Cities are home to more than half the people on Earth. Cities are noisy, crowded, complex, often smelly and can be so stressful. They’re all the things a calm home in which to lay your weary head should not be. True peace lives elsewhere – in the natural world, our...
If you want to gauge the state of the planet, you don’t have to be a scientist, you just have to look for what’s missing around you. We are essentially creatures of two dimensions and only slightly of the third: up. Above us is the kingdom of air, clouds, flying...
Water is so common it hardly bears notice until rain takes a holiday and the taps run dry. Nearly three-quarters of the planet is covered with the stuff. But in fact, it’s an absolutely magical substance – and when it becomes ice it can blow your mind. Water breaks...
Gazing across the wild, rolling nothingness of the Kalahari or the ramparts of the Drakensberg, have you ever wondered how that bit of scenery got there? To a geologist the answer is all in the name, but ask them to elaborate at your peril. The film Jurassic Park,...
It’s now common knowledge that bees communicate by dancing. But the extent of their intelligence deserves a hard look at just how smart insects are. Bees pose a problem. Not because they sting – all creatures have the right to defend themselves – but because they...
Katherine Jenkins performing at Sanbona. (Photo: Don Pinnock) Katherine Jenkins, a singing superstar, and her husband Andrew Levitas, a top US movie producer and director, jetted quietly into South Africa with their children over Christmas for some game park time...
For reasons hard to explain, the word ‘gyre’ holds a mysterious allure for me. It comes from the Latin word gyrus and means a ring, spiral or vortex. It’s a small word, which, in oceanography, describes vast pulses of water that flow to the heartbeat of sun, moon...
The biologist Francois Jacob once wrote that nature isn’t a divine artificer but an excellent tinkerer. Its dictum is: never invent when you can adapt. Take the Epipactis, a marsh orchid. It uses two petals as a trap. One of these is a nectar-filled cup desirable...
‘If I have learned one thing, it is that humans are only part of this ecosystem. When we destroy the ecosystem, we destroy ourselves, for on its survival depends our own.’ One day, back in the 1940s, on the patch of land cultivated by her family near Mount Kenya,...