Thousands of Year 12 students across Australia are getting ready to sit their final exams.

Students may be feeling a lot of things right now – from heightened pressure to excitement it will all be over soon. Families may be seeking strategies to help their young people to feel confident and stay calm.

Here are some research-backed strategies to help.

Reframe the narrative

Students, schools and the media often talk about Year 12 exams as the culmination of schooling. This may not be helpful to everyone, as not everyone will receive the results they want.

Stress tends to increase throughout the final year of school.

Although a moderate level of stress is normal, and some pressure may even be useful, too much worry about exams can affect performance and overall wellbeing.

Remember, one exam is not the whole story of your ATAR or your future.

It is healthier to think about the bigger picture. Education isn’t just about exams. They are one part of a bigger journey that includes the relationships you’ve formed with peers and teachers, all the things you learned and all the experiences you’ve had.

Students have already achieved a great deal in 13 years of school – regardless of what happens in their exams or ATAR.

What is ‘success’?

In our 2021 study, colleagues and I looked at how different ideas of “success” relate to young people’s wellbeing.

A review of existing studies suggests teenagers who focus on their connections to others and their personal growth may have greater wellbeing than those who focus on “extrinsic” goals or external approval.

Families can help students by emphasising the importance of life beyond the classroom.

You’ve got options!

Keep in mind, your future does not hinge on this result.

There are more alternative pathways into university or further study than ever before. This can include going to TAFE or non-ATAR entry schemes for university.

Reminding yourself – or your child – about these options may help to reduce stress.

Have a clear plan for your exams

As you near the end of your study revision period, think about your plan for certain exams.

You will likely already have done practice exams and revision questions, so you know what format to expect.

Remind yourself when you get into the exam room to take your time to read the instructions carefully and be aware of sections where there is a choice. Pay attention to the weighting of questions as this can help you to plan the time well.

And remind yourself to stop and understand the “command terms”. These are words that tell you what to do in a question, like “analyse”, “compare” or “discuss”.

What if something goes wrong?

You may come out of an exam feeling like you didn’t do your best or something didn’t go to plan. This is very common!

So having a strategy to manage when things do not go well can be important –especially when the setbacks happen early in the exam schedule.

Research tells us planning and persistence are key components of “academic buoyancy”, or students’ resilience in the face of a setback.

This means you should revisit your plan for the next exam, whether it is tomorrow or next week. Plan your timing and approach. Look at any feedback you received on the practice exams, or advice you have received from teachers. Feeling prepared for the next exam will increase your confidence.

Remember, resilience is not just an individual trait: it comes from relationships and contexts too.

You don’t have to handle setbacks alone. In fact, it’s better if you ask for help.

Talking with a trusted friend, teacher, family member or counsellor can put things into perspective or help reframe your approach for the next exam.

Keep some balance in your life

In among your revision and preparation, don’t forget to look after your health.

Get plenty of sleep, eat well, take breaks and spend time in nature – these will all help you maintain focus and wellbeing.

Kylie Trask-Kerr, Senior lecturer, School of Education, Australian Catholic University and Steven Lewis, Associate Professor of Education Policy, Australian Catholic University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

When The Buggles’ music video “Video Killed the Radio Star” aired on August 1, 1981, it marked a historic moment for both television and music. The day marked the launch of the Music Television channel (MTV).

MTV rapidly became a trendsetter and remained one for over two decades by offering something revolutionary: a nonstop stream of music videos, visual storytelling, and youth culture.

Just like The Buggle’s iconic song, MTV’s innovation disrupted radio. It became the tastemaker long before YouTube, TikTok, and artificial intelligence-based recommendations ever existed.

Everyone looked forward to the countdown and the MTV awards — shared rituals that shaped youth culture, music tastes, and even communities.

But that’s it for MTV. Last week, it announced its various UK music channels would be shutting down later this year. Only one reality show-based channel — MTV HD — will remain.

MTV wasn’t immune to the overall decline of TV viewership. Video jockeys (VJs) that once guided audiences through playlists have been replaced by algorithms. Consumers’ endless scrolling habits take away the excitement of waiting for the next fixed show.

MTV’s decline goes beyond a mere business downturn or the shutdown of some television channels. It is the end of an era when music videos brought people together in the same beat.

The golden age

MTV sparked excitement upon its launch. At the time, the public was captivated by how it transformed music into something that could no longer just be heard, but also seen and felt through videos.

Musicians also took advantage of the opportunity to show off through videos: combining music, fashion, and visual performance. The “King of Pop”, Michael Jackson, was a perfect example of what MTV’s influence did for his career.

Track songs like Thriller, Beat It, and Billie Jean brought Michael Jackson to the pinnacle of fame. Other artists such as Duran Duran and Madonna also got their long-lasting popularity from MTV.

Its dominance took shape after Viacom Inc. (now Paramount Global) acquired it for US$667.5 million in 1985.

Together with Paramount, MTV presented various variety of genre-based programs, such as Yo! MTV Raps and Headbangers Ball, which targeted youth cultural segments and fostered a sense of shared identity.

MTV created something more than just a television network. It also symbolised a shared culture, reflecting how people listened to music, dressed, and imagined their futures.

Its expansion turned out to be a massive success. Paramount polished MTV into one of the world’s most influential channels for decades. At some point, MTV annual revenue touched US$400 million and reached 112 million viewers in just one year.

Lost and slow adaptation

Technological advancements began disrupting the entertainment landscape at the start of the 21st century. The digital revolution beat up traditional television, and of course MTV itself.

People who used to watch TV shifted their attention to the internet. The emergence of music and video entertainment platforms offering on-demand services made MTV’s music channel outdated.

Through Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube, people have instant and unlimited access to music without having to schedule their days.

This shift in viewing habits stems from changes in consumer behaviour, corporate pressures, and the evolution of digital media. The demise of MTV and the new disruption wave of on-demand platforms reflect a major shift in the global cultural landscape.

The pressure also came from MTV itself. Former MTV UK Head of Digital Matthew Kershaw said the management’s reluctance to break away from its old business model contributed to its downfall.

MTV’s vast network of channels was once seen as innovative. But its increasingly corporate approach shifted the focus toward reality shows like Jersey Shore, MTV Cribs, and Jackass. While these programs were popular for a time, MTV drifted away from its music roots.

But these innovations weren’t relevant anymore. Back then, these channels united audiences because everyone watched the same music videos, talked about them in school, and formed a collective identity.

Now, people enjoy music in more personal and customised ways — thanks to algorithms and AI.

As of July 2025, MTV Music only attracted around 1.3 million viewers. There is a huge gap from its heyday in the 1980s-90s which reached hundreds of millions.

Did nothing — and it Backfired

MTV’s downfall is a reminder that in the digital age, technological adaptation, time management and the ability to adapt to consumer behavior are crucial.

MTV certainly made history as a disruptor of the old model. Yet over time, MTV has now become the one being disrupted by the very thing it once used: technology.

People can now watch whenever and wherever they want with the current innovation. There’s no need to wait for a fixed schedule to enjoy the music from their favourite artists.

Still, Even today’s disruptors must stay vigilant. Slowly but surely, TikTok is the phantom manace. This Chinese social media platform has successfully captured the popular trend of dancing combine with music.

MTV basically has resources, even more, than platforms that now dominate music entertainment like Spotify and YouTube. It is all about consumer behaviour and needs mismatch. MTV’s lack of agility to meet next generation needs just paid off.

MTV was once a phenomenon built on the slogan “video killed the radio star.” Now it must admit that streaming has killed the video star.

Farhan Mutaqin, PhD Researcher, University of Edinburgh and Naufal Rafiansyah, Marketing science, University of Edinburgh

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Like many star-crossed lovers, Elaine Goodale and Charles Alexander Eastman came from different worlds.

Goodale, born in 1863 to a family claiming Puritan roots, grew up on a farm in a remote part of western Massachusetts. In 1858, a baby first named Hakadah, later called Ohíye S’a, who then became widely known as Charles Alexander Eastman for most of his adult life, was born near Redwood Falls, Minnesota. A Wahpeton Santee Dakota, he fled to Manitoba, Canada, with tribal members during the 1862 Dakota War between the U.S. military and several bands of Dakota collectively known as the Santee Sioux.

In December 1890, the two unexpectedly met each other while working at the Pine Ridge Agency in the newly declared state of South Dakota. Even more improbably, they fell in love.

Just weeks later, booming Hotchkiss rifles 15 miles away signaled the start of the Wounded Knee Massacre. Federal troops ended up killing at least 250 Lakota Sioux men, women and children; the traumatic event, historian David Martínez writes, sparked “the abrupt transformation of Indian nations from geopolitical powers … to symbols of conquest.”

