly what I had to do. I had to go in and build a rapport for him to trust me which he ended up doing. And then, from that point on, we started training and we were with each other, literally, every single day. Even on our off days, I was there at some point trying to do some kind of obedience or something with him just to build that bond every single day.

Werman: Now, you said he was trained to attack?

Dowling: Yeah, he was a dual certified dog. He was trained to protect and also attack suspects if you needed to, but he was also trained in detection – for finding explosives and weapons, things like that.

Werman: So detection, attacking as needed. What kinds of other tasks are dogs like Rex performing for the Marines and other troops in places like Iraq?

Dowling: The majority of the work that the military dogs are needed for is really just detection work…explosive detection work. We don’t really need the patrol work too much. It’s more of a psychological deterrent.

Werman: I was gonna ask you what was the attitude of Iraqis (having that Rex was a German Shepherd) toward this particular dog?

Dowling: You know, they have dogs but they don’t domesticate them and so, they essentially just have stray dogs all over the country everywhere, and they are diseased. So, their outlook on the dog isn’t that good at all. But then, you have these amazing, gorgeous, beautiful working dogs that the Military brings over and it’s actually a great tool for them to learn because nowadays the Iraqi police force have been trained to work with working dogs whereas traditionally they weren’t before. So, it was a great learning tool for them.

Werman: Well, a little aside here Mike. I noticed that, curiously, the acronym of military working dogs is MWD an anagram of WMD. There were no WMDs in Iraq but there were plenty of MWDs. How many were there at the peak of the occupation?

Dowling: At the peak, I honestly don’t know. I would probably have to say a few hundreds, at least. When I went out there, I was one of twelve Marine Corp dog teams but that number quickly grew. It’s funny that you mentioned that acronym – that MWD and WMD; we like to refer to the working dogs as ‘weapons of mass detection’ because they detect to well.

Werman: Right. How long do these animals tend to stay in service?

Dowling: An average working dog in the military will probably serve anywhere from 6 to 8 years which is just incredible.

Werman: What happened to Rex after the military?

Dowling: Rex did three deployments and he was actually wounded on his third deployment so he didn’t deploy again, but he was still very useful back in the States. Then he retired in April of 2012 and he got adopted by the other handler that took him to Iraq. He got to enjoy retirement for a good several months until he passed away.

Werman: Mike, we often talk about the human side of dogs and how we connect with them emotionally. Do dogs have post-traumatic stress disorder when they’ve been in theaters of war?

Dowling: Yes and, actually, Rex had PTSD. Dogs are emotional creatures just like human beings are and so combat stress will affect them the same way it affects…maybe not the same way but it certainly affects them just like it affects human beings. It is a very real issue (the PTSD within canines). In fact, it is so real that there is an entire military working dog hospital at Lackland Air Force Base which is where the military dog program is located where they have a program at the hospital specifically set up for therapy for dogs with PTSD.

Werman: Mike, I can hear the way you’re talking about Rex just the bond that the two of you had. Obviously, handlers like you come to love their dogs and that bond develops but what about the rest of the unit? Is there kind of a quality like a fire-house dog where everybody is in love with the dog?

Dowling: That’s absolutely correct. So many Marines will come up, when I was out there, to say hi to me and Rex and Rex would get all the attention which…that’s okay because he’s a piece of home that you bring with you out there and he reminds you of your own dog back home. They are just great therapy tools. Whether or not we go on missions, just to have them around is a great benefit to everyone out there.

Werman: I have to ask this. What did Rex eat and was he as grossed out by the MREs as a lot of Marines are?

Dowling: Oh, Rex would eat anything [laughs]. He would actually steal my food. I would get care packages in the mail from family and friends and people that support and, actually, most of the stuff in the mail was for Rex instead of me [laughs]. We have a very strict diet regimen for all of our military dogs that we abide to but, every once in a while, we’d sneak some beef jerky in there or something.

Werman: Nice. Mike Dowling, the author of “Sergeant Rex” (Rex being the military working dog that Dowling handled). Rex died recently at the age of 11. Mike, thank you.

