Gina Ziervogel isn’t your average harbinger of doom. In fact, she has a whole new take on that most inconvenient of truths: global warming. Johannesburg-born Ziervogel, a fellow at Sweden’s Stockholm Environment Institute’s Oxford office, researches how climate change is affecting societies across Southern Africa.
The science of forensics, popularised by TV programmes like <i>CSI</i>, is nowhere near as glamourous as Hollywood would have us believe. Especially when it comes to exhuming mass graves and recovering and identifying the victims of genocide. This is a task all too familiar to forensic anthropologist Clea Koff, one of 16 scientists chosen by the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal to go to Rwanda to unearth evidence of genocide and crimes against humanity.
The severity of human rights abuses in Zimbabwe has increased in the past three years, according to a recently released Human Rights Watch report. State security institutions are directly involved in the violations — a new development since 2000, when militias and war veterans were mainly responsible.
A critical meltdown of ice sheets and severe sea level rise could be inevitable because of global warming, the world’s scientists are preparing to warn their governments. New studies of Greenland and Antarctica have forced a United Nations expert panel to conclude there is a 50% chance that widespread ice sheet loss "may no longer be avoided" because of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
When Mark Shuttleworth donned his space suit and ventured into the "final frontier" of outer space, he took with him the aspirations of the nation and stirred our Âcollective consciousness. So it came as no surprise when Cabinet last year approved the establishment of South Africa’s first space agency, tasked with coordinating research into space technology.
The Life Offices Association has made a recommendation that HIV/Aids exclusions should be dropped on all existing life and disability policies because Aids should be treated like any chronic disease and not singled out for special pre-conditions. This is an important psychological step for the country in terms of how it views the disease.
The oceans off the Antarctic peninsula are some of the most mysterious on the planet. A thick cover of ice has concealed what life they contain for the past few millennia. But with the rise in global temperatures, speeded by the gaping hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica, some of these ice sheets have collapsed.
Making science popular to the masses has always had its problems. The image of the geek — an overly studious science boffin with no fashion sense or friends — has not exactly helped. Thankfully, the dawn of the digital age has changed the way the public regards science and technology.
African elephants are the most studied big mammal species in Africa. But in spite of all we know about them, there is still a lot that we don’t know. A project being conducted by the Wildlife Environmental Physiology team at the University of the Witwatersrand’s school of physiology is exploring how the elephant’s body functions in the heat of the savannah.
We have been warned about pirated CDs and DVDs, but now — shock! horror! — watch out for illegal toilet paper. It may sound ridiculous, but it’s true. You might be buying illegal toilet paper, even though you don’t know it. The South African Tissue Manufacturers’ Association (Satma) has announced that illegal toilet paper exists, and has been around for some time already.