Daily Archives

Africa-born particle physicist Ketevi Assamagan is a man on a science mission. His goal is to bring science education to a new generation of African youth through a traveling program known as the African School of Fundamental Physics and Applications, or ASP.

“Sometimes, people just need some help to be able to find the right resources,” said Assamagan, one of the founders. Assamagan works at the U.S. Energy Department’s Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York, experimenting with a huge device or collider that beams tiny particles at each other, almost at the speed of light.

“So, together with some colleagues, we decided to create this school,” said Assamagan, who earned a doctorate from the University of Virginia in 1995. Gratitude to past mentors fueled the desire to start the ASP, said Assamagan, who was born in Guinea but grew up in Togo.

Positive elements

The ASP program runs for three weeks every two years in a different African country. The first was in 2010 in South Africa, with subsequent gatherings in Ghana, Senegal, Rwanda and Namibia. The next is planned for July 2020 in Marrakesh, Morocco.

Each workshop brings together up to 80 students, who are treated to intensive lectures and training by top-flight physicists.

“We get students from all over Africa [who] have at least three years of university education,” Assamagan said. “The majority of them are usually at the master’s level and they come from different fields: nuclear and high energy physics, medical applications, computing, mathematics and theoretical physics.”

The students’ expenses are covered by roughly 20 international sponsors, including the Brookhaven lab; the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy; the South African Department of Science and Technology; and Italy’s National Institute for Nuclear Physics. 

Another sponsor has been the European Center for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, in Geneva. Assamagan worked on CERN’s particle accelerator for several years while conducting research on the elusive Higgs boson subatomic particle. He left in 2001 to join Brookhaven.

Sustained support

After the program, participants are paired with senior mentors who offer advice on additional education, teaching and research opportunities, both in Africa and abroad.

For Zimbabwe native Last Feremenga, participation in the 2010 ASP workshop served as a springboard to a doctorate in physics from the University of Texas. Now he’s a data scientist with Digital Reasoning, an artificial intelligence firm headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee.

“I sift through large datasets of written text in search of rare forms of conversations/language. These rare conversations are useful for our clients from health care to finance,” the 32-year-old told VOA in an email. He added that he’s using “similar tactics” to those he learned at ASP.

Julia MacKenzie, senior director of international affairs for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, says training programs such as ASP are especially important in developing countries.

“Science is increasingly recognized as an important engine of economic growth and societal advancement,” she wrote in an email. She noted “increasing numbers of such programs on the African continent, where there is a surging young population entering the workforce.”

“A potential impact of graduate training is exposure to new ideas and people,” MacKenzie added. “Any time graduate students can come together, it’s likely that new friendships will form, and those relationships can provide support through inevitable challenges and spawn new collaborations.”

Hands-on learning

Assamagan says that when he was in high school in Togo, science was taught from second-hand textbooks from abroad. There was no experimentation.

“Direct involvement … in terms of playing with things and getting mental challenge to try to figure it out was not really there,” he said. “We want to resolve that” through ASP.

The 70 or so science teachers at the workshop last year in Namibia learned hands-on experiments that could be replicated with scant equipment and resources. 

For example, using only a small plastic box with an aluminum plate, tin foil, Styrofoam, pure alcohol and dry ice, high school students could build a tabletop “cloud chamber” to simulate the detection of cosmic particles from outer space. Another experiment taught physics to elementary school children by way of art. The children could drip paint on a canvas tilted at various angles, then observe the patterns the paint made as it descended.

“You can then start introducing the idea of gravity,” Assamagan said, adding, “And then relating things falling down to the Earth going around the sun as being driven by the same force.”

Assamagan predicts a bright future for physics research in Africa. He says he sees talent and commitment, but that more digital libraries, along with continent-wide access to high-speed internet connections and the political will to provide them, are needed.

VOA Africa division’s Carol Guensburg contributed to this report.
…

Scientists say images of craters taken by European and American space probes show there likely once was a planet-wide system of underground lakes on Mars.

