Aedan O'Brien

Earth’s temperatures are on track to blow past the objectives set in the Paris climate agreement. Last year was the fourth warmest on record for surface temperatures and the hottest ever for oceans.   A recent report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that nations around the globe must implement

Smartphone addiction does not seem like a questionable thing to believe in. It exists. Surely it does, doesn’t it? After all, there’s a Wikipedia page on it. The New York Times writes about it. There are even claims it’s killing us, that smartphones are destroying an entire generation.   But while nobody is saying we should be

Scientists have demonstrated a lightweight type of foam made of hollow metallic spheres that can withstand the incredible impact of .50 calibre rounds: the kinds of bullets fired by heavy machine guns and sniper rifles.   While weighing only about half as much as conventional steel armour, this engineered material – called composite metal foam

Electric car motors, iPhones, military jet engines, batteries, and satellites all have something in common: They require rare-earth elements to function. Rare-earth elements are a group of 17 metals that – as their name suggests – form under the Earth’s surface and are difficult to find and extract.   But they are crucial to the

The Dutch airline KLM is funding the development of a V-shaped aeroplane designed to seat passengers in its wings to make it more fuel-efficient, the company announced Monday. Its futuristic shape will make the “Flying V” lighter and more aerodynamic, KLM said. Its designers say it will need 20 percent less fuel than an Airbus

Solar panels are fantastic pieces of technology, but we need to work out how to make them even more efficient – and scientists just solved a 40-year-old mystery around one of the key obstacles to increased efficiency.   A new study outlines a material defect in silicon used to produce solar cells that has previously

Twitter, used by 126 million people daily and now ubiquitous in some industries, has vowed to reform itself after being enlisted as a tool of misinformation and hate. But new evidence shows that the platform may be inflicting harm at an even more basic level. It could be making its users, well, a bit witless.

A new artificial intelligence created by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pulls off a staggering feat: by analyzing only a short audio clip of a person’s voice, it reconstructs what they might look like in real life.   The AI’s results aren’t perfect, but they’re pretty good – a remarkable and somewhat terrifying

You wouldn’t ordinarily want to seek out a computer with viruses installed, but that’s exactly what the winner of a US$1.345 million auction just did – picking up a laptop crammed with the deadliest malware of our time in return for their cash.   The buyer remains anonymous but we know much more about the

A newly revealed patent application filed by Amazon is raising privacy concerns over an envisaged upgrade to the company’s smart speaker systems. This change would mean that, by default, the devices end up listening to and recording everything you say in their presence.   Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant system that runs on the company’s Echo

An Australian teenager and self-proclaimed Apple fanboy – who can’t be identified for legal reasons – has been found guilty of hacking into Apple’s systems in 2015 and 2017. The 17-year-old teen from Adelaide in South Australia, along with another teenager, hacked into the tech giant’s mainframe for the first time when he was 13

Our deepfake problem is about to get worse: Samsung engineers have now developed realistic talking heads that can be generated from a single image, so AI can even put words in the mouth of the Mona Lisa.   The new algorithms, developed by a team from the Samsung AI Center and the Skolkovo Institute of

Scientists have developed a new way of achieving artificial photosynthesis, producing high-energy hydrocarbons by leveraging electron-rich gold nanoparticles as a catalyst. In photosynthesis, plants convert energy from sunlight into glucose by rearranging molecules of water and carbon dioxide. The new process mimics this natural ability via chemical manipulations that create liquid fuel, without requiring chlorophyll.

The city of Baltimore is under attack, but not by someone armed with guns or bombs. Two weeks ago, cybercriminals used ransomware known as RobinHood to seize control of about 10,000 of the city’s computers, saying they won’t relinquish access unless Baltimore hands over about US$100,000 worth of bitcoin.   Baltimore is refusing the meet

Sometimes, while waiting for quantum computers to become a thing, or complaining that your stupid laptop keeps dying on 5 percent battery, it’s easy to forget just how far technology has come over the past 50 years.   Sure, we can all list off a whole bunch of innovations that have changed the way the

Most people are familiar with optical lasers through their experience with laser pointers. But what about a laser made from sound waves? What makes optical laser light different from a light bulb or the sun is that all the light waves emerging from it are moving in the same direction and are pretty much in

Millions of cryptocurrency investors have been scammed out of massive sums of real money. In 2018, losses from cryptocurrency-related crimes amounted to US$1.7 billion. The criminals use both old-fashioned and new-technology tactics to swindle their marks in schemes based on digital currencies exchanged through online databases called blockchains.   From researching blockchain, cryptocurrency and cybercrime,

Scientists have reworked the DNA of Escherichia coli to help us understand apparent redundancies in its genetic code. At four million base pairs in size, they now have the results of the most ambitious attempt at a completely synthetic form of life.   For all its immense variation, life on Earth all shares a common language in