Author: The Conversation

The pursuit of nuclear fusion as a clean, sustainable energy source represents one of the most challenging scientific and engineering goals of our time. Fusion promises nearly limitless energy without carbon emissions or long-living radioactive waste. However, achieving practical fusion energy requires overcoming significant challenges. These come from the heat generated by the fusion process, the radiation produced, the progressive damage to materials used in fusion devices and other engineering hurdles. Fusion systems operate under extreme physical conditions, generating data at scales that surpass the ability of humans to analyse. Nuclear fusion is the form of energy that powers the Sun. Existing nuclear…

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, like chatbots, are attracting growing scrutiny for their voracious energy demands. However, energy consumption is only one part of their broader environmental impact. Late last year, ChatGPT, the popular AI chatbot run by OpenAI, celebrated its second birthday. In its brief existence, the platform has amassed over 300 million weekly users who send roughly one billion messages to the chatbot per day. With US$6.6 billion raised in its last funding round, OpenAI has emerged as one of the most valuable private companies in the world. Soaring emissions Elsewhere in tech, other companies marked less savoury milestones. Alphabet —…

Almost US$600 billion was wiped off the value of artificial intelligence (AI) microchip maker Nvidia overnight on Monday, when a little-known Chinese startup, DeepSeek, threatened to upend the US tech market. While Nvidia suffered the biggest one-day loss in sharemarket history, other tech giants – Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon, who are investing heavily in competing AI tools including ChatGPT and Gemini – were also hit. The rout was caused by investors’ shock at the claimed performance of DeepSeek’s new R1 chatbot. The Chinese AI was reported to be more advanced than its competitors and less expensive to develop. DeepSeek R1 has…

Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepSeek has sent shockwaves through the tech community, with the release of extremely efficient AI models that can compete with cutting-edge products from US companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Founded in 2023, DeepSeek has achieved its results with a fraction of the cash and computing power of its competitors. DeepSeek’s “reasoning” R1 model, released last week, provoked excitement among researchers, shock among investors, and responses from AI heavyweights. The company followed up on January 28 with a model that can work with images as well as text. deepseek’s r1 is an impressive model, particularly around what they’re able…

You may not know it, but right now there’s a huge cosmic rave party happening far, far above our heads. The chief partygoers are known as supermassive black holes. These mysterious objects can have masses several million or billion times that of the Sun and are so dense that they warp space-time around them. As far as astronomers know, all galaxies harbour a supermassive black hole at their very centres. In some galaxies, large amounts of interstellar gas are spiralling around the supermassive black hole and getting pulled in beyond the event horizon and essentially on to the black hole. This process…

A hundred years ago, astronomer Edwin Hubble dramatically expanded the size of the known universe. At a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in January 1925, a paper read by one of his colleagues on his behalf reported that the Andromeda nebula, also called M31, was nearly a million light-years away – too remote to be a part of the Milky Way. Hubble’s work opened the door to the study of the universe beyond our galaxy. In the century since Hubble’s pioneering work, astronomers like me have learned that the universe is vast and contains trillions of galaxies. Nature of the nebulae In 1610, astronomer…

Director Brady Corbet’s stunning new film, The Brutalist, has won three Golden Globes and remains a frontrunner for this year’s Oscars despite a controversy over its use of AI which erupted this week. (The film has received 10 Oscar nominations, including best film, best director and best actor.) The growing backlash centres on whether the film should have used AI to improve the Hungarian accents of its stars, Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones. Many of today’s actors are superb at delivering accents – like American Renée Zellweger’s perfect English in Bridget Jones, or British actor Idris Elba’s Baltimore accent in The Wire or Australian Margot…

Scientific and commercial activities on the Moon could permanently change the lunar environment. These activities include sending vehicles to the Moon, extracting its resources through mining the lunar surface, building facilities and extracting water from areas on the Moon where sunlight never shines. However, an organisation called the World Monuments Fund (WMF) is attempting to protect the Moon from being despoiled by adding it to its list of monuments worth protecting. The non-profit, based in New York, is dedicated to safeguarding the world’s heritage. Working with local governments, they have protected more than 700 sites in 112 countries including many Unesco world heritage sites. The WMF highlights almost…

Picture this: a rugby player sprints down the pitch with no opponent in sight, only to collapse mid-run. It’s a non-contact injury, a frustrating and often preventable setback that can sideline players for weeks or months. Rugby is a game of power, precision and relentless intensity – and it’s also a sport where injuries are ever-present. But imagine a tool that could predict injuries before they happen, giving coaches the chance to intervene and keep players in the game. That’s the potential end-point of our latest research into AI and rugby injury. Non-contact injuries to the legs account for nearly 50% of player absences in…

The rapid spread of artificial intelligence has people wondering: who’s most likely to embrace AI in their daily lives? Many assume it’s the tech-savvy – those who understand how AI works – who are most eager to adopt it. Surprisingly, our new research (published in the Journal of Marketing) finds the opposite. People with less knowledge about AI are actually more open to using the technology. We call this difference in adoption propensity the “lower literacy-higher receptivity” link. This link shows up across different groups, settings and even countries. For instance, our analysis of data from market research company Ipsos spanning 27 countries…