Dowling: Thanks Marco. I appreciate it.

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At least if the bulging biceps of the US Ambassador to Finland are anything to go by.

Bruce Oreck, former attorney and former Obama fundraiser, took up his post in 2009. That last name might be familiar; he’s the son of David Oreck, the vacuum cleaner manufacturer.

As a diplomat, Bruce Oreck’s focused heavily on environmental issues.

And, for Christmas, the nearly 60-year-old Oreck posted this on YouTube…seated alongside his wife, Cody.

Friends like to say that Oreck’s big personality is matched only by his arms.

You see, he’s also a former professional body-builder. ProBody Magazine, a Finnish body-building monthly, got Oreck to pose for its latest issue.

Talk about “gun”-boat diplomacy…

A spokesman for the US Embassy in Helsinki assured The Washington Post that no photo-shopping was involved at all.

The Ambassador, the spokesman told the Post, “places tremendous emphasis on staying in shape.”

Not prone to shyness, the Ambassador also used one of the muscle-shots in a holiday gag card to close friends.

Oh, and we should also note that this isn’t the first time Oreck’s flexed his muscles for the Finnish media.

A while back he posed completely shirtless for another Finnish magazine.

The title of that photo shoot?

Mr. Amerikka.

As Frederick the Great, the former King of Prussia, once quipped:

“Diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments.”

If that’s the case, it’s fair to say that Bruce Oreck is nothing less than a symphony.

Cromwell Wall and Family, North London, 1908.

Christmas was a time for family gatherings, Wall’s grandson Oliver tells the BBC.

“I can remember the occasions,” he says. “We always had big parties. And singing, around the piano with grandpa playing, and then he took us around marching.”

Grandpa Wall, the story goes, could be seen pushing a baby stroller. But often it didn’t contain one of Wall’s nine children.

Instead, Wall used it to cart around a phonograph and some wax cylinders.

Wall liked to record the family’s holiday happenings. Starting in 1902, the recordings run through to 1917.

In many, like the recording done in 1904, you can hear Cromwell Wall sending greetings his own parents and grandparents.

A number of Wall’s recordings survived the years, and ended up at the Museum of London, where curator Julia Hoffbrand helped unearth them earlier this year.

“The hair on my arms stood on end. It was fantastic,” says Hoffbrand.

“We had an idea of what was on the recordings, because Cromwell had written very detailed descriptions on the cylinder boxes. But it was really like a window opening into the past.”

For curators, the find was incredible for two reasons. First, it is rare for wax cylinders like this to survive intact for so long. And second, such devices were mostly used at the time by offices for dictation and the like, not by individuals looking to record their “funniest home audio.”

So, for historians and curators, hearing Cromwell’s son Leslie singing Christmas songs is, well, solid gold.

After curators found the cylinders earlier this year, they cleaned them very carefully. Then, they made digital versions, and cleaned the sound up a bit. Finally, the Museum of London notified the Wall family, and in October, they heard the recordings for the first time.

Cromwell Wall’s niece Daphne says it brought back fond memories of him.

“He used to dress up as Father Christmas, and I’ve got a photograph of a windmill he made one year that they put presents in. There was a great deal of excitement.”

Museum officials say that 24 of Cromwell Wall’s recordings survive. They describe the sound quality as “outstanding,” considering some of them are more than 100 years old.

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Today’s Geo Quiz is all about getting up close and personal with with some of the world’s biggest carnivores, without actually leaving the comfort of your own home.

These big meat-eaters are residents of a national park in East Africa that covers more than 5,500 square miles.

It was established in 1951, and contains grassland and savanna, but also river-fed forests.

Tourism is allowed, but humans are not allowed to live permanently on park land.

Scientists, though, are busy studying animal interactions in the park. And they’re using more than 220 camera traps to help capture candid shots, especially of big predators.

“There’s a wonderful sequence where a lion comes up and falls asleep in front of the camera, and every once in a while we get a paw flicking, or a tail flicking, and the camera takes another shot,” says Chris Lintott of Oxford University.

We’re looking for both the name of the park, and the country in which it’s located.

