Top scams to watch out for as you enjoy this year’s Black Friday sales: Top scams to watch out for as you enjoy this year’s Black Friday sales Despite the continued reports about the tough economic environment facing South African consumers and the fact that disposable income is steadily decreasing, South Africans are still enjoying …
JFK 60 years on: his leadership style and the reality behind the myths: John F. Kennedy retains an iconic status as an exemplary – even inspirational – public figure and his leadership approach has been influential for decades. The former US president (1961-63) projected an idealist image of leadership, which, at its best, demonstrated that …
JFK assassination 60 years on: seven experts on what to watch, see and read to understand the event and its consequences: John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy in the limousine in Dallas minutes before the assassination. Walt Cisco/Dallas Morning News November 22 2023 marks 60 years since US president John F. Kennedy was shot and …
Black November: remembering Uganda’s massacre of the opposition three years on: November marks a sombre anniversary in Uganda’s recent political history. In 2020, the east African country’s leading opposition politician, Robert Kyagulanyi, aka Bobi Wine, was arrested. He was on the campaign trail ahead of the 2021 presidential elections. Mass demonstrations demanding the release of …
Jurassic Park: why we’re still struggling to realise it 30 years on: Rattana/Shutterstock Jurassic Park is arguably the ultimate Hollywood blockbuster. Aside from the appeal of human-chomping dinosaurs, tense action sequences and ground-breaking cinematography, its release in 1993 was a movies-meet-science milestone. As global audiences were soaking up the gory action, the premise of the …
Twenty years after section 28 repeal, lessons still need to be learned from UK’s homophobic law: November 18 2023 marks the 20 year anniversary of the repeal of section 28 in England and Wales. This law silenced any discussion of lesbian and gay matters in schools, and was law for 15 years between 1988 and …
Africa-US trade: Agoa deal expires in 2025 – an expert unpacks what it’s achieved in 23 years: African governments are seeking an extension of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa) beyond 2025. The law was enacted in 2000 to “encourage increased trade and investment between the United States and sub-Saharan Africa”. We asked David …
Why the search for the Loch Ness monster (and other beasts) continues 90 years after that first blurry photograph: Hugh Gray was taking his usual post-church walk around Loch Ness in Scotland on a November Sunday in 1933. His amble was disrupted when he saw something bobbing above the water two or three feet from …
Turkana stone beads tell a story of herder life in a drying east Africa 5,000 years ago: On the shores of Lake Turkana in east Africa, about 5,000 to 4,000 years ago, pastoralists buried their dead in communal cemeteries that were marked by stone circles and pillars. The north-west Kenya “pillar sites” were built around …
Wildcats lived alongside domestic cats for 2,000 years but only started interbreeding 60 years ago – new study: There are very few wildcats like this one left in their natural habitat in Scotland. Mark Bridger You are unlikely to have seen one, but wildcats are still clinging on by a claw in Scotland. Most of …
I’ve researched time for 15 years – here’s how my perception of it has changed: lassedesignen/Shutterstock Time is one of those things that most of us take for granted. We spend our lives portioning it into work-time, family-time and me-time. Rarely do we sit and think about how and why we choreograph our lives through …
Carbon budget for 1.5°C will run out in six years at current emissions levels – new research: Mykhailo Pavlenko/Shutterstock If humanity wants to have a 50-50 chance of limiting global warming to 1.5°C, we can only emit 250 another gigatonnes (billion metric tonnes) of CO?. This effectively gives the world just six years to get …
TB vaccine: WHO expert explains why it’s taken 100 years for a scientific breakthrough, and why it’s such a big deal: The BCG vaccine for TB has been used for 100 years. It is largely effective for children under five, but less so in older people and can’t be used on patients who have certain …
A mystery disease hit South Africa’s pine trees 40 years ago: new DNA technology has found the killer: An unidentified fungal killer swept through a South African pine plantation in the 1980s. Rodger Shagam In the 1970s and 1980s, pine trees growing in various forestry plantations in South Africa’s Western Cape province began to die …
People in Europe ate seaweed for thousands of years before it largely disappeared from their diets – new research: Yarlander / Shutterstock Seaweed isn’t something that generally features today in European recipe books, even though it is widely eaten in Asia. But our team has discovered molecular evidence that shows this wasn’t always the case. …
The thorny issue of ‘race’ in South African politics: why it endures almost 30 years after apartheid ended: “Race” continues to have much political salience in South Africa, a country where, in the past, perceived differences of skin colour were used to construct a hierarchy of “races”, with whites at the top, to justify their …
Carl Sagan detected life on Earth 30 years ago – here’s how his experiment is helping us search for alien species today: Earth and Moon as seen by the Galileo spacecraft from a distance of 6 million km away. NASA It’s been 30 years since a group of scientists led by Carl Sagan found evidence …
Israel and Palestine: views of students and youth activists shouldn’t be dismissed – they have shaped the conversation for years: University campuses have long been hubs of political activism. As young people form their own opinions away from their parents, many act passionately for causes they believe in. This includes the situation in Israel and …