South Africa

Always Something New

South Africa
Always Something New
When the Roman naturalist and soldier Pliny the Elder wrote that there
was “always something new out of Africa”, he was relying on stereotype
and not intending to flatter. By new, he meant strange, and what he was
referring to was Africa’s unusual wildlife which he took to be the result of the Use your smartphone to
miscegenation of species thrown together by the search for water in an arid scan the QR codes and
land. learn more about:

Pliny was not the first and certainly not the last outsider to have a peculiar
understanding of Africa. For many, the continent is still terra incognita. SKA
Happily, that is changing rapidly, which is all to the good because today,
what is coming out of Africa isn’t strange, but genuinely new and fresh and
exciting. Africa has a huge contribution to make as mankind seeks to advance
the boundaries of knowledge and solve the problems that confront the
shared and shrinking planet we call home. Here are some examples.

Square Kilometer Array Telescope

South Africa is leading a bid with eight other African countries to host what,
when it is completed in the middle of the next decade, will be by several
orders of magnitude the largest and most powerful radio telescope ever built. Joule

The Square Kilometer Array, or SKA, as the instrument is known, will consist
of thousands of linked receiving dishes, enabling scientists to see back to
the very beginning of time. The technical challenges are immense. As the SA
project director Dr Bernie Fanoroff puts it, “The SKA will collect more data in
a week than humankind has collected in its entire history. The amount of data
that will flow through the SKA will be about 250 times the total data traffic
currently on the internet, requiring supercomputers about 1000 times faster
than the fastest now available.”

South African scientists, engineers and industry are finding solutions to

these challenges as they work on the SKA’s precursor, the MeerKAT, which Sustainable Wine
astronomers from around the world are already lining up to use when it
becomes operational in 2015.

The SKA project is exciting not only for the light it promises to shed on
the origins of the universe. It is inspiring a generation of young Africans to
seek the skills and knowledge needed to be part of it. The technological
breakthroughs and new communications infrastructure that will be required
to make it happen promise to spawn new industries that could revolutionize
the continent’s development.
Already, says Dr Fanoroff, “the project has created a critical mass of young
people with world-class expertise in the technologies which will be
ubiquitous in the global technology economy in the next decades.”

The MeerKAT is being designed and built in Cape Town. Key South African
industry partners are EMSS, a Stellenbosch company developing innovative
receivers, radio feeds and cryogenics; Tellumat, which is working on the
manufacture of boards and receivers; MMS and BAE Land Systems, which
have built the composite dishes; Eskom, the national electric power utility;
Optic 1, which built the power and fiber optic cables to the site; Broadband
InfraCo, which is connecting the site to Cape Town and the world; and MESA
Solutions, working on electromagnetic compatibility.

For more information, visit www.ska.ac.za or scan the QR code labelled SKA
with your smartphone to see the project’s twitter feed.

Joule Electric Car

As project manager for SALT, the Southern African Large Telescope, Kobus
Meiring oversaw the completion of the biggest device of its kind in the
southern hemisphere on time and on budget in 2005. Today he is the driving
force behind an ambitious bid to make South Africa a world leader in electric
car design and production.

Optimal Energy, Meiring’s Cape Town-based company, plans to start

manufacture of the Joule, a sleek five-seater powered by lithium ion
batteries, in 2012. The Joule has a range between charges of over 200 miles
based on the US Environmental Protection Agency’s standard, known as the
urban dynamometer driving schedule. It is expected to reach South African
showrooms, where car prices are generally higher than they are in the US,
with an unsubsidized price tag in the region of $30 000.

That South Africa is a leader in this area should come as no surprise. The
country has a thriving automotive sector which produces top quality
cars, including Mercedes and BMW, for global markets. It is perhaps no
coincidence that the entrepreneurial and technical genius behind the
Tesla electric car is a South African educated at Pretoria Boys High, Paypal
cofounder Elon Musk.

Visit Optimal Energy’s website – www.optimalenergy.com – or scan the QR

code labeled Joule to watch a video about the car’s 2008 launch.

Wine that’s easy on the palate and the planet

Most of South Africa’s award-winning wines come from vines in the Cape
Floral Kingdom, the smallest yet richest of six such kingdoms worldwide and
home to some 9600 plant species, more than are found in the whole of the
northern hemisphere. South Africa’s winegrowers are determined to preserve
their unique natural heritage.

Under the Biodiversity and Wine Initiative (BWI), growers are setting aside an
acre of land conservation for every acre they put under vine, conserving over
300 000 acres in the past four years alone.
From the 2010 harvest on, a new seal guarantees consumers that the
wine in the bottle they are about to open was produced in a sustainable,
environmentally friendly manner. You can enter the numbers on the
seal -- unique to each bottle -- on a website (www.swsa.co.za) and
obtain details of the wine’s production along with independently audited
data on what the makers are doing to protect the environment and
their workers. Are they limiting use of chemicals? Reintroducing natural
predators? Treating waste water? Promoting biodiversity? The seal
confirms that they are doing all these things.

Visit the Wines of South Africa website (www.wosa.co.za) for more details
or use the Sustainable Wine QR code to watch a video on how South
Africa’s winemakers are protecting the environment.

Lowering the risk of nuclear proliferation

The less the world needs weapons grade uranium for any purpose, the
lower the risk of the material falling into the wrong hands. South Africa,
the only country to have developed and then voluntarily scrapped its
own nuclear weapons, leads the world in the “proliferation resistant”
production of a radioactive isotope essential for diagnostic imaging.

