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 #Wits100   #WitsForGood 

#Sediba   #Issa : An international team of scientists from New York University, the University of the Witwatersrand and 15 other institutions announced today in the open access journal e-Life, the discovery of two-million-year-old fossil vertebrae from an extinct species of ancient human relative.
Full story:  https://www.wits.ac.za/news/latest-ne ...


The recovery of new lumbar vertebrae from the lower back of a single individual of the human relative, Australopithecus sediba, and portions of other vertebrae of the same female from Malapa, South Africa, together with previously discovered vertebrae, form one of the most complete lower backs ever discovered in the early hominid record and give insight into how this ancient human relative walked and climbed.

“While Issa was already one of the most complete skeletons of an ancient hominin ever discovered, these vertebrae practically complete the lower back and make Issa’s lumbar region a contender for not only the best-preserved hominin lower back ever discovered, but also probably the best preserved,” says Wits Professor Lee Berger.  #nature   #evolution 

🔌💡🖲  #WitsEIE : The Wits School of Electrical and Information Engineering (Wits EIE) Open Day aims to develop engineering innovations for solutions to everyday challenges. From ‘sniffing’ for an internet connection to estimating poverty from space, Open Day had you covered. Full story:  https://www.wits.ac.za/news/latest-news/research-news/2021/2021-11/eie-open-day-2021.html 

The impact of Covid-19 on how we live, work & play was a central theme in this year’s Open Day for fourth-year students in the School of Electrical & Information Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment.

“This is the crowning glory of four years of hard work. Electrical engineers are involved in everything from studying lightning to telecommunications to controlling things to artificial intelligence and machine learning. Projects are identified by academic staff and students, and each pair of students work together to find a solution to unique complex engineering problems,” Professor Estelle Trengove, Head of School, said in her welcoming address to the more than 300 avatars of students, family members, academics, and members from related industries, ‘gathered’ in the main ‘conferencing hall’ in the EIE Gather Town. 

🔌 🌐 Lighting the digital divide

Wits leads efforts to develop low-cost, long-range free-space optics that can connect informal settlement communities to high-speed internet. 
The ‘Fibre Before the Fibre Project’ is a collaboration between Wits University in South Africa and the Universities of Glasgow and Aston in the UK. The two-year project is underway to demonstrate the use of wireless optical technologies to provide flexible and rapidly deployable communications infrastructure that researchers say will be a ‘fibre before the fibre’ solution for communities not yet connected to existing fibre infrastructure. 
Lead investigator Dr Mitchell Cox, co-founder of the OC Lab at Wits University, says: “In cities like Johannesburg there’s a stark contrast between informal settlements that don’t have fibre and nearby affluent suburbs, often just across the road, that do.”

Read more:  https://www.wits.ac.za/news/latest-news/research-news/2021/2021-11/lighting-up-the-digital-divide-with-fibre-before-the-fibre.html 

#MondayMotivation : Best wishes for your final exams Witsies! Remember, the capacity to learn is a gift; the ability to learn is a skill; the willingness to learn is a choice. Good luck! 

Wits University and the Russian Embassy in South Africa celebrated 60 years of human space exploration with the unveiling on Thursday, 21 October, of a bust of Yuri Gagarin, the first man to reach outer space in a spacecraft. Read more:  https://www.wits.ac.za/news/latest-news/general-news/2021/2021-10/wits-and-russian-embassy-unveils-yuri-gagarin-bust.html