The 1990s was a period of fast-paced change and disruption for the desktop publishing industry.
A swathe of different companies were bought, sold and merged together to reshape the foundations for what we see today – an industry dominated by Adobe.
One of the most significant deals of this era was Adobe’s merger with Aldus in 1994, which pioneered a number of key applications and developed others that were derived from pervious industry deals. It’s difficult to see how we’ve gotten to a point at which Adobe is releasing products like the artificial intelligence (AI) powered imagine generator Firefly in Photoshop if such a deal hadn’t happened three decades ago.
Creating a dynasty
Aldus, founded in 1984, released its game-changer of a product the following year with PageMaker, which relied on Adobe’s PostScript page description language. It was perhaps the first spark of a relationship that culminated in the $500 million merger just ten years later.
The PostSCript language had become the de facto standard for exchanging documents on printing and display devices, according to a New York Times report from the time. Its inclusion on the Apple Compuer laser printer, alongside the use of Aldus’ Pagemaker for the Macintosh, allowed individual consumers to produce professional-grade documents at a fraction of the cost of typesetting services.
Analysts, at the time, said the merger would create a comprehensive product line for document creation, desktop publishing, prepress production and electronic document delivery. So, too, did Adobe go on to create a myriad of products spanning different formats and media from images to video, with tools and services handling different aspects of the production process.
After all, these two companies were “on a collision course for several years,” according to Inside the Publishing Revolution: The Adobe Story by Pamela Pfiffner. But while Adobe was relatively prospering, Aldus was struggling, and its flagship products weren’t the market leaders in their respective categories.
When Aldus eventually found a partner with which to merge, Adobe, the two entities combined into Adobe Systems. Not all of Aldus’ products, however, continued under the joint label, although there was an exception for the likes of PageMaker and After Effects. The last major release of PageMaker came in 2001, after which point InDesign became the chief product moving forwards.
As Linda Clarke, one of the original members of Adobe’s graphics applications division, put it: “The Aldus acquisition was a huge turning point for the company. It changed the nature of Adobe.”
This one-off folding iPhone mod could be a glimpse of the future. Photo: KJMX
Apple may have decided that 2026 is the right year to launch a folding iPhone.
Cupertino has been tinkering with prototype handsets with foldable displays for a long time. An analyst predicted Thursday that the company will finally have something to offer in a couple of years.
No Folding iPhone before 2026
Samsung is already hard at work on its sixth-generation Galaxy Fold, though foldable handsets are still a niche product. The market-analysis firm IDC says only about 18.1 million devices in the category shipped globally in 2023. Apple is nevertheless exploring the possibility, and has been since 2018.
But its efforts won’t see a tangible product for years to come. “Apple is predicted to release a 7-8 inch foldable iPhone in 2026,” said Kang Min-soo, a senior analyst with Omdia, according to the Korean-language site The Elec (machine translation).
Apple is aware of your concerns
It’s not hard to find critics of current foldable devices. The products are thick, expensive and the flexible screens develop creases over time.
“Foldables were a hard sell in 2023, as many vendors struggled to move significant inventory,” said Anthony Scarsella, an IDC analyst. “The market has not fully embraced the form factor. High prices and longevity remain a challenge to both consumers and vendors.”
This has not escaped Apple’s attention. Details of folding iPhone prototypes that leaked out recently show the company is striving to make a device as slim as current iOS handsets. And it wants a foldable screen without a visible crease.
Despite the 2026 prediction, there’ll be no folding iPhone until it meets the company’s design goals, according to information leaking out of Apple.
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Northern Australian elder George Milpurrurr shows the next generation how to do a cultural burn.Credit: Penny Tweedie/Alamy
Indigenous Australians have been using fire to shape the country’s northern ecosystems for thousands of years. Researchers analysed charcoal that was preserved in the sediment of a flooded sinkhole over the last 150,000 years. They discovered that, around 11,000 years ago, there was a shift to more frequent but less intense fires as a result of Indigenous fire-stick farming. European colonization mostly brought an end to the practice, which might have contributed to the return of more high-intensity wildfires.