It also transformed Goodale and Eastman’s nascent relationship: They resolved to marry and to work together for Native American causes.

Wounded Knee, however, would also prove an unfortunate metaphor for their marriage.

In the research for my new dual biography, “Love and Loss After Wounded Knee: A Biography of an Extraordinary Interracial Marriage,” I dove into letters, photographs and hundreds of newspaper articles documenting this high-profile, late-19th-century relationship.

I came to understand that their marriage failed not only because of interpersonal tensions and a clash of values, but also because of some of the ways in which ideas about gender, race and Indigenous identity were rapidly changing in the U.S.

From writer to teacher

At 13, Goodale started publishing poetry in St. Nicholas Magazine, a popular children’s periodical. Her poems generated attention from the press, in addition to fan mail from notable men of letters, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. By the time she was 20, she had published five books.

But because poets without family fortunes needed other means to support themselves – and because women in the late 1800s had few career options – Goodale turned to teaching. She accepted a job at Virginia’s Hampton Institute, a boarding school that was founded to teach newly emancipated Black students. It later became part of the government’s program to assimilate Native Americans.

Goodale became convinced that Indigenous children would benefit more from schools in their own communities, rather than at government- or church-run boarding schools. She traveled to the Dakota Territory and opened a day school. She also turned from poetry to prose, documenting her observations of “Indian life and education” in dozens of articles.

By the time she came to Pine Ridge Agency, the administrative offices at the Oglala Lakota Indian Reservation, she had been appointed the first supervisor of education for the Dakotas.

The ideal ‘assimilated Indian’

Ohíye S’a’s early years were marked by family trauma and U.S. government policies aimed at seizing land and displacing and assimilating Native people. His mother died shortly after he was born, and during the Dakota War it was widely believed that his father and brothers had perished. His grandmother and uncle raised him until his mid-teenage years.

In 1873, the 15-year-old was surprised to discover that his father was, in fact, alive. Jacob Eastman had taken a European-American name and converted to Christianity. He was convinced that only a formal English-language education could provide a path forward for Native people.

At his father’s urging, Ohíye S’a became “Charles Eastman,” and he also converted to Christianity. He attended a series of boarding schools before landing at Dartmouth College and then Boston University Medical School.

His white mentors saw Eastman – the only Native person in his class at either institution – as the ideal “assimilated Indian.” His achievements often appeared in newspapers with headlines like “He’s a Winner: Sioux Indian Who Got a Boston University Degree,” an allusion to the fact that “Ohíye S’a” translated to “winner.”

It isn’t clear whether Eastman ever thought of himself in that way. But throughout his life, he straddled the world in which he was raised and the one in which he was educated. His first job, as agency physician at Pine Ridge, placed him at the nexus of these two cultures.

An unlikely pair, a media sensation

After the shots rang out near Wounded Knee Creek, Eastman’s medical education was put to the test. Called into service as a nurse, Goodale also tended the wounded and dying in the makeshift hospital at a nearby church.

Six months later, Elaine and Charles were married in New York City in June 1891, much to the consternation of her family.

The couple’s nuptials appeared in hundreds of newspapers, partially due to the rarity of an interracial marriage in the 19th century. Much of the coverage was rife with racist stereotypes.

The Watertown Times in New York proclaimed, “Poetess Marries a Big Injun’”; the San Francisco Examiner ran a front-page story declaring “Fair Bride of An Indian: Elaine Goodale Weds the Red Man of Her Choice.”

Sometimes, articles focused on Charles’ educational background, often misrepresenting it by suggesting he had attended Cornell, Harvard or Yale. He was referred to as a “specimen,” with racialized language discussing his physical attributes: “He is of medium height … with all the peculiarities of his people in his features. His eyes are small and glittering, his face and nose are broad and his cheek bones very pronounced,” according to the San Francisco Examiner.

This type of media coverage – highlighting the differences between Elaine and Charles’ backgrounds, while pointedly describing Charles in stereotyped ways – would dog them throughout their marriage.

Professional travails, personal problems

Charles attempted to set up his own medical practice in St. Paul, Minnesota. But white patients proved reluctant to see “an Indian doctor,” while Native patients were hesitant to patronize a physician dispensing unfamiliar medicines. The practice failed.

Financial pressures increased over the next decade as Elaine and Charles became parents of six children. They moved frequently: Charles took on a series of jobs, including recruiting for the YMCA, lobbying on behalf of the Santee Sioux, and working as an “outing agent” at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which involved finding summer placements for Native students with white families in a further attempt to Americanize them.

Because Charles left behind few personal papers, it’s difficult to know if he believed in this program. But it’s easy to see how it could have created an identity crisis of sorts.

At other points in his life, Charles seemed to put his Dakota identity front and center. For example, he was one of the co-founders of the Society of American Indians, an organization that worked on behalf of self-determination for Native Americans. He even served as its president in 1918. Meanwhile, his wife remained a staunch believer in assimilation.

At Elaine’s urging – and likely, under her editorial stewardship – Charles began publishing stories and then books about his “Indian Boyhood.” While Elaine continued writing and was able to publish a few books, his literary career took off and hers stalled out.

Even their children weren’t spared from the headlines. An article in the St. Paul Globe wrote, of one of the Eastman children, “… the child had not inherited any of the attractiveness of the mother. It was a veritable old squaw miniature.”

In her personal writing, Elaine never acknowledged her children as biracial. The public stereotyping and private dismissal of the Eastman children’s identities were undoubtedly another stressor in an already-stressed marriage.

Pictures worth a thousand words

After many moves, the Eastmans landed in Amherst, Massachusetts. But Charles did not stay put, embarking upon a vigorous new career on the lecture circuit.

He became one of the best-known Native Americans of his era, as well as one of the most photographed.

Sometimes Charles chose to appear in a Victorian suit and cravat. Other times he posed in traditional Sioux regalia. Often the coverage of his talks focused more on what he was wearing than the content of his lecture. Historian Kiara Vigil suggests that Charles knew that his dress functioned as an advertisement for his work, arguing that his choice of attire was strategic: “Eastman’s ability to dress up as an Indian, or not, enabled him to address diverse audiences and their expectations.”

He was away from home more than he was present, further fueling Elaine’s resentment. In personal letters, she described her bitterness at Charles leaving the children and household to her sole care, and her belief that he was reinforcing the gender roles she’d railed against. While she certainly understood that his posing in buckskin and feathered headdress was good marketing, she probably never realized what reclaiming his Indigenous identity meant to Charles; she, too, thought of him as the product of successful assimilation.

It all falls apart

The personal and professional pressures on the Eastmans continued through the early years of the 20th century.

They reached a breaking point after their second daughter, Irene Taluta, died in the 1918 influenza pandemic. The tragic loss of a beloved child continued to unravel an already frayed marriage.

Elaine and Charles separated in 1921, though they never formally divorced.

I’ve been interested in the Eastmans and their unlikely marriage since I first learned of it years ago. As I pieced together parts of this complex relationship, I became convinced that while their compelling story reveals much about late 19th and early 20th century America, it’s also a story for today.

At a time of profoundly unsettling controversies around race, immigration and identity, the marriage of Elaine Goodale and Charles Eastman underscores why it can be so challenging for people from different backgrounds to truly understand each other.

But their story – how their mutual commitment to improve life for Native American people brought them together, how their quest to educate the nation about a marginalized people gave them purpose, and the ways in which they melded the personal and the political – also suggests the importance of trying.

Julie Dobrow, Distinguished Senior Lecturer of Child Study and Human Development, Tufts University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Last week, OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT Atlas, a web browser that promises to revolutionise how we interact with the internet. The company’s CEO, Sam Altman, described it as a “once-a-decade opportunity” to rethink how we browse the web.

The promise is compelling: imagine an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant that follows you across every website, remembers your preferences, summarises articles, and handles tedious tasks such as booking flights or ordering groceries on your behalf.

But beneath the glossy marketing lies a more troubling reality. Atlas is designed to be “agentic”, able to autonomously navigate websites and take actions in your logged-in accounts. This introduces security and privacy vulnerabilities that most users are unprepared to manage.

While OpenAI touts innovation, it’s quietly shifting the burden of safety onto unsuspecting consumers who are being asked to trust an AI with their most sensitive digital decisions.

What makes agent mode different

At the heart of Atlas’s appeal is “agent mode”.

Unlike traditional web browsers where you manually navigate the internet, agent mode allows ChatGPT to operate your browser semi-autonomously. For example, when prompted to “find a cocktail bar near you and book a table”, it will search, evaluate options, and attempt to make a reservation.

