Scientists have always believed that at one point in time, the human race transcended the ape family when they started walking on two feet. The latest findings observed from Orrorin fossils in Kenya, however, show shocking evidence that the transition may have taken place much earlier than originally estimated. The fossils suggest that our ancestors probably started prancing around on twos as early as four million years ago. Details in the full article.

Fans of large, long snakes listen up! A recent study has discovered a new giant species of spitting cobra in Kenya called the Naja Ashei. It is a whopping 2.6 metres long and carries  enough venom to kill up to 20 people in one bite.

From all indications, the Naja Ashei is known to be a very aggressive snake. Want to find out more about this new species? More details in the full article via the "read more" link below.

Due to the lack of fossil evidences in Africa, it is a common belief among experts that the common ancestors of great apes and humans left the region for Europe and Asia around seven to 13 million years ago. A recent finding, however, suggests otherwise. A 10 million year old jawbone of a great ape has just been found in the Nakali region of Kenya.

The team believe that the jawbone belongs to an entirely new species of the great ape. Click the "read more" link for the full story.

With AIDS still rampant in poorly-developed third-world countries and not enough awareness about the killer disease spread around, it's no surprise that the World Health Organization (WHO) has ordered routine HIV testing to be performed for health center attendees - unless, of course, said attendees refuse to take the test themselves.

This comes as a direct response to the all-too-real scenario of AIDS carriers unwittingly spreading the virus around - specifically because they never knew they had AIDS in the first place.

This is a welcome change in the battle against the immune system-destroying disease, as testing has always been on a per-request basis - the exact reason why too many opportunities to diagnose the actual infection are missed.

With the WHO turning things around, HIV tests will now be carried out on all patients in a routine fashion, regardless of the reason they came into the health center in the first place and whether or not they have visible symptoms of HIV. This isn't something the patients have no say in, however.

People must be fully informed before the testing can even take place, and they can easily veto the test for whatever reason they may have. Support will also be provided to patients from the very real danger of one's HIV results leaking out to the public, discrimination, and outright violence included.

And it's not just starting out - already the program has made incredible progress on areas such as Botswana, Kenya, Malawi, Uganda and Zambia. Canada, Thailand, UK, and the US have also joined in, offering tests in high-risk settings.

It's also to note that the collaborative efforts have been met with significant approval from organizations also combating the dreaded disease. Lisa Power of the UK HIV charity Terrence Higgins Trust is but one of the many supporting the change, saying:

We fully support these recommendations In the UK, this means that sexual health clinics and health services for those at particular risk of HIV should be recommending HIV testing - something which we've been advocating for some time. A third of people with HIV don't know they have it and many of them may never have considered testing. We need this proactive approach to help these people as early as possible.

A proactive approach in helping individuals stricken with HIV, especially in parts of the world such as sub-Sahara Africa where only a small percentage of the population actually bother with testing - this new policy has a potential to make a difference in the ongoing fight against AIDS. You can check out more about this policy by clicking on the read link below.

Scientists have found conclusive evidence that male circumcision actually lowers the chance of getting infected with the HIV virus by 51 to 60 percent after a study conducted in Kenya.

Two separate studies were conducted. The first was held in Uganda with 4.966 men. 2,474 were circumcised while 2,522 were not. The other study was in Kenya where 1,391 circumcised men were compared to 1,393 uncircumcised men. The subjects were then tracked for two years and the results that followed were amazing.

World Health Organization (WHO) AIDS Department director Dr. Kevin de Cock remarked "This is an extraordinary development. Circumcision is the most potent intervention in HIV prevention that has been described."

The news gives renewed hope that over 2 million AIDS cases could be prevented in the next 10 years. More importantly, 300,000 lives can be saved.

However, this landmark discovery isn't without a hitch. Male circumcision will not be easy to apply on a massive scale in Africa because of two problems. First, religious and ethnic gridlocks will have to be dissolved in order for circumcision to be implemented. The practice of cutting off the foreskin of the male reproductive organ is primarily a Jewish/ Christian-originated practice and may very well be shunned by ethnic groups. Second, health services in Africa are already overworked and will need heavy planning, financial aid and manpower.

Dr. Catherine Hankins, scientific advisor for the United Nations AIDS agency (UNAIDS) describes the situation is "a tricky one" and explains "Male circumcision is such a sensitive religious and cultural issue that we need to be careful."

