Author: The Conversation

During the pandemic, video calls became a way for me to connect with my aunt in a nursing home and with my extended family during holidays. Zoom was how I enjoyed trivia nights, happy hours and live performances. As a university professor, Zoom was also the way I conducted all of my work meetings, mentoring and teaching. But I often felt drained after Zoom sessions, even some of those that I had scheduled for fun. Several well-known factors – intense eye contact, slightly misaligned eye contact, being on camera, limited body movement, lack of nonverbal communication – contribute to Zoom fatigue. But…

How can you know that science done quickly during a crisis is good science? This question has taken on new relevance with the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. Researchers developed vaccines in under a year – easily breaking the previous record of four years. But that pace of development may be part of the reason about 1 in 7 unvaccinated adults in the U.S. say they will never get the COVID-19 shot. This is in spite of continued assurances from infectious disease experts that the vaccines are safe. Scientists are called on to come up with answers under pressure whenever there is a crisis, from the Challenger space shuttle explosion to the 2020 California…

Wearable fitness trackers will be on many Christmas shopping lists this year, with a vast range of devices (and an ever-increasing number of features) hitting the market just in time for the festive season. But what does the latest research say about how effective they are? Fitness trackers are trendy Currently, about one in five Australians own one of these wearables, and about a quarter use a mobile app or website to monitor their activity levels and health. And sales are predicted to grow over the next five years. The landscape of the market is fast changing. For years, Fitbit and Garmin were the…

The need to transition to clean energy is apparent, urgent and inescapable. We must limit Earth’s rising temperature to within 1.5 C to avoid the worst effects of climate change — an especially daunting challenge in the face of the steadily increasing global demand for energy. Part of the answer is using energy more efficiently. More than 72 per cent of all energy produced worldwide is lost in the form of heat. For example, the engine in a car uses only about 30 per cent of the gasoline it burns to move the car. The remainder is dissipated as heat. Recovering even…

Twitter recently announced that it will no longer allow “the sharing of private media, such as images or videos of private individuals without their consent”. The move takes effect through an expansion of the social media platform’s private information and media policy. Sharing images is an important part of folks’ experience on Twitter. People should have a choice in determining whether or not a photo is shared publicly. To that end we are expanding the scope of our Private Information Policy. 🧵 — Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) November 30, 2021 In practical terms, this means photos and videos can be removed if the photographer has not…

A space station on the Moon could be very useful. It would provide future space missions with a stopping point between leaving the Earth and reaching further into the Solar System or even the Milky Way. One reason we haven’t built a space station on the Moon is that we don’t send people there very often. We have only managed to put astronauts on the Moon six times so far. These Moon landings took place in a three-year period between 1969 and 1972 and were part of a series of space missions called the Apollo missions. The type of rocket used…

Not a day passes without a fascinating snippet on the ethical challenges created by “black box” Artificial Intelligence systems. These use machine learning to figure out patterns within data and make decisions – often without a human giving them any moral basis for how to do it. Classics of the genre are the credit cards accused of awarding bigger loans to men than women, based simply on which gender got the best credit terms in the past. Or the recruitment AIs that discovered the most accurate tool for candidate selection was to find CVs containing the phrase “field hockey” or the first name “Jared”.…

“Quantum entanglement” is one of several plot devices that crops up in modern sci-fi movies. Fans of the Marvel superhero movies, for instance, will be familiar with the idea of different time lines merging and intersecting, or characters’ destinies becoming intertwined through seemingly magical means. But “quantum entanglement” isn’t just a sci-fi buzzword. It’s a very real, perplexing and useful phenomenon. “Entanglement” is one aspect of the broader collection of ideas in physics known as quantum mechanics, which is a theory that describes the behaviour of nature at the atomic, and even subatomic, level. Understanding and harnessing entanglement is key to…

Hybrid warfare is gaining traction globally as the preferred option for conducting malicious statecraft in the grey zone between peace and war. There is a growing international trend in attacking a nation’s specific vulnerabilities, including the national power grid and its critical infrastructure. The term hybrid warfare was coined by William Nemeth in 2002. He described it as warfare … where a wide range of overt and covert military, paramilitary, and civilian measures are employed in a highly integrated design. The adversary tries to influence influential policymakers and key decision makers by combining kinetic operations with subversive effort. The aggressor often resorts to clandestine actions, to…

In 2020, scientists made global headlines by creating “xenobots” – tiny “programmable” living things made of several thousand frog stem cells. These pioneer xenobots could move around in fluids, and scientists claimed they could be useful for monitoring radioactivity, pollutants, drugs or diseases. Early xenobots survived for up to ten days. Read more: Not bot, not beast: scientists create first ever living, programmable organism A second wave of xenobots, created in early 2021, showed unexpected new properties. These included self-healing and longer life. They also showed a capacity to cooperate in swarms, for example by massing into groups. Last week, the same…