Superman always puts payphone booths to good use. It seems they might become wifi hotspots too. Charlie Fripp of HTXT.Africa writes more about such plans. Late last year, the City of New York announced plans to turn old public payphones into WiFi hotspots across the city. LinkNYC, as it was named, would reportedly cost the city…
The University of Johannesburg (UJ) and the South African Institute of Electrical Engineers (SAIEE) have announced a programme that will see disadvantaged children around Joburg getting the chance to build their own robots. UJ and SAIEE are taking the university’s Technolab engineering education training programme out of the lecture rooms and into Soweto, Alexandra and the…
Late last year the South African government controversially revealed that it has potentially signed a nuclear partnership deal with Russia, that would see the country construct nuclear power plants in SA to the tune of R1.2 trillion. Those nuclear power plants need to be staffed by someone, and that is why the Department of Energy…
A new nanoparticle-based water filtration system will soon be saving lives all over rural Tanzania, thanks to the Royal Academy for Engineering’s inaugural Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation. At the final leg of the competition in Cape Town on Monday night, Dr Askwar Hilonga of the Nelson Mandela African Institute of Science & Technology in…
Young people such as Cable Maharaj have proven that they can be counted among the top brains in the local MakerSpace, which is why a project called TinkerTainer wants to help unearth more talented youths by building South Africa’s first portable kids’ MakerSpace hubs. TinkerTainer aims to build MakerSpace hubs around the country where kids…
South Africa has joined the computing grid for the largest particle accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The collider, which straddles the border between France and Switzerland and is about 100m underground, is a massive particle accelerator, owned by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern). The super-conducting magnets in the accelerator…
A lot more solar power plants are springing up across South Africa, as Eskom struggles to keep the lights on to the general public. But there is a little bit of good news, as one company that will be adding its generating capacity to the national grid soon is SunEdison. The company has just been…
After much anticipation, South African-born entrepreneur Elon Musk has finally unveiled a battery designed to help homes go off-grid and run using solar power. Adam Oxford from htxt.africa has the story. Musk’s Tesla Motors firm announced Powerwall this morning, a lithium-ion battery which is built to be charged from solar panels. It’s gird-tied, which means its output…
The opportunity to have a close look at a jet-powered car built to clock at 1000 mph (1600 km/h) is not one to miss. You have only until this Friday, April 24th, to view the Bloodhound Supersonic car (SSC) before it goes on its record-setting mission on a barren stretch of land in the Northern Cape in…
Adam Oxford of the tech website htxt.africa visited Tshwane University of Technology to find out how to take a wireworks car (“draadkar” in Afrikaans) to the next level. There’s nothing unusual about wirework model cars: roadside craftspeople and shops in tourism hotspot sell them by the beaded bucketload. How, then, to make yours stand out if…