Africa

Modern microwear analysis of the teeth of the infamous big cats known as the man-eating lions of Tsavo indicate that the animals may have developed a taste for human flesh to the point of devouring 135 railway workers in Africa in 1898 due to dental disease.

​​Kenya has opened up its skies for commercial drone use. Drones stand to have a real impact in the developing world where road infrastructure can make movement of goods difficult, but the technology in Kenya will also touch industries such as film-making, relief and conservation.​

A new study suggests that drones can help save elephants not by scaring away would-be hunters, but by scaring away the elephants themselves.​

The World Health Organization (WHO) last year reported some very promising signs during the early stages of a trial involving an Ebola vaccine called rVSV-ZEBOV, and now the final results are in, confirming a 100 percent protection rate from the deadly disease. ​

​​In the developing world, aerial drones can do a lot of good. With this in mind, the Government of Malawi and UNICEF have established a drone testing corridor, which is reportedly the first of its kind anywhere in Africa.​

Most bans on ivory trading outlaw the sale of pieces acquired after 1976. Scientists have now used a form of carbon dating to determine the real age of ivory samples, with an early study revealing more than 90 percent of seized shipments came from animals that died within three years previous.​​

What is claimed to be the world's first national drone delivery service has launched in Rwanda. Operated by US robotics firm Zipline in partnership with the Rwandan government, the service makes emergency deliveries of blood from a distribution hub to transfusion facilities up to 75 km (47 mi) away.

In the developing world, many cell phone users have to walk long distances in order to use paid charging stations. JikoPower, however, aims to bring the power to the people's cooking fires, with its Spark thermoelectric generator.

Stanford University researchers have come up with a method that could start to fill in some of the blanks when it comes to mapping global poverty, feeding satellite imagery into a machine learning algorithm to identify impoverished areas across the African continent.

Many Madagascar villages aren't accessed by decent roads. This means that it can be difficult getting medical samples to labs in a timely fashion. That's where a project led by Stony Brook University comes in. It's been using drones to get samples from those villages to a testing center.

Delivering urgent medical supplies to isolated areas seems a particularly good fit for drone technology. The Norman Foster Foundation is developing such a scheme, and the first prototype Droneport was recently displayed at this year's Venice Biennale.

A stunning new composite image, made up of nearly 7,000 individual snaps taken by ESA's Sentinel-2A, shows a completely cloud-free view of the African continent. It took the satellite some four months to gather the photos, with most of the shots taken between December 2015 and April 2016.