Author: The Conversation

Whether it’s Facebook’s News Feed or TikTok’s For You page, social media algorithms are constantly making behind-the-scenes decisions to boost certain content – giving rise to the “curated” feeds we’ve all become accustomed to. But does anyone actually know how these algorithms work? And, more importantly, is there a way to “game” them to see more of the content you want? Optimising for engagement In broader computing terms, an algorithm is simply a set of rules that specifies a particular computational procedure. In a social media context, algorithms (specifically “recommender algorithms”) determine everything from what you’re likely to read, to…

There is a growing movement among Gen Z to do away with smartphones and revert back to “less smart” phones like old-school flip and slide phones. Flip phones were popular in the mid-1990s and 2000s, but now seem to be making a comeback among younger people. While this may seem like a counter-intuitive trend in our technology-reliant society, a Reddit forum dedicated to “dumb phones” is steadily gaining in popularity. According to a CNBC new report, flip phones sales are on the rise in the U.S. Gen Z’s interest in flip phones is the latest in a series of obsessions young people are having…

Most diamonds are formed deep inside Earth and brought close to the surface in small yet powerful volcanic eruptions of a kind of rock called “kimberlite”. Our supercomputer modelling, published in Nature Geoscience, shows these eruptions are fuelled by giant “pillars of heat” rooted 2,900 kilometres below ground, just above our planet’s core. Understanding Earth’s internal history can be used to target mineral reserves – not only diamonds, but also crucial minerals such as nickel and rare earth elements. Kimberlite and hot blobs Kimberlite eruptions leave behind a characteristic deep, carrot-shaped “pipe” of kimberlite rock, which often contains diamonds. Hundreds of these…

On March 22, 2023, thousands of researchers and tech leaders – including Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak – published an open letter calling to slow down the artificial intelligence race. Specifically, the letter recommended that labs pause training for technologies stronger than OpenAI’s GPT-4, the most sophisticated generation of today’s language-generating AI systems, for at least six months. Sounding the alarm on risks posed by AI is nothing new – academics have issued warnings about the risks of superintelligent machines for decades now. There is still no consensus about the likelihood of creating artificial general intelligence, autonomous AI systems that match or exceed humans at most economically valuable tasks. However,…

The technology to decode our thoughts is drawing ever closer. Neuroscientists at the University of Texas have for the first time decoded data from non-invasive brain scans and used them to reconstruct language and meaning from stories that people hear, see or even imagine. In a new study published in Nature Neuroscience, Alexander Huth and colleagues successfully recovered the gist of language and sometimes exact phrases from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain recordings of three participants. Technology that can create language from brain signals could be enormously useful for people who cannot speak due to conditions such as motor neurone disease. At the…

Between March 2020 and June 2022, families in Toronto experienced some of the longest lockdowns in the world. Ontario schools closed for in-person learning for over 27 weeks, longer than any other province or territory, and government restrictions on public spaces lasted for months. Parents were left to figure out how to manage work, child care and virtual school. We interviewed mothers of young children to reflect on how they managed their children’s screen media practices during this tumultuous time. Our study is part of a larger collaborative research study, with researchers in Australia, the United States, China, Colombia, South Korea and the United Kingdom.…

Silicon solar cells are an established technology for the generation of electricity from the sun. But they take a lot of energy to produce, are rigid and can be fragile. However, a new class of solar cell is matching their performance. And what’s more, it can now be printed out using special inks and wrapped flexibly around uneven surfaces. We have developed the world’s first rollable and fully printable solar cell made from perovskite, a material that is much less expensive to produce than silicon. If we can also improve their efficiency, this points to the possibility of making cheaper solar cells on…

Passwords could soon become passé. Effective passwords are cumbersome, all the more so when reinforced by two-factor authentication. But the need for authentication and secure access to websites is as great as ever. Enter passkeys. Passkeys are digital credentials stored on your phone or computer. They are analogous to physical keys. You access your passkey by signing in to your device using a personal identification number (PIN), swipe pattern or biometrics like fingerprint or face recognition. You set your online accounts to trust your phone or computer. To break into your accounts, a hacker would need to physically possess your device and have the…

Debates about AI often characterise it as a technology that has come to compete with human intelligence. Indeed, one of the most widely pronounced fears is that AI may achieve human-like intelligence and render humans obsolete in the process. However, one of the world’s top AI scientists is now describing AI as a new form of intelligence – one that poses unique risks, and will therefore require unique solutions. Geoffrey Hinton, a leading AI scientist and winner of the 2018 Turing Award, just stepped down from his role at Google to warn the world about the dangers of AI. He follows in…

The famous first image of a black hole just got two times sharper. A research team used artificial intelligence to dramatically improve upon its first image from 2019, which now shows the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy as darker and bigger than the first image depicted. I’m an astronomer who studies and has written about cosmology, black holes and exoplanets. Astronomers have been using AI for decades. In fact, in 1990, astronomers from the University of Arizona, where I am a professor, were among the first to use a type of AI called a neural network to study the shapes of galaxies. Since then, AI has spread…