Author: The Conversation

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…

You’ll be hearing a great deal about artificial intelligence (AI) and education in 2025. The UK government unveiled its “AI opportunities action plan” in mid-January. As part of the plan it has awarded funding of £1 million (about US$1.2 million) to 16 educational technology companies to “build teacher AI tools for feedback and marking, driving high and rising education standards”. Schools in some US states are testing AI tools in their classrooms. A Moroccan university has become the first in Africa to introduce an AI-powered learning system across the institution. And the theme for this year’s United Nations International Day of Education, observed annually on 24 January, is…

The Brutalist has drawn attention this week for its use of artificial intelligence (AI) to refine some of the actors’ dialogue. Emilia Pérez, a musical crime comedy, also used AI to extend lead star Karla Sofía Gascón’s vocal range. Her singing voice was blended with that of French popstar Camille, who co-wrote the film. Earlier this month, Adrien Brody won the Golden Globe for Best Male Actor for The Brutalist for his portrayal of the fictional Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor László Tóth. He is a favourite to win the award at the Oscars, and Emilia Pérez is also a strong contender this awards…

The U.S.’s return to the Moon with NASA’s Artemis program will not be a mere stroll in the park. Instead it will be a perilous journey to a lunar location representing one of the most extreme environments in the solar system. For the Artemis program astronauts, walking on the Moon will require new ways of thinking, the latest technology and innovative approaches to improve boot and spacesuit design. The Apollo program’s journeys to the Moon 50 years ago were all to the milder, equatorial regions of the lunar surface, where the coolest temperatures reached -9 degrees Fahrenheit (-23 degrees Celsius). In contrast, the Artemis missions are designed to…