Author: The Conversation

One year ago, an artwork was sold for US$69 million (R1.4 billion) by the prestigious auction house Christie’s. This was no lost Matisse or rarely seen Van Gogh. Instead, it was a composite collection of digital art by the then relatively unknown artist Beeple. What makes this piece, Everydays: the First 5000 Days, truly remarkable, is that it was sold as a non-fungible token (NFT). In the year since that sale, NFTs have gone from a relatively obscure tech-world phenomenon to the mainstream. NFTs are tokens that exist on a secure record-keeping system called a blockchain. These tokens are akin to…

Dating apps are the new reality, but do they really make dating easier? My study suggests they complicate it further. Questions about trust and online dating regularly crop up along with headlines about unpleasant online approaches, scams and even physical assaults when dates move offline. Still, dating apps like Tinder remain hugely popular, downloaded and used mostly on cellphones to meet new people. In fact, they have received increasing traffic globally in recent years despite these bleak stories and spurred by COVID-induced lockdowns. My ethnographic research in Cape Town, South Africa, shows that Tinder dating is riddled with contradictory feelings. As an anthropology scholar who is curious about…

Exoplanets, planets that orbit stars other than the sun, are found at distances very far from Earth. For example, the closest exoplanet to us, Proxima Centauri b, is 4.2 light years away, or 265,000 times the distance between the Earth and the sun. To the naked eye, the planets in the solar system appear as bright spots. However, using a telescope, these dots stand out from the stars and reveal structures such as Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, Saturn’s rings, or the ice caps of Mars. Although the presence of such phenomena is expected on exoplanets, their distance from the Earth prevents…

Shortly before access to the BBC News website was reportedly blocked in Russia a few days ago, the BBC announced that it was resuming the broadcasting of the BBC World Service via shortwave radio for four hours per day. It said that this was to ensure that people in parts of Russia and Ukraine can access its news service. You can listen for updates on the Russia-Ukraine war on BBC World Service live online 📱 https://t.co/ZpQiRUoNHP And the map shows our shortwave radio reach in #Ukraine 📻 15735 kHz 16:00 – 18:00 GMT +2 📻 5875 kHz 22:00 – 00:00 GMT +2 pic.twitter.com/q1wa2o3j4g —…

Many animals form groups. Living in a group can protect individuals from predators, reducing risk; it also helps them to find more food, increasing rewards. However, the presence of cities can alter these patterns of risk and reward. When wildlife enters urban space, there’s the potential that the way individuals behave in groups – their “collective behaviour” – can be drastically altered. Until recently, scientists have known little about the collective behaviour of wild animals because it’s difficult to observe many individuals at once. Even less is known about wild animals’ collective behaviour in human-changed environments because the physical structure…

“Look away now if you don’t want to know the score”, they say on the news before reporting the football results. But imagine if your television knew which teams you follow, which results to hold back – or knew to bypass football altogether and tell you about something else. With media personalisation, which we’re working on with the BBC, that sort of thing is becoming possible. Significant challenges remain for adapting live production, but there are other aspects to media personalisation which are closer. Indeed, media personalisation already exists to an extent. It’s like your BBC iPlayer or Netflix suggesting content…

While we have been focused on the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine mandates and related protests for much of the past two years, a wave of financial fraud has spread rapidly across Canada and around the world. While not a deadly respiratory virus, this new approach to scamming has affected thousands of individuals globally, with victims defrauded of a record US$14 billion in 2021. The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre reported nearly $100 million stolen from victims in Canada alone in 2020 and 2021. Emotional manipulation The pig-butchering, or “sha zhu pan,” scam is a highly sophisticated form of romance and cryptocurrency investment scam. Scammers — mainly working for…

3D printed concrete may lead to a shift in architecture and construction. Because it can be used to produce new shapes and forms that current technologies struggle with, it may change the centuries-old processes and procedures that are still used to construct buildings, resulting in lower costs and saved time. However, concrete has a significant environmental impact. Vast quantities of natural sand are currently used to meet the world’s insatiable appetite for concrete, at great cost to the environment. In general, the construction industry struggles with sustainability. It creates around 35% of all landfill waste globally. Our new research suggests a way to…

The world’s five leading tech companies – Google (now Alphabet), Apple, Facebook (now Meta), Amazon and Microsoft – have taken steps to impose significant and (mainly) voluntary sanctions on Russia, in response to its invasion of Ukraine. But the decisions didn’t come unprompted. Ukraine has lobbied the major tech companies in the same way it sought assistance from the European Union, NATO and the US government. Facing the largest military action in Europe since the second world war, Ukraine appealed directly to big tech companies as though they were nation states. It’s a reminder that in today’s world, these giants…

You probably know what a crystal is. We’ve all seen one, held one in our hands, and even tasted one on our tongue (for instance sodium chloride crystals, also known as “salt”). But what on earth is a “time crystal”, if not a sci-fi gadget in the latest Marvel movie? Why do we need a quantum computer to make one? And what is a quantum computer anyway? Bits and qubits Let’s start there. Computers are all around us. Some are compact, portable and primarily used to stream Netflix, while others fill entire rooms and simulate complex phenomena like the weather…