Author: The Conversation

On December 19 1972, astronauts Eugene Cernan, Harrison Schmitt and Ronald Evans splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean, ending the Apollo 17 lunar mission. They were the last people to travel beyond low-Earth orbit – typically defined as less than 1,000km above the Earth’s surface. Some 49 years later, we are approaching the launch of Nasa’s Artemis 1 lunar mission. Artemis is the latest in a long series of projects over many decades to attempt a human return to the Moon. It’s by far the closest one to being realised, with the earliest launch attempts currently scheduled for March 2022. Artemis 1 will not carry astronauts,…

Have you had the experience of looking at some product online and then seeing ads for it all over your social media feed? Far from coincidence, these instances of eerily accurate advertising provide glimpses into the behind-the-scenes mechanisms that feed an item you search for on Google, “like” on social media or come across while browsing into custom advertising on social media. Those mechanisms are increasingly being used for more nefarious purposes than aggressive advertising. The threat is in how this targeted advertising interacts with today’s extremely divisive political landscape. As a social media researcher, I see how people seeking to…

Astronomers are increasingly drawing back the curtains on black holes. In the past few years, we have finally captured actual photos of these fearsome creatures and measured the gravitational waves – ripples in spacetime – that they create when colliding. But there’s still a lot we don’t know about black holes. One of the biggest enigmas is exactly how they form in the first place. My colleagues and I now believe we have observed this process, providing some of the best indications yet of exactly what happens when a black hole forms. Our results are published in two papers in Nature and the Astrophysical Journal. Astronomers…

5G stands for fifth-generation cellular network technology. It’s the technology that enables wireless communication – for example, from your cellular phone to a cell tower, which channels it to the internet. 5G is a network service provided by telecommunications carriers and is not the same thing as the 5 GHz band on your Wi-Fi router. 5G offers an order of magnitude – 10 times – more bandwidth than its predecessor, 4G. The greater bandwidth is possible because over and above low and medium frequency radio waves, 5G uses additional higher-frequency waves to encode and carry information. Bandwidth is analogous to…

Don’t look now – but we are currently experiencing a rash of stories about a forthcoming global catastrophe. But in a change from reports of pandemics and climate change, this global catastrophe is produced by the impact of a giant asteroid. Or comet. Or both. This may feel extra ominous given the events in the recent Netflix film “Don’t Look Up”, in which the Earth is threatened by a “planet killer” asteroid. But how worried should we really be – and what would happen if such a body actually hit us? It has been my experience that killer asteroids tend to…

The metaverse is coming. Like all technological innovation, it brings new opportunities and new risks. The metaverse is an immersive virtual reality version of the internet where people can interact with digital objects and digital representations of themselves and others, and can move more or less freely from one virtual environment to another. It can also involve augmented reality, a blending of virtual and physical realities, both by representing people and objects from the physical world in the virtual and conversely by bringing the virtual into people’s perceptions of physical spaces. By donning virtual reality headsets or augmented reality glasses, people will…

The idea of spending thousands or even millions of dollars to buy fictitious “land” in a virtual world sounds, to be frank, absurd. But in recent months, we’ve seen significant investments in virtual land within the metaverse. PwC is among the latest to dive in, having purchased real estate in The Sandbox, a virtual gaming world, for an undisclosed amount. If other reported sales are anything to go by, it would have been a handsome sum. One person recently bought a plot of land in the Snoopverse – a virtual world rapper Snoop Dogg is developing within The Sandbox – for US$450,000 (around £332,500). Meanwhile, the…

Astronomers ended 2021 on a high with the launch on December 25 of the James Webb Space Telescope, a joint mission between the European Space Agency, Nasa and the Canadian Space Agency. It was a relief to hear that the precision drives that opened up the complex sunshield, which is about the size of a tennis court, worked perfectly. The telescope is now on the way to its destination, 1.5 million kilometres away from Earth, where it will begin a series of tests once it arrives in late January. If the mission goes to plan, we can expect to start receiving images…

The year 2021 was marked by several major breakthroughs for cryptocurrencies. For one, new crypto applications like non-fungible tokens (NFTs) gained ground, with sales of these digital assets setting new records at major auction houses. Secondly, Bitcoin made strides towards mainstream acceptance with major websites like Expedia and Microsoft accepting the coin as a means of exchange. Third, in September, El Salvador became the first country in the world to accept bitcoin as legal tender. There are many more examples of how the market for cryptocurrencies has expanded just in the last year. With this uptick of activity, what’s ahead in 2022 for cryptocurrencies?…

Let’s be honest: there are many ways in which size matters, and for some purposes small is beautiful. However, sometimes very small things, like nanoparticles, are misunderstood. In recent months, many people have had difficult conversations with friends and family members who were hesitant about taking the COVID-19 vaccine. In some cases, this hesitance arose because they have been led to believe that vaccines can’t be trusted because they contain nanoparticles. It is lipid nanoparticles — called liposomes — that carry the mRNA molecule in the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. The nanoparticles in mRNA vaccines Those liposomes act as vehicles delivering the viral protein template…