How Iceland rolled back coronavirus with science
Driving along Reykjavik’s windswept roads on a cold March morning, Kári Stefánsson turned up the radio. The World Health Organization had just announced that an estimated 3.4 per cent of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 would die — a shockingly high fatality rate, some 30 times larger than that for seasonal...
Scientists say dogs can detect coronavirus
Asher is an eccentric, Storm likes sunbathing and Maple loves to use her brain. All three could play a part in controlling the Coid-19 pandemic, but they are not scientists or politicians. They are dogs. And they are not alone. Around the world, canines are being trained to detect the...
Why Oxford’s positive Covid vaccine results are puzzling scientists
A highly anticipated Covod-19 vaccine has delivered some encouraging — but head-scratching — results. The vaccine developed by the University of Oxford, UK, and pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca was found to be, on average, 70 per cent effective in a preliminary analysis of phase III trial data, the developers announced in...
Nairobi sucked into ‘fool’s gold’ as the mineral fuels conflict in central Africa
Despite efforts invested licit mineral trade to stifle gold smuggling and money-laundering, East Africa – with Nairobi and Kampala as pivots – still towers other countries in Africa as a major conduit for pirated gold and diamonds from conflict regions in the South and Central Africa. East Africa is in...
As Kenya mulls facial recognition technology, resistance builds up in Europe, US
In Belgrade’s Republic Square, dome-shaped cameras hang prominently on wall fixtures, silently scanning people walking across the central plaza.It is one of 800 locations in the city that Serbia’s government said last year it would monitor using cameras equipped with facial-recognition software, purchased from electronics firm Huawei in Shenzhen, China.The...
Puzzle of Kenya’s ‘mysteriously low Covid death toll’
One of the first large SARS‑CoV-2 antibody studies in Africa suggests that by mid-2020, the virus had infected four per cent of people in Kenya — a surprisingly high figure in view of Kenya’s small number of Covid-19 deaths.The presence of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 indicates a history of infection with...
What forecasters can learn from climate models to simulate the Covid pandemic
Epidemiologists predicting the spread of Covid-19 should adopt climate-modelling methods to make forecasts more reliable, say computer scientists who have spent months auditing one of the most influential models of the pandemic.In a study that was uploaded to the preprint platform Research Square on November 6, researchers commissioned by London’s...
Trade: Synthetic alternatives to endangered wildlife products being developed
Roughly a million species are threatened with extinction, according to a major international study published last year. And trade and personal use by people is the second leading driver behind habitat destruction, the research established.Conservation agency, Cites (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora)...
CITES is a terminally ill patient in need of serious attention – conservationists
Customs officials in Singapore made a grisly discovery last April at a port on the island’s southern coast. Inside shipping containers supposedly transporting frozen beef from Nigeria to Vietnam, they found bloodstained sacks stuffed with 14 tonnes of scales stripped illegally from pangolins — scaly anteaters endemic to Africa and...
Russia announces positive coronavirus vaccine results from controversial trial
For the second time this week, researchers have announced positive results for the final, human stages of a coronavirus vaccine trial. This time, the results are from the Russian vaccine trial, dubbed Sputnik V.On November 9, New York City-based drug company Pfizer put out a press release on positive interim...
