Scientists aboard South Africa’s Agulhas II, a polar supply and research vessel searching for a century-old shipwreck in the Weddell Sea of Antarctica, say they’ve been forced to end the mission after weather and equipment setbacks. The team reached the site of the Endurance, lost to the elements in 1915…
China’s Huawei is set to become the first cloud service provider with a data center on the African continent, when it launches in March the first of two centers planned for South Africa. The Johannesburg center will be followed by one in Cape Town, according to a company statement. Huawei’s…
Scientists aboard South Africa’s Agulhas II, a polar supply and research vessel, say they’ve reached the site of the Endurance, an expedition vessel led by Sir Ernest Shackleton that shipwrecked and sank in the Weddell Sea more than 100 years ago –and that no one has visited since. The Agulhas…
Embattled social media company Facebook announced on Thursday it will open a new facility in Kenya to provide better content review services on the continent. Facebook is partnering with Samasource in Nairobi to open the center, a first in sub-Saharan Africa. It is expected to employ 100 people by the…
A South Korean solar energy company partnering with a Kenyan school has received a 2019 Innovation Award at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), for a project designed to keep children in developing nations in school rather than missing out on an education to work at home. The global technology showcase…
South Africans celebrated the success of Thursday’s launch of ZACube-2, a two-year project to put its second nanosatellite into orbit with the main purpose of using automatic identification of ships (AIS) technology to monitor its waters. The ZACube-2 also has near-infrared imaging equipment for detecting forest fires. “Science is indeed…
In recent weeks the controversies surrounding Chinese telecom giant Huawei seem to mount every day. From New Zealand to Japan, and from Europe to the long-suspicious United States, countries balk at the idea of using Huawei equipment in their communications networks. In China and Canada, the arrest of a top…
Laureen is the editor of Africa Times
Have you been targeted by hostile trolls on Twitter? You’re not alone, and if you’re a female politician or journalist the odds are you’ve already encountered the experience plenty of times. A study of 288,000 tweets sent to 778 such women in 2017 demonstrated a pattern of abuse that’s especially…
Tunisia has completed the training of its first group of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) pilots, whose skills will be used to boost agricultural productivity in the North African nation. The eight pilots participated in a two-week session to learn how to fly and maintain the drones, as well as understand…
For the first time, more than half of the world’s population is using the Internet and it is sub-Saharan Africa that is making the greatest progress. The ITU, a United Nations agency devoted to information and communication technologies, released a report Friday that estimates that 3.9 billion people, or 51.2…
The social media giant Facebook has come under heavy fire for its admitted failures to protect user privacy, to prevent “fake news” on its platform that influences elections or hate speech that fuels unrest. That’s been true in the United States and Europe, and notably in Myanmar where misinformation has…
Okwui Okpokwasili, a choreographer and dancer of Nigerian descent, has been named a 2018 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and the recipient of what are commonly called the MacArthur “genius grants.” She’ll receive USD$625,000 across the next five years, as well as the visibility that comes with the prestigious award. Okpokwasili, raised…
The cut marks on ancient bones from a long-extinct giant bird show that humans arrived on Madagascar some 6,000 years before scientists previously thought, according to new findings from a research team led by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). The bones of the extinct Madagascar elephant bird, found in…
Would local agriculture benefit if treated human wastewater from cities like Abidjan, Lagos and Kinshasa was applied to nearby fields? Yes, in some cases, say the authors of a new study published in Nature Sustainability. The research team from the University of Illinois in the United States looked at 56…
African youth and the continent’s future will shape the planet in coming decades, and technology is the key to unlock that potential, said Nigeria’s Vice President Yemi Osinbajo during the Google for Nigeria event in Lagos. “In Nigeria, we cannot train our nearly 200 million young people by 2045, in…