Green cars might not be top of mind right now, but the threat of global warming and its ensuing calamities is persuading more and more people to sit up and take notice. In other words, green is becoming sexy. Does that make Toyota’s Auris HSD a desirable machine? DEON SCHOEMAN finds out.

Ernest Shackleton was a previous generation’s Steve Jobs – flawed, a failure, but also a remarkable success. There are those that still swear by his leadership style, and consider him a model. That’s both a good thing, and a really, really bad thing. By RICHARD POPLAK.

The charge that science is an inherently sexist discipline is repeated so often it’s a cliché. American historian and author of The Madam Curie Complex, Julies Des Jardins throws a spanner in the works by saying that women often limit themselves. Isn’t it time to debunk the “science” of gender discrimination in science? By MANDY DE WAAL.

Everyone’s looking for the secret to allure, which is why there’s so many strange websites selling even stranger potions that promise to “promote paradise-engineering” or get your target of attraction into an “enchanted and sensual state.” Thank God for authors like Kayt Sukel who puts these outrageous claims to the test in the name of science. By MANDY DE WAAL.

Almost four decades ago, a fledgling automaker called Hyundai produced a modest compact sedan dubbed the Pony. It was small and pokey, with ugly duckling looks, a tacky interior and a flimsy execution. Thirty-six years later, its bloodline is altogether more convincing– proof the Korean auto industry has come a long way. DEON SCHOEMAN drives the latest Hyundai Accent.

For those who believe there is no solution to the regular carnage on South African roads – a thousand or so killed this past holiday season, by way of example – think again. Google’s driverless car is here to save us. It has a couple of twists and turns to manoeuvre before we’re out of the driver’s seat, though. By RICHARD POPLAK.

Kim Schmitz, aka Kim Dotcom, was until his arrest last week the kingpin of one of the largest piracy networks the Internet has yet seen. But the misdirected “libertarian” hacker group Anonymous supported him anyway. What does this have to do with the two pieces of anti-piracy legislation that have just been shelved by the United States Congress? And how can artists, writers and musicians make a living in the face of a populist call for online anarchy? By KEVIN BLOOM.

Rarely has the launch of a new vehicle been preceded with more hype than that of the Range Rover Evoque. And since its much-anticipated arrival, this most radical of Range Rovers has been showered with accolades – and the drool of thousands of would-be buyers. Which means driving one makes you feel a bit like a rock star, as DEON SCHOEMAN found out.

Huaxi claims to be the richest village in China. It also bills itself as a model socialist community. How does it do it? By REBECCA DAVIS.

As motoring years go, 2011 was arguably one of the busiest – at least as far as new model launches are concerned. While we covered almost 50 new cars in the 12 months, the list of 2011 debutants is a lot longer. For DEON SCHOEMAN it all boiled down to a handful of finalists.

Care to take a guess at what the most dangerous occupation in the world is? If you’re thinking “Iranian nuclear scientist”, you’ve won a free trip to Tehran and a tour of the Natanz uranium enrichment plant. For another young man working on Iran’s nuclear program has been killed. And the stakes couldn’t be higher. By RICHARD POPLAK.

On Sunday, 8 January, a birthday celebration at the University of Cambridge unfolded without the famous celebrant. He was too ill to attend. The wheelchair-bound theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, despite almost half a century of infirmity, just turned 70. Where would we be without him? By RICHARD POPLAK.

Among physicists, there is now a largely worked out, generally internally consistent theory for how the universe works. However, there is a whopping hole in the model as it does not explain how it is that particles have mass – the answer to which lies with the elusive Higgs boson.  By J BROOKS SPECTOR.

Call of Duty 3: Modern Warfare is the fastest-selling video game of all time and the biggest entertainment story of the year. $1-billion in 16 days, it has Hollywood execs slobbering in envy and wonder. But the Internet is in its own lather over the sheer “sequel-ness” of the sequel, which has inadvertently caused a crisis of confidence in the gaming industry. What does all that dough actually amount to, if the fans aren’t happy? By RICHARD POPLAK

The Norwegians have long known what the English-speaking world has for most of the last 100 years refused to admit – in terms of achievements alone, Roald Amundsen was the greatest of the polar explorers. On this day, a century after he claimed the South Pole for the first time, we look at some of the other “firsts” that Amundsen has been denied by popular history. By KEVIN BLOOM.

