A string of pearls is widely regarded as a beautiful thing, with one exception. If the string has more than 10 pearls and it’s lining your ovaries, it could jeopardise your ability to bear children. “When we do an ultrasound of a woman’s ovaries and a string of 10 or more pearl-like cysts are visible [...]
For the past 27 years, Grant McLaren has driven the long, straight road into Soweto to the St John Eye Hospital at Chris Hani-Baragwanath Hospital. The professor is the full-time head of the eye hospital and, together with his team, they attend to 250 to 300 eye patients a day. With skills that would earn [...]
WHEN rocket scientists Denise Wilson and Prevani Kistan-Naidoo are introduced to people and asked what they do, the response is usually “No, really”, “Me, too” or “You’re joking”. “That’s why we usually just say we’re engineers,” smiles Wilson, who heads up the R1 billion A-Darter air-to-air missile programme at Denel Dynamics, the arms manufacturer based [...]
It affects millions of women,but can go undiagnosed for years, so enigmatic is the condition called endometriosis. One of its enigmas is that one in three sufferers have no symptoms at all, says Dr Merwyn Jacobson of the Vitalab fertility clinic in Morningside, Johannesburg. “In other women, endometriosis may cause severe menstrual cramps, pain during [...]
Would you rather be a hominid or a therapsid? That is what I asked 20-year-old Barend Minnies as we stood in the Gats riverbed in Nieu Bethesda where 253-million-year-old therapsid fossils are embedded in the rocks. Not any old fossils, they offer us the best record in the world of what life was like on [...]
Man or woman, the time has come for you to find a farmer. The forum for finding a farmer is the legendary ‘Hitching Post’ in Farmer’s Weekly, that most excellent South African magazine. Simply place your advert and request all farmers to include a photo of their tractor in their reply. Many a request of [...]
With all eyes upon us a smorgasbord of horror was presented to the world as ‘a day in the life of South Africa’ directly before visitors from the far corners headed this side for the 2010 World Cup. Apart from our daily fare of crime and no punishment, the international visitors were treated to footage [...]
“I still feel much more South African than anything else,” says beer monarch Graham Mackay who transformed South African Breweries (SAB) into the global Fortune 500 giant that is SAB Miller. Sitting round the glossy dining table in his South African office on the second floor of SAB Miller in Braamfontein, Mackay does not initially [...]
As an architectural student Bob van Bebber dreamed of designing a world-class soccer stadium. At the age of 47, his dream materialised into Soccer City, the flagship stadium for the 2010 Soccer World Cup. This year, as the applause of over 88 000 people launches the FIFA 2010 World Cup within Soccer City’s compelling calabash, [...]
“Africa is long on junk and short on power. There is an obvious opportunity here to re-think how we can use waste to generate power. To this end we are increasing our activity throughout the African continent,” says Kevin Whitfield, Head of Carbon at Nedbank Capital. Suitable carbon projects that the Nedbank can monetize on [...]
