Fans of large, long snakes listen up! A recent study has discovered a new giant species of spitting cobra in Kenya called the Naja Ashei. It is a whopping 2.6 metres long and carries  enough venom to kill up to 20 people in one bite.

From all indications, the Naja Ashei is known to be a very aggressive snake. Want to find out more about this new species? More details in the full article via the "read more" link below.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai put forward a concept last November 8, 2006 about the deterioration of the environment and proposed a campaign entitled the Billion Tree Campaign with the goal of planting one billion trees by the end of 2007.

A little more than a year after, the results have been tallied and put forward during a meeting that the Billion Tree Campaign has already reached its goal of planting a billion trees.

There's some bittersweet news for the scientific community today. Scientists have just managed to uncover what could very be the oldest child ever to have been on earth. Found in the badlands of Northeastern Ethiopia, the fossil remains of the child date back more than 3 million years.

According to scientists, the female child seems to be from the species Australopithecus afarensis, believed to be the ancestor of the genus Homo (which includes Homo sapiens like us). Some of the most notable features of the remains happen to tie in directly with our ape ancestry. For instance, the remains featured shoulder blades reminiscent of a young gorilla's, which may indicate that she may have been a tree-climber.

This is also supported by her hyoid bone, which is more reminiscent of great apes than of human shaped hyoids. The hyoid bone is important in relation to our voice box, and differences between the voiceboxes of people 3 million years ago to our current voice boxes could help in explaining how we managed to acquire speech.

Sadly, it would seem that the cause for the girl's death to begin with was a flood, which also managed to bury her under sand and rock. Of course, we may not really know what happened to her, but at least she has been found now.

We often associate Africa with devastating droughts but not this year. The monsoon rains is so heavy Lake Turkana in Kenya is losing its capacity to take in more water. Since August, almost 1,000 people have been killed in flash floods while 120,000 have been evacuated in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan.

The UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported, "Thousands of people are in need of urgent humanitarian relief as entire communities have been displaced, disrupted, bereaved, and have lost vital livestock and farmland."

And things will get worse before they get better according to humanitarian aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres.

If rivers overflow, dams and levees in Ethiopia could give way in the coming weeks. Flood waters have already reached threatening levels in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan and has affected 30,000 people in Niger and 20,000 in neighbouring Burkina Faso.

Outbreaks of malaria and water-borne diseases like cholera are also expected.

The countries most affected by the extreme rainfall are located in what is often called the Horn of Africa. It is also known as the Somali Peninsula and extends for hundreds of kilometers into the Arabian Sea. Covering the countries of Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia, the area is inhabited by about 86.5 million people.