Personal journal excerpt: It is Tuesday evening; I am relaxing in Mpala research center reminiscing a productive day. I am inspired to write a short account of the ant-acacia relationship we learned earlier today: Picture an ant, One ferocious and alert, She tends and serves, To protect her reserves! Picture another ant, One [...]
Hi again! It’s Ava and Christine, Mechnical Engineering Undergraduate students from MIT D-Lab. After a beautiful few days spotting animals in the Masai Mara, we flew up to TBI's facility on the east side of Lake Turkana in Ileret to continue our evaporative cooling research! During our time in Ileret, we focused on understanding the [...]
This past weekend we visited the West Turkana Archaeological Project(WTAP) campsite at Lomekwi and had the opportunity to set up and test a charcoal evaporative cooler and a hanging evaporative cooler. The field research camps have limited access to electricity and cold storage for fruits and vegetables, so evaporative cooling is a potential solution to [...]
Hello! We are Ava and Christine, from MIT D-Lab, and this summer we are working with the Turkana Basin Institute and our PI, Dr. Eric Verploegen, to research evaporative cooling as a means of post harvest fruit and vegetable storage. In regions of the world where access to food preservation methods is limited, up to [...]
The Turkana Basin Field School for Fall 2013 has begun! The students made their long journey to Kenya from New York and set off on a short safari into the Great Rift Valley to Lake Elementeita, Lake Nakuru and Lake Naivasha. We started at Lake Elementeita in the Rift Valley where we went for a [...]
As part of the TBI Field School students get to work on new fossil material. Well, maybe not “new” in the normal sense of that word, but they get to work with material that no one else has laid hands on or thought about because it just came out of the ground a few days [...]
Time flies, especially when you’re learning something new. In the case of the ecology module it was more likely to be mosquitoes or bees than flies, but either way we’re all a little shocked that we’re a fifth of the way through the course. Two weeks in the Turkana Basin gone in a flurry of [...]