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Just who's to blame for the childhood obesity epidemic? Over the years, the finger has been pointed at parents, video games, Happy Meals and the hamburgers in the school cafeteria.

A new documentary, Fed Up, alleges it all boils down to simple substance most of us consume every day: sugar. The pushers of "the new tobacco," according to the film, are the food industry and our own government.

With a mix of dramatic music, scary soundbites and powerful images of kids injecting insulin into their chubby tummies, Fed Up argues the children are not to blame. For the rising number of overweight and obese kids, the mantra of "eat less, move more" is an impossible goal. They simply can't circumvent the onslaught of marketing that has made them into junk-food junkies, the film says.

"What if our whole approach to this epidemic has been dead wrong?" the film's narrator, TV journalist Katie Couric, says in the film's opening.

Hoping to do for childhood obesity what An Inconvenient Truth did for climate change, Fed Up takes on the U.S. Department of Agriculture, First Lady Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" campaign and Big Food: Coca Cola, Nestle, Kraft, and Kellogg, to name a few. Laurie David, who produced the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth, is executive producer along with Couric; Stephanie Soechtig is the director.

The film sometimes resorts to hyperbole to describe the obesity epidemic and its related health costs, but the message is backed up with sobering statistics and policies that got us here.

The Salt

Why We Got Fatter During The Fat-Free Food Boom

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."

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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.

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