Author: The Conversation

As the story goes, in the 1780s, a former lover of the Empress of Russia wanted to impress her with his efforts to build empire in what would later become part of Ukraine. Grigory Potemkin had workers build a façade showing a prosperous village along the riverbanks, visible from passing boats, disassembling and reassembling it further up the river as Catherine the Great sailed by. A “Potemkin village” has become shorthand for a false veneer designed to hide the truth, but historians tell us the original story doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. In a sense, it’s fake news, 1700s style. The region…

A court in South Africa has confirmed the constitutional right of the country’s citizens to an environment that isn’t harmful to their health. This includes the right to clean air, as exposure to air pollution affects human health. Air pollution also affects land and water systems, and decreases agricultural yields. The case, referred to as the “Deadly Air” case, was brought against the government by two environmental justice groups – groundWork and the Vukani Environmental Justice Movement in Action. They were represented by the Centre for Environmental Rights. The case concerned air pollution in the Highveld Priority Area. The area includes one of South Africa’s largest cities, Ekurhuleni,…

In 2019, my colleagues and I discovered spooky glowing rings in the sky using CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope in Western Australia. The rings were unlike anything seen before, and we had no idea what they were. We dubbed them odd radio circles, or ORCs. They continue to puzzle us, but new data from South Africa’s MeerKAT telescope are helping us solve the mystery. Read more: ‘WTF?’: newly discovered ghostly circles in the sky can’t be explained by current theories, and astronomers are excited We can now see each ORC is centred on a galaxy too faint to be detected earlier. The circles are most likely…

On Sept. 1 and 2, 1859, telegraph systems around the world failed catastrophically. The operators of the telegraphs reported receiving electrical shocks, telegraph paper catching fire, and being able to operate equipment with batteries disconnected. During the evenings, the aurora borealis, more commonly known as the northern lights, could be seen as far south as Colombia. Typically, these lights are only visible at higher latitudes, in northern Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia. What the world experienced that day, now known as the Carrington Event, was a massive geomagnetic storm. These storms occur when a large bubble of superheated gas called plasma is ejected from…

On the last day of his 11 years as chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), Rod Sims announced the commission is bringing a “world-first” claim against Meta (owner of Facebook) in the Federal Court for false or misleading conduct. The ACCC alleges Meta failed to take sufficient steps to stop displaying scam cryptocurrency ads on Facebook in 2019, even after receiving complaints. Sims said the ads led to more than A$650,000 in losses for one consumer. “Those visits to landing pages from ads generate substantial revenue for Facebook,” Sims said. Almost a decade ago, the ACCC failed in…

In early 2022, nearly two years after Covid was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization, experts are mulling a big question: when is a pandemic “over”? So, what’s the answer? What criteria should be used to determine the “end” of Covid’s pandemic phase? These are deceptively simple questions and there are no easy answers. I am a computer scientist who investigates the development of ontologies. In computing, ontologies are a means to formally structure knowledge of a subject domain, with its entities, relations and constraints, so that a computer can process it in various applications and help humans to be more…

The UK government is reportedly considering a £16 billion proposal to build a solar power station in space. Yes, you read that right. Space-based solar power is one of the technologies to feature in the government’s Net Zero Innovation Portfolio. It has been identified as a potential solution, alongside others, to enable the UK to achieve net zero by 2050. But how would a solar power station in space work? What are the advantages and drawbacks to this technology? Read more: Solar power stations in space could be the answer to our energy needs Space-based solar power involves collecting solar energy in space and transferring…

More than ten years ago, the so-called “rare earth crisis” highlighted the fragility of the supply chain of these metals, which are crucial for the transition to a carbon-neutral economy. Most of the world’s supply of these minerals comes from a handful of giant ore deposits, but we still know little about how these deposits formed. Despite the name, the rare earths are relatively widespread in Earth’s crust, compared with elements such as gold and platinum. Large, concentrated deposits suitable for mining, however, are much more scarce. To understand how these deposits form, we recreated the hellish temperatures, pressures and chemical…

Some medical students in Canada are collaborating in a virtual class with design engineering students in Italy. Their mutual goals are to enhance their preparedness and insights regarding their respective real-world professional challenges by working together online in a scenario. The students log in to an online simulation of a virtual emergency room. The medical students are assigned doctor and nurse avatars, and the engineering students have IT specialist or designer avatars. The scene plays out in response to the collaborative actions the students take. This is a real learning experience supported by educators at McMaster University’s Faculty of Health…

In a huge milestone, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has finally been aligned to produce the first unified image of a single star. Most traditional telescopes these days (like one you might have in your backyard) have a single primary mirror that collects distant light from stars. But the JWST has 18 mirrors! These had to be aligned extremely precisely to capture the image NASA released today. This gif shows the several intermediary images of stars used for the crucial JWST mirror alignment process. NASA/Twitter The challenge with JWST The JWST is the largest telescope humans have ever sent into space. It’s so big…