In a sunlit opening in the forest, Skinnah spots a large adult chimpanzee hammering something with a big stone. The chimpanzee puts a broken nut into its mouth then continues pounding. When Skinnah tries to move closer, the chimp disappears into the trees. By the time Leinert and her crew get to the clearing, the animal is long gone.

For the past year, Leinert has been trekking through Sapo National Park, Liberia’s first and only protected reserve, to study its chimpanzee population. A student volunteer at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (EVA) in Leipzig, Germany, Leinert has never seen her elusive subjects in the flesh but she knows some of them well. There’s an energetic young male with a big belly who hammers nuts so vigorously he has to grab a sapling for support. There are the stronger adults who can split a nut with three blows. And there are the mothers who parade through the site with their babies. They’ve all been caught by video cameras placed strategically throughout Sapo.

Chimpanzees in the wild are notoriously difficult to study because they flee from humans — with good reason. Bushmeat hunting and human respiratory diseases have decimated chimpanzee populations¹, while logging and mining have wiped out their habitat. Population numbers have plunged — although no one knows by exactly how much because in most countries with great apes, the animals have never been properly surveyed.

The Pan Africa Great Ape Program, the first Africa-wide great-ape census to be mounted, could change that. In addition to surveying chimpanzee numbers (see ‘How many chimpanzees are left?’), project scientists plan to set up automated video and audio recording devices at 40 research sites in 15 countries with chimp populations. Led by Christophe Boesch, director of the primatology department at the EVA, and Hjalmar Kühl, also at the EVA, the programme aims to get a picture of how chimpanzee behaviour — from nut cracking to vocal calls — varies across Africa. Ultimately, the hope is to learn about the origins and extent of what, in humans, would be called culture.

Until recently, scientists regarded culture — defined as socially transmitted behaviours — as exclusive to humans, but there is growing recognition that many animals exhibit some sort of culture. Chimpanzees, which share 98% of their genes with humans, have the most varied set of behaviours documented in the animal world. The difference between humans and animals is growing less distinct, say some researchers. “It is not black and white,” says Kühl, who is Leinert’s supervisor at the EVA.

In the old scenario, “only humans have culture”, says Jason Kamilar, a biogeographer in the department of anthropology at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. “Then, culture would be the defining feature of humanity, which evolved some time after the split between the human and chimp lineages,” he says. But “if chimps have culture, then presumably the last common ancestor of chimps and humans had culture”.

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The first ever pan African great ape survey aims to get an accurate estimate of chimpanzee populations remaining in the wild.

Kenyan science is a study in contrasts. Among sub-Saharan nations, it ranks third — behind South Africa and Nigeria — in its output of scientific papers published in international journals, and its publishing outranks that of economic heavyweight Nigeria in fields such as environment, ecology and immunology. It is also a hub of collaborations on the continent (see ‘Country connections’). But Kenya’s research output has grown more slowly than most other sub-Saharan nations. In the recent African Union survey, Kenya scored last in terms of the increase in the numbers of published research papers, normalized for population size.

Most of the scientific work in Kenya is centred in government-owned research institutes that have extensive international collaborations. Among the most renowned is the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI), which has centres around the country and does basic research as well as developing drugs, vaccines and products such as diagnostic kits for HIV — an important service because Kenya lacks a thriving private sector for commercialization of research. KEMRI has a budget of $37.5 million, with 45% coming from its international collaborators, including the Wellcome Trust, a London-based medical research charity.

Other centres also stand out, such as the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute, headquartered in Nairobi, which has an international reputation for its work on crops and agricultural diseases. And the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute, headquartered in Mombasa, has a programme focused on mangrove research that is considered the best in sub-Saharan Africa.

By contrast, the universities suffer from lack of infrastructure and money. The government and donors have focused on boosting primary and secondary education, but have neglected universities, say observers.

The government invested only $3.6 million in 2010 on university-based research, according to Shaukat Abdulrazak, secretary of the National Council for Science and Technology. And there is a shortage of professors to serve a student population that grew from 90,000 in 2004 to more than 120,000 in 2008.

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Njoro, Kenya (Jun 30, 2011) — David Cheruiyot noticed that his wheat fields were turning the wrong colour. The stems of the plants took on a sickly brown hue, and when he peeled open the heads there was no grain inside. “If you go to inspect it, there is nothing but dust,” he recalls.

Ug99, a virulent fungus that causes a disease called stem rust, arrived on Cheruiyot’s farm in Kenya in 2007. It devastated wheat fields in the country that season, slashing yields by as much as 80% in some regions. Since that epidemic, Cheruiyot has sprayed his wheat three times a season with fungicide, something that few farmers in Africa can afford.
Online collection.

Stem rust has plagued farmers for millennia, but Ug99 is a new superstrain that overcomes defensive genes in 90% of the wheat crops planted around the globe. Since it was first detected in 1998, spores of the fungus have spread from East Africa into Yemen and Iran. If the disease continues its march eastwards, hitting the breadbaskets of south Asia and China, it will threaten the food supply of hundreds of millions of people.

