photo credit - Dr Els Vermeulen 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. “It’s a good year [...]
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 [...]
The largest research project ever undertaken by multiple nations using tracking data of seabirds and mammals over the entire Southern Ocean, calls for conservation areas to be urgently established. The findings from this international collaboration that were published in Nature are intended to inform spatial management across the entire Southern Ocean, to recommend where MPAs should be expanded or new MPAs created in areas of national jurisdiction as well as within the high seas where there is no national jurisdiction. The goal is to maximise biodiversity conservation in areas of ecological importance.
It all started in the dusty basement of the Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein, which houses the archives of South African court records dating back over 100 years. Here, writer and historian Richard Conyngham found – and has brought to life – the extraordinary legal struggles of working-class South African men and women [...]
The annual theoretical physics internship develops key 4IR skills, builds capacity for South African-based international science programmes such as the SKA and SA-CERN science, and boosts South Africa’s physics brains trust. “The internship is all about preparing final year BSc, Honours and Master’s students from all South African universities to be high-level problem [...]
Humans delight in creating patterns in the sand, and over 100 000 years ago it would appear we were no different. People were drawing triangles in the dunes along South Africa’s southern Cape coast. They had also mastered how to draw circles compass-style and sculpted something that closely resembles a stingray [...]
