Muhammad Ali funeral: Thousands line route for farewell

Thousands are attending a farewell procession for boxing legend Muhammad Ali in his home city of Louisville, in the US state of Kentucky.

Onlookers lining the roadside waved, took photos and chanted "Ali, Ali" as a cortege led by the hearse carrying his coffin drove through the downtown area.

The heavyweight champion and rights activist died last Friday aged 74.

The cortege is taking Ali's body past key sites in his life, ahead of an interfaith memorial service.

Actor Will Smith and ex-boxer Lennox Lewis will be among the pallbearers, while former President Bill Clinton will deliver one of the eulogies.

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Thousands of free tickets for the memorial service, taking place at a major sports centre, were snapped up within half an hour.

Image copyrightREUTERS

Image captionThe pallbearers, including Mike Tyson and Will Smith, loaded the coffin into the hearse for the procession

Image copyrightREUTERS

Image captionPeople chanted Ali's name as the cortege left the funeral home

Image copyrightAP

Image captionA Louisville city bus displays the words "Ali the Greatest"

Image copyrightAP

Image captionA Muhammad Ali action figure sits on the seat of a bicycle as fans await the funeral procession

The motorcade procession began at about 10:35 local time (14:35 GMT), more than an hour behind schedule, and took the coffin past his childhood home, the Ali Center, the Center for African American Heritage and then down Muhammad Ali Boulevard.

Fans threw flowers at the hearse and rose petals were scattered along the route.

In one neighbourhood, several young men ran alongside the vehicle carrying a placard which read: "Ali is the greatest, thanks 4 all the memories."

The procession will end at the Cave Hill Cemetery where Ali will be laid to rest in a private ceremony.

The funeral service at the KFC Yum! Centre is due to begin at 14:00 local time.

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Muhammad Ali: 1942-2016

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Comedian Billy Crystal will also deliver a eulogy, while sports journalist Bryant Gumbel, the daughter of civil rights activist Malcolm X, Attallah Shabazz, and Ali's wife, Lonnie, and daughters, Maryum and Rasheda, are also expected to speak.

Among those expected to attend the service is King Abdullah of Jordan.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan attended Thursday's prayer ceremony and had been due at the service, but reports say he has cut short his visit to the US.

The reasons for his departure are not clear, though there are reports of differences with the funeral's organisers.

President Barack Obama will not be there, as he is to attend his eldest daughter Malia's graduation.

But in a video message, he said: "This week we lost an icon. A person who for African Americans, I think, liberated their minds in recognising that they could be proud of who they were."

Muhammad Ali

Born Cassius Marcellus Clay, 17 January 1942

61 fights

over a professional career lasting 21 years

56 wins

including 37 knockouts

• 3 times crowned World Heavyweight Champion
• 1 Light-heavyweight Olympic gold medal
• 31 straight wins before being beaten by Joe Frazier

Getty

White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett - who knew Ali - will represent the president.

Lennox Lewis, a former world heavyweight boxing champion himself, said it was an honour to be a pallbearer and that Ali's memory would never fade.

"The term 'float like a butterfly, sting like a bee' will always be remembered. He is an icon and a legend of boxing," he said.

The other pallbearers are family and friends, along with Will Smith, who portrayed Ali in the 2001 film about the boxer's life.

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Experiment 'turns waste CO2 to stone'

Image copyrightJUERG MATTER

Image captionThe experiment injected 220 tonnes of carbon dioxide several hundred metres underground

Scientists think they have found a smart way to constrain carbon dioxide emissions - just turn them to stone.

The researchers report an experiment in Iceland where they have pumped CO2 and water underground into volcanic rock.

Reactions with the minerals in the deep basalts convert the carbon dioxide to a stable, immobile chalky solid.

Even more encouraging, the team writes in Science magazine, is the speed at which this process occurs: on the order of months.

"Of our 220 tonnes of injected CO2, 95% was converted to limestone in less than two years," said lead author Juerg Matter from Southampton University, UK.

"It was a huge surprise to all the scientists involved in the project, and we thought, 'Wow! This is really fast'," he recalled on the BBC's Science In Action programme.

