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You're looking at a once-in-a-lifetime scientific discovery. A team of experts announced today that these fragments of space rock, discovered last month near Foumzgit, Morocco, are in fact meteorites from Mars. More »
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Many incredible works of art have been made using terracotta, including the world famous Terracotta Army created for the first emperor of China. But because terracotta is often simply unglazed clay, many of the finest works were lost long ago. More »
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Until recently, scientists thought humans first left Africa between forty and seventy thousand years ago. But the archaeological record keeps painting a far different, more ancient picture, one that took humans deep into the Arabian peninsula 100,000 years ago. More »
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Paleontologists recently discovered rodent teeth in Peru dating back over 41 million years, making them the oldest evidence of rodents in the Americas. But despite its location, this rodent was far more closely related to today's African, not American, rodents. More »
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HIV testing is now something you can do in the privacy of your own home. New research has tracked a trial program of self-administered HIV tests in Malawi, and shown that these tests could make a major difference in helping people find out their HIV status — and stop spreading the disease. More »
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Many in the scientific community have long assumed that nest-building in birds is a purely instinctive skill — an inborn ability that birds repeat from one nest to the next, regardless of their personal building history. More »
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The evidence has been mounting for years that early humans and Neanderthals interbred, but now it's pretty much a certainty. Part of the X chromosome found in people from outside Africa originally comes from our Neanderthal cousins. More »
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Our genes don't just help determine who we are — they also preserve an incredibly ancient record of who our ancestors were. Our genomes can actually reveal human population sizes dating all the way back to before humans even existed. More »
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When modern humans left Africa roughly 100 thousand years ago, it was only the last of several waves of hominoid migration that had previously included the likes of Neanderthals and Homo Erectus. Now a tooth in Germany reveals the original hominoid migration. More »
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Humans are the only animals who display loyalty to individuals we don't personally know. Scientists had assumed this was a new development made possible by the rise of centralized governments. But it might actually be part of how we evolved. More »
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We can trace our evolutionary heritage back millions of years, but it's surprisingly tricky to say with certainty which hominid species came directly before us. Now it looks like one of our evolutionary cousins is actually our parent species. More »
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Just before the uprisings now known collectively as "Arab Spring," I took a short trip to Casablanca, the wealthiest and largest city in North Africa. And there I had a vision of the future. More »
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There's fewer than 800 Mountain Gorillas left in the entire world, and their survival depends in part on people willing to pay money to go see them. But all this human interaction is bringing gorillas into contact with dangerous diseases. More »
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There's still a lot we don't know about our evolutionary history, but one generally agreed upon point is that humans originated in eastern Africa, around what's now Ethiopia. But a new genetic study suggests we came from somewhere else entirely. More »
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In the last couple years, amateur engineers from Africa have built DIY planes and helicopters out of recycled parts. These rigs look undeniably bad-ass, even if it's unclear whether they can get off the ground. More »
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Current genetic evidence says the ancestors of modern humans left Africa 60,000 years ago. But recently discovered stone tools in the Arabian peninsula and India suggest humans actually started exploring the world as much as 120,000 years ago. More »
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Geologists working in Ethiopia have found that a 60-meter-long canyon is steadily expanding and will allow a new ocean to form — one which will bisect the African continent. More »
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In the 1950s, the recreational use of amphetamines like Benzedrine and Dexedrine was legal, and even Disney characters got in on the uppers game. In the following comic, Mickey and Goofy go to Africa to sell crank. It transcends wrong. More »
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These baobab-inspired towers from Polish firm H3AR are designed to pump water from the 19,110 sq. mile lake under Darfur. And although they exist only in concept, these water-gathering monoliths could ostensibly slake the thirst of this drought-plagued region. More »
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The first and second Gods Must Be Crazy films followed Xixo the Bushman and his misadventures with modernity. The Gods Must Be Crazy III was about a Chinese vampire. Which of these is not like the other? More »
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Excited about the booming pirate economy? Now you can get a tiny cut of Somalian pirate booty by investing in their stock market - that's right, these pirates are now offering stock in their plundering operations. More »
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Over the next 50 years, the climates of most African nations will change enough that their traditional crops will no longer be able to grow. But there is a solution — a new type of explorer called a genetic prospector. More »
