Category: Technology

Agriculture in the global south remains under pressure to produce more food while responding to climate change and resource constraints. Policy responses have focused on increasing production. But what about post-harvest losses? Globally, about one-third of food produced for human consumption is estimated to be lost or wasted. The problem was examined in a recent […]

CREATISTA/Shutterstock Do you remember the last time you were laughing and simply could not stop? Perhaps it was a situation when you should not have been laughing at all. This happened to one of us while accompanying a friend to a family court in the middle of an unpleasant divorce case. It led to a […]

The AI doomsday news cycle plays on anxieties about the future. The media has tended to prioritise sensational takes on the risk at the expense of more thoughtful opinions by, for example, experts in the ethics of AI. Alarmist fantasies of superintelligence – where artificial intelligence surpasses that of the most gifted human minds – […]

Not every snakebite injects venom. When venom enters the body, however, it can cause snake envenoming. This is a potentially fatal condition and it mostly affects poor rural communities across tropical and subtropical regions who don’t have easy access to medical care. As researchers with decades of combined experience in snakebite and tropical disease epidemiology, […]

Is AI a climate change villain, whose insatiable hunger for electricity will roast the planet? Or will it help predict where the next climate disaster will strike and what to do about it? In order to weigh these questions up, a good starting point is with AI’s energy consumption. The 2015 Paris agreement was a […]

Much of what scientists know about how genetic differences affect health comes from studying populations outside Africa. This matters because genetic information is increasingly being used to understand disease, interpret genetic tests and, in some cases, guide treatment. Africa has the greatest human genetic diversity in the world, yet African populations remain poorly represented in […]

PeopleImages/Shutterstock Who comes to mind when you think of someone emotionally intelligent? Someone who can read a room, defuse an argument, and who knows exactly what to say when a friend is struggling? For many people, that person is a woman. It’s such a widely held belief that popular psychology treats it as fact. We […]

Africa boasts up to 25% of Earth’s animal and plant species. This diversity is driven by diverse habitats: harsh deserts, vast grasslands, dense forests, towering mountains, lush coastlines and teeming seas. It is also due to deep evolutionary roots, as many animal and plant groups originated here in the distant past. Palaeontologists have been excavating […]

Shutterstock AI generator The 2026 Nobel prize for chemistry has been awarded to two researchers for their work on mirror-image molecules. Frances’s Henri Kagan and Japan’s Kensō Soai were announced as this year’s winners during a news conference in Stockholm. Some molecules, like amino acids, the building blocks of proteins in living beings, exist in […]

Climate does more than shape the weather. It can influence when and where infectious diseases emerge by changing how disease-carrying vectors and animal hosts survive and behave. Scientists use weather data to anticipate some disease risks days or weeks ahead. But forecasting how those risks will change across seasons and years remains difficult. We asked […]