Image copyrightLAMONT-DOHERTY EARTH OBSERVATORY

Image captionThe reactions in the volcanic rock produced immobile carbonates (white deposits)

With carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere marching ever upwards and warming the planet, researchers are keen to investigate so called "carbon capture and storage" (CCS) solutions.

Previous experiments have seen pure CO2 injected into sandstone, or deep, salty aquifers. Chosen sites - which have included disused oil and gas wells - have relied on layers of impermeable capping rocks to hold down the carbon dioxide. But the fear is always that the CO2 could find a way to leak back out into the atmosphere.

Image copyrightJUERG MATTER

Image captionCores were drilled to check on the progress of the subterranean reactions

The Carbfix project on Iceland, on the other hand, seeks to solidify the unwanted carbon in place.

Working with the Hellisheidi geothermal power plant outside Reykjavik, it combined the waste CO2 with water to make a slightly acidic liquid that was then sent hundreds of metres down into the volcanic basalts that make up so much of the North Atlantic island.

The low pH water (3.2) worked to dissolve the calcium and magnesium ions in the basalts, which then reacted with the carbon dioxide to make calcium and magnesium carbonates. Cores drilled into the experimental site pulled up rock with the tell-tale white carbonates occupying the pore spaces.

The researchers also tagged the CO2 with carbon-14, a radioactive form of the element. In this way, they were able to tell if any of the injected CO2 was leaking back to the surface or finding its way out through a distant watercourse. No such escape was detected.

"This means that we can pump down large amounts of CO2 and store it in a very safe way over a very short period of time," said study co-author Martin Stute from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, US.

"In the future, we could think of using this for power plants in places where there's a lot of basalt - and there are many such places."

Dr Matter added: "You can find basalts on every continent and, certainly, you can find them offshore because all the oceanic crust - so below the seafloor - is all basaltic rocks. In terms of the availability of basaltic rocks to take care of CO2 emissions globally - no problem."

Image copyrightTHINKSTOCK

Image captionIceland has abundant basalts, but these rocks are not found everywhere

Image copyrightP.HUEY/SCIENCE/AAAS

Image captionSome CCS experiments have pumped pure CO2 into sedimentary rocks (L) where the gas is trapped below an impermeable caprock. In CarbFix (R), the CO2 is dissolved in water and chemical reactions at depth then ensure nothing leaks back to the surface

There is, however, the issue of cost. Capture of the CO2 at power stations and other industrial complexes is expensive, and without incentives it is currently deemed to be uneconomic. The infrastructure needed to pump the gas to the burial site also has to be considered.

And in the case of the Carbfix approach, a substantial amount of water is required. Only something like 5% of the mass sent underground is CO2.

Christopher Rochelle is an expert on CCS at the British Geological Survey and was not involved in the Iceland experiment.

He said Carbfix underlined the importance of moving beyond modelling and lab studies to real-world demonstrations. Only by doing this can the technology readiness be properly assessed.

"We need to do more field-scale tests, like this one in Iceland, to better understand the types of processes that are ongoing and how fast they work," he told BBC News.

"Here, they injected into reactive rocks and the minerals precipitated relatively quickly and are then unable to migrate anywhere. That's great, but the rocks under Iceland are different to those under the North Sea, for example. So the approach that is taken is going to have to vary depending on where you are. We are going to need a portfolio of techniques."

The Hellisheidi geothermal power station has now moved beyond the experiment reported in Science magazine and is routinely injecting CO2 into the subsurface in larger quantities. The company is also burying hydrogen sulphide - another byproduct from the plant. This benefits the locals who have had to suffer the occasional waft of rotten eggs coming over their properties.

Image copyrightLAMONT-DOHERTY EARTH OBSERVATORY

Image captionThe Hellisheidi geothermal power station continues to pump CO2 under Iceland

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Apple to lower App Store 'tax' for loyal subscribers

If you sell an app, subscription or other product through the App Store, Apple gets 30% of the money.

That's how its been since the App Store's inception seven years ago.

But soon Apple will for the first time lower its App Store commission on one condition: if an app can retain a subscriber for over a year, the revenue split will be 85/15.

The change will apply immediately to existing apps with users that are more than a year old - potentially providing an injection of extra revenue for many companies.

Spotify, for example, boasted of having 20 million subscribers this time last year.