UNAIDS and WHO officials will meet in Switzerland next month with African leaders to discuss possible measures on how to best apply the new knowledge.

Does the Earth hum? Scientists say it does. In 1998, researchers in Japan detected a mild, rumbling sound in the lithosphere even when there aren't any earthquakes detected. 

To test this yourself, try holding your ear close to the ground and listen- do you hear a sound that goes "thump, thump, thump?" If you can, seek medical help because something is very wrong with you. Either that or you were somewhere in Kenya with gazelles stampeding in the distance at the time you were doing the test.

That's because the earth's hum, although very real, is well below the hearing range of humans. Detectable only by the most sensitive seismometers, the hum is only about 10 millihertz in frequency.

The researchers who made the discovery hypothesized that the rumble may not actually coming from the earth itself, but from the force of air downdrafting on soil and pounding it to create the steady rhythm. However, American scientists recently concluded an elaborate research suggesting that the thump emanates from waves in the coastline hitting the shores and not from wind. Barbara Romanowicz, from the University of California at Berkeley, spearheaded the American research team and deployed seismometers worldwide to determine the source of the rumbling.

Meanwhile, Goran Ekstrom demonstrated in 2005 in Columbia University that the amplitude of the rumbling coincided and showed correlation to the energy picked up at coastlines worldwide. Now, Spahr Webb, a colleague of Eksrtom, says that he can demonstrate how exactly the ocean waves drive the humming. Webb says that when two waves of the same frequency travel at different directions, they alternately (the waves amplify and cancel each other out) create a pattern in which the surface of the sea becomes wavy, then flat, then wavy again. The motion creates a standing wave and ultimately, the thumps.

The waves then double in frequency, generating the humming of the earth from the seabed to the continents. That coincides with the Berkeley research which also noted that along coastlines, the hum signature is at its strongest, most notably in Vancouver right off the Canadian coast.

Webb also points out that Mars may have a hum similar to Earth's but, due to the absence of oceans in the red planet, the hum is most probably caused by "Marsquakes."

With HIV being so prevalent nowadays, you'd want to take all necessary precautions, and then some, just to make sure you won't get infected for engaging in the sexual act. Well, if you're not the type who enjoys wearing rubber, then maybe circumcision could work for you.

But before you separate ways with your foreskins, and then going on an all-out rampage thinking you'd be immune from HIV forever, you better sit down and read the rest of this post. Getting circumcised don't give you an all-encompassing power that makes you untouchable by the disease. It does, however, cut down the risk by about 50%. That's still a big chunk, actually.

This was the finding of two studies conducted in Africa, the leading victimized continent. At the end of 2005, an estimated 24.5 million people were living there with HIV, and by the end of the year, approximately 2.7 million new infections were recorded. Just last year, the African statistics of people who died of the disease rose to two million people. More than 12 million children have been orphaned in the region because of AIDS.

Now, back to the circumcision trial. The Kenya trial gave out the result that there was a 53% reduction on new HIV infections in circumcised heterosexual men, while there was a 48% drop in Uganda. It was said that the findings are so striking, the US National Institutes of Health decided to put an early halt to the study as they deemed it unethical to not offer circumcision in the men who were acting as controls.

Yeah, we guess they wouldn't really be happy to be infected with HIV because they were part of some study, eh.

Anyhow, there are said to be a variety of reasons why circumcision may provide protection against HIV infection. Supposedly, there are specific cells in the foreskin that may be potential targets for HIV infection. Also, with circumcision, the skin under the foreskin becomes less sensitive and is less likely to bleed, thus reducing the risk of infection.

But as mentioned earlier, this should not be taken as the ultimate preventive solution against infection. Says Dr. Kevin De Cock, director of the World Health Organization's HIV/Aids department, "This is an intervention that must be embedded with all the other interventions and precautions we have. Men must not consider themselves protected. It's a very important intervention to add to our prevention armamentarium."

Exactly. So, while we may deem the results to be a "significant scientific advance", it most definitely is far from being the ultimate protection, and most certainly would never replace existing prevention strategies. 

Right. Precautions should remain guys. ALL necessary precautions.

