Author: The Conversation

Sixty-five years ago, in 1958, several government programs that had been pursuing spaceflight combined to form NASA. At the time, I was only 3 years old. I’ve now been a professor of physics and astronomy for nearly 30 years, and I realize that, like countless others who came of age in the 1960s and ‘70s, NASA’s missions have had a profound effect on my life and career path. From John Glenn’s first flight into orbit to the Hubble telescope, the agency’s legacy has inspired generations of scientists. First flight into orbit The date was Feb. 20, 1962. My first grade teacher, Ms. Ochs,…

Christopher Nolan’s 2023 film Oppenheimer is a biopic about the theoretical physicist behind the atomic bomb. After watching the film, I was inspired to write about my visit to the actual Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated. As part of my research on nuclear weapons and civil defence, I visited the Trinity Site in 2015. Located in the desert in the southwest United States, the Trinity Site is isolated, peculiar and disconcertingly mundane. The tower that held the bomb is featured prominently in the Oppenheimer film. A small fragment of it exists today, as the rest of it was vaporized.…

The former chief executive of South Africa’s power utility, Eskom, has written a scathing critique of the ruling party’s practices that have seriously damaged the country’s economy. Andre de Ruyter’s book Truth to Power is not the first exposé of the country’s political and economic woes under the African National Congress. But it strikes a sensitive chord because of the impact of recurring power cuts on the economy and daily life, a crisis De Ruyter was hired to deal with. Beyond his description of Eskom’s corruption and ineptitude is a subtler message that is equally disturbing. It’s De Ruyter’s prescription to end the state’s involvement…

A congressional subcommittee met on June 26, 2023, to hear testimony from several military officers who allege the government is concealing evidence of UFOs. By holding a hearing on UFOs – now called “unidentified anomalous phenomena” by government agencies – the subcommittee sought to understand whether these UAPs pose a threat to national security. I’m an astronomer who studies and has written about cosmology, black holes, exoplanets and life in the universe. I’m also on the advisory council for an international group that strategizes how to communicate with an extraterrestrial civilization should the need ever arise. While the hearings brought attention to UAPs and could lead to more reporting from people who work in the military…

Even tech experts have been astonished by the recent, rapid growth of AI technology, able to hold human-like conversations in multiple languages, create music and pass medical exams. While the potential benefits of AI in fields such as healthcare are indeed inspiring, the pace of change is rapid, and there is still lots of uncertainty about the future. If you feel worried about how AI could affect your career, your privacy or your safety in the coming years, you might be experiencing AI-nxiety. This term, coined by a marketing agency and spreading on social media, describes the uneasy feeling about the effects of AI on human creativity and inventiveness.…

ChatGPT has exploded in popularity, and people are using it to write articles and essays, generate marketing copy and computer code, or simply as a learning or research tool. However, most people don’t understand how it works or what it can do, so they are either not happy with its results or not using it in a way that can draw out its best capabilities. I’m a human factors engineer. A core principle in my field is never blame the user. Unfortunately, the ChatGPT search-box interface elicits the wrong mental model and leads users to believe that entering a simple question should lead to a comprehensive result, but that’s not how ChatGPT works.…

To non-moguls, Elon Musk’s (perhaps temporary) rebrand of Twitter to “X” may seem high risk, amateurish, or even capricious. But it is likely doing exactly what he intended: generating enormous global interest, pushing Twitter closer to his other X brands (SpaceX, Tesla Model X, xAI), and clearing the way for a profitable merging of technologies. What happened to the blue bird? Last weekend, Musk began the (reversible) changes by renaming the Twitter platform X on its website and replacing the iconic blue bird logo with a crowdsourced “interim” white “X” on a black background. Later, Musk posted an image of the character projected on the…

ChatGPT recently experienced a decline in user engagement for the first time since its launch in November 2022. From May to June, engagement dropped 9.7 per cent, with the largest decline — 10.3 per cent — occurring in the United States. Meanwhile, Meta’s Threads platform experienced a significant drop in user numbers, going from more than 49 million users on July 7 to 23.6 million active users by July 14. In the same time frame, the average time users in the U.S. spent on the app dropped from a peak of 21 minutes in early July to just above six minutes. In…

Last year, we made an intriguing discovery – a radio signal in space that switched on and off every 18 minutes. Astronomers expect to see some repeating radio signals in space, but they usually blink on and off much more quickly. The most common repeating signals come from pulsars, rotating neutron stars that emit energetic beams like lighthouses, causing them to blink on and off as they rotate towards and away from the Earth. Pulsars slow down as they get older, and their pulses become fainter, until eventually they stop producing radio waves altogether. Our unusually slow pulsar could best be…

NASA’s Artemis program aims to return humans to the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years, with the first human landing currently scheduled for 2025. This goal is not just technically ambitious, but it’s also politically challenging. The Artemis program marks the first time since the Apollo program that an effort to send humans to the Moon has been supported by two successive U.S. presidents. As a scholar of international affairs who studies space, I’m interested in understanding what allowed the Artemis program to survive this political transition where others failed. My research suggests that this program is not just about advancing science and technology or inspiring…