For many plants, spring is just a really good time. They have endured a cold, dark, hard winter and in some places, winters can be murderously tough for plants.

It makes sense that when spring comes around, plants are ready to take advantage of warmer temperatures, longer days and more sunshine. They resume growth after their winter dormancies and many rapidly produce flowers.

You’ve probably been spotting the sudden springtime explosion of flowers everywhere on your neighbourhood walks, your commute or in your own garden.

But why exactly do flowers go crazy in spring, and how do they know exactly when to show up for duty? Here’s the science.

Letting loose in a big rush

For many plants, the conditions for growth in spring are close to ideal. Water, warmth and sunlight are suddenly readily available.

Plants don’t have to hold back anymore. They can resume almost unconstrained growth and have the energy and resources to invest in flowering.

Your garden (or a patch of natural bush) is, in fact, a highly competitive environment.

Plants will rush to produce masses of flowers in the hope this will give individual plants an advantage in the reproductive race that ultimately might lead to seed and reproduction. This, after all, is the universal goal of biological success.

There is another factor, however, that also influences spring flowering.

The birds and the bees (and other insects)

Flowering plants (known as angiosperms) are relatively recent arrivals on the evolutionary time line. They first became significant during the Cretaceous Period, about 100 to 120 million years ago.

By then, insects had already been on the scene and evolving for millions of years. Birds had evolved more or less at the same time as these flowering plants, becoming more common during the Cretaceous Period too, but a few million years earlier.

These creatures, the plants noticed, were excellent at dispersing pollen and seeds. Many flowering plants evolved to use their helpful services.

Before the angiosperms, ancient plants used spores for reproduction. Conifers, which had evolved hundreds of millions of years before angiosperms, used wind to disperse their pollen. Seed dispersal was often limited, unreliable and slow.

Flowering plants needed to attract pollinators and seed dispersal vectors, such as insects and birds. Many developed flashy and showy flowers: the epitome of good advertising.

So flowering in spring coincides with the return of migratory birds and the life cycles of insects (insect activity usually declines over winter).

It makes great sense that many plants flower when the insects and birds so vital to their reproductive success are also getting active (and getting busy).

It is a matter of great timing that benefits all involved.

Timing is everything

The way flowering plants time their flowering is superb biology.

Many people assume warmer temperatures trigger spring flowering. But temperature is renowned for its variability and unpredictability. Temperature is not a good indicator of season or time.

So most plants measure day length using a green pigment called phytochrome (literally plant colour). This exists in two forms, one of which is active in triggering plant metabolism.

This phytochrome system enables plants to measure, with remarkable accuracy, both day length (also known as photoperiod) and the night length.

The ratio of the two forms allows plants to measure time like a biological clock.

Photoperiod is a very accurate and reliable measure of time and season and so plants nearly always get their flowering times in spring right.

In some plants there is an extra feature that can affect flowering, where the plants produce an inhibitor (abscisic acid) before winter that keeps them dormant.

Abscisic acid is cold-sensitive. So when spring comes, the inhibitor level is low. This, combined with photoperiod, helps initiate flowering.

The two mechanisms combined are a very reliable and consistent trigger for flowering.

Advantages to being a flower in spring

Flowering in spring means plants can use insects and birds to facilitate pollination and disperse seeds.

The pollen can be spread effectively and in a targeted way to other flowers of the same species. Less valuable pollen is wasted than if you’re relying on wind dispersal.

The seed can spread over much greater distances. The seed for many species will germinate during spring when growth conditions are highly favourable.

It’s not a coincidence flowering plants with this type of reproductive biology spread around the globe very quickly after their emergence during the Cretaceous Period.

They are highly efficient and successful plants.

Not everyone can be a flower in spring

So why don’t all flowering plants bloom in spring?

It is one of the delights of biology that there is nearly always room for contrarians and exceptions.

Some plants flower in autumn or perhaps during winter and some in summer, but there is always advantage in them doing so.

Sometimes it’s to avoid the fierce competition from all those other spring flowers in attracting pollinators.

Sometimes it’s because they are focused on a particular insect or bird vector that another season suits better.

Sometimes it’s because the plants can only survive in a highly competitive environment by not flowering in spring.

In the complex web of plant biology, a one-size-fits all approach never works.

Spring flowering has a lot going for it – as the current profusion of flowers attests – but many plants have made success of being different.

Gregory Moore, Senior Research Associate, School of Agriculture, Food and Ecosystem Sciences, The University of Melbourne

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

You’re introduced to someone and your attention catches on their eyes. They might be a rich, earthy brown, a pale blue, or the rare green that shifts with every flicker of light. Eyes have a way of holding us, of sparking recognition or curiosity before a single word is spoken. They are often the first thing we notice about someone, and sometimes the feature we remember most.

Across the world, human eyes span a wide palette. Brown is by far the most common shade, especially in Africa and Asia, while blue is most often seen in northern and eastern Europe. Green is the rarest of all, found in only about 2% of the global population. Hazel eyes add even more diversity, often appearing to shift between green and brown depending on the light.

So, what lies behind these differences?

It’s all in the melanin

The answer rests in the iris, the coloured ring of tissue that surrounds the pupil. Here, a pigment called melanin does most of the work.

Brown eyes contain a high concentration of melanin, which absorbs light and creates their darker appearance. Blue eyes contain very little melanin. Their colour doesn’t come from pigment at all but from the scattering of light within the iris, a physical effect known as the Tyndall effect, a bit like the effect that makes the sky look blue.

In blue eyes, the shorter wavelengths of light (such as blue) are scattered more effectively than longer wavelengths like red or yellow. Due to the low concentration of melanin, less light is absorbed, allowing the scattered blue light to dominate what we perceive. This blue hue results not from pigment but from the way light interacts with the eye’s structure.

