African Spotlight Spotlighting Africans at Home and Abroad

Waiting hours for a cellphone to charge may become a thing of the past, thanks to an 18-year-old high-school student’s invention. She won a $50,000 prize Friday at an international science fair for creating an energy storage device that can be fully juiced in 20 to 30 seconds, NBC News reports. The fast-charging device is a so-called supercapacitor, a gizmo ...

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) has unveiled a lower-cost BlackBerry that is designed for emerging markets. CEO Thorsten Heins said on Tuesday that the Q5 device will be available this summer. It is RIM’s third smartphone to run the new BlackBerry 10 system. It will have a physical keyboard. Heins is speaking at the company’s annual three-day conference in ...

Nokia has revealed a budget phone with a 48-day standby time. The Asha 501 is aimed at people who cannot afford a smartphone, but want to upgrade. Scroll down for video… Nokia has worked with developers such as Facebook and Twitter to make apps for the phone. It offers 17 hours of talk time, 56 hours of music playback and ...

Scientists in the US have created a robot the size of a fly that is able to perform the agile manoeuvres of the ubiquitous insects. This “robo-fly”, built from carbon fibre, weighs a fraction of a gram and has super-fast electronic “muscles” to power its wings. Scroll down for video… Its Harvard University developers say tiny robots like theirs may ...

A kidney “grown” in the laboratory has been transplanted into animals where it started to produce urine, US scientists say. Similar techniques to make simple body parts have already been used in patients, but the kidney is one of the most complicated organs made so far. A study, in the journal Nature Medicine, showed the engineered kidneys were less effective ...