“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, [...]
Vuyani Chipunza never expected to become a maths and science celebrity, but these days he is stopped in the streets by learners asking if he is “that Vuyani from Yebo Tutor”. He most certainly is. He is one of several skilled tutors in the Centre for Broadband Communication (CBC) at Nelson Mandela University who livestream [...]
‘We are confident that we can help to solve South Africa’s food insecurity crisis through our national FoodBanking model, but in order to achieve this, government has to put in place a food donations policy. We have requested this for years but nothing has been done.’ These are the words of Andy Du Plessis, the [...]
“Finding the Higgs boson at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was all about the power of long-term research and collaboration in large science projects between large numbers of top physicists from many countries,” said Professor Peter Jenni, an experimental physicist at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland and the University of [...]
On 30 May 2022, the Makhanda High Court in South Africa’s Eastern Cape reserved judgment in response to an application to set aside Shell’s Wild Coast exploration right in its entirety. While awaiting judgment to be delivered, this is what is at stake. The entire issue of prospecting or production for oil, gas or any [...]
