Science Journalist, Scribbler, Question-asker, Audio-wrangler, Note-taker, Tea-drinker, and (Occasional) Author
Fracking, already controversial for its potential environmental impact, could spell disaster for poor and corrupt municipalities, bringing further harm to areas already poorly governed. This is one of the possibilities sketched out in an as-yet-unreleased assessment of the possible impact of hydraulic fracturing to recover shale gas in South Africa. This week, an assessment team … Read more
It began in 2010: whispers of “shale gas”, “game changer”, “fracking” and “Karoo”. They issued from boardrooms, diplomatic quarters, government circles and the quiet corners of sleepy towns and soon infiltrated conversations all around South Africa. By 2013, this murmur had turned into a cacophony of contestation, thousands of newspaper centimetres and hours of television … Read more
SCIENCE is often held up as a panacea for South Africa’s problems: the data will tell you whether the country can afford free university tuition or how to conserve water, science will instruct us in how to curb the obesity epidemic spreading among our citizens, or create the employment vital to quality of life. But … Read more
Researched by Sarah Wild In Brazil, 404 babies were born with microcephaly in 2015 – a disorder in which a foetus’s brain does not develop properly in the womb — with thousands more cases under investigation. Of those, 17 babies were infected with the zika virus, a mosquito-borne disease, and 76 have died. Due to … Read more
Researched by Sarah Wild The zika virus, which has been associated with cases of microcephaly in Brazil and nervous system disorders in Micronesia, was originally discovered in Africa in 1947. “For 60 years, [zika] was seen as a mosquito-spread virus causing mild illness occasionally in African populations across the equatorial belt,” Prof Jimmy Whitworth, with … Read more
It is surprisingly difficult to find a place in Cape Town to leave a 60kg pig to rot. It cannot be close to water, in a residential area or anywhere near agricultural land – there are certain biohazard requirements. It also has to be secure, so that none of the accompanying R46 000-worth of weather-monitoring equipment … Read more
South Africa’s radio astronomy ambitions are feeling the pinch of austerity as Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan’s 2016 budget cuts its Square Kilometre Array (SKA) allocation by R250-million. (*The department later noted that this was an error in the budget. The budget decreased by R89-million.) The SKA will be the largest radio telescope in the world, … Read more
South Africa’s Square Kilometre Array (SKA) infrastructure designs got a R40-million injection from the European Union (EU) on Tuesday. The SKA, which has a conservative price tag of €2-billion, will be the world’s largest radio telescope, comprising thousands of antennae throughout Australia and Africa, with the core in South Africa’s Northern Cape. It will attempt to … Read more
This was perhaps the worst-kept secret in all of science: the detection of gravitational waves. It has been seeping out of sources like leaky taps. But on 11 February, it was finally announced that scientists had detected gravitational waves. Gravitational waves are distortions in space and time that – rather than the force of “gravity” … Read more