Jul 22, 2015
A team of scientists has discovered a novel approach to crafting higher thermoelectric efficiencies, which can help develop electrical energy from waste heat such as that emitted by internal combustion engines. Professor André Strydom from the Department of Physics at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) collaborated with researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing; Institute of Solid State Physics in Vienna; the Max Planck Institute in Dresden; and the University of Aarhus in Denmark in the discovery. A research article, Large Seebeck Effect by Charge-Mobility Engineering, co-authored by Prof Strydom, appeared in the June 2015 edition of Nature Communications.
Jul 21, 2015
The Gauteng Department of Education (GDE) today officially launched its technology-enabled teaching and learning programme to Grade 12 learners in the Gauteng province. The programme, commonly known as “the paperless classroom”, entails the usage of interactive boards, mobile devices such as tablets, and laptops with complete Internet connectivity to conduct teaching and learning.
Jul 17, 2015
An interim framework agreement between Uber and the Gauteng Provincial Metered Taxi Council (GPMTC) aims to ease tensions between the parties. Gauteng MEC for Roads and Transport, Ismail Vadi, who facilitated talks between the organisations, says they were constructive and led to an understanding of the different kinds of services being provided by metered taxis and Uber partner-drivers.
Jul 16, 2015
Icy mountains on Pluto and a new, crisp view of its largest moon, Charon, are among the several discoveries announced by NASA’s New Horizons team, just one day after the spacecraft’s first-ever Pluto flyby. A new close-up image of an equatorial region near the base of Pluto’s bright heart-shaped feature shows a mountain range with peaks jutting as high as 3 500m above the surface of the icy body. The mountains on Pluto likely formed no more than 100-million years ago – mere youngsters in a 4,56-billion-year-old solar system. This suggests the close-up region, which covers about 1% of Pluto’s surface, may still be geologically active today. Unlike the icy moons of giant planets, Pluto cannot be heated by gravitational interactions with a much larger planetary body. Some other process must be generating the mountainous landscape.
Jul 15, 2015
The call everyone was waiting for is in: NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft phoned home last night to tell the mission team and the world it had accomplished the historic first-ever flyby of Pluto. The pre-programmed “phone call” – a 15-minute series of status messages beamed back to mission operations at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland through NASA’s Deep Space Network – ended a suspenseful 21-hour waiting period.
