European Research Council funds project on early human evolution at Senckenberg.

A new species of fossil staphylinine rove beetle from Orapa.

The Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe is Research Professor of History and Politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER), at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He will receive the award of NOK 6,000,000 (approx. EUR 525,000) during a 6 June ceremony at the University of Bergen, Norway.

A group of marine biologists specialising in shark ecology, genetics and fisheries have challenged the findings from a recent study suggesting that South Africa’s white shark population has not decreased, but simply redistributed eastwards to flee predation from orcas.

Dung beetles share the load when it comes to showing their affection for each-other, when transporting a “brood ball”.

The Grand Challenges Africa Drug Discovery Accelerator (GC ADDA) programme will leverage US$4.7 million (about R85 million) of the funding to develop new drugs in the fight against malaria and Tuberculosis (TB) – two of the top killers that disproportionally affect Africans – by supporting two teams led by scientists from the Universities of Ghana (UG) and Pretoria (UP) and Stellenbosch University (SU). While African countries have made remarkable progress in the fight against malaria and TB, the continent still bears the brunt of infectious diseases burden, with these two age-old diseases killing almost one million people on the continent each year. According to the World Health Organisation, of these, about 600 000 deaths are due to malaria and 400 000 due to Tuberculosis. The continued development of treatment-resistant forms of these diseases means that there is a critical need for innovative tools to eliminate them. GC ADDA has two main objectives: to support exciting drug discovery projects in Africa and create a project-driven virtual African drug discovery network that advances Global Health. GC ADDA brings together and leverages on partnerships that support strategic and scientific leadership.

The story of oaks in South Africa is a classic example of how global change is rapidly changing the roles and perspectives of species in urban areas. But now, since the arrival of the pholyphagous shothole borer (PSHB), the nearly 400-year-old history of oaks in South Africa may be coming to an end, forever changing the treescape of towns and cities such as Cape Town, George, Paarl, Stellenbosch and Swellendam.

Africa’s first deep underground science laboratory may become a reality in the next five to ten years with the establishment of the Paarl Africa Underground Laboratory (PAUL) in the Du Toits Kloof mountains in the Western Cape in South Africa, accessed via the existing Huguenot tunnel.

The PAUL project was officially launched in the aftermath of a week-long international symposium at Du Kloof Lodge recently, during which current and future research projects and collaborations with other deep underground laboratories around the world were discussed. The Symposium on Science at PAUL took place from 14 to 18 January 2023, and included a visit to the proposed site.

Already a decade in planning, the future Paarl Africa Underground Laboratory would be a first for Africa, and only the second such laboratory in the Southern hemisphere after Australia’s Stawell Underground Physics Laboratory. Currently there are a dozen such underground laboratories in Asia, Europe and North America.

For the first time, researchers from the Structured Light Laboratory (School of Physics) at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa have demonstrated the remarkable ability to perturb pairs of spatially separated yet interconnected quantum entangled particles without altering their shared properties.

Optica partners with the University of the Witwatersrand to introduce a faculty position dedicated to the pursuit of quantum optics. South African visionary and quantum expert Isaac Nape confirmed as inaugural chair.