Linda-Gail Bekker, Prof. of medicine and deputy director of Desmond Tutu HIV Centre at the Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine, Univ. of Cape Town 6 February 2020 The discovery of a rare new strain of HIV for the first time in nearly 20 years recently made headlines around the world. The big question […]

The highs and lows of the opium trade in southern Africa Thembisa Waetjen, Associate Professor of History, University of Johannesburg; Julie Parle, Honorary Professor in History, University of KwaZulu-Natal, and Rebecca Hodes, Director, AIDS and Society Research Unit, University of Cape Town If you want to score heroin in some of the historically black suburbs, […]

Mary Ann Dove, Honorary Researcher, University of Cape Town Most of South Africa’s top players, such as the champion batsman and former national captain AB de Villiers, come from privileged, or relatively privileged, white backgrounds. So what environmental factors have enabled Lungi Ngidi, the son of a domestic worker and a caretaker from KwaZulu-Natal, or […]

Peter Lee, Professor of Applied Ethics and Director, Security and Risk Research, University of Portsmouth The recent killing of senior Iranian general Qassem Soleimani has been widely reported as conducted by an MQ-9 Reaper drone. But what does such an operation actually involve? While the ultimate decision to carry out the attack has clearly been […]

Carla Lever, Research Fellow at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, University of Cape Town Bobi Wine has come a long way in two years. The self-styled “Ghetto President” of Uganda used to be a music star, playing politically charged reggae beats to packed houses. In 2017, the politics took over. Donning a red […]

Dion Forster, Head of Department, Systematic Theology and Ecclesiology, Professor in Ethics and Public Theology, Director of the Beyers Naudé Centre for Public Theology, Stellenbosch University Reverend Purity Malinga has just become the 100th Presiding Bishop to be elected by the Methodist Church of Southern Africa. She is the first woman in the church’s 200-year […]

Reinhart Kössler, Professor in Political Science, Freiburg University The level of uncertainty that surrounded the sixth Namibian elections since the country’s independence in 1990 was unprecedented. Held late last month, the poll combined voting for the country’s president and for the national assembly. Two issues dominated the debate until right before election day. The first […]

Your ears are extraordinary organs. They pick up all the sounds around you and then translate this information into a form your brain can understand. Your sense of smell, taste and vision all involve chemical reactions, but your hearing system is based solely on physical movement. The ability to recognise sounds and identify their location […]

Women from places as different as the jungles of Amazonia, the salons of Paris, and the highlands of New Guinea apparently flirt with the same sequence of expressions. First the woman smiles at her admirer and lifts her eyebrows in a swift, jerky motion as she opens her eyes wide to gaze at him. Then […]

Kevin Mitchell, Associate Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin and Uta Frith, Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Development, UCL The question of whether it is genes or environment that largely shapes human behaviour has been debated for centuries. During the second half of the 20th century, there were two camps of scientists – each […]