Green eyes result from a balance, a moderate amount of melanin layered with light scattering. Hazel eyes are more complex still. Uneven melanin distribution in the iris creates a mosaic of colour that can shift depending on the surrounding ambient light.

What have genes got to do with it?

The genetics of eye colour is just as fascinating.

For a long time, scientists believed a simple “brown beats blue” model, controlled by a single gene. Research now shows the reality is much more complex. Many genes contribute to determining eye colour. This explains why children in the same family can have dramatically different eye colours, and why two blue-eyed parents can sometimes have a child with green or even light brown eyes.

Eye colour also changes over time. Many babies of European ancestry are born with blue or grey eyes because their melanin levels are still low. As pigment gradually builds up over the first few years of life, those blue eyes may shift to green or brown.

In adulthood, eye colour tends to be more stable, though small changes in appearance are common depending on lighting, clothing, or pupil size. For example, blue-grey eyes can appear very blue, very grey or even a little green depending on ambient light. More permanent shifts are rarer but can occur as people age, or in response to certain medical conditions that affect melanin in the iris.

The real curiosities

Then there are the real curiosities.

Heterochromia, where one eye is a different colour from the other, or one iris contains two distinct colours, is rare but striking. It can be genetic, the result of injury, or linked to specific health conditions. Celebrities such as Kate Bosworth and Mila Kunis are well-known examples. Musician David Bowie’s eyes appeared as different colours because of a permanently dilated pupil after an accident, giving the illusion of heterochromia.

In the end, eye colour is more than just a quirk of genetics and physics. It’s a reminder of how biology and beauty intertwine. Each iris is like a tiny universe, rings of pigment, flecks of gold, or pools of deep brown that catch the light differently every time you look.

Eyes don’t just let us see the world, they also connect us to one another. Whether blue, green, brown, or something in-between, every pair tells a story that’s utterly unique, one of heritage, individuality, and the quiet wonder of being human.

Davinia Beaver, Postdoctoral research fellow, Clem Jones Centre for Regenerative Medicine, Bond University

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

Lady Gaga is leading the nominations for this year’s MTV Video Music Awards – merely her latest accolade.

Since she burst onto the scene with The Fame album in 2008, Gaga has become one of the world’s most recognisable pop stars. Her hit Born This Way even topped Billboard’s list of the 100 greatest LGBTQIA+ anthems of all time. The track defines her commitment to celebrating diversity in all its forms.

While she is known for filling dance floors and dominating pop culture, she has also sparked serious academic interest. Scholars have explored her influence on music, fashion, gender and sexuality. Yet her use of religious imagery remains relatively under-examined. As a theologian, I have studied Gaga’s music and its rich religious symbolism.

Gaga’s most overtly political and theological album was Born This Way, released in 2011. It also inspired the Born This Way Foundation, which she founded with her mother to “empower and inspire young people to build a kinder, braver world that supports their mental health”.

I argue Gaga’s work makes her a kind of “musical public theologian”. In other words, an artist who brings theological arguments into public debate, particularly around LGBTQIA+ inclusion, often in tension with religious communities.

Born This Way

Take the title track. Here she tackles the theological opposition to LGBTQIA+ inclusion head on, in what might seem a fairly obvious and unsophisticated way: “No matter gay, straight, or bi, lesbian, transgender life, I’m on the right track, baby, I was born to survive … I’m beautiful in my way ’cause God makes no mistakes, I’m on the right track, baby, I was born this way.”

In a world where some claim that God’s design allows only for heterosexuality, Gaga turns this argument upside down. If God makes no mistakes, she insists, then diversity itself is divinely intended.

So far, so simple. But there is a more complicated story to be told about Gaga’s theological affirmation of difference. Some queer theorists are uneasy with the idea of being “born this way”, and the notion that identity is fixed by biology alone.

This is where deeper analysis of Born This Way pays dividends. The video offers a more fluid understanding of identity as something that can be performed.

It opens with a surreal sci-fi creation myth, scored with the theme from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), a film in which identity is not straightforwardly “given”. The dancers adopt multiple postures resembling ovaries and wombs – a visual metaphor for the possibility of new births – suggestive of our ability to take on fresh identities for ourselves.

Gaga doesn’t do the work of connecting the lyrics and the visuals. That goes on in the world of queer theology, which is an approach that places LGBTQIA+ people at the centre of faith. But Gaga makes a significant public theological statement by holding them together in this song and its accompanying video.

Central to Gaga’s creative vision and resistance to dominant narratives telling people who and how they should be, is the theme of monstrosity. She calls herself “Mother Monster” and her fans “little monsters”, reclaiming a word often used to exclude or belittle those who are different.

The “Manifesto of Mother Monster”, at the beginning of the Born This Way video, presents a mythic creation story where freedom and difference are celebrated. It builds on the ambiguous place of monsters in religion.

Garden of Eden

Although her later albums are less overtly theological, Gaga has continued to weave religious themes into her music, including those of monstrosity. On her latest album Mayhem, for example, which was released earlier this year, the song Garden of Eden plays with the biblical story of the fall of Adam and Eve.

At one level, the theological motif of taking a bite from the apple in Eden can be seen simply as a metaphor for indulging in a short-lived relationship that, for that very reason, disobeys more conservative expectations of sexual relationships. But here, too, Gaga’s lyrics can be read at a deeper level. The story of Adam and Eve is fundamental to Christian theology, and it can be used to enforce certain ways of being.

Instead, Gaga’s reinterpretation of Eden offers a liberating vision. There’s an invitation to rethink a story that has been used to divide the world neatly into good and evil. Instead of using scripture to police behaviour, she reimagines it as a story that opens up possibilities. This reflects the experiences of many of her fans, who may have felt excluded by dominant religious narratives.