The technology works by giving ChatGPT access to your browsing context. It can see every open tab, interact with forms, click buttons and navigate between pages just as you would.

Combined with Atlas’s “browser memories” feature, which logs websites you visit and your activities on them, the AI builds an increasingly detailed understanding of your digital life.

This contextual awareness is what enables agent mode to work. But it’s also what makes it dangerously vulnerable.

A perfect storm of security risks

The risks inherent in this design go beyond conventional browser security concerns.

Consider prompt injection attacks, where malicious websites embed hidden commands that manipulate the AI’s behaviour.

Imagine visiting what appears to be a legitimate shopping site. The page, however, contains invisible instructions directing ChatGPT to scrape personal data from all open tabs, such as an active medical portal or a draft email, and then extract the sensitive details without ever needing to access a password.

Similarly, malicious code on one website could potentially influence the AI’s behaviour across multiple tabs. For example, a script on a shopping site could trick the AI agent into switching to your open banking tab and submitting a transfer form.

Atlas’s autofill capabilities and form interaction features can become attack vectors. This is especially the case when an AI is making split-second decisions about what information to enter and where to submit it.

The personalisation features compound these risks. Atlas’s browser memories create comprehensive profiles of your behavior: websites you visit, what you search for, what you purchase, and content you read.

While OpenAI promises this data won’t train its models by default, Atlas is still storing more highly personal data in one place. This consolidated trove of information represents a honeypot for hackers.

Should OpenAI’s business model evolve, it could also become a gold mine for highly targeted advertising.

OpenAI says it has tried to protect users’ security and has run thousands of hours of focused simulated attacks. It also says it has “added safeguards to address new risks that can come from access to logged-in sites and browsing history while taking actions on your behalf”.

However, the company still acknowledges “agents are susceptible to hidden malicious instructions, [which] could lead to stealing data from sites you’re logged into or taking actions you didn’t intend”.

A downgrade in browser security

This marks a major escalation in browser security risks.

For example, sandboxing is a security approach designed to keep websites isolated and prevent malicious code from accessing data from other tabs. The modern web depends on this separation.

But in Atlas, the AI agent isn’t malicious code – it’s a trusted user with permission to see and act across all sites. This undermines the core principle of browser isolation.

And while most AI safety concerns have focused on the technology producing inaccurate information, prompt injection is more dangerous. It’s not the AI making a mistake; it’s the AI following a hostile command hidden in the environment.

Atlas is especially vulnerable because it gives human-level control to an intelligence layer that can be manipulated by reading a single malicious line of text on an untrusted site.

Think twice before using

Before agentic browsing becomes mainstream, we need rigorous third-party security audits from independent researchers who can stress-test Atlas’s defenses against these risks. We need clearer regulatory frameworks that define liability when AI agents make mistakes or get manipulated. And we need OpenAI to prove, not simply promise, that its safeguards can withstand determined attackers.

For people who are considering downloading Atlas, the advice is straightforward: extreme caution.

If you do use Atlas, think twice before you enable agent mode on websites where you handle sensitive information. Treat browser memories as a security liability and disable them unless you have a compelling reason to share your complete browsing history with an AI. Use Atlas’s incognito mode as your default, and remember that every convenience feature is simultaneously a potential vulnerability.

The future of AI-powered browsing may indeed be inevitable, but it shouldn’t arrive at the expense of user security. OpenAI’s Atlas asks us to trust that innovation will outpace exploitation. History suggests we shouldn’t be so optimistic.

Uri Gal, Professor in Business Information Systems, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Earlier this year, the consumer watchdog fined three retailers, Michael Hill, MyHouse and Hairhouse Online, almost A$20,000 each for advertising “site-wide discounts” that allegedly never applied to all items on the website.

At first glance, this might look like a straightforward case of using allegedly misleading advertising for an economic benefit. Yet the implications go further.

Years of exposure to constant promotions have trained shoppers to chase a bargain, promoting “clickbaiting”: tactics designed to lure consumers into browsing.

Businesses spend heavily to secure the spot on your social media feed, and that investment has to be recouped. The most effective way is through personalised, persistent ad campaigns that quietly push consumers to buy more.

The way these ad campaigns currently collect data leaves consumers exposed. They also feed into broader concerns about overproduction, which in turn drives overconsumption. That benefits the retailers, but it fuels waste.

Bargains and the data you give away

When you click on an ad, whether it is on a brand’s website or its social media feed, you are not just interacting with the campaign. Behind the scenes, these platforms are collecting your data, analysing your behaviour, and using it to shape personalised ads designed just for you.

Australia’s discount season kicks off in November and extends through to January. With Australians ready to consume, buying gifts for family and themselves, marketing teams go into overdrive. They flood websites and social media feeds with discount banners.

Every time a consumer clicks on an ad, they are revealing something about their shopping patterns. This information is collected through data harvesting (gathering user data) and data mining (analysing patterns in that data). The platform records and shares this information with the business to show the effectiveness of the campaign and whether it led to a conversion (a purchase, sign-up, or other intended action).

Behind this, tracking runs much deeper. Ads use “cookies”, which are tiny digital files that remember your browsing activity such as which sites you visit and how often. “Tracking pixels” quietly collect details such as your IP address, geo-location, time zone, and the type of device used. Together, these build a profile that helps predict your preferences and target you with similar ads later.

A long list of companies have access to your data

Advertisers also gather demographic and behavioural data, such as, your age, gender, interests and browsing history. They can tap data from other apps in your phone that share information through “third parties”. This is one of the vaguest terms in privacy policies. It sounds harmless, but usually hides a long list of unnamed companies getting access to your data.

This information creates a pool of bigger data which allows brands to “re-target” consumers, showing the same or related ads repeatedly. This triggers what psychologists call the “mere exposure effect”: the more you see something, the more familiar and trustworthy it feels. Over time that familiarity can nudge consumers towards buying, not because they needed it but simply because they had seen it so often. This subconsciously promotes overconsumption.

Although marketing campaigns are designed to make consumers buy, even if they do not, they still give away something of great value. Every click, scroll, or view generates data that is later used or sold to monetise; shaping targeted advertising, influencing consumer behaviour and creating economic value.

Did we really consent to this?

A government survey in 2023 showed that Australians do not fully understand the data privacy implications.

The Privacy Act 1988 forms Australia’s main legal framework, and is currently under review. But it only applies to businesses with an annual turnover above A$3 million. While most large retailers easily surpass the threshold, what’s less clear is whether the third parties in the privacy policies do.

In Australia, implied consent is often considered sufficient. If a website states in its privacy policy that it collects data, simply browsing the site is considered consent. A site provides little control over individual cookies unless the user manually adjusts their browser settings. Clicking an ad on social media can also be taken as agreeing to data collection.

In Australia, you either do not see a consent box at all or instead encounter a line stating that “by browsing this site, you agree to our privacy policy”. In both cases, consent is implied.

Stricter rules

In contrast, a website regulated under European Union regulations must clearly explain what data it collects. Only essential cookies are active by default. Marketing and tracking cookies are switched off unless consumers actively choose to allow them.

The difference is stark. The EU imposes stricter rules on data ownership, profiling and behavioural tracking, with no tolerance for vague implied consent. In Australia, behavioural tracking and targeted advertising depend on implied consent, typically hidden in lengthy, jargon-heavy privacy polices that few consumers can navigate.

While data privacy laws are still catching up, educating consumers is crucial to helping them understand how their data is used to influence them into overconsuming.

So now you know what really happens behind every click or “agree” button; the question is, will you still fall for the trick?

Aayushi Badhwar, Lecturer in Enterprise and Technology, RMIT University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

One of the earliest figures known to have faked an illness for personal advantage was Odysseus.

Odysseus was the hero of Homer’s Odyssey, which was probably written around the 8th century BC, but based on much older legends.

According to one version of the story, Odysseus pretended to be mentally ill to avoid taking part in the war of the Greeks against Troy.

To show he was not sane enough to go to war, Odysseus ploughed sand instead of soil, and did other wild deeds. However, his lie was exposed.

Palamedes, one of the leading figures on the Greek side of the war, threw Odysseus’ baby son, Telemachus, in front of Odysseus’ plough. Odysseus stopped to protect his son, showing he was not mentally ill.

Pretending to be ill to gain some personal benefit – such as trying to avoid work or war – is something ancient and modern people have in common.

As we’ll see, “taking a sickie” has a long history.

The Roman slave with a ‘sore knee’

The Greek physician Galen of Pergamum (129–216 AD) was familiar with the phenomenon of people pretending to be sick.

In one of his many books, he provides the most detailed ancient account we have of a doctor with a patient who fakes an illness.

