Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, the year 2020 has been dominated by data. But with great amounts of data comes great responsibility to communicate it properly. Unfortunately, the accurate and clear communication of complex information has been an area where many have fallen short this year. The UK government in particular has been criticised for […]
Isabel Hofmeyr, University of the Witwatersrand and Charne Lavery, University of Pretoria On many beaches around the Indian Ocean, keen observers may spot bits of broken pottery. Washed smooth by the ocean, these shards are in all likelihood hundreds of years old, from centres of ceramic production like the Middle Eastern Abbasid caliphate and the […]
How much are you conscious of right now? Are you conscious of just the words in the centre of your visual field or all the words surrounding it? We tend to assume that our visual consciousness gives us a rich and detailed picture of the entire scene in front of us. The truth is very […]
An ancient legend from the Indonesian island of Flores speaks of a mysterious, wild grandmother of the forest who eats everything: the ‘ebu gogo’. According to folklore, such tiny, hairy people as her once roamed the tropical forests alongside modern humans, eating crops and sometimes even human flesh. For decades, ethnographers documented the tale, recording […]
The Pacific Ocean is the deepest, largest ocean on Earth, covering about a third of the globe’s surface. An ocean that vast may seem invincible. Yet across its reach – from Antarctica in the south to the Arctic in the north, and from Asia to Australia to the Americas – the Pacific Ocean’s delicate ecology […]
If you are a fan of the MARVEL universe, you will have noticed that many of its characters, such as Spiderman, Black Panther, Ant-Man or Wolverine, have superpowers based on the abilities of certain animals. Using the animal kingdom as a reference, and using the abilities of certain animals, is not something exclusive to comics […]
“Did the Atlantic close and then reopen?” That was the question posed in a 1966 paper by the Canadian geophysicist J. Tuzo Wilson. The answer? Yes, over millions of years. And it was the breakup of the supercontinent Pangea, starting some 180 million years ago, that began creating the Atlantic Ocean basin as we know […]
Is this the first time there has been a fire of this magnitude? If there have been fires like this before, what damage was done to the mountain’s vegetation and how long did it take it to recover? Fires are quite common in the higher areas of Kilimanjaro at the end of the dry seasons […]
The third person effect phenomenon was described by Davidson in 1983 . People tend to think that media influence other people more than themselves. This self reinforcement is a key mechanism to understand the different effects caused by the media on their audience, since people are motivated to maintain a positive image of themselves by […]
When did something like us first appear on the planet? It turns out there’s remarkably little agreement on this question. Fossils and DNA suggest people looking like us, anatomically modern Homo sapiens, evolved around 300,000 years ago. Surprisingly, archaeology – tools, artefacts, cave art – suggest that complex technology and cultures, “behavioural modernity”, evolved more […]