The first immune-cell therapy for solid tumours, Iovance Biotherapeutics’ lifileucel, has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. At least 20 people with advanced melanoma will receive the treatment, which uses cancer-killing immune cells extracted from a person’s own tumour. Researchers hope that the approval will pave the way for cheaper versions — lifileucel costs more than half a million dollars — as well as similar therapies for other cancers, including lung and pancreatic tumours.
Both the US and Chinese climate envoys, John Kerry and Xie Zhenhua, are stepping down — and scientists worry that the change will rattle the cooperative spirit between the world’s two biggest carbon emitters. The new envoys, diplomat Liu Zhenmin and strategist John Podesta, bring some climate credentials, but it remains to be seen how well they work together. The upcoming US elections and broader geopolitical tensions remain major hurdles to achieving global climate goals. “The biggest uncertainty is American politics,” says public policy researcher Wang Yi.
The cost of restoring Ukraine’s public research infrastructure destroyed or stolen because of the Russian invasion, according to the cultural organization UNESCO. (Reference: UNESCO report)
Features & opinion
The cold war-era laws that govern space exploration are not fit for purpose any more, argues philosopher A. C. Grayling in Who Owns the Moon? Without a bold new consensus, Grayling predicts, a space ‘wild west’ is going to emerge as nations and companies clamour for extraterrestrial resources. The 1959 Antarctic Treaty and the law of the sea could both provide templates for negotiations, but neither agreement transposes readily to outer space, says reviewer and Space Governance Lab founder Timiebi Aganaba. Instead, there could be lessons to learn from the ongoing climate change-induced reconsideration of resource exploitation, she says. “Any future dispute-resolution mechanisms must balance inclusivity and justice.”
Neuroscientist Roger Guillemin spent much of the 1950s and 60s dissecting millions of sheep brains and separating their peptides with 3-metre-tall chromatography columns that extended through the lab’s ceiling. His efforts paid off: he determined the structure of the thyrotropin-releasing factor, a small peptide that triggers a cascade of hormones that regulate metabolic activity in nearly every tissue of the body. What followed was a torrent of advances in neuroendocrinology, including more than two dozen drugs to treat endocrine disorders and cancers. In 1977, Guillemin shared the Nobel Prize with Andrew Schally, his former student turned competitor. Guillemin has died, aged 100.
The editors of Nature Reviews Physics and Nature Human Behaviour have teamed up to explore the pros and cons of using generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as ChatGPT in science communication. Chatbots ‘hallucinate’ convincing inaccuracies and they make churning out disinformation all too easy, write the editors — and they have “an obvious, yet underappreciated” downside: they have nothing to say. Ask an AI system to write an essay or an opinion piece and you’ll get “clichéd nothingness” — “the AI system has no agency in writing or otherwise.”
Interviews with six experts in Nature Human Behaviour reveal that they broadly agree that generative AI systems can be useful tools. But they are clear-eyed about the risks. “Given the much-publicized propensity of generative AI tools to produce nonsense, science communicators should consider whether generative AI is in fact completely antithetical to the very purpose of their work,” says Amanda Alvarez, a communications specialist at the Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence.
In Nature Reviews Physics, seven other experts delve into the key role of science communication in building trust between scientists and the public. “Regular, long-term dialogical interaction, preferably face-to-face, is one of the most effective ways to build a relationship based on trust,” notes science-communication researcher Kanta Dihal. “This is a situation in which technological interventions may do more harm than good.”
Lerato Seleteng-Kose is a botanist working at the National University of Lesotho in Roma.Credit: Barry Christianson for Nature
“It’s almost always windy and cold up here,” says botanist Lerato Seleteng-Kose about the Bokong Nature Reserve, where she tracks plants such as the Lesotho red-hot poker (Kniphofia caulescens). “Lesotho provides water to some of the most populous parts of neighbouring South Africa, so the health of these wetlands matters to a large number of people.” (Nature | 3 min read) (Barry Christianson for Nature)
Do you have a great mentor?
