#afria

On June 21, 2020 an annular solar eclipse passed over parts of Asia and Africa. Eclipses happen when the Moon lines up just right between the Sun and Earth, allowing it to block out part or all of the Sun’s bright face and cast a shadow on Earth. 

On that day, the International Space Station was orbiting over Kazakhstan and into China when this picture of the solar eclipse shadowing a portion of the Asian continent was captured by an external high definition camera. In the left foreground, is the H-II Transfer Vehicle-9 from Japan.

Here is another angle as seen from the orbital lab. In the left foreground, is the Progress 74 resupply ship from Russia.

Richat Structure -- “The Eye of the Sahara”

Ebola Vaccine Success

The Ebola virus – the fine red strands in this artificially-coloured microscope image – has been around in Africa for over four decades. But it wasn’t until the 2014 outbreak in west Africa that it hit the headlines. More than 11,000 people were killed, with many thousands more infected. Yet there was no vaccine and little incentive to develop one. Spurred into action by the recent epidemic, scientists led by the World Health Organisation have developed and tested a vaccine, known as rVSV-ZEBOV, in record time. In a trial of nearly 6,000 west African adults getting the jab, who had all been exposed to someone infected with the virus, all were still well more than a week later. In a similar unvaccinated group, 23 people got the disease. The vaccine can’t bring back the lives that were lost, but when the next Ebola outbreak comes we can finally fight back.

Written by Kat Arney

Image courtesy of the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Bethesda, MD, USA

Image published on Flickr under a CC BY 2.0 attribution

Research published in The Lancet, December 2016