Author: The Conversation

You meet an attractive stranger on a dating site. They live in your city and you hit it off right away. Soon, you’re texting with them frequently and making plans to meet in person. You’ve been lonely and isolated amid lockdowns, and this person relieves the anguish, so you seem to be spending all your time chatting with them. What’s even better is that they’re doing great, financially. They got into the crypto investment boom at the right time and have seen their savings balloon. You really like them, so when they encourage you to take the dip together and…

As the latest report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) makes clear, the 2020s must be a decade of transformation if we are to stand any chance of achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is widely anticipated to play a key role in this transformation by helping to cut carbon emissions worldwide. But relying on CCS may overshadow solutions that focus on reducing our energy demand and making behavioural changes that put sustainability first. Over the coming years, global greenhouse gas emissions need to fall rapidly in accordance with the Carbon Law, a relatively simple equation developed by scientists to achieve…

When you hear the word “nanomedicine,” it might call to mind scenarios like those in the 1966 movie “Fantastic Voyage.” The film portrays a medical team shrunken down to ride a microscopic robotic ship through a man’s body to clear a blood clot in his brain. Nanomedicine has not reached that level of sophistication yet. Although scientists can generate nanomaterials smaller than several nanometers – the “nano” indicating one-billionth of a meter – today’s nanotechnology has not been able to generate functional electronic robotics tiny enough to inject safely into the bloodstream. But since the concept of nanotechnology was first introduced…

New details of our past are coming to light, hiding in the nooks and crannies of the world, as we refine our techniques to go looking for them. Most lauded is the reconstruction of the evolution of humanity since our African origins around 300,000 years ago, by analysing our living and fossil DNA. Replete with the ghosts of African and Eurasian populations of the deep past, these have been resurrected only through the ability of science to reach into the world of the minuscule by studying biomolecules. Now, digital analysis of rock surfaces reveals how other ghosts of the deep…

Over the last few weeks, there has been a lot of talk of the public square fuelled by Elon Musk’s recent proposed takeover of Twitter. Many have balked at the idea that a billionaire would entirely control another one of the world’s important social networks, one that has been adopted by academics and politicians as a choice venue for public debates. But what is the public square, and what can we do to save it? Squares and spheres The concept of the public square is one that has a rich history in communications and technology studies. Historically, the public square was a central location where…

Infectious diseases such as malaria remain a leading cause of death in many regions. This is partly because people there don’t have access to medical diagnostic tools that can detect these diseases (along with a range of non-infectious diseases) at an early stage, when there is more scope for treatment. It’s a challenge scientists have risen to, with a goal to democratise health care for economically disadvantaged people the world over. My colleagues and I have developed a new method for the investigation of biological cells which is small enough to fit into a smartphone lens. While we have so far only…

When a star explodes and dies in a supernova, it takes on a new life of sorts. Pulsars are the extremely rapidly rotating objects left over after massive stars have exhausted their fuel supply. They are extremely dense, with a mass similar to the Sun crammed into a region the size of Sydney. Pulsars emit beams of radio waves from their poles. As those beams sweep across Earth, we can detect rapid pulses as often as hundreds of times per second. With this knowledge, scientists are always on the lookout for new pulsars within and outside our Milky Way galaxy.…

When new innovations emerge, there’s always a temptation to say that we need to rewrite the rulebook for them. Gamification has been no exception. Gamification refers to the use of elements from gaming, often by a smartphone app, to make ordinary activities like stock trading or rideshares more engaging. It can have powerful influences on our choices, sometimes in controversial ways. For instance, users of gamified trading apps like Robinhood have suffered huge losses, often from trading too frequently and making outsized bets on meme stocks or other assets that were too risky for them. By designing their interfaces to make stock trading…

Today more than half of the world’s population is connected to the internet. In Africa, there are over 590 million internet users and over 800 million mobile phone subscribers. Some observers note that such diffusion of digital tools and connectivity is bringing political, economic, social and cultural transformations on the African continent. One such change is that workers from Lagos to Johannesburg to Nairobi are carrying out various forms of digital work. These are activities which involve manipulation of digital data using tools such as mobile phones, computers and the internet. Examples are transcription, article writing, image tagging, search engine optimisation, and inbound and outbound customer services, which can be done for…

Elon Musk is the planet’s number one billionaire. If anyone can turn cyberspace into a heaven – or hell – of free speech “absolutism” via a US$44 billion (£35 billion) Twitter takeover, then surely he’s the man. Right? When free-market elephants like Musk or Jeff Bezos (who bought the Washington Post in 2013) take charge of major mass-media outlets, concerns are raised about the direction of free speech, which remains the essential ingredient of democratic participation. This feeds into wider concerns around the ever-increasing privatisation of public spaces. In the online age, the fact that we spend so much of our time in…