Applications are now open for the Nature Awards for Mentoring in Science, which this year recognizes mentors in West Africa who have made a significant contribution to their mentees’ careers. There are two categories, one for lifetime achievements and one for mid-career achievements. Find out more or nominate someone here.
Quote of the day
The sign-language lexicon that chemist Christina Goudreau Collison co-developed removes some of the time lag for Deaf students and their interpreters who would have had to painstakingly fingerspell the names of hundreds of chemical reactions. (Nature | 6 min read)
In just four U.S. states, residents can add their driver’s license or ID to the Apple Wallet app on the iPhone and Apple Watch, providing a convenient and contactless way to display proof of identity or age at select airports, businesses, and venues.
Adoption of the feature has been slow since Apple first announced it in September 2021, with IDs in the Wallet app only available in Arizona, Maryland, Colorado, and Georgia so far. Two years ago, Apple shared a list of additional states committed to supporting the feature in the future, but none of them have revealed any plans yet.
Participating States
Committed States
In March 2022, Apple said the additional eight states listed below would “soon” allow residents to add their driver’s license or state ID to the Wallet app, but it is now two years later and none of these states support the feature yet.
Connecticut
Hawaii
Iowa
Kentucky
Mississippi
Ohio
Oklahoma
Utah
Apple said the feature would also be supported in Puerto Rico.
In 2021, Apple said it was “already in discussions with many more states” and hoped to offer the feature nationwide in the future.
It is unclear if Apple plans to expand the feature to other countries.
Participating Locations
Apple Wallet app IDs can be used at select TSA checkpoints within select U.S. airports:
Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI)
Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA)
Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport (PHX)
Denver International Airport (DEN)
Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL)
Apple says travelers should refer to TSA checkpoint signage to confirm availability of the feature.
Apple’s website says IDs in the Wallet app can also be used to show proof of age or identity at “select businesses and venues,” but adoption is limited.
While the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max are still around six months away from launching, there are already many rumors about the devices. Below, we have recapped new features and changes expected so far. These are some of the key changes rumored for the iPhone 16 Pro models as of March 2024:Larger displays: The iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max will be equipped with larger 6.3-inch…
Resale value trends suggest the iPhone SE 4 may not hold its value as well as Apple’s flagship models, according to SellCell. According to the report, Apple’s iPhone SE models have historically depreciated much more rapidly than the company’s more premium offerings. The third-generation iPhone SE, which launched in March 2022, experienced a significant drop in resale value, losing 42.6%…
Apple appears to be internally testing iOS 17.4.1 for the iPhone, based on evidence of the software update in our website’s logs this week. Our logs have revealed the existence of several iOS 17 versions before Apple released them, ranging from iOS 17.0.3 to iOS 17.3.1. iOS 17.4.1 should be a minor update that addresses software bugs and/or security vulnerabilities. It is unclear when…
Apple’s next-generation iPad Pro models are expected to be announced in a matter of weeks, so what can customers expect from the highly anticipated new machines? The 2022 iPad Pro was a minor update that added the M2 chip, Apple Pencil hover, and specification upgrades like Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity. The iPad Pro as a whole has generally only seen relatively small updates in…
iOS 17.4 was released last week following over a month of beta testing, and the update includes many new features and changes for the iPhone. iOS 17.4 introduces major changes to the App Store, Safari, and Apple Pay in the EU, in response to the Digital Markets Act. Other new features include Apple Podcasts transcripts, an iMessage security upgrade, new emoji options, and more. Below, we…
Apple plans to release new iPad Pro and iPad Air models “around the end of March or in April,” according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. He also expects new Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil accessories for iPads to launch simultaneously. Apple is expected to release a larger 12.9-inch iPad Air In his Power On newsletter on Sunday, Gurman reiterated that Apple is preparing a special build of the…
Apple today announced three further changes for developers in the European Union, allowing them to distribute apps directly from webpages, choose how to design in-app promotions, and more. Apple last week enabled alternative app stores in the EU in iOS 17.4, allowing third-party app stores to offer a catalog of other developers’ apps as well as the marketplace developer’s own apps. As of…
AirPods Pro will gain a new “hearing aid mode” with the release of iOS 18 later this year, according to the latest report by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Writing in the subscriber edition of his regular Power On newsletter, Gurman claims that the “big news” for AirPods Pro in the near term will be support for a hearing aid-style function when iOS 18 drops in the fall. To be clear, this isn’t …
The scale and prevalence of mobile phones in today’s age is extraordinary when you think that little more than 40 years ago, not one person was able to buy one commercially. That all changed on March 13 1984, when the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X became the first mobile phone to be sold in the US Midwest and East coast, more than a year after it was first revealed.
