Author: The Conversation

Over the Thanksgiving travel period an estimated 30 million Americans plan to fly to enjoy turkey and all the trimmings with far-flung family and friends. The huge increase in air travelers and ever more full – and oversold – flights have made air travel more trying. But it has gotten better in one aspect that most of us in the smartphone-addicted public appreciate: Cellphone use is no longer completely forbidden on planes. We used to have to turn our phones off and store them when we flew commercially, but now can keep them on as long as they are in Airplane Mode. Why? What’s changed? Weren’t…

In August 2021, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced the electric car manufacturer was planning to get into the robot business. In a presentation accompanied by a human dressed as a robot, Musk said work was beginning on a “friendly” humanoid robot to “navigate through a world built for humans and eliminate dangerous, repetitive and boring tasks”. Musk has now unveiled a prototype of the robot, called Optimus, which he hopes to mass-produce and sell for less than US$20,000 (A$31,000). pic.twitter.com/EzxImHtqBP — Tesla (@Tesla) October 1, 2022 At the unveiling, the robot walked on a flat surface and waved to the crowd, and was shown…

The Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for 2022 has been awarded to Svante Pääbo from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, “for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution”. In other words, Pääbo has been awarded the prestigious prize for having sequenced the genomes of our extinct relatives, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, and for the fact that these discoveries have resulted in novel insights into human evolution. BREAKING NEWS: The 2022 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Svante Pääbo “for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human…

People consider creativity to be inherently human. However, artificial intelligence (AI) has reached the stage where it can be creative as well. A recent competition attracted anger from artists after it awarded a prize to an artwork created by an AI model known as Midjourney. And such software is now freely available thanks to the release of a similar model called Stable Diffusion, which is the most efficient of its kind to date. Unions of creative practitioners such as Stop AI Stealing the Show have for some time been raising concerns about the use of AI in creative fields. But could AI actually replace human artists?…

Sixty six million years ago, sea monsters really existed. They were mosasaurs, huge marine lizards that lived at the same time as the last dinosaurs. Growing up to 12 metres long, mosasaurs looked like a Komodo dragon with flippers and a shark-like tail. They were also wildly diverse, evolving dozens of species that filled different niches. Some ate fish and squid, some ate shellfish or ammonites. Now we’ve found a new mosasaur preying on large marine animals, including other mosasaurs. The new species, Thalassotitan atrox, was dug up in the Oulad Abdoun Basin of Khouribga Province, an hour outside Casablanca in Morocco. At the end…

Russia’s Sputnik kicked off the space age in 1957. But Africa didn’t join until 1999. Why? Sputnik happened partly due to the cold war rivalry between the US and the former Soviet Union. During this period, most African countries were still under colonial rule. Only Ghana had gained independence, earlier that year. Through the colonial systems and structures put in place then, African countries had no control over their natural and human resources. The colonies were made to focus on the labour, raw materials and agricultural crops that were needed by their colonial masters. They could not pay attention to research and development,…

As data storage has become more accessible than ever, the amount of digital “stuff” we all have stashed away is on the rise, too – for many of us, it’s becoming more unwieldy by the day. In a recent paper published in the journal Information & Management, we have investigated a rising phenomenon called “digital hoarding” – the need to acquire and hold onto digital content without an intended purpose. The way we interact with digital content through easily available smartphones, social media and messaging apps only exacerbates the behaviour. Social media platforms especially encourage us to hoard, as our emotions…

Ontario recently announced a partial reform of its elementary and secondary school curricula to include mandatory learning on coding, as of September 2022. As researchers with combined expertise in teaching computer programming and curriculum development, it’s clear to us that this curricula is about computer programming, despite the fact that the province only uses the term “coding.” Coding is a most basic aspect of learning programming. Ontario’s decision is in line with those taken by Nova Scotia and British Columbia, which were the first and only Canadian provinces to make learning computer programming compulsory at the primary and secondary levels in 2015 and 2016…

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…