Federal government has granted environmental approval for evaluation and open cultivation of TELA Maize, a new maize variety developed by researchers at the Institute for Agricultural Research, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, that resists fall armyworm, stem borers, and tolerates moderate drought. The government’s decision was contained in a certificate issued to IAR by the National Biosafety Management Agency (NBMA), the federal government agency mandated to regulate genetically modified products in the country. The Certificate dated October 8, 2021, with permit code no. NBMA/CM/003, was issued to IAR for General\Commercial Release of TELA Maize Genetically Modified for Drought Tolerance, Resistance to…

We may sometimes behave like computers, but more often, we are creative, irrational, and not always too bright. At least since the 1950s, the idea that it would be possible to soon create a machine that was capable of matching the full scope and level of achievement of human intelligence has been greeted with equal amounts of hype and hysteria. We’ve now succeeded in creating machines that can solve specific fairly narrow problems — “smart” machines that can diagnose disease, drive cars, understand speech, and beat us at chess — but general intelligence remains elusive. Let’s get this out of…

Children across much of Africa are to be vaccinated against malaria in a historic moment in the fight against the deadly disease. Malaria has been one of the biggest scourges on humanity for millennia and mostly kills babies and infants. Having a vaccine - after more than a century of trying - is among medicine's greatest achievements. The vaccine - called RTS,S - was proven effective six years ago. Now, after the success of pilot immunisation programmes in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi, the World Health Organization says the vaccine should be rolled out across sub-Saharan Africa and in other regions…

Facebook has apologised after it stopped working for users around the world for several hours on Monday. WhatsApp and Instagram - which are owned by the company - were also down. What was the problem? In a nutshell, Facebook's systems stopped talking to the wider internet. It was as if "someone had pulled the cables from their data centres all at once and disconnected them from the internet", explained web infrastructure firm Cloudflare. Facebook's explanation was a little more technical. It said "configuration changes on the backbone routers that co-ordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted…