The next James Bond film — the 24th in the series that began with Dr No in 1962 — is to be called Spectre. Although the plot remains a closely guarded secret, the name reveals more than it lets on. Spectre has an important place in the
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Two people walk into a seminar: one takes photos, video and an audio recording of the presentation, while the other takes hand-written notes. Which person do you think will better recall the information? The former can use their digital notes to create something new that builds on the topic, the latter
Alan Turing is one of the world’s best known mathematicians, and probably the best known in the past century. This is partly for his work on cracking German codes in World War 2, and partly for his arrest, conviction and punishment for homosexuality in the 1950s. The mathematics that made him
It’s Friday, which means it’s time for another episode of TalkCentral, TechCentral’s weekly podcast. This week, your hosts Duncan McLeod and Regardt van der Berg discuss PayPal bringing US e-commerce sites closer to South African
Telescopes have come a long way since the days when they were all about lone astronomers watching the night sky through their upstairs windows. Today, teams of astrophysicists build and use much more modern instruments
It’s Friday, which means it’s time for another episode of TalkCentral, TechCentral’s weekly podcast. This week, your hosts Duncan McLeod and Regardt van der Berg discuss Telkom’s interim financial results, looking specifically at the sharp decline
Taylor Swift’s recent announcement that she is removing her music from the Spotify music service has started a debate about the future of music. Swift argued that artists are not receiving appropriate compensation and that
The day is coming, we are told, when the world as we know it ends. Somewhere in a laboratory, possibly Silicon Valley in the US or more likely a rogue research group in China or North Korea, an engineer or
The business logic is clear; only the timing remains to be settled. Everything in telecommunications, including voice, will soon be data. In a world where everything is data, there will be two types of companies. And they will not be mobile operators. There will be content companies and there will be data
Imagine launching a robotic spacecraft on a 10-year mission to land on a comet 600m kilometres from Earth knowing that you will not be able to make any physical repairs to the craft during the journey. This daunting engineering challenge has been the ultimate goal of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta