Dr Karl explains 5G and why it won’t kill you

If you've ever seen a deepfake video, you'll know they can be unsettling.
Whether it's AI-altered Mark Zuckerberg warning of the dangers of Facebook or a seemingly innocuous one of Bill Hader morphing into Tom Cruise — we can no longer trust what we see.
Most of the discussion around deepfakes centres on their political implications in the era of fake news, and on our perception of truth — but the majority of victims aren't politicians.
Deepfakes are mostly weaponised against women and girls; a dangerous new frontier in so-called "revenge porn".
Read Kirsti Melville's feature article.
Listen to the full episode of Earshot.

We're losing perspective on the true state of the world and fear is impeding our ability to make decisions and effect positive change.
That's the view of Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist who argues that we — both as individuals and societies — are ignoring statistical evidence that the world "is getting better, not worse".
This includes a dramatic fall in infant mortality, a significant rise in life-expectancy, a decline in homicide across many parts of the world, increasing literacy levels, a drop in the number of deaths in war, and a massive reduction over the last half-century in the number of people living in extreme poverty.
According to Professor Pinker, our media culture shoulders much of the blame. He believes it's biased toward the negative because bad news is seen as being "more morally serious".
Others go further, saying pessimism is now entrenched in the Western world, leading to a pervading sense of cultural decline.
Read more in Antony Funnell's feature article.
Or listen to the episode of Future Tense.

Whether you like it or not, 5G is coming.
And it's promising blisteringly fast download speeds — up to 1 gigabyte per second — which is almost as astonishing as the amount of negative publicity it's getting.
Opponents of 5G have made all sorts of alarming claims. It's killing birds! It's a weapon used by the military! It's going to trigger a cancer epidemic!
None of these claims are particularly plausible, and most of them are downright far-fetched.
Read the story from Dr Karl Kruszelnicki and Jo Khan.
Or listen to Dr Karl's podcast, Great Moments In Science. ​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​

Samia Khatun didn't expect to disprove historians when she found a book of Bengali Sufi poetry in the old tin mosque at Broken Hill.
She had gone to investigate the book — found in the 1960s — that historians and locals said was a Koran.
"The first thing I did was I called my mother," she says, remembering the moment she opened the 500-page book.
The text was in a classical form of her mother tongue, which she hadn't read since the age of seven, when her family had emigrated from Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Ms Khatun didn't realise it at the time, but she was already connected to the dusty old book in Broken Hill.
Read more in Alice Moldovan's feature article.
And listen to the episode of Soul Search.