Above: Amanda Subalusky and Chris Dutton of the Yale Mara Project describe their research on the impact of wildebeests and hippos on rivers within Kenya’s renowned Maasai Mara National Reserve. (more…)
While African wildlife often run afoul of ranchers and pastoralists securing food and water resources for their animals, the interests of fauna and farmer might finally be unified by the “Sodom apple,” a toxic invasive plant that has overrun vast swaths of East African savanna and pastureland.
Should the ominous reference to the smitten biblical city be unclear, the Sodom apple, or Solanum campylacanthum, is a wicked plant. Not a true apple, this relative of the eggplant smothers native grasses with its thorny stalks, while its striking yellow fruit provides a deadly temptation to sheep and cattle. (more…)
Research reveals common challenges preventing IT progress in Africa recommends steps to overcome technology roadblocks
Nairobi, Kenya – 27 Jan 2014: IBM IBM today announced the results of a new study entitled ‘Setting the pace in Africa: How IT leaders deliver on the potential of emerging technologies’, which found that while nearly 87 percent of African IT leaders rank new technologies such as analytics, cloud, mobile and social media as being critical to business success, only 53% are pushing forward with adoption. (more…)
University of Missouri researcher part of team that found the bone in Kenya
COLUMBIA, Mo. – Humans have a distinctive hand anatomy that allows them to make and use tools. Apes and other nonhuman primates do not have these distinctive anatomical features in their hands, and the point in time at which these features first appeared in human evolution is unknown. Now, a University of Missouri researcher and her international team of colleagues have found a new hand bone from a human ancestor who roamed the earth in East Africa approximately 1.42 million years ago. They suspect the bone belonged to the early human species, Homo erectus. The discovery of this bone is the earliest evidence of a modern human-like hand, indicating that this anatomical feature existed more than half a million years earlier than previously known. (more…)
Twitter clips human thoughts to a mere 140 characters. Animals’ scent posts may be equally as short, relatively speaking, yet they convey an encyclopedia of information about the animals that left them.
In the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a Michigan State University researcher shows that the detailed scent posts of hyenas are, in part, products of symbiotic bacteria, microbes that have a mutually beneficial relationship with their hosts. (more…)
Doing paperwork has proven to be unsustainable but also entirely cumbersome in recent years given the multiplication of smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices. From Australia to America, Canada to Kenya, a paradigm shift towards cloud computing is being felt in the world and this could only expedite the clamor for less paper consumption.
Tradespersons have progressively depended on cloud-based applications to manage invoicing, bookkeeping and other jobs instead of filling their dashboards with unnecessary clutter. In particular, most farmers have looked and used the Cloud for a chance to turn a profit and save the earth all at the same time. (more…)
Nearly a decade ago, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory caught signs of what appeared to be a black hole snacking on gas at the middle of the nearby Sculptor galaxy. Now, NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), which sees higher-energy X-ray light, has taken a peek and found the black hole asleep.
“Our results imply that the black hole went dormant in the past 10 years,” said Bret Lehmer of the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. “Periodic observations with both Chandra and NuSTAR should tell us unambiguously if the black hole wakes up again. If this happens in the next few years, we hope to be watching.” Lehmer is lead author of a new study detailing the findings in the Astrophysical Journal. (more…)
Among other tragedies in countries with HIV epidemics, political violence can have the additional long-term consequence of an increase in viral resistance to treatment and HIV treatment failure, say the authors of a new paper in AIDS Reviews. The researchers, who have studied post-strife treatment failure and resistance in Kenya, argue that officials and health care providers need to study and prepare for how violence disrupts antiretroviral treatment and complicates the epidemic.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — As Kenyan citizens negotiated the tensions following the March 4 nationwide elections, memories of the violence that followed the December 2007 vote weighed heavily for many reasons. Among those in any nation with an HIV epidemic, argue authors of a new paper in AIDS Reviews, should be the long-term damage that political conflict can do to public health by disrupting treatment and thereby promoting resistance to antiretroviral drugs and treatment failure. (more…)
