Author: The Conversation

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…

If a person is lost in the wilderness, they have two options. They can search for civilization, or they could make themselves easy to spot by building a fire or writing HELP in big letters. For scientists interested in the question of whether intelligent aliens exist, the options are much the same. For over 70 years, astronomers have been scanning for radio or optical signals from other civilizations in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, called SETI. Most scientists are confident that life exists on many of the 300 million potentially habitable worlds in the Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers also think there is a decent…

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a bitter reminder that there is no end to the horrific suffering that humans are sometimes willing to inflict on others. Over the past several years, a seemingly endless stream of painful stories and images coming out of Syria, Yemen and now Ukraine – as well as mass shootings in the U.S. – have become a regular part of our daily life. With each passing day of the ongoing war in Ukraine and the gruesome news that it brings, many of us find ourselves checking the news the minute we wake up and last thing before…

The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, seems set to purchase the social media platform Twitter for around US$44 billion. He says he’s not doing it to make money (which is good, because Twitter has rarely turned a profit), but rather because, among other things, he believes in free speech. Twitter might seem an odd place to make a stand for free speech. The service has around 217 million daily users, only a fraction of the 2.8 billion who log in each day to one of the Meta family (Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp). But the platform plays a disproportionately large role in society. It is…

With nearly 84% of the world’s population now owning a smartphone, and our dependence on them growing all the time, these devices have become an attractive avenue for scammers. Last year, cyber security company Kaspersky detected nearly 3.5 million malicious attacks on mobile phone users. The spam messages we get on our phones via text message or email will often contain links to viruses, which are a type of malicious software (malware). There’s a decent chance that at some point you’ve installed malware that infected your phone and worked (without you noticing) in the background. According to a global report commissioned by private company Zimperium, more…

Netflix’s recently released first-quarter earnings for 2022 reported a shocking loss of 200,000 subscribers – a worrying shift for a business that had previously only seen sustained growth since 2011. The New York Times headline: Netflix loses subscribers for the first time in a decade was catchy – however, a little bit of nuance is required. The company’s withdrawal from Russia as a response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and related sanctions saw a loss of 700,000 subscribers attributed to the quarter. The net result, taking into account the Russian loss, was a growth of 500,000 subscribers – a number still short…

It appears Twitter’s board of directors finally warmed to Elon Musk’ hostile bid and agreed to a sale – but not before it took a severe beating from the Tesla and SpaceX billionaire, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and other prominent users on their own social network. Musk, who on April 25, 2022, sealed a deal to buy Twitter for US$44 billion, criticized board members for owning almost no shares of the company they oversee. Dorsey, who will step down from his seat on Twitter’s board at the end of his term in May 2022, called it the “dysfunction of the company.” Conservative politicians derided the board as “scared”…