For the sake of argument, if even just half of those subscribers are still paying members today, the change could potentially represent around $15m in extra subscription revenue for Spotify every month, and that's probably a conservative estimate.

'Terrific news'

As well as price, Apple will introduce another significant change to App Store subscriptions. Until now, only apps in certain categories - media and entertainment content - could charge subscription fees. Soon, any app will be able to offer such an option.

This is widely seen as a way for Apple to encourage high-end productivity apps onto its mobile operating system, iOS.

"This could be the change that makes the market for professional-calibre iPad apps possible," wrote John Gruber, a technology writer and long-time Apple watcher.

"I think this is terrific news both for developers and users."

The danger, of course, is by opening up subscriptions to every type of app, Apple risks creating a frustrating environment that's irritating for users who were accustomed to the simple model of paid or free apps.

Then again, subscriptions are surely more likely to encourage quality compared to one-off payments - the challenge for developers shifts from being convincing people to pay once, to convincing them to keep paying, again and again.

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The revenue split change is just one piece of Apple's plans for its store, which now has 1.5 million apps on offer - second only to Google's Play store.

It means discovery for apps seeking to gain new users can be difficult, with limited possibilities for promotion within the store other than becoming an Apple "featured app", a lucrative accolade that can make or break a new app.

Soon, ads will appear at the top of searches made in the App Store. They will, Apple says, be relevant to the search in question, and be clearly marked as being a paid-for position. Ads won't be shown to users who are under 13.

Location data is used to power some of the ads, but users can opt out of this, Apple said, and no user data is shared with the advertisers in question.

Developer's conference

The changes have been announced ahead of Apple's annual Worldwide Developers' Conference, or WWDC.

More announcements are on the way, but it's traditional for WWDC to be more about software improvements than new hardware.

Microsoft, Facebook and Google have already held their equivalent events, and at each, artificial intelligence was the main talking point. Will Apple offer the same?

There's rumblings in the Valley that Apple lags way behind the others when it comes to machine learning and AI technologies - presenting a problem which one prominent observer warned could see Apple become the "next Blackberry".

Such talk is premature, of course, when talking about the world's most valuable company. The changes to the App Store - outlined in Apple's words here - are about maintaining dominance of the market, not chasing it.

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Ten Spectacular museums around the world 2016

In honour of #museumweek, BBC Culture rounds up stunning buildings around the world that house the treasures of civilisation.

Musee d’Orsay, France

Standing on the Left Bank of the Seine, this venerable Paris museum was opened in 1986 in a former Beaux-Arts railway station and hotel. The layout uses its previous incarnation to full effect – galleries cluster around the grand nave and light streams in through its sweeping glass roof. Conceived to bridge the gap between the collections of the Louvre Museum and the Pompidou Centre, it focuses on late 19th and early 20th Century art and houses the world’s largest collection of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings. (Credit: Daniella Nowitz/Corbis)

Guggenheim, Spain

During a period of city-wide regeneration in Bilbao in the late 1980s, the idea for the museum came about through a collaboration between Basque authorities and the Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation. US/Canadian architect Frank Gehry won the design commission and the museum opened its doors in October 1997. The impressive building stands on the edge of the Nervión River in the old industrial heart of of the city, its glass and limestone structure clad in waves of titanium. It was an immediate sensation; among its fans, the architect Philip Johnson hailed it “the greatest building of our time”. (Credit: Art Kowalsky / Alamy Stock Photo)

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Oscar Niemeyer Museum, Brazil

The museum was opened in 2002-3 and nicknamed ‘the eye’ as it resembles a giant human eye perched on a yellow pillar. The legendary Brazilian architect who designed it (and gave it his name) was a key figure in the modern movement; he was 95 when the building was completed. A 2,000 sq-ft museum space houses international art along with many of Niemeyer’s own works. (Credit: Chris Schmid Photography / Alamy Stock Photo)

British Museum, London

The architect Robert Smirke designed the core of the museum, which opened in 1852, in the neo-Classical style. The grand south entrance, with its impressive pediment and pillars, drew inspiration from ancient Greece. In 2000, Foster and Partners created a new Great Court, which, with its spectacular glass roof, transformed the museum’s inner courtyard into the largest covered space in Europe. (Credit: David Pearson / Alamy Stock Photo)

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