Ghana’s first satellite is now orbiting Earth. It’s a historic moment for the country at a time when several African countries are increasingly interested in space exploration. Just last year, the African Union passed an initiative to help coordinate the efforts of space agencies across the continent. The GhanaSat-1 was designed by a team of engineers at Ghana’s All Nations…
Insect to cause $3bn damage to maize in next 12 months and serious food shortages An invasion of fall armyworms from the Americas has ravaged crops across more than 20 African countries, putting hundreds of millions of people at risk of hunger. Experts warned this week that the continent will struggle to contain the threat posed by the 3.4cm…
Languages Grew From a Seed in Africa, a Study Says A researcher analyzing the sounds in languages spoken around the world has detected an ancient signal that points to southern Africa as the place where modern human language originated. The finding fits well with the evidence from fossil skulls and DNA that modern humans originated in Africa. It also…
As biological research races forward, ethical quandaries are piling up. In a report published Tuesday in the journal eLife, researchers at Harvard Medical School said it was time to ponder a startling new prospect: synthetic embryos. In recent years, scientists have moved beyond in vitro fertilization. They are starting to assemble stem cells that can organize themselves into embryolike…
DANAKIL DEPRESSION, Ethiopia — In oppressively dry heat and a miasma of sulfur and chlorine, the rocky landscape sprouts patches of neon green and yellow that resemble oozing scrambled eggs. Near-boiling pools of acidic water bubble between odd formations of rocks and minerals: white beehive-shaped mounds of salt, yolk-colored lattices of sulfuric crust, purplish-red crumbles. Nearby, iron-rich rock fans…
With its bone-dry grasslands and oppressive heat, the middle of the Namib Desert may seem like a strange place to go fishing. Yet there Jennifer Guyton and Tyler Coverdale were, standing in a sea of orange sand and brittle yellow grass with their 30-foot carp pole. But the two Princeton graduate students weren’t trying to catch some sort of…
Astronomers have arrived at what they believe to be the most accurate measure yet of the mass of the Milky Way: about 4.8 x 1011 times the mass of the sun, or “solar masses,” to use a standard unit of mass in astronomy. This comes to about 9.5 x 1041 kilograms — that is, 95 followed by 40 zeros….
In 2001, President George W. Bush issued an executive order banning federal funding for new sources of stem cells developed from preimplantation human embryos. The action stalled research and discouraged scientists. Five years later, a Kyoto University scientist, Shinya Yamanaka, and his graduate student, Kazutoshi Takahashi, re-energized the field by devising a technique to “reprogram” any adult cell, such…
For a few days, Venus smiled — sideways. When Japan’s Akatsuki spacecraft pulled into orbit around Venus in December 2015 and turned on its instruments, it almost immediately discovered a bow-shape feature in the atmosphere stretching 6,000 miles, almost pole to pole — a sideways smile. More remarkably, while Venus’s winds blow at speeds up to 250 miles per…
The force of crashing waves can generate huge amounts of energy. But there’s a catch: how do you develop technology that can withstand the sea’s harsh environment with minimum disruption to the ecosystem? One Israeli-based company, Yam Pro Energy — believes it can offer the ideal solution and is set to build a wave-energy plant on the coastline of…