Through her music and imagery, Gaga invites us to embrace difference and to question stories that oppress. She queers tradition, offering an alternative theology rooted in inclusivity and creativity. Her work demonstrates that theology does not belong only in churches or seminaries. It can be found in music videos, stadium tours and dance anthems.

In studying Gaga’s work, I have come to see her as a theologian in her own right. She transforms pop music into a space where faith, identity and power are re-imagined. That, to me, is why she is worth celebrating, not just as a pop icon, but as someone who has turned theology into art for a wider audience.

Stephen Roberts, Honorary Lecturer in Theology, Cardiff University

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

Just over a year ago, Nasa made a remarkable announcement. The Perseverance rover had found potential signs of ancient life on Mars. Now, the technical details behind that discovery have been published in a Nature paper that, despite its rather modest wording, may ultimately prove to be among the most significant in the history of science.

The bottom line is this: it might be life, but we won’t know for sure until we return the samples to Earth. Perseverance has already collected a fragment of the relevant rock — we just have to go and get it.

Indeed, Nasa has been working with the European Space Agency on a mission to go to Mars, retrieve the samples of rock collected by Perseverance and deliver them to Earth. This would include the sample from the rock that’s the subject of the Nature study. However, the mission, known as Mars Sample Return, has run into trouble because of rising costs.

In mid-2024, the Perseverance rover encountered a block of ancient mudstone, nicknamed Cheyava Falls, distinguished by its brick-red hue. This rock was laid down by water roughly four billion years ago. While most Martian rocks appear red due to a coating of oxidised (ferric) iron dust, Cheyava Falls is red through and through – the ferric iron is in the rock itself.

More intriguingly, Cheyava Falls is peppered with dozens of tiny pale spots, typically less than a millimetre across. These spots are fringed with a dark phosphorus-rich mineral, which also appears as tiny dots called poppy seeds that are scattered between the other spots. Associated with this mineral are traces of ancient organic compounds. (Organic compounds contain carbon and are fundamental to life on Earth, but they also exist in the absence of biology.)

What does this have to do with life?

All living organisms on Earth harness energy through oxidation-reduction (redox) reactions – transferring electron particles from chemicals known as reductants to compounds named oxidants. On Earth, for example, structures called mitochondria in animal cells transfer electrons from glucose (a reductant) to oxygen (an oxidant). Some rock dwelling bacteria use other kinds of organic compound instead of glucose, and ferric iron instead of oxygen.

When ferric iron is reduced to a different form, known as ferrous iron, it becomes soluble in water and either leaches away or reacts to form new, lighter-coloured minerals. The result is that many red rocks and sediments on Earth contain small bleached spots – “reduction spots” – strikingly similar to those found in Cheyava Falls. In fact, Perseverance subsequently spotted bleached features even more reminiscent of reduction spots at a site called Serpentine Rapids, but spent too little time there to analyse them and, unfortunately, didn’t collect any samples.

The new Nature paper builds on abstracts presented at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, held in Houston in March 2025, but with more detail and the added weight of peer review. It confirms that the pale spots are associated with organic matter, and that they contain ferrous iron and sulphur – specifically, an iron-sulphide mineral.

The most plausible interpretation is that redox reactions occurred within the rock after it formed, transferring electrons from organic matter to ferric iron and sulphate, and producing bleached zones where ferric iron was depleted.

Notably, these reactions – especially sulphate reduction – don’t typically occur at the low temperatures this rock experienced over its history. Unless microbes are involved, that is. Microbial oxidation of organic matter can also produce phosphate minerals, like those found at Cheyava Falls.

Without getting samples back to laboratories on Earth, there’s only so much we can really know about what happened at Cheyava Falls four billion years ago. Even so, no entirely satisfying non-biological explanation accounts for the full suite of observations made by Perseverance.

The new paper does a good job of making this clear, considering the possibilities one by one. But in astrobiology, the lack of a non-biological explanation isn’t where life detection ends – it’s where it begins. History tells us that when we can’t think of a non-biological explanation for something, it’s usually not because there isn’t one. It’s just that we haven’t thought of it yet.

So what happens next? First, astrobiologists around the world must explore which oxidation-reduction reactions involving iron, sulphur, organic compounds, and phosphate can occur with and without biology under conditions relevant to Cheyava Falls.

Second, Nasa and other space agencies must provide bold leadership on the Mars Sample Return mission. Yes, it will be expensive – possibly tens of billions of dollars – but the payoff could be the most important scientific discovery ever made.

Sean McMahon, Reader in Astrobiology, University of Edinburgh

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

“You have to keep beating it for longer,” my grandmother instructed me. “It isn’t pale yet. It’s still too yellow.” I didn’t ask how long this would take. I was nine years old, and I understood what my grandmother meant. You have to keep doing something until it works. It’s like asking: “Are we there yet?”

I watched for the miraculous transformation. The eggs, golden when first beaten, were lightening to a soft lemon colour. The texture was changing. You couldn’t see the sugar anymore; it had looked like sand, but now it was invisible, cloaked in the egg. My grandmother stopped beating, and lifted up the beater. A stream of thick liquid hung down, like the wet sand you used to reinforce a sandcastle. “Yes, that’s enough. Now add the melted butter. Slowly. Then the flour. We’ll need a bit more.”

My grandmother taught me to cook. She never weighed anything. The only measurement she used was a pink breakfast teacup, and it was more a useful scoop than a measure. Instead, she worked towards a desired result. You didn’t cook things for five minutes. You cooked things until you got the result you wanted. The first thing she taught me to make was bechamel sauce. She didn’t call it that. She called it white sauce with flavour. I could make it when I was five, and I still do it the same way.

