Category: Featured

Pierre C. Sibiry Traore makes an offer:

I’ve been trying to join the ethnologue.com database with detailed shapefiles of dominant linguistic groups of Africa at a fairly detailed level, but lack time/resources to dig in further. If someone, self-funded (PhD student…) is interested in an in-depth investigation I’d be willing to spend some time towards joint publications! Or better, host him/her at SotubaGIS, Bamako, Mali.

Any takers?

Don takes a trip down memory lane:

I recall a huge tomato model in a plastic box at UC Davis with a sign that went something like, “This is a model of the canning tomato, which was developed in this building. Tax revenues from it would support…” (something huge). I wonder if anyone remembers that tomato model.

Over to you, crowd; any wisdom on that?

More news has come in from the Desert Research Center in Egypt, which is spread over several sites. We knew the genebank in North Sinai had been looted, while the national genebank, near Giza, seemed to be safe. Now we learn that a site at Matrya, on the outskirts of Cairo, has been robbed, with 300-400 computers and other equipment loaded into private cars between 1 and 5 in the morning. At least, that’s what I get from the message, which seems to have been through a combination of machine and human translation. Having but two words of Arabic, I can’t complain. However, if anyone out there more fluent than me would like to get in contact and prepare a more readable account, we’ll be happy to host it. Anonymously if need be.

Less bad news from the genebank at the Desert Research Centre in North Sinai, Egypt.

ElSayed ElAzazi, a PhD student there, has left a string of comments assuring us that the seeds are safe for now, even though a lot of equipment has been looted. Including, alas, his PhD data. All we can do is wish him, and the genebank, good luck in getting back on track.

Michiel van Slageren of Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank has some good news regarding (some of) the material in Egypt’s looted Deserts Gene Bank:

…I can report that the collections made under our joint work are duplicated at the Millennium Seed Bank in the UK, illustrating the usefulness of this principle for all the wrong reasons. They are safe and not lost for the Egyptian nation.