Aedan O'Brien

Recently Facebook, Reddit, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube committed to removing coronavirus-related misinformation from their platforms. COVID-19 is being described as the first major pandemic of the social media age. In troubling times, social media helps distribute vital knowledge to the masses. Unfortunately, this comes with myriad misinformation, much of which is spread through

The world is only just getting used to the power and sophistication of virtual assistants made by companies like Amazon and Google, which can decode our spoken speech with eerie precision compared to what the technology was capable of only a few short years ago.   In truth, however, a far more impressive and mind-boggling

With the right mechanical contraption attached, human running speeds could rival those of cyclists, according to new research – getting runners up to 20.9 metres per second, or more than 46 miles per hour.   It’s worth noting that these are theoretical calculations for now, and the team responsible is hoping to have their prototype

Electric cars absolutely do produce less CO2 than gas guzzlers, a new study has confirmed – countering claims that carbon emissions from the manufacture of electric cars and the production of electricity outweighed the savings on the road.   Crunching the numbers on data collected from 59 different regions in the world that represent 95

The zero-emissions option of hydrogen fuel holds a lot of promise for reducing our reliance on fossil fuels – if only we could find a way to produce it cheaply and without needing insane amounts of energy input. Now, scientists have found a way to efficiently produce hydrogen fuel by using rust and a light

We may not be as lucky as birds, but the human eye does pretty well when it comes to colour perception; typically, we can distinguish around 1 million colours. A new type of contact lens could now restore some of that range in people with colour blindness, whose colour perception is limited in some parts of

Recent reports from scientists pursuing a new kind of nuclear fusion technology are encouraging, but we are still some distance away from the “holy grail of clean energy”. The technology developed by Heinrich Hora and his colleagues at the University of NSW uses powerful lasers to fuse together hydrogen and boron atoms, releasing high-energy particles

The effect that fossil fuels are having on the climate emergency is driving an international push to use low-carbon sources of energy. At the moment, the best options for producing low-carbon energy on a large scale are wind and solar power.   But despite improvements over the last few years to both their performance and

To cram ever more computing power into your pocket, engineers need to come up with increasingly ingenious ways to add transistors to an already crowded space. Unfortunately there’s a limit to how small you can make a wire. But a twisted form of rare earth metal just might have what it takes to push the

Scientists have ‘puppeteered’ the movements of a jellyfish and made it even faster than the real thing. Taking artificial control with a microelectronic implant, researchers have increased the natural swimming speed of a live moon jellyfish (Aurelia aurita) by nearly threefold.   What’s more, they achieved this with only a little bit of external power

Last month, SpaceX became the operator of the world’s largest active satellite constellation. As of the end of January, the company had 242 satellites orbiting the planet with plans to launch 42,000 over the next decade.   This is part of its ambitious project to provide internet access across the globe. The race to put

An Australian fusion startup called HB11, a spin-off from the University of New South Wales, claims to have found a way to revolutionize current nuclear fusion technology, potentially laying the groundwork for a new era of power generation — without running the risk of a nuclear meltdown.   The startup’s leadership doesn’t mince words. “We

If humanity fails to find a way through this train wreck of a climate crisis, we might want a form of record-keeping that doesn’t decay after a generation or two. You know, just to let future intelligences know we had some redeeming qualities.   Artist Joe Davis from Harvard University thinks he has a solution.

Randomness is not always as random as you think. It’s actually very challenging for computers to generate true randomness, because algorithms introduce subtle patterns that can be detected, meaning the numbers they come up with are pseudorandom, and not ultimately unpredictable.   Which is not to say machines can’t play a part. What if we

They found it buried in the muddy shores of the Potomac River more than three decades ago: a strange “sediment organism” that could do things nobody had ever seen before in bacteria.   This unusual microbe, belonging to the Geobacter genus, was first noted for its ability to produce magnetite in the absence of oxygen, but with

Solar panels are fantastic pieces of technology, but we need to work out how to make them even more efficient – and last year, scientists solved a 40-year-old mystery around one of the key obstacles to increased efficiency.   The 2019 study outlined a material defect in silicon used to produce solar cells that has

In the half-century since the historic Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969, computer technology has evolved in some pretty giant leaps itself. So much so, that even simple devices today are more powerful, in terms of raw processing power, than the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) was – a machine that helped us to pull off

Have you ever used a public charging station to charge your mobile phone when it runs out of battery? If so, watch out for “juice jacking”. Cybercriminals are on the prowl to infect your mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers and access your personal data, or install malware while you charge them.