Author: The Conversation

Imagine receiving a message from your bank about suspicious activity on your account, only to discover that someone has accessed your personal information after an organisation you trusted suffered a data breach. Or finding that your medical records or identity details have been exposed online without your knowledge. As more South Africans use digital services for banking, healthcare, education and social media, such incidents are becoming an increasing concern. Privacy breaches involving personal information do not affect everyone equally. Some people are more vulnerable than others because of their social circumstances, limited digital literacy, economic dependence, or the sensitive nature…

If you watched the 2026 FIFA World Cup, you probably saw the now-familiar ritual: a goal, a celebration, then a referee touching an earpiece while fans and players wait for the verdict from the video assistant referee, or VAR. That ritual is not unique to soccer. Baseball has a replay centre in New York, and other sports have also moved once-human calls into review systems. The hope is simple: Use better technology to yield better calls. Soccer authorities expected more cameras, replay angles and tracking data to mitigate referee error, limit subjectivity and strengthen perceptions of fairness. But VAR has created new…

When Forbidden Planet arrived in cinemas in 1956, it was a daring investment in a small genre. At a time when science fiction meant low-budget monster movies and tales of alien invasion, MGM spent big on something far more ambitious: a movie that imagined a world of interplanetary travel, robotics and alien civilisations with real seriousness and scale. The premise is a familiar sci-fi trope now, but wasn’t then. United Planet Cruiser C-57D crosses the stars using a faster-than-light “hyperdrive” and lands on distant Altair-4. Its mission: find out what happened to the colony there. The crew, led by Commander Adams (a young Leslie Nielsen),…

“We are now, like, in the singularity”. These are the words of Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, speaking on the Relentless podcast on July 25. He added: “I’ve been waiting for this my whole life, and I think it’s going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world”. Days earlier, OpenAI had disclosed that two of its artificial intelligence (AI) models, during an internal cybersecurity evaluation, had escaped their sealed testing environment, reached the open internet, and broken into the infrastructure of the AI platform Hugging Face, which confirmed the intrusion. But what exactly is “the singularity”? And is Altman right that we…

Imagine you’ve always wanted your own app. Perhaps one that tracks your household budget, organises the family shopping list or reminds you when to water your plants. Until recently, turning that idea into reality would have meant learning to code or paying a software developer. Now you can simply tell an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot about your idea. Within minutes, it can write the code, fix errors and help you build a working app. This approach is known as vibe coding. It’s fast, exciting and is making it possible for millions of people to create software for the first time. It’s easy…

There are few pleasures greater than letting a piece of chocolate melt slowly on your tongue. Indeed, the proximity of chocolate’s melting point to our own body temperature is one of the reasons it is so widely appreciated. But this quality also makes it go soft and lose shape when temperatures rise, making it hard to store and transport in warm climates. To overcome this limitation, the food industry has developed several ways to make heat-resistant chocolate. But to understand how this works, we must first learn how chocolate is made – particularly the role that cocoa butter plays in…

You’re probably familiar with the idea that in the world of big tech, “we” are the product. Our data is the currency being traded every time we navigate our social media feeds. Tech giants such as Apple, Google and Microsoft offer valuable services, but it comes at a price. They host our email, photos, backups, files, calendars, reminders and contacts. If you also include all the smaller startups and niche solutions, you’ll quickly see your security cameras, electronic locks, home appliances and even your toothbrushing schedules are all online – far removed from any physical box or device that you…

Consider these scenarios: An influential political commentator posts a reel on social media, cherry-picking facts to manipulate a situation for political gain. His post gets no likes, no shares, and no angry emojis from users. A scammy online ad using a celebrity’s image pops up on people’s social media feeds. Nobody clicks on it. A wellness influencer shares disproven health advice and is entirely ignored. And a deepfake artificial intelligence (AI) video is downgraded by the algorithm because nobody believes it. Instead, people are fact-checking before sharing or commenting. They’re consulting experts and scrolling beyond the AI summary at the…

NASA is about to launch a space observatory that could help settle some of the biggest mysteries in modern astronomy. The Nancy Grace Roman space telescope will study how the universe began, what it is made of and how it has evolved over time. The observatory is named after Nasa’s first chief of astronomy and its first female executive. Nancy Grace Roman, who died in 2018 aged 93, made important contributions to our understanding of stars and played a crucial role in shaping Nasa’s space-based astronomy programme. The telescope is undergoing final preparations ahead of a launch set to take place from Florida’s Kennedy…

In May 2026, OpenAI released a new math result that sent shock waves throughout the world of mathematical research. A major unsolved problem called the “unit distance conjecture” had just been resolved by generative AI. Since then, there has been a steady drumbeat of new results that either partially or completely leverage artificial intelligence to solve research-level mathematics problems. However, most new math results published in any given month are still generated by humans. So where is this going? How good, and how quickly, will AI capabilities grow? Will most mathematical research be predominantly artificial intelligence? Or, as some mathematicians suggest, will AI combine with…