LATEST NEWS

WEBB’S FIRST EXOPLANET DISCOVERY CONFIRMED The James Webb telescope has been used to confirm its first ever Exoplanet. The James Webb telescope is currently the largest and most powerful telescope built to date and is being utilized for a number of ambitious space exploration projects. The telescope which is as large as a three-story building and as wide as a tennis court was built to fold so that it could actually fit into the rocket ship that would launch it into space. The telescope uses infrared radiation light to see things that humans cannot and uses its infrared cameras to see through dust clouds caused by planets and stars that we would otherwise be unable to see through. With this line of sight, [...]

GOOGLE’S CHATGPT COMPETITION Google has held the monopoly in the Search space for quite some time. Yes, there are a number of other web browsers, however as of November 2022, Google Chrome had a global market share of approximately 66% percent, which means that the majority of people who use a web search browser, use Google Chrome. In second place was Apple’s Safari offering at 18.7% followed by Microsoft Edge at a mere 4.4%, with Firefox and Samsung Internet closing off the top five at 3% and 2.7% respectively. These statistics are indicative of just how prominent Google’s Chrome offering is in comparison to its closest competitors, particularly when accessed via a desktop. Google Chrome has similar numbers on its mobile application and [...]

AFRICA’S FIRST CHIEF HEAT OFFICER Firstly, let’s start with what a chief heat officer is: “a CHO is responsible for improving coordination and accelerating existing heat protection efforts and initiating new work that reduces the risks and impacts of heat stress and extreme heat for vulnerable communities.” So far Phoenix, Athens, Miami and now Freetown in Sierra Leone have appointed Chief Heat Officers in the hopes of proactively tackling global warming on a localised level and educating and raising awareness in communities that require it most, especially in countries and cities that are particularly vulnerable to the immediate and long term effects of rising temperatures attributed to global warming. According to the World Economic Forum, the hottest places measured in Celsius in the last [...]

CUTTING EDGE CANCER VACCINATION TRIAL In a ground-breaking development, it seems that cancer vaccine trials could be launched in the United Kingdom as soon as September 2023. This is significant given that cancer is still the leading cause of death worldwide according to the World Health Organisation.  In 2020 alone, cancer was attributed to the cause of death for approximately 10 million people. The most common cancers include breast, prostate, lung, colon and rectum cancers which can be caused by a multitude of different factors particularly those around a person’s lifestyle including things like smoking and alcohol consumption, lack of nutrient rich food and subsequently a high body mass index, as well as a lack of physical activity – ultimately all equating to [...]

BANKING ON BANK CARDS South Africa’s banking systems are some of the most developed worldwide, and for the most part our banks have been effectively digitised to all those who are able to access data and the respective banking Apps. For those who use Apple and Android devices, there is also the ability to tap into (no pun intended) the likes of an Apple Pay which uses a digital version of a banking card and can be tapped directly off the phone at a point of payment device instead of a physical card. This is all in the name of digitisation and transactional minimisation. In SA and globally, we make use of banking cards containing chips known as EMV cards. EMV stands for [...]

CHATGPT THE WORLD’S MOST POPULAR CHATBOT You may have seen a number of interesting poems and posts populating your social feeds as of late. These are all the work of the internet’s most popular AI Chatbot, otherwise known as ChatGPT. GPT is an acronym that stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer and is a natural language system developed by OpenAI laboratory, one of the company’s founders is Twitter boss Elon Musk. At the beginning of December 2022, the company released ChatGPT to the public and in just under a week the AI Chatbot surpassed a million users, which is a pretty impressive feat in such a short space of time. Like most AI technologies, there is an element of machine learning involved, which is [...]