West Coast fossil park: before the dig site

Kids swarmed off the bus and into the playground at the West Coast fossil park after a chilly early morning bus ride from the MTN Sciencentre in Cape Town.



Kids met Mr Skinny in the museum. Of course, as our guide Heidi pointed out, if the body is a record of earth's history, mankind would only be a hair on top of the head. This is Yusuf Bharoochi with Amir Hoffman, 6, who divides his time between Tamboerskloof and Mitchell's Plain, and is in Grade R at Tamboerskloof primary.



Heidi Duncan was the volunteer who took us back in time - but not all the way back to the dinosaurs; that bit was washed out to sea long ago. (Which might have been easier because the sea covered the town of Langebaan Lagoon and the M7 freeway and in fact much of the old phosphate mine site we were standing on, at various points in Africa's history). Still, a couple of million years ago is good going!



The kids enjoyed hanging out with Mr Skinny prior to piling back into the bus for the trip down to the dig sites, which have been left open - complete with the lattice of square marking the bones sticking up out of the old riverbed - with a wooden boardwalk around anda greenhouse-style canopy around.



This last picture is Yusuf Bharoochi, 8, of Grassy Park. He's a grade 1 student at Vista Nova school in Rondebosch.

Peerless Peer's Cave

We marked African Origins Month with a stunning walk today to Peer's Cave, a stone age home/kitchen/cemetery overlooking the Atlantic Ocean coastline by Fish Hoek. Of course, the water level would have been a little higher back when this was a Stone Age condo, and much of the valley would have been flooded. Given climate change, maybe it's going to happen again!

Inside the cave are the terrible trio of six year olds - Jesse Dunbar, Benjamin Scott Wittenberg and Amir Hoffman. They were a tad disappointed that Victor Peers had already been and removed the skeletons from 9 burial sites in the cave, and had to be gently dissuaded from initiating their own dig.



Ali Wittenberg Scott chatting with MTN Sciencentre staffer Fikiswa Majola. Poured with rain last year; cooked in the heat this year - what would we talk about, if not the weather? Actually, we were also talked about - on Bush Radio, who then blogged us here - www.morningcruise.blogspot.com



A small portion of the group before listening to Jason discuss the rock art and dating methods (no, not that kind of dating).

Tweeked on TwitPic

Twitter is a brief - VERY brief - free microblogging option that lets people keep in touch with their mates using the web, their cellphone, or instant messaging. (The updates are called tweets, and you have to sign up to receive them.) More than two million people use it, including Barack Obama.

Twitter even does photos on twitpic, which makes text-based updates a lot prettier.

Here's someone by the name of Mario Olckers who recently posted a shot of his daughter at the Mars Rover exhibition at the MTN Science Centre - see http://twitpic.com/62db

Agulhas

What an oversight! How could we forget to blog about our fantastic open day on the famous South African ice-breaker the Agulhas, docked at the V& A waterfront. Close to 900 people came to tour, assisted by copious amounts of hot chocolate. Just a dozen staff worked hugely well assisted by copious amounts of briyani from Maharajah's (and all complaints about garlic must go to the Vampire Association!).



And MTN hothead beanies were in view, as per this shot of Ali Wittenberg-Scott perched temporarily in the cockpit of the SAS Agulhas helicopter on its launching pad, before the pilot got nervous and suggested that she should depart immediately because he didn't really want to crash next time on account of some kid fiddling with a switch!



The helicopter, by the way, doesn't take its normal complement of staff (which doesn't yet include 6-year-old Ben Scott Wittenberg, above) because the researchers are so bulked up in their cold-weather gear that they need extra space (imagine if this was the SAA economy seats).

The Agulhas trip was written up in the Department of Science and Technology's monthly double-page spread on science in the Mail & Guardian newspaper, and Bush Radio broadcast from the venue. We were also able to Skype and webcam with researchers currently working in the cold and dark of the South African base in the Antarctic. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday in July - and let's face it, the weather was better than in 2007. If this keeps up, we may even see sun when we do the Agulhas again in 2009, with any luck.

