Author: The Conversation

It is extremely possible that you might be opting to take a road trip this December, even though travel restrictions during this pandemic are being lifted. While pandemic-era travel is a risk in any form, travelling within South Africa has the greatest chance at a positive outcome — economy stimulation, as well as no risk of being stuck outside the country for weeks. To ensure your trip is memorable in the best rather than the worst way, here are some things you and your fellow travellers can do to reduce the risk of becoming infected with, or spreading, COVID on…

Young kids believe that YouTube videos are better for learning than TV shows or videos created on a researcher’s smartphone. They also view people in YouTube videos to be more real than those on TV but less real than those featured in a researcher-created smartphone video. These are the major findings from a pre-COVID-19 study conducted in U.S. children’s museums in 2019. We asked children aged 3-8 to look at images that we told them came from YouTube, television or a researcher’s smartphone. Then, we asked them to tell us if they believed that the person in the video was real or…

The audio on the otherwise shaky body camera footage is unusually clear. As police officers search a handcuffed man who moments before had fired a shot inside a pizza parlor, an officer asks him why he was there. The man says to investigate a pedophile ring. Incredulous, the officer asks again. Another officer chimes in, “Pizzagate. He’s talking about Pizzagate.” In that brief, chilling interaction in 2016, it becomes clear that conspiracy theories, long relegated to the fringes of society, had moved into the real world in a very dangerous way. Conspiracy theories, which have the potential to cause significant harm, have found…

If you take classes online, chances are you probably procrastinate from time to time. Research shows that more than 70% of college students procrastinate, with about 20% consistently doing it all the time. Procrastination is putting off starting or finishing a task despite knowing that it will seriously compromise the quality of your work – for instance, putting off a major class project until the last minute. In fact, research has shown that procrastination can be a harmful behavior that lowers a student’s grades. Now that so many colleges and universities are operating remotely because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we worry that students are more…

Daniel Bliss is a professor of electrical engineering at Arizona State University and the director of the Center for Wireless Information Systems and Computational Architecture. In this interview, he explains the ideas behind the original cellular networks and how they evolved over the years into today’s 5G (fifth generation) and even 6G (sixth generation) networks. How did wireless phones work before cellular technology? The idea of wireless communications is quite old. Famously, the Marconi system could talk all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. It would have one system, which was the size of a building, talking to another system, which was…

I walk outside my rural Saskatchewan house before dawn and look up, expecting to have my breath taken away by the sheer number of stars overhead. I’m a professional astronomer, but I still appreciate naked-eye stargazing as much as an eager child. This is the first place I’ve lived that’s dark enough to easily see the Milky Way, and I’m stunned and awed every time I look up. This time though, I curse softly. There’s a bright satellite. And another following behind. And another. And another. I used to be excited about seeing artificial satellites, but now I know what’s coming.…

It sounds like science fiction: giant solar power stations floating in space that beam down enormous amounts of energy to Earth. And for a long time, the concept – first developed by the Russian scientist, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, in the 1920s – was mainly an inspiration for writers. A century later, however, scientists are making huge strides in turning the concept into reality. The European Space Agency has realised the potential of these efforts and is now looking to fund such projects, predicting that the first industrial resource we will get from space is “beamed power”. Climate change is the greatest challenge of…

In the latest salvo of an almost two-decade console war between Microsoft and Sony, both Sony’s Playstation 5 and Microsoft’s Xbox Series S/X were launched last week. With increased spending on videogames due to ongoing quarantine and travel restrictions, the launches have been described as historically significant. Head of Xbox Phil Spencer tweeted: https://twitter.com/XboxP3/status/1326693095954550784? As is typical for a “next-generation” launch, both consoles sport significant boosts to computing power, support 4K graphics and offer faster performance and loading times. But unlike previous launches, they present starkly different visions for the future of video gaming. Sony continues to focus on providing exclusive content. Meanwhile, Microsoft yesterday…

Building grippers for robots that can firmly grasp heavy objects and also gently grasp delicate ones usually requires complicated sets of gears, hinges and motors. But it turns out that it’s also possible to make grippers out of simple sheets of flexible material with the right creases in them. Our lab at Arizona State University has designed curved fold patterns that can change stiffness and flexibility. Flexible materials shaped with these patterns can be used to make simple, inexpensive robotic grippers, swimming robots and other mechanical devices. People naturally vary the amount of stiffness needed to handle fragile and sturdy objects appropriately.…

The Assassin’s Creed franchise is leaping forward (off the top of a building, presumably) with the release of the 12th game in the series – Assassin’s Creed Valhalla – and the recent announcement of an upcoming Netflix show. While the games are hugely popular, we will have to hope this new show is an improvement on the 2016 film. It had great actors playing bland characters, and perfectly adequate action scenes but no discernible narrative content. Indeed, Assassin’s Creed provides a classic lesson on the difficulties of turning even an expansive, multi-dimensional gaming world into a story that’s suitable for other formats. The Assassin’s…