Her cooking was preliterate, or, more exactly, a special kind of literacy, a grammar of ingredients and heat and air.

I’m a food historian and the author of English Food: A People’s History. I have never found the recipes of the middle ages as difficult to understand as most food historians. Perhaps because they look a little like my grandmother’s instructions.

Cooking in the middle ages

Take and make a crust in a trap, and take cruddes and wryng out þe wheyze, and drawe hem þurgh a straynour, and put in þe straynour crustes. Do þerto sugar the þridde part and somdel whyte of ayren, and shake þerin blomes of elren, and bake it up with eurose, and messe it forth.

This is a recipe for “sambocade” from a middle ages manuscript held in the British Library. Sambocade is an elderflower cheesecake of sorts. It uses curds – the beginnings of cheese – and the recipe gives quite detailed instructions on how to make them, a method a little like making Greek yoghurt. You add sugar, egg white and elderflowers, along with rosewater. Then you serve it.

A recipe like this is not a series of instructions. It is meant to act as a reminder, a series of quick notes to recall to mind something taught orally – something taught as my grandmother taught me.

Just as Google Maps will not tell me how to walk by putting one foot in front of the other, this kind of recipe doesn’t tell me what I’m looking for or how to achieve it. It doesn’t give exact measurements. It doesn’t really give any measurements at all. But if you made this recipe half a dozen times, you would soon understand the process required. And then, it would be yours, in a way that a recipe tested or created by another cook can never quite be yours.

In my kitchen I still keep my mother’s recipe book, a manuscript volume in which she tried to preserve recipes that were gifts from friends. All of it is in her handwriting.

It contains a recipe for cheesecake from the days when cheesecake was a little-known novelty; it notes that the recipe comes from an American friend. It contains exact quantities and exact baking times, although the result is a lot more strongly baked than the majority of cheesecakes now. The exact quantities preserve a memory of the effect that’s difficult to reconstruct from recipes that come from earlier times.

In the same way, I have only my memories of my grandmother’s cooking to preserve what she did; she was barely literate, and her own recipes consisted solely of lists of ingredients. These were kept in a shoe box and after she died, my mother threw it away on the grounds that it was of no possible value to anyone. All the same, every time I make a sponge cake, I say to myself, is it pale enough yet?

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Diane Purkiss, The William F Pollard Tutorial Fellow in English, University of Oxford

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

If you’ve been supermarket shopping lately, you might have noticed more foods with big, bold protein claims on black packaging – from powders and bars to yoghurt, bread and even coffee.

International surveys show people are shopping for more protein because they think it’ll help their fitness and health. But clever marketing can sway our judgement too.

Before your next shop, here’s what you should know about how protein is allowed to be sold to us. And as a food and nutrition scientist, I’ll offer some tips for choosing the best value meat or plant-based protein for every $1 you spend – and no, protein bars aren’t the winner.

‘Protein’ vs ‘increased protein’ claims

Let’s start with those “high protein” or “increased protein” claims we’re seeing more of on the shelves.

In Australia and New Zealand, there are actually rules and nuances about how and when companies can use those phrases.

Under those rules, labelling a product as a “protein” product implies it’s a “source” of protein. That means it has at least 5 grams of protein per serving.

“High protein” doesn’t have a specific meaning in the food regulations, but is taken to mean “good source”. Under the rules, a “good source” should have at least 10 grams of protein per serving.

Then there is the “increased protein” claim, which means it has at least 25% more protein than the standard version of the same food.

If you see a product labelled as a “protein” version, you might assume it has significantly more protein than the standard version. But this might not be the case.

Take, for example, a “protein”-branded, black-wrapped cheese: Mini Babybel Protein. It meets the Australian and New Zealand rules of being labelled as a “source” of protein, because it has 5 grams of protein per serving (in this case, in a 20 gram serve of cheese).

But what about the original red-wrapped Mini Babybel cheese? That has 4.6g of protein per 20 gram serving.

The difference between the original vs “protein” cheese is not even a 10% bump in protein content.

Black packaging by design

Food marketers use colours to give us signals about what’s in a package.

Green signals natural and environmentally friendly, reds and yellows are often linked to energy, and blue goes with coolness and hydration.

These days, black is often used as a visual shorthand for products containing protein.

But it’s more than that. Research also suggests black conveys high-quality or “premium” products. This makes it the perfect match for foods marketed as “functional” or “performance-boosting”.

The ‘health halo’ effect

When one attribute of a food is seen as positive, it can make us assume the whole product is health-promoting, even if that’s not the case. This is called a “health halo”.

For protein, the glow of the protein halo can make us blind to the other attributes of the food, such as added fats or sugars. We might be willing to pay more too.

It’s important to know protein deficiency is rare in countries like Australia. You can even have too much protein.

How to spend less to get more protein

If you do have good reason to think you need more protein, here’s how to get better value for your money.

Animal-based core foods are nutritionally dense and high-quality protein foods. Meats, fish, poultry, eggs, fish, and cheese will have between 11 to 32 grams of protein per 100 grams.

That could give you 60g in a chicken breast, 22g in a can of tuna, 17g in a 170g tub of Greek yoghurt, or 12g in 2 eggs.

In the animal foods, chicken is economical, delivering more than 30g of protein for each $1 spent.

But you don’t need to eat animal products to get enough protein.

In fact, once you factor in costs – and I made the following calculations based on recent supermarket prices – plant-based protein sources become even more attractive.

Legumes (such as beans, lentils and soybeans) have about 9g of protein per 100g, which is about half a cup. Legumes are in the range of 20g of protein per dollar spent, which is a similar cost ratio to a protein powder.