The answers are: the Serengeti National Park, located in Tanzania.

For more than 40 years, scientists with the Serengeti Lion Project have been documenting the lives of lions in the park. Of course, in the old days, studying detailed animal interactions meant sending a graduate student out with diary.

“That’s like trying to understand Britain by sitting in Trafalgar Square for an afternoon,” Lintott says. “You don’t get a picture of everything that’s going on.”

Lintott’s involved with a project called Snapshot Serengeti.

Scientists have set up more than 200 camera traps in the park to capture pictures not just of lions, but of all the wildlife.

But here’s the thing — those 200 cameras capture a lot of photos. Imagine if you had not hundreds, but millions of holiday snapshots from your African safari to sort through.

“The cameras allow us to carpet the whole place, and get a real understanding of what’s going on,” says Lintott. “But only if we have some help in sorting through the three million holiday snaps that we’ve got.”

And so, on the Snapshot Serengeti website, you are asked to look through the pictures. With just a few clicks, you can help identify the animals, number them, and describe what they’re doing in the picture.

“The cameras capture much everything,” Lintott says, remembering one sequence of hyena photos that recently caught his eye.

“The first is the hyena looking straight down the lens, like a superstar out on a Friday night. And the second one, the hyena’s in the background skulking. And the third shot is the inside of the hyena’s mouth as it attacks the camera.”

“And that’s one of the problems,” Lintott says. “The animals take a strong interest in the cameras and they don’t survive all that long.”

The cameras can last about two months before needing maintenance and new batteries. Of course, they’re likely to be torn down by elephants or infested by ants before then.

But it’s all worth it.

The photos, Lintott says, will help scientists get a clearer picture of how animals, especially big predators like lions, interact with other big predators in the park.

“Do they compete for food? Do they attack each other? Do they ignore each other and go about their business? And so that’s one of the things we think we can understand by doing this experiment.”

Lintott says experts are also hoping to get a better sense of just how much park land big carnivores need to survive and thrive.

The Snapshot Serengeti project, by the way, has a good pedigree.

Lintott’s group also runs two other popular “citizen science” projects:

One called Old Weather gives you the chance to mine old Navy ships’ logs for climate data.

Another called Galaxy Zoo allows you to help classify galaxies.

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That little nod to the popular board game Monopoly is your first clue for Wednesday’s Geo Quiz.

There are, as you may know, many global versions of the popular board game. But now, for the first time ever, there’s an approved version of the game for an African city.

We’re looking for a port city in Africa’s most populous nation. Close to eight million people call this city home.

The place is renown for its traffic jams and crazy drivers. Crossing the road, in fact, can be hazardous to your health. That’s why there are bridges across some of the roads…not that many people us them.

Maybe that’s why in the Monopoly version, one of the “Chance” cards reads: ”For attempting to cross the road using a pedestrian bridge, move three places ahead.”

There’s also a fair bit of corruption in this city. Another “Chance” card reads: “For attempting to bribe a law enforcement agent, pay a fine.”

So, where is it that Boardwalk’s been replaced by glitzy Banana Island, and Mediterranean Avenue has been replaced by a slum on stilts called Makoko?

The answer is Lagos, Nigeria.

BBC correspondent Tomi Oladipo is in Lagos, and walks us through the new version of Monopoly.

By the way, Lagos isn’t the only African version of Monopoly. South Africa and Morocco have their own country versions of the game. Nairobi, Kenya has a version as well, but it’s not officially sanctioned.

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We’re looking for the European country that wants to raise taxes on beer by — wait for it — 160 percent.

Ouch!

That translates to about six cents a glass for the average drinker.

This country’s socialist leader says the tax will raise money for much-needed public services. Others hope that pricier beer will mean less binge drinking and better public health.

Now, the place we’re looking for is probably better known as a nation of wine-drinkers. Still, the average resident in our mystery location quaffs about 11 gallons of beer a year.

Bonus points if you also guess the name of this country’s northern neighbor, which has threatened to raise taxes on wine in retaliation.

The answer is France, where President Francois Hollande seems determined to raise the price of a pint.

