These are my 6th to 10th Top Ten Stories. To see a list of all The Top Ten, click here.

#7 : China Partners with U.S. for Peace in Sudan
The world’s two most diametrically opposed societies have struggled uncomfortably ever since shaking hands during the Nixon administration in the 1970s. Whether it be over world wars and conflicts, climate change, human rights – you name it, we’ve been at odds.

But this year the two adversaries teamed up to make peace in The Sudan. This is terribly exciting.

Two years ago South Sudan became its own nation after years of civil war with The North. That in itself was amazing, and in no large part because of enormous initiatives by the Obama administration.

But the border between the two has never been completely demarcated. And it goes right through the most productive oil fields in the area, and so border disputes spilled over into outright warfare.

China and the U.S. got together and stopped it. Period.

It is an amazing geopolitical development, because the U.S. is heavily invested in The South, and China, in The North. But rather than parry their positions, they negotiated them for peace.

Unfortunately, trouble persists in both countries not due to this grander conflict. Darfur remains troubling for The North and The South’s northwest states are close to open rebellion.

But the grand deal signed earlier this year between the two hostile siblings of the once singular Sudan state remains laudable.

#8 : Breakthrough Discovery for Malaria Eradication
The devil is in the details to be sure, and despite a generation of unprecedented research and global aid, malaria finds ways to evade suppression. But this year a new genetic discovery might finally herald a definitive way to eradicate this disease that is so devastating in Africa.

Malaria is such a tough candidate for making a vaccine against because it’s really seven different types of life forms. True, it’s only one of the stages that infects us, but that one has proved terribly difficult to fight against.

If we could simply interrupt the change of life forms from one to the other, we’d do the trick. And now, a new genetic discovery gives us a guide towards finding out how to do that. It’s complicated, but perhaps the most promising new science regarding malaria in my life time!

#9 : African Arms Dealer Finally Prosecuted in U.S.
It’s no secret that you can’t fight a war without a gun. But the west – and especially the U.S. – and Russia have suppressed this evident fact because their war machine economies are so important to their overall economies.

And what’s even more embarrassing is that several of the most prominent arms dealers have lived as foreign visitors on extended friendly visas for some time in the U.S. The presumption has to be that the U.S. felt some advantage for letting them stay here.

So it was striking that finally the Obama administration actually began to prosecute arms dealers in a way past administrations, including back through Clinton and Reagan, declined to do.

Viktor Bout, a Russian, was convicted after a full court press by the Obama administration, suggesting more such prosecutions are on the way. This is an African story, because that was the turf on which Bout played, heavily involved in the most recent wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

#10 : Les Fisher Goes on Safari at 91 years old
The Don of African Zoo Directors who helped pioneer some of the first American adventure travel in Africa took a group of small friends on a not-so-easy safari into Botswana in the hot season.

I’ve guided Dr. Les Fisher on at least a dozen safaris over the years, and we’ve been in some of the most remote parts of Africa, together.

As I recall this was his 5th “Last Safari Ever!” At 91 that’s hard to argue, but it was hard to argue at 90, too!

Stay tuned.

Malaria is one of the most intriguing diseases in the world, incredibly complex. It is among the greatest killers in Africa, vying every year as the greatest killer with AIDS and gastrointestinal infections.

Last month researchers at the Centre International de Recherches Médicales de Franceville in Gabon collaborating with French laboratories published an amazing discovery about the genetic makeup of malaria. Their findings could open up an entirely new front for the attack against the disease.

As we learned this past week in Texas, the might of the developed world’s mastery of pesticides has kept malaria and other mosquito born diseases mostly at bay.

Malaria was essentially eradicated from the U.S. by the middle of the last century through extensive use of DDT. Many in the developing world argue for the use of DDT right now in Africa, but control of the substance remains with the developed world that has decided it’s too toxic a pesticide.

That debate is furious but there is strong evidence to suggest DDT might do more harm than good for two very interrelated reasons.

The first is that systematic spraying of the sort that occurred in the U.S. would be too hard to implement in Africa’s most malarial areas, which include sprawling slums and extraordinarily remote wetlands and swamps.

DDT’s toxicity isn’t in dispute: Numerous species of bird, insect and even plants could be eradicated if used. But in light of the terrible plight the sickness strikes every moment in Africa, the world might be willing to lose a few species of bird, insects and plants, but not if the implementation plan is as uncertain as it seems it would be.

Particularly if other remedies for malaria can be found.

Malaria isn’t just a single thing. It seven different life forms, like caterpillars and cocooned pupas and butterflies, but more than double that butterfly formation. The one form that does us damage is the sporozoite which produces the malaria attack.

But all other six forms have to produce and cycle to produce the sporozoite, and just that amazing transformation in an evolutionary sense is absolutely mind-boggling.

Remember, evolution is chance. Imagine the billions, trillions, godzillions of chance mutations that occured on each of the seven life forms meaning we have a permutation of godzillion to the seventh power (which I think is still godzillion).

Anyway, I hope you catch my drift. This is an amazing evolutionary development arguably as complex as many of the most complex life forms on earth, today.

But consider this after you catch your breath. Each life form’s mutated chance change produced some type of response in the disease’s host. Maybe, like sickle cell anemia, the sporozoites slides off the red blood cell so can’t infect it. Maybe another godzillion defenses (many like sickle cell anemia aren’t ideal) occur.

So there is this back-and-forth over time of the disease and its host (including man) trading punches. To date, malaria has won.

We know that apes and chimps get malaria, too. But we didn’t think until this new research that anything other than creatures in man’s family tree got malaria.

Wrong. The new research reveals that the greater spot-nosed monkey gets malaria. The guy is a primate, but we know from DNA research that he is far away from the line of primates that produced chimps, apes and man.

