Author: The Conversation

Imagining future cities has long been a favourite activity for architects, artists and designers. Technology is often central in these schemes – it appears as a dynamic and seemingly unstoppable force, providing a neat solution to society’s problems. But our recent research has suggested that we need to significantly rethink the way we imagine future cities, and move our focus from an overarching technological vision to other priorities, such as environmental sustainability and the need to tackle social inequalities. We need to answer questions about what can be sustained and what cannot, where cities can be located and where they cannot, and…

Since time immemorial, humans have been fascinated by the night sky. Our relationship with it was forever changed in the early 1600s, when Galileo Galilei raised a small hand-held telescope to the sky and became the first person to see Jupiter’s moons and Saturn’s rings. Optical telescopes today range from pocket telescopes just a few inches long, to the colossal Thirty Meter Telescope being built in Hawaii (which will weigh more than 1,400 tonnes). There are even bigger arrays of telescopes that observe in radio wavelengths, such as the Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (SKAP) radio telescope. These large telescopes used for research don’t have…

Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series is one of the world’s best-selling video game series. Featuring settings ranging from Ancient Greece to the French revolution, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, released last month, takes the player into the mind of Evior, a viking raider who invades England. Little about Assassin’s Creed is unique or new: many games feature historical settings, with or without time travel; there are countless third-person action and action role playing games — and the entire video game industry is preoccupied with making each game look and sound better than the last. Even Assassin’s Creed’s signature stealth action gameplay, which allows the player to sneak…

Private company SpaceX launched SN8, a prototype of its Starship spacecraft, designed to go to the Moon and Mars, on December 10. Its short flight attracted a great deal of attention for it’s final few seconds before landing – when it exploded. But consider the near perfect totality of its six-and-a-half-minute flight. Look at the groundbreaking technology and manoeuvres involved. It is reasonable to view this as a hugely successful test. Ordinary spacecraft return to Earth by using the “aerodynamic drag” in the atmosphere to slow their re-entry. Decelerating from 20,000 mph dissipates a lot of heat which is why they carry heat shields,…

Many eight- to 12-year-olds are now heavy users of social media such as Instagram and Snapchat – even though most platforms require users to be 13 or over. However, concern over young people’s use of social media tends to focus on older teenagers or young adults – rather than this preteen or “tween” group – and concentrates on specific issues such as cyberbullying or sexting. My new research investigated tweens’ perceptions of social media and the issues they face when engaging with using these platforms. It reveals that while children are aware of dangers such as online predators, what tweens are being taught by parents and schools…

One of the central technologies of artificial intelligence is neural networks. In this interview, Tam Nguyen, a professor of computer science at the University of Dayton, explains how neural networks, programs in which a series of algorithms try to simulate the human brain work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqAw9OpuE9c&feature=emb_logo Tam Nguyen explains neural networks. What are some examples of neural networks that are familiar to most people? There are many applications of neural networks. One common example is your smartphone camera’s ability to recognize faces. Driverless cars are equipped with multiple cameras which try to recognize other vehicles, traffic signs and pedestrians by using neural networks, and…

Sensors are all around. They are in automatic doors, at cash registers, in doctors’ offices and hospitals. They are used inside the body and outside. Sensors detect aspects of the physical world – matter, energy, force – similarly to a person’s or animal’s senses. But instead of translating the information into nerve impulses, sensors translate them into electrical signals. The signals can be stored, processed on a computer or displayed on a screen. They can be a current or voltage that is constant or varying with time. Sensors answer many important questions such as how well-inflated are a car’s tires, whether ice…

What is your idea of an asteroid? Many people think of them as potato-shaped, inert and perhaps rather dull, pock-marked objects – far away in deep space. But over the last ten years, two Japanese space missions – Hayabusa and now Hayabusa 2 – have dispatched that view to the history books. Asteroids are interesting bodies that may be able to explain how life on Earth came about. The Japanese Space Agency, JAXA, has brought back samples to Earth from the 1km-wide asteroid Ryugu – touching down on December 6 at in South Australia. The first Hayabusa craft returned samples from asteroid Itokawa in 2010, which like Ryugu orbit…

During the first UK lockdown I received an email from my son’s primary school with a list of webcams we might enjoy having a look at. We particularly enjoyed watching and identifying the animals at a particular African watering hole that we could watch, live, online. I continued exploring this world of live-streamed place-based webcams, something I had previously overlooked. I was fascinated by those focusing on city centres, which revealed largely deserted urban landscapes. I left nature-cams and coastal webcams open on my PC monitor as welcome distractions as I worked from home. They offered me a portal to the outside…

Experienced outdoor athletes know that with winter rapidly approaching, the secret to success lies in protecting the core. That is, the body’s core temperature through layering, wicking and a host of ever-improving technical fabrics that prevent the cold, snow and ice from affecting performance. The same could be said for cybersecurity. With organizations and workers now in their ninth month of COVID-19, the time has come to prepare as the threat of cyberattacks becomes even more menacing. Cybersecurity experts predict that in 2021, there will be a cyberattack incident every 11 seconds. This is nearly twice what it was in 2019 (every…