Author: The Conversation

We’ve all had some kind of interaction with a chatbot. It’s usually a little pop-up in the corner of a website, offering customer support – often clunky to navigate – and almost always frustratingly non-specific. But imagine a chatbot, enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI), that can not only expertly answer your questions, but also write stories, give life advice, even compose poems and code computer programs. It seems ChatGPT, a chatbot released last week by OpenAI, is delivering on these outcomes. It has generated much excitement, and some have gone as far as to suggest it could signal a future in which AI has…

Construction of the world’s biggest radio astronomy facility, the SKA Observatory, begins today. The observatory is a global project 30 years in the making. With two huge two telescopes, one in Australia and the other in South Africa, the project will see further into the history of the Universe than ever before. Astronomers like me will use the telescopes to trace hydrogen over cosmic time and make precise measurements of gravity in extreme environments. What’s more, we hope to uncover the existence of complex molecules in planet-forming clouds around distant stars, which could be the early signs of life elsewhere…

Earlier this month, Meta announced new AI software called Galactica: “a large language model that can store, combine and reason about scientific knowledge”. Launched with a public online demo, Galactica lasted only three days before going the way of other AI snafus like Microsoft’s infamous racist chatbot. The online demo was disabled (though the code for the model is still available for anyone to use), and Meta’s outspoken chief AI scientist complained about the negative public response. Galactica demo is off line for now. It’s no longer possible to have some fun by casually misusing it. Happy? https://t.co/K56r2LpvFD — Yann LeCun (@ylecun) November 17, 2022 So…

Some stars just get unlucky. There are billions of stars within a typical galaxy. Yet once every 100,000 years or so, one of those stars will wander too close to the supermassive black hole lurking at the galaxy’s centre and be torn apart. These cosmic behemoths weigh in at millions to billions of times the mass of our Sun, and their immense gravitational force can destroy an unlucky star. The stellar debris spirals in towards the black hole, which feeds on the remains. However, black holes are messy eaters. In a small fraction of cases, this stellar destruction can power…

Since the world’s second-largest crypto exchange, FTX, declared bankruptcy earlier this month, the flow-on effects have been felt far and wide. But among the many victims are also some not-so-innocent parties. For the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a country facing heavy sanctions, cryptocurrency theft has been a (relatively) simple way to fund the country’s expanding nuclear arsenal. It’s well documented that Kim Jong-un’s military operation hackers have been stealing cryptocurrency to support North Korea’s nuclear and missile program for several years. But with the general downturn in the crypto market, coupled with the recent FTX collapse and myriad other pitfalls, analysts estimate North Korea has probably lost most of its crypto haul. Can we…

Each year around mid-summer, somewhere between December and mid-January, the skies of South Africa’s Gauteng province, including the city of Johannesburg, fill with small white butterflies. Some land in people’s gardens, allowing a closer look at the thin brown markings on their wings. Those markings give the butterflies their name: the brown-veined white butterfly (Benenois aurota). Their annual migration takes between 80,000 and 155,000 butterflies per hour from South Africa’s Kalahari region to Mozambique, a journey of hundreds of kilometres via Gauteng. They are leaving the arid Kalahari in search of food and moisture. The butterflies move in a huge group and…

The European Space Agency made history last week with the announcement of the first “parastronaut”, 41-year-old UK citizen John McFall. He is the first candidate selected for the Parastronaut Feasibility project, described by ESA as a “serious, dedicated and honest attempt to clear the path to space for a professional astronaut with a physical disability”. McFall, a former Paralympic sprinter, had his right leg amputated after a motorcycle accident at age 19. Most of us are familiar with images of gruelling astronaut selection tests and training from movies such as The Right Stuff. ESA seeks to answer the practical question of what…

The night sky is a shared wilderness. On a dark night, away from the city lights, you can see the stars in the same way as your ancestors did centuries ago. You can see the Milky Way and the constellations associated with stories of mythical hunters, sisters and journeys. But like any wilderness, the night sky can be polluted. Since Sputnik 1 in 1957, thousands of satellites and pieces of space junk have been launched into orbit. For now, satellites crossing the night sky are largely a curiosity. But with the advent of satellite constellations – containing hundreds or thousands of satellites…

Most species are transitory. They go extinct, branch into new species or change over time due to random mutations and environmental shifts. A typical mammalian species can be expected to exist for a million years. Modern humans, Homo sapiens, have been around for roughly 300,000 years. So what will happen if we make it to a million years? Science fiction author H.G. Wells was the first to realise that humans could evolve into something very alien. In his 1883 essay, Man in the year million, he envisioned what’s now become a cliche: big-brained, tiny-bodied creatures. Later, he speculated that humans could also split…

Physicists have long struggled to explain why the universe started out with conditions suitable for life to evolve. Why do the physical laws and constants take the very specific values that allow stars, planets and ultimately life to develop? The expansive force of the universe, dark energy, for example, is much weaker than theory suggests it should be – allowing matter to clump together rather than being ripped apart. A common answer is that we live in an infinite multiverse of universes, so we shouldn’t be surprised that at least one universe has turned out as ours. But another is that our universe…