Author: The Conversation

In the few short years since the COVID pandemic changed our world, China, Japan and India have all successfully landed on the Moon. Many more robotic missions have flown past the Moon, entered lunar orbit, or crashed into it in the past five years. This includes spacecraft developed by South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, and an Israeli not-for-profit organisation. Late last week, the American company Intuitive Machines, in collaboration with NASA, celebrated “America’s return to the Moon” with a successful landing of its Odysseus spacecraft. Recent Chinese-built sample return missions are far more complex than this project. And didn’t NASA ferry a dozen humans…

In 2009, an Air France jet crashed into the ocean, leaving no survivors. The plane’s autopilot system shut down and the pilots, having become reliant on their computerised assistant, were unable to correct the situation manually. In 2015, a bus driver in Europe typed the wrong destination into his GPS device and cheerfully took a group of Belgian tourists on a 1,200 kilometre detour in the wrong direction. In 2017, in a decision later overturned on appeal, US prosecutors who had agreed to release a teenager on probation abruptly changed their minds because an algorithm ruled the defendant “high risk”. These are dramatic examples, but…

In today’s interconnected world, space technology forms the backbone of our global communication, navigation and security systems. Satellites orbiting Earth are pivotal for everything from GPS navigation to international banking transactions, making them indispensable assets in our daily lives and in global infrastructure. However, as our dependency on these celestial guardians escalates, so too does their allure to adversaries who may seek to compromise their functionality through cyber means. A satellite’s service could be interrupted, or at worst the spacecraft could be disabled. The expansion of the digital realm into space has opened new frontiers for cyber threats, posing unprecedented challenges. This…

A class-action lawsuit filed in the United States against Match Group – the parent company of dating apps Tinder, Hinge and The League – is making headlines around the world. The claimants accuse Match of having a “predatory” business model and using “recognised dopamine-manipulating product features” to get people addicted to their apps. So, can dating apps really be addictive? Are we swiping right into a trap? Here’s the science behind how dating apps are influencing our brains. How do apps give us a dopamine hit? Dating apps, like many apps these days, are designed to keep users engaged. Like any…

People in palliative care are dealing with serious, non-curable illnesses. Every day can be filled with severe physical, psychological and emotional pain. Palliative care staff work hard to help make patients as comfortable as possible and provide strong emotional support. Meaningful activities can help but patients often aren’t well enough to do the things they really love, such as travel. We wondered whether virtual reality (VR) could help. To find out, we supported 16 palliative care patients in an acute ward to do three 20-minute VR sessions, and asked them how they felt before and after each one. Our study,…

As misinformation and radicalisation rise, it’s tempting to look for something to blame: the internet, social media personalities, sensationalised political campaigns, religion, or conspiracy theories. And once we’ve settled on a cause, solutions usually follow: do more fact-checking, regulate advertising, ban YouTubers deemed to have “gone too far”. However, if these strategies were the whole answer, we should already be seeing a decrease in people being drawn into fringe communities and beliefs, and less misinformation in the online environment. We’re not. In new research published in the Journal of Sociology, we and our colleagues found radicalisation is a process of increasingly…

Leanne Manas is a familiar face on South African televisions. Towards the end of 2023 the morning news presenter’s face showed up somewhere else: in bogus news stories and fake advertisements in which “she” appeared to promote various products or get-rich-quick schemes. It quickly emerged that Manas had fallen victim to “deepfaking”. Deepfakes involve the use of artificial intelligence tools to manipulate images, video and audio. And it doesn’t require cutting-edge technical know-how. Software like FaceSwap and ZaoApp, which can be downloaded for free, mean that anybody can create deepfakes. Deepfakes were initially used in the entertainment industry. For example, an actress in France who…

Given the huge problem-solving potential of artificial intelligence (AI), it wouldn’t be far-fetched to think that AI could also help us in tackling the climate crisis. However, when we consider the energy needs of AI models, it becomes clear that the technology is as much a part of the climate problem as a solution. The emissions come from the infrastructure associated with AI, such as building and running the data centres that handle the large amounts of information required to sustain these systems. But different technological approaches to how we build AI systems could help reduce its carbon footprint. Two technologies…

Imagine you’re driving to work on a rainy day, when a distracted, reckless driver hits your car out of nowhere. With a “boom,” an air bag deploys faster than you can blink your eyes to save your life. That air bag deployed rapidly thanks to an energetic material called sodium azide, which generates nitrogen gas during a chemical reaction to inflate your airbag. But what’s an energetic material? Energetic materials include propellants, pyrotechnics, fuels and explosives, and they’re used in all sorts of settings. Uses of energetic materials include flares, matches, solid rocket boosters, gun propellants, hot thermite welding used to fuse materials together, fireworks and the explosive special effects in your favorite…

I used to love rocket launches when I was younger. During every launch, I imagined what it would feel like to be an astronaut sitting in the spacecraft, listening to that final countdown and then feeling multiple gees push me up through the atmosphere and away from our blue marble. But as I learned more about the severe limitations of human spaceflight, I turned my attention to the oldest and most accessible form of space exploration: the science of astronomy. Since 2019, I’ve watched my unencumbered enthusiasm for rocket launches soften to tepid interest, and finally sour to outright dread. The corporate…