A South African-developed coding programme called Tangible that teaches problem-solving through simple, fun games, and works with or without computers, has been accepted by the international UNICEF-led Learning Cabinet. This places it alongside a small group of international education tools that have been independently assessed for safety and scalability for real learning impact. Tangible was [...]
On 25 August 2024, a two-ton rock burst into the Earth’s atmosphere from Space and a fragment of it was found by a nine-year-old girl in the Eastern Cape. A year later scientists are able to tell us more about the Nqweba Meteorite as it is called, and how they have tracked it all the [...]
“It’s so interesting to engage with people decades younger than me, and I’m always listening. It shifts the way I think when I hear what young people have to say, often with insights and points of view that I haven’t thought about, so there is great reciprocity,” says South Africa’s celebrated editorial cartoonist, Jonathan Shapiro, [...]
Working through the night on the rooftop of the Engineering building at Stellenbosch University, physicists Dr Yaseera Ismail and Professor Francesco Petruccione set a new world record by establishing the longest-ever secure quantum satellite communication link in partnership with researchers from China. This groundbreaking research will be published for the first time on 19 March [...]
“We are close to the edge of social disaster and destroying our planet, but it doesn’t need to be this way. We can create a different future.” These are the words of biodiversity and global change scientist Dr Phoebe Barnard (MSc 1990) who is the co-founder and former CEO of the USA-based Stable Planet Alliance [...]
Millions of people are still awaiting their government-funded homes, and developing affordable, sustainable, dignified housing in South Africa remains an unrelenting need. Addressing this is a highly innovative collaboration between the Cape Town-based company nonCrete; the Institute of Technology in Architecture at ETH Zurich, Switzerland; and the Council for Scientific and Industrial research (CSIR). They [...]
Amid the push for cannabis legalisation globally and the escalating drug use crisis in Africa, second year PhD student in the Department of Human Physiology at Nelson Mandela University, Musa Aminu, is pursuing critical research and awareness-raising about cannabis use disorders (CUD).
South Africa has a huge shortage of postgraduate statisticians, mathematicians and physicists. As a result, our universities do not have enough academics and researchers in these fields as many of the postgraduates are snapped up by industry. The financial sector and Johannesburg Stock Exchange, for example, seek out physics PhDs as they have a unique [...]
From June to October the southern right whales give birth and nurse their calves in protected bays along South Africa’s southern Cape coast. The first aerial survey for 2023 on 28 August revealed 556 mothers with calves (1,112 whales) between Hermanus and Witsand.
Any decline in our honeybee populations is a direct threat to food and job security in South Africa’s extensive agricultural crop industry. ‘Over 50 agricultural crops, worth over R10,3 billion per annum to the South African economy, are pollinated by honeybees,’ says Shelly Fuller from the World Wide Fund for Nature's (WWF’s) Sustainable Agriculture Programme, [...]
