Author: The Conversation

Imagine your team has been tasked with delivering a high-stakes policy paper under intense time pressure. Everyone turns to generative artificial intelligence (AI), and within minutes, it delivers a full draft complete with structured arguments and authoritative-looking citations. The team then transfers the AI-generated text into the corporate template, polishes the narrative flow and structure, and gives it one final check before sending it up the chain. Leadership takes a glimpse of the polished-looking draft, and – assuming the underlying research has already been verified – signs off and publishes. This scenario is not hypothetical. South Africa’s Draft National AI…

The recent announcement of novel, viable viruses created by artificial intelligence (AI) was celebrated as a major advance in the fight against antibiotic resistance. But it also raised urgent concerns about regulation. Alongside precision gene-editing technologies such as CRISPR/Cas9 and synthetic biology, AI is now making it increasingly possible to design and alter entire biological systems. These technologies could clearly do a lot of good. The new AI-designed viruses – bacteriophages that exclusively kill bacteria – rapidly overcame antibiotic-resistant strains of E. coli. Gene-editing itself is already contributing to medical advances such as the recently approved CRISPR-based therapy for sickle cell disease. And synthetic biology is helping to tackle environmental challenges by…

Human beings have long told versions of the same warning: be careful what you wish for. In Greek mythology, King Midas got exactly what he asked for, but at the cost of everything else he valued. In the famous story of The Monkey’s Paw, a man’s wishes are granted through terrible and unforeseen routes. These stories feel newly relevant with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) agents: systems to which we can give a goal, then leave it to work out how to get there. As AI systems become more autonomous, they are coming to resemble wish-granting genies: finding routes and using methods…

NASA is planning to send three small rovers to the Moon with a single instruction: Work out among yourselves how to explore a patch of ground. The Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration mission, or CADRE, will land on the side of the Moon facing Earth as part of NASA’s IM-3 launch, planned for late 2026. These rovers will spend roughly two weeks mapping the terrain as a self-guided team. No joystick will control them, and no human will approve each turn. The rovers will elect a leader among themselves, assign their own tasks and redraw their plans as a group when one of…

For centuries, useful metals have been developed by starting with one core element and adding small amounts of other elements. Steel, for example, is composed primarily of iron; carbon is added in varied amounts to produce different grades of steel. Bronze is made up of copper and tin. These mixtures are known as alloys. Africa already supplies several of the metals used in alloys. Yet the continent captures far less value from designing and manufacturing advanced materials than from mining the ores that make them possible. For example, the continent supplies about three-quarters of the world’s manganese, 70% of cobalt, and nearly…

You tell an artificial intelligence agent, an AI capable of autonomous reasoning and multistep actions, “Find me a shirt for less than $30, but do not buy it.” The agent finds one – and places the order anyway. You challenge the charge. The retailer shows the order came through your account. The AI agent provider shows your instruction not to buy. The payment service shows the charge. Each record may be accurate. But nothing in those records links the charge to the task you gave the agent to find – but not buy – a shirt. A conventional chatbot suggests…

In recent days, media reports have revealed several instances where Facebook has paid for content that could be deemed controversial. ABC News Verify found that Facebook had monetised Australian accounts described as having white nationalist, neo-Nazi or anti-vaccine links. According to the report, some of the content they posted even appeared to conflict with Meta’s own monetisation policies. Meta did not answer questions about the individual pages, and their earnings are not public. However, it did state that if creators breach their policies, their earnings will be disabled, and they may be removed entirely for repeated breaches. Payment is different from…

Artificial intelligence (AI) has designed viruses that can infect bacteria and reproduce – a first that shows AI is beginning to do more than analyse the genetic code of living things. It can write new versions of it, too. The viruses in question are bacteriophages, or phages – viruses that infect bacteria rather than people, animals or plants. Researchers used AI to design hundreds of new versions of a well-studied phage, then built the viruses from scratch in the laboratory. Of 285 AI-designed genomes that the team tested, 16 produced working phages capable of infecting E coli. The result is an important step…

Approximately three-quarters of 393 preschool and K-12 teachers in the U.S. say they use YouTube for instructional purposes, with roughly half using it on a daily or weekly basis, according to our new nationally representative survey. Those findings come from our new research, published in June 2026 in Educational Researcher, an academic journal. Our sample included teachers from all grade levels and subject areas, and from across public, charter and private schools. Our results revealed that teachers who said they use YouTube as an instructional tool do so for a considerable amount of classroom time, alongside other common teaching methods like…

You might think about rockets as powerful vehicles that blast astronaut crews and robotic missions off into space. But what if they could be used to send cargo from one side of the Earth to the other, in a fraction of the time it would take a plane? The company SpaceX recently announced a project that aims to use its rockets to do just that. SpaceX launched its Starfall demo mission on June 23, 2026. According to a document from the Federal Aviation Administration, Starfall has two main purposes: to use rockets to quickly deliver cargo around the world, and to deliver cargo to and…