Author: The Conversation

Bitcoin continues to trade close to its all-time high reached this month. Its price recently reached around US $34,000 — up about 77% over the past month and 305% over the past year. First launched in 2009 as a digital currency, Bitcoin was for a while used as digital money on the fringes of the economy. It has since become mainstream. Today, it’s used almost exclusively as a kind of “digital gold”. That is to say, a scarce digital asset. In response to the risk of economic collapse due to COVID, governments around the world have flooded global markets with money created…

What is the cost of propaganda, misinformation and conspiracy theories? Democracy and public safety, to name just two things. The United States has received a stark lesson on how online propaganda and misinformation have an offline impact. For months, Donald Trump has falsely claimed the November presidential election was rigged and that’s why he wasn’t re-elected. The president’s words have mirrored and fed conspiracy theories spread by followers of the QAnon movement. While conspiracy theorists are often dismissed as “crazy people on social media,” QAnon adherents were among the individuals at the front line of the storming of Capitol Hill.…

Spotify offered the promise that, in the age of digital downloads, all artists would get paid for their music, and some would get paid a lot. Lorde and Billie Eilish showed what was possible. Lorde was just 16 when, in 2012, she uploaded her debut EP to SoundCloud. A few months later, Sean Parker (of Napster and Facebook fame) put her first single — “Royals” — on his popular Spotify Hipster International playlist. The song has sold more than 10 million copies. Eilish’s rags-to-riches story is a little murkier. But the approved narrative begins in 2015, when the 13-year-old uploaded “Ocean Eyes” (a…

Space exploration achieved several notable firsts in 2020 despite the COVID-19 pandemic, including commercial human spaceflight and returning samples of an asteroid to Earth. The coming year is shaping up to be just as interesting. Here are some of the upcoming space missions to keep an eye out for. Artemis 1 Artemis 1 is the first flight of the Nasa-led, international Artemis program to return astronauts to the Moon by 2024. This will consist of an uncrewed Orion spacecraft which will be sent on a three-week flight around the Moon. IT will reach a maximum distance from Earth of 450,000km – the farthest into space that…

Recently, when I opened Instagram, I noticed that the usual spot for checking notifications is now a Shop tab. The Instagram blog post announcing the redesign said that the change will support small businesses and connect people with their favorite brands and creators. This made me pause. As a researcher who studies social media, people and society, I’m concerned about the effects of surveillance capitalism. This includes social media companies profiting from collecting user data, making algorithmic inferences about people’s preferences and using this information to target people with advertising. Features like Instagram’s Shop tab facilitate surveillance capitalism, so it’s important to look at…

In Lewis Carroll’s Victorian classic Through the Looking-Glass, Alice steps through a mirror into a world that is a reflection of the one she already exists in. This fictional account of a familiar yet topsy-turvy reality resonates with our lived experiences during the pandemic, where we must navigate work, school and leisure through a screen. Using our combined observations of hundreds of Zoom meetings and scholarly insights from the fields of anthropology and psychology, we explore these questions to consider the transformative impact of digital platforms on our work environments and identities. As the legendary Aretha Franklin asks, “who’s zoomin’ who,”…

Have you been hitting the gym again with COVID restrictions easing? Or getting back into running, cycling, or playing team sports? As many of you might’ve experienced, the inevitable muscle soreness that comes after a break can be a tough barrier to overcome. Here’s what causes this muscle soreness, and how best to manage it. What is muscle soreness and why does it occur? Some muscle soreness after a workout is normal. But it can be debilitating and deter you from further exercise. The scientific term used to describe these aches is delayed onset muscle soreness, or DOMS, which results from…

The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clearer than ever that we are at risk of losing control of our economies. Our institutions have increasingly struggled to meet the challenges of economic development before the crisis, and yet throughout the pandemic we’ve seen surging stock market valuations of tech giants — including staggering CEO salaries — the inability of anti-trust regulators, particularly in the United States, to effectively regulate markets and the rise of China’s tech companies. Tech giants are not just surviving the pandemic; they’re thriving. The superstar economy What’s known as the superstar economy is one with a few hyper-productive, gigantic and highly profitable companies. Superstar firms such as…

Astronomers have mapped about a million previously undiscovered galaxies beyond the Milky Way, in the most detailed survey of the southern sky ever carried out using radio waves. The Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey (or RACS) has placed the CSIRO’s Australian SKA Pathfinder radio telescope (ASKAP) firmly on the international astronomy map. While past surveys have taken years to complete, ASKAP’s RACS survey was conducted in less than two weeks — smashing previous records for speed. Data gathered have produced images five times more sensitive and twice as detailed as previous ones. What is radio astronomy? Modern astronomy is a multi-wavelength enterprise. What do we…

NASA is planning to land a crew on the Moon by 2024, and then onward to Mars, possibly in the 2030s. One day, we will have permanently crewed bases on both worlds. Unlike the initial short-stay visits, long-term bases will have to be self sufficient in as many essentials as possible. A lot of research has gone into preparing for In Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) that could help to build and sustain a lunar base. Now, similar ideas for Mars are catching up, with a new study, published in PNAS, suggesting a way to use the brine (salty water) found on Mars to make breathable air…