Merck Seminar: Developing software for visualizing, analyzing and simulating chemical structures
Global Game Jam showdown
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UCT well represented at climate summit
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Honorary degrees for two UCT academics
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First paper from world's most ambitious science project
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Research chair in multi-wave astronomy will underpin study of far galaxies
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Death of a star: A white dwarf waits to go kaboom
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UCT scholars get country's highest honours
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No more monkey business with baboons
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UCT recently hosted the second Global Game Jam (GGJ), which saw its computer science team finish third for the game that they developed. The event had teams from 38 countries - straddling 23 time zones - go into a lock down, competitors having 48 hours to develop and implement a fully functional computer game.
UCT has its presence felt at the highly anticipated United Nations Climate Change Summit currently underway in Copenhagen, Denmark, with no less than 13 people from the university attending. The UCT representation is led by Associate Professor Harald Winkler and Dr Andrew Marquard of the Energy Research Centre (ERC), both part of a South African government delegation.
On 14 December, UCT conferred honorary degrees (honoris causa) to two of its most distinguished scholars, Emeritus Professors George Ellis and Brian Warner, at the summer graduation ceremony. Although retired, the two are still active scientists (Warner in astronomy and Ellis in cosmology), who last year won Honorary Fellowships from the Royal Society of South Africa.
On 23 November 2009, the first collisions between protons of the Large Hadron Collider were delivered to the four experiments at the accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland. Four days after the first collisions the first paper was published by the ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) collaboration in the European Physics Journal and many among its large number of authors are from the Cape Town region: about half from UCT and the other half from iThemba Labs.
The Head of the Department of Astronomy, Professor Renée Kraan-Korteweg, is delighted that astronomy at UCT has been awarded the Chair in Extragalactic Multi-Wavelength Astronomy, part of the South African Research Chairs Initiative in collaboration with the South African Square Kilometre Array (SKA) office. 
It's not often that an academic paper on the evolution of a supernova star - when a large dying star implodes - sends audiences scurrying for YouTube. But Associate Professor Patrick Woudt and his co-author Emeritus Professor Brian Warner's paper (published in the 20 November 2009 issue of Astrophysical Journal) on the unique explosion of a white dwarf star, V445 Puppis, has caused quite a stir internationally. 
Two UCT scholars, Professor Johann Lutjeharms and Professor Bongani Mayosi, will be among the three South Africans - all academics - to receive the Order of Mapungubwe, the country's highest national order, from President Jacob Zuma in Pretoria on 11 December.
If baboons are something of a nuisance to locals, it could well be because, as UCT doctoral student Tali Hoffman has now shown, humans are encroaching all the more on the baboons' stomping grounds on the Cape Peninsula. As part of her doctoral research with the Baboon Research Unit in the Department of Zoology, Hoffman has compiled a series of digital maps that pinpoint the baboons' home range on the Peninsula.