Not everyone has an auntie like Sibongile Moyo, who sold a cow so that her niece and adoptive daughter Silethelwe Nxumalo could enter university for a basic degree in metallurgy. But “Lethu” Nxumalo — who recently made her aunt proud by graduating with an award-winning University of Cape Town (UCT) doctorate in mechanical engineering — says there are other (non-mooing) options.
African space science advanced this week with the launch of a new Nigerian satellite and the announcement of South Africa’s plans to launch a second low-Earth-orbiting satellite next month. Nigeria launched its communications satellite at the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in Sichuan province, south-west China.
An Indian chemist and a Mexican biologist were each awarded the Trieste Science Prize 2007, according to a report on the Science and Development Network website. Luis Rafael Herrera-Estrella, professor of plant genetic engineering, was one of the winners. The other was Goverdhan Mehta, honorary professor of organic chemistry in India.
Residents and businesses in the Amathole district in the Eastern Cape will enjoy high-speed internet access as well as free voice-over-internet-protocol (VoIP) phone calls within the network by the middle of this year. This is thanks to a new project to roll out WiMAX broadband services in the district.
More than half of all healthcare workers in the developing world, including Africa, are unknowingly infected with deadly tuberculosis (TB), according to a report on the Science and Development Network’s website. The report also contains worrying findings about the emergence of extensively drug-resistant TB in countries such as South Africa.
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/ 2 December 2006
The cheerful Super Silly Science Game is ideal for cash-strapped classrooms. For a start, teachers can get it free. It’s also fun. So much fun that students playing it may not realise they’re refreshing their knowledge and skills at the same time.
A gathering of Africa’s top media owners this week called on the continent’s leaders to give priority to development of a professional and ethical media, and boost the role of the media in support of development. The meeting called on African governments to view a vibrant and plural media as a vital cog in the development of Africa.
A new JavaScript worm has been identified that exploits an unpatched vulnerability in Yahoo! web mail. The worm, JS.Yamanner@m, spreads from person to person when the user opens an e-mail that is originally sent by the worm. The worm then sends itself to the user’s contacts that also use Yahoo! Mail.
Scientific papers freely available on the internet make a bigger impact than many people realise, according to a new study available on the Science and Development Network’s website. South African research journals have already been urged to increase their visibility dramatically.
Okay, so abstinence hasn’t worked very well, featuring more in conversations than in bedrooms. Male condoms mean trusting men both to display foresight and to eat the proverbial "banana with its peel on", while female condoms are scarce, awkward and apparently noisy. A vaccine against that quick-change-artist, the Aids virus, is science fiction — and likely to remain that way for a long time.
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/ 20 December 2005
India will gain nearly $6-billion in information technology investment over the next few years from just three United States companies, according to a report on the Science and Development Network website, <i>SciDev.Net</i>. But critics claim the computer world is drawing the country’s scientific talent away from other areas of research.
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/ 14 December 2005
Africa’s fabled grasslands could vanish due to climate change, causing huge changes to both the economy and the ecology of much of the continent, say researchers on the Science and Development Network website, <i>SciDev.Net</i>. Savannahs are both economically important and ecologically unique.
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/ 12 October 2005
Are you earning money for yourself, your children, your home and your retirement — or are you working hard just to make other people rich?
With less than two weeks to go to the May 15 Ethiopian parliamentary polls, at least 27 000 voters have to be re-registered after irregularities were found, which included 10-year-old children being registered to vote. In some areas, however, eligible voters were not even registered to take part in the election.
Talk is cheap, but carrying out the promises you make less so. That being the case, has all the talk about ensuring equality between men and women in South Africa resulted in action where it counts most: the allocation of funds along gender lines in the national budget? Nearly a decade ago, the Ministry of Finance promised to provide a breakdown of ways in which the budget promoted gender equality.
Could husband-hunting be a deadly business for South Africa’s young women? Jeremy Magruder, a young American economist at the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Social Science Research, thinks so. Frisky, risky chancers may be transmitting the incurable virus among themselves but Magruder suspects that dating, with a view to marriage, is pushing the infection.
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/ 16 February 2005
The Academy of Science of South Africa has been chosen to receive funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The science academies of Nigeria and Uganda have also received funding. The funding will help boost the academies’ ability to provide African governments and the public with advice on science-related issues.
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/ 3 February 2005
The theory that humans have evolved over millions of years independent of any "divine" influence is not widely accepted in many countries. That list now includes Brazil, according to the Science and Development Network. Meanwhile, evolutionary facts underpin many of the events coming up at Africa’s largest science festival, the ninth annual Sasol Science Festival in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape.
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/ 20 September 2004
"Give me a child until he is seven, and I will show you the man," goes the old Jesuit saying — an advertisement, if ever there were one, for the virtues of preprimary education. Yet, a decade after the advent of democracy, South Africa appears to spend more on keeping convicted criminals in their cells than on keeping children off the streets and in preschool.
There are 35 000 genes in the humble coffee bean. So say scientists in Brazil, after studying 200 000 strands of DNA and drinking an unspecified amount of the brew itself. This genetic research will lead to better-tasting coffee — significant news for Africa’s embattled coffee producers.
The story of Sharpeville-born, Lesotho-raised Tebello Nyokong suggests that sometimes adversity is the best career counsellor. Nyokong won the Science and Technology category in this year’s prestigious 2004 Shoprite Checkers/SABC2 Women of the Year Award for her research in cancer diagnosis and treatment. Yet her path, from childhood, was strewn with obstacles.