Author: The Conversation

Imagine two towns on two opposite sides of a mountain. People from these towns would probably have to travel all the way around the mountain to visit one another. But, if they wanted to get there faster, they could dig a tunnel straight through the mountain to create a shortcut. That’s the idea behind a wormhole. A wormhole is like a tunnel between two distant points in our universe that cuts the travel time from one point to the other. Instead of traveling for many millions of years from one galaxy to another, under the right conditions one could theoretically use a…

Twitter’s former security chief, Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, filed a whistleblower complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission in July 2022, accusing the microblogging platform company of serious security failings. The accusations amplified the ongoing drama of Twitter’s potential sale to Elon Musk. Zatko spent decades as an ethical hacker, private researcher, government adviser and executive at some of the most prominent internet companies and government offices. He is practically a legend in the cybersecurity industry. Because of his reputation, when he speaks, people and governments normally listen – which underscores the seriousness of his complaint against Twitter. As a former cybersecurity industry practitioner and current cybersecurity researcher,…

The world has not yet won the war against malaria. While the total number of cases has declined from about 81.1 cases per 1,000 population to 59 per 1,000 since 2000, there were still an estimated 240 million cases and 600,000 deaths in 2020 globally. Malaria remains a menace across Africa. The continent carries by far the world’s largest disease burden: 94% of cases and 96% of deaths occur across the continent. Alarmingly, children aged five or younger account for 80% of these deaths. There is no room for complacency. While vaccines look promising, there is still a steady rise of antimalarial drug resistance, especially…

Many around the world will watch eagerly this Saturday as NASA launches Artemis I, the agency’s first Moon exploration mission since the 1970s. The spectacle involves the most powerful rocket in the world: the Space Launch System (SLS). Standing at nearly 100 metres tall and weighing more than 2,600 tonnes, the SLS produces a massive 8.8 million pounds of thrust – (more than 31 times the thrust of a Boeing 747 jet). But it’s not just amazing engineering that’s behind rocket science and space exploration. Hidden within, there’s clever chemistry that powers these fantastic feats and sustains our fragile life in space.…

Cognitively enhanced lawyers may one day work in our courts. A recent report from The Law Society of England and Wales suggests the rapidly advancing field of neural technology could create “digitally enhanced” super-lawyers capable of focusing more keenly or accessing case law via an implant. The report is broad and far-reaching, describing some of the most recent advances in neural technology. It also sets out many of the ways that neural technology could affect the practice and enforcement of law in the future. Some of these possibilities are unlikely to occur any time soon. For example, the report suggests “neurotechnologically augmented”…

Scientists know very little about the matter that makes up the galaxies in the Universe. About 20% of the matter in galaxies is visible or baryonic: subatomic particles like protons, neutrons and electrons. The other 80%, referred to as “dark matter”, remains mysterious and unseen. In fact, it may not exist at all. “Dark matter” is just a hypothesis. Physicists and astronomers may be chasing a phantom – but that doesn’t stop us from looking. Why? Because if dark matter isn’t real, then the behaviour of the stars, planets and galaxies makes little sense. Today dark matter – and its cousin,…

Plastic pollution is a growing global menace. Between 2010 and 2020, the global production of plastics increased from 270 million tonnes to 367 million tonnes. Every year, more than 12 million tonnes of plastics end up in the world’s oceans, with severe consequences for marine life. When macro plastics degrade into micro-plastics, they easily contaminate the food chain and pose significant threats to human health via inhalation and ingestion. By 2030, plastic waste is expected to double to 165 million tonnes in African countries. Most of this will be in Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. A significant proportion of the plastic that ends up on…

The timing and intensity of the seasons shapes life all around us, including tool use by birds, the evolutionary diversification of giraffes, and the behaviour of our close primate relatives. Some scientists suggest early humans and their ancestors also evolved due to rapid changes in their environment, but the physical evidence to test this idea has been elusive – until now. After more than a decade of work, we’ve developed an approach that leverages tooth chemistry and growth to extract information about seasonal rainfall patterns from the jaws of living and fossil primates. We share our findings in a collaborative study just published in Proceedings of the National Academy of…

Does rapid eye movement during sleep reveal where you’re looking at in the scenery of dreams, or are they simply the result of random jerks of our eye muscles? Since the discovery of REM sleep in the early 1950s, the significance of these rapid eye movements has intrigued and fascinated scores of scientists, psychologists and philosophers. REM sleep, as the name implies, is a period of sleep when your eyes move under your closed eyelids. It’s also the period when you experience vivid dreams. We are researchers who study how the brain processes sensory information during wakefulness and sleep. In our recently published study, we found…

Paleontology is undergoing a new renaissance. Since the mid-20th century, genomics has become the main focus of evolutionary biology. But the last few decades have shown how the study of fossils can complement genomic data and improve our understanding of the history of life on Earth. Every fossil site provides information about the ecology and evolution of ancient life, but a handful of fossil sites are providing unique, critical data. These sites of exceptional preservation are known as laggerstätte. These sites can contain fossils with soft tissues, which are unmineralized structures that would normally decay is most conditions, thus usually becoming absent from…