News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
On 17 February, Malawi’s Ministry of Health announced a nasty surprise: A 3-year-old girl who was paralyzed in November 2021 was infected with the wild poliovirus, which Africa officially vanquished in 2020. The sequence of the virus showed it had somehow made the leap from Pakistan, one of the last two holdouts of the wild … Read more
Africa is the birthplace of our species, but ancient DNA from the continent has so far provided relatively few clues to our history there, partly because researchers have struggled to recover genetic samples that survived the hot, humid climate. Now, an analysis of ancient DNA from six individuals from southeastern Africa offers a glimpse of … Read more
As sea levels rise due to climate change, heritage sites all around the African coast will come under increasing risk of flood damage – including Carthage and sites linked to the Ancient Egyptian civilisation Humans 10 February 2022 By Michael Marshall Sabratha, an ancient Roman town in what is now Libya Sklifas Steven/Alamy Stock Photo … Read more
In 2019, Alessandra Mascaro, a volunteer and budding evolutionary biologist for The Loango Chimpanzee Project, noticed something no other primatologist in Africa had reported before. In the forests of Gabon, while following and filming a female chimpanzee Suzee and her son Sia, Mascaro noticed Suzee clamp something tiny between her lips, before applying the … Read more
The engineers aboard the floating power station on Lake Kivu could only watch nervously as the volcano in the distance erupted violently, sending tremors rumbling through the water beneath them. It was not the lava shooting from Mount Nyiragongo last May that spooked them, but the enormous concentrations of potentially explosive gases within Kivu, … Read more
The course of human evolution never did run smooth. The emergence of hominins on the continent of Africa is full of twists, turns, gaps, and dead ends, which makes it all the more difficult to retrace the rise of our own species. Today, we still don’t really know when or where the first Homo … Read more
The characters used to write the Vai script, which was invented in Liberia in 1833, have become visually simpler over time, reflecting the evolutionary pressures acting on writing Humans 11 January 2022 By Colin Barras A character representing the syllable “bi” in Vai script Kelly et al The symbols we use to write words evolve … Read more
A devastating mudslide ripped through Sierra Leone’s capital of Freetown in August 2017, burying homes and killing at least 1,100 people. Triggered by weeks of unusually heavy rain, it was one of the worst environmental disasters the region had experienced in years. More than four years later, scientists are concerned that it could happen again. … Read more
Every geography schoolbook has them: maps that look like today’s Earth, but not quite, since all continents are merged into a single supercontinent. Those maps were used to explain why dinosaurs in South America and Africa, or North America and Europe looked so alike. Paleogeographic reconstructions like these provide context to study the processes … Read more
A new type of weather condition has been observed, existing primarily in one particular part of the world: compact, slow-moving, moisture-rich pools. Researchers are calling these ‘atmospheric lakes’. This unique type of storm occurs over the western Indian Ocean and moves towards Africa. Unlike most storms – created by a vortex – the lakes … Read more