New Gene Study Shows Locusts Came Out of Africa
Newswise — Current thinking about the desert locust, the swarming African insect that destroys crops and wreaks havoc on economies, has been that it originated in the western hemisphere and migrated to Africa. A new genetic study of this insect of biblical fame says it’s actually the other way around. Like humans, this voracious species of locust probably came out of Africa.
In a paper in the January ’06 issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, lead authors Sean Mullen, University of Maryland post-doctoral fellow, and Nathan Lovejoy, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, indicate that these locusts – Schistocerca – originated in Africa. From there they probably migrated to the western hemisphere, between three and five million years ago, by flying over vast expanses of Atlantic Ocean.
The findings reverse the conclusions of an earlier morphological study (Song 2004), which tried to determine why there is only one species of these locusts in the eastern hemisphere, when all of its more than 50 species of relatives live in the west. That study theorized that the desert locust colonized Africa from North America.
More: newswise.com
Related Travel Information
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay traveled on official business less than dozens of members of Congress, who took 5,400 official trips at a cost of $16 million in the last five years, according to a study released Tuesday.
Democrats traveled more frequently than Republicans.
Most of the trips were hosted by nonprofit organizations that accepted money from lobbyists and others who could not pay directly for congressional travel — a funding setup at the center of the controversy over some of DeLay's trips, according to a report by the PoliticalMoneyLine, a nonpartisan watchdog group that focuses on campaign finance issues.
The most traveled
Germans unwrap Europe's fastest supercomputer
Jülich, a German Research Centre, has unveiled Europe's most powerful supercomputer, an IBM Blue Gene system that will be used by European scientists for environmental and particle physics research.
Called Jülich Blue Gene/L (JUBL), the system offers a peak performance of 45.8 teraflops, equivalent to 45.8 trillion operations per second. That makes it Europe's most powerful supercomputer based on the latest supercomputer top 500 list, published in November, says. Norbert Attig of Jülich's Central Institute for Applied Mathematics.
It supplants the former biggest supercomputer in Europe, the MareNostrum blade cluster at the Barcelona Supercomputer Centre — which is
A new study finds that while corruption is still rampant in most African countries, some of them have taken steps to fight crime.
Anti-Corruption watchdog Transparency International has released the results of the 2005 corruption perception index, and the head of the agency's Kenya Chapter, Mwalimu Mati, said most African countries are still perceived to be corrupt.
"Unfortunately Africa is the continent with the lowest average in the CPI with 31 countries out of the 44 listed in the CPI scoring less than three on the index, a sign of rampant corruption," he said.
Mr. Mati said the report shows that countries
New shows coming to BBC America
BBC America has made a deal with international distributor FremantleMedia to air a package of British shows never before seen in the United States.
A couple of the never before aired shows are a documentary special called Beatles Biggest Secrets and psychological thriller, A Good Murder, Daily Variety reported Monday.
Also included in the deal are comedy series Hardware, made for TV movie The Return, Benny Hill: Worlds Favorite Clown and series How Clean is Your House?
More : smallscreen.monstersandcritics.com
Australia, NZ fall short in leadership department: study
ANTIPODEAN leaders are suffering from a crisis of confidence, a global study has flagged.
The study found Australian and New Zealand leaders put less emphasis on making tough calls than their global peers. They also had less belief in their companies' ability to execute.
While leaders here seemed to have more focus on getting things done, they were less likely than their overseas peers to take into account issues such as integrity, ethics and innovation.
The global study, compiled by human resources consultancy DDI, found that Australian and New Zealand leaders were less positive about the
