Science news

  • July 2018

    At WWF Belgium’s request, the RMCA Wood Biology service analysed charcoal sold in different stores around the country. Half of the examined bags contained tropical wood – and sustainable forest management certificates or mentions of origin were often missing.

  • July 2018

    PRIMA, an international network of Belgian and African museums from the Republic of the Congo, Burkina Faso, and Kenya, are working together to digitise their African musical instrument collections. Several of these are already online.

  • May 2018

    Who was the first female scientist working in the RMCA? Historian Eline Sciot has put ethnographer Olga Boone in the spotlights for the first time and traced her career and scientific work.

  • March 2018

    In 2017, hundreds of people perished in landslides in tropical Africa. Alas, we still know very little about the phenomenon in this part of the world. Liesbet Jacobs has just completed her doctoral thesis investigating the processes leading to landslides in wet tropical areas, with hopes that this will help predict when and where these hazards are going to hit.

  • February 2018

    Researchers from AfricaMuseum, the Institute of Tropical Medicine (ITM), and KU Leuven have found that some of the parasites causing schistosomiasis produce more offspring than others. This discovery opens up possibilities for finding new drugs and vaccines against the tropical disease.

  • September 2017

    On 22 September 2017, the Wood Biology service trained a group of inspectors from the federal Environment service in wood identification, giving them the skills to identify and seize illegal wood shipped to Belgium.