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SUPER HUMANS – THE SCIENCE BEHIND SUPER POWERS We’ve all seen the Marvel and DC Universe movies featuring super heroes and villains boasting a wide variety of superpowers from super strength, speed, flying, super senses, invisibility, mind-reading, telepathy, time-travelling, telekinesis, x-ray vision, elemental powers, animal powers, healing and regeneration – the list goes on. Sometimes it’s fun to fantasize about which super powers we would want to posess if we were ever bitten by a radioactive spider or were exposed to a mysterious substance or a ‘mad’ scientist, but those are just fantasies and make for great movie and television plots. In the real world, ‘super powers’ can look very different, but being extraordinary is possible, just not always probable as it depends [...]

HOT, HOTTER, HOTTEST – FEBRUARY 2024 THE WARMEST MONTH TO DATE Just over nine months ago, June 2023 was declared the hottest month recorded in Earth’s history. The nine months since have set new records of their own, with each subsequent month outdoing the highs of the previous one, culminating with February 2024 outstripping all previous months of their title as the world’s hottest month to date. Sea-ice in the Antarctica is at an all-time low as a result of the unprecedented temperatures with ocean surface temperatures rising too. The high temperatures are largely affected the El Nino weather event, however this is not solely to blame – global warming and climate change are the largest culprits in the current climate state. How [...]

AVOIDING JOB SCAMS IN A TOUGH JOB MARKET South Africa’s unemployment rate rose to 32.1% in the last quarter of 2023. What this also means is that currently, South Africa has the highest unemployment rate on the continent, and even worse, in the world too as of 2024. Globally, the job market is extremely competitive with many companies looking to cut costs wherever possible based on the tough economic climate. Sadly, one of the biggest cost-cutting mechanisms is reducing overheads by reducing employees, which is what a number of the largest tech firms have done in recent months. The aim is to do more with less, which also often requires employees that are left, to be able to wear multiple hats in order [...]

GOOGLE GEMINI AND THE ISSUE WITH ITS AI Google Gemini was launched towards the backend of 2023, and was introduced as the company’s “largest and most capable AI model” to date. According to Demi Hassabis, CEO and Co-Founder of Google DeepMind, “Gemini is the result of large-scale collaborative efforts by teams across Google, including our colleagues at Google Research. It was built from the ground up to be multimodal, which means it can generalize and seamlessly understand, operate across and combine different types of information including text, code, audio, image and video.” Gemini comes in three different models that are designed to provide flexible AI-driven solutions based on the device and complexity of the task at hand. Gemini Ultra is designed for complex [...]

LOCALLY GROWN BRINGING IT HOME AT THE 2024 GRAMMY AWARDS Tyla Laura Seethal, or Tyla as she is more commonly known, scooped up her first Grammy Award on the 5th of February at the 2024 Grammy Awards. The 22 year old picked up the Grammy Award for the Best African Music Performance for her hit-song Water. The song, which has gone viral has also inspired its own dance and has become the backing track to many TikTok videos too. The music video has had over 118 million views on YouTube and has become a global phenomenon spurred on by social media. Tyla beat out a number of very well-known African artists to take home the coveted award, including Nigerian mega-stars Burna Boy and [...]

20 YEARS OF FACEBOOK The 4th of February 2024 marked 20 years of the social networking social media platform that we’ve all come to know as Facebook. Originally named The Facebook, the social networking service was then renamed in August 2005. The site was founded by Mark Zuckerberg as well as his Harvard College roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. The initial idea was to use TheFacebook to connect Harvard students only, but later expanded to other universities in the vicinity, then across the United States and Canada, and then in 2006, the site became public to anyone who had a valid email address and was over the age of 13. Facebook has had its fair share of controversies [...]