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WHAT THE WORLD

Face Masks For Burping Cows, A New Way To Fight Climate Change

Face Masks For Burping Cows, A New Way To Fight Climate Change
Clémence Guimier

For more than a year now, humans around the world have been masking up to limit the spread of COVID. Now, masks may be deployed among another species to combat a very different global ill: cow burps.

The agricultural multinational Cargill is inaugurating a new kind of face mask designed to absorb cows' gaseous emissions. The idea might sound odd, but as French radio station RTL reports, the blue masks could help cut down as much as half the world's farming gas emissions. Contrary to popular belief, it is indeed the belching part of a cow's digestive output that is responsible for most of its noxious methane (yes, bovine farts get more laughs, but cause less damage to the environment).

All in all, the methane produced by cows — whichever way — is said to be responsible for 14% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the world.

This led the British start-up Zelp to develop a muzzle-mask which relies on small ventilators, powered by solar batteries, able to absorb and filter the ruminants' burps. Fixed on the cows' nostrils, the masks allow them to keep grazing and drinking at leisure.

"Our research shows that these masks don't affect our milk production," Cargill France's director of technology additives Deplhine Melchior tells RTL.

Starting this summer, farmers will be able to start renting the masks deployed by Cargill, at 65 euros a piece, reusable for a year, with at least part of the cost covered by environmental subsidies. And if you hear extra moo-ing while driving past the pastures, it may just be the anti-maskers among the herd...?

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FOCUS: Israel-Palestine War

My Gaza Diary: The Massacre Has Resumed, Nowhere To Hide

Three days since the truce ended, the Israeli army announced that it had launched 10,000 airstrikes on Gaza since the beginning of the war. Total war continues, with the invader’s fiercest fight waged against life itself.

Photo of Palestinians among rubble in Gaza

Palestinians stand among rubble in Rafah, Gaza

Moustafa Ibrahim*

RAFAH — On the evening of the 57th day of the war, I was facing a situation that no one would envy.

A friend from Jordan called to tell me her brother and his children, who had been displaced from Gaza City to Rafah, were injured by a bombing in the Al-Geneina neighborhood in eastern Rafah, where I now live. She wanted to check on them. As soon as she mentioned her brother's name, I knew that he had been killed. I told her: “I will ask at the hospital, and will let you know.”

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At that moment I stopped thinking. What would I say to her? It is not easy to be the one who tells a friend their loved one is dead.

The next day, the friend called back to say she’d found out her brother had been killed, and that his wife and children had been injured but were fine. She asked this time for help to search for her five-year-old nephew, who was missing and had not wound up at the hospital. After hours of searching, they found his body. He died too from the bombing.

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