Author: Admin

Biobanks are repositories which receive, store, process and disseminate specimens. These include DNA derived from humans and animals; bacterial strains; and environmental samples like plants and soil. Biobanks also provide the vital infrastructure for research to support scientific advancement and innovation. Dominique Anderson, Alan Christoffels and Carmen Swanepoel wrote in The Conversation that, according to a recent study, across the world, […]

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Esther Nakkazi writes in scidev that, despite developing countries contributing nearly 0.1 per cent of the global emissions to climate change, they suffer more than 90 per cent of the global impacts because of their inability to adapt to climate change, according to the Global Climate Change Regime report published in 2013. As countries grapple with the challenges […]

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The critical importance of conducting practical experiments as well as learning theory sets science education apart from many other taught courses. The value of this practical training is two-fold: first, it provides an in-depth understanding of the biological systems that are being studied. Second, the practice of science in industry or academia is essentially a […]

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Walk into any modern physics laboratory and you’ll see all kinds of hi-tech instruments. There are spectrometers, microscopes, oscilloscopes and diffractometers all spitting out data, spectra and images. In the developing world it’s difficult to get and maintain the hi-tech equipment we associate with modern laboratories. But could open-science hardware provide a lifeline? And what […]

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Over the last few years, banks and other large companies have deployed their USSD applications at great cost due to the engineering effort and equipment required. Until very recently, individuals and small organizations could never even dream of building their own USSD apps. USSD stands for Unstructured Supplementary Service Data and supposedly it never got […]

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Any good leader knows that scientific discovery and innovation fuel progress, facilitates development and can tackle issues such as food insecurity, water shortages and climate change. But most African governments are failing to fund research and development (R&D) adequately. According to the Unesco Institute for Statistics, countries in sub-Saharan Africa spend, on average, just 0.5% […]

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Over the past decade, thanks to large public and private investments, MI has progressed rapidly in both basic research and the development of a vast array of applications. However, the talent pool currently advancing MI is modest and unrepresentative of the diversity of our world, leaving us less capable of facing global challenges. The African […]

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The Bio economy summit which was open by the Anja Karliczek, Federal Minister of Education and Research, attracted participants from different parts of the world hailing from diverse walks of life such as science, civil society, policy and the business sector to Berlin under the theme “Innovation, Green growth and sustainable development”. The gathering created […]

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