Nuts and seeds like sunflower seeds can have 7g in one 30g handful. Even one cup of simple frozen peas will provide about 7g of protein.

Peanuts at $6 per kilogram supply 42g of protein for each $1 spent.

Dry oats, at $3/kg have 13g of protein per 100g (or 5g in a half cup serve), that’s 33g of protein per dollar spent.

In contrast, processed protein bars are typically poor value, coming in at between 6-8g of protein per $1 spent, depending on if you buy them in a single serve, or in a box of five bars.

Fresh often beats processed on price and protein

Packaged products offer convenience and certainty. But if you rely on convenience, colours and keywords alone, you might not get the best deals or the most nutritious choices.

Choosing a variety of fresh and whole foods for your protein will provide a diversity of vitamins and minerals, while reducing risks associated with consuming too much of any one thing. And it can be done without breaking the bank.

Emma Beckett, Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Nutrition, Dietetics & Food Innovation - School of Health Sciences, UNSW Sydney

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

Anthropic, an AI startup founded in 2021, has reached a groundbreaking US$1.5 billion settlement (AU$2.28 billion) in a class-action copyright lawsuit. The case was initiated in 2024 by novelist Andrea Bartz and non-fiction writers Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson.

If the settlement is approved by the presiding judge, the company will pay authors about US$3,000 for each of the estimated 500,000 books included in the agreement. It will destroy illegally downloaded books and refrain from using pirated books to train chatbots in the future.

This is the largest copyright settlement in US history, establishing a crucial legal precedent for the evolving relationship between AI companies and content creators.

It will have implications for numerous other copyright cases currently underway against AI companies OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and most recently Apple. In June, Meta prevailed in a copyright case brought against it, though the ruling left open the possibility of other lawsuits.

The settlement follows a landmark US ruling on AI development and copyright law, issued in June 2025, that separated legal AI training from illegal acquisition of content. Anthropic allegedly pirated over seven million books from two online “shadow libraries” in June 2021 and July 2022.

The plaintiffs and Anthropic are expected to finalise a list of works to be compensated by September 15.

Cautious optimism

In Australia, the response to news of a potential settlement has been cautiously optimistic. Stuart Glover, head of policy at the Australian Publishers Association told me:

We welcome these court-enforced steps towards accountability, but this settlement shows why AI companies must respect copyright and pay creators – not just see what they can get away with.

And for the sake of Australian authors and publishers whose works have been unlawfully scraped without compensation under this action, it’s a clear call for the Australian government to maintain copyright and mandate that AI companies pay for what they use.

Lucy Hayward, CEO of the Australian Society of Authors, told me:

While all of the details are yet to be revealed, this settlement could represent a very welcome acknowledgement that AI companies cannot just steal authors’ and artists’ work to build their large language models.

However, in the Anthropic case, authors will be only compensated if their publishers have registered their work with the US copyright office within a certain timeframe. Hayward expressed concern about this, as the seven million works that are alleged to have been pirated were written by authors from around the world and “we suspect many international authors may miss out on settlement money.”

She has called on Australian the government to introduce new laws requiring tech companies to “pay ongoing compensation to creators where Australian books have been used to train models offshore”.

Legal risks

In June, US judge William Alsup ruled that using books to train AI was not a violation of US copyright law. But he ruled Anthropic would still have to stand trial over its use of pirated copies to build its library of material.

Judge Alsup has since criticised the settlement for its loopholes. He has scheduled another hearing for September 25. “We’ll see if I can hold my nose and approve it,” he said.

If the settlement is not approved, Anthropic risks significantly greater financial repercussions. The trial is scheduled for December. If the company loses the case, US copyright law allows for statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work in cases of wilful copyright infringement.

William Long, a legal analyst at Wolters Kluwer, suggests potential damages in a trial could reach multiple billions of dollars, potentially jeopardising or even bankrupting the company.

Anthropic recently secured new funding worth US$13 billion, bringing its total value to $183 billion. Keith Kupferschmid, president and CEO of the US-based Copyright Alliance, has argued that this is evidence “AI companies can afford to compensate copyright owners for their works without it undermining their ability to continue to innovate and compete”.

For Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, the historic settlement is “an excellent result for authors, publishers, and rightsholders”. Rasenberger expects “the settlement will lead to more licensing that gives author[s] both compensation and control over the use of their work by AI companies, as should be the case in a functioning free market society.”

A step forward

While this particular settlement may offer little help to Australian writers and publishers whose works are not registered with the US Copyright Office, overall it is at least potentially good news for creators globally. It represents a step towards the establishment of a legitimate licensing scheme.

Australian copyright law does not include a US-style “fair use” exception, which AI companies claim protects their training practices. There have been calls to change the law with major AI players, including Google and Microsoft, lobbying the Australian government for copyright exemptions.

The recent Productivity Commission interim report proposed a text and data mining exception to the Australian Copyright Act, which would allow AI training on copyrighted Australian work. The proposal faced strong opposition from the Australian Society of Authors and the publishing industry.

As Arts Minister Tony Burke stated in August 2025, the government has “no plans, no intention, no appetite to be weakening” our copyright laws.

The Australian publishing industry is not entirely opposed to AI, but significant legal and ethical challenges remain. The Australian Publishers Association has advocated for government policies on AI that prioritise a clear ethical framework, transparency, appropriate incentives and protections for creators, and a balanced policy approach, so that “both AI development and cultural industries can flourish”.

Agata Mrva-Montoya, Senior Lecturer, Department of Media and Communications, University of Sydney

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

Young people are under intense scrutiny. They are subject to community, media and policy concerns about everything from technology use to public safety.

