... would still be meaningless

We always thought that the term coloured was pretty meaningless. Let me now tell how meaningless, judging from the DNA based information just released by the Living History Project. A joint initiative of the Africa Genome Education Institute and Ancestry24.com, we took 500 DNA samples from individuals in Cape Town, Pietermaritzburg and Johannesburg during 2007 and are releasing the results now.

The first result I want to tell you about is that of Keith Forbes. From his mother’s side he is West African. Technically, he inherited the energy producing mitochondrial DNA from his female ancestors linked a group referred, in the jargon, to as L2a1b. ‘The distribution of group L2a’ Himla Soodyall (2008) wrote, ‘is possibly a signature of the Bantu expansion, the great movement of black people of Niger-Congo origin who migrated in waves throughout Africa to eventually dominate the continent demographically speaking.

No-one understands...

The science journalist’s first and foremost duty is to understand the science – and secondly – in terms of time – to re-write this science into popular language. Simple!

So what’s happening - why aren’t the public not better informed? Why has scientific rationale appeared to bypass the public debate over GM crops? And why do scientists continually lament to the poor standard of scientific knowledge held by the general public (in Africa and elsewhere)? Time and again during interviews in South Africa on the implications of biotechnology I have heard from scientists that the general public basically knows nothing about biotechnology, they’re misinformed, or they hold views that are fly in the face of rationality. Presuming that the scientists themselves feel they know more - what’s going wrong with science journalism in Africa?

Keep sniffing

Anosmia refers to the inability to smell, the lack of olfactory activity. Hyposmia on the other hand refers to an increased ability to smell. It is hard to imagine a world without smell, a curse of sorts, as it is hard to imagine living in a world of enhanced smell, in the sensory world of the dog for example, a curse of sorts too.

Anosmia can be temporary or permanent. A cold or sinusitis or any upper respiratory tract infection may temporarily deprive you of a sense of smell. It is more than likely if not inevitable that you would lose your sense of taste too. Taste and smell are bound together, as if partners in a dance of sensory joy.

Salty, sour, sweet, bitter, umami (richness) and astringent (sharp or severe) are our six distinctive tastes but we are able to smell about 10,000 scents that conspire with taste to give us the magic of flavour. When one can’t smell anything food loses most of its flavour.