*Discovery of partial foot skeleton could mean hominin species lived side by side*
A new fossil discovery from Eastern Africa called the Burtele foot indicates Australopithecus afarensis, an early relative of modern humans, may not have been the only hominin to walk the plains and woodlands of what is now the Afar region of Ethiopia some 3.4 million years ago.
Researchers openly have questioned whether Au. afarensis, the species to which the famous fossil “Lucy” belongs, was the only living hominin during the late Pliocene of Africa. Lucy’s bones provided evidence that she and perhaps other early hominins may have walked upright, but whether or not she was the sole hominin species in her particular geologic time scale has been the subject of much debate. (more…)
*Youths echo findings from International Youth Foundation report, which urges actions to help young people succeed.*
REDMOND, Wash. — March 27, 2012 — The numbers are staggering: Our planet has the largest youth population ever, with more than 1 billion people aged 15 to 24, and the figure is racing to 1.5 billion by 2035, according to “Opportunity for Action,” a new report being released today from the International Youth Foundation (IYF). The report shows that while some youths are succeeding, millions of others are not because they don’t have access to the necessary education, skills and opportunities.
Microsoft commissioned the “Opportunity for Action” report to bring attention to the urgency of the global youth opportunity divide — the gap between those who have access to a good education and the technology, skills and connections to be successful, and those who do not. No region of the world escapes the unsettling picture captured by the report. In Brazil, approximately 40 percent of firms have difficulty finding qualified staff to fill job vacancies due to low-quality education. In Asia, 70 percent of working youths are engaged in the agricultural sector, where jobs are seasonal and offer no protections or access to safety nets. And in sub-Saharan Africa, youths are grossly under-employed, leaving 72 percent of young people living on less than two dollars per day. (more…)
AUSTIN, Texas — Researchers have developed a new dynamic mapping tool that will help policymakers and other groups determine a country’s vulnerabilities to climate change and conflicts and show how these two issues intersect in Africa.
The pilot version of the tool was released this month by the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at The University of Texas at Austin and additional data tools are expected to come online starting this spring. (more…)
*Microsoft’s U.S.-based employees helped raise over US$100 million for thousands of nonprofits during the 2011 Microsoft Giving Campaign, the largest total in company history.*
REDMOND, Wash. – Microsoft employees raised a record-breaking US$100.5 million in 2011, topping last year’s total with donations to more than 18,000 community organizations across the United States and around the world.
Giving was up across the board in 2011—more employees participated, donating more time and money than ever before, which surprised some after 2010’s record year. (more…)
U of T leading centre for study of global Christianity
A century ago, 80 per cent of the world’s Christians lived in Europe and North America; today, nearly 70 per cent live in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, making Christianity a predominantly non-Western religion.
A critical mass of scholars who are looking into the implications of this shift has made the University of Toronto a leading centre for the study of global Christianity.
Christianity today has more than 2.2 billion adherents worldwide. The majority are overwhelmingly poor, displaced from rural villages into overcrowded cities in search of work, and adhere strictly to the word of Scripture, which can command their loyalty far more than state or society. (more…)
*Project to use 2 million PCs to crunch numbers, compress 100 years of research into just one*
LA JOLLA, CA and ARMONK, NY – IBM’s Watson computing system broke new ground earlier this year when it defeated two celebrated human competitors on the Jeopardy! game show. Now, The Scripps Research Institute is hoping to do something equally novel but more critical to human health with part of the prize money from that tournament: Find a cure for drug-resistant malaria. And it’s asking for the public’s help.
To that end, Scripps Research and IBM are encouraging anyone in the world with a personal computer to join World Community Grid, a sort of “supercomputer of the people” that will crunch numbers and perform simulations for “GO Fight Against Malaria”—the project that Scripps Research and IBM have launched at https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org. (more…)
In Africa 140 years ago, David Livingstone, the Victorian explorer, met Henry M. Stanley of the New York Herald and gave him a harrowing account of a massacre he witnessed, in which slave traders slaughtered 400 innocent people. Stanley’s press reports prompted the British government to close the East African slave trade, secured Livingstone’s place in history and launched Stanley’s own career as an imperialist in Africa.
Today, an international team of scholars and scientists led by Dr. Adrian Wisnicki of Indiana University of Pennsylvania, publishes the results of an 18-month project to recover Livingstone’s original account of the massacre. The story, found in a diary that was illegible until it was restored with advanced digital imaging, offers a unique insight into Livingstone’s mind during the greatest crisis of his last expedition, on which he would die in 1873. (more…)
*New analytical method approaches the unstudied 99% of the human genome*
WASHINGTON, D.C., – 02 Nov 2011: Evolutionary history shows that human populations likely originated in Africa, and the Genographic Project, the most extensive survey of human population genetic data to date, suggests where they went next. A study by the Project finds that modern humans migrated out of Africa via a southern route through Arabia, rather than a northern route by way of Egypt. These findings will be highlighted today at a conference at the National Geographic Society.
National Geographic and IBM’s Genographic Project scientific consortium have developed a new analytical method that traces the relationship between genetic sequences from patterns of recombination – the process by which molecules of DNA are broken up and recombine to form new pairs. Ninety-nine percent of the human genome goes through this shuffling process as DNA is being transmitted from one generation to the next. These genomic regions have been largely unexplored to understand the history of human migration. (more…)
