dpi.uillinois.edu This is a conceptual rendering of the future Discovery Partners Institute site. Current plans are for the facility to be built in downtown Chicago on land donated by Chicago developer Related Midwest. University of Illinois faculty say an ongoing statewide investment in a public-private research network is key to boosting the state s economy. The Discovery Partners Institute, a UI-led research and workforce development hub based in Chicago, is the flagship program of the Illinois Innovation Network that seeks to invest in 15 regional hubs affiliated with the UI system to spur economic growth with state funding. The goal of IIN is to create technology jobs in Illinois and train the state s workforce to fill them.
A hoard of more than 100 elephant tusks aboard a sunken ship that was lost for nearly 500 years has been traced to West Africa in a new study.
Scientists used DNA analysis to compare the well-preserved tusks – recovered from a 16th century Portuguese shipping vessel called the Bom Jesus that was discovered in 2008 – to those belonging to various species of modern-day elephants.
The 500-year-old ivory matched up with the African forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis), which is native to humid forests in West Africa and Congo Basin.
Traders aboard the ill-fated shipping vessel would have maimed the species on the West coast of Africa in their attempts to flog the creatures ivory in India – before the ship sank and the traders perished at sea.
Shipwreck Filled With Treasure and Elephant Tusks Sheds Light on 16th-Century Ivory Trade
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Elephant tusks pulled from the 16th-century Bom Jesus shipwreck. (Image: National Museum of Namibia)
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A trove of elephant tusks found in the cargo hold of an old Portuguese shipwreck is yielding new insights into the 16th-century ivory trade and lost African elephants.
Ivory From Shipwreck Reveals Elephant Slaughter During Spice Trade
A trove from a Portuguese trading ship that sank in 1533 preserved genetic traces of whole lineages that have vanished from West Africa.
The ivory from the shipwreck was identified as belonging to forest elephants rather than the species’ larger, more well-known savanna-dwelling cousins.Credit.Nicholas Georgiadis
By Rachel Nuwer
Dec. 17, 2020
In 2008, workers searching for diamonds off the coast of Namibia found a different kind of treasure: hundreds of gold coins mixed with timber and other debris. They had stumbled upon Bom Jesus, a Portuguese trading vessel lost during a voyage to India in 1533. Among the 40 tons of cargo recovered from the sunken ship were more than 100 elephant tusks.
2020
Things are pretty bleak. The Trump administration is petering out in the most predictable way, screaming about a fictional election conspiracy and continuing to ignore a deadly pandemic. The United States is basically averaging a 9/11 every day at this point. I’m old enough to remember when people made a big deal about how they’d “never forget” the magnitude of that tragedy. Less than 20 years later, here we are. At the time I type this, there’s still no new stimulus deal. Almost 8 million people have fallen into poverty since June, the largest such increase in the history of the country.