Video - Bat researchers of Nigeria

"Bats are cool" is the message from renowned bat biologist, Iroro Tanshi. Bats dominate her life, day and night. She and her biologist husband, Ben Obitte, comb the caves high up in Nigeria’s Afi mountains to research, monitor and understand different bat species, in order to protect them. They relate their inspiring journey and share their award-winning work, revealing the story of their love of bats – and of each other. Simpa Samson is an international award-winning documentary director, producer, photographer and video journalist from Nigeria. He works with many global broadcasters, publishers and brands, focussing on health, human rights and international development.

Al Jazeera

Artemis Accords signed by Nigeria and Rwanda

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rwanda and Nigeria became the latest nations to sign the document that outlines best practices for safe and sustainable space exploration based on the Outer Space Treaty and other agreements.

During the US-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced that two African countries, Rwanda and Nigeria, became the first from the continent to join the Artemis Accords as the United States works to bring more emerging space nations into the agreement.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson was joined by Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs Monica Medina, U.S. National Space Council Executive Secretary Chirag Parikh, as well as representatives from Nigeria and Rwanda as those nations signed the Artemis Accords.

With the addition of these two signatories, 23 nations have affirmed their commitment to transparent, safe, and sustainable space exploration. Through the accords, the signatories are guided by a set of principles that promote the beneficial use of space for all of humanity.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said: “I’m thrilled Nigeria and Rwanda are committing to the safe, sustainable use of outer space. In an era where more nations than ever have space programs, today’s signings highlight a growing commitment to ensure space exploration is conducted responsibly. As the first African nations to sign the Artemis Accords, Nigeria and Rwanda exemplify the global reach of the accords and are demonstrating their leadership in space exploration.”

The accords were signed on behalf of the Federal Republic of Nigeria by Isa Ali Ibrahim, minister of Communications and Digital Economy.

On behalf of the Republic of Rwanda, Francis Ngabo, chief executive officer of the Rwanda Space Agency, signed the accords.

The summit, hosted by President Joe Biden and led by the US Department of State, brought together leaders from across the African continent to Washington. The Artemis Accords were signed at the start of the US-Africa Space Forum – an element of the broader summit.

NASA and the State Department announced the establishment of the Artemis Accords in 2020. The Artemis Accords are a set of principles to guide the next phase in space exploration, reinforcing and providing for important operational implementation of key obligations in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. The Accords also reinforce the commitment by the United States and signatory nations to the Registration Convention, the Rescue and Return Agreement, as well as guidelines and best practices NASA and its partners have supported, including the public release of scientific data.

More countries are anticipated to sign the Artemis Accords in the months and years ahead, as the United States continues to work with international partners for a safe, peaceful, and prosperous future in space. Working with both new and existing partners will add new energy and capabilities to help ensure the entire world can benefit from our journey of exploration and discovery.

SatelliteProMe

Video - New yam varieties developed by scientists in Nigeria to boost harvest

Scientists in Nigeria have developed new yam varieties that are helping to increase output for the world’s biggest producer of the crop. They say the new, more robust and sustainable yams will also help to cut farmers’ losses, reducing hunger and poverty. Al Jazeera's Ahmed Idris reports from Ibadan, Nigeria.

Al Jazeera

Video - Industrial Chemist develops pigment to reduce waste in Nigeria

An industrial Chemist has developed pigment to reduce food wastage in the West African nation of Nigeria. CGTN's Tesem Akende with a detailed report.

The town in Nigeria known for multiple twin births

In a dusty school playground in southwest Nigeria, the rows of children lined up to return to their classrooms are dotted with the faces of identical twins.

Sights like this can be seen everywhere in Igbo Ora, where a banner welcomes visitors to the “twins capital of the world”.

Twins are common in the Yoruba ethnic group that dominates this part of Nigeria. A 1970s study by a British gynecologist found that around 50 sets of twins were born out of every 1,000 births in the southwest - one of the highest rates of twin births in the world.

In Yoruba culture twins are so common that they are traditionally given specific names. They are called either Taiwo or Kehinde depending on whether they were born first or second.

But even for Yoruba people, Igbo Ora is considered to be exceptional. Among the nearly 100 secondary school children assembled at the end of their break there were nine sets of twins.

“There are so many twins because of the okra leaf that we eat,” said 15-year-old Kehinde Oyedepo, one of the twins, repeating a view commonly held in the town.

The leaves are used to make a stew that is popular in Igbo Ora.

Others have pointed to the popularity of Amala - a local dish made from yams and cassava flour. One theory is that yams prompt the production of gonadotropins, a chemical agent that stimulates the production of eggs.

Ekujumi Olarenwaju, an obstetrician gynecologist based in Lagos, around 100 miles (160 km) away, believes the causes of the phenomenon lie elsewhere because the same kind of yam is eaten elsewhere in the world without the same result.

“Thus far scientifically, no one can say this is the reason,” said Olarenwaju. “One of the plausible reasons is the hereditary aspect of it because maybe over the years they inter-marry, they now have that gene being pooled and concentrated in that environment,” he said.

But the women who sell piles of okra leaves at a town market are quick to disagree.

They said local traditions over how the leaves are consumed were crucial. For example, a stew made from the leaves should be eaten immediately and never stored.

Oyenike Bamimore, who sells the bread, said she was living proof that the diet was the cause. “Because I eat okra leaves a lot, I gave birth to eight sets of twins,” she said.


Reuters

Nigerian genome team contained Lassa fever outbreak with international assistance

Lassa fever first flared across Nigeria in February 2018, 1081 cases reported in just six weeks, according to the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control; 57 people, including four healthcare workers, died. As Lassa cases continued to spike throughout the year, it sparked fears of a new form of the virus or path of transmission.

The fear for scientists and health professionals at the time was that the virus had mutated into a deadlier strain, perhaps one that can be passed through the air, like the flu. Such a change could be catastrophic.

Genetic sequencing of Lassa virus genomes taken from patients revealed the virus was neither a dangerous new strain nor being passed from person to person through the air; the multifarious results, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, pointed to a diverse range of Lassa viruses which had previously been seen in Nigeria, ruling out a new form, and it was determined that the increase had not been caused by a mutation or new route in transmission.

The cases continue to spike this year; from Jan. 1 to Feb. 10. The World Health Organization reported 324 confirmed cases and 72 deaths across Nigeria, the majority of them in Edo and Ondo states in Nigeria’s south. Fatalities are hovering around 20%, which is high for Lassa, and while the virus is not a mutant—the worst-case scenario—the reason for the dramatic rise remains a mystery. On Jan. 22, the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control declared the outbreak an emergency.

Lassa fever is a viral hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola, but less lethal. Mortality rates for confirmed cases between Jan. 1 and Mar. 17 this year is 23%. The virus is zoonotic, meaning it jumps from an animal reservoir to a human being; the most common reservoir of Lassa is the multimammate rat.

Humans usually become infected through contact with the rat’s urine or feces. In non-fatal cases, the virus usually causes mild symptoms—including fever, headache, and weakness—and often goes undiagnosed. While Lassa is a viral hemorrhagic fever, the bleeding famously associated with a small percentage of Ebola cases is extremely rare.

Scientists use genetic sequencing to determine the order of the four chemical building blocks which make up DNA. This order tells them what kind of information is coded into that DNA, as well as what type of virus it is. While the assays used to test the virus’ genomic sequence were not new, the speed with which the information was analyzed and put to action—and where it was performed—was new.

Years of partnership and preparation between the African Center of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Disease (ACEGID), the Irrua Specialist Teaching Hospital in southern Nigeria, and the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Broad Institute ensured the samples were rapidly sequenced in Nigeria by local labs.

This response, marked by cooperation and in-country capability, may be the model for the years ahead, as scientists from both Broad in the US and Nigeria believe the chances are high of emerging virus outbreaks occurring more frequently.

The test results identified the subtypes of Lassa fever causing the infections, and where in the country they were. That information was quickly made available to health officials at the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control for use in determining the best course of action for handling the outbreak with a speed that would not have been possible if it had to have been tested overseas.

“That is very important, because that has immediate implications in terms of countermeasures to block it,” says Christian Happi, centre director and principal investigator at ACEGID.

Genomic analysis has often been reactive, completed long after an outbreak had run its course.

“With the improvement of technique and also greater collaboration between partners we’re able to have these results in real-time to influence the actual control of the outbreak that we are managing,” says Chikwe Ihekweazu, director general of the NCDC.

Analysis from end to end was done on the ground in Nigeria, according to Happi. Scientists at Irrua Specialist Teaching Hospital sent confirmed samples to ACEGID, at Redeemer’s University, Ede, Osun state, Nigeria. ACEGID teams extracted the virus’ RNA, converted it to DNA, then broke it into component parts, reassembling a complete genome of the virus that could be compared to sequenced viruses from previous cases. The process took about three to four days per sample.

