Transient males account for 99 percent of Makgadikgadi Pans National Park s elephant population. But, because the park is vast with very little infrastructure, no one knows for sure where these non-resident animals spend the bulk of their time as they travel through. Elephants for Africa will be traveling through the park, looking for males, and darting them. When the darting team is finished, ten males will be outfitted with satellite trackers as part of important new research by EfA to understand the likely movement patterns of African savannah elephants in Botswana.
Science s COVID-19 reporting is supported by the Heising-Simons Foundation
Testing for COVID-19 at Johannesburg s airport in January. A variant of concern that arose in South Africa has spread around the world.
PHOTO: GUILLEM SARTORIO/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES
Last month, Gytis Dudas was tracking a concerning new coronavirus variant that had triggered an outbreak of COVID-19 in his native Lithuania and appeared sporadically elsewhere in Europe and in the United States. Exploring an international database of coronavirus genomes, Dudas found a crucial clue: One sample of the new SARS-CoV-2 variant came from a person who had recently flown to France from Cameroon. A collaborator, Guy Baele of KU Leuven, soon identified six more viral sequences from people in Europe who had traveled there from Cameroon. But then their quest to pinpoint the variant s origins hit a wall: Cameroon had only uploaded 48 viral genomes to the global sequence repository called GISAID. None included the variant.
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Researchers say more countries need to sequence the SARS-CoV-2 virus genome. It would help spot and track new variants like the Central African B.1.620 quicker.