Beware of serious health risks posed by arsenic poisoning in water, food
Arsenic’s potent effect on humans has been known since at least the Roman Empire. For centuries, it was a popular poison for murderers because it can’t be seen, smelled or tasted in food or water. That made it difficult to detect. As chemical detection methods improved, its use as a...
Hashtag: A genie or ally governments around the world cannot rein in?
After Twitter drew world attention to schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram terror group, Nigerian security forces began to arrest protesters and later deployed armed police and water cannons onto the median. That scene would only provide more arresting footage to help drive the story further up the Twitter algorithm. Nigeria...
Social media: Powerful tool for galvanising civilians against dictators and crime
Watching the analytics skyrocket during a dentist appointment in San Francisco, Jack Dorsey was struck by how quickly a hashtag can move. The founder of Twitter had seen people fire off tweets to coordinate protests in Iran in 2009, and the next year, the website had galvanised crowds of millions...
How a hashtag went viral and incited a military intervention in Nigeria
Russell Simmons was finishing his morning yoga routine on a yacht floating in the turquoise Caribbean waters off St Barts, peacefully unaware that he was about to provoke a tidal wave. The man who founded the boom-bap hit machine Def Jam Records in a cramped Manhattan dormitory room and made...
Espionage: It’ll take years for US, Europe to unpack China’s and Russia’s spying sprees
First it was SolarWinds, a reportedly Russian hacking campaign that stretches back almost a year and has felled at least nine US government agencies and countless private companies. Now it’s Hafnium, a Chinese group that’s been attacking a vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange Server to sneak into victims’ email inboxes and...
Egypt secures €109 million AfDB loan for rural sewage infrastructure development
Egypt has embarked on a massive rural areas sewage infrastructure for which it has secured €109 million from the African Development Bank to finance the project. The projects will improve sanitation infrastructure and services for rural communities in Luxor Governorate in Egypt’s Upper Nile region, the two parties said in...
Multitude of coronavirus variants found in the US, but the threat is unclear
For the scientists who have spent the past year poring over hundreds of thousands of coronavirus genomes, the United States has been an enigma. Despite having world-leading genome sequencing infrastructure and experiencing more Covid infections than any other country, the United States has until recently lagged far behind in sequencing...
Covid vaccines: Scammers, sellers wait on the dark market to pounce
The entire globe is currently undergoing one of the largest and most complex vaccination campaigns in history, and, not surprisingly, scammers and sellers on the dark market have been eager to make a profit off the process. Kaspersky researchers examined 15 different marketplaces on the Darknet and found advertisements for...
Regional integration at the ce of Mozambique’s energy success
As one of leading resource-rich countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Mozambique has the potential to not only significantly advance its own socioeconomic status, but also dramatically boost economic growth throughout the region. According to the World Bank Group, regional integration helps countries to overcome divisions that impede the flow of goods,...
Microsoft on verge of secure and decentralised ID systems
For years, tech companies have touted blockchain technology as a means to develop identity systems that are secure and decentralised. The goal is to build a platform that could store information about official data without holding the actual documents or details themselves. Instead of just storing a scan of your...
