Lothar Böttcher

I am so happy that my sculpture “Home Sweet Home” has been selected for this year’s New Glass Review by the Corning Museum of Glass @corningmuseum , representing #SouthAfricanGlass 🇿🇦 amongst so many other fantastic works from across the world 🌍 ✨🏠✨

Visual representation of the distance between Earth and the Moon

Around 60,000 years ago, humans in southern Africa made etchings on eggshells, and archaeologists are now analyzing them. There are hatches, grids, rotations, repetitions—signs that the artist had the final egg design in mind before starting the work. archaeology.org/news/2026/03/0…

Apollo 11 mission was a monumental technological triumph for the United States, Carl Sagan emphasized that its most profound legacy was not about the Moon itself, but the view it provided of our own planet.

What’s up for February? ​​ The Moon could have human visitors for the first time since 1972, the constellation Orion will be clear to see, and a planetary parade will sparkle across the skies. 🌟

🚨: After 48 years of travel, NASA 's Voyager 1 is nearing one light-day from Earth, almost 16 billion miles away. A proud milestone for humanity, and a humbling reminder of how small we are in an infinite universe.

Echo Chamber I’m excited to see where this rabbit hole will lead to, exploring in depth the influence of 📺 ,and intuitively “carving and polishing light” ✨

✨Dosis Sola Facit Venenum✨ TV screen, mirror, steel, wood. My sculpture comments on how we obediently sit in silence and absorb the sermon projected from our screens ⚡️📺⚡️ This work was exhibited at the Pretoria Art Museum for the Artefacts exhibition, with Caitlin Greenberg.

The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next. - Abraham Lincoln

𝗨𝗞 𝗗𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗥𝗲𝘄𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗲𝘀 𝗛𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗛𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗙𝗶𝗿𝗲-𝗠𝗮𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 Archaeologists have just discovered 400,000-year-old evidence of fire-making at Barnham, Suffolk - the earliest proof humans could create fire on demand. Early Neanderthals used pyrite and flint as prehistoric lighters in this groundbreaking find. #AncientOrigins #AncientHistory #evolution ancient-origins.net/news-evolution…

@abelmike Read this: amycoded.substack.com/p/everyone-wan…

We’ve Lost the Plot 🌎🎪 Something’s off. You can feel it. On social media. In conversations. In comment sections. In the way people talk past each other. It’s not stupidity. There’s no shortage of smart people. But something deeper has gone missing. The ability to sit with nuance. To hear something uncomfortable without immediately reaching for a label. We’re all doing it. Choosing comfort over curiosity. Tribe over truth. The dopamine hit of being right over the harder work of being honest. And I get it. When people are anxious, they grab onto certainty. When you feel invisible, you grab onto identity. When institutions feel broken, conspiracies start sounding plausible. But here’s what really worries me. We’ve built a machine that profits from this. Algorithms that learned, quickly, that outrage travels faster than understanding. That tribalism gets more clicks than thought. That complexity loses to certainty every single time. The result? We’re all getting a little bit dumber together. Not in IQ. In judgment. Look at the words weaponised. “Liberal” used to mean something beautiful: open societies, free minds, human rights. Now it’s just a cancel culture team jersey. And both sides are guilty. Flattening ideas into loyalty tests. Mistaking volume for virtue. Taking sides over inconvenient truths. Meanwhile, history keeps whispering lessons we refuse to hear. Open economies work. Closed ones don’t. Real diversity, where there is alignment in the values of humanity and freedoms, makes societies stronger. Not simply theological. Freedom and responsibility are a package deal. They can never be separated. Show me a theocracy that produced freedom. Show me a socialist experiment that delivered prosperity without prisons. But I can show you dozens of imperfect, messy, open societies that built something worth defending. So why are we walking away from that? Because someone benefits. Division is good business. Confusion keeps people distracted. When you’re fighting your neighbour, you’re not watching who owns the suburb. Marx said religion was the opium of the masses. Today, the opium is the deathscroll. The infinite feed that rewards feeling over thinking. That validates prejudice. Where truth competes with rage for airtime. And rage usually wins. Here’s what keeps me up at night. It’s not that people are being fooled. It’s that they’ve stopped caring whether they are. They embrace the divisive sugar rush. The real test ahead isn’t left versus right. It’s this: Can we reclaim our ability to think clearly? To disagree without demonising? To ask “is this true?” before asking “does this validate my opinion?” Because the world hasn’t just lost its mind. Someone’s making money off the madness. Countries. Platforms. Bad actors. The question is whether we’re going to continue letting them? Something to perhaps ponder over the weekend…

The universe is big. Humans are inherently bad at judging how big and far away things are in the cosmos because the distances and sizes involved are simply too vast to intuitively grasp, but scaling things down can help us visualize them. Let’s shrink Earth to the size of a grain of sand and see just how mind-blowingly huge everything else is🧵1/9