Galen describes how a Roman slave boy tries to get out of doing his work by claiming he has severe pain in his knee.

As part of his deception, the slave smears poisonous ointment over his knee to make it look like it is swollen and bruised:

The slave boy had a large swelling at the knee which would frighten people who know nothing about medicine, but someone with medical expertise knows clearly that it was produced by the drug called ‘thapsia’.

This was Thapsia garganica, a poisonous plant that causes inflammation and swelling.

Galen could also tell this was a fake injury from the slave’s contradictory accounts of his pain. The slave said, at one point:

‘I feel tension in my whole joint’ and at another: ‘I feel a throbbing inside it’, and yet another: ‘it feels like there is an arrow stuck in it’ or: ‘it feels like it was pricked with needles’ or: ‘it feels heavy like a stone’, then ‘I feel pain in my whole leg in this way’ and then ‘the bone feels weak’.

Galen also gives the slave a fake cure to see how he responds:

I said to him: ‘I am going to rub a drug on your knee, and the pain you have will stop immediately’. I then rubbed a drug on it that does not at all relieve pain but usually only cools the heat generated by the thapsia. That slave confirmed after just a short while that his pain had gone completely. Had this pain really been caused by a hot swelling brought about by an internal cause, this cooling medicine would have intensified the pain and certainly not relieved it.

After the slave boy’s lie was exposed, he had to go back to work.

How to spot a faker

Galen also advised doctors on how to find out whether a patient was faking their illness. This included instructing doctors to tell their patients what they would have to give up to get better:

Some people are fond of drinking wine, some are fond of food, […] some are fond of bathing at the baths and some are fond of sex.

Clearly, Galen thought people wouldn’t want to pretend to be sick if they had to give up doing their favourite things or eating their favourite foods and drinks while receiving treatment.

Is faking an illness ever justified?

People in ancient times are shown faking all kinds of illnesses for personal advantage, mainly to get out of work, military service, or to conceal an affair.

However, in extreme cases lying may have been justified.

In Xenophon of Ephesus’ novel The Ephesian Tale (2nd–3rd century AD), the heroine Anthia avoids being sold into prostitution by faking an epileptic fit.

She then lies by saying she has always suffered from epilepsy, and is set free.

Modern sickies

In modern times, “taking a sickie” has become a well known phenomenon.

We’ve all seen the stories about people calling in sick and then their bosses seeing them on TV or social media boozing at the cricket or footy.

If the phenomenon of “taking a sickie” tells us anything, it’s that illness generates sympathy, and sympathy causes us to allow sick people time away from their duties – but this sympathy can be exploited for personal gain.

Galen knew that well, some 2,000 years ago.

Konstantine Panegyres, Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History, The University of Western Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Milky Way is a rich and complex environment. We see it as a luminous line stretching across the night sky, composed of innumerable stars.

But that’s just the visible light. Observing the sky in other ways, such as through radio waves, provides a much more nuanced scene – full of charged particles and magnetic fields.

For decades, astronomers have used radio telescopes to explore our galaxy. By studying the properties of the objects residing in the Milky Way, we can better understand its evolution and composition.

Our study, published today in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, provides new insights into the structure of our galaxy’s galactic plane.

Observing the entire sky

To reveal the radio sky, we used the Murchison Widefield Array, a radio telescope in the Australian outback, composed of 4,096 antennas spread over several square kilometres. The array observes wide regions of the sky at a time, enabling it to rapidly map the galaxy.

Between 2013 and 2015, the array was used to observe the entire southern hemisphere sky for the GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky MWA (or GLEAM) survey. This survey covered a broad range of radio wave frequencies.

The wide frequency coverage of GLEAM gave astronomers the first “radio colour” map of the sky, including the galaxy itself. It revealed the diffuse glow of the galactic disk, as well as thousands of distant galaxies and regions where stars are born and die.

With the upgrade of the array in 2018, we observed the sky with higher resolution and sensitivity, resulting in the GLEAM-eXtended survey (GLEAM-X).

The big difference between the two surveys is that GLEAM could detect the big picture but not the detail, while GLEAM-X saw the detail but not the big picture.

A beautiful mosaic

To capture both, our team used a new imaging technique called image domain gridding. We combined thousands of GLEAM and GLEAM-X observations to form one huge mosaic of the galaxy.

Because the two surveys observed the sky at different times, it was important to correct for the ionosphere distortions – shifts in radio waves caused by irregularities in Earth’s upper atmosphere. Otherwise, these distortions would shift the position of the sources between observations.

The algorithm applies these corrections, aligning and stacking data from different nights smoothly. This took more than 1 million processing hours on supercomputers at the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre in Western Australia.

The result is a new mosaic covering 95% of the Milky Way visible from the southern hemisphere, spanning radio frequencies from 72 to 231 MHz. The big advantage of the broad frequency range is the ability to see different sources with their “radio colour” depending on whether the radio waves are produced by cosmic magnetic fields, or by hot gas.

The emission coming from the explosion of dead stars appears in orange. The lower the frequency, the brighter it is. Meanwhile, the regions where stars are born shine in blue.

These colours allow astronomers to pick out the different physical components of the galaxy at a glance.

The new radio portrait of the Milky Way is the most sensitive, widest-area map at these low frequencies to date. It will enable a plethora of galactic science, from discovering and studying faint and old remnants of star explosions to mapping the energetic cosmic rays and the dust and grains that dominate the medium within the stars.

The power of this image will not be surpassed until the new SKA-Low telescope is complete and operational, eventually being thousands of times more sensitive and with higher resolution than its predecessor, the Murchison Widefield Array.

This upgrade is still a few years away. For now, this new image stands as an inspiring preview of the wonders the full SKA-Low will one day reveal.

Silvia Mantovanini, PhD Candidate, Astronomy, Curtin University and Natasha Hurley-Walker, Radio Astronomer, Curtin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Beyond ghoulish costumes and mountains of lollies, Halloween is rooted in celebrating nature. It originated in the Celtic pagan tradition of Samhain, marking the bounty of the autumnal harvest and transition to the dark depths of winter.

Fast forward to 2025, and Halloween is a commercial juggernaut expected to exceed $A19 billion in spending in the US alone.

It’s also one that can cause serious environmental harm, generating masses of plastic and food waste, and disturbing and harming wildlife.

This year, let’s celebrate nature’s spookiest and most gruesome wildlife with an environmentally-friendly Halloween.

Move aside werewolves, headless horsemen, witches and warlocks, here are ten of the most marvellous and macabre animals that will truly turn heads.

1. Vampire and ghost bats

Dracula had nothing on vampire bats. These flying mammals use razor-sharp teeth to puncture their prey’s bodies and grooved tongues then lap up the blood. Vampire bats are restricted to Central and South America.

But Australia has the aptly-named ghost bat, although they don’t drink blood. This species hunts mammals, birds, lizards, frogs, and other prey, but is itself sadly listed as vulnerable to extinction.

2. Horned lizards

Rather than being blood suckers, some animals squirt blood to protect themselves!

Horned lizards can control and constrict the blood flow in their heads, causing pressure to build up and, ultimately, rupture blood vessels around their eyes.

Rapid and repeated squirts of blood — laced with noxious chemicals from their venomous ant prey — are shot with remarkable precision over several feet at unsuspecting would-be predators, including coyotes.

3. Dementor wasps

The dementor wasp is truly the stuff of nightmares, especially if you’re a cockroach. They inject venom into cockroach brains, turning them into compliant zombies.

Once in control, wasps lead the zombie cockroaches back to their nests, lay their eggs in or on them, and the young wasps eat them alive.

4. Goblin sharks

The ocean depths are renowned for bizarre animals, including the wolf-fish, the fang-tooth fish, the vampire squid … and the goblin shark!

These sharks have distinctly goblin-like pointed snouts and long sharp teeth. Perhaps their most shocking feature is their mouth, which can be rapidly shot out from their head when feeding.

5. Assassin bugs

Assassin bugs kill ants for a living. But that’s not all.

Once they’ve liquefied and sucked their prey dry, they pile the lifeless bodies onto their backs. This is thought to be a way to confuse living ants and avoid their attack.

6. Slow lorises

Beware cute first appearances. The slow loris is capable of turning living creatures into visions of the walking dead.

Glands in their armpits produce a noxious oil, which oozes out and is licked by the loris. Combining this oil with their saliva produces a powerful cocktail that can be delivered through strong jaws and grooved teeth capable of piercing bone.

A bite from a slow loris can cause flesh to gradually rot away.

7. Sea cucumbers

The film The Exorcist is famous for its vomiting scene, but the humble sea cucumber delivers a far more unnerving performance.