But of the more than three million young people in Australia aged between 15 and 24, most are just doing normal things, like school and work, trying to make a life.

Despite this, young people are one of the most disempowered groups in society. Their views are rarely sought, taken seriously or acted on by those with influence and power.

A new report by the national peak body for young people, the Australian Youth Affairs Coalition, hears directly from more than 1,000 young people about their thoughts on Australian society. Many feel unrepresented and excluded – but there’s things that can be done to help.

The report

Unlike other research on social cohesion in Australia, this study focused specifically on young people aged 12–25.

Online questionnaires and focus groups garnered the perspectives of 1,186 young people. While not representative, the sample broadly reflected the diversity of the Australian population including cultural background, identity and experience. This includes young people identifying as Indigenous, LGBTQIA+, living with a disability and “doing it tough”.

Young people were asked about their views on social cohesion. While not generalisable, the report provides new insights into the perspectives of some young Australians.

More fairness and equity

On the whole, young people believe a more cohesive Australia requires recognising and respecting diversity.

As has been shown in research, young people in Australia largely consider multiculturalism to be the norm.

But they recognise this doesn’t mean everyone’s treated equally.

As one young person said:

I think immigrants and refugees get it tough – even though we rely on them a lot in this country. I don’t think they get “the fair go” that everyone talks about in this country […] it’s a bit like we cling on to the idea we’re not as racist as we could be and there’s people worse than us. And it’s like that stops us improving […]

Moreover, other research shows young people identify discrimination, violence and climate change as significant issues that disproportionately affect them – especially those who are Indigenous, migrants and LGBTQIA+.

The report also supports other evidence of the acute sense of inequality and lack of economic opportunity that young people are facing.

Another participant said:

personally, I feel very sad about the gap in intergenerational wealth in Australia, and how it’s just getting worse and worse over the decades.

Expanding democracy

As the report finds, young people’s involvement in Australian democracy should not wait until they are 18. It should not be ad hoc or only for those with cultural and social capital to lead in ways that are recognised by established institutions. A participant shared:

I think [leadership programs involving advisory roles] are only for the select few. As much as there are opportunities to advocate and talk about these issues, they’re not open to everyone […]

Instead, more effort is required to define with young people what participation in democracy should look like.

This means co-designing spaces and mechanisms – with associated institutional accountability – for making these transformations in our political and civic cultures. This could be more deliberative processes and a role for broader networks and collectives of young people.

Practical ways forward

The research offers some practical ways to address the causes of inequality, which undermine social cohesion.

1. Embedding youth impact assessments across all government policy

This novel idea is particularly valuable for addressing growing intergenerational inequality. As identified by the not-for-profit Think Forward, young people’s needs now and into the future are insufficiently considered in relation to policy areas such as taxation, which is highly inequitable.

2. Value and support youth work

Youth workers are the frontline support for young people to learn about themselves and the world around them.

In the United Kingdom, the direct economic value of the youth work sector is estimated to be £5.7 billion (around A$11 billion).

In Australia, research has found that the sector is under-resourced. Professionals are highly committed to the work they do, but they are under severe strain. This has likely gotten worse since the onset of the COVID pandemic.

3. Implement educational policy that promotes equity and improved outcomes

The economic benefits of an education system, from childhood to university, that provides equal opportunities for all young people is backed by evidence.

System changes should include, but not be limited to, funding models. For example, it’s crucial to broaden recognition of learning so students can identify and meet their learning goals no matter where they are born, what their life experience or the capabilities that they have.

Importantly, the costs of education and daily life must not consign young people to poverty.

4. Raise the rate of income support to at least above the poverty line

One in six children live in poverty. This affects their health and learning into their late teens.

If we are to support opportunity and social cohesion, we must ensure all young people – whether they live at home or independently – can afford to rent, eat and pursue their interests, education and work.

A matter of perspective

Research shows the more culturally, economically and politically equal a society, the healthier it is.

While societal “health” and social cohesion are different phenomena, they go hand in hand.

The report argues that to achieve ongoing social cohesion, we must deal with the drivers of inequality – and young people must not be left out of the conversation. They must be allowed to contribute to the terms of the debate and identifying responses to the challenges we face.

Young people know that this is not asking much. In the words of one participant:

I would like adults to view problems from a young person’s perspective.

Philippa Collin, Professor of Political Sociology, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University

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The New South Wales government recently announced the launch of the NSW Fashion Sector Strategy, 2025–28. The strategy, developed in partnership with the Australian Fashion Council, TAFE NSW, University of Technology Sydney and the Powerhouse Museum, promises to “accelerate NSW’s position as a global leader in high-quality, innovative and inclusive fashion”.

This new policy includes A$750,000 in funding to support local designers. It also prioritises smart factories, skills and training, and a fashion hub to incubate emerging talent.

It is a welcome contribution to the local fashion economy. Yet it is also a reminder of the complex challenges facing the industry.

Fashion in Australia

Australia has a global reputation for producing high-quality, sustainable textiles and clothing.

Despite widespread offshoring of manufacturing capabilities since the 1990s, Australian wool and cotton remain in high demand. Local small and medium-sized brands lead the way in sustainable and ethical fashion production.

The sector is also a significant employer of women. The $27 billion fashion industry – encompassing designers, retailers, suppliers and manufactures, among other roles – employs nearly half a million Australians, 77% of whom are women.

But recent years have seen the closure of many pioneering local sustainable fashion brands, including Arnsdorf, A.BCH, Nique and Nobody Denim (bought by Outland Denim). These closures are testimony to the difficult retail landscape in Australia.

Despite consumers committed to ethical fashion, the challenges of producing locally and competing with low-cost fast fashion brands often prove insurmountable.