Now, millions of mobile phones – that we largely call smartphones – are sold every day. Smartphone sales reached an annual peak of more than 1,556 million units in 2018, before slumping ever so slightly over the COVID-19 years, and remaining at roughly 1,339 million units in 2023, according to Statista. Phones sold today, however, are a far cry from the cumbersome, oversized and blocky Motorola handset that was first sold 40 years ago.
This family of devices was called Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage – or DynaTAC – and the 8000X became the first approved by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
An $11,800 phone that offered 30 minutes of speaking time
The 8000X offered 30 minutes of speaking time on a single charge (which took around ten hours to reach maximum battery capacity) and weiged 790 grams. It was also 25 cm (10 inches) long, meaning it wasn’t the most portable in the world – but a shade more portable than anything that had come before it. After all, before its release, the predominate communications system outside of the domestic landline were car phones, which Motorola also first introduced in 1946.
All this would set you back a staggering $3,995 – which is approximately $11,800 (£9,100) today.
The best business smartphones today, by contrast, boast battery lives in excess of 24 hours and enough processing power to run heavy-duty software applications. There’s also the growing trend of on-device AI to take into account – and all for under $2000 (£1,500). Motorola too has kicked on and produced some stunning and iconic handsets through the years, including its Razr flip phone and the foldable equivalents some years later.
But it’s also worth noting the cultural and technological significance of the first mobile phone when it was sold in 1984.
“Consumers were so impressed by the concept of being always accessible with a portable phone that waiting lists for the DynaTAC 8000X were in the thousands,” said Motorola design master Rudy Krolopp on the 20th anniversary of the device, according to the Project Management Institute (PMI). “In 1983, the notion of simply making wireless phone calls was revolutionary.”
“When you think about the history of Bluetooth, and specifically about audio, you really have to go back to the mid-to-late ’90s.”
Chuck Sabin is a Bluetooth expert. As a senior director at Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), he oversees market research and planning as well as business development. He’s also leading the charge for emerging uses of Bluetooth, like Auracast broadcast audio. In other words, he’s an excellent person to speak to about how far Bluetooth has come — from the days of mono headsets solely used for voice communication to today’s devices capable of streaming lossless-quality music.
In the mid ’90s, mobile phones were starting to become a thing, and of course so were regulations about hands-free use of them in cars. Sabin previously worked in the cellular industry, and he remembers how costly and intrusive the early hand-free systems were in vehicles. Bluetooth originated from cell phone companies working together to cut the cord to headphones since using those not-yet-wireless audio accessories in the car was cumbersome. One of the first mobile phones with Bluetooth was from Ericsson in the late ’90s, although an updated model didn’t make it to consumers until 2001. That same year, the IBM ThinkPad A30 became the first laptop with Bluetooth built in. At that time, the primary intent of the short-range radio technology was for voice calls.
The Bose Bluetooth Headset Series 2 (Bose)
“You had a lot of people who ended up with these mono headsets and boom mics,” he explained. You know, the people we all probably made fun of — at least once. Most of these things were massive, and some had obnoxious blinking lights. They’re definitely a far cry from the increasingly inconspicuous wireless earbuds available now.