And for bonus points, France’s northern neighbor is Belgium, a giant of the beer-brewing tradition.

Belgian brewers are worried that France’s move to raise the price of beer will severely hurt their business.

In fact, the Belgian government has started talking about raising the taxes on French wine in response.

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Moore, who died Sunday at the age of 89, inspired generations of Britons to take up astronomy as both a hobby and a profession.

Patrick Alfred Caldwell Moore was born in 1923. By the age of six, he’d already found a calling.

“It was a rainy afternoon, and I had nothing to do,” Moore once reminisced. “I curled up in the armchair, and by my side was a bookshelf, and on that bookshelf was a small book called The Story of the Solar System.”

“It was published in 1898, and it wasn’t a boy’s book, but I could read it. And I decided this was interesting, and should be pushed along.”

Pushed along is really an understatement. At the age of 13, Moore published and presented his first paper to the British Astronomical Association. It was about craters on the moon’s surface.

At 16, he lied about his age, faked his medical tests, and passed up a place at Cambridge, all in order to join the Royal Air Force during World War II.

His experiences, which included a visit to Dachau, made him a lifelong opponent of war.

Moore’s fiancé also died during a World War II bombing raid. Moore never married.

After the war, he taught and spent time building his own telescopes.

Then, in 1957, the BBC decided to launch a TV astronomy program, and asked Moore to host it.

“I remember saying ‘what a good idea,’” Moore recalled in a 1992 interview. “And the BBC said we’d create a program called Starmap – we actually altered the name to The Sky at Night before the first program – and the BBC said they’d put it on the air once every four weeks for three months, and see how it went.”

Fifty-plus years later, The Sky at Night continues to be a huge hit.

Moore brought incredible energy and intelligence to the show, often sounding more like a sportscaster than an astronomer.

“I used to beg to be allowed to stay up to watch The Sky at Night. And my parents kindly indulged me, and I was captivated,” says astrophysicist Brian May. “And I read one of Patrick’s books which was in the school library called The Earth, and learned about trilobites and the formation of the earth. I was hooked on astronomy, and that was it. It was to stay with me all my life.”

Well, part of May’s life anyway. He is, of course, better known as the guitarist for the rock band Queen. May eventually became good friends with Patrick Moore, and the guitarist sometimes appeared as a guest on The Sky at Night.

Patrick Moore himself was no stranger to music. In fact, Moore, a piano player, once accompanied none other than that great violinist Albert Einstein at a pre-war astronomy conference in New York.

More also composed music for, and performed on, the xylophone.

He also enjoyed making his own wine, and was a true animal lover. Friends often remember him surrounded by cats while he worked at the old typewriter in his study.

“His cat Ptolemy was on his lap when he died,” close friend and fellow astronomer Heather Cooper told the BBC. “Patrick’s actually bequeathing quite a bit of money to cat charities, which I think is marvelous.”

More was an eccentric’s eccentric to be sure, right down to the trademark monocle he liked to wear. But in all the years he presented The Sky at Night, Moore only missed one episode.

During the years of the Cold War Space Race, both the Americans and the Soviets used his maps of the moon. He was friends with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

“Astronomy has just grown through leaps and bounds,” Aldrin said. “And it’s people like Patrick who have been able to put it in perspective, and to help people understand the enormity of the universe.”

Patrick Moore liked to say on The Sky at Night: “We are a very, very small speck in the universe…about as important as a single ant in the whole of the world.”

That from the man who always said he wanted to be remembered merely as “an amateur astronomer who played cricket…and the xylophone.”

His crime –flying a single engine plane into Moscow and taxiing into Red Square — made headlines across the globe.

It all began in May of 1987. Rust was fed up with the Cold War tension between the United States and the Soviet Union.

He had a pilot’s license, but little experience. So he hopped into a small, single engine Cessna airplane, and told his parents he wanted to bank some flying time.

For two weeks, while he flew around Western Europe, a plan was forming.

“I came to the conclusion that I need to do something that puts an end to this dead end situation,” Rust tells the BBC. “I thought I could use this plane to build an imaginary bridge between West and East.”

