Category: Technology

The effective collapse of the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) fighter jet programme is a major setback for European defence cooperation. France, Germany and Spain have spent nearly a decade trying to develop what was intended to become Europe’s premier next-generation combat aircraft, only for the programme to succumb to disputes over leadership, the distribution […]

From election debates to job interviews, language shapes our perceptions of how trustworthy other people are. This power can be used to build healthy relationships, but it can also be used to manipulate and deceive. To better understand this darker side of building trust, my colleagues and I turned to the corporate world – a […]

Forced labour in cybercrime might call to mind scam compounds in south-east Asia. A growing body of scholarship, journalism and policy attention has entrenched that stereotype. Images of fortified compounds, armed guards and confiscated passports are shaping how courts worldwide interpret cybercriminal participation. But new research challenges that template. There are different kinds of coercion. […]

Some farms are looking at how best to use their lights at night. MillaF/Shutterstock Growing evidence suggests that excessive outdoor lighting at night may be harming wildlife. For generations, rural communities worked to the rhythms of daylight and darkness. Today, the amount of harsh light switched on at nightime is having profound consequences for many […]

Mauritius set out its national AI strategy in 2018, the first by an African country. Since then over a dozen African states have adopted national AI policies of some sort or another. As a national policy plan, an AI strategy typically sets out the priorities and aspirations in achieving certain policy objectives. At the continental […]

The Artemis III mission will involve launching the Orion spacecraft into low Earth orbit. Nasa/Esa/ATG Medialab Nasa has named the crew of its next Artemis mission, which it promised would be an “extraordinary demonstration of what is possible”. Artemis is the ambitious American-led effort to the return humans to the lunar surface by 2028. However, […]

Cape gannets colony, South Africa. Asher Pardey, Unsplash, CC BY Conservationists analyse overwhelming volumes of ecological data in their work. For example, they might need to process decades of weather data or the movements of millions of insects. Up until now, these scientists and decision makers have had to manually find and sort information, then […]

When I talk to my son, an engineering student, and we have a question or disagreement, he immediately turns to ChatGPT as his primary source of information and confirmation. He is not alone in this. The use of generative AI tools has exploded across different demographic groups. For many people, these tools can be entertaining, […]

Astronomers using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa have discovered the most distant hydroxyl megamaser ever detected, opening a new radio astronomy frontier. A hydroxyl megamaser is a natural space laser, and this one is located in a violently merging galaxy more than 8 billion light-years away. We spoke to the astronomers, Thato Manamela, […]

From the air, you see it only through the constant jolt, tilt and shudder of the low-flying Cessna aircraft. The landscape of the Llanos de Moxos, northern Bolivia, appears as a disconnected patchwork of open grassland savannahs, forest islands and lakes. It feels random, almost unreadable. Only gradually does the pattern resolve itself: raised causeways […]