Bluetooth as a specification continued to evolve, with companies leveraging it for music and streaming audio. To facilitate music listening, there had to be faster communication between headphones and the connected device. Compared with voice calling, continuous streaming required Bluetooth to support higher data speeds along with reduced latency. Where Bluetooth 1.0 was call specific, version 2.0 began to achieve the speeds needed for audio streaming at over 2 Mb/s. However, Sabin says, the 2.1 specification adopted by Bluetooth SIG in 2007 was when all streaming audio capabilities were implemented in automobiles, phones, headphones, headsets and more.
Of course, it would still be a few years before wireless headphones were mainstream. In the early 2000s, headphones were still directly connected to a mobile phone or other source device. Once Bluetooth became a standard feature in all new phone models, as well as its inclusion in laptops and PCs, consumers could count on wireless connectivity being available to them. Even then, music had to be loaded onto a memory card to get it on a phone, as dedicated apps and streaming services wouldn’t be a thing until the 2010s.
“The utility of the device that you carried around with you all the time was evolving,” Sabin said. “Bluetooth was ultimately riding that continued wave of utility, by providing the opportunity to use that phone as a wireless streaming device for audio.”
Bragi Dash true wireless earbuds (Photo by James Trew/Engadget)
About the time wireless headphones had become popular, a few companies arrived with a new proposition in 2015: true wireless earbuds. Bluetooth improvements meant reduced power requirements leading to much smaller devices with smaller batteries — and still provide the performance needed for true wireless devices. Bragi made a big splash at consecutive CESs with its Dash earbuds. The ambitious product had built-in music storage, fitness tracking and touch controls, all paired with a woefully short three-hour battery life. Perhaps the company was a bit overzealous, in hindsight, but it did set the bar high, and eventually similar technologies would make it into other true wireless products.
“Companies that were building products were really starting to stretch the specification to its limits,” Sabin explained. “There was a certain amount of innovation that was happening [beyond that] on how to manage the demands of two wireless earbuds.” Bluetooth’s role, he said, was more about improving performance of the protocol as a means of inspiring advances in wireless audio devices themselves.
He was quick to point out that, for the first few years, true wireless buds accepted the Bluetooth signal to only one ear and then sent it to the other. That’s why the battery in one would always drain faster than the other. In January 2020, Bluetooth SIG announced LE Audio at CES as part of version 5.2. LE Audio delivered lower battery consumption, standardized audio transmission and the ability to transmit to multiple receivers — or multiple earbuds. LE Audio wouldn’t be completed until July 2022, but it offers a lower minimum latency of 20 to 30 milliseconds versus 100 to 200 milliseconds with Bluetooth Classic.
“All of the processing is now done back on the phone itself and then streamed independently to each of the individual earbuds,” Sabin continued. “That will continue to deliver better performance, better form factors, better battery life and so on because the processing is being done at the source level versus [on] the individual earbuds.”
The increased speed and efficiency of Bluetooth has led to improvements in overall sound quality too. Responding to market demands for better audio, Qualcomm and others have developed various codecs, like aptX, that expand what Bluetooth can do. More specifically, aptX HD provides 48kHz/24-bit audio for wireless high-resolution listening.
“One of the elements that came into the specification, even on the classic side, was the ability for companies to sideload different codecs,” Sabin explained. “Companies could then market their codec to be available on phones and headphones to provide enhanced audio capabilities.”
LE Audio standardizes Bluetooth connectivity for hearing aids, leading to a larger number of supported devices and interoperability. The use cases range from tuning earbuds to a user’s specific hearing or general hearing assistance needs, with or without the help of active noise cancellation or transparency mode, to simply being able to hear valuable info in public spaces via their earbuds or hearing aid.
“Bluetooth is becoming integral for people with hearing loss,” he explained. “Not only for medical-grade hearing aids, but you’re seeing hearing capabilities built into consumer devices as well.”