When threatened they self-evisercate, spilling their guts out of their head or rear end (cloaca) and putting off would-be predators who prefer “live prey” from their meals.

Some have additional sticky and toxic filaments able to entangle, immobilise and even kill some attackers. Once danger has passed they can retreat and over several days they will remarkably regenerate their internal organs.

8. Skipper caterpillars

Living in confined spaces can pose many problems, including how to avoid soiling your home. Skipper caterpillars that live in curled leaves have a solution – explosive defecation!

They fire their waste via a hatch and under elevated blood pressure, meaning their flung dung can travel as far as 1.5 metres. It’s believed this trick has evolved to reduce scent building up that could attract predatory wasps.

9. Gordian worms

Gordian worms are another body-snatching species.

When their encysted larvae are eaten by unsuspecting grasshoppers or crickets, they develop inside their host and ultimately control their behaviour.

They lead them to water and cause them to drown themselves, whereupon the worm that has been growing inside them hatches out and completes the parasite’s life cycle. Ridley Scott’s iconic chest-bursting scene in Aliens comes to mind.

10. Shrews

Like the slow loris, cute and furry can hide a darker side for shrews. Many shrew species are venomous, using their bite to subdue their prey.

But they don’t always eat their victims immediately. Instead, they engage in “live hoarding”, where they stow their incapacitated, comatose meals away until hunger calls.

Halloween horrors

Far scarier than any animal’s appearance or bizarre behaviour, is the toll Halloween takes on the environment.

Halloween sees a surge in the sale of single-use polyester and plastic costumes and decorations, as well as individually-wrapped sweets.

One of the most popular but dangerous Halloween decorations are fake spider webs. These synthetic fibres regularly entangle and kill wildlife. They’re often blown away, ending up in waterways – where they can cause the same issues for aquatic life.

Halloween bright lights and loud noises also confuse and disorient nocturnal animals.

Making Halloween wildlife and environmentally friendly

This Halloween, try these ideas to celebrate without harming animals and the environment.

1. Instead of buying lollies, bake Halloween-themed biscuit treats. (Make sure people with allergies know the ingredients).

2. Use biodegradable and recyclable materials like twigs, feathers, leaves and paper to make decorations. Cardboard makes excellent nature-inspired Halloween cutouts and stencils.

3. Carve a pumpkin! But eat what you scoop out to reduce food waste and compost your pumpkin afterwards to prevent adding to landfill, methane production and climate change.

4. Visit your local opportunity shop or repurpose old clothes to make a Halloween costume. It’s better to reuse and recycle than give in to fast fashion.

Why not let some of our wonderful native wildlife, like ghost bats or peacock spiders, inspire your Halloween costume and theme this year!

Euan Ritchie, Professor in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, School of Life & Environmental Sciences, Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

We all know how commercial Halloween has become, with expensive dress-ups, trick-or-treat “candy” and fake cobwebs (please don’t – they kill birds!).

But if you’ve ever dismissed Halloween as an American invention, you might want to rethink that.

For at least the past couple of millennia, the changing of the seasons has been marked among Celtic peoples with festivals at recognised times of year.

One of these was known by the Irish and Scottish Gaels as Samhain (pronounced “sah-win”), celebrated at the onset of winter. In the northern hemisphere, this falls around the end of October, although the tradition predates our modern calendar.

Samhain and the rhythms of the farming year

At Samhain, the harvest would be over, the last livestock would be brought back from the summer pastures, and people would prepare for the winter.

The old Gaelic saying “Oidhche Shamhna theirear gamhna ris na laoigh” (on Samhain night, calves become stirks) shows us how closely the idea of Samhain is tied to the rhythms of the farming year. (A stirk is a beast aged between six and 12 months.)

Summer in Gaelic culture meant outdoor life – young family members staying up in the hills watching the grazing livestock, renewal of the thatch on the family home, growing and harvesting crops.

Winter meant long hours inside the house, rationing the food that had been stored.

Samhain became an opportunity for one last celebration of nature before the long period indoors.

Seasonal duties were completed. Beasts unlikely to survive would be butchered, with part of the meat preserved and part used in a shared meal.

Bonfires would be lit for a last outdoor party, also providing warmth, invoking protection and fertility.

Fires were probably a way of mimicking the warmth and light of the Sun – holding back the winter darkness a little longer, protecting against evil by appeasing the old gods or new saints.

There’s also a long-held Celtic belief that at liminal times like Samhain – on the cusp between summer and winter – the veil between the human and spirit worlds was especially thin.

This meant otherworldly beings or spirits, particularly those of the ancestors, might be found roaming in our world.

The forerunners of our modern trick-or-treaters

Various Samhain activities, recorded from the early 18th century, reflect uneasiness about the possibility of encountering spirits, but also the fun of the bonfire party.

Many involved divination: attempts to predict a future spouse or otherwise foretell the future, are particularly widely recorded.

Acts of mischief by perpetrators unknown (likely teenagers), not all of them benevolent, were also common at Samhain in parts of Scotland and Ireland.

Gates might be removed and hidden, meaning livestock might stray. Chimneys might be blocked with turnips, trapping smoke in the house. Houses might be pelted with vegetables, wheels taken from carts, boats pulled up above the waterline, or chamber pots tied to doors.

Some people carved ghoulish faces into turnips, into which a light (usually a smouldering peat or ember in the rural areas, but sometimes a candle) would be inserted. It may originate from the practice of carrying a smouldering peat to light the way, or it may originate from the idea of pre-emptive frightening of any spirits wandering abroad. This is the likely origin of today’s pumpkin carving.

Perhaps the peculiar combination of uneasiness and fun led to the most widespread Samhain activity: guising.

Guisers might be considered the forerunners of our modern trick-or-treaters, but this was not a matter of dressing as your favourite character, or donning a fetching witch’s hat.

Guisers could be genuinely terrifying, especially for young children.

On the island of South Uist, for example, masks made from sheepskin with features painted on them were often paired with wigs of straw and old clothes or animal skins that concealed the form of the person inside. Sometimes a sheep’s skull might be added.

Guisers would visit neighbouring houses, challenging the householders to guess their identities, perhaps reciting rhymes, riddles or songs, before accepting a scone or other food and going on their way.

There are two explanations of why guising began.

One is that by obscuring their identities, guisers would evade any hostile spirits seeking to harm them.

The other is that guisers were themselves imitating the ancestor spirits, and trying to frighten others.

Both are possibly true. The idea that the evening would morph into a sharing of songs, stories and food, surely holds the kernel of modern trick-or-treating.

All traditions change over time

In the 18th and 19th centuries, during the infamous Highland Clearances and Great Irish Famine, a great deal of the rural populations of Scotland and Ireland were relocated – often against their will – to North America.

In those relocated settlements, what could be more natural than to reproduce these familiar, and perhaps comforting, rituals of home?

The name Halloween refers to the Christian tradition of All Souls’ Day falling on November 1: the night before is All Souls’ (or All Hallows’) Eve, which became Halloween. As happened with many other significant dates, it seems to have been layered with the pre-existing festival of Samhain.

Halloween as we now know it has certainly been heavily influenced by North America, but if we look closely enough, we can still see the traces of much older Celtic beliefs.

We can embrace the idea of marking the turning of the seasons without having to adopt the whole package.

Pamela O'Neill, Sir Warwick Fairfax Lecturer in Celtic Studies, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Today marks 60 years since English photographic model Jean Shrimpton, dubbed “The Shrimp”, caused a stir among conservative racegoers at the Melbourne Cup.

On October 30 1965, the then 22-year-old wore a “swinging 60s” minidress that would go on to become the stuff of legend.

Shrimpton ventured to Flemington Racecourse in a simple dress, minus the trappings of 1960s conservative female attire: hat, gloves and stockings. She was also flashing a few extra inches of bare thigh which would have been deemed unseemly for the occasion.

This dress, a mere 10cm above the knee, would hardly turn heads in 2025.

Shrimpton was one of the world’s most photographed faces at the time, and her Derby Day appearance has been credited with driving a cultural shift in Australian sartorial style – one that marked the dawn of casual dressing and the rise of youth fashion culture.

However, as my research highlights, Shrimpton did not come to Australia with the intention to shock or disrupt. In fact, her influence on fashion was more a result of the reach of one particular big business.

Why did Jean Shrimpton come to Australia?

Ahead of the 1965 Melbourne Cup, the Victoria Racing Club (VRC) invited a number of locally active textile fibre producers to bring an international model to the event dressed in their product.

The VRC hoped a bit of extra glamour and pizzazz (at no cost to them) might stem waning attendance numbers and generate more interest in the relatively new Fashions on the Field event.