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Germany is still recovering from one of the world’s worst outbreaks of enterohaemorrhagic Escherichia coli, which as of 18 June had sickened more than 3,200 people and caused 39 deaths¹. The unusually deadly bacteria moved undetected through the food supply from livestock to agriculture to the dinner table, and the response to the outbreak was branded slow and inefficient by physicians and scientists (see ‘Microbe outbreak panics Europe‘).

Now a group of health professionals assembled by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, has called for biosurveillance efforts in the United States and worldwide to be streamlined to help recognize and respond to threats quickly.

“We are trying to create an international immune system, a system that has the capacity to recognize abnormalities,” says Ian Lipkin, co-chair of the National Biosurveillance Advisory Subcommittee (NBAS) and director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, New York.

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Parts of Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia and eastern Uganda are most affected. The U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) estimates that 8.4 million people are in need of food aid in the region, according to spokesman David Orr. Thousands of livestock have already died in Kenya and Ethiopia from animal diseases associated with the drought. The severity this year will depend on the rainy season between March and May.

A drought for the record books

Unlike more instantaneous natural disasters such as earthquakes, drought progresses slowly like a drumbeat. There is an apex, usually around the ninth month when the numbers of cattle dying rises drastically. The numbers depend on how poor the rainfall is, and meteorologists have so far predicted below-average rainfall for 2011 in eastern parts of the Horn.

Predictions of the current drought depend on ocean temperatures. A La Niña episode, caused by cooling ocean surface temperatures, began in the central Pacific Ocean in July 2010. Temperatures lowered by 1.5 to 1.6 degrees Celsius, changing ocean and atmospheric circulation patterns.

In historical terms, this episode has been among the strongest in a century, according to the World Meteorological Agency. The system unleashed massive flooding in Australia and Southeast Asia. In East Africa, it caused a dry spell between October and December 2010. It was the driest short rain season in 30 years.

“It is too early to say yet, although the general view is [the rains] look like being quite poor in certain parts of Somalia and Ethiopia,” said Orr. “Combined with conflict and rising food prices in Somalia, this could be particularly serious in that country.”

The WFP is continuing its normal operations of providing a food basket of cereals to the regions but is underfunded by 56 percent for the April to September period, Orr said.

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Funding gap persists as agencies and organizations attempt to wipe out the tenacious virus.

Some 99% of wild poliovirus has been eradicated, but it clings on in a few places. The last endemic hot spots are the conflict-ridden front lines of Pakistan and Afghanistan, areas of India and Nigeria — and governments and charities are scrambling to eliminate it entirely.

Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation headquartered in Seattle, Washington, announced in his annual letter yesterday his commitment to eradicate polio by 2012, by giving the vaccine to all children under five in poor countries. The initiative is led by the Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), which includes among other organizations Rotary International, a non-profit foundation headquartered in Evanston, Illinois.

Nature examines the challenges that remain before the virus can be wiped out.

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U.S. EPA says it is OK for humans to take in up to 50 micrograms of BPA per kilogram of body weight each day. The new study, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, suggests that we are exposed to at least eight times that amount every day.

“Our data raise grave concern that regulatory agencies have grossly underestimated current human exposure levels,” states the study.

The study also gives the first experimental support that some BPA is likely cleared at similar rates in mice, monkeys and humans, making it possible to extrapolate health studies in mice to humans.

Despite decades of research, questions about BPA have lingered and recently become politicized. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) hopes to add an amendment to the “FDA Food Safety Modernization Act,” currently under consideration in the Senate, banning the chemical from children’s food and drink packaging. Republicans and industry representatives have been averse, saying that research has not shown conclusively that the chemical is harmful.

Hormones are essential during development and can determine, among other things, a child’s gender. BPA, since it mimics estrogen, is an “endocrine disrupter,” according to Thomas Zoeller, a biology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. And amazingly, BPA has the ability to bind to not one, but three receptors — the estrogen, the male hormone and the thyroid hormone receptors, Zoeller said.

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The Environmental Justice Strategic Enforcement Assessment Tool uses a complex combination of census data, a respiratory hazard index, poverty levels, toxic emissions, infant mortality, an index of documented pollution events and other such numbers to assign a score to a geographical area.

The end result will be a national database that will identify small tracts of people as unfairly affected over the years. Officials can take the score into consideration while making land-use and permit decisions, reducing chances of human judgment errors. Officials stressed that the tool was only a starting point, and other information would also be used to make decisions.

The tool is being developed to assist the agency in its quest to help officials take into account concerns of minorities, low-income and indigenous communities while they prepare rules, issue permits and seek compliance. The interim guidance on the issue, released Monday, will go for assessment to the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC), a council put together by EPA in 1992 to address environmental justice issues.

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The upsurge is not unexpected. Experts say more than half the world’s population will be at risk by 2085 because of greater urbanization, global travel and climate change. Over the past 30 years, a global outcry against using the pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or DDT, has led to the resurgence of the mosquito, a voracious consumer of human blood and carrier of infectious disease.

Epidemics have become routine in Latin America, a continent on the verge of becoming highly endemic. Outbreaks are today raging in Brazil, Guatemala and other nations. Thailand, within a week of its annual dengue season this year, has already reported 18,000 cases and 20 deaths, according to the Ministry of Public Health.