Curiosity 19: #Disruption

Curiosity, August 2025: With the world on a geopolitical knife-edge, disruption is both a crisis and an opportunity. Not inherently good, it must be directed to be a force for reinvention.

In this issue, themed #Disruption, we mark the International Year of Quantum by unveiling a significant breakthrough in quantum noise reduction. As AI disruption rapidly impacts our daily lives, the new Wits Machine Intelligence and Neural Discovery (MIND) Institute reclaims space for humans — not as users and productivity metrics, but as complex, whole beings.

Post-COVID, our researchers are leveraging scientific advancements to pandemic-proof our future. Their voices offer hope amid the Trumpian assault, and we highlight how they are disrupting precision medicine, African mental and public health, sexual offences legislation, agriculture, architecture, animation and Amapiano.

Highlights:

1. How Africa’s quantum tech could rewrite the future (page 8): Professor Andrew Forbes and his team are the first in the world to have engineered a quantum system that can ignore noise.
2. Where we MIND humans as much as code (page 12): In a world dictated by data, scale and speed, the MIND Institute prioritises the human being.
3. Waste to wonder (page 18): How cashew nut shells could help Africa make its own vaccines.
4. What next after post-pandemic seismic shifts? (page 24): 足球竞彩app排名 revealed the truth: humans are mortal — but they can also organise, strategise and fight to survive.
5. Saving the lifesavers from sleep disruption (page 32): Dr Joshua Davimes is on a mission to understand sleep, sleep deprivation and its impact on frontline emergency workers in Africa’s extreme conditions.
6. Amapiano moved the world to SA’s beat (page 34): The music genre emerged from townships in the mid-2010s and has grown from a local underground sound into a global cultural force.