At the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), lecturer Abdul-Khaaliq Mohamed and his students in the Faculty of Electrical and Information Engineering have been developing their "3D prosthetic hand", the name referring to the fact that it is 3D printed. He and his classmate Nabeel Seedat were responsible for perfecting the "stand pinch" in the hand—the grip used to hold a pen—after which they added sensors to the fingertips that allow the hand to sense force.
Cochlear implants
The operation was featured on Carte Blanche and can be seen on YouTube (search for '3D printed middle ear transplant'). The University of Pretoria's Department of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology has a close relationship with the Pretoria Cochlear Implant Unit.
Hearing assessment apps
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Neuromuscular disease
The late Professor Stephen Hawking – the most famous disabled scientist of modern times – had a rare, early-onset and slow-progressing form of motor neurone disease (MND). Stephen Hawking relied on the Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit (ACAT), which has been made available as free, open-source software to help others with severe speech problems. When connected to a computer with screen reading software installed, such as JAWS (Job Access With Speech) or NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access), they allow the user to read or hear text on the computer screen.
Printed text can be read using a stand-alone reading machine such as the Eye-Pal Solo, which resembles an overhead projector.
It scans and reads the page of printed material, and the text can be stored electronically on a USB flash drive. It's available on both Google Play and the iOS app store, but it's actually a device that can be attached as a handle to the top of any white cane, making it a 'smart cane'. The device can be controlled via a touchpad or via voice activation, with English and Turkish currently the only supported languages (WeWALK was designed by Kürşat Ceylan, a blind social entrepreneur from Turkey).
By pairing the device with a smartphone, using Bluetooth and the WeWALK app, it can be integrated with Google Maps and Voice Assistant to get audio walking directions through the phone's speakers.
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Never in my academic life have I imagined myself sitting in a small tent under the bushes with a torch anxiously waiting for raindrops to hit the ground, but this is what we recently experienced in the Jonkershoek catchment, just north-east of Stellenbosch, experienced.
Our purpose
Background: How can we tell which water comes from where and how much of it reaches
Chasing the rain in Jonkershoek
To be able to perform hydrographic separation, we collected water samples from groundwater wells, streams, springs and piezometers (shallow groundwater). The baseflow component was sampled one day before the expected rainfall event and again four hours before the onset of rain. At the beginning of the rainfall event, water samples from streams and the piezometer were collected hourly until peak flow, and later every two hours during the recession period.
Rainwater samples were collected using sequential samplers equipped with 50 ml bottles collected near the rain gauge to enable the sample volume to be related to rain intensity and rainfall period.
They provide an understanding of runoff generation processes by revealing how much of the runoff water existed before a rainfall event, what portion was added to the runoff during the event, and where that water came from. During this period people developed many different strategies to produce a variety of stone tools. One of our first projects has been to examine ancient versions of the strange disc-shaped object that South Africans colloquially know as the "woer woer".
Different versions exist in different parts of the world, known by different names.
Bullroarers and woer woers
The Middle and Later Stone Age, which lasted from about 300,000 to 300 years ago in South Africa, was an important time for the African continent. There has been very little research into the role of sound production during the Stone Age. This is very surprising since we know that the latter part of this period was an important period for the development of complex cognition, symbolic expression and social dynamics among human ancestors.
By working with bone artefacts from archaeological sites in the Southern Cape region of South Africa, we were able to show that some implements may have been used to produce sound in the past.
Woer woers
Xam Bushmen reported in the 19th century how they would use the bullroarer to manipulate bees. The orange highlighted portion in the top wave output is shown in more detail below. Our interpretation of these results is that one of the decorative hangers was used to produce sound, in a similar manner to a bullroarer.
Aerophones produce sound by creating vibrations in the air when rotated on their axis.
Buzzing as ritual gateway
The soundtrack recorded while rotating the largest replica of the pendant reveals the rhythmic and pulsating nature of the sound. The sound frequency of the objects we assumed were worse ranged from 52 to 200 Hz. Listen to the woer woer and bullroarer replica recordings at https://theconversation.com/how-our-african-ancestors-made-sound-in-the-stone-age-121142.
Using the world's largest and most energetic laser, scientists in the United States have replicated.
Using the world’s largest and most energetic laser, scientists in the USA have been replicating
In the core of the Sun and other stars, nuclear fusion turns hydrogen into helium, and a small amount of matter is converted into energy in the process. It starts with just the protons in the core of regular hydrogen atoms," said Gatu Johnson. Shot-time' image from a NIF experiment simulating stellar nucleosynthesis, with 3He+3He fusion reactions occurring in the white-hot, dense center .