That means that malaria was doing its dirty work before the homonids line evolved from earlier primate forms. And that means that the malaria had to have evolved in some type of parallel way to homonids, and separately, to the greater spot-nosed monkey.

And that means if we can study the detailed difference between greater spot-nosed monkey’s malaria, and hominin’s (man’s), then we might find the point in the complicated life cycle of the disease that is most vulnerable to attack, the spot that makes human malaria distinctly human.

Perhaps it’s a gene in the human malaria that binds to hemoglobin. We’d have never known to look for that gene (among untold numbers of genes) if it wasn’t pointed out to us because it doesn’t exist in the monkey malaria. It’s very likely that that unique gene is of critical importance to the whole malarial chain of events that we might then be able to interrupt.

Go ahead and scratch your head. Read this wonderful summary about malaria that is better than mine. And then, think about it. It’s incredibly fascinating.

Here it is, are you ready?

“Chemical Rescue of Malaria Parasites Lacking an Apicoplast Defines Organelle Function in Blood-Stage Plasmodium falciparum”

For those of you who think you might have a scintilla of a chance of understanding this, it would behoove you to go to the Home Page of “PLOS” in which this article appears.

This is such an incredibly important scientific breakthrough, that this normally complex scientific journal has rearranged its home page since publication yesterday to try to help us lay folk understand.

So will I try, too.

Malaria is the worst parasitic disease of humans today, and as far as we know, has existed for the longest time of any large scale endemic human parasitic disease.

Its effects are devastating. It’s a story of one organism, the malaria parasite, beating up another, human beings.

My own involvement with malaria has been intense. I know I’ve had it twice, once near death, but I’ve probably had it more often than that. My wife was very sick with it once. Early, bad medications helped partially ruin the sight in my right eye.

I’ve held babies in Africa dying of malaria. I’ve had countless employees sick with it.

Probably every single employee manager for me in Africa has had a close relative, like a child, die of malaria.

I’ve had a dozen or so clients who came home with it from safari and were misdiagnosed and then mistreated. I’ve had more clients who seemed to go crazy when using incorrect malarial prophylactics.

Malaria has beaten us up.

I would love to live to see the day when the fight turns. And it may actually happen!

I’m no scientist and most of my understanding comes not from PLOS’ wonderful attempt at a plebian home page, but from the even simpler attempts at explanation.

The best I’ve found comes from the researchers’ own university, Stanford.

It all has to do with the apicoplast!

Well, that’s it, then!

Sort of. Over the last decade, it was discovered that when the malaria is actually in the human blood stream, it swims merrily around with a little “organelle” inside it called an apicoplast. Organelles are sort of like adopted organs of a single-cell organism that were somehow taken from some other single-cell organism.

A long, long time ago. Apparently this happened millions and millions of years ago. We know this from the genetic structure of malaria. As man was increasing his brain size and creating tools to conquer the planet, the joker malaria was searching madly for a better offense.

Somewhere out there, it found an apicoplast and consumed it into itself forever and that was apparently when it became deadly to man.

But we didn’t know why. For the last decade a number of researchers have been trying to create drugs that would specifically target the apicoplast like a nano drone, but to no avail.

We know there have been dozens of drugs starting with quinine that work for a time against malaria. But the parasite, like most diseases, reproduces so quickly that it’s always just a matter of time until natural selection filters out the progeny resistant to the drug, and then the drug becomes useless.

That’s how I got my first case of malaria. We didn’t know it at the time, but the so-called preventative drug was no longer preventative.

But if we could find a drug that specifically targeted the apicoplast? Whoa. That’s like trying to fashion a bullet that doesn’t just hit the bull’s eye, but the right milliquadrant molecule of the bull’s eye.

Struck out on that one.

Alas, genetic research to the rescue. Why not bioengineer a malaria parasite without an apicoplast? They did. But so what?

You can’t exactly go around the world and replace every malaria parasite that’s in someone’s liver with a bioengineered non-apicoplastic parasite and suddenly make them better.

And you’d have to bioengineer your malaria non-apicoplastic guy to be stronger and better than his original cousin, so he could eventually prevail over his weaker apicoplastic cousin.

Oops. Maybe then you’d create a super malaria parasite that with all its history of clever evolution might something else terribly do.

What Ellen Reh and Joseph DeRisi of Stanford did was study exactly what the apicoplast does for our little malaria parasite. And this is the discovery that will get them the Noble Prize.

It creates a single chemical, IPP for short, that is essential to the parasite. Without IPP, the parasite dies.

So what good is that? You can’t go all around the world with microsyringes and remove the IPP from every malevolent little parasite, can you?

No, of course not. But guess what? This IPP doesn’t only keep the parasite alive, it’s also the arsenal that attacks man.

Now a little secondary lesson on vaccines. You know the difference between “live vaccines” and “dead vaccines” and how the live polio vaccine wasn’t such a good idea in the 1950s.

Nor would a live malaria vaccine be any better. Although scientists have tried very hard, no vaccine they’ve produced works quickly enough that the body develops a defense against it before the vaccine prevails and makes the body sick.

So if we engineer millions and billions of malaria parasites without their apicoplast (which Yeh and DeRisi have already done), and though they die remain organic and whole long enough that our body would recognize them as the devils they once were….

Yes, the way a dead vaccine works. The human body then miraculously engineers all these micro molecular weapons that stay in the body long after the freak bioengineered dead non-apicoplastic malaria that provoked the human arsenal has been discarded.

So … that … maybe, when a real apicoplastic malaria sneaks in.. And it doesn’t look all that different from its freak dead cousin that was there a while ago … well, maybe, then:

ZAP!