The Conversation

The heads of more than 100 of the world’s top artificial intelligence companies are very alarmed about the development of “killer robots”. In an open letter to the UN, these business leaders – including Tesla’s Elon Musk and the founders of Google’s DeepMind AI firm – warned that autonomous weapon technology could be misused by terrorists and despots or hacked to perform in undesirable ways.

A cold beer on a hot day can loosen your thinking until you feel able to pierce the mysteries of the universe. So should come as no surprise that deep space is awash with alcohol, in the gas that occupies the chasms between the stars. We just need to go collect it.

Neurological and psychiatric conditions both involve the brain, but are treated very differently. Put simply, neurologists are trained to deal with the “brain” and psychiatrists to deal with the “mind”. Neurologists and psychiatrists formally parted company in the late 19th century. Ever since the days of Sigmund Freud – who was originally a neurologist but is also the father of psychoanalysis – the way we think about brain disorders has been coloured by this artificial divide.

If you’ve ever needed a blood transfusion, or donated blood, you probably would have been asked your blood type. While it was once thought all blood was the same, we now know there are different types of blood, called blood groups. Transfusions between blood groups can be catastrophic, even deadly, so knowing the blood type of donors and recipients is of the utmost importance. Our bodies contain trillions of red blood cells. Each is covered in an array of proteins and sugars, inherited from our parents, which determine our blood group. We can all be classified into group A, B, AB or O, based on which sugars coat our red blood cells.

Here are some surprising facts about humans’ effect on planet Earth. We have made enough concrete to create an exact replica of Earth 2mm thick. We have produced enough plastic to wrap Earth in clingfilm. We are creating “technofossils”, a new term for congealed human-made materials – plastics and concretes – that will be around for tens of millions of years.
But it is the scale that humans have altered Earth’s life support system that is the most concerning.

American chestnut trees were once among the most majestic hardwood trees in the eastern deciduous forests, many reaching 80 to 120 feet in height and eight feet or more in diameter.   The “then boundless chestnut woods” Thoreau wrote about in Walden once grew throughout the Appalachian mountains. They provided habitat and a mast crop for wildlife, a nutritious nut crop for humans and a source of valuable timber. Because of their rapid growth rate and rot-resistant wood, they also have significant potential for carbon sequestration, important in these days of climate change.

Sitting has been branded the “new smoking” for its supposed public health risks, especially for people with sit-down office jobs.Over the past 15 years or so sitting has been linked with cancer, heart disease and diabetes and even

Fictional metaphors matter, and in the battle to safeguard our civil liberties few metaphors matter more than George Orwell’s 1984. Although first published almost 70 years ago, the lasting salience of this most archetypal dystopia is undeniable.

The latest performance tables for secondary and primary schools in England have been released – with parents and educators alike looking to the tables to understand and compare schools in their area. Schools will also be keen to see if they have met a new set of national standards set by the government. These new standards now include “progress” measures, which are a type of “value-added measure”. These compare pupils’ results with other pupils who got the same exam scores as them at the end of primary school.

The number of Australians who run for exercise has doubled since the mid-2000s. Preventing and managing injuries are common concerns, and can present an ongoing health burden and high cost if not addressed appropriately. But what if listening to the sound of running could help prevent injuries?We recently conducted the first study to relate running technique with the sound of feet hitting the ground. Listening could prove a simple and effective feedback mechanism for runners, coaches and clinicians to understand how runners land their feet and the potential for certain injuries.

There’s a widespread belief that actually existing democracies are in the grip of a fast-paced world dominated by breaking news and all things instant. The following contribution sets out to question this belief. It takes readers on a time journey. It sets out to probe the meaning of time, and explains why time has a malleable quality. It asks why time is a political matter and why, when they function well, democracies do intriguing things to people’s shared sense of time.

We know that there is sound on planets and moons in the solar system – places where there’s a medium through which sound waves can be transmitted, such as an atmosphere or an ocean. But what about empty space? You may have been told definitively that space is silent, maybe by your teacher or through the marketing of the movie Alien – “In space no one can hear you scream”. The common explanation for this is that space is a vacuum and so there’s no medium for sound to travel through.But that isn’t exactly right. Space is never completely empty – there are a few particles and sound waves floating around. In fact, sound waves in the space around the Earth are very important to our continued technological existence. They also they sound pretty weird!