Can reality trump art? That was the question hovering over the launch on 24 April, at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, of a plan by a firm called Planetary Resources to mine metals from asteroids and bring them back to Earth. It sounds like the plot of a film by James Cameron — and, appropriately, Cameron is indeed one of the company’s backers. The team
In 1086, William the Conqueror completed a comprehensive survey of England and Wales. The Domesday Book, as it came to be called, contained details of 13 418 places and 112 boroughs — and is still available for public inspection at the National Archives in London. Not so the original version of a new survey that was commissioned for the
Picture yourself as a historian in 2035, trying to make sense of this year’s American election campaign. Many of the websites and blogs now abuzz with news and comment will have long since perished. Data stored electronically decays. Many floppy disks from the early digital age are already unreadable. If you are lucky, copies of
A ruling which would let the City of Johannesburg off the hook for inaccurate and inflated billing faces a court challenge, the Sunday Times reported at the weekend. The National Consumer Commission will ask the high court to set aside a ruling made by the National Consumer Tribunal, which cancelled 45 compliance notices which the commission
Unions and opposition parties at the weekend applauded the decision by the high court in Pretoria to put the controversial e-toll system on hold with immediate effect. Trade federation Cosatu said the decision would allow more time to look at alternative methods of funding road construction and usage. “We hope that the e-toll system will be abandoned forever
Marvel’s master plan for an all-star superhero film with some of its most popular characters has finally come together in The Avengers, a rousing special FX blockbuster that delivers exactly what most comic-book fans will be looking for. It’s an enjoyable
First National Bank has launched its first hi-tech “dotFNB” store in Johannesburg. The outlet is meant to introduce customers to FNB’s various digital channels and show off technologies like an “interactive surface” that supports both touch interaction and augmented reality and allows customers to interact with the bank and its products and
Vodacom stands accused of using political and diplomatic pressure in its battle with a fixer who recently won a case against it in a Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) court, which ordered the company to pay him US$21m. A lawyer representing Moto Mabanga, the SA-based fixer, has
MTN, the R255bn Johannesburg-listed cellphone giant, is in danger of being whacked with sanctions by the US for its telecommunication activities in Iran and Syria. US President Barack Obama issued an executive order this week that allows American authorities for the first time to impose sanctions on individuals or entities found to have
There is a certain Darwinian poetry in the fact that Cable & Wireless Worldwide, a remnant of a once mighty telecommunications empire based on telegraph wires and established in the 1850s, looks set to be eaten up by Vodafone, a contemporary telecoms industry giant born only in 1985. Even as late as 1999, C&W (CWW’s predecessor
