Author: The Conversation

You may know nothing about it, but your phone – or your laptop or tablet – could be taken over by someone else who has found their way in through a back door. They could have infected your device with malware to make it a “bot” or a “zombie” and be using it – perhaps with hundreds of other unwitting victims’ phones – to launch a cyberattack. Bot is short for robot. But cyberbots don’t look like the robots of science fiction such as R2-D2. They are software applications that perform repetitive tasks they have been programmed to do. They…

It’s hard to imagine that the sustainable development goals (SDGs) and the fourth industrial revolution can be part of the same conversation. But, as a briefing paper by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) points out: Over 70% of the 136 SDG targets could be enabled by technology applications already in deployment. To be achieved, both ideas – sustainable development and the fourth industrial revolution – require innovative thinking and a change of attitude. The fourth industrial revolution is defined by many as a period of rapid evolution caused by digitalisation, globalisation and technological innovation. It has been happening over the last decade and people are finally…

One highlight of my Grade 3 life was dying from dysentery at the hands of a video game. I was ahead on schoolwork, and allowed to use the classroom computer to pioneer a family across America in the game The Oregon Trail. It was odd that I played this in a Canadian school — rather than exploring something like the challenges of long-haul trucking in the game Crosscountry Canada. But with players still joking about Oregon Trail memes today, it’s clear the game made its mark. When we look at educational video games, many struggle to make a similar impact. The reason is…

Cryptocurrencies are experiencing their worst crisis since the arrival of the first crypto assets and virtual currencies in the 1990s and their democratization in the 2010s. Bitcoin had an unprecedented tumble in late 2020 and has yet to recover. In addition to this sharp decline, there is much discussion about the worrisome collapse of some so-called stablecoins, which are supposed to be less volatile. This is compounded by the fall of cryptocurrency giants, particularly due to allegations of fraud in cases like the FTX scandal. At its peak, FTX had one million users and was the third-largest cryptocurrency exchange in terms of volume. Experts…

Is there such a thing as nothing? – Reggie, aged seven, Darlington Could someone see nothing? What does nothing look like? – Maya, aged nine, Bristol Imagine you hear a noise outside your window. You think it might be a dog barking, or maybe a child shouting. But when you get up and have a look, there’s no dog or child. “Oh,” you say, “there’s nothing there.” We often say we’ve “got nothing”, or that there’s “nothing there”. But what we mean is that we haven’t got a particular thing. When you looked outside, lots of things were there –…

Two major astronomy research programs, called EMU and PEGASUS, have joined forces to resolve one of the mysteries of our Milky Way: where are all the supernova remnants? A supernova remnant is an expanding cloud of gas and dust marking the last phase in the life of a star, after it has exploded as a supernova. But the number of supernova remnants we have detected so far with radio telescopes is too low. Models predict five times as many, so where are the missing ones? We have combined observations from two of Australia’s world-leading radio telescopes, the ASKAP radio telescope and the Parkes radio telescope,…

We know more about the Moon than the deep sea. This idea has been repeated for decades by scientists and science communicators, including Sir David Attenborough in the 2001 documentary series The Blue Planet. More recently, in Blue Planet II (2017) and other sources, the Moon is replaced with Mars. As deep-sea scientists, we investigated this supposed “fact” and found it has no scientific basis. It is not true in any quantifiable way. So where does this curious idea come from? Mapping the deep The earliest written record is in a 1954 article in the Journal of Navigation, in which oceanographer and chemist George Deacon…

The world seems to be obsessed with aging. The media is plagued with articles about the costs of growing older, the cure to aging and secrets to aging successfully. Alongside these concerns, we strive to age gracefully or become “cognitive super-agers” — people whose brains function like those of a much younger person. Not everyone fears aging. There are also those who embrace it, and suggest that, instead of viewing aging as something to overcome, we should view it as “second adulthood” — an opportunity in life after retirement, to complete, consolidate and share experiences of lives that were meaningfully lived. But even in embracing aging, we…

Digital teaching and communication tools are increasingly present in kindergarten to Grade 12 classrooms. By April 2020, not long after the onset of the pandemic, Google Classroom had doubled its users to more than 100 million. For educational technology companies, the pandemic accelerated opportunities to grow markets and profits. Whether for facilitating learning, assessing learning or communicating with parents and guardians, digital tools are increasingly part of many children’s and parents’ school experiences. In our ever-connected classrooms and societies, one notable element is the use of freemium software — software that is free for all users to obtain and use, but only with…

Across much of the world’s oceans, waves are getting bigger. In the Southern Ocean, where storm-driven swell can propagate halfway across the world to California, the average wave has grown about 20cm in the past 30 years. These changes are part of climate change, and are likely to continue well into the future. If you’re making long-term plans near the sea – like building ships, or constructing flood defences in coastal cities – you need more detail about how big those waves are going to get. In a study published today in Science Advances, we looked at the projected changes in the…