Author: The Conversation

Sputnik 1 was launched by the former Soviet Union on October 4, 1957, marking the start of the space age. Since then space activity has delivered many benefits. For instance, satellite imagery can be used in agriculture to predict food shortages and surplus harvests. It can also be used to forecast and monitor natural disasters like flooding. In recognition of this, by the second decade of the 21st century, more than 50 countries had space agencies, or other government bodies, carrying out space activities. Some African countries are also making their mark. The continent’s evolving space sector is reportedly worth USD$400 billion today. Various experts from across the…

Data breaches are becoming commonplace in both small and big tech companies. The most recent victim was Australian telecommunications company Optus, resulting in unauthorised access to the identity data of roughly 10 million people. Adding to the misery of the victims, this cyber-attack further unleashed a plethora of subsequent phishing and fraud attempts using the data obtained from this breach. Having more rigorous security measures when logging in can help to protect your accounts, and significantly reduces the likelihood of many automated cyber attacks. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) is a security measure that requires the user to provide two (also known as two-step verification or two-step authentication) or more…

Venus, often called Earth’s “evil twin” planet, formed closer to the Sun and has since evolved quite differently from our own planet. It has a “runaway” greenhouse effect (meaning heat is completely trapped), a thick carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere, no magnetic field and a surface hot enough to melt lead. Several uncrewed scientific missions will study how and why that happened in the next decade. But now some scientists want to send a crewed mission there as well for a flyby. Is that a good idea? With a slightly smaller diameter than Earth, Venus orbits closer to the Sun. This means that any water on the surface…

We live in a world characterised by inequality, poverty, economic volatility, globalisation, climate change and ambiguity. In my own country, South Africa, residents have to navigate socioeconomic and political instability, power and water cuts, homelessness, unethical governance and mediocre or no service delivery. It is a far cry from what the country could be if we brought its best talent and resources to bear for the benefit of humanity. Innovation will be key to any positive changes – and research-intensive universities have a central to play in that innovation. As the University of the Witwatersrand (or Wits, as it’s commonly known) turns 100, my colleagues and I have been thinking…

Telecommuting has the potential to reduce traffic congestion, but other factors, such as increasing the distance between home and work or adding new trips, can contribute to producing more congestion. Studies conducted prior to the COVID-19 pandemic have shown that telecommuting can help reduce traffic congestion by decreasing the number of vehicles on roads at peak hours and the amount of time commuters spend on roads. For example, a 2004 study in Waterloo, Ont., showed that telecommuting could potentially reduce traffic congestion without affecting other household activities, such as errands, children’s activities or social outings. Yet the potential impacts of telecommuting…

Hundreds of kilometres from shore, and covering two-thirds of the Earth’s surface, the high seas are a world that few of us will ever see. After more than a year in the field, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ian Urbina concluded: “There are few remaining frontiers on our planet. Perhaps the wildest, and the least understood, are the world’s oceans.” Governed by no single country or authority, the high seas represent a literal and figurative final frontier. And in this age of information — where we can access livestreams from Mars, for example — we know shockingly little about the ocean. The race for oceanic…

When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 in 1957, it represented humanity’s first significant foray into the cosmos. Our imagination was opened to the wonder and lure of space for human endeavour as science fiction suddenly became science fact. A space arms race? At the time, the prevailing Cold War mentality contributed to suspicion and fear about what it meant to be in space, and resulted in the military roots of space technology and applications. John F. Kennedy famously stated that “if the Soviets control space they can control the earth, as in past centuries the nation that controlled the seas…

Tactical nuclear weapons have burst onto the international stage as Russian President Vladimir Putin, facing battlefield losses in eastern Ukraine, has threatened that Russia will “make use of all weapon systems available to us” if Russia’s territorial integrity is threatened. Putin has characterized the war in Ukraine as an existential battle against the West, which he said wants to weaken, divide and destroy Russia. U.S. President Joe Biden criticized Putin’s overt nuclear threats against Europe. Meanwhile, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg downplayed the threat, saying Putin “knows very well that a nuclear war should never be fought and cannot be won.” This is not the…

The human face is special. It is simultaneously public and personal. Our faces reveal sensitive information about us: who we are, of course, but also our gender, emotions, health status and more. Lawmakers in Australia, like those around the world, never anticipated our face data would be harvested on an industrial scale, then used in everything from our smartphones to police CCTV cameras. So we shouldn’t be surprised that our laws have not kept pace with the extraordinary rise of facial recognition technology. But what kind of laws do we need? The technology can be used for both good and…

In 2020, China’s Chang’e 5 mission sampled more than a kilogram of Moon rock and soil and brought it back to Earth. The samples contain countless tiny beads of glass, created when asteroids hit the Moon and splashed out droplets of molten rock around the impact site. We have analysed these glass beads and the impact craters near where they were found in great detail. Our results, published in Science Advances, reveal new details about the history of asteroids hitting the Moon over the past 2 billion years. In particular, we found traces of several waves of impacts occurring at the…