Author: The Conversation

Artificial intelligence (AI) has designed viruses that can infect bacteria and reproduce – a first that shows AI is beginning to do more than analyse the genetic code of living things. It can write new versions of it, too. The viruses in question are bacteriophages, or phages – viruses that infect bacteria rather than people, animals or plants. Researchers used AI to design hundreds of new versions of a well-studied phage, then built the viruses from scratch in the laboratory. Of 285 AI-designed genomes that the team tested, 16 produced working phages capable of infecting E coli. The result is an important step…

Approximately three-quarters of 393 preschool and K-12 teachers in the U.S. say they use YouTube for instructional purposes, with roughly half using it on a daily or weekly basis, according to our new nationally representative survey. Those findings come from our new research, published in June 2026 in Educational Researcher, an academic journal. Our sample included teachers from all grade levels and subject areas, and from across public, charter and private schools. Our results revealed that teachers who said they use YouTube as an instructional tool do so for a considerable amount of classroom time, alongside other common teaching methods like…

You might think about rockets as powerful vehicles that blast astronaut crews and robotic missions off into space. But what if they could be used to send cargo from one side of the Earth to the other, in a fraction of the time it would take a plane? The company SpaceX recently announced a project that aims to use its rockets to do just that. SpaceX launched its Starfall demo mission on June 23, 2026. According to a document from the Federal Aviation Administration, Starfall has two main purposes: to use rockets to quickly deliver cargo around the world, and to deliver cargo to and…

If you’re buying literature in translation online, buyer beware. You may unknowingly be buying low-quality AI-assisted translations presented as the work of a professional. Certain online retailers are being used to flood the book market with AI-assisted “translations”. Amazon is one such example, though the company seems to be aware of the problem and claims to be addressing it. I’m a published translator of French and Belgian literature and I teach literary translation to MA students. So I know from experience how much time and effort go into translation. Like many translators, I’m wary of the impact of AI on translation quality,…

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, Europe’s cartographers traded on their reputation for accuracy and detail at a time of huge societal change. But as demand grew for increasingly detailed maps of the world to support industrialisation at home and colonisation overseas, they didn’t always get it right. For over a century, the Mountains of Kong festooned maps of Africa after the Scottish surgeon and explorer Mungo Park returned from an expedition in the 1790s and described them to his cartographer, James Rennell, as a possible source for the Niger river. Rennell, who is buried in Westminster Abbey, dutifully produced two maps featuring this supposed mountain chain, extending it well beyond…

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has speculated about how long it will take for artificial intelligence to replace senior leadership teams in organisations. “Shame on me,” Altman told the Conversations with Tyler podcast in November 2025, “if OpenAI is not the first big company run by an AI CEO.” Altman is not the only one thinking about corporate robot leaders. Mark Zuckerberg has revealed he is training an AI agent to partly automate his job as the boss of Meta. The promise of an AI CEO, powered by machine learning and neural networks, is that it can streamline decision-making and improve management operations. This vision is not new:…

You search online for a pair of trainers. Minutes later, similar shoes appear on social media feeds. A shopping site offers a limited-time discount and suggests a matching jacket. This is no longer just an advert shown to millions of people. Increasingly, artificial intelligence is helping decide not only what you see, but which sales pitch is most likely to persuade you. As AI becomes more deeply embedded in online shopping, researchers like me are asking whether these systems are merely making shopping easier, or quietly encouraging us to buy far more than we need. At the same time, a growing…

Global air travel is predicted to more than double by 2050, threatening to exceed the capacity of air traffic control officers (ATCOs) to oversee our skies safely. One solution would be to recruit more controllers – but that’s not as easy as it sounds. Airspace in the UK and elsewhere is broken up into geographically and altitude-bounded sectors – with each sector normally the responsibility of one ATCO (the tactical controller) at any time. So, increasing the number of controllers to deal with a greater concentration of aircraft could require a major redesign of UK airspace. An alternative is to move beyond the current generation…

In the past ten days, two of the companies leading the artificial intelligence (AI) boom discovered their own powerful, semi-autonomous models had hacked into real-world systems during testing in four distinct incidents. These weren’t just lab mishaps. In several cases, the models recognised signs suggesting they’d broken into real systems – and only one stopped as a result. The incidents show testing advanced AI models is no longer a controlled exercise. And the companies behind them need to do more to keep AI’s most dangerous capabilities safely contained. When a test becomes reality The first report came from OpenAI, the lab behind…

Imagine receiving a message from your bank about suspicious activity on your account, only to discover that someone has accessed your personal information after an organisation you trusted suffered a data breach. Or finding that your medical records or identity details have been exposed online without your knowledge. As more South Africans use digital services for banking, healthcare, education and social media, such incidents are becoming an increasing concern. Privacy breaches involving personal information do not affect everyone equally. Some people are more vulnerable than others because of their social circumstances, limited digital literacy, economic dependence, or the sensitive nature…