Africa

There are a number of trials being conducted to investigate how small aerial surveillance aircraft can be used to combat poaching. The latest effort involves the use of AI software to quickly identify poachers and animals in drone footage, in an attempt to better protect elephants and rhinos.

They may give us an almost endless supply of eggs and nuggets, but industrial chicken farming comes with a tradeoff: it produces a lot of poop. To turn a con into a pro, researchers have developed a process that mixes chicken manure with an invasive weed to create a feedstock for making biofuel.

Masrasector nananubis might have been no bigger than a skunk, but that didn't prevent it from becoming top dog after the dinosaurs died out. Named after the Egyptian god of mummification​, its rise and fall is part of an epic evolutionary tale of climate change and continental drift.​​

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.