Cape Town Open Nights The SAAO’s headquarters are in the Cape Town suburb of Observatory on the site of the former Royal Observatory. The historic building is recognised as a National Heritage Site, and houses administration facilities, offices, and the SAAO library. You are welcome to visit the SAAO in Cape Town on SAAO Open…
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Emergency Helpline Numbers 💔 Suicide: 0800 567 567 🙏 Rape: 021 447 9762 ✋ Assault: 0861 322 322 😔 Depression: 0800 121 314 🚔 SAPS: 10111 🚑 Ambulance: 10177 🚑 Bester Emergency Medical Service: 087 711 0001 📱 Government Emergency Services: 112 📚 ADHD Helpline: 0800 554 433 💬 Trauma Line: 0800 205 026 🧠…
Cape Town retains title as MOST congested city in South Africa
A bird’s eye view of the City of Cape Town. Picture: SkyPixels/Wikimedia Commons By Chanté Ho Hip, 13 January 2025 The Mother City has the worst traffic in South Africa and some of the worst in the world. As people get back to work and schools prepare to open, it probably won’t surprise residents that…
Greg Frey’s wondrous recommendations for fiction and non-fiction from 2024
From Midjourney One of our favourite writers, Greg Frey, recommends his reads from 2024: FICTION Kitchen – Banana Yashimoto Before Murakami became the go-to for surreal Japanese fiction Yashimoto was blazing the trail. There’s something about her gentle, minimalist style that I adore. This is a book that’s dealing with characters at risk of losing themselves or…
Taking stock, five years on from the pandemic we were about to meet
Meiringspoort. (Photo: Tony Jackman) By Tony Jackman – 20 December 2024 Roads dissipate like shape-shifting mirages when the stories of the unfolding years dissolve into what’s really in front of you. As the final days of the year are swallowed up, you cast an eye over your shoulder and realise how far you’ve all come….
The Spookily Accurate Predictions For 2025 Made 100 Years Ago
Envisioning interactive headsets way back in 1925 is pretty impressive. Image credit: Owlie Productions/Shutterstock.com By BENJAMIN TAUB Freelance Writer Edited by Laura Simmons It’s now a quarter of a century since Y2K, which means we’re well into the futuristic age imagined by the science-fiction writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. And while we’re yet…
Seven advances in technology that we’re likely to see in 2025 (The Conversation UK)
Photo by Sebastian Davenport-Handley on Unsplash The Alternative – 31 December 2024 From The Conversation UK: In the grand scheme of things, 45 years is not a long time. Back in 1980, it would take me three weeks to run a computer program, written in the programming language Cobol, that worked using punched cards. Each card represented one line of code…
Aloe ferox — the Karoo’s winter soldiers
The Aloe ferox, or Bitter Aloe, the exclamation mark of the Eastern Karoo veld. (Photo: Chris Marais) By Julienne Du Toit – 23 May 2024 When the landscape turns cold, bleak and often snowy, the Aloe ferox lifts its bright spears of red flowers all across the southern Karoo. Everywhere you go along the southern…
I was in despair about the environmental crisis. Then I volunteered to clean up my local park
Sam Pyrah – 13 January 2025 ‘Instead of sobbing in front of your computer screen,’ my counsellor said, ‘go out and do something’ There’s a pesky crisp wrapper half-sunk in the mud under brambles. Each time I secure it within the jaws of my litter-picker, another piece tears off. I persist, until all the fragments…
What if climate solutions were causing more harm than good?
Greenpeace Africa, 2025 Across Africa, Indigenous Communities are being displaced, with their land being auctioned off in the name of ‘saving the planet’. At the centre of this injustice lie carbon credits, a so-called solution to the climate crisis. We created a powerful video that breaks it all down, uncovering the truth behind this curated…