Author: The Conversation

NASA has set its sights on the Moon, aiming to send astronauts back to the lunar surface by 2026 and establish a long-term presence there by the 2030s. But the Moon isn’t exactly a habitable place for people. Cosmic rays from distant stars and galaxies and solar energetic particles from the Sun bombard the surface, and exposure to these particles can pose a risk to human health. Both galactic cosmic rays and solar energetic particles, are high-energy particles that travel close to the speed of light. While galactic cosmic radiation trickles toward the Moon in a relatively steady stream, energetic particles can come from the Sun in big…

Astronomers, maybe more than anyone, appreciate what an island of perfection our Earth is. Our orbit may put us at a perfect distance from the sun for life to flourish, but it is too small to easily help astronomers determine how big the universe is. Late Renaissance scholar Nicolaus Copernicus suggested that the Earth orbits the sun in 1543, but it took 300 years to prove it. In 1838, a nearby star appeared to wobble because our viewpoint on Earth was moving due to our planet being in orbit around the sun. Such apparent motion is called “parallax.” We can use only indirect means…

Across the African continent, more than 300 new hydropower projects are planned to meet the growing demand for electricity. Some of these will require big dams, which can have major negative environmental impacts. Another looming problem with hydropower is that the water cycle is affected by climate change. Water availability will be reduced and become more variable in some locations in the next decades. We are a team of environmental and energy systems researchers. Energy systems is the study of how energy can be produced to meet the demands of the different sectors of society. Environmental systems modelling is used to simulate the natural environment…

From government documents to news reports, commerce, music and social interactions, much of the world’s information is now online. Google, founded in 1998 with the mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” is the way we access this torrent of knowledge and culture. In April 2024, Google’s search engine accounted for 90 per cent of the Canadian search market. For academics, its specialized Google Scholar and Google Books are mainstays of our research lives. However, while Google Search is an essential infrastructure, Google itself is recklessly sabotaging it in socially damaging ways that demand a strong regulatory response. Re-imagining search…

Earth is constantly bombarded by fragments of rock and ice, also known as meteoroids, from outer space. Most of the meteoroids are as tiny as grains of sand and small pebbles, and they completely burn up high in the atmosphere. You can see meteoroids larger than about a golf ball when they light up as meteors or shooting stars on a dark, clear night. While very small meteoroids are common, larger ones – bigger than a dishwasher – are not. Meteoroids are difficult objects for aerospace and geophysics researchers like us to study, because we can’t usually predict when and where they will hit the atmosphere.…

If you have used Google lately and been lucky – or unlucky – enough to encounter an answer to your query rather than a bunch of links, you have been subjected to something called AI Overviews. This is a new core feature that Google has been rolling out, a move widely anticipated since the company’s experiments with its LaMDA large language model in 2021, and since OpenAI’s ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot rocketed to prominence in 2023. This feature is yet another addition to the increasing number of add-ons and tools being integrated into search engines like Google. Some of the notable examples include knowledge graph-driven knowledge…

At some point in your life, you are likely to need legal advice. A survey carried out in 2023 by the Law Society, the Legal Services Board and YouGov found that two-thirds of respondents had experienced a legal issue in the past four years. The most common problems were employment, finance, welfare and benefits and consumer issues. But not everyone can afford to pay for legal advice. Of those survey respondents with legal problems, only 52% received professional help, 11% had assistance from other people such as family and friends and the remainder received no help at all. Many people turn to…

Over the past decade, a new form of scepticism about human activities in space has emerged. It seems to be based exclusively in the Western world and centred around the idea that increasingly ambitious space plans will damage humanity and neglect the Earth. In China, things are different, but this will likely change eventually. Our best data, a survey published in 2020 by Lincoln Hines, shows remarkably high levels of support for space programmes in China. This is in spite of the costs, the occasional debris falling from the sky and memory of the deadly Xichang Disaster in 1996 when a Long March 3B…

Artificial intelligence is going to transform how we date. The question is: will it be for better or worse? It’s already causing some real problems, especially related to “romance scams” and other fraud. But it’s not all doom and gloom. Used in the right way, AI can actually make dating better. It can help write profiles and find matches, provide dating advice and coaching and, if all else fails, become a date companion. I have spent the last few years studying the impact of technology, and especially AI, on our romantic lives. And I think this is an exciting time to be single…

When astronomers turn our radio telescopes out towards space, we sometimes detect sporadic bursts of radio waves originating from across the vast expanse of the universe. We call them “radio transients”: some erupt only once, never to be seen again, and others flicker on and off in predictable patterns. We think most radio transients come from rotating neutron stars known as pulsars, which emit regular flashes of radio waves, like cosmic lighthouses. Typically, these neutron stars spin at incredible speeds, taking mere seconds or even a fraction of a second to complete each rotation. Recently, we discovered a radio transient…