Baboons (genus Papio) are distributed over most of sub-Saharan Africa and in the southern portion of the Arabian Peninsula. Six distinct morphotypes, with clearly defined geographic distributions, are recognized (the olive, chacma, yellow, Guinea, Kinda and hamadryas baboons). The evolutionary relationships among baboon forms have long been a controversial issue. Phylogenetic analyses based on mitochondrial DNA sequences revealed that the modern baboon morphotypes are mitochondrially paraphyletic or polyphyletic. The discordance between mitochondrial lineages and morphology is indicative of extensive introgressive hybridization between ancestral baboon populations. To gain insights into the evolutionary relationships among morphotypes and their demographic history, we performed an analysis of nuclear variation in baboons. We sequenced 13 non-coding, putatively neutral, nuclear regions and scored the presence/absence of 18 polymorphic transposable elements in a sample of 45 baboons belonging to five of the six recognized baboon forms. We found that the chacma baboon is the sister-taxon to all other baboons and the yellow baboon is the sister-taxon to an unresolved northern clade containing the olive, Guinea and hamadryas baboons. We estimated that the diversification of baboons occurred entirely in the Pleistocene, the earliest split dating ~1.5 million years ago, and that baboons have experienced relatively large and constant population sizes for most of their evolutionary history (~30,000 to 95,000 individuals).

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Historically, female students have shown low interest in the field of computer science. Previous computer science curricula have failed to address the lack of female-centered computer science activities, such as socially relevant and real-life applications. Our new summer camp curriculum introduces the topics of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and other real-world subjects to engage high school girls in computing by connecting lessons to relevant and cutting edge technologies. Topics range from social media bots, sentiment of natural language in different media, and the role of AI in criminal justice, and focus on programming activities in the NetsBlox and Python programming languages. Summer camp teachers were prepared in a week-long pedagogy and peer-teaching centered professional development program where they concurrently learned and practiced teaching the curriculum to one another. Then, pairs of teachers led students in learning through hands-on AI and ML activities in a half-day, two-week summer camp. In this paper, we discuss the curriculum development and implementation, as well as survey feedback from both teachers and students.

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