It was a year which saw awards given, and awards returned. REBECCA DAVIS reviews some of South Africa’s major happenings on the arts scene over the course of 2011.

The Foreign Policy website is generally hailed as an expert voice in international affairs. It’s just released its predictions on what the top foreign-policy stories of 2012 will be. By REBECCA DAVIS.

From sublimely graceful to daringly acrobatic, the show brings a touch of magic to the stage this festive season. By LESLEY STONES.

For men of the early twentieth century, the polar caps were the last real geographic extremities remaining to be conquered and explored. The goal of reaching the South Pole first set up a classic competition between British and Norwegian explorers, Robert F Scott and Roald Amundsen. J BROOKS SPECTOR looks back on the race into nothingness.

Last week’s discovery of a potentially-habitable planet, Kepler-22b, might have been the most exciting space-related story of the year. But 2011 has been a big one for astronomical discoveries. REBECCA DAVIS takes a look at some of the hits of the year.

A great irony of the cyber age is the way it connects seemingly incongruous and anachronistic opposites in bizarre and unexpected ways. Now the ragtag though powerful Islamist terror group, Al Shabaab, is taking on the Kenyan army on the battlefields of … Twitter. By SIMON ALLISON.

Domain names using the suffix “.xxx” went on sale for the first time last week. The idea is purportedly to attempt to restrict pornography online to one domain area. Yet elements of the project sound like one big scam. By REBECCA DAVIS.

Justice has come slowly for Zoliswa Nkonyana, the 19-year-old woman murdered in Khayelitsha for being a lesbian. Sentencing is set for 19 December in a trail plagued by justice system flaws and failures. But this is the norm in a South Africa where brutalising or killing someone because of their sexual orientation is no hate crime, where rape’s under reported and most offenders get away scot-free. By MANDY DE WAAL.

When Air France Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic on 1 June 2009, its causes became one of the greatest mysteries of aviation. Now Popular Mechanics has published the transcript of the pilots’ conversation in the final moments before the plane went down, and it makes for chilling reading. By REBECCA DAVIS.

In 1987 in a dog fight over Angola, Arthur Piercy’s Mirage F1 was damaged by a Cuban pilot who deployed a missile at Piercy’s fighter craft. Piercy made it back to base, but on landing had a crash that left him permanently in a wheelchair. These days, Piercy’s flying again, and has launched a global quest of possibility and reconciliation, a journey that will see him reunite with the Cuban pilot who fired that missile. By MANDY DE WAAL.

The idea that the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt had advanced knowledge of the Pearl Harbour attack, on 7 December 1941, has long been a favourite trope of conspiracy theorists. But, as history shows, a far more dangerous and authentic conspiracy was being hatched by US Republicans and men like Charles Lindbergh. By KEVIN BLOOM.

Strap yourself in, space cowboy. If you aren’t about to get sucked into a black hole with the mass of 21-billion suns, you’re about to get fried by aliens who live on a habitable planet only 22-billion light years away. It’s been a good week for astronomers, but a bad week for Earthlings. By RICHARD POPLAK.

It’s hard to make sense of all the medical jargon, but the conclusion is clear and potentially life-saving. Researchers in America have released a report saying they might just have found a cure for one of the world’s most dangerous diseases, the dreaded Ebola virus. Testing is still in its initial phases, but results are promising – and we have the US government to thank. By SIMON ALLISON.

UK newspaper the Guardian has been carrying out a study into the cause of the London riots in collaboration with the London School of Economics. The results paint a picture of a city with stark racial divisions. By REBECCA DAVIS.

Negotiations at the UN Climate Change conference, COP17, have so far focused on the politics of the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. Equally important, however, are the negotiations on adapting to the effects of climate change in embattled parts of the developing world like Africa’s Sahel. By KHADIJA PATEL.