McMaster University became the proud owner of a rare $750,000 genome sequencer, a machine of which less than 40 currently exists, which is probably the next best thing to an actual time machine since the genome sequencer can do in hours what normally takes scientists years to accomplish - to create an exact picture of prehistoric organisms and environments that existed long before cellphones with video cams were invented.

The sequencer reads the DNA from various kinds of samples such as ice, hair, or poop. Unlike other machines which is governed by the Garbage-in/Gabage-out rule (like this PC I'm using), the genome sequence can take in a fossilized poop/hair sample and spit out  astounding bits of info in turn. For example, the poop could reveal the genetic portrait of the creature that left it, the animals and plants it had eaten, the bacteria that broke down food in its gut and even the viruses that made it sick.

Such genomic portraits could help scientists answer some of mankind's questions such as:

• When did we leave Africa?
• Did we have sex with Neanderthals?
• Did Raquel Welch-like amazons duked it out with dinosaurs One Million Years BC?

"For anybody working in archeology or paleontology, it's sort of a dream come true. It changes the ball game, going from maybe a million bases per month to maybe 40 million in five hours. We're talking about orders of magnitude." said McMaster researcher Hendrik Poinar with a smile on his face that makes him look like he just came from a date. Poinar plans to use the machine to decode woolly mammoth DNA.

The mammoth is an extinct genus of elephant, often with long, curved tusks. Those that live in the northern regions were covered by long hair and they lived during the Pleistocene epoch which was between 1.6 million years to around 3,500 years ago. They are believed to have originated from Africa, but mammoth remains have been found in Europe, Africa, Asia, and North America. Mammuthus africanavus fossils have also been found in Chad, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia. The Mammuthus subplanifrons found in South Africa and Kenya, is one of the oldest species which lived about four million years ago.

We often associate Africa with devastating droughts but not this year. The monsoon rains is so heavy Lake Turkana in Kenya is losing its capacity to take in more water. Since August, almost 1,000 people have been killed in flash floods while 120,000 have been evacuated in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan.

The UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported, "Thousands of people are in need of urgent humanitarian relief as entire communities have been displaced, disrupted, bereaved, and have lost vital livestock and farmland."

And things will get worse before they get better according to humanitarian aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres.

If rivers overflow, dams and levees in Ethiopia could give way in the coming weeks. Flood waters have already reached threatening levels in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan and has affected 30,000 people in Niger and 20,000 in neighbouring Burkina Faso.

Outbreaks of malaria and water-borne diseases like cholera are also expected.

The countries most affected by the extreme rainfall are located in what is often called the Horn of Africa. It is also known as the Somali Peninsula and extends for hundreds of kilometers into the Arabian Sea. Covering the countries of Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia, the area is inhabited by about 86.5 million people.

When Lawrence Anthony, founder of the South African Earth Organisation, goes to work he doesn't take a cab downtown, sit behind a desk in a comfortable office with air-conditioning, coffee machine and chitchat with polite co-workers.

Anthony is fighting for the very survival of the White Rhinoceros and that means working with the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), Uganda's rebel forces infamous for committing widespread human rights violations, mutilation, torture, rape, civilian abductions and the use of child soldiers. Not to mention a number of massacres.

"Desperate times call for desperate measures, I suppose," says Anthony.

Anthony met with representatives of LRA regarding the highly endangered White Rhino when the rebel group made their base in the Garamba national park on the Democratic Republic of Congo side of the Ugandan border. The park is the last refuge of the said animal.

Fortunately for the White Rhino, LRA officials told Anthony of their “strong cultural ties to wildlife” and agreed to protect the rhino and allow park rangers to patrol in safety.

Anthony, like the late Steve Irwin, doesn't think twice about risking personal safety in his campaign to save wildlife. Immediately after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Anthony went to Baghdad to rescue animals from the city's zoo which was damaged by  military bombings.

The White Rhinoceros or Square-lipped rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum) is one of the five species of rhinoceros that still exists. The average size range of a mature white rhino is a weight of 1800-3000 kg (4000-6600 lb), a head-and-body length of 3.35-4.2 meters (11-13.9 ft) and a shoulder height of 150-185 cm (60-73 in).

Native to north-eastern and southern Africa, it is under threat from habitat loss and poaching with only about 10 rhinos left in the wild. In January 2005, conservationists proposed airlifting White Rhinos from Garamba into Kenya as last ditch efforts to save them from extinction.