“I did not want to be a builder,” Hamilton Wende explained as he leapt onto the arm of the couch in his writing den and reached up to the pelmet to retrieve a photo of an Afghan soldier in the mountains of northern Afghanistan. The photo and Wende’s lack of desire to become a builder [...]
Harpuis is a species close to my ‘hearth,’ for one of its many species grows on our farm in the Sneeuberg mountain range on the Great Escarpment of the Karoo. Should you happen to see me running across the veld here, brandishing a burning bush, please understand I am not performing some netherworld ritual, nor [...]
An onion is a lovely thing,” he told me, freshly plucked onion in hand. He was a farm labourer and he was heading back to his cottage on the farm to make a stew for his evening meal. I have never forgotten what he said about the onion, and I now repeat it in the [...]
If you find yourself thinking negative thoughts and talking negative talk you’re not alone. But that doesn’t mean it’s okay. Highly negative speech, whether it’s spoken to yourself (self-talk) or to others, holds you back, drags you down and can destroy your dreams. ‘Women tend to be inclined to negative speech, thoughts and self-talk because [...]
When you raise the subject of “stem cells”, a hushed silence often follows as people imagine brains, hearts and limbs cultured from embryos. While this is certainly one type of stem cell (known as the pluripotent stem cell), there is another altogether different type known as the committed stem cell, which has been saving lives [...]
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 [...]