But apart from the Australian Wool Board, the only party to take up the offer was multinational chemical and textile giant DuPont de Nemours Inc (DuPont). DuPont hired Shrimpton under a sponsorship contract, and arranged to fly her to Australia to wear and promote one of its synthetic fibres called Orlon.

At the time, Orlon’s reputation in the fashion market was practically non-existent. What better way to increase its profile than to have it associated with a famous face?

Rumours of a tussle over fabric

Shrimpton was sent lengths of woven Orlon fabric in advance, and given free rein in having her racewear made in designs of her choice in London.

Stories abound about her having insufficient fabric to work with – hence the short hemline. In her 1990 autobiography, Shrimpton blamed DuPont for shortchanging the fabric allowance, but then affirmed she would have worn similar styles to any other race meeting in the world, as short skirts were “in” in 1965. DuPont also knew about those “mini” London styles Shrimpton was famous for wearing.

If the company had erred, or if Shrimpton had really craved a more traditional hemline, supplying additional fabric would not have been a problem for the large, well-resourced multinational.

When Shrimpton and her boyfriend, English actor Terence Stamp, touched down at Essendon Airport on Derby Day, they were 24 hours late.

A welcome party planned for the evening before Derby Day at Melbourne’s Top of the Town restaurant was cancelled at the last minute when DuPont got word around 6pm that the guest of honour was still in Sydney. The “big shrimp” ice carving prepared as a party centrepiece was left to melt.

Shrimpton was lucky to have made it to the Derby Day meeting at all. With no time to freshen or change, DuPont representatives hastily bundled her and Stamp into waiting vehicles at the airport, and headed straight to Flemington Racecourse.

What happened next is, shall we say, history.

Fallout from a fashion faux pas

Many have recalled the indignation among racegoers when Shrimpton entered the members’ enclosure on Derby Day — as well as the furore that erupted later and was enthusiastically fanned by the media.

Strict dress codes ruled supreme in the members’ enclosure. It was a space of conspicuous consumption, and one where haute couture traditionally took centre stage.

The promotional buildup to Shrimpton’s Australian arrival had been robust thanks to DuPont’s marketing efforts, so some of the public’s indignation and anger was likely tinged with disappointment.

The magic of a much-anticipated celebrity appearance was quickly dashed by the reality of a young model with unruly, windswept hair, wearing a simple, synthetic dress.

Critics blasted Shrimpton’s supposed lack of etiquette, manners and fashion choice, while Australia’s provincialism was called out internationally.

And while Shrimpton maintained her right to dress in her own style, she went home nursing bruised feelings over her public dressing-down. Meanwhile, DuPont’s involvement in the incident was all but forgotten.

Six decades on, Shrimpton retains her status as an icon who delivered Australian youth from the stifles of conservative dressing. But it’s also worth remembering the big business sponsorship behind her famous appearance.

After DuPont’s initial attempt at damage control – which involved supplying Shrimpton a hat and stockings for the Cup Day meeting – the company’s marketers quickly embraced the controversy as “absolutely sensational!”

It seems they followed the logic of 19th century showman P.T. Barnum, who reportedly said “there is no such thing as bad publicity”.

Pauline Hastings, Affiliate, School of Philosophical, Historical & Indigenous Studies (SOPHIS), Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Monopoly is the best-selling licensed board game of all time, popular since its 1935 release when “the new craze” swept the world.

It has remained a staple, with over 390,000 copies sold in Australia to date.

Its transformation from an economic critique to a capitalist icon highlights its historical evolution and adaptability.

A game with a message

Monopoly’s roots trace back to The Landlord’s Game (1903), created by Elizabeth Magie to critique monopolistic land ownership.

It featured two sets of rules – one emphasising wealth accumulation, the other wealth distribution. The aim was to demonstrate how different policy levers, taxing income versus taxing land, affect economic outcomes of players.

It was based on economist Henry George’s proposition for a “land value tax” or “single tax”. Under this regime, people would keep all they earned, with public funds raised from land ownership instead.

The two sets of rules in the Landlord’s Game demonstrate how wealth is either concentrated in the hands of landlords (taxing income) or is more fairly distributed across society (taxing land).

In 1935, a man named Charles Darrow removed the game’s socialist critique (the version that taxed land), renamed it Monopoly and sold it to Parker Brothers. The game was now focused on the accumulation of real estate until one player remained, having bankrupted their fellows.

The game thrived during the Great Depression, offering an escapist fantasy of financial success.

In 1935, Parker Brothers paid Magie US$500 (US$11,800 today) for the rights to her game, ensuring their ownership of Monopoly was unchallenged. As part of the deal, they released her original game, but it failed to gain traction with players.

Not everyone welcomed its capitalist themes – Fidel Castro famously ordered all Monopoly sets in Cuba destroyed in 1959

Playability and house rules

Philip Orbanes, former vice president of research at Parker Brothers, argued a good board game must have clear rules, social interaction and an element of luck. Monopoly ticks all three boxes.

Despite this, Monopoly is notorious for causing arguments. Hasbro (who bought out Parker Brothers in 1991, acquiring Monopoly in the process) found that nearly half of Monopoly games end in disputes, often over rule interpretations. Monopoly is the game most likely to be banned, or see a particular player banned, on game nights.

Monopoly’s rules have been adjusted and manipulated as players have sought to overcome the inequities in the game. Another of Hasbro’s surveys found 68% of players admitting to not having read the rules in their entirety, and 49% said they had made up their own rules.

These “house rules” include things like cash bonuses on Free Parking or modifying auctions to make the game more engaging.

Identity and nostalgia

Monopoly’s use of real-world locations makes it adaptable to local markets.

The original version reflected Atlantic City’s socio-economic hierarchy. When Waddingtons released the English version in 1936 under license (the same version which would go on to be released in Australia in 1937), Atlantic City’s wealthy Boardwalk and working class Mediterranean Avenue became London’s Mayfair and Old Kent Road, respectively.

The game can also serve as a bridge to former geographies. The 1980s Yugoslav edition remains a link to the past for those who lived through that era, recording changing political geographies and cultural shifts.

Monopoly is a flagship brand for Hasbro, worth an estimated US$272m in 2018. Part of Monopoly’s success lies in its licensing strategy. The board layout is extremely flexible, allowing for localised adaptations to be made to suit different markets, without any substantial change to the game play.

There are believed to be over 3,400 different versions of Monopoly issued, from classic city street layouts to popular culture imaginings.

It is this aspect that attracts collectors; world record holder Neil Scanlon owns 4,379 sets of Monopoly (he is still searching for the Cronulla Sharks set).

Monopoly reflects the world’s economic systems, embodying both the dream of wealth and the realities of financial inequality.

It has been studied by economists and educators as a tool for understanding capitalism, wealth accumulation and market control.

The game originally meant to critique monopolistic practices became a celebration of them. Each player has the opportunity to accumulate vast wealth, reflecting the promise of capitalism: where anyone can enjoy riches as long as they work hard enough.

Magie’s message was leveraged by Federal MP Andrew Leigh in his 2023 critique of the growing concentration of business monopolies in Australia. Leigh noted how monopolies affected Australian families and how the Albanese government had “increased penalties for anti-competitive conduct, and banned unfair contract terms” with the aim of creating a fairer society.

Enduring popularity

In 2025, Hasbro introduced digital banking versions – though many players lament the feel of physical wads of cash.

The game continues to be a favourite, ranking as the top childhood game among Baby Boomers, Gen X and Millennials – and fourth for Gen Z. The sense of nostalgia was strong among all groups, not surprising as board games were found to be an integral part of family bonding.

Monopoly has evolved from an anti-capitalist critique into a commercial juggernaut. While it has faced criticism for erasing its socialist origins and its reliance on luck, its ability to reinvent itself has ensured its lasting appeal.

As both a cultural artefact and a competitive game, Monopoly remains firmly embedded in board game culture.

Lisa J. Hackett, Senior Lecturer, Sociology & Criminology, University of New England

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Mercury prize almost always produces surprises – among them, Gomez not The Verve in 1998, and English Teacher not Charli XCX in 2024 – but perhaps the biggest surprise is that the prize has survived for so many years. That it has been won this year by Sam Fender in his native Newcastle speaks very much of the time that has passed in those 34 years.

Conceived as a kind of credible alternative to the Brit Awards – a prize for those beyond the razzamatazz of mainstream pop music – the (then) Mercury Music prize was introduced in 1992.

This was the year of a general election which, while won by the Conservative party, did not see the re-election of Margaret Thatcher. But Thatcher’s work had been done: the introduction of neoliberal policies which ravaged many UK industries and the regions in which they were located.

