Author: The Conversation

On May 11, 2020 a deadly threat flew from Los Angeles to New York City in under nine minutes. It was a 20-tonne Chinese Long March 5B rocket body passing around 60 miles overhead. Just 15 minutes later, the rocket body re-entered the atmosphere and broke into pieces, including a 12-metre-long pipe that crashed into a village in the Ivory Coast. Reports of a 12-m-long object crashing into the village of Mahounou in Cote d’Ivoire. It’s directly on the CZ-5B reentry track, 2100 km downrange from the Space-Track reentry location. Possible that part of the stage could have sliced through the atmo…

We have just published evidence in Nature Astronomy for what might be producing mysterious bursts of radio waves coming from distant galaxies, known as fast radio bursts or FRBs. Two colliding neutron stars – each the super-dense core of an exploded star – produced a burst of gravitational waves when they merged into a “supramassive” neutron star. We found that two and a half hours later they produced an FRB when the neutron star collapsed into a black hole. Or so we think. The key piece of evidence that would confirm or refute our theory – an optical or gamma-ray flash coming from the direction of…

Shortly after rumors leaked of former President Donald Trump’s impending indictment, images purporting to show his arrest appeared online. These images looked like news photos, but they were fake. They were created by a generative artificial intelligence system. Generative AI, in the form of image generators like DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, and text generators like Bard, ChatGPT, Chinchilla and LLaMA, has exploded in the public sphere. By combining clever machine-learning algorithms with billions of pieces of human-generated content, these systems can do anything from create an eerily realistic image from a caption, synthesize a speech in President Joe Biden’s voice, replace one person’s likeness with another in a video,…

A new 3D-printing technique using silicone can make accurate models of the blood vessels in your brain, enabling neurosurgeons to train with more realistic simulations before they operate, according to our recently published research. Many neurosurgeons practice each surgery before they get into the operating room based on models of what they know about the patient’s brain. But the current models neurosurgeons use for training don’t mimic real blood vessels well. They provide unrealistic tactile feedback, lack small but important structural details and often exclude entire anatomical components that determine how each procedure will be performed. Realistic and personalized replicas of patient brains during…

Since it was founded in 2016, Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface (BCI) company Neuralink has had its moments in biotech news. Whether it was the time Musk promised his “link” would let people communicate telepathically, or when the whole company was under investigation for potentially violating the Animal Welfare Act, the hype around Neuralink means it’s often the first mental reference people have for BCI technology. But BCIs have been kicking around for much longer than you’d expect. Musk’s is just one in a growing list of companies dedicated to advancing this technology. Let’s take a look back at some BCI milestones over the…

In mid-February, Tesla announced the recall of over 350,000 vehicles — more than 20,000 in Canada  — due to a problem with its “Full Self-Driving Capability” system. This self-driving feature was found to possibly cause vehicles to misbehave when entering intersections or exceed the speed limits, posing a risk for safety. This is just another instance of vehicles equipped with automated driving technology falling short of their safety expectations. In September 2022, a driver on the Queen Elizabeth Way near St. Catharines, Ont., was caught asleep at the wheel of a Tesla. The vehicle appeared to be operated by a semi-automated system with no monitoring…

How did life come about? The answer to this question goes to the very heart of our existence on planet Earth. Did life simply arise from chemical reactions among organic compounds in a primordial soup left after Earth clumped together from space rubble? If so, where did the organic compounds come from? Some of the so-called “building blocks of life” may have been surprisingly common in the early Solar System. A team of Japanese and American scientists led by Yasuhiro Oba has analysed samples taken from the asteroid Ryugu in 2018 by the Hayabusa2 mission and found uracil, one of…

Most films offer exactly the same viewing experience. You sit down, the film starts, the plot unfolds and you follow what’s happening on screen until the story concludes. It’s a linear experience. My new film, Before We Disappear – about a pair of climate activists who seek revenge on corporate perpetrators of global warming – seeks to alter that viewing experience. What makes my film different is that it adapts the story to fit the viewer’s emotional response. Through the use of a computer camera and software, the film effectively watches the audience as they view footage of climate disasters. Viewers are…

Since time immemorial, humans around the world have gazed up in wonder at the night sky. The starry night sky has not only inspired countless works of music, art and poetry, but has also played an important role in timekeeping, navigation and agricultural practices in many traditions. For many cultures, the night sky, with its stars, planets and the Milky Way, is considered just as important a part of the natural environment as the forests, lakes and mountains below. Countless people around the world gaze at the night sky: not only amateur and professional astronomers, but also casual observers who enjoy looking up…

AI tools can help us create content, learn about the world and (perhaps) eliminate the more mundane tasks in life – but they aren’t perfect. They’ve been shown to hallucinate information, use other people’s work without consent, and embed social conventions, including apologies, to gain users’ trust. For example, certain AI chatbots, such as “companion” bots, are often developed with the intent to have empathetic responses. This makes them seem particularly believable. Despite our awe and wonder, we must be critical consumers of these tools – or risk being misled. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI (the company that gave us the ChatGPT…