Sony’s CRE-E10 OTC hearing aids (Sony)
Sabin also noted how the development of true wireless earbuds have been key for people with hearing loss and helped reduce the stigma around traditional hearing aids. Indeed, companies like Sennheiser and Sony have introduced assistance-focused earbuds that look no different from the devices they make for listening to music or taking calls. Of course, those devices do that too, it’s just their primary aim is to help with hearing loss. The boom, which has been going on for years, was further facilitated by a 2022 FDA policy change that allowed over-the-counter sale of hearing aids.
One of the major recent developments for Bluetooth is broadcast audio, better known as Auracast. Sabin described the technology as “unmuting your world,” which is exactly what happens when you’re able to hear otherwise silent TVs in public spaces. You simply select an available broadcast audio channel on your phone, like you would a Wi-Fi network, to hear the news or game on the TV during your layover. Auracast can also be used for things like PA and gate announcements in airports, better hearing at conferences and sharing a secure audio stream with a friend. Companies like JBL are building it into their Bluetooth speakers so you can link unlimited additional devices to share the sound at the press of a button.
“You’re seeing it in speakers, you’ll see it in surround sound systems and full home or party-in-a-box type scenarios,” he said. Sabin also noted that applications beyond the home could simplify logistics for events, since Auracast audio comes from the same source before it’s sent to a PA system or connected earbuds and headphones with no latency. Sabin said the near-term goal is for Bluetooth audio to be as common in public spaces as Wi-Fi connectivity, thanks to things like Auracast and the standard’s constant evolution.
Even after 20 years, we’re still relying on Bluetooth to take calls on the go, but both the voice and audio quality have dramatically improved since the days of the headset. Smaller, more comfortable designs can be worn all day, giving us constant access to music, podcasts, calls and voice assistants. As consumer preferences have changed to having earbuds in at all times, the desire to tune into our surroundings rather than block them out has increased. “Unmuting your world” is now of utmost importance, and the advancement of Bluetooth technology, from the late ’90s through LE Audio, continues to adapt to our sonic preferences.
To celebrate Engadget’s 20th anniversary, we’re taking a look back at the products and services that have changed the industry since March 2, 2004.
For many decades, businesses in the US and across the world have been relying on specially-engineered business laptops that have boosted productivity immeasurably.
One such model that’s been a staple for 30 years is the Dell Latitude family of enterprise laptops – starting with the Dell Latitude XP in 1994. Since then, Dell has continued manufactured a series of machines widely considered among the best business laptops, but it’s worth casting our eye back to the Latitude – the machine that started it all.
Nowadays, Dell has engineered a plethora of functional and productivity-enabling devices including the Latitude 7490, Latitude 7230 Rugged Extreme, and Latitude 9440. These machines usually incorporate the latest and most powerful components; the lattermost, for example, can be fitted with 13th-Gen Intel Core processors and up to 64GB RAM and up to 2TB storage.
Dell’s blast from the past
But the first machine, the Latitude XP, featured just a 9.5-inch color display, 8MB RAM, a 340MB hard drive, and an IntelDX4 75MHz processor. It was also fitted with a lithium-ion battery, among the first such machines to be fitted with one, and weighed a rather heavy 5.9 pounds (2.68 kg).
By contrast, today’s best ultraportables can sometimes come in at under 2.2 pounds (1kg). This device was available for “only” $3,399, equivalent to just under $7,100 (£5,500) today.
Some “cool facts” according to an ad from the time was that it was the most tested product in Dell’s history, at the time and the publication PC Computing heralded it as “the fastest, longest-lasting 486 notebook” that it have tested. It had “enough [bettery life] to get you from New York to London (and back if you catch the concorde) without a hiccup”.
The LA Times‘ Richard O’Reilly was also impressed with the fact that the Dell Latitude did not reduce the device’s screen brightness when it was using its battery, unlike many other similar machines at the time, including the ‘ThinkPad colour computer’.