Fender can be understood as a voice of that ravaged Britain. He was born two years after John Major’s election victory, and grew up in a disintegrating family in a disintegrating former industrial region. He survived the chaos and has written about that collective suffering with great skill and passion over three albums.

It is telling, too, that the (renamed) Mercury Prize lost its corporate sponsorship along the way. Being publicly allied with music is no longer the marketing “must have” it once was. This year’s award event was paid for jointly by Newcastle City Council and the regional authority.

As Britain attempts to cope with the evaporation of major industries and the suffering that permanent loss of employment infrastructure induces, many UK regions now foreground the creative abilities of their residents as a reason to invest in their particular area. Demand for music, and for the creativity it carries and expresses, has become a key feature of social and economic as well as cultural life.

This begs the question: what is it that creative people actually contribute? The 2025 Mercury prize shortlist gives us some clues, especially if we look at three of the nominees who missed out on the prize: Pulp, Wolf Alice and Martin Carthy. Both Pulp and Wolf Alice are previous winners (1996 and 2018 respectively), but Carthy has won very few awards over the 84 years of his life.

“Notable” musicians tend to be of their time. This is partly because their choice of instruments and combinations of keys, notes and tempos resonate with the moments they and their audiences are living through. But there is more to being a musician than this.

Real, affecting performance draws on and mobilises symbolic information far beyond musical soundmaking – even though that demands skill and ability. Fender, for example, is unequivocally a Geordie, even as he fits the mould of a kind of Bruce Springsteen for his times.

Both Pulp and Wolf Alice are challenging to discuss. Where Jarvis Cocker is concerned, the word “uncompromising” comes to mind, but what does that mean? Here is someone who is unique – yet what his vision of the world is, is never quite apparent. Cocker is “about something”, and he is about it so strongly that people stand back and admire him for it.

Wolf Alice are something different: a successful rock band in a time when rock bands have gone into decline. It is almost the band’s own self-awareness that, somehow, “they shouldn’t be” that gives them their energy – mining rock’s extensive back catalogue to support essentially introspective lyrics about (mainly singer Ellie Rowsell) self-adjusting to the demands of an evermore turbulent world.

In this, there are shades of Cocker. And with Fender singing about negotiating this turbulence too (only with a more explicit set of references to a world beyond his interior), so the core strengths of contemporary music begin to emerge.

Popular musicians go on providing a soundtrack for our lives because they express themselves through the idioms of the moment. If we take Fender’s previous album, Seventeen Going Under, as a point of reference, every aspect of the recording and its video speaks to his growing up in the northeast of England and his continuing loyalty to the place.

His moving acceptance speech and rapport with the audience were evidence of this. His performance of People Watching was almost pure Bruce Springsteen – mainstream rock inflected and defined by a hometown sensibility.

Which brings us to Martin Carthy. It is impossible to capture Carthy’s significance in words, because his voice cannot be heard on the page – and it is so powerfully distinctive that it needs to be heard.

Carthy was the soul of English folk music in the 1960s and ’70s. His brand of folk music speaks to a resilience through suffering – the suffering of pre-industrial society articulated through song. Now, Fender is speaking to the suffering of post-industrial society. They both should have won.

Mike Jones, Course Director MA (Music Industries), University of Liverpool

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As the seasons turn and the nights draw in, the countryside of the British Isles seems alive with omens: an owl’s screech, or a bat above the hedgerows.

For centuries, such creatures were cast as messengers of fate, straddling the boundary between the natural and the supernatural. Yet today, the omens these animals bring are no longer warnings of ghosts or witchcraft, but of something far more tangible: their own survival.

The very species that once haunted our imagination and foretold ill-fated futures are now haunted by habitat loss, climate change and pressure from urbanisation. In the stories of these creatures, we glimpse both our fear of the wild past and our responsibility for the future. Now is the time to revisit some of Britain’s iconic “omen animals”, tracing their folklore and asking what their fate tells us about our shared environment.

Hedgehogs

Hedgehogs, though voted Britain’s favourite mammal, were previously deemed to be milk thieves.

A widespread folkloric belief of the early modern period, likely exacerbated by the European witch hunts, was that witches would transform into hedgehogs to steal milk from cows’ udders. This belief was so prevalent that a campaign to hunt and eradicate hedgehogs was backed by English parliament, with a bounty of a tuppence placed on the head of each hog.

Though their public image has recovered in recent years, hedgehogs are now classed as “vulnerable” to extinction in the UK. Their key threats are linked with habitat loss and fragmentation. Their natural prey, insects and invertebrates, are also in decline due to increased use of pesticides.

Declines in hedgehogs have been particularly steep in rural habitats, with populations reduced by 30–75% since 2000. Conservation priorities focus on restoring lost habitats for hedgehogs and understanding how best to protect them.

Adders

As the only venomous snake in the UK, it is unsurprising that the adder would attract some negative publicity over the years. The species is increasingly a conservation concern and now locally extinct across much of England due to habitat loss.

An “adder’s fork” was a spell ingredient listed by the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1606). He invoked them too in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600) as a way for one character to accuse another of treachery and deceit.

Even more sinister, finding an adder on your doorstep was considered a death omen. It is now unlikely for your threshold to be crossed by an adder, as they are now mostly found in small, isolated populations. Even they could be lost by 2032.

Conservation efforts are focusing on the creation, restoration and management of suitable grassland, but are not currently widely implemented. Increasing public awareness and appreciation of the species is a key goal for adder preservation.

Wildcats

Once widespread across Britain, wildcats are now considered our most endangered animal species. They have a long reputation in Scottish folklore for being untameable, serving as the namesake of the Pictish province of Cataibh when it was formed in 800BC. They were often adopted as symbolic emblems or mascots in early clan lore due to their fierce fighting spirit. Their ominous cry is thought to have inspired ghost stories across the ages.

Deforestation and persecution, especially by Victorian gamekeepers, eradicated wildcats from England, Wales and much of Scotland. In 2019, experts concluded that breeding with feral domestic cats has compromised their genetic integrity and that the remnant populations are too small, isolated and genetically degraded to have a long-term future.

But some hope does remain for the wildcat. Saving Wildcats, a European partnership project dedicated to wildcat conservation, is leading efforts to breed the species in captivity. As of 2023, a number of wildcats have been reintroduced back into the wild in Scotland’s Cairngorms.

Mountain hares

The mountain hare is the UK’s only native member of the hare and rabbit family. Once widespread across Britain, mountain hares are now confined to upland regions of Scotland and the Peak District.

Hares have a long history of superstitious and folkloric attachments. They were seen as shape-shifters, or familiars of witches, which would bring doom and misfortune to any person unfortunate enough to have their path crossed. Their shape-shifting abilities were referenced in The Mabinogion, a collection of Welsh stories compiled in the 12th and 13th centuries, across Celtic folklore before. Numerous regional hare-witches were referenced across England.

While fear of wronging a witch historically offered hares some protection, they have faced decline and range reduction from competition with brown hares, hunting pressures and land use change. Recent surveys suggest a 70% crash in the Peak District population over just seven years. Under current rates of decline, the mountain hare will become extinct from the region within five years.

Nightjars

Summer visitors to the UK, nightjars were once thought to drink milk from goats and in doing so poison them and cause their udders to wither away. These birds were also said to snatch up lost souls wandering between worlds with their unearthly call.

Nightjars suffered a catastrophic population decline in excess of 50% and range contraction of around 51% during the latter half of the 20th century. However, surveys conducted in 1992 and 2004 saw welcome population increases of 50% and 36% respectively. Nightjar were recorded making use of new clear-felled and young conifer plantations and benefiting from long-term habitat management projects in their southern strongholds. Although recent recoveries offer hope, nightjars have reclaimed only a fraction of their former range – around 18%.

These species, and far more besides, have been instrumental in the stories people have woven across time. So the next time you hear the screech of an owl outside your bedroom window or glimpse the wings of a bat flapping over your garden, pause to think about the omens of our wild country – and how their stories might yet continue.

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Jessica Lloyd May, PhD Candidate in History, University of Nottingham and Matthew Jones, PhD Candidate in Conservation and Biodiversity, Nottingham Trent University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A new specimen of one of the most controversial species of dinosaur has the potential to overturn decades of research on the T rex.

Nanotyrannus, the “miniature T rex”, has been the centre of one of the fiercest debates in palaeontology. Scientists have long argued over whether the Nanotyrannus is a separate species or just a young T rex.

The controversy was ignited in 1999 when the only known fossil of a Nanotyrannus was found to belong to a juvenile. More complete fossils have since failed to produce any conclusive answers because they were all also found to be juvenile.