4 schools

It was prety much a full house for our first women's day function on Friday. 40 students came from Khayelitsha's Zola high school - which has experienced phenomenal increase in the number of learners writing (and passing) the matric examinations and increased the number of exemptions from two in 2002 to 16 in 2004. Not bad going for a school that doubled its numbers over two years.

Nerly 50 students also came in from Iqhayiya high, situated in a former primary school (and they're not complaining, at one point they were running on the platoon system afterhours in yet another primary school) in the delightful mix of low-income homes and shacks in section H in Khayelitsha.

Learners also came in from the Afrikaans-medium Scottsdene high school in Kraaifontein in the northern suburbs (which might explain why one explanation of MDR TB and XDR TB came in die taal!).

And students also came from the bilingual Elswood High in Epping Avenue in Elsies River, a suburb which was classified as 'coloureds-only' under the old apartheid nonsense. The grounds may be surrounded by many factories and block of flats, but the school itself is a bit of an oasis, with green trees and plants, as Elswood is the only school in the Elsies River community with an indigenous garden.

Nadia Isaacs at the PASCAP trust, www.pascap.org.za, which hosts the Big Sister events, also arranged for about 20 slightly younger students to attend. PASCAP stands for Partners with After School Care Projects, and they're also hosting a women's day/Cape Learning Festival event for 50 girls from Khayelitsha, Langa & Gugulethu on 11 August.



Thanks to Amandla Marine for putting up a table about jobs in their industry, as well.

Women's Day

The organisation South African Women in Science and Engineering (SA-WISE) hosted a women's day function on Friday morning for a predominantly female audience of high school students in our auditorium.

Speakers (seen above) at the SciCafé included GIS (Geographic Information Systems) mapper Takadzani Rambuda, conservationist Katy Lannas, chemical engineer Melinda Griffiths, immunologist Boipelo Sebesho, bat researcher Lizelle Odendaal - all from the University of Cape Town - and the sole representative from the University of Stellenbosch, systems biologist Jennifer de Beyer.

They're all post-graduate students who gave brief powerpoint presentations with lots of pictures. Audible gasps were heard from Melinda Griffiths when she pointed out that she got to live and travel in the United Kingdom.

More audible gasps were heard when Jennifer de Beyer - who also spoke at the science centre during National Science Week - said that next month she leaves for Cambridge University after winning a fellowship which will make her Dr de Beyer.

Boipelo Sebesho probably got the lion's share of questions, probably because she mentioned extremely drug resistant tuberculosis and multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, two issues of huge importance for South Africans - although her research area has narrowed down to focus on nasty brain infections caused by TB-linked meningitis.

Boipelo - who has to be cool, because she's on Facebook - said something really interesting in the question-and-answer session. ''Do we look hungry?'' she challenged the audience. Boipelo was pointing out tht even though many of the speakers are still studying, they're not suffering for science. They get paid to learn.

UCT zooogist Lizelle Odendaal - who's batty about bats - also got lots of questions. And smiles, when she said that she studies bats for all the official reasons (including them being the only flying mammals) but also because they're cute.

Melinda Griffiths' photos of mountain climbing helped to show that women in science are diverse and well-rounded, and that you don't have to be a slave to science and never get out to have fun.

Katy Lannas' photos of some of the beautiful places she works in were also quite impressive, and help to explain that science can get you out of the office and into intriguing situations.

The nice people from Popular Mechanics gave lekker calculators away to the students who could remember who did what at the end of the session, while Murray Steyn from the University of Cape Town provided branded pens, posters, magazines and computer mouse pads.

And well done to Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan, author of ''Famous Dinosaurs of Africa'' for putting the whole event together and hosting it.

Zooba gear

Both Zoob (sold at the Experilab shop here and used in our workshops) and the MTN Sciencentre have been praised in separate posts in a blog run by a Cape Town family who home-school not one, not two, not three but seven children.

I particularly like the creativity of turning the Zoobs into scuba gear (does that make it Zooba gear?), as seen in this 'Spy Kids' picture, which is taken from the blog http://www.se7en.org.za.

And the MTN Sciencentre is listed in one of the 7 best places to visit in Cape Town.