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Learning is something people, like other animals, do whenever our eyes are open. Education, though, is uniquely human, and right now it's at an unusual point of flux.

By some accounts, education is a $7 trillion dollar global industry ripe for disruption. Others see it as almost a sacred pursuit — a means of nurturing developing minds while preserving tradition. Around the world, education means equal rights and opportunity. People risk their lives for it every day.

No matter what you think you know about education, what's clear right now is that the old blueprints are out the window. The economy isn't creating jobs the way it once did. Technology has forever altered how we communicate and has challenged the meaning of knowledge itself. The cost of college has risen more than any other good or service in the U.S. economy since 1978. There's increasing evidence that qualities like creativity, communication, collaboration and persistence matter most, yet our school system remains pegged to standardized tests that just take in reading and math.

Education has to become something more than regurgitating the past. But what?

That's what we'll be exploring at NPR Ed. Our mission: cover learning and education, online and on the air, from preschool through the workplace and beyond.

The stakes are high, and so are our ambitions. "If you look at the ramifications of good education coverage, it has to be one of the most important things that journalism takes on," says Claudio Sanchez, veteran NPR education reporter and a senior member of our team. "I think our measure of success should be whether we take the time to really put together pieces that speak to the average American, not the ivory tower."

“ "If you look at the ramifications of good education coverage, it has to be one of the most important things that journalism takes on."

In 2008, Nathan Deuel and his wife packed up their things and moved to Saudi Arabia. That country, famous for being largely closed to westerners, was newly open to handful of journalists. The couple moved to Riyadh. A year later, in 2009, their daughter was born.

Then came the Arab Spring. In the midst of political convulsions, and with an infant, the family decided to stay in the Middle East, even when Deuel's wife, foreign correspondent Kelly McEvers, became NPR's Baghdad Bureau chief. As the region erupted in revolution, Deuel moved with their young daughter to Istanbul, then to Beirut.

Nathan Deuel's memoir of his time in the Middle East is titled Friday Was the Bomb: Five Years In The Middle East. He spoke with the host of Weekend All Things Considered, Arun Rath.

Paleontologists in Argentina say they have unearthed the fossils of the biggest dinosaur ever to walk the planet.

The bones are believed to be from a new species of the aptly named titanosaur, a massive herbivore from the late Cretaceous period, officials from the Museo Paleontologico Egidio Feruglio told BBC News.

The titanosaur was a sauropod, like the apatosaurus or brachiosaurus, that roamed the forests of Patagonia 95 million years ago.

"Given the size of these bones, which surpass any of the previously known giant animals, the new dinosaur is the largest animal known that walked on Earth," the researchers told BBC News.

Based on the size of the largest thigh bones, the scientists calculated that the titanosaur weighed around 170,000 pounds and measured 130 feet long and 65 feet tall.

"It's like two trucks with a trailer each, one in front of the other, and the weight of 14 elephants together," said Jose Luis Carballido, a dinosaur specialist at the museum, CNN reported.

The Two-Way wondered what else on earth compares to that gargantuan size. Imagine a professional basketball court: Not even three-quarters of the beast's length would fit, with the remaining 40 feet hanging out in the seats behind the basket.

According to the museum's estimates, the creature weighed some 5,000 pounds more than a Boeing 737's maximum takeoff weight, and would have stretched a half-foot longer than the airplane.

The jumbo titanosaurus would have been about as tall as the Great Sphinx at Giza, something like the height of a seven-story building.

The blue whale has the new sauropod beat, however. Though the ocean mammal is shorter by about 30 feet, the largest are estimated to weigh as much as 320,000 pounds. To be fair, the blue whale never has to support its bulk on land.

The site of the discovery in Argentina holds the remains of seven dinosaurs, about 150 bones total, after an accidental discovery by a farmer in 2011 in the desert near La Flecha, near Trelew, Patagonia, said The Telegraph.

The size of the previous holder of the title of world's largest dinosaur, the Argentinosaurus, was calculated from just a few bones, as opposed to the treasure trove just revealed, the BBC explains.

"Originally thought to weigh in at 100 tonnes, [Argentinosaurus] was later revised down to about 70 tonnes - just under the 77 tonnes that this new sauropod is thought to have weighed," the BBC reports.

The new titanosaur still needs a name, one befitting its monumental dimensions.

"It will be named describing its magnificence and in honour to both the region and the farm owners who alerted us about the discovery," the researchers told the BBC.

More than five years after the crash, homebuilding is stuck at half its normal level. That's a big drag on the economy. And things aren't looking much better: A report out Thursday shows homebuilder confidence is at its lowest level in a year.

This severe slump in single-family home construction has been going on across the country. We haven't seen anything close to this kind of a long-term construction slump since World War II.

"This is a completely unprecedented collapse," says Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. "What we learned was that if you pump enough leverage into a housing market and then take it out very quickly, you can see collapses the likes of which you've never even imagined," he says.

Homebuilding remains a kind of sleeping giant. If it wakes up, it could create a lot of good-paying construction jobs and manufacturing jobs at companies making everything from windows to dishwashers to lawn mowers. When housing really recovers it can offer a real boost to the economy.

And last spring, it seemed like that boost was coming. "Things seemed to be coming back, and we were seeing a big pickup in house prices, and construction was picking up as well. Everyone got very excited," Shepherdson says.

But then mortgage rates went up. "And at that point things came very quickly to a jibbering halt," Shepherdson says.