Do we benefit from scientific advancement equally? December 2nd 1921, 14-year-old Leonard Thompson is admitted into the Toronto General Hospital. Emaciated and weighing just 29.5 kilograms, suffering from severe diabetes in a time where treatment could…
What did I learn about getting a dissertation done? By the time this piece is published my dissertation will be sitting in the hands of my examiners and I will be moving on to my PhD. The last two and-a-bit years have been the most intense learning exp…
Should we be worried about the chemicals in our food? As I write this, Twitter is a flurry of activity over local celebrity chef Lesego Semenya’s (aka LesDaChef) comments on a video from Food Insider’s Food Wars series. The video in question contrasts …
How can we eradicate prejudices in science communication? Last month I wrote and published a piece called Seeing the wood for the trees. The piece, which gave a brief overview of the term ‘plant blindness’, was written with absolute sincerity. Yet now,…
What is plant blindness? Take a moment to look at the image below and think about what you see. If the first thing you saw was a giraffe on a cloudy day, you might be suffering from a phenomenon known as plant blindness. That giraffe is but one of hund…
Do we do enough to identify our own biases in everyday life? Inscribed on the frontispiece of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi are three maxims. The first, and arguably most famous, “know thyself”. A simple phrase that holds the entirety of one’s existen…
Does the right to freedom of speech include the right to be wrong? There is a touch of irony in one of the defining characteristics of the Information Age being #FakeNews, and in recent years the impacts and origins of #FakeNews have become the subject…
Can science communicators be apolitical and effective? In mid-February famed evolutionary biologist and science communicator Professor Richard Dawkins was once again the centre of a virtual maelstrom, after tweeting that theoretically selective breedin…
Is the most sustainable option always as it appears? I think a lot about waste. I suspect it’s because of all the cleaning up I had to do caring for the menagerie of animals I kept when I was younger. As a society we have a complex relationship with wa…
Is spekboom South Africa’s silver-bullet solution to becoming carbon neutral? Over the last few weeks, a viral trend known as the #SpekboomChallenge has dominated South Africa’s social media timelines. The challenge? To grow 10 or more spekboom (Portul…
