The world’s biggest video-sharing platform, YouTube, has just turned 20. It was started inauspiciously in February 2005 by former PayPal employees Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim – with a 19-second video of Karim exploring the San Diego Zoo. That year, YouTube’s disruption of the media timeline was minimal enough for there to be no mention of it in The Guardian’s coverage of TV’s Digital Revolution at the Edinburgh TV Festival. Twenty years on, it’s a different story. YouTube is a massive competitor to TV, an engagement beast, uploading as many new videos every five minutes as the 2,400 hours BBC Studios produces in a…
Author: The Conversation
Last time you scrolled the “For You” page on TikTok, did you get a video about current events? Politics? Breaking news? If you’re one of the 63% of teens or 33% of adults in the U.S. who use TikTok, you probably have. But where did it come from? Who created it? And should you believe what it told you? As a communication researcher who has studied news content on social media for over a decade, I can share three crucial things to know about news you get on TikTok: What videos count as news, how they got to you, and what you should do when…
Imagine buying a flat sheet from a furniture store that changes into a sofa when you heat it with a hairdryer. Or consider the value of a stent that precisely expands inside a patient’s artery, adapting to their unique anatomy. Welcome to 4D printing, a frontier in material and manufacturing science that has been rapidly expanding over the past decade. While 3D printing has captured global attention for its ability to create objects layer by layer, 4D printing adds the element of time. It involves 3D-printing adaptable objects from materials such as polymers or alloys that can bend, twist or…
Three and a half kilometres beneath the Mediterranean Sea, around 80km off the coast of Sicily, lies half of a very unusual telescope called KM3NeT. The enormous device is still under construction, but today the telescope’s scientific team announced they have already detected a particle from outer space with a staggering amount of energy. In fact, as the team reports in Nature, they found the most energetic neutrino anyone has ever seen – and it represents a tremendous leap forward in exploring the uncharted waters of the extreme universe. To explain why it’s such a remarkable discovery, we need to understand what…
I teach a course on the relationship between social media and society at Durham College. As part of their assessments, I ask my students to reflect on their social media use. A recurring theme is that they cannot be separated from their smartphones. Many admit to spending significant time daily on social media watching short videos without a clear purpose and as a way to procrastinate on more productive activities. There is a term for this kind of behaviour and its impact on mental health, one that was recently named Oxford Word of the Year 2024: “brain rot” — the deterioration of a…
The world is fast transitioning towards renewable energy systems. However, in many African countries, this transition is not solving historical inequalities or socio-economic challenges. This is because moving away from fossil fuels is costly and governments have largely not involved historically disadvantaged communities in the transition. Instead, African countries are focusing on how much clean energy technology costs and how to get companies to invest in it. Government and policymakers are overlooking concerns about social equity, environmental protection and political inclusion. This can lead to human rights violations and protests by communities who oppose renewable energy projects because they fear a repeat of past injustices…
As a nine-year-old, I loved singing and took every chance to do so enthusiastically during school assemblies and end-of-year shows. I developed a bit of a reputation, so much so that one day, a classmate asked me to serenade him and a girl. Cut to me belting Donna by 10CC from behind a bush outside his bedroom window. My classmate was lacking in musical or lyrical abilities to write and perform his own song. However, if he found himself in a similar position this Valentine’s Day, he could get a little help from AI, and so can you. Suno’s Valentine’s Day Experience is a…
In his inauguration speech in January, United States President Donald Trump declared the US would “plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars”. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. In 2017, in Trump’s previous term of office, he promised to “establish a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars”. And his billionaire adviser Elon Musk is famously obsessed with colonising the red planet. The first spacecraft to successfully explore another planet was NASA’s Mariner 2 mission. It passed within 35,000km of Venus on December 14 1962. Since then, there have been many successful missions to explore various planets, moons, asteroids and comets in the Solar System.…
Every day, millions of engines and factories burn fossil fuels, releasing carbon dioxide – a greenhouse gas that traps heat in Earth’s atmosphere and contributes to climate change. Now imagine a clean fuel that does not pollute and produces only water as waste. That’s the promise of green hydrogen, which is made by using solar and wind power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Countries worldwide, including South Africa, see green hydrogen as a vital tool for tackling climate change. There are plans to use green hydrogen in South Africa for everything from producing fertiliser for farms to powering factories and heavy…
Have we tried everything to tackle the climate crisis? At least one simple idea has hardly been explored: prioritizing climate content on social media. The climate crisis is seriously aggravated by a lack of attention, including in the recent United States presidential election campaign. But algorithmic recommenders could help, as they are responsible for a significant proportion of how human attention online is allocated. Algorithmic recommenders are artificial intelligence systems that suggest content, such as news feeds, music or videos, to people based on their behaviour and preferences. Take YouTube, where hundreds of millions of users watch billions of hours of content…