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What Did the Stone Age Sound Like?(Sapiens) On South Africa’s southern coast, above the mouth of the Matjes River, a natural rock shelter nestles under a cliff face. The cave is only about 3 meters deep, and humans have used it for more than 10,000 years. The place has a unique soundscape: The ocean’s shushing … Read more

Only dishonest mental gymnastics can hold up the hypothesis of race ‘science’ (Mail & Guardian) One man made thousands — possibly hundreds of thousands — of children sick. Many of them died and many will continue to die, because one man passed bad science off as legitimate. In 1998 Andrew Wakefield published an article in … Read more

South Africa has tripled its black science PhD graduates over the last decade (Quartz) South Africa has tripled its black science PhD graduates over the last decade, and since 2013 has been graduating more black PhDs than white ones—a marked change from the situation under the apartheid regime. But the academic space still has a … Read more

Quest to map Africa’s soil microbiome begins (Nature) One thousand ziplocked bags of soil from ten countries will form the basis of the first large-scale survey of the microbial life hidden underground in sub-Saharan Africa. The leaders of the African soil microbiology project hope that the data will one day help to drive better agricultural … Read more

#South Africa’s forgotten dead Part 1: The unidentified dead One in 10 people who pass through Gauteng’s mortuaries is not identified. Their bodies languish for months in overcrowded and under-resourced forensic pathology service facilities, flesh slowly decomposing because a fridge can only slow the inevitable decay for so long. Part 2: Identifying the dead If it … Read more

Giant SKA telescope rattles South African community (Nature)  “Move it away! We don’t want it!” a farmer shouted at a crowded meeting in Carnarvon, a small town in the semi-arid, sparsely populated Northern Cape, one of South Africa’s poorer provinces. He was talking about what will be the largest radio telescope in the world, the international … Read more