If you’d like to know more about comet 3I/Atlas, you’ll find the latest observations released as pre-prints at the link below. This is the place you should look if you want detailed, reliable information. These are not yet published in journals and care is still required, but it’s as good a place as any to see fast-developing research in action, and if you have questions you may find answers here: arxiv.org/search/?query=…

Oct 20-21, 2025: Earth is passing through the debris field of a comet! Enjoy the Orionids meteor shower! #space #astronomy #nasa #science

🇿🇦This is a very well written piece by an African about why our country is in the state it is.... ‼️ The Politics of Self-Destruction ‼️ There comes a time in a nation’s life when even the educated must admit defeat — not because they have failed, but because the system rewards failure. That dejected look on General Mkhwanazi’s face captured that exact moment — when competence meets political deployment, and logic meets the stupidity of power. Here is a man with a BTech in Policing, an MBA, an LLB, a National Diploma in Police Administration, and is an admitted attorney of the High Court — forced to answer questions from a Parliament that confuses noise for intellect. What we saw in that room was not governance. It was a performance — a theater of mediocrity sponsored by the taxpayer. This is the crisis of Africa — not lack of education, not lack of talent — but the deliberate exclusion of capable minds from positions of influence. Political deployment has become the new apartheid — it separates the loyal from the qualified. It replaces thinkers with followers and silences those who still believe in merit. In such a country, education no longer inspires. It humiliates. Because the child in the township sees the truth: that the man who read all the books sits jobless, while the one who shouts the loudest slogan drives a government car. When young people see that power is gained through party loyalty, not through knowledge, they lose faith in school. They drop out, not because they are lazy, but because the system has made ignorance profitable. How do you convince a young girl in Limpopo to finish matric when she sees her councillor can’t spell “governance” yet controls millions in municipal funds? How do you tell a boy in Mahikeng to study electrical engineering when the tender for electricity is awarded to a DJ? That is the economic collapse we refuse to measure — the destruction of faith in education. It’s not just corruption of money — it’s corruption of purpose. The economy doesn’t collapse because of lack of minerals or investors. It collapses because of mental poverty — the kind that makes a leader think a slogan can build a road, or that a struggle song can replace sound fiscal management. Africa’s tragedy is not that we are poor. It’s that we are mismanaged. We export gold and import poverty. We have diamonds under our feet and debt over our heads. We send our best engineers abroad, while we appoint cousins to build bridges that collapse before the ribbon is cut. Political deployment has turned public service into personal service. Institutions are no longer centers of excellence — they are shelters for the connected. That is why our schools fail, our hospitals die, and our police are demoralized. Because every appointment is political, not professional. And every professional who dares to challenge the system is pushed out — humiliated, or silenced. General Mkhwanazi’s look of defeat was not personal. It was national. He carried on his face the disappointment of every competent South African trapped in an incompetent system. And until we replace party loyalty with national loyalty, until we restore meritocracy over mediocrity, we will keep watching our brightest minds fade away in despair. The revolution Africa needs today is not just political — it is intellectual. It is time to decolonize our thinking, not just our slogans. It is time to value results over rhetoric, books over boots, and skill over slogans. Because when mediocrity governs excellence, poverty becomes permanent. So, let the message be clear: We will no longer clap for stupidity. We will no longer elect the loudest voice — we will elect the most capable mind. We will no longer let our children believe that education is useless. Because the future of Africa depends on the restoration of merit, discipline, and dignity. By Seako Masibi (Inspired by Wiseman Mbali

We have held the peculiar notion that a person or society that is a little different from us, whoever we are, is somehow strange or bizarre, to be distrusted or loathed. Think of the negative connotations of words like alien or outlandish. And yet the monuments and cultures of each of our civilizations merely represent different ways of being human. An extraterrestrial visitor, looking at the differences among human beings and their societies, would find those differences trivial compared to the similarities. The Cosmos may be densely populated with intelligent beings. But the Darwinian lesson is clear: There will be no humans elsewhere. Only here. Only on this small planet. We are a rare as well as an endangered species. Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another. - Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Dwarf planet Ceres is like Pluto but closer… #space #nasa #astronomy

Today marks the 4th anniversary of the assassination of whistleblower ... Babita Deokaran #RIP - Zapiro's archival cartoon published on @dailymaverick (28 August 2021) - zapiro.com/210828dm

“I am a collection of water, calcium and organic molecules called Carl Sagan. You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label. But is that all? Is there nothing in here but molecules? Some people find this idea somehow demeaning to human dignity. For myself, I find it elevating that our universe permits the evolution of molecular machines as intricate and subtle as we."

Carl Sagan on why books are human’s greatest invention: