General
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The Earth has a lot of water – around 71% of our planet’s surface is covered with water. For years, scientists have tried to discover why, and where all that water came from. Did Earth form with its water already here? Or was it delivered later by a cosmic hailstorm of comets or asteroids? The evidence has tipped back and forth over the years, and scientists haven’t been able to provide a definitive answer.
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The World Health Organisation (WHO) has validated the fact that burn-out is real. The WHO has included burn-out in its most recent International Classification of Diseases (ICD), which is widely used as a benchmark for diagnosis and health insurers.
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Earth is remarkable in our solar system because it is the only rocky planet with such a large moon, and is also the only planet besides Pluto to have a moon so fundamentally similar to itself in composition. Most bodies in the solar system have unique chemical compositions, but lunar rocks brought home during the Apollo missions show that their isotopic fingerprint is almost identical to that of minerals from Earth.
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A few years ago, microscopic life forms called tardigrades, also known as “water bears”, created an uproar in the scientific community, when one of the creatures laid eggs that successfully hatched after the tardigrade was frozen for almost 30 years. These animals can weather extreme heat, cold, radiation and even the vacuum of space, researchers have found, and could provide clues to how we can make crops more resistant to drought, better preserve blood and medicines, and even make more effective sunscreen.
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In the wake of the fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral, civil engineering and architectural experts – not to mention historical authorities – will be gearing up to restore the damaged building. French President Emmanuel Macron has provided a timeline of just 5 years for the rebuilding efforts, stating “we will rebuild Notre-Dame Cathedral, more beautiful than ever.”
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South Africa has exported many innovations overs over the years, ranging from the Kreepy Krawly to the heart transplant. Now Dimension Data and Cisco have partnered to take home-grown anti-poaching technology to the rest of the world.
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Steven Pinker, a Canadian psychologist and author, has proposed the controversial stance that inequality is not inherently bad. He argues that we should focus on questions of poverty and unfairness which are tied to the discussion around inequality, rather than inequality as a concept.
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South Africa’s battle against plastic pollution may have found a solution in the form of plastic roads. The Democratic Alliance (DA) in the Eastern Cape has announced a pilot project that would see a 1km stretch of road in Jeffreys Bay being built with new technology that involves recycled plastic.
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With the dawning of the first week without guaranteed load shedding in South Africa, many people have started tallying the cost of Eskom’s failure to provide regular electricity supply to the country. Based on using the standard cost of 75 cents per kilowatt-hour, and the average time the lights have been out for each individual load shedding announcement, Eskom has cost the economy R38 billion as of Wednesday 20 March. This includes a week of rolling blackouts in February.
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For years, 3D printing has been touted as the solution for everything from construction challenges to manufacturing bottlenecks, but has remained a specialist solution for very specific applications. Professor Mashudu Tshifularo and his team from the University of Pretoria have made use of the specialist nature and innate capabilities of 3D printing to perform the world’s first middle ear transplant.
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It’s official: South Africans need to take better care of themselves. According to The Indigo Global Wellness Index, a new study published by an investment firm called LetterOne, South Africa is at the bottom of the world’s health and happiness rankings. Of the 151 countries feature in the study, South Africa came stone last – particularly when it came to health.
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Sustainability and eco-friendliness have become a focus of our business and personal lives, and most people try to do their bit for the environment – whether it’s driving electric cars, recycling, or even composting food waste. These measures make us feel like we are contributing to a better planet, even though their impact is small on an individual level.
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This year’s budget speech saw the expected increases of so-called ‘sin taxes’; these being an easy way for government to bring a bit extra into the kitty. It seems as though the sugar tax is fast becoming another easy money-making measure, but these tax increases have a much wider effect on the economy, according to experts.