There will be one more round of experiments, currently planned for February 2020, where Dr Gatu Johnson plans to better characterize the temperatures reached in the stellar conditions.
SALT observes super fast spirals
Q&A
You’re a nuclear physicist! Wow! What made you choose this career path?
What about nuclear materials? What do you do with them? What are you researching? Why are
How did you fi rst get interested in science?
Why do you think so many girls, in particular, are put off by maths and science?
Girls respond better to encouragement and the teacher showing them that he/she believes in them. The teacher's enthusiasm for the subject also plays a role in the way girls respond. This can lead to a lack of interest in math and science, as they may think that careers related to these subjects are not for them.
People will generally find it easier to succeed if there is a role model who “looks like them” and has a similar background to them.
Tell us a bit about your books for toddlers
Some girls will be discouraged from taking math and science because they can't think of themselves in similar positions to the people they perceive are supposed to have these jobs. Girls need to be exposed to such women to make it easier for them to imagine that they are on the same path to success.
What would you like to see more of in terms of women in research?
This usually involves capturing the animal, injecting it with heavy isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen (non-toxic 'double-labeled water'), holding it captive for a short period of time, then releasing it and later capturing it again. During this period, three blood samples are taken and the levels of heavy isotopes in the blood are measured over time. PhD student Amanda Bourne (UCT) and Honors student Emma Jepsen (UP) have developed and tested non-invasive methods for measuring physiological responses in wild birds.
The research takes advantage of a habituated population of Southern Pied Baboons, Turdoides bicolor, at the Kuruman River Reserve in the Northern Cape, in collaboration with Associate Prof.
Non-invasive physiological measurements in wild animals
Studying these responses in animals can tell us a lot about how much environmental stress animals can tolerate, helping to improve our understanding of animal biology and inform conservation management actions. Traditional methods for measuring physiological responses to environmental stress can cause considerable inconvenience, especially when they involve repeated capture of individuals along with blood or tissue sampling. For example, a common way to estimate energy expenditure and water use is by measuring the turnover of hydrogen and oxygen atoms in an animal's body as they are used up during respiration and evaporative cooling.
Amanda's research focuses on measuring metabolism and water consumption, and Emma's focus on measuring stress.
No touching please!
Instead of trapping the birds and taking blood samples, both Amanda and Emma collected droppings from the ground after the birds had excreted them naturally. Taken together, these studies demonstrate that valuable information about the physiology of wild birds can be gathered without imposing capture or handling stress—a step in the right direction to both improve animal welfare in science and maximize the validity of measurements of responses to environmental stress under natural conditions. This article originally appeared in the July 2019 edition of UCT's Science Faculty Newsletter, Science Matters.
Instead of injecting the birds with doubly labeled water, she fed the beetle larvae injected with the isotope solution.
Climate change
DNA profiling and ancestry of cattle is based on ISAG and FAO STR markers/SNP markers and mutation analysis. Wildlife DNA profiling is offered for several species using a comprehensive, highly informative STR marker panel for routine DNA profiling and parentage.
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I shared with the public how to keep your heart happy and the doctor away," she says, pointing out that it starts with a healthy lifestyle by eating more fruits and vegetables, reducing fatty foods and salt intake, avoiding tobacco use, as well as exercising. It is important for the public to be informed and make the right choices," she says. She is the director of the pediatric heart disease research unit and a pediatric cardiologist at the Red Cross War Memorial Children's Hospital in Cape Town.
My research is to improve outcomes for children with heart disease by conducting family-centered, community-based research,” she explains.
A team of international
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Wild Flowers of the Cape Peninsula
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The Last Elephants
Field Guide to Wild Flowers of South Africa
Dance of the Dung Beetles
Their Role in our Changing World
The top and young scientists were female, as were the winners of the Siemens Grand Prize and four Eskom Special Prizes, among others. Iqra won a cash prize of R75 000 and was also awarded the Meiring Naudé Award for the most inspiring project. Her project, "Fractal Exploration: 3-Dimensional Koch Snow Ake," aimed to examine the mathematical trends and apparent properties for the surface and volume of the 3-dimensional Koch Snow Ake.
The Koch snow ax begins as an equilateral triangle, and then you divide the sides by three and add an equilateral triangle one-third of that length to each side, and then it goes on," she said.
Girl Power!
Weeks of hard work on science projects paid off for female students who won top prizes at the Eskom Expo International Science Fair in September. The lead teacher was Iqra Faki, a Grade 12 student from Star College Sybrand Park Girl's High in Cape Town. 5 The listenZA app is this type of listening test 6 An acronym for a free online course.
4 The middle bone or ossicle in the middle ear 5 The largest in the world is used to imitate a star.
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