African

Anne Luther, a digital heritage specialist and one of Digital Benin’s principal investigators, hopes the project will be a model for other communities that want to explore how technology can be used to help them reconnect with and reclaim stolen artifacts. “Before Digital Benin, digital restitution was not a conversation being had by larger institutions,” Luther says.  In building the catalogue, the team received more than 400 data sets from 131 institutions in 20 countries, which they then drew from in order to make…

Credit: iScience (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.108533 Africa is on fire. It has been for thousands of years. The continent contains more than 50% of the total area on Earth that is burning, on average, and there is no sign of it stopping; indeed, the migrating, hemisphere-hopping African wildfire season is steadily increasing. The fire is…

“Dr. Holt, I need you to come listen to one of my second graders. This is one of my best students, but I’m worried I might be overlooking a speech or language disorder—I’m just not sure,” the teacher asked me. I visited her second-grade classroom and listened to the student say, “The mama bird, she jus’ rub’ her body on the baby in the nes’ ’cause it was col’.”This child was Black and was using African American English. To many people in the U.S., including many educators and trained speech-language pathologists, the…

In late August 2020, wildlife veterinarian Chris Foggin was masked up and dissecting an elephant that was suspected to have died from anthrax when he got a call to say there had been more fatalities.The next day, another five dead elephants were found in the baking hot Zimbabwean sun.Foggin knew he and his team couldn't get to all of the dead elephants to collect post-mortem tissue samples, but he collected what he could before the carcasses decomposed.By November, a total of 35 African elephants (Loxodonta africana) had…

TUNL, a South African parcel shipping platform, has secured $1 million in pre-seed funding from investors, including Founders Factory Africa, Digital Africa Ventures, E4E Africa, and Jozi Angels. The platform, which claims to help e-commerce merchants save between 50% and 80% on international shipping costs, said the funding will fuel its expansion in its primary market, South Africa, and lay the groundwork for its launch in other key African and emerging markets. CEO Matthew Davey and COO Craig Lowman founded the…

The South African pop singer Zahara, whose soaring voice and strident ballads earned her multiple platinum-selling albums in her home country, has died aged 35.South Africa’s sports, arts and culture minister, Zizi Kodwa, announced her death, saying: “My deepest condolences to the Mkutukana family and the South African music industry. Government has been with the family for some time now. Zahara and her guitar made an incredible and lasting impact in South African music.”Last month, her manager Oyama Dyosiba confirmed she…

As It Happens6:12Scientists find elusive golden mole for the 1st time in 87 yearsWhen a group of conservation scientists set off in search of a long-lost species of South Africa moles in 2021, their colleagues warned them not to get their hopes up.After all, the last time a scientist had seen a De Winton's golden mole was in 1936. What's more, the critically endangered species dwells entirely underground, and is extremely difficult to distinguish from other types of golden moles who share its habitat.But now, the team…

A study has revealed that over 210 million years ago, ancient animals possibly possessed bird-like feet. This discovery comes from an analysis of Trisauropodiscus footprints found in southern Africa, dating back to the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic Periods. These footprints, which differ from any known fossil animals of that era, suggest that either early dinosaurs or other reptiles may have evolved bird-like feet, predating the earliest bird fossils by 60 million years. (Artistic concept artwork.) Credit:…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain A very large percentage of South Africans who are released from prison end up being rearrested and being convicted for crimes again. The country has one of the highest recidivism rates in the world. Criminologist Casper Lӧtter sets out his findings in a recent paper on what can be learned from…

If 2022 was the year mpox infections exploded globally, 2023 was the year much of the world stopped paying attention.Yet Canadian researchers, in collaboration with scientists working on the ground in hot spots such as Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), are still shining a spotlight on the virus that sparked last year's unprecedented global outbreak — and one that still seems capable of new surprises. One joint Canadian-DRC research team, co-led by Jason Kindrachuk from the University of Manitoba, has…