Author: The Conversation

Elon Musk’s recent rebranding of Twitter as X is a step toward the CEO’s goal of developing an “everything app.” Musk’s vision is for X to mark the spot for all your digital needs – to chat with your friends, order groceries, watch videos and manage your finances, all on one platform. His recent announcement might have left you wondering what an everything app is and whether you need really one. If everything apps are so great, why isn’t there one that’s widely used in the U.S. already? As someone who studies how consumers use social media and what that means for digital marketing, I find the…

Neurotechnologies – devices that interact directly with the brain or nervous system – were once dismissed as the stuff of science fiction. Not anymore. Several companies are trying to develop brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, in hopes of helping patients with severe paralysis or other neurological disorders. Entrepreneur Elon Musk’s company Neuralink, for example, recently received Food and Drug Administration approval to begin human testing for a tiny brain implant that can communicate with computers. There are also less invasive neurotechnologies, like EEG headsets that sense electrical activity inside the wearer’s brain, covering a wide range of applications from entertainment and wellness to education and the workplace. Neurotechnology research and…

The universe we live in is a transparent one, where light from stars and galaxies shines bright against a clear, dark backdrop. But this wasn’t always the case – in its early years, the universe was filled with a fog of hydrogen atoms that obscured light from the earliest stars and galaxies. The intense ultraviolet light from the first generations of stars and galaxies is thought to have burned through the hydrogen fog, transforming the universe into what we see today. While previous generations of telescopes lacked the ability to study those early cosmic objects, astronomers are now using the James…

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has been in the news, most recently concerning the Hollywood actors’ strike about the potential impact of AI in filmmaking. Another story involved AI being used to replicate the voice of the Canadian rapper Drake in a track that went viral. These stories raise questions about performers’ rights, and also lead people to wonder: will AI replace artists? These questions are also germane given recent advances in generative artificial intelligence trained on a vast amount of existing images that have been used to create new images based only on user-provided prompts. I am a composer who has used creative AI in my music and sound…

The bitter conflict between actors, writers and other creative professionals and the major movie and TV studios represents a flashpoint in the radical transformation roiling the entertainment industry. The ongoing strikes by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild were sparked in part by artificial intelligence and its use in the movie industry. Both actors and writers fear that the major studios, including Amazon/MGM, Apple, Disney/ABC/Fox, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Paramount/CBS, Sony, Warner Bros. and HBO, will use generative AI to exploit them. Generative AI is a form of artificial intelligence that learns from text and images to automatically produce new written and visual…

We live at a time when universities and colleges are facing multiplying crises, pressures and changes. From the COVID-19 pandemic and budgetary pressures to generative artificial intelligence (AI) and climate catastrophe, the future of higher education seems murky and fragmented — even gloomy. Student mental health is in crisis. University faculty in our own research from the early days of the pandemic told us that they were “juggling with a blindfold on.” Since that time, we’ve also heard many echo the sentiment of feeling they’re “constantly drowning,” something recounted by researchers writing about a sense of precarity in universities in New…

Asteroids are chunks of rock left over from the formation of our Solar System. Approximately half a billion asteroids with sizes greater than four metres in diameter orbit the Sun, travelling through our Solar System at speeds up to about 30 kilometres per second – about the same speed as Earth. Asteroids are certainly good at capturing the public imagination. This follows many Hollywood movies imagining the destruction they could cause if a big one hits Earth. Almost every week we see online headlines describing asteroids the size of a “bus”, “truck”, “vending machine”, “half the size of a giraffe”, or indeed a whole giraffe.…

In the Netflix documentary “The Tinder Swindler,” victims exposed notorious con artist Simon Leviev, who posed as a wealthy diamond mogul on the popular dating app Tinder to deceive and scam numerous women out of millions of dollars. Leviev is a flashy example of a dating scammer, but criminal operations also prey on emotionally vulnerable people to gain their trust and exploit them financially. The internet has revolutionized dating, and there has been a surge in U.S. adults using apps to find ideal matches post-pandemic. While these apps offer convenience for connecting with romantic partners, they also open the door to online romance…

Several African countries are pursuing digital transformation ambitions – applying new technologies to enhance the development of society. But concerns exist over the absence of appropriate policies across the continent to create a resilient and secure cyber environment. Nnenna Ifeanyi-Ajufo, a technology law expert, explains the current cyber governance situation in Africa. What is cyber governance and why is it so important? Cyber governance is an important aspect of the international cybersecurity strategy for preventing and mitigating cyber threats. It features oversight processes, decision-making hierarchies and international cooperation. It also includes systems for accountability and responsible state behaviour in cyberspace. In…

There’s no question that sending human beings to space is an extraordinarily difficult and perilous proposition. Since human space exploration began just over 60 years ago, 20 people have died – 14 in the NASA space shuttle tragedies of 1986 and 2003, three cosmonauts during the 1971 Soyuz 11 mission, and three astronauts in the Apollo 1 launch pad fire in 1967. Given how complicated human spaceflight is, it’s actually remarkable how few people have lost their lives so far. But NASA plans to send a crew to the Moon in 2025 and astronauts to Mars in the next decade. Commercial spaceflight is becoming routine. As space travel becomes…