South Africa's AHRLAC is a weird bird. With a narrow, high body, and stadium seating for the pilot and sensor operator, it looks like a rough draft for an F-4 phantom. A pusher prop and slightly forward-swept wings seem like an aviation mistake from the First World War. Built as a bushwacking scout, able to operate from rough fields without runways, AHRLAC is an odd drone alternative, a peopled plane built to do a drone's job. Now, thanks to a deal Paramount (AHRLAC's maker) struck with Boeing, it's going to get weapons.
In September of 2013, two cave explorers, on a routine exploration in South Africa happened upon a collection of fossils that would soon question our current understanding of humans' ancestral history. While probing a narrow fracture system in the Rising Star Cave System in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, they found the entrance into a dark cave now known as Dinaledi Chamber. Inside, they discovered a series of fossils, which anthropologists have now identified as a species of hominin distinct from those that make up our family tree — a human ancestor entirely new to science.
Powered by a pusher propeller, covered in pixel camouflage, and furnished with stadium-seating for its two crew members, the Advanced High Performance Reconnaissance and Surveillance Aircraft (AHRLAC) looks like an alternate history version of a World War I fighter. The result of a collaboration between South Africa's Aerosud aviation firm and the Paramount Group, the AHRLAC is designed as a cheap alternative to the big name in military surveillance right now: drones.
Two weeks ago, at a conference in South Africa, scientists met to discuss how to contain a deadly banana disease outbreak in nearby Mozambique, Africa. At fault was a fungus that continues its march around the planet. In recent years, it has spread across Asia and Australia, devastating plants there that bear the signature yellow supermarket fruit.
In this week's important science news, flies are found to essentially be wasted college students making bad decisions. Researchers fromStellenbosch University in South Africa studying the habits of bee flies showed that species of orchids and daisies trick flies into pollinating with them by mimicking female insects, even going so far as to make sexy fly-shaped bumps. But,as described in theProceedings of the Royal Society Bstudy and relayed via the excellent ScienceNewsheadline "Sexually deceived flies not hopelessly dumb," the flies get all weird about it, and don't spend as much time trying to mate with the plantsin the future.