He spent two weeks psyching himself up in Helsinki, and then took off, telling the tower he was going to Stockholm.

Instead, he headed for Moscow, and it wasn’t long before he got the attention of the Soviet Air Force.

“I was approached by a Soviet fighter,”says Rust. “It circled around me two or three times, and then it passed very close on the left. I could see the two pilots, and of course the red star on the wing of the aircraft.”

Rust thought he was a goner. But the Soviet plane left him alone, and he flew on. Each control tower along the way, the story goes, thought he was a local pilot.

Eventually, Rust saw Moscow. At first, he wanted to land in the Kremlin. But then he decided to try to land in Red Square, which was full of people.

So, he landed nearby, and then taxied into Red Square, to the surprise of onlookers.

“I was surrounded by a big crowd of bystanders. Most of them were Russians. And they were standing and smiling at me,” Rust remembers.

They asked Rust who he was, why he was in Moscow, and where he had come from.

“I said I was just here to deliver a peace message to Mikael Gorbachev, and that I just came from Germany.” The bystanders smiled, and noted that Germany was a friend of the Soviet Union.

“And I said, no, not East Germany. I’m coming from West Germany.”

Rust was soon arrested, and convicted of illegally crossing the Soviet Border, and “hooliganism.” He was sentenced to four years in prison.

Mathias Rust in 2012. (Photo: Wiki Commons)

But in the Kremlin, heads rolled. Gorbachev dismissed a number of high-ranking officials.

“Gorbachev was able to replace important officials with men of his favor. I think my flight to Moscow helped bring both sides closer to each other,” Rust says.

Mathias Rust only served a little more than a year of his four-year sentence. He was released in 1988 as a “goodwill gesture” by the Soviet Union.

Rust returned to Germany, where he’s had legal troubles as well, including convictions for fraud and attempted manslaughter.

He now lives in Hamburg, Germany. He describes himself as a financial analyst…and yoga instructor.

By the way, Rust got his own anthem, of sorts, back in 1987 from a West German band called Modern trouble. Enjoy:

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“History’s always been interesting and magical to me, even as a little girl,” says Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse. “I’ve always had this magical idea what happened in my street before I was born.”

Teeuwisse, who was born and raised in The Hague in the Netherlands, has made her passion her profession.

After attending film school, she started a “historical consultancy” business. She helps museums, and TV and film productions get the feel and flavor of history just right.

And that means having a keen eye.

Back when she was a student, Teeuwisse spotted a bunch of old negatives at an Amsterdam flea market. She decided to spend her dinner money on the negatives.

“I chose history over food. It wasn’t really a hard choice,” she says.

The negatives, Teeuwisse says, were all in folders, and those folders were full of notes and comments.

“Whoever made those photos wrote down a lot of information, except his name. It’s a little bit like a mystery. And I’m an extremely curious person, especially when it comes to history, so I wanted to find out more about the family where these photos were coming from.”

It turns out there were more than 300 black and white shots from the last years of World War II, 1944-45.

The shots detailed daily life in Amsterdam and other parts of Holland. Teeuwisse thought she recognized some of the locations. So, she went to try to find them, and photograph them.

One of the old negatives was a photo of factory workers sitting on some steps in Amsterdam.

“While I was researching the area, I suddenly saw these steps,” Teeuwisse says. “And I thought these can’t be the same steps where the people are sitting on.”

“I took a picture, and back home, I thought, ‘Well, maybe they are, they’re so similar.’ So, not for fun but as a proper history tool, I had to overlay them and compare them. And then I realized it’s exactly the same set of stairs.”

And that’s how the Ghosts of History project got started a few years ago.

Teeuwisse started taking the negatives, and then mashing them up with modern day photos of the same location.

A particularly striking one shows Dam square in full-color, modern day Amsterdam.

As your eye travels up, though, the colors fade and and you see a huge SS placard in black and white on a building. In the background, that past gives way again to a McDonald’s sign.

Teeuwisse put her mashed-up photos online, and then kind of forgot about them.

Then, on the photo-sharing site Flickr, she came across a set of World War II era photos from Normandy, side by side with modern day photos of the same locations.