The industry has been flooded with fast fashion since the 2010s, with the arrival of Zara (in 2011), H&M and Uniqlo (both in 2014). This accelerated with the introduction of ultra-fast fashion brands such as Shein from 2021.

Annually, 220,000 tonnes of clothing ends up in Australian landfills.

Legislating against ultra-fast fashion

To combat the dominance of these low-cost brands, France has established new taxes on the import of ultra-fast fashion and bans on influencer promotions of their products.

The legislation aims to protect the French fashion industry from cheap products saturating the market, and to reduce the number of garments going to landfill. It sends a strong message to producers and consumers about the harmful labour conditions that make ultra-fast fashion viable.

This week, the European Union adopted new rules mandating producer responsibility to cover costs of collecting, sorting and recycling of textiles.

Despite being the largest per capita consumer of fashion items globally, Australian approaches to tackling the issues of fast fashion have been either voluntary or toothless.

Modern slavery in fashion supply chains

The closest Australia currently comes to regulating the fashion industry is at the intersection of fashion and modern slavery.

In 2018, Australia introduced the Modern Slavery Act. The policy requires companies operating in Australia with an annual revenue of more than $100 million to report on the risks of modern slavery in their supply chains.

But Australian fashion brands continue to be implicated in offshore modern slavery practices, largely because there is no requirement to act on risks identified. Furthermore, most fashion brands are not required to report because their revenue falls below the threshold.

A recent report from Oxfam Australia looked at continued labour rights abuses in Bangladesh’s garment industry. The report notes reporting on modern slavery under the act “has become a box-ticking exercise for many brands, with little impact for the people making our clothes”.

The report makes for difficult reading, and reinforces concerns around the lack of penalties for non-compliance.

New initiatives to support local fashion

There are calls for further regulation of the industry. Peak industry body, the Australian Fashion Council, launched Seamless in 2023, designed to make brands responsible for the entire life of their products.

Seamless aims to create a circular clothing industry – in which the fashion lifecycle follows a reduce, reuse, recycle model – by 2030.

Labels participating in the voluntary scheme will have a 4 cent levy for each clothing item sold. This levy will fund programs to incentivise durable design and crucial expansion of used (or unsold) clothing collection, sorting and recycling.

In response to the Productivity Commission’s interim report on unlocking the future of a circular economy, Seamless is calling for regulation of the scheme.

Local brands, such as Citizen Wolf and Madre Natura, are advancing innovative onshore manufacturing technologies and radical circular business models.

It is vital we support small businesses if these sorts of approaches to fashion production are to survive.

What next?

The introduction of the NSW Fashion Sector Strategy is a positive sign of much-needed investment in this industry.

However, Australia has the potential to have one of the most creative and sustainable fashion industries in the world.

To live up to this potential, we need a more consolidated approach.

The industry requires a whole-of-government strategy to strengthen legislation that will protect our industry. This must include stronger penalties to prevent modern slavery in supply chains, new taxes on ultra-fast fashion, and stronger regulation for circular-economy business models.

That would be a real game-changer for our industry.

Harriette Richards, Senior Lecturer, School of Fashion and Textiles, RMIT University; Lisa Lake, Director, Centre of Excellence in Sustainable Fashion + Textiles, University of Technology Sydney, and Natalya Lusty, Professor of Cultural Studies, The University of Melbourne

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Ten years ago, scientists heard the universe rumble for the first time. That first discovery of gravitational waves proved a key prediction from Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity and began a new era of astronomy.

Now, a new gravitational-wave discovery marks the anniversary of this major breakthrough. Published today in Physical Review Letters, it puts to the test a theory from another giant of science, Stephen Hawking.

What are gravitational waves?

Gravitational waves are “ripples” in the fabric of space-time that travel at the speed of light. They are caused by highly accelerated massive objects, such as colliding black holes or the mergers of massive star remains known as neutron stars.

These ripples propagating through the universe were first directly observed on September 14 2015 by the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors in the United States.

That first signal, called GW150914, originated from the collision of two black holes, each more than 30 times the mass of the Sun and more than a billion light years away from Earth.

This was the first direct proof of gravitational waves, exactly as predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity 100 years earlier. The discovery led to the award of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics to Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne for their pioneering work on the LIGO collaboration.

Hundreds of signals in less than a decade

Since 2015, more than 300 gravitational waves have been observed by LIGO, along with the Italian Virgo and Japanese KAGRA detectors.

Just a few weeks ago, the international LIGO/Virgo/KAGRA collaboration released the latest results from their fourth observing run, more than doubling the number of known gravitational waves.

Now, ten years after the first discovery, an international collaboration including Australian scientists from the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), has announced a new gravitational-wave signal, GW250114.

The signal is almost a carbon copy of that very first gravitational wave signal, GW150914.

The black hole collision responsible for GW250114 had very similar physical properties to GW150914. However, due to significant upgrades to the gravitational wave detectors over the past ten years, the new signal is seen much more clearly (almost four times as “loud” as GW150914).

Excitingly, it’s allowed us to put to the test the ideas of another groundbreaking physicist.

Hawking was right, too

More than 50 years ago, physicists Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein independently formulated a set of laws that describe black holes.

Hawking’s second law of black hole mechanics, also known as Hawking’s area theorem, states that the area of the event horizon of a black hole must always increase. In other words, black holes can’t shrink.

Meanwhile, Bekenstein showed that the area of a black hole is directly related to its entropy, a scientific measure of disorder. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that entropy must always increase: the universe is always getting messier. Since the entropy of a black hole must also increase with time, it tells us that its area must also increase.

How can we test these ideas? Colliding black holes, it turns out, are the perfect tool.

The precision of this recent measurement allowed scientists to perform the most precise test of Hawking’s area theorem to date.