Data collected by NASA and ESA probes orbiting the red planet provide the first geological evidence for an ancient Martian groundwater system, according to a study by researchers in Italy and the Netherlands published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Francesco Salese, one of the scientists involved, said in an email Friday that the findings confirm earlier models and smaller-scale studies, and that the underground lakes may have been connected to each other.

The notion of water on Mars has long fascinated scientists because of the possibility that the planet may have once harbored similar conditions to those that allowed life to develop on Earth. Patches of ice previously spotted on Mars provide tantalizing hints of a watery past for the arid world.

Researchers said flow channels, pool-shaped valleys and fan-shaped sediment deposits seen in dozens of kilometers-deep craters in Mars’ northern hemisphere would have needed water to form.

Co-author Gian Gabriele Ori said an ocean some scientists speculate Mars may once have had between three and four billion years ago could even have been connected to the underground lakes.

The researchers also saw signs of minerals such as clay on Mars that would have required long periods of exposure to water to form. Ralf Jaumann, a planetary scientist at the German Aerospace Center who wasn’t directly involved in the study, said such sites are a good starting point for future Mars landers to search for signs of ancient life.

However Jack Mustard, a professor of geological sciences at Brown University who also wasn’t part of the study, questioned the paper’s claims, saying he didn’t see evidence of underground lakes in the data.

“But I am probably just a skeptical Martian,” he added.
…

Spelt risotto was on the menu at a recent lunch in Paris. Spelt is an ancient form of wheat with a nutty flavor. It is rich in fiber and minerals, and counts among dozens of sometimes ancient and obscure foods scientists say benefit people and the planet.

A green cuisine effort is growing in France as scientists warn that meat consumption must be drastically cut to fight climate change and sustainably feed a global human population set to reach 10 billion by 2050.

“Seventy-five percent of our food comes from 12 crops and five animals. Sixty percent of all our calories come through three vegetables,” said David Edwards, director of food strategy at environmental group WWF, which jointly produced a report, “Future 50 Foods,” with the German food giant Knorr.

The message: Our current eating habits, which rely heavily on large-scale farming and livestock production, have got to change.

“We’ve had a 60 percent decline in the wildlife population since the 1970s — the last 50 years, within a lifetime,” Edwards added. “And …  a precipitous decline in insect populations also … food has pushed wildlife into the extreme margins.”

The Paris lunch featured many of the report’s so-called “future” foods. Vegetables are in. Meat is out. On the menu: walnuts, root vegetables, lentil flour, yams and soy milk.

Also, fonio — a drought-resistant grain that Senegalese chef Pierre Thiam now markets in the United States and serves at his New York City restaurant. He sources it from smallholder farmers in Africa.

“We’re still importing food like rice in Senegal. Yet we could have our own fonio, our own millet. We should be consuming it. But we still have this mentality that what comes from the West is best,” Thiam said.

Former White House chef Sam Kass, who led Michelle Obama’s campaign against childhood obesity, is now fighting for the environment.

“When we talk about these dramatic changes to overhaul everything, people are like, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, I don’t know what to do.’ And here, it’s like, just pick 2 to 3 foods and eat them once a week. That would be a big start,” Kass said.

In Europe, research fellow Laura Wellesley of British think-tank Chatham House says governments must aid in a shift to so-called plant-based meat and, more controversially, meat grown in laboratories.

“The EU has really invested quite heavily in this area … but it could do more,” Wellesley said. “It could invest more public finance in the research and development of culture and plant-based meat that are truly sustainable and are healthy options. And it could also support the commercialization of innovations.”

At the Paris lunch, diner Thomas Blomme gave his first course a thumbs-up.

“[S]ome sort of soup, with a lot of spices and some new ingredients. Tasted really well with some lentils,” he said.

And for diners heading back to work but feeling a bit sleepy after the seven-course tasting menu: A green moringa after-party booster juice was offered.
…