Creator
Sarah Wild is a multiaward-winning science journalist. She studied physics, electronics and English literature at Rhodes University in an effort to make herself unemployable. It didnt work and she now writes about particle physics, cosmology and everything in between.In 2012, she published her first full-length non-fiction book Searching African Skies: The Square Kilometre Array and South Africas Quest to Hear the Songs of the Stars, and in 2013 she was named the best science journalist in Africa by Siemens in their 2013 Pan-African Profiles Awards.
This is an edited extract from Sarah Wild’s new book ‘Human Origins’
Whether it was in the use of satellites to monitor the continent’s resources or precision medicine, we need technology to accelerate development.
Political buy-in is vital to science and research, particularly in a constrained economic environment.
This year’s Science Forum South Africa had an additional enticement: deputy president and ANC presidential hopeful Cyril Ramaphosa.
The annual Science Forum is the government’s showcase of continental science and technology.
Cyril Ramaphosa and Naledi Pandor have a particularly pro-intellectual stance, pushing science and technology as a way to drive economic growth.
Science Forum South Africa continues to be the only science forum of its kind for the country and the continent
Although it is totally discredited, its pervasive influence still colours perceptions because of its long association with empirical validity
We have the technology to edit the human genome, cut out parts of it and insert preprogrammed bits of replacement genome.
Science is advancing faster than our legislation
Thousands of unidentified bodies pass through South Africa’s mortuaries every year. Who are they? How did they end up there?
‘We should not succumb to the temptations of a post-truth society. Evidence, facts, must remain the yardsticks for progress’
Science Forum South Africa
A small group of experts constantly monitors the workings of the system and stays abreast of new developments.
The still infant telescope, which will be a major part of the Square Kilometre Array, is proving to be much more effective than anticipated.
The new app – known as Abalobi – signals a lifeline for fisherfolk who were marginalised and never had legal rights to fish marine resources.
The MeerLicht telescope will scour the skies to study transient celestial events. But its link to the MeerKAT radio telescope is what sets it apart.
Ordinary South Africans are helping monitor water resources amid worsening shortages under citizen and school programmes.
Because pig flesh is similar to that of humans, how their corpses decay on land and in the sea can help forensic pathologists.
Editing embryos may end up saving lives, but what does it mean for the human gene pool?
