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Already known as "the world's most endangered feline species," the Iberian lynx is headed to extinction in the wild within the next five decades, an international team of researchers warn in the journal Nature Climate Change.

"Anticipated climate change will rapidly and severely decrease lynx abundance and probably lead to its extinction in the wild within 50 years, even with strong global efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions," they write.

The problem, they say, is that climate change has reduced the availability of the cats' "main prey, the European rabbit," CBS News reports.

According to the World Wildlife Fund, the Iberian lynx could become "the first cat species to become extinct for at least 2,000 years. ... In the early 19th century the Iberian lynx was found in Spain, Portugal and Southern France. It has steadily declined since then, falling to the dangerously low levels today."

The researchers estimate there are "only an estimated 250 individuals surviving in the wild." That's up slightly from a decade ago thanks to "habitat management, reduction of destructive human activity and, more recently, reintroducing the lynx into suitable areas where they have lived in recent history."

But, they warn, "ongoing conservation strategies could buy just a few decades before the species goes extinct."

"The species is extremely vulnerable to shifts in habitat quality or to changes in the abundance of their rabbit prey due to climate change," says Professor Barry Brook, Chair of Climate Science at the University of Adelaide, in a statement released by the researchers.

What do the researchers recommend? They say: "A carefully planned reintroduction program, accounting for the effects of climate change, prey abundance and habitat connectivity, could avert extinction of the lynx this century." They also suggest putting some of the cats in "higher latitude and higher altitude regions on the Iberian Peninsula" where the climate should be more hospitable.

So much fascinating tech and culture news, so little time. But we certainly think you should see the journalism that's catching our curiosity each week, so each Friday we'll round up the week that was — the work that appeared in this blog, and from our fellow technology writers and observers at other organizations.

ICYMI

In case you missed it ... here on All Tech, Steve Henn wrote about the clever ways that developers are hacking Google Glass to do what Google doesn't want them to do. Martin Kaste reported on the troves of data that law enforcement has captured, and in many cases, saved, about our license plates and our whereabouts. Our weekly innovation pick was Smart Bedding, which purports to keep your top sheet from bunching up while you sleep. We revisited a spring study about online ranters — it turns out that online outrage makes you feel worse in the long run.

On our airwaves, All Things Considered featured several pieces about the rush to digitize medical records and one of the companies behind electronic records.

The Big Conversations

The larger tech conversations this week focused on phone payment plans (more on that later) and the future of television viewing, with Netflix making history by garnering Emmy nods for its original programming and sparking questions about the end of consumer relationships with cable, aka, cord-cutting. "Google is freshly rumored to be pursuing the same kind of deals in order to 'stream traditional TV programming' across the Internet. Google, however, has sought these kinds of deals before and failed, so there's no guarantee the company will succeed this time," writes The New Yorker's Matt Buchanan, in a smart piece called "The Tyranny of Traditional TV."

Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile are now all offering installment plans for their mobile phone customers. The analyses on these new upgrade plans are almost all negative. Some sample headlines: "Smartphone Upgrade Plans Are A Bad Deal," "Make it stop: Verizon's Edge phone upgrade program is just as bad as AT&T's," and "Verizon and AT&T early upgrade plans are steaming hot piles of rip-off."

Wired compared the three plans Friday morning.

What's Catching Our Eye

In no particular order:

The New York Times: How Googling Unmasks Child Abuse

Fascinating research on how Google searches for certain terms that are a proxy cry for help.

The Atlantic: The Rise and Fall of a Racist Corner on Reddit

The popular online community is growing up and grappling with what to do about some darker subreddits that give hateful, misogynistic, racist sentiments a home.

Atlantic Wire: Tumblr's Gaping Security Hole

If you're a Tumblr user, you probably got the notice midweek: Tumblr asked all users of its iPhone and iPad app to change their password and download an update to fix a major security glitch. "It's such a huge and egregious error," Kevin O'Brien, an enterprise solutions architect for CloudLock, told the Atlantic Wire.

TechCrunch: Google Brings Street View to the Eiffel Tower

An elegant experience. I think I had more fun visiting the Eiffel Tower from my desk than when I actually visited the Paris icon. Those darn tourists everywhere ...

As we reported during Coffee Week in April, coffee aficionados pay top dollar for single-origin roasts.

The professional prospectors working for specialty coffee companies will travel far and wide, Marco Polo-style, to discover that next champion bean.

But to the farmers who hope to be that next great discovery, the emergence of this new coffee aristocracy is less Marco Polo, more Cinderella: How do you get your coffee bean to the ball?

Consider this tale of impoverished Ethiopian coffee growers whose beans once sold for rock bottom prices:

The yellowed highlands around the city of Jimma in Ethiopia are where coffee was discovered in the 8th century. But by the end of the 20th century its reputation had become as shaky as a car ride on its mountain roads.

Carl Cervone, a coffee agronomist for the New York-based non-profit organization Technoserve, says most of the coffee here is labeled Jimma 5, because it has all five major defects that come from poor farming.

"The types of defects that you have include overripe beans, which are called foxies, and under-ripe beans, which are called quakers," says Cervone. There are also cracked beans, and beans chewed by insects.

"But the worst of them all which is called a stinker, which means that you've basically left a bean fermenting for much longer than you should and it becomes rotten and its basically like putting a rotten egg in an omelet it kind of ruins the entire cup," he says.

Jimma 5 was so bad it became the trade term for bad coffee in Ethiopia, according to Cervone.

And yet ask one of the farmers here, Haleuya Habagaro, she'll tell you her coffee isn't just not bad, it's exquisite.

"When I roast the coffee people come to ask where that strong fruity smell is coming from," says Habagaro. "It's like when you hold an orange."

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The age of the traditional landline telephone is in rapid decline, as NPR's Dan Bobkoff reports on today's All Things Considered.

"For nearly a century, the government has promoted universal access: the idea that anyone should be able to get a reliable home phone connection at a reasonable cost," Dan says. "But phone customers have been ditching traditional phone service. Some now get their home phone from the cable company. Others have gone completely wireless. Verizon has seen a 67 percent drop in the number of customers using copper landlines since 2000."

That statistic prompted us to look at how telephone use has changed around the world. The International Telecommunications Union maintains data about this. It's a U.N. body based in Geneva that, among other things, allocates global radio spectrum and satellite orbits.

Here's a snapshot of the data. Please note the numbers are regional, not country-based, so the figures for the Americas include both North and South America. The CIS refers to the Commonwealth of Independent States, the former Soviet Union. (The * at 2012 and 2013 denotes estimates).