The Australian Cyber Security Centre is asking organisations and businesses to be on high alert amid Russia’s cyber attack bombardment of Ukraine. The United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre issued a similar warning, as have New Zealand and the United States Department of Homeland Security. The Australian Cyber Security Centre has said it is not… Read more »
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has flatly opposed the bid led by tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes to buy Australia’s biggest energy company AGL and spend A$20 billion switching it to renewables. This includes closing its coal power stations by 2030. As Morrison stated this week: We need to ensure that our coal-fired generation of electricity runs… Read more »
Few people in recent times have created as much controversy as Donald Trump. A year after his utterances got him banned from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, his new enterprise, Truth Social, has made its debut on Apple’s App Store. The platform, which is available as both an app and website, was made available to download… Read more »
Two events in the past week mark a watershed for Australia’s electricity industry. The first, on Thursday, was Origin Energy’s surprise announcement that it intends to close the mammoth Eraring power station in the NSW Hunter region in 2025, seven years earlier than previously advised. Eraring is Australia’s largest coal-fired generator and supplies between a… Read more »
It’s probably no surprise that keeping healthy in space is incredibly important. And without the typical resources found on Earth, creative solutions have to be explored. Right now, some excited Year 10 and 11 students from around Victoria are waiting with anticipation as their space-made yoghurt – fresh off the International Space Station (ISS) –… Read more »
Early in the pandemic, the COVIDSafe app was designed as a tool to improve contact tracing. And a multimedia campaign promoted it as helping to find more COVID contacts faster. Now, almost two years after its launch in April 2020, we publish in The Lancet Public Health our evaluation of the app’s effectiveness and usefulness… Read more »
Scott Morrison will continue to tip out large dollops of money when he addresses the National Press Club on Tuesday, with his theme “building national resilience”. He will announce the government will fund a $2.2 billion Research Commercialisation Action Plan, which includes about $2 billion in new money The centrepiece is a 10-year $1.6 billion… Read more »
In a few weeks’ time, a rocket launched in 2015 is expected to crash into the Moon. The fast-moving piece of space junk is the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket which hoisted the Deep Space Climate Observatory satellite off our planet. It has been chaotically looping around Earth and the Moon ever… Read more »
You might remember hearing a lot about green hydrogen last year, as global pressure mounted on Australia to take stronger action on climate change ahead of the COP26 Glasgow summit last November. The government predicts green hydrogen exports and domestic use could be worth up to A$50 billion within 30 years, helping the world achieve… Read more »
Comedian Robin Williams once called cocaine “God’s way of telling you you are making too much money”. This role may now have been overtaken by non-fungible tokens, the blockchain-based means to claim unique ownership of easily copied digital assets. The latest NFT mania involves fantastic amounts of money being paid for “Bored Apes”, 10,000 avatars… Read more »
Hands up if you’ve ever cursed, mocked or yelled at a chatbot. No surprise if you have. Those automated “helpers” – supposedly designed to make customer service smarter, faster and more efficient – can certainly be a source of frustration for sentient beings. Interactions with chatbots have become increasingly common in our daily lives. But… Read more »
After all the bad press tech companies have received, would anyone still be surprised to learn the outwardly smiling face of social media conceals a sophisticated data-collection industry? Last year’s headlines delivered news of an array of concerning data and privacy violations from the world’s biggest tech players. But interestingly, it also seemed to be… Read more »
John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) was the greatest economist of the twentieth century. Less well known is that he had a parallel career as a successful investor: fairly successful early in his career, and spectacularly successful later on when he changed his strategy. After the first world war, his income depended more on his investments than… Read more »
Wearable fitness trackers will be on many Christmas shopping lists this year, with a vast range of devices (and an ever-increasing number of features) hitting the market just in time for the festive season. But what does the latest research say about how effective they are? Fitness trackers are trendy Currently, about one in five… Read more »
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg recently announced the tech giant will shift from being a social media company to becoming “a metaverse company”, functioning in an “embodied internet” that blends real and virtual worlds more than ever before. So what is “the metaverse”? It sounds like the kind of thing billionaires talk about to earn… Read more »
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