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Can you believe iluli turned five (!!) in March? I was so oblivious to the rapid passage of time that the landmark date completely passed me by – until late April, that is, when a Webby Award or two came a-knocking.   Yes, you read that right! Having been a nominee and honouree on multiple occasions, 2024 was the year we finally won, securing both the Jury and the People’s Voice awards for best video in the Health & Wellness category. The video that did the business? Magic

How do you feel about machines tracking your emotions? Imagine if your phone could sense that you’re feeling stressed, and it responded by recommending a meditation app. The rapid rise of emotion recognition technology means this could soon be a reality. If AI-powered tech can learn to recognise and respond to our emotions, the potential will be huge. But so are the concerns. And that’s before we get to the really big question: can this technology actually work?  Watch my sho

The global population is expected to pass 10 billion within the next few decades. That means we’ll have doubled the number of people on the planet in less than 100 years. As a result, the world faces an existential dilemma: how do we boost production to feed billions more people while reducing agriculture’s negative impact on the environment?  For thousands of years, farming has been central to human civilisation. But the looming "population bomb" means we’re going to need so

ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini – formerly known as Bard – can plan parties, write stories, hold conversations and pass exams. These incredible Large Language Model (LLM) systems might look like the all-knowing AI promised by science fiction. But they are not.  As powerful, impressive and revolutionary as they are, LLMs are essentially elaborate bluffing systems which use statistics to piece sentences together. It is only by understanding how these systems work that we will get t

Everyone loves a good magic trick. Take mind-reading, for instance. We can enjoy the stagecraft and illusion safe in the knowledge that it isn’t actually possible for someone to pry into our innermost thoughts. But what if it was? We may be on the verge of a technological breakthrough that takes mind-reading from illusion to reality. Brain scanning is one of the wonders of medical science. Its history goes back to 1924 and, over the years, the abstract signals and images coll

Last month was the hottest ever recorded on Earth. It is a fact that the planet is heating up and, without drastic action, the changing climate threatens to unleash a wave of global disasters. Human activities are responsible for this and, while we are taking some gradual steps to become greener, we still generate most of our energy by burning heat-trapping carbon. But what if, in addition to reducing our carbon dependency, we could undo some of the damage we’ve already in

From eyes that see over a million different colours to ears that detect a staggering range of frequencies, the human senses are incredible. But none can hold a candle to the most powerful part of our sensory system: the brain. The human brain does the most impressive feat of data analysis imaginable – decoding electrical impulses from all over the body and combining them to create the rich, multi-modal experience we call reality. But what if a connection fails, and a sense is

Welcome to the second part of my article on microchips. Part one covered the invention of the transistor and a brief history of the microchip. Now, let’s bring things into the present with a look at how and where microchips are made today, their place in modern geopolitics and what might happen when we finally reach the limit of Moore’s Law. The most complex engineering process ever invented As microchips have got ever-smaller, the machines required to manufacture them have g

Advances in technology over the past century have been staggering. It took just 66 years to progress from launching the first airplane to landing on the moon. Life-changing new smart gadgets, revolutions in communication and miraculous medicines now come so thick and fast that we almost take them for granted. What has driven this incredible rate of innovation? It all comes down to a tiny piece of technology: the transistor.  Our ability to keep making these transistors smalle

Netflix sent out its last red envelope in September 2023, marking an end to 25 years of mailing DVDs. Like me, you’re probably surprised to hear this side of the business still existed. Nowadays, Netflix is synonymous with modern-day entertainment as one of the world’s leading streaming platforms. You only reach such heady heights with a culture designed for success. And in the book, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention , Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings and

As technologies go, printing can feel fairly mundane and uninspiring. Sure, some impressive things are being done with 3D printing but that can feel pretty remote when you’re trying to fix yet another paper jam. What if I told you that printing might be on the verge of a huge breakthrough which would herald a revolution in medical science and save tens of thousands of lives a year? What if instead of just churning out paper and plastic, our printers could print… us? That’s th

Compared to Hollywood’s portrayal, life in the 21st century can sometimes feel a bit of a let-down. Where are the cities full of driverless cars? The hand-held lasers? The robotic killing machines who’ll stop at nothing to topple their human overlords? Ok, maybe not that last one... But what if some of these things are much closer to being realised than we thought? Enter LiDAR – short for Light Detection And Ranging. LiDAR scanners bounce laser beams off objects to calculate

In the late 19th century, America was gripped by an engineering battle that would forever change the world. In the "war of the currents," inventors Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse (with some help from Nikola Tesla) raced to find the best way to bring electricity to cities and industries. Edison favoured a system called direct current (DC) while Westinghouse championed alternating current (AC). After a brutal fight, the latter won out, the world adopted AC, and the rest

In medical emergencies, every moment counts. That’s why innovations that can shave even fractions of a second off the time it takes someone to get life-saving treatment represents a massive leap forward. When it comes to organ transplantation, speed really is of the essence. According to the American Transplant Foundation , an average of 16 people die each day because they do not receive organs in time. What’s more, between 2014 and 2019 there were 370 “ near misses ” where

Spoiler alert: Yes, it’s already happening. Scorsese. Kubrick. Lynch. Anyone with the last name Coppola. Iconic directors invariably have a distinct style and vision that make their work easily recognisable. Chances are that even if you didn’t see the words "Directed by Quentin Tarantino" appear in the credits of a film, you’d still be able to identify the auteur through the kind of snappy dialogue, hammy violence and unique overall aesthetic seen on screen. Or would you? In

In years gone by, parents would worry about letting their children play out in the street. Nowadays, it’s the potential dangers lurking online that are just as likely to keep mums and dads awake at night. The explosion of games, apps, and video content has happened faster than regulators and the rest of us can possibly keep up with. In that respect, the internet is like the new Wild West. Some countries are now turning to facial recognition to identify the age of those consum

Thanks to social media, it has never been easier to connect with people from the past. Curious about what that old classmate is up to now? Their profile is only a couple of clicks away. What’s more, most of us now use our social media feeds as a kind of virtual photo album. If you’re of a certain age, then a scroll through the older photos will no doubt take you on a trip down memory lane which rekindles memories of long-forgotten nights out, old friends we lost touch with an

Chatbots are proliferating rapidly thanks to advancements in AI. Most of us have come into contact with them, commonly in a customer service capacity. Formulaic responses aside, they can save a lot of time. Who wants to spend over an hour on hold, only to be hung up on? Chatbots mimic whatever information is fed to them. The result is a reflection of the integrity (or otherwise) of whoever programmed the information. Given the nefarious potential, it’s left some to question i

Proteins probably don’t weigh too heavily on your mind day to day. It’s ironic, given every single cell in your brain, and the rest of your body, is made up of a myriad of protein building blocks known as amino acids. A whopping 20,000 proteins are expressed by the human genome. The information needed to create these proteins is contained in the nuclei of our DNA. Now, scientists have discovered an intelligent method for reading these instructions. We’re just beginning to scr

What if we could predict the behaviour of bush and forest fires before they ever break out? Thanks to the bright sparks working away at some of the world’s most exciting startups and research institutions, breakthroughs in space technology could soon be setting the world ablaze – in a good way. As if we didn’t have enough on our plates, recent history has seen angry, ruthless blazes ripping through the natural environment like, well, wildfire. From Australia to the Amazon, Ca