Author: The Conversation

One of the most difficult problems in finance right now is figuring out the fundamental economic value of cryptocurrencies. And the past week has complicated this further. For many cryptocurrency investors, the value of Bitcoin is based on the fact it is artificially scarce. A hard cap on “minting” new coins means there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin in existence. And unlike national currencies such as the Australian dollar, the rate of release for new Bitcoin is slowing down over time. Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that takes its name and logo from a Shiba Inu meme that was popular several years…

There’s a new kid on the social media block, and it is making big waves. It is less than a year old, yet is already valued at US$1 billion, and has venture capitalists scrambling to invest. The newcomer is Clubhouse, a social platform built around “drop-in audio chat”. Featuring ephemeral real-time voice conversations that any user can listen to and nobody can record, the invite-only app has gathered a legion of high-profile fans and some two million users. The coronavirus pandemic may have created the ideal conditions for Clubhouse to thrive: hordes of people isolated by lockdowns or safety concerns, desperate for…

No-one has visited the Moon since 1972. But with the advent of commercial human spaceflight, the urge to return is resurgent and generating a new space race. Nasa has selected the private company SpaceX to be part of its commercial spaceflight operations, but the firm is also pursuing its own space exploration agenda. To enable flights to the Moon and beyond, both Nasa and SpaceX are developing new heavy lift rockets: SpaceX’s Starship and Nasa’s Space Launch System. But how do they differ and which one is more powerful? Starship Rockets go through multiple stages to get into orbit. By discarding spent fuel tanks while…

Artificial intelligence has been making waves in recent years, enabling us to solve problems faster than traditional computing could ever allow. Recently, for example, Google’s artificial intelligence subsidiary DeepMind developed AlphaFold2, a program which solved the protein-folding problem. This is a problem which has had baffled scientists for 50 years. Advances in AI have allowed us to make progress in all kinds of disciplines – and these are not limited to applications on this planet. From designing missions to clearing Earth’s orbit of junk, here are a few ways artificial intelligence can help us venture further in space. Astronaut assistants Do you…

Israeli company StoreDot recently announced it can now mass produce electric vehicle batteries that can be fully charged in just five minutes. “The bottleneck to extra-fast charging is no longer the battery,” claimed the firm’s chief executive. But is this fast-charging battery really a gamechanger? And if so: exactly how? Electric vehicle charging speeds are a minefield and can be tough to understand. The latest models claim peak charging rates of over 900 miles in an hour, but the average rate when charging from 10% to 80% of battery capacity is typically about half that. The last bit of the battery is…

During a walking tour of Queensland’s Daintree rainforest in Australia, a talented guide regularly pointed out creatures that were well camouflaged into their surroundings. At one point, he directed our attention to a tree trunk, where a large grasshopper was camouflaged. The guide’s observations and stories wove together the connections between biology, geology and colonialism, helping explain how big and small changes could transform life in this ecosystem. Our society has been altered by the rapid proliferation of new technologies and devices that produce digital data. Nested within and feeding on this data ecosystem, artificial intelligence (AI) executes cognitive tasks…

For millions of children, being dragged to a museum is a singularly painful experience, marked by time standing still rather than history coming to life – as it does in the film “Night at the Museum”, starring Ben Stiller. But that all could change with the development of new “mixed reality” (MR) technology, which could inject new forms of interactive storytelling into our museums – introducing holographic tour guides and immersive digital displays in place of finger-smudged glass cabinets and faded information boards. Unlike the total immersion of virtual reality (VR), or the computer screen required for augmented reality (AR),…

The price of the world’s second largest cryptocurrency, ether, hit a new all-time high of US$1,440 (£1,050) on January 19. This breached a previous high set three years ago and gave ether a total value (market capitalisation) of US$160 billion, although it has since fallen back to around US$140 billion. Ether, which runs on a technology system known as the ethereum blockchain, is worth over ten times the price it was when it bottomed during the COVID market panic of March 2020. And the cryptocurrency is still only five years old. In part, this remarkable rise in the value is due to excess money flowing into…

Who owns your face? Of course, a silly question … right? But what about the data generated from your face? And what does it mean to have your face become data? Facial recognition is a technology you should be aware of. Already, plenty of data about millions and millions of faces exist. We have volunteered our faces in social media posts and photos stored in the cloud. But we’ve yet to determine who owns the data associated with the contours of our faces. In the age of Big Tech, we need to grapple with what expectations we can and should have about…

We’ve probably all been there. We buy some new smart gadget and when we plug it in for the first time it requires an update to work. So we end up spending hours downloading and updating before we can even play with our new toy. But what happens when we can’t update our gadgets any further? Vintage technology Every year vendors such as Apple and Google add to their list of vintage devices that no longer get operating system or security updates. For example, owners of the Pixel 2 smartphone (released by Google in 2017) were told in late 2020 they would no longer receive…