Results from the ACEGID sequencing were sent to the NCDC when they were considered actionable. The results were cross-checked at Broad, while both institutions then continued to test the samples to provide a larger data set, replicating sets of each other’s samples for consistency, Siddle says.

“As we got the result, we shared the report with the NCDC, and they swung into action,” says Happi. Putting the people, infrastructure, and capability required for rapid analysis on firm footing took roughly five years. The collaboration between the labs of Broad Institute member Pardis Sabeti, Happi’s lab at Redeemer’s University, and scientists at Irrua laid the groundwork for the 2018 Lassa response.

“They’ve worked together for a number of years to understand various different aspects of Lassa virus,” explains Katherine Siddle, a postdoctoral fellow at Broad and Harvard. “Through that, they kind of really built up a vision for doing infectious disease genomics in West Africa.”

The Lassa fever outbreak provided a first chance to demonstrate that vision.

Scientists and health officials believe outbreaks of emerging viruses like Lassa, Ebola, Marburg and Nipah are likely going to increase in the future. As human expansion and climate change shifts the boundaries between people and animals, forcing them closer together than ever before, the chance for zoonotic viruses to jump species increases.

Nations where these viruses are endemic or where completely novel ones are likely to emerge can take cues from Nigeria’s model. The ability to handle an outbreak within their own borders may prove the difference that prevents a pandemic.

The in-country model makes sense from both scientific and practical standpoints, says Siddle. Building the infrastructure required to control an outbreak in the midst of one is challenging in and of itself; when outbreaks occur in regions destabilized by violence—as Ebola currently is in the Democratic Republic of Congo—even more so. The speed with which information can be analyzed and provided to health officials, much faster when handled in-country, is crucial; the virus is not awaiting samples from overseas.

“To answer the big public health problems of our time, collaboration will be critical,” says Ihekweazu. “No single group of scientists is going to come up with some magic bullet to save the world.”

Those big public health problems will increasingly lay in places like West Africa, where a booming population and rapidly developing economy make for perfect conditions for a virus to spread. “These are our problems,” Ihekweazu notes. “We need to be able to be at least part of the solution.”

Improvements in one country’s capabilities may have an impact far beyond their borders. A nation which can contain outbreaks quickly, accurately, and in-country is better positioned to curtail a pandemic.

By B. David Zarley 

Quartz

Nigeria plans to send a man to space by 2030

It might sound like the set-up for some kind of email scam, but it’s not: Nigerian Minister of Science and Technology Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu has announced that his country plans to send its first astronaut into space before the year 2030.

The announcement comes roughly a month after a highly-circulated email con claiming that a Nigerian astronaut was after secretly being sent to space in 1989, according to the Toronto Sun. The email went on to claim that this astronaut had been kept alive thanks to care packages, but now really wants to come home and needs financial assistance to do so.

Of course, none of that is true, but Nigeria does actually have a space program, and as Channels TV and Quartz reported over the weekend, they want to join the US, India, China, Japan, Russia, Canada and the member states of the European Space Agency as governing bodies that have sent humans beyond the Earth’s atmosphere and the Karman Line (62 miles above sea level).

During a meeting with the Nigerian Defense Space Agency in Abuja last week, Dr. Onu said that spaceflight was “very important for a country like Nigeria” and that the government was working to create the infrastructure needed to pull off a manned mission, according to Channels TV.

He added that space was “a major asset which nations like Nigeria must also be involved in for the purposes of protecting national interest,” and that the ministry would need to “work very hard in the years ahead... to ensure that the nation plays a role” in space travel in the near future.

As Quartz pointed out, however, a Nigerian astronaut actually has already traveled into space – sort of. In 2006, the website explained, the country sent a 17-year-old girl named Stella Felix to an altitude of six miles (10 km), during which time she experienced 30 seconds of weightlessness and was called the first Nigerian to experience a “space flight,” according to BBC News.

Semantics aside, the plan seems to be to launch an astronaut using rockets developed by Nigerian engineers and built domestically through their own space program, which was originally founded in 2001 and launched its first satellite in 2003. It may sound like a tall order, but experts with the program have been working with China to help launch their satellites in exchange for training.

Dr. Onu, for one, is confident that he and his colleagues can pull off the feat, telling This Day, “on or before 2030, we can do it before with the program and infrastructure that we have,” and that all the funding needed to implement was a program had been included in a recently-passed budget.

“We have developed the capacity to design” and “assemble” spacecraft, he continued. “The last stage is the capacity to launch and we believe very strongly that with the support from President Muhammadu Buhari, we will utilize whatever limited resources that we have in a very efficient manner to make sure that we make the nation proud.”


Red Orbit