Afro Cinema: Nollywood festival ends in Paris as ‘About a Boy’ wins top prize
About a Boy, a story about the psychological games played between a writer and his muse by first-time director Diji Aderogba received the highest honour at the 2021 Nollywoodweek Film Festival, the audience appreciation award known as the Prix du Public. The announcement of the winning film marked the culmination...
Race to militarise artificial intelligence is the biggest threat to world peace
A race to militarise artificial intelligence is gearing up. Two years ago, the US Congress created the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI). This March, it recommended that the United States must accelerate artificial-intelligence (AI) technologies to preserve national security and remain competitive with China and Russia. This will...
Raucous nominated senator with skin disability axed from Kenya parliament
Troubled ruling party in Kenya, Jubilee, moved with speed to replace axed Nominated MP Isaac Mwaura with Sammy Leshore for Special Seat for people with disability in the Senate. The latest change happens on the back of a flurry of similar actions in parliamentary leadership that has seen a number...
Why it’s going to be hard to rein in the Covid variants on the rampage in India
Scientists are working to understand several coronavirus variants now circulating in India, where a ferocious second wave of Covid-19 has devastated the nation and caught authorities unawares. The country recorded nearly 400,000 new infections on May 9, taking its total to more than 22 million. Evidence is growing that one...
Uganda legislature bans same-sex unions with a new law after 8 years of haggling
The Ugandan Parliament has enacted a sexual offenses law that criminalises same-sex relationships and unions, bringing to an end a controversial a standoff that has lasted eight years. Now people who violate the new law risk up to five years in jail if President Yoweri Museveni assents to it. The...
Smartphones now offer cheaper malaria, Zika, chikungunya and dengue tests
Debojyoti Chakraborty took just a few months to develop a Covid-19 diagnostic test that worked in his lab; the challenge was to optimize it for the field. Based on the gene-editing technology CRISPR, the test produces a band on a paper strip if viral RNA is present. But Chakraborty, who...
South Africa’s largest fund administrator goes live with Temenos
Banking software company Temenos has today (Tuesday May 11) announced that South Africa’s largest third-party administrator, Curo Fund Services, has gone live with Temenos Multifonds Global Accounting platform, completing the first phase migration of funds from its five legacy systems to a single instance of Temenos’ award-winning funds administration platform....
Trump-shaped hot potato that’s turning Facebook into a failed digital ‘country’
In 2020, Facebook appointed what it refers to as its “Supreme Court” – a quasi-independent council called the Facebook Oversight Board – to review controversial content moderation decisions. This week, the Oversight Board handed down its most important judgment to date: support for the company’s move to ban former US...
Spending on science has been, should always be an investment for government
Much like Otto von Bismarck and other nation-builders in Germany, Tsar Alexander II was eager to bolster industrial development throughout his country. Central to those efforts was investing heavily in precision metrology. The tsar found eager and skilful natural scientists such as Mendeleev to help. In the same decade, Japan...
Aging and rejuvenation: It’s probably not a single factor that wastes, revives tissues
Conceptually, the therapeutic strategies of two front-runner start-ups – Elevian and Alkahest – could not be further apart. On the one extreme is Elevian’s reductionist approach, which attempts to recapitulate the benefits of young blood through supplementation with a single pro-youthful factor. On the other is Alkahest’s plasma formulations, created...
