Author: The Conversation

The walking, talking, dancing Optimus robots at the recent Tesla demonstration generated huge excitement. But this turned to disappointment as it became apparent that much of what was happening was actually being controlled remotely by humans. As much as this might still be a fascinating glimpse of the future, it’s not the first time that robots have turned out to be a little too good to be true. Take Sophia, for instance, the robot created by Texas-based Hanson Robotics back in 2016. She was presented by the company as essentially an intelligent being, prompting numerous tech specialists to call this out as well beyond our capabilities at the time. Similarly, we’ve…

Discovering extraterrestrial life would be one of the most profound scientific and philosophical revelations that our species has ever made. But such a big discovery won’t come easy. Our starting point is to first search other worlds for signs of habitability, that is, the potential for life to exist. NASA is doing just that: launching a spacecraft on October 10 to Europa, a moon of Jupiter holding twice the water of all Earth’s oceans combined. Europa’s ocean is between 60 and 150 kilometres deep and is hidden beneath an outer shell of ice that’s 15 to 25 kilometres thick. The evidence for an…

South Africa’s state-owned electricity company, Eskom, has applied to the National Energy Regulator of South Africa to approve a 36.1% electricity price hike from April 2025, an 11.8% price increase in 2026 and a 9.1% increase in 2027. Steven Mathetsa teaches and researches sustainable energy systems at the University of the Witwatersrand’s African Energy Leadership Centre. He explains some of the problems with the planned tariff increase. Why such a big hike? Eskom says the multi-year price increase is because of the need to move closer a cost-reflective tariff that reflects the actual costs of supplying electricity. However, Eskom’s electricity tariff increases have been exorbitant…

From the mind-bending reality warps of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) to the breathtaking alien vistas of Avatar: The Way of Water (2022), visual effects have transported us to worlds beyond imagination. Yet the future of visual effects (VFX) could hang in the balance as artificial intelligence is subsumed into screen production processes. Lionsgate’s recent partnership with AI startup Runway has sparked controversy in the visual effects industry. By allowing Runway to train AI on Lionsgate’s vast film and TV catalogue, the collaboration promises increased efficiency and financial savings – but at what cost? Growing apprehension among workers According to a research report published in…

In recent decades, we’ve learnt huge amounts about the universe and its history. The rapidly developing technology of telescopes – both on Earth and in space – has been a key part of this process, and those that are due to start operating over the next two decades should push the boundaries of our understanding of cosmology much further. All observatories have a list of science objectives before they switch on, but it is their unexpected discoveries that can have the biggest impact. Many surprise advances in cosmology were driven by new technology, and the next telescopes have powerful capabilities. Still, there are gaps,…

It’s now almost two years since Elon Musk concluded his takeover of Twitter (now called X) on 27 October 2022. Since then, the platform has become an increasingly polarised and divisive space. Musk promised to deal with some issues that had already frustrated users, particularly bots, abuse and misinformation. In 2023, he said there was less misinformation on the platform because of his efforts to tackle the bots. But others disagree, claiming that misinformation is still rife there. A potential reaction to this may be apparent in recent data highlighted by the Financial Times, which showed the number of UK users of the platform had…

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a shift towards the use of social media platforms in teaching. The South African Department of Basic Education, for one, instructed all schools to adopt online teaching and learning to save the 2020 school year, disrupted by the pandemic and the forced closure of schools. It is getting clearer that this shift towards technology use will continue. Some researchers have noted that it has also put the focus of the learning process more on students than on teachers. Young people aged between 15 and 24 usually attend secondary school or higher education institutions and use social media. Incorporating social…

Just as calculators took over the tedious number-crunching in maths a few decades ago, artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming coding. Take Kyo, an eight-year-old boy in Singapore who developed a simple platform game in just two hours, attracting over 500,000 players. Using nothing but simple instructions in English, Kyo brought his vision to life by leveraging the coding app Cursor and also Claude, a general-purpose AI. Although his dad is a coder, Kyo didn’t get any help from him to design the game and has no formal coding education himself. He went on to build another game, an animation app, a drawing app…

The United States’ most senior public health official, surgeon-general Vivek Murthy, believes social media platforms should come with warning labels. The United Nations’ education, science and culture agency says smartphones should be banned in schools. Chinese regulators are pushing to limit children’s smartphone use to just two hours a day. These are just a few high-profile examples of growing global concerns about the risks young people face when using the internet. Those worries are backed by a large, global body of research. Social media use has been linked to feelings of envy, depression and anxiety among young people all over the world, including those in African countries. This evidence can make for depressing…

NASA plans to send crewed missions to Mars over the next decade – but the 140 million-mile (225 million-kilometer) journey to the red planet could take several months to years round trip. This relatively long transit time is a result of the use of traditional chemical rocket fuel. An alternative technology to the chemically propelled rockets the agency develops now is called nuclear thermal propulsion, which uses nuclear fission and could one day power a rocket that makes the trip in just half the time. Nuclear fission involves harvesting the incredible amount of energy released when an atom is split by a neutron. This reaction is known as…