Malnourished Children of Maiduguri.

Stephen Heunis/AFP

Stephan Heunis/AFP

Malnourished children from Africa may seem like a cliche. But they are starving, and are still children. Maiduguri, known as the birthplace of boko haram, the Islamist group whose insurgency has devastated northeast Nigeria with horrific and relentless attacks on mosques, churches, markets and bus stations, suicide bombings and raids on remote villages since 2009. 

Stephan Heunis/AFP

Stephen Heunis/AFP

        In the past few months, the Nigerian Army has reclaimed territory from the insurgents. But this doesn't mean the people living there are doing any better. Especially people living in remote areas. Severe food shortages have meant that hundreds of people -- in particular children -- are suffering from severe acute malnutrition.

HIV infected Man Paid To Have Sex with Underage Girls

"Hyena" is a traditional title given to a man hired by remote communities in the southern part of Malawi to provide what is called 'sexual cleansing'. Eric Aniva a HIV positive middle aged man who lives in the Nsanje district in southern Malawi happens to be one of the hyenas in his community. 

Afghanistan's 'dancing boys' are made to dress like girls and abused bypedophiles

Bacha bazi, an ancient tradition which literally means "playing with boys" involves a wide variety of activities that involves homosexual child sexual abuse and pederasty. 

Woman Interrogates A Mouse For Stealing Her Bananas

A man and woman from China tied up a defenseless mouse and ‘interrogated it’ on camera for allegedly stealing bananas. The rodent was bound by its legs while the woman, thought to be from Chengdu, southwest China, asked if it enjoyed eating bananas and has any accomplices, reports the People’s Daily Online.

According to the report, the woman caught the mouse in her home, strapped it to a bottle and began the interrogation.

The 90-second video shows the tiny mouse tied with white rope to what looks like a bottle filled with water.

Its legs are spread tightly around the bottle. Its back legs look almost dislocated, and its front legs are tied above its head, again tightly around the bottle.

Completely helpless and unable to escape, the mouse is then whipped and shouted at by the unidentified woman together with another male voice.

The woman shouts at the mouse in her local dialect: ‘Are the bananas tasty?’ and ‘Do you have any accomplices.’

Harvard Student Develops Technique To Diagnose Cancer From A SingleDrop Of Blood

Harvard student Neil Davey, A.B. ’18, has developed a technique that pushes the possibility of non-invasive cancer diagnosis one step closer to reality.

Photo: https://www.seas.harvard.edu

His technique involves injecting a tiny amount of blood into a microfluidic device to encapsulate single cells from the blood stream in individual microfluidic drops. Once the cells have been encapsulated, Davey uses a polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a common technique in molecular biology, to target and amplify fragments of cancer DNA within the drops.

“The advantage of this technology is that it is ultra-sensitive, so I can detect as few as one cancer cell from a billion normal cells in the blood,” he said. “The process is also very specific. One can uniquely detect a wide range of cancers using this DNA amplification technology.”

The technique could hold huge implications in the world of cancer diagnostics, which currently relies primarily on invasive and dangerous tumor biopsies. Microfluidics is much easier and cheaper than traditional methods, since the test uses only tiny amounts of reagents and takes 30 to 60 minutes to complete. The technology is currently about 90 percent accurate, but that accuracy can be improved if the test is refined to target more genes of the cancer cell, Davey said.

For Davey, who recently declared an economics concentration with a secondary field in statistics, the opportunity to use his knowledge to potentially improve the lives of cancer patients has been extremely rewarding.