Author: The Conversation

In the wake of Facebook rebranding as Meta, reflecting its focus on the “metaverse”, Microsoft has now announced it, too, will launch into this space. Meta has proposed that the metaverse will eventually allow us to engage across education, work and social contexts, while Microsoft looks to be focusing specifically on the realm of the virtual office for now. But what actually is the metaverse and to what extent should we believe that the vision being presented to us is really going to be central to our daily lives? The idea itself isn’t new. Science fiction author Neal Stephenson coined the term “metaverse” in…

Leaked internal documents suggest Facebook – which recently renamed itself Meta – is doing far worse than it claims at minimizing COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on the Facebook social media platform. Online misinformation about the virus and vaccines is a major concern. In one study, survey respondents who got some or all of their news from Facebook were significantly more likely to resist the COVID-19 vaccine than those who got their news from mainstream media sources. As a researcher who studies social and civic media, I believe it’s critically important to understand how misinformation spreads online. But this is easier said than done. Simply counting instances…

It takes seven months to get to Mars in an efficiently engineered spaceship, covering the distance of 480 million kilometres. On this journey, a crew would have to survive in a confined space with no opportunity to experience nature or interact with new people. It is easy to imagine how this much isolation could have a severe impact on the crew’s well-being and productivity. The challenges long-duration space travellers experience are not foreign to regular folk, although to a lesser degree. Many Canadians experience isolation and loneliness, at least occasionally. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdvEbjqs1kU&feature=emb_logo Virtual reality can help people experience what being in space is…

Dozens of space-based telescopes operate near Earth and provide incredible images of the universe. But imagine a telescope far away in the outer solar system, 10 or even 100 times farther from the Sun than Earth. The ability to look back at our solar system or peer into the darkness of the distant cosmos would make this a uniquely powerful scientific tool. I’m an astrophysicist who studies the formation of structure in the universe. Since the 1960s, scientists like me have been considering the important scientific questions we might be able to answer with a telescope placed in the outer solar…

Few of us who have survived the last year aren’t grateful for technology. Zoom, email, connected workplaces and solid internet connections at home have made it possible to work, shop, study and carry on our lives in a way that wouldn’t have been possible had the pandemic hit, say, 20 years earlier. But parts of big tech — the parts that track us and drive us to think dangerous and antisocial things just so we keep clicking — are doing us enormous damage. Although it might seem like we can’t have the best of both worlds — the connectivity without…

Twenty years on from the public release of Windows XP, the popular operating system is still regarded one of Microsoft’s greatest achievements. As of August this year, Windows XP still maintained a greater market share than its successor, Windows Vista. When mainstream support for XP ended in April 2009, it was running on a huge 75% of Windows computers and about 19% of people were still using XP when extended security support finished in 2014. Microsoft provided security support in a few special cases, such as for military use, until 2019 — an incredible 18 years after the initial release. But what made XP excel? And…

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has announced the company will change its name to Meta, saying the move reflects the fact the company is now much broader than just the social media platform (which will still be called Facebook). The rebrand follows several months of intensifying discourse by Zuckerberg and the company more broadly on the metaverse – the idea of integrating real and digital worlds ever more seamlessly, using technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). Zuckerberg said he hoped the metaverse will be a new ecosystem that will create millions of jobs for content creators. But is this…

Facebook’s smart glasses ambitions are in the news again. The company has launched a worldwide project dubbed Ego4D to research new uses for smart glasses. In September, Facebook unveiled its Ray-Ban Stories glasses, which have two cameras and three microphones built in. The glasses capture audio and video so wearers can record their experiences and interactions. The research project aims to add augmented reality features to smart glasses using artificial intelligence technologies that could provide wearers with a wealth of information, including the ability to get answers to questions like “Where did I leave my keys?” Facebook’s vision also includes a future where the glasses…

Picture this: it’s April 2020, you’re between Zoom meetings, and scrolling through your social media newsfeed. Headlines like “Death toll continues to rise”, “COVID-19 may cause long-term health implications” and “Health-care systems overwhelmed” flash across your screen. Your mood takes a dive, but you can’t stop scrolling. If this scenario rings true for you, you’re not alone. Research shows people have a tendency to seek out information during uncertain times – it’s a natural coping mechanism. But is persistent information-seeking on social media, sometimes called doomscrolling, helpful during a pandemic, or any time? Research on the effects of bad news on mood more…

The world’s second most valuable cryptocurrency, ether, has been touching all-time highs in price ahead of a major upgrade of its underlying platform, ethereum. Ether is currently worth in aggregate just shy of US$500 billion (£363 billion). That’s still slightly less than half that of the biggest cryptocurrency, bitcoin. But could this upgrade, a vital step towards a much greener and faster version of the current system, put ethereum on the path to becoming the dominant platform on the internet and make ether number one? First of all, it’s important to understand the difference between bitcoin and ethereum. Bitcoin is a…