Not only is the Safari-1 research reactor operated by South Africa’s

Nuclear Energy Corporation (NECSA ) the world’s top source of
molybdenum-99 (Mo-99), but NECSA subsidiary NTP Radioisotopes has
developed a process to produce the isotope using low-enriched uranium
(LEU).

Hitherto, Mo-99 has had to be made using highly enriched, or weapons

grade, uranium, civilian demand for which will be significantly reduced
as a result of NTP’s work.

The US Department of Energy has given NTP a $25 million contract

to take its research forward. The US Food and Drug Administration
has approved the use of Mo-99 made from LEU for the production
of technetium-99m, which is used in more than 30 million medical
procedures every year to diagnose and treat patients around the world.

Visit www.npt.co.za for more information. For National Public Radio’s

report on the first shipment of LEU-derived Mo-99 to the US, scan the
QR code labelled Mo-99 on the next page.

HIV/AIDS Prevention Breakthrough

A two-and-a-half-year study of 889 women by the Durban-based Center

for the Aids Program of Research in South Africa (Caprisa) has found
that a vaginal gel containing the antiretroviral drug tenofovir was 39%
effective in reducing a woman’s HIV risk when used for about three-
quarters of sex acts. It was 54% effective when used more consistently,
and also halved the incidence of genital herpes infections.

“Tenofovir gel could fill an important HIV prevention gap by empowering

women who are unable to successfully negotiate mutual faithfulness or
condom use with their male partners,” said Quarraisha Abdool Karim, one of
the lead investigators of the study and associate director of Caprisa. Mo-99

“This new technology has the potential to alter the course of the HIV
epidemic, especially in southern Africa, where young women bear the brunt
of this devastating disease.”

“We are giving hope to women,” Michel Sidibé, executive director of UNAIDS,
said following publication of the results in Science magazine last July. “For
the first time we have seen results for a woman-initiated and -controlled HIV
prevention option.”

To watch a video, scan the QR labeled Caprisa. Caprisa

Capturing Carbon

As proud as South Africa is to lead the world in technologies to turn coal and
gas into liquid fuels, it also seeks to be in the vanguard of efforts to reduce
carbon emissions. Given that 90 percent of South Africa’s power is coal-
generated, this presents a challenge.

The government’s integrated resource plan calls for 42 percent of all new
power that comes on stream over the next 20 years to be from renewable Carbon Capture
sources such as the $22 billion, 5 000 MW solar park planned for the semi-
desert Northern Cape.

Because current infrastructure cannot be scrapped prematurely without

serious economic consequences, government and industry and have come
together to launch the South African Center for Carbon Capture.

The center has begun mapping sites for injecting CO2 into the ground and
has identified four possible storage basins with an estimated capacity of 150
000 million tonnes. Current South African emissions are thought to be in the
region of 400 million tonnes a year. Diamond Ship
The center’s unique atlas can found at www.saccs.org.za. For a short video,
scan the QR code labelled Carbon Capture.

Magnificent Multihulls

As visitors to the annual Miami Boat Show have discovered, South African
boatbuilders are starting to dominate the market for luxury catamarans like
the Tag 60 pictured on page 3, with a reputation for excellent craftsmanship,
state-of-the-art design and durability. South Africa is sole supplier to the
largest charter fleet in the world which operates predominantly in US and Sediba
Caribbean waters. For more details, visit www.sabbex.co.za.

Harvesting Diamonds from the Ocean Floor

Not all forms of carbon found in and around South Africa make the same
contribution to global warmning. Diamonds, for example.

South Africa’s highly industrialized economy was built on mining, and South
Africans, not suprisingly, are in a league of their own when it comes to the
technology for wresting valuable minerals from the ground.

For sophistication and ingenuity, though, it is hard to top the fleet of De Beers
ships like Peace in Africa operating off the Atlantic coast of South Africa and
Namibia with their robot crawlers scouring the ocean floor for diamonds
washed out to sea by ancient rivers.

To meet the woman in charge of production when a group of American

bloggers went aboard Peace in Africa in 2008, scan the QR code marked
Diamond Ship.

A Satellite for Africa by Africa

Africa is being called the last great investment frontier. The “Lions on the
move” McKinsey & Co talks about need to be fully connected -- both to the
world and to each other -- if their industries are to generate $2.6 trillion a
year in revenue by the end of the decade as the consultancy projects.

New Dawn, a $250 million communications satellite being readied for launch
by Arianespace in spring 2011, is a joint venture between a South African
investor group led by Convergence Partners and Intelsat, the world’s leading
provider of fixed satellite services.

New Dawn which will be positioned in geostationary orbit 36 000 km above

Africa is the first communications satellite Africa can call its own and has
been designed specifically to meet Africa’s needs.

The satellite will provide ready-made infrastructure for existing and start-up
telcom operators, broadcasters and high bandwidth data services. Learn
more at www.convergencepartners.co.za.

New Light on Our Common Ancestry

What’s new out of Africa is often extremely old. Researchers with the Institute
of Human Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand continue to shed
remarkable light on humanity’s origins as they explore the area now known
as the Cradle of Humankind northwest of Johannesburg.

Last year’s announcement of the discovery of the so-called Sediba bones,

hominid fossils of a young male and mature female dating back 1.78 to 1.95
million years, promises to turn the palaeontological world upside down,
in the words of Professor Lee Berger, leader of the team that made the
discovery.

Casts of the fossils, including the extraordinarily well preserved skull pictured
above, were donated to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in
February.

South Africa’s deputy president Kgalema Motlanthe captured the poetry

of the find: “The discovery opens an unusually panoramic window on our
African origins. These time travellers have found their way into the present,
and with the assistance of our scientists, they are able to speak to us from the
distant past.”

Scan the Sediba QR code for a video.

Contact us:
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