Previous tests using the first detection, GW150914, showed that signal was in good agreement with Hawking’s law, but could not confirm it conclusively.

Black holes are surprisingly simple objects. The horizon area of a black hole depends on its mass and spin, the only parameters necessary to describe an astrophysical black hole. In turn, the masses and spins determine what the gravitational wave looks like.

By separately measuring the masses and spins of the incoming pair of black holes, and comparing these to the mass and spin of the final black hole left over after the collision, scientists were able to compare the areas of the two individual colliding black holes to the area of the final black hole.

The data show excellent agreement with the theoretical prediction that the area should increase, confirming Hawking’s law without a doubt.

Which giant of science will we put to the test next? Future gravitational wave observations will allow us to test more exotic scientific theories, and maybe even probe the nature of the missing components of the universe – dark matter and dark energy.

Simon Stevenson, ARC DECRA Fellow, Swinburne University of Technology

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Primavera is the Museum of Contemporary Art’s annual spring exhibition featuring selected Australian artists under 35. This year, curator Tim Riley Walsh asks what it means for artists to create in a post-industrial age of reproduction.

Walsh foregrounds a material fascination running through the artists’ works.

Many artists integrate metallurgy into their installations, often using machine fabrication. Traps, cages, monuments, pipes, window frames, carpet and boomerangs appear in the show.

These are not inert objects but create spaces that privilege embodied experience. It is a gesture that resonates in an age when the screen is ubiquitous to daily life.

From fabricated monuments to traps

The tension between touch and industrial manufacture is most evident in Vinall Richardson’s corten steel and copper monoliths.

Each block, scaled up from cardboard maquettes, carries the trace of handmade imperfections. Set against the engineered precision of architectural steel, these marks of inaccuracy break with the exactitude of 1960s’ Minimalism and the emphasis on repetitive, mass-produced forms.

Francis Carmody’s two-part installation turns material toward commodification.

A white dog is dissected at the midsection, trapped in three intersecting silver rings. Nearby, amorphous silver forms crusted with salt and electroplated graphite suggest a production line that leads to shiny polished silver vessels.

Between objects and canines, the dogs act as metaphorical stand-ins for us: ensnared by the gleaming lure of commodities and capital.

Mining: labour or leisure

The emphasis on metallurgy and the material of mining’s infrastructure is brought into focus in Emmaline Zanelli’s installation and two-channel video.

Second-hand rat and hamster cages are linked by a labyrinth of plastic tunnels lit with coloured LEDs. Like a nightscape, the cages lead into a film centred on teenagers in Roxby Downs, South Australia, where families service the nearby Olympic Dam mine for copper, gold and uranium.

In the video, teens appear with exotic pets in bedrooms. As a girl dances on one screen, the other cuts to a copper smelter and the camera’s swift, claustrophobic passage through plastic pipes, echoing a miner’s subterranean descent.

Placed at the centre of the exhibition and lined with gaming chairs, the work embeds the materials of mining into the social realms of labour and leisure.

Eerie corporate veneers and the business of art

The final two works move from extraction into the corporate interior.

Alexandra Peters’ installation is an expanded painting that blurs surface, sculpture and architecture. Enamel-coated industrial pipes designed to feed oil, gas or water are coiled with culturally coded shisha tubing that props a false wall over the gallery wall.

Window frames double the building’s own frames. A three-panel, screen-printed work on imitation leather hangs above dead stock grey carpet. The installation feels like the foyer of a shell company.

The effect is deadpan, summoning what cultural theorist Mark Fisher called the eerie – a sense of space emptied of its expected presence.

In Peters’ hands, this eeriness is decentering: materials and veneers leave the human adrift in the architecture of surfaces designed for occupation but hollowed of life.

The staging of corporate life inflects Keemon Williams’ adjacent installation. The work positions the artist’s Aboriginal identity as embedded within the commodities of industry.

Metal boomerangs fabricated offshore are stacked into towers that read as a cityscape or corporate graph.

On the wall, a large vinyl chart divides boom from doom; along with Williams’ portraits between those states – in one he lifts a boomerang like a phone, in another he slumps on a modernist sofa.

At the media preview, Williams quipped he doesn’t know what he’ll do with the boomerangs after the show: stripped of their use-value, they are not designed to be thrown.

Together, Peters and Williams bring the exhibition’s focus on material residues into the present tense. Industrial processes and social relations are reassembled as corporate veneers, graphs and flightless boomerangs.

From here, the show’s broader stakes become clear.

Australia in the post-industrial age

All of the artists in Primavera 2025 were born in the 1990s. While the following decades marked the global rise of internet and screen culture, more locally, this era saw the effects of Australia’s trade liberalisation.

These artists grew up during the collapse of manufacturing, leaving mining extraction and services dominant. This shift echoes in the fabricated forms and thematic concerns of the exhibition.

As Karl Marx observed in Capital, raw materials are not neutral but products of past labour, their extraction and history. That inheritance runs through the materials and objects of the exhibition: the corten steel monoliths, the silver canine traps, the mining tunnels, the oil and water pipes, the corporate foyer, the stacked boomerangs.

Each work gestures to the way materials of industry are embedded within the social and environmental aspects of Australian life.

In the show, artists play with materials as alluring yet toxic, solid yet emptied of use, all bearing the social and political conditions of their making. That reckoning finds its sharpest expression in a line from Zanelli’s video, penned by poet Autumn Royal: “I could croak with copper on my nails”.

To make art in a post-industrial age is not to escape commodities, but to reckon with their afterlife.

Primavera 2025: Young Australian Artists is at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, until March 8 2026.

Sara Oscar, Senior Lecturer, Visual Communication, School of Design, University of Technology Sydney

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