Author: The Conversation

When a solar storm strikes Earth, it can disrupt technology that’s vital for our daily lives. Solar storms occur when magnetic fields and electrically charged particles collide with the Earth’s magnetic field. This type of event falls into the category known as “space weather”. The Earth is currently experiencing one of the most intense solar storms of the past two decades, reminding us of the need for ways to understand these events. An international team of researchers (including us) is working on a spacecraft mission that would enable researchers to study the conditions that create solar storms, leading to improved forecasts of…

The retirement of West Midlands police chief Craig Guildford is a wake-up call for those of us using artificial intelligence (AI) tools at work and in our personal lives. Guildford lost the confidence of the home secretary after it was revealed that the force used incorrect AI-generated evidence in their controversial decision to ban Israeli football fans from attending a match. This is a particularly egregious example, but many people may be falling victim to the same phenomenon – outsourcing the “struggle” of thinking to AI. As an expert on how new technology reshapes society and the human experience, I have observed a growing phenomenon which…

OpenAI has announced plans to introduce advertising in ChatGPT in the United States. Ads will appear on the free version and the low-cost Go tier, but not for Pro, Business, or Enterprise subscribers. The company says ads will be clearly separated from chatbot responses and will not influence outputs. It has also pledged not to sell user conversations, to let users turn off personalised ads, and to avoid ads for users under 18 or around sensitive topics such as health and politics. Still, the move has raised concerns among some users. The key question is whether OpenAI’s voluntary safeguards will hold once advertising…

People have become used to living with AI fairly quickly. ChatGPT is barely three years old, but it has changed the way many of us communicate or deal with large amounts of information. It has also led to serious concerns about jobs. For if machines become better than people at reading complex legal texts, or translating languages, or presenting arguments, won’t those old-fashioned human employees become irrelevant? Surely mass unemployment is on the horizon? Yet, when we look at the big numbers of the economy, this is not what’s happening. Unemployment in the EU is at a historical low of around 6%, half…

Consistent with the general trend of incorporating artificial intelligence into nearly every field, researchers and politicians are increasingly using AI models trained on scientific data to infer answers to scientific questions. But can AI ultimately replace scientists? The Trump administration signed an executive order on Nov. 24, 2025, that announced the Genesis Mission, an initiative to build and train a series of AI agents on federal scientific datasets “to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs.” So far, the accomplishments of these so-called AI scientists have been mixed. On the one hand, AI systems can process vast datasets and detect subtle correlations…

Autonomous vehicles have made remarkable progress over the past decade. Driverless cars and buses that once struggled to stay in lane can now navigate busy city streets, recognise pedestrians and cyclists, and respond smoothly to traffic signals. Yet one challenge remains stubbornly difficult. The hardest situations on the road are not the common ones but the rare and unpredictable events – what AI researchers call “long-tail scenarios” or “edge cases”, because they occur as outliers on any event distribution curve. Examples include unexpected roadworks, unusual behaviour from other road users, and other subtle situations where there is a very low probability…

Ransomware is a type of malicious software that makes a victim’s data, system or device inaccessible. It locks the target or encrypts it (converting text into an unreadable form) until the victim pays a ransom to the attacker. It’s one of the most widespread and damaging forms of cyberattacks affecting organisations around the world. An Interpol report identified ransomware as one of the most widespread cyber threats across Africa in 2024. South Africa reported 12,281 detections and Egypt reported 17,849. Despite global efforts to curb it, ransomware continues to thrive, driven by cybercriminals seeking quick financial gain. In its first-quarter 2025 report, global cybersecurity…

Around the turn of the century, the internet underwent a transformation dubbed “web 2.0”. The World Wide Web of the 1990s had largely been read-only: static pages, hand-built homepages, portal sites with content from a few publishers. Then came the dotcom crash of 2000 to 2001, when many heavily financed, lightly useful internet businesses collapsed. In the aftermath, surviving companies and new entrants leaned into a different logic that the author-publisher Tim O’Reilly later described as “harnessing collective intelligence”: platforms rather than pages, participation rather than passive consumption. And on January 15 2001, a website was born that seemed to encapsulate this new era.…

In the past five years, higher education has been in a seemingly endless state of disruption. In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a mass rapid pivot to emergency remote teaching. In shifting to unfamiliar digital learning environments, instructors scrambled to replicate classroom learning online. When restrictions lifted, many institutions pushed for a “return to normal,” as though the pre-pandemic educational standard was ideal. Now, with generative AI disruptions, we are seeing a similar desire to cling to an idealised vision of the modern university. AI has unsettled long-established forms of assessment, simultaneously instigating a return to older assessment models in the interest of…

In 2026, astronauts will travel around the Moon for the first time since the Apollo era, powerful new space telescopes will prepare to survey billions of galaxies, and multiple nations will launch missions aimed at finding habitable worlds, water on the Moon and clues to how our solar system formed. Together, these launches will mark a turning point in how humanity studies the universe – and how nations cooperate and compete beyond Earth. Coming from one of the world’s largest astrophysical research institutes, I can tell you, the anticipation across the global space science community is electric. Mapping the cosmos at…