Author: The Conversation

As people, we are all shaped by the neighborhoods we grew up in, whether it was a bustling urban center or the quiet countryside. Objects in distant outer space are no different. As an astronomer at the University of Arizona, I like to think of myself as a cosmic historian, tracking how supermassive black holes grew up. Like you, every supermassive black hole lives in a home – its host galaxy – and a neighborhood – its local group of other galaxies. A supermassive black hole grows by consuming gas already inside its host galaxy, sometimes reaching a billion times heavier than our…

This week, technology news has been abuzz as Apple introduced its latest iPhones into the market. Among the usual new feature announcements, one stunning change has stood out in particular. The long-standing rumours are true – the new iPhone 15 series has USB-C standard charging ports. The ditching of Apple’s proprietary Lightning port, which was first introduced in 2012, means iPhone users will finally be able to recharge their phones with the same chargers they use for other devices. But what does this major change really mean for Apple, consumers and the environment? Apple marched to its own beat until now Since the…

NASA’s independent study team released its highly anticipated report on UFOs on Sept. 14, 2023. In part to move beyond the stigma often attached to UFOs, where military pilots fear ridicule or job sanctions if they report them, UFOs are now characterized by the U.S. government as UAPs, or unidentified anomalous phenomena. Bottom line: The study team found no evidence that reported UAP observations are extraterrestrial. I’m a professor of astronomy who has written extensively on astrobiology and the scientists who search for life in the universe. I have long been skeptical of the claim that UFOs represent visits by aliens to Earth. From sensationalism to science During a press briefing, NASA Administrator Bill…

There are alien minds among us. Not the little green men of science fiction, but the alien minds that power the facial recognition in your smartphone, determine your creditworthiness and write poetry and computer code. These alien minds are artificial intelligence systems, the ghost in the machine that you encounter daily. But AI systems have a significant limitation: Many of their inner workings are impenetrable, making them fundamentally unexplainable and unpredictable. Furthermore, constructing AI systems that behave in ways that people expect is a significant challenge. If you fundamentally don’t understand something as unpredictable as AI, how can you trust it? Why AI is unpredictable Trust is grounded…

Data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has shown that an exoplanet around a star in the constellation Leo has some of the chemical markers that, on Earth, are associated with living organisms. But these are vague indications. So how likely is it that this exoplanet harbours alien life? Exoplanets are worlds that orbit stars other than the Sun. The planet in question is named K2-18b. It’s so named because it was the first planet found to orbit the red dwarf star K2-18. There is a K2-18c as well – the second planet to be discovered. The star itself is dimmer and…

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike has been going for over 130 days. Joined by the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), Hollywood writers are protesting several issues. Among other demands, the WGA is calling for explicit regulations on the use of AI in media production, in what Time Magazine called “a pivotal moment” in film history. Enter Tom Cruise and cue the Mission: Impossible theme music. Although Barbie and Oppenheimer received most attention this summer, Tom Cruise’s latest instalment in the Mission: Impossible series (Dead Reckoning Part One), reveals more about the future of movies. Highlights threat from AI Eerily prescient to the Hollywood strikes,…

In June 2022, Google engineer Blake Lemoine made headlines by claiming the company’s LaMDA chatbot had achieved sentience. The software had the conversational ability of a precocious seven-year-old, Lemoine said, and we should assume it possessed a similar awareness of the world. LaMDA, later released to the public as Bard, is powered by a “large language model” (LLM) of the kind that also forms the engine of OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot. Other big tech companies are rushing to deploy similar technology. Hundreds of millions of people have now had the chance to play with LLMs, but few seem to believe they are conscious.…

Late last week, Google announced something called the Privacy Sandbox has been rolled out to a “majority” of Chrome users, and will reach 100% of users in the coming months. But what is it, exactly? The new suite of features represents a fundamental shift in how Chrome will track user data for the benefit of advertisers. Instead of third-party cookies, Chrome can now tap directly into your browsing history to gather information on advertising “topics” (more on that later). In development since 2019, this change has attracted a great deal of controversy, as some commentators have deemed it invasive in terms of privacy.…

Technologies based on nanoscale materials – for example, particles that are more than 10,000 times smaller than the period at the end of this sentence – play a growing role in our world. Carbon nanofibers strengthen airplanes and bicycle frames, silver nanoparticles make bacteria-resistant fabrics, and moisturizing nanoparticles called nanoliposomes are used in cosmetics. Nanotechnology is also revolutionizing medicine and pushing the boundaries of human performance. If you received a COVID-19 vaccine in the United States, it contained nanoparticles. In the future, nanotechnology may allow doctors to better treat brain diseases and disorders like cancer and dementia because nanoparticles pass easily through the blood-brain barrier.…

The United States military plans to start using thousands of autonomous weapons systems in the next two years in a bid to counter China’s growing power, US Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks announced in a speech on Monday. The so-called Replicator initiative aims to work with defence and other tech companies to produce high volumes of affordable systems for all branches of the military. Military systems capable of various degrees of independent operation have become increasingly common over the past decade or so. But the scale and scope of the US announcement makes clear the future of conflict has changed: the age of…