The 1994 model saw an improvement a year later with the XPi, which featured an Intel Pentium processor, 40MB RAM and a NeoMagic NM2070 graphics card with 1MB memory. The screen size also got a boost to 10.5-inches. Since then, of course, the technology has vastly improved and businesses are able to take advantage of stunning displays and new AI features in the likes of the Latitude 7350 Detachable and Latitude 9450.
It’s unclear whether Tim Berners-Lee knew the magnitude of his authoring of the 1989 paper titled “Information Management: A Proposal“. But it was undoubtedly a transformative moment for humanity and has impacted society and business in profound ways.
35 years on from a mere proposal, we have interconnected systems all around the world that are powering large-scale big data analytics workloads, cloud-enabled quantum computing and artificial intelligence (AI) agents that are integrated into software components — like Microsoft‘s Copilot module. There may yet be further room for growth, with the metaverse and holographic projection possibly next in line as data transmission capabilities increase over the coming years.
Although the web was first proposed with Berners-Lee’s paper, the building blocks were in place for a few years beforehand by the US Department of Defense, when it decided to implement TCP/IP into its network. Thus, Arpanet was born. This eventually evolved into the model that’s become the web we use today — but it was a simple idea then, and pales into comparison compared with the intricately connected systems that govern every aspect of our lives.
The post-AI internet
The amount of data, for example, on the internet has exponentially surged — especially in the last few years. In 2018, IDC predicted that data would swell from 33ZB (or one billion terabytes) to 175ZB by 2025. Other estimates suggest it’s even greater, with 64ZB in 2020 ballooning to 181ZB by next year, according to Statista.
Considering what form the data takes is also key. With high-speed connections becoming more mainstream, the amount of video content has increased to the extent that it now represents 53.72%, according to a study published in 2022.
Now, however, there are also rising concerns over how much of the internet is real. A “shocking amount” of the content on the internet is fake, according to scientists with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in a recently published paper. More than half (57.1%) of all the sentences on the web have been translated into two or more other languages, suggesting AI tools like large language models (LLMs) were used to create and translate them. It reinforces findings by 404 media, showing Google News is inadvertently promoting AI-generated content.
If Berners-Lee has anything to say about the future of the internet, we might adopt a new protocol known as Solid. Spearheaded by his new company, Inrupt, it leans on Web 3.0 principles and the prioritization of user privacy. Whether or not this idea takes off, however, remains to be seen.
Northern Australian elder George Milpurrurr shows the next generation how to do a cultural burn.Credit: Penny Tweedie/Alamy
Indigenous Australians have been using fire to shape the country’s northern ecosystems for at least 11,000 years, according to charcoal preserved in the sediment of a sinkhole. The study was published on 11 March in Nature Geoscience1.
The practice of cultural burning, also known as ‘fire-stick farming’, is integral to Indigenous Australian culture and history, and is understood to have profoundly altered landscapes across the country.
Fire-stick farming involves introducing frequent, low-intensity fires in small areas of the landscape in a patchy, ‘mosaic’ pattern, and is done early in the dry season. The practice is important culturally and environmentally; in particular, it reduces the amount of fuel available for burning and therefore decreases the intensity of wildfires that might spark late in the dry season because of lightning strikes or other triggers.
Archaeological evidence indicates that humans have continuously occupied the Australian continent for at least 65,000 years2, but little is known about when the practice of fire-stick farming began.
“You need a really long record that goes back before people were here so you can see what the natural world — the definitively unimpacted world, if you’d like — looks like and then you’ve got enough of a record to be able to see if anything changed,” says study co-author Michael Bird, a geologist at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia.
The researchers found that record in the sediment of Girraween Lagoon, a permanent water body formed in a collapsed sinkhole near Darwin in the Northern Territory. The lagoon is an important site for the traditional owners of the land, the Larrakia Nation, and was made famous by the crocodile attack scene in the 1986 film Crocodile Dundee.
