Category: Technology

It’s one thing to know what makes people happy, but quite another to live a happy life oneself. I didn’t get a true taste of happiness until I quit my decade-long career as a happiness academic, packed all I’d need for many months onto a bicycle, and began meandering my way around the world to […]

South Africa is famous for its amazingly rich and diverse fossil record. The country’s rocks document more than 3.5 billion years of life on Earth: ancient forms of bacterial life, the emergence of life onto land, the evolution of seed-producing plants, reptiles, dinosaurs and mammals – and humanity. Many will be familiar with hominid fossils […]

Almost like aftershocks, questions about earthquake prediction tend to follow disasters like the Feb. 6, 2023, Turkey-Syria quake. Could advance notice have prevented some of the devastation? Unfortunately, useful predictions are still in the realm of science fiction. University of Washington professor of seismology and geohazards Harold Tobin heads the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network. He […]

An international team of researchers looking for signs of intelligent life in space have used artificial intelligence (AI) to reveal eight promising radio signals in data collected at a US observatory. The results of their research, published in Nature Astronomy are remarkable. The team hasn’t yet carried out an exhaustive analysis, but the paper suggests […]

Titanium is a strong, resilient and relatively light metal. Its properties have also been well studied; scientists know a great deal about it. All of this makes it the ideal base for fashioning artificial limbs – particularly knees and hips – and teeth. It is less likely than other metals to rust and, as research […]

People are exposed to numerous chemicals throughout their lifetimes. These chemicals can be from the air, foods, personal care items, household products and medications. Unfortunately, exposure to certain chemicals can cause harmful health effects, including cancer. Substances that cause cancer are called carcinogens. Familiar examples include tobacco smoke, radon, asbestos and diesel engine exhaust. To […]

The magnitude-7.8 earthquake near Gaziantep that struck southeastern Turkey and neighbouring Syria on February 6, and the large aftershocks that followed, destroyed thousands of buildings and claimed tens of thousands of lives. In response to criticism of the efforts to rescue buried survivors, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan reportedly said that it was “impossible to […]

Each year around mid-summer, somewhere between December and mid-January, the skies of South Africa’s Gauteng province, including the city of Johannesburg, fill with small white butterflies. Some land in people’s gardens, allowing a closer look at the thin brown markings on their wings. Those markings give the butterflies their name: the brown-veined white butterfly (Benenois […]

In the cloud forests of South America, amid the constant cacophony of bird and insect noise, a deafening blare pierces through the background from time to time. Belonging to the loudest known bird, the white bellbird, Procnias albus, this sound would be painful to humans listening nearby and capable of causing immediate hearing damage from […]

The typical reaction to learning about how people have lost money to a con artist is “how could anyone be so gullible?” But it’s the wrong question. Fraudsters fool even the most clever and admired experts by playing on their psychological vulnerabilities. News of multi-million and even multi-billion dollar deceptions keep rolling in. Sam Bankman-Fried, […]