Author: The Conversation

Space is a hostile, extreme environment. It’s only a matter of time before ordinary people are exposed to this environment, either by engaging in space tourism or by joining self-sustaining colonies far away from Earth. To this end, there needs to be a much better understanding of how the environmental dangers of space will affect the biology of our cells, tissues, organs, and cognition. Crucially for future space colonies, we need to know whether we can easily reproduce in environments other than those found on Earth. The effects of radiation on our cells, producing DNA damage, are well documented. What’s less clear is how lower…

Our Sun has a rather lonely existence in the Milky Way galaxy. It sits on its own, four light years away from the nearest star, with only its planetary system for company. But it wasn’t always like this. We almost exclusively observe young stars in groups, so-called stellar nurseries, where they brush shoulders with stellar siblings. These stellar nurseries are densely populated places, where hundreds of thousands of stars often reside in the same volume of space that the Sun inhabits on its own. Violent interactions, in which stars exchange energy, occur frequently, but not for long. After a few…

Doomscrolling can be a normal reaction to living through uncertain times. It’s natural to want to understand dramatic events unfolding around you and to seek out information when you’re afraid. But becoming absorbed in bad news for too long can be detrimental. A newly published study has found that people with high levels of problematic news consumption are also more likely to have worse mental and physical health. So what can you do about it? We spoke to Australians in the state of Victoria about their lengthy lockdown experiences and found how they managed to stop doomscrolling. Here are some tips to help you do…

The metaverse is a virtual online world that people can access in a variety of ways, including through virtual and augmented reality. It offers people an interactive social experience where users are represented by avatars. Users can teleport through different virtual social worlds, participate in events and make transactions using cryptocurrencies. By 2026, it is predicted that 25 per cent of people will spend at least one hour a day in the metaverse. There, they’ll be able to participate in activities such as working and shopping, and 30 per cent of firms will have their products and services ready for the…

Once upon a time, most advertisements were public. If we wanted to see what advertisers were doing, we could easily find it – on TV, in newspapers and magazines, and on billboards around the city. This meant governments, civil society and citizens could keep advertisers in check, especially when they advertised products that might be harmful – such as alcohol, tobacco, gambling, pharmaceuticals, financial services or unhealthy food. However, the rise of online ads has led to a kind of “dark advertising”. Ads are often only visible to their intended targets, they disappear moments after they have been seen, and…

Cyber-attacks are on the rise globally, with seriously negative implications for countries’ strategic, national, economic and social well-being. A cyber-attack can be defined as an unauthorised attempt – successful or not – to infiltrate a computer or computer system for malicious purposes. Reasons for such attacks vary from financial gain to espionage, gathering strategic and national information and intelligence about an adversary. Such an adversary can be a nation state, a corporate entity or a private individual. The authoritative international Cybercrime Magazine expects global cybercrime costs to grow by 15% a year over the next five years, reaching $10.5 trillion a year by 2025,…

How many intelligent civilisations should there be in our galaxy right now? In 1961, the US astrophysicist Frank Drake, who passed away on September 2 at the age of 92, came up with an equation to estimate this. The Drake equation, dating from a stage in his career when he was “too naive to be nervous” (as he later put it), has become famous and bears his name. This places Drake in the company of towering physicists with equations named after them including James Clerk Maxwell and Erwin Schrödinger. Unlike those, Drake’s equation does not encapsulate a law of nature. Instead…

Did you ever want to see an alien world? A planet orbiting a distant star, light years from the Sun? Well, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has just returned its first-ever picture of just that – a planet orbiting a distant star. The new images reveal JWST will be a fantastic tool for astronomers aiming to improve their knowledge of exoplanets (planets around other stars) – even better than we had hoped it would be! But for those who’ve grown up on a diet of Star Trek, Star Wars, and myriad other works of science fiction, the images may be underwhelming. No wonderful…

Nothing lasts forever, including the stars in our night sky. One of the brighter and more notable stars in our sky is Betelgeuse, the bright red supergiant in the shoulder of Orion. In late 2019, astronomers around the world grew giddy with excitement, because we saw this giant star get fainter than we’ve ever seen it before. Since Betelgeuse is at the end stages of its life, there was some speculation this might be a death rattle before the end. But the cause of the “great dimming” wasn’t entirely clear until now. New preprint research awaiting peer review, led by Andrea Dupree…

Astronomers at Western Sydney University have discovered one of the biggest black hole jets in the sky. Spanning more than a million light years from end to end, the jet shoots away from a black hole with enormous energy, and at almost the speed of light. But in the vast expanses of space between galaxies, it doesn’t always get its own way. Taking a closer look At a mere 93 million light-years away, the galaxy NGC2663 is in our neighbourhood, cosmically speaking. If our galaxy were a house, NGC2663 would be a suburb or two away. Looking at its starlight…