She asked the owners of the photos if she could mash them up, and they agreed.

Suddenly, a modern day French crosswalk teems with Allied soldiers running to avoid gunfire.

A dead German soldier rests against a modern doorstep.

“He died on someone’s doorstep,” says Teeuwisse, talking about how and why her photos strike a chord. “That could be yourdoorstep.

Teeuwisse’s built up quite a community of followers for Ghosts of History on Flickr and Facebook.

She says people from all over the world contact her about potentially usable photos, and that she gets notes from teachers saying they like using her photos in class.

“Even if children don’t know anything about World War II, or even if they don’t care, they are sometimes still fascinated by the pictures, because it’s the same magic realization that I had as a little girl — history is here, it’s where you are. It’s all around us, and that hits a nerve.”

By the way, despite years of sleuthing, Teeuwisse still hasn’t found out the name of the person who took the original photos she bought at the flea market.

And as for the some of the soldiers in the pictures? Well, no luck identifying them either.

Although she has received some messages from Canadians saying that their fathers might be in the photos, that they helped liberate that part of the Netherlands during 1944 and 45.

By the way, Teeuwisse’s not the only one who has caught the history bug with online photos. Shawn Clover’s doing something similar with 1906 San Francisco earthquake photos. There’s also a Tumblog called Dear Photograph that let’s you do the mash-up of past and present. And for your smartphone, there’s an app called Historypin.

A tugboat on the Thames near Tower Bridge in heavy smog, December 1952. (Photo by Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Now it’s true that London and fog are hardly strangers.

Charles Dickens put it well in Bleak House: “Fog everywhere. Fog up the river where it flows among green airs and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.”

But the events of 1952 were far from ordinary.

(Click to expand) Heavy smog in Piccadilly Circus, London, December 1952. (Photo by Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

“There was a high-pressure system holding air over the city, and there was very little wind,” Young says. “It was very cold. Everyone had their house fire on, and at the time houses were normally heated by coal fires. And the smoke that those produced went into this pocket of air all over the city. They were added to by emissions from industries, and they are all going into the same pocket of air that was not moving anywhere.”

Iris Humphries, who was 21 at the time, remembers how dirty it was.

“We used to wear petticoats, and the hems were black,” says Humphries. “Your hair was grimy, and you could feel the grit in the air, because it was coal smoke that made this fog. “It was just choking and dreadful.”

And, for some, it was deadly.

Rosemary Merritt was a schoolgirl back in 1952.

Her father worked at a London bus garage. He already suffered from bronchitis.

Because of transport disruptions, he was forced to walk an hour and a half through the smog to get home. Merritt remembers him walking through the front door.

(Click to expand) A London bus conductor is forced to walk ahead of his vehicle to guide it through the smog , December 1952. (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Merritt says the doctor couldn’t even make it to their house. So, she and her mother tried to go and get medicine for him.

“We got to the doctor’s, picked up these tablets, and came back home,” she says. “We were greeted at the front door by the neighbors who had looked after my dad, to tell my mum he’d died.”

Rosemary Merritt’s father was one of more than 4,000 people thought to have died as a result of the Great Smog of 1952.

“It was the combination of coal smoke with sulfur dioxide,” says Dr. Robert Waller, who was working in London’s St. Bartholomew’s hospital at the time.

“People were dying in their homes, and in the hospitals. They were mainly elderly people with existing cardio-respiratory disease.”

“No one realized at the time that the number of deaths was increasing,” Dr. Waller says. “There weren’t bodies lying around the streets. One of the first indications that things were happening is that undertakers were running out of coffins, florists were running out of flowers.”

After four days, the deadly smog finally cleared.

The British government formed a commission to recommend steps to ensure such a thing never happened again. In 1956, Britain’s Parliament passed the Clean Air Act, which introduced a number of measures to cut down on the burning of coal.

But on the 60th anniversary of the Great Smog, some say that London still has significant pollution problems. The environmental organization ClientEarth says that an estimated 4,300 Londoners now die each year as a result of air pollution.

The culprit now is not coal, the group says, but vehicle emissions.

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