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One of the finalists for the prize in this year's Buckminster Fuller Challenge is a project that would use known technologies to convert the Sahara desert into a sustainable source of fresh fruit and vegetables. More »
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The worst invasion of army worms in decades has reduced Liberia's farms to ruins in a matter of days. Now the worms are menacing neighboring countries. More »
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Click to viewAt the same time as Paraguay is drying up, Africa is ripping open, a slow process that will result in the emergence of a whole new ocean, according to Scientific American. The rip you see above can't be resewn — as Eitan Haddock's photographs document. Last year, scientists watched an 8 meter rip in the earth appear in only three weeks. Change is nothing new for this part of the world: researchers recently revealed that the Sahara was entirely covered in vegetation at many points during the last 120,000 years. Watch an ocean appear before your disbelieving eyes, after the jump. More »
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Kibera, a dense, 2.5 square km shantytown outside Nairobi, is the largest slum in Kenya. It's estimated that possibly a million people live its maze of houses and outdoor markets. Now a group there has figured out a fast, efficient way to convert piles of trash into compost — and to convert areas that were once trash heaps into instant organic farms using just recycled PVC piping and other easily-accessible materials. One farm, which now feeds 30 people, was operational in just 3 months. This low-tech form of land reclamation could be a model for rapidly-growing urban populations. More »
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A new mobile phone-based device called Block&Track, the result of several homebrew hacks by a young Kenyan inventor, acts as a quick and dirty car theft prevention gadget. The device sits in your car and sends a message to your cell phone when somebody starts the engine. At that point, you can send a command that will alert the police, shut down your engine, and activate a listening device that captures sound inside your car. Not only can you stop auto theft before it happens, but you can get your own private Cops show when you listen in as the cops bust the thieves. More »
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The traditional relationship between the developed world and developing one is about to be turned on its head. New scientific training programs will allow Africans to exploit their own national resources, rather than outside interests exploiting them. Millions of dollars in grants to several African science institutions will train local researchers lead operations to discover, mine, and use the rich mineral resources found in many African nations. While some of the money will go to medical training and efforts to preserve the coastal environments on the vast continent, I am most intrigued by the money that's going to materials science. More »
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These thunderheads are brewing over the midwestern United States, a region where thunderstorms can whip up pretty damn fast. Courtesy of NASA, this image is one of a series running on the Boston Globe's website to celebrate the work done by the International Space Station. Want to see what this kind of cloud looks like a little closer? More »
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While scientists and politicians in the developed world continue their tedious arguments about whether climate change is really happening, farmers in Africa have not only accepted it but are adjusting their entire lives to deal with rapid weather shifts brought on by global warming. Local environmental groups have been tracking dramatic seasonal changes in Benin, Kenya and Malawi, nations with a lot of farmland that have traditionally relied primarily on rain to irrigate crops. Now the rainy season is no longer adequate, and farmers have come up with some solutions that aren't in the Kyoto Protocols. More »
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If you ever find yourself in central Africa, here's a piece of advice: don't mess with the frogs. As Ed Yong over at "Not Exactly Rocket Science" warns us, several species of them come equipped with a set of bony Wolverine-like claws that punch through their skin when threatened. More »
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Prices for cornmeal and rice have doubled in Somalia since January, and on Monday food riots wracked the Somalian city of Mogadishu. Thousands of people protested the insane prices for staple foods, and eventually police shot and killed two protesters. Earlier this year, food riots broke out in the African nation of Senegal as well. What's causing these conditions, which sound like the precursors to the apocalyptic food-shortage flick Soylent Green? More »
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This is what a mass evacuation from a city looks like from space. Using satellites orbiting over Africa, human rights groups published UNOSAT satellite imagery to show, in very simple terms, the human cost of violence in the Chadian capital city of N'Djamena. Over 10,000 people are crammed on a bridge, trying to escape into the neighboring nation of Cameroon. The black dots are people, and the yellow dashes are vehicles, most likely trucks and buses. It's a chilling portrait of the human future, wracked with violence and recorded via space-based surveillance devices, taken on February 27. See the full map below. More »
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A few days ago, this Ariane rocket blasted off from Kourou, French Guiana. Its payload included a telecom satellite for Africa, which is now sailing serenely overhead. Image by Jody Amiet, AFP/Getty Images. More »
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It's called the Dignity Toilet, and it doesn't just provide a comfy seat when you want to take a dump; it also has a strap so you can carry the full toilet on your back; and finally, its shape allows you to quickly turn your poop into fertilizer at your local field. The Dignity Toilet, designed by Cooler Solutions, just took first prize for a "sanitary solution for Africa" from Design for People in Need. More »
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