Author: The Conversation

Military planning is a complicated endeavour, calling upon experts in logistics and infrastructure to predict resource availability and technological advancements. Long-range military planning, deciding what to invest in now to prepare armed forces for the world in thirty years’ time, is even more difficult. One of the most interesting tools for thinking about future defence technology isn’t big data forecasting and the use of synthetic training environments, but narrative and imagination. And we get this from science fiction. That might sound fanciful, but many militaries are already engaging with the genre. The US military and the French army use science fiction writers to generate future…

It usually takes 10 to 15 years to develop a new drug, and they cost around US$2.6 billion each. Because it’s difficult to predict how a drug candidate will interact with human cells, many drugs never pass clinical trials. Testing new drugs on human cells is expensive and complicated, so it is difficult to do early in the development of a drug. To help solve this problem, my research group has built designer artificial cells on a chip the size of a postage stamp. These artificial cells mimic how cells degrade during cancer. This makes it possible to test new drugs…

The mobile apps installed on our smartphones are one of the biggest threats to our digital privacy. They are capable of collecting vast amounts of personal data, often highly sensitive. The consent model on which privacy laws are based doesn’t work. App users remain concerned about privacy, as a recent survey shows, but they still aren’t very good at protecting it. They may lack the technical know-how or the time to review privacy terms, or they may lack the willpower to resist the lure of trending apps and personalised in-app offers. As a result privacy laws have become more detailed, imposing additional requirements…

We may have walked on the Moon and sent probes across the solar system, but we know very little about what’s going on inside other planets. Now, for the first time, we have been able to view the interior of one, thanks to Nasa’s Mars InSight probe. The probe, which landed in 2018, is equipped with a solar-powered lander bristling with equipment, including a seismometer (a very sensitive vibration detector). The results, published in three studies in Science, throw up some unexpected findings about Mars’s interior, including a very large core. Though Mars has no tectonic plates, the first “marsquakes” were detected within months…

In collaboration with the United States Navy’s Underwater Archaeology Branch, I taught a computer AI how to recognize shipwrecks on the ocean floor from scans taken by aircraft and ships on the surface. The computer model we created is 92% accurate in finding known shipwrecks. The project focused on the coasts of the mainland U.S. and Puerto Rico. It is now ready to be used to find unknown or unmapped shipwrecks. The first step in creating the shipwreck model was to teach the computer what a shipwreck looks like. It was also important to teach the computer how to tell the difference…

It’s been a momentous month for space-faring billionaires. On July 11, British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson’s Unity “rocket-plane” flew him and five fellow passengers about 85 kilometres above Earth. And this week, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ New Shepard capsule reached an altitude of 106km, carrying Bezos, his brother, and the oldest and youngest people ever to reach such a height. Passengers on both flights experienced several minutes of weightlessness and took in breathtaking views of our beautiful and fragile Earth. Both flights created an avalanche of media coverage and brand recognition for Branson’s Virgin Galactic and Bezos’s Blue Origin. There is renewed anticipation of a…

The world’s most sophisticated commercially available spyware may be being abused, according to an investigation by 17 media organisations in ten countries. Intelligence leaks and forensic phone analysis suggests the surveillance software, called Pegasus, has been used to target and spy on the phones of human rights activists, investigative journalists, politicians, researchers and academics. NSO Group, the Israeli cyber intelligence firm behind Pegasus, insists that it only licenses its spyware to vetted government clients in the name of combating transnational crime and terrorism. It has labelled reports from investigative journalists a “vicious and slanderous campaign” upon which it will no longer comment. Yet the founder and chief executive of NSO Group previously…

Many governments are increasingly approaching artificial intelligence with an almost religious zeal. By 2018 at least 22 countries around the world, and also the EU, had launched grand national strategies for making AI part of their business development, while many more had announced ethical frameworks for how it should be allowed to develop. The EU documents more than 290 AI policy initiatives in individual EU member states between 2016 and 2020. The latest is Ireland, which has just announced its national AI strategy, “AI – Here for Good”. It aims to become “an international leader in using AI to benefit our economy and society, through…

For nearly two years, 68 United Nations member states — along with private enterprises, non-governmental organizations, technical communities and academics — participated in an open-ended working group on developments in information and telecommunications in international security (Cyber OEWG). The working group deliberated on responsible state behaviour in cyberspace. In March 2021, the working group produced a final report. The report comes at a critical time in light of the high-profile cyberattacks on SolarWinds and Microsoft Exchange Server, as well as ransomware attacks on critical civilian infrastructures and essential public services. Multi-stakeholder inclusion The Cyber OEWG was established in 2018. It was tasked to continue cybersecurity negotiations in a…

Billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson and his team successfully flew to the “edge of space” on the Unity 22 mission aboard a Virgin Galactic plane on July 12. The event was hailed as the start of space tourism, narrowly beating the planned launch on 20 July by fellow billionaire business magnate Jeff Bezos and his firm Blue Origin. But does the 85km (53 miles), the altitude of the recent Virgin Galactic flight, actually count as space? And what are these companies likely to achieve going forward? The definition of where space begins is very subjective. The Kármán line is a distance of 100km (62 miles), determined in 1957. This line has been adopted…