Author: The Conversation

The International Space Station is no longer the only place where humans can live in orbit. On Nov. 29, 2022, the Shenzhou 15 mission launched from China’s Gobi Desert carrying three taikonauts – the Chinese word for astronauts. Six hours later, they reached their destination, China’s recently completed space station, called Tiangong, which means “heavenly palace” in Mandarin. The three taikonauts replaced the existing crew that helped wrap up construction. With this successful mission, China has become just the third nation to operate a permanent space station. China’s space station is an achievement that solidifies the country’s position alongside the U.S. and…

ChatGPT is the latest and most impressive artificially intelligent chatbot yet. It was released two weeks ago, and in just five days hit a million users. It’s being used so much that its servers have reached capacity several times. OpenAI, the company that developed it, is already being discussed as a potential Google slayer. Why look up something on a search engine when ChatGPT can write a whole paragraph explaining the answer? (There’s even a Chrome extension that lets you do both, side by side.) But what if we never know the secret sauce behind ChatGPT’s capabilities? The chatbot takes advantage of a…

Smart buildings, which are central to the concept of smart cities, are a new generation of buildings in which technological devices, such as sensors, are embedded in the structure of the buildings themselves. Smart buildings promise to personalize the experiences of their occupants by using real-time feedback mechanisms and forward-looking management of interactions between humans and the built environment. This personalization includes continuous monitoring of the activities of occupants and the use of sophisticated profiling models. While these issues spark concerns about privacy, this is a matter of not seeing the forest for the trees. The questions raised by the massive arrival…

For a multitude of reasons, Eskom CEO Andre de Ruyter’s resignation is a huge setback for the state-owned power utility and South Africa. It comes at a time when the utility, which produces 95% of the electricity used in the country, needs stable leadership. Stability is critical for success in the three key transitions Eskom needs to navigate. It needs to turn back the tide of state capture, and deliver a reliable electricity supply. It must reorganise the group into generation, distribution and transmission, and it must reduce its carbon footprint. Under De Ruyter’s leadership, some progress has been made in all three areas.…

A group of researchers studied 15 months of human mobility movement data taken from 1.5 million people and concluded that just four points in space and time were sufficient to identify 95% of them, even when the data weren’t of excellent quality. That was back in 2013. Nearly ten years on, surveillance technologies permeate all aspects of our lives. They collect swathes of data from us in various forms, and often without us knowing. I’m a surveillance researcher with a focus on technology governance. Here’s my round-up of widespread surveillance systems I think everyone should know about. CCTV and open-access cameras Although…

A dust devil looks a bit like a tornado, but is weaker and rarely lasts more than about a minute. It is a twisting column of warmed air scooting across sun-heated ground, made visible by the dust that it lofts upwards. Although usually benign, occasionally dust devils can kill. Dust devils have been known to appear on Mars since the 1970s. They have been observed both from the ground and from orbit. The more dust in the Martian atmosphere, the warmer and more agitated it becomes, and this can escalate into a global dust storm. When the dust settles, it can coat and disable…

The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot has given us a glimpse into the future of teaching and learning alongside artificial intelligence. Educators immediately pointed out the chatbot’s ability to generate meaningful responses to questions from assessments and exams. And it’s often not possible to attribute these responses to a particular source – making it difficult to detect plagiarism. Concerns didn’t go unnoticed. Shortly after ChatGPT’s release, OpenAI announced it was developing a “digital watermark” to embed into the chatbot’s responses. This kind of watermark is embedded as a digital signal that can identify the content as being AI-generated, and which (in theory) should be difficult to…

Scientists made headlines last week for supposedly generating a wormhole. The research, reported in Nature, involves the use of a quantum computer to simulate a wormhole in a simplified model of physics. Soon after the news broke, physicists and experts in quantum computing expressed scepticism that a wormhole had in fact been created. Media coverage was chaotic. Outlets reported that physicists had created a theoretical wormhole, a holographic wormhole or perhaps a small, crummy wormhole, and that Google’s quantum computer suggests wormholes are real. Other outlets soberly offered the news that no, physicists didn’t make a wormhole at all. If this has you confused, you’re not alone! What’s going…

For the first time, scientists in the US have confirmed a fusion energy experiment achieved net gain. This means releasing more energy than it takes to initiate, demonstrating the physical basis for producing fusion energy in a controlled way. This historic feat took place at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, using the National Ignition Facility experiment after decades of planning and research. On December 5, a team at LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) conducted the first controlled fusion experiment in history to reach this milestone, also known as scientific #energy breakeven, meaning it produced more energy from #fusion…

The massive carbon footprint left behind by emails has been widely discussed by the media, but most of the time these discussions are exaggerated. According to Agnès Pannier-Runacher, the French minister of energy transition, reducing the number of emails that are sent and deleting them would reduce the individual carbon footprint. News stories have voiced these ideas as well. In a recently published paper, we found that some iconic digital activities, such as sending email, contribute marginally to the annual carbon footprint of information and communication technology users. As researchers working on the environmental impacts of our actions, we believe it is important…