But the debate surrounding the identity of Nanotyrannus may finally be settled. A new fossil specimen, described in the journal Nature, is the smoking gun researchers have been looking for: an adult Nanotyrannus.

Known as the duelling dinosaurs, this fossil preserves an almost-complete Nanotyrannus and Triceratops entombed together. They seem frozen in combat (whether they were actually fighting when they became buried in the Earth’s sediment remains to be tested).

Although the fossil was discovered in Montana, US back in 2006, it was under private ownership until the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences purchased it in 2020. Now accessible to scientists, the true nature of this remarkable fossil can be revealed for the first time.

The researchers have confirmed that Nanotyrannus is a separate miniature type of tyrannosaur by demonstrating this specimen belonged to a near fully-grown adult. The age and maturity of dinosaurs can be assessed by looking at the inside of their bones.

Dinosaurs grew in cycles of faster and slower growth which produced distinct layers of bone. When cut open and examined under a microscope, these marks can be counted like rings in a tree.

Using this method, the researchers could determine that the Nanotyrannus in the duelling dinosaurs was at least 14 years old when it died. The researchers also found its rate of growth had slowed significantly in its final years, indicating that this individual was nearly at full body size.

So just how small was this miniature T rex? Nanotyrannus is only around one tenth of the size of a fully grown T rex. Being one of the largest predators to ever walk the Earth, however, T rex would make most animals look small. The duelling dinosaurs Nanotyrannus is over four metres long and estimated to have weighed over 700kg – that’s as heavy as some of the very largest polar bears.

Other specimens of Nanotyrannus are even bigger. The almost complete skeleton known as Jane, discovered in 2001 also in Montana, is estimated at over a ton, larger than any land predator alive today.

The researchers have found enough differences in the shape of bones in the skulls of the duelling dinosaurs fossil and the larger Jane to separate them into two different species: Nanotyrannus lancensis and the newly-named Nanotyrannus lethaeus.

Other than small size, another feature that the researchers have used to distinguish Nanotyrannus from T rex is the number of teeth. Despite its much smaller mouth, Nanotyrannus could no doubt pack a powerful bite with its over 60 teeth. T rex had 40-50 teeth in its jaws.

The teeth themselves are also different. Nicknamed “lethal bananas”, the teeth of T rex are curved and serrated like steak knives. These unique teeth are perfect for slicing into flesh and could crush bone. By contrast, some of the teeth of Nanotyrannus are straight, chisel-like and without serrations, more closely resembling those of other types of carnivorous dinosaur.

T rex had famously tiny arms, the source of many jokes and dinosaur impressions. Nanotyrannus does not share this feature. Its arms are almost the same size as those of T rex, despite belonging to an animal ten times smaller.

Nanotyrannus is overall more lanky than the stout T rex, with proportionally longer legs to match its longer arms. The foot bones of the small duelling dinosaurs Nanotyrannus are nearly as long as those of the largest known T rex. Research suggests that, while T rex couldn’t manage anything much faster than a walk, Nanotyrannus was well adapted to run and chase after its prey.

Aside from confirming the existence of this long-controversial dinosaur species, this discovery overturns decades of T rex research. Much of what scientists think about the life and growth of T rex is based on the assumption that many gangly “teen” tyrannosaurs fossils would have grown up into the well-known bulky giants. In light of this discovery, scientists must reevaluate what life was like for a young T rex and go back on the hunt for genuine juvenile T rex fossils.

It has been widely assumed that T rex was the only dinosaur of its type living in the US in the last days of the dinosaurs. Some researchers have proposed that T rex was so dominant that other large predators could not live alongside it, with its own juveniles outcompeting any other medium-sized predators. This total dominance is now called into question.

T rex has now been joined by not one but two species of smaller carnivorous dinosaur, hinting at a more complex and diverse ecosystem thriving in the US towards the end of the reign of the dinosaurs.

Despite being arguably the most well-known and best studied dinosaur, T rex and its close relatives continue to surprise us from beyond the grave. There is still much left to learn about the largest and fiercest predators ever to walk the Earth.

Abi Crane, Postgraduate Researcher in Palaeontology, University of Southampton

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Continuous sleep is a modern habit, not an evolutionary constant, which helps explain why many of us still wake at 3am and wonder if something’s wrong. It might help to know that this is a deeply human experience.

For most of human history, a continuous eight-hour snooze was not the norm. Instead, people commonly slept in two shifts each night, often called a “first sleep” and “second sleep.” Each of these sleeps lasted several hours, separated by a gap of wakefulness for an hour or more in the middle of the night. Historical records from Europe, Africa, Asia and beyond describe how, after nightfall, families would go to bed early, then wake around midnight for a while before returning to sleep until dawn.

Breaking the night into two parts probably changed how time felt. The quiet interval gave nights a clear middle, which can make long winter evenings feel less continuous and easier to manage.

The midnight interval was not dead time; it was noticed time, which shapes how long nights are experienced. Some people would get up to tend to chores like stirring the fire or checking on animals. Others stayed in bed to pray or contemplate dreams they’d just had. Letters and diaries from pre-industrial times mention people using the quiet hours to read, write or even socialise quietly with family or neighbours. Many couples took advantage of this midnight wakefulness for intimacy.

Literature from as far back as ancient Greek poet Homer and Roman poet Virgil contains references to an “hour which terminates the first sleep,” indicating how commonplace the two-shift night was.

How we lost the ‘second sleep’

The disappearance of the second sleep happened over the past two centuries due to profound societal changes. Artificial lighting is one of them. In the 1700s and 1800s, first oil lamps, then gas lighting, and eventually electric light, began turning night into more usable waking time. Instead of going to bed shortly after sunset, people started staying up later into the evening under lamplight.

Biologically, bright light at night also shifted our internal clocks (our circadian rhythm) and made our bodies less inclined to wake after a few hours of sleep. Light timing matters. Ordinary “room” light before bedtime suppresses and delays melatonin, which pushes the onset of sleep later.

The Industrial Revolution transformed not just how people worked but how they slept. Factory schedules encouraged a single block of rest. By the early 20th century, the idea of eight uninterrupted hours had replaced the centuries-old rhythm of two sleeps.

In multi-week sleep studies that simulate long winter nights in darkness and remove clocks or evening light, people in lab studies often end up adopting two sleeps with a calm waking interval. A 2017 study of a Madagascan agricultural community without electricity found people still mostly slept in two segments, rising at about midnight.

Long, dark winters

Light sets our internal clock and influences how fast we feel time passing. When those cues fade, as in winter or under artificial lighting, we drift.

In winter, later and weaker morning light makes circadian alignment harder. Morning light is particularly important for regulating circadian rhythms because it contains a higher amount of blue light, which is the most effective wavelength for stimulating the body’s production of cortisol and suppressing melatonin.

In time-isolation labs and cave studies, people have lived for weeks without natural light or clocks, or even lived in constant darkness. Many people in these studies miscounted the passing of days, showing how easily time slips without light cues.

Similar distortions occur in the polar winter, where the absence of sunrise and sunset can make time feel suspended. People native to high latitudes, and long-term residents with stable routines, often cope better with polar light cycles than short-term visitors, but this varies by population and context. Residents adapt better when their community shares a regular daily schedule, for instance. And a 1993 study of Icelandic populations and their descendants who emigrated to Canada found these people showed unusually low winter seasonal affective disorder (SAD) rates. The study suggested genetics may help this population cope with the long Arctic winter.

Research from the Environmental Temporal Cognition Lab at Keele University, where I am the director, shows how strong this link between light, mood and time perception is. In 360-degree virtual reality, we matched UK and Sweden scenes for setting, light level cues, and time of day. Participants viewed six clips of about two minutes. They judged the two minute intervals as lasting longer in evening or low-light scenes compared with daytime or brighter scenes. The effect was strongest in those participants who reported low mood.

A new perspective on insomnia

Sleep clinicians note that brief awakenings are normal, often appearing at stage transitions, including near REM sleep, which is associated with vivid dreaming. What matters is how we respond.

The brain’s sense of duration is elastic: anxiety, boredom, or low light tend to make time stretch, while engagement and calm can compress it. Without that interval where you got up and did something or chatted with your partner, waking at 3am often makes time feel slow. In this context, attention focuses on time and the minutes that pass may seem longer.

Cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) advises people to leave bed after about 20 minutes awake, do a quiet activity in dim light such as reading, then return when sleepy.

Sleep experts also suggest covering the clock and letting go of time measurement when you’re struggling to sleep. A calm acceptance of wakefulness, paired with an understanding of how our minds perceive time, may be the surest way to rest again.

Darren Rhodes, Lecturer in Cognitive Psychology and Environmental Temporal Cognition Lab Director, Keele University, Keele University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.