Because the lagoon has remained full, its sediments offer a continuous record of deposition that has not been disturbed by drying out and cracking. Bird and his colleagues were able to extract a core from the bottom of the lagoon that provided a 150,000-year-long record of changes in the type and geochemistry of the deposited charcoal, and in the accumulation of pollen.
Change in the charcoal
The team notes that, around 11,000 years ago, the changes in the charcoal deposits point to alterations in the intensity of fires in the area.
Without human influence, fires are less frequent but have enough intensity to burn trees and leave behind charcoal, says Bird.
“A less-intense fire doesn’t get into the crown — it’s burning what’s on the ground,” he says. The grass, as well as twigs and fallen tree leaves, are more likely to become charcoal than the trees themselves, he adds.
Because tree-derived charcoal has higher concentrations of the isotope carbon-13 than does charcoal from grasses, the researchers analysed the composition and geochemistry of the burnt residue in the sample. The authors found a sustained change from low-frequency, high-intensity fires — the ‘natural’ fire regime — to more frequent but less intense ones, which they suggested was the result of Indigenous fire-stick farming.
The authors ruled out climate change as the cause of the shift by using the ratio of tree pollen to grass pollen as a type of climate history to show that vegetation changes did not explain the shift in the charcoal record.
However, Bird notes that European colonization has mostly brought an end to cultural burning practices, and has shifted fire intensity back towards a natural pattern. “Because we’ve had, 10,000 plus years of a particular fire regime, it’s the release from that fire regime that’s actually creating quite significant issues,” he says, suggesting that this shift has contributed to the return of more high-intensity wildfires.
Joe Fontaine, a fire ecologist at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, says that the growing understanding of how cultural burning has shaped the Australian landscape, particularly in the northern regions, is crucial for contemporary fire-management practices, which to a large extent have excluded Indigenous people and their expertise.
“The barriers to doing cultural burning, in our arcane system of laws and bureaucracy,” are challenging to overcome, Fontaine says. There are also many more permanent structures in the landscape nowadays than there were before colonization, he says, so the challenge is to work out where and how cultural burning can be restored as a practice.
The continuing work that “puts cultural burning practices out there and establishes it as something that really existed, is crucial to the evolution of contemporary fire management,” he says.
After seven years of development, indie visual novel game The Hayseed Knight is now available in full for PC on both Steam and Itch.io.
Helmed by solo developer Maxi Molina, the game follows a one-eyed farm boy called Ader as he pursues his personal quest to become the most celebrated knight in Acazhor – a fictional kingdom inspired by the Muslim-ruled regions of medieval Spain.
The narrative was greatly influenced by the Picaresque literary genre, a storytelling tradition rooted in Spanish culture that depicts a plucky adventurer overcoming one scrape after another. It features an intriguing mix of comedy, romance, and more serious moments too, with your decisions affecting the overall trajectory of the story.
Rather unusually for an indie title, The Hayseed Knight is also fully voice-acted and absolutely bursting with gorgeous hand-drawn animation. This allows scenes to unfold in an almost cartoon-like fashion and you can see some of the animation for yourself in an animated trailer that debuted alongside the full release.
It contains five chapters (in addition to small epilogues) that are estimated to take around 20 hours to complete in total, with potential for further playthroughs in order to discover all three major endings.
Development first began in 2017, with the game entering Steam early access and receiving major updates on a chapter-by-chapter basis. A recent Steam post outlines some of the biggest changes in the full version, including the release of the final chapter plus plenty of overhauls and improved illustrations throughout. The post also describes this release as “the last big update” providing there isn’t “anything failing catastrophically and needing patches.”
In line with Molina’s aim to offer “newcomers a chance to add a high-profile paid project to their resume,” the voice cast includes actors with a wide range of experience levels. In addition to the voice actors, all external contributors including musicians, translators, and consultants are credited in the game no matter the scope of their work – which is certainly commendable.
