Video: The Great Ape Program
The first ever pan African great ape survey aims to get an accurate estimate of chimpanzee populations remaining in the wild.
Read MoreNature: Science in Africa – View from the Frontline
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.
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 [...]
Read MoreNature: The Wheat Stalker
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, [...]
Read MoreNature News: Better biosurveillance could halt disease spread
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 [...]
Read MoreNature News: A last push to eradicate polio
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 [...]
Read MoreEvolution: A One-Way Street
Since Darwin, evolution has been in vogue. Most scientists take it on principle that accumulation of mutations in DNA over million of years leads to new life forms.
But a question that has intrigued researchers for some time is whether organisms can go back to their ancestral forms. Is evolution is reversible? Conventional wisdom—known in the sphere of evolutionary biology as “Dollo’s law” after pre-eminent dinosaur researcher Louis Dollo—says no. A recent study published in the journal Nature has elegantly confirmed that evolution is a one-way street by studying the process at the molecular level.
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