By LELETHU TONISI and MATABELLO MOTANTSI Khanyisa High School pupils welcomed Dr Komal Kumar with enthusiastic singing at the start of her lecture on organ donations for patients living with HIV. In her Scifest talk, titled Organ donations, transplantation, and little bit of HIV, Kumar, who is an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore USA, described her field as the study of populations. At the heart of her work is HIV-to-HIV kidney transplantation. Only six of our many organs are transplantable with kidneys being highest in demand. Currently this demand outstrips supply. One person is added to the…
Author: Gillian Rennie
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By Hlamvu Yose, Meagan du Plooy and Ncebekazi Ntsokota Professor Henrietta de Kock’s Scifest lecture on food senses on Wednesday changed the way we perceive food. We do not eat just for the sake of eating, she explained. Food does so much more for us by stimulating all five senses without us even being aware. De Kock (a food sensory scientist and associate professor at the University of Pretoria) also made it clear that the taste of food is important to everyone, regardless of their economic status. The lower income community spends 30% of their budget on food and beverages,…
By Keegan Frances Think of nanotechnology and you’re likely to think of tiny cunning robots. But this is far from the truth. As The Wonders of Nanotechnology workshop demonstrates, nanotechnology appears frequently – and usefully – in our current life. Chris Botha, owner of Orbilectron Consulting, listed these. One is the medical process commonly referred to as an angiogram. Doctors can insert a thin hollow tube through an artery in the groin or arm to get x-ray images of blood vessels. This helps them evaluate and diagnose coronary heart disease. In some cases, this procedure is used to treat blocked…
Technology failed Scifest’s very first lecture on Wednesday when Antarctic adventurer Danielle Taljaard was almost silenced by a power outage. With no visuals and little light, Taljaard’s eager audience came to the rescue. Their questions about how she lives and works on a block of ice where nothing moves in winter, plus a well-placed cellphone torchlight, meant the show could go on. A radar engineer’s day (and night) job by Sphumelele Ndlovu A radar engineer, Taljaard explained, studies the movement of energy from radiation to pick up patterns that lead her to more accurately predict weather and the occurrence of…