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In the cold weather, few items of clothing beat a hoodie. They’re comfy, warm and they look cool.

But where did hoodies come from and how did they come to be everywhere?

From warmth and protection, to sportswear then streetwear, across decades hoodies have become entangled with groups and gangs, surveillance and control, fear and policing, race and power.

Hoodies can divide, but they also bring people together. With this in mind, they might be “our last truly political item of clothing”.

Hoods in history

Hooded garments are nothing new. In fact, they’re very old.

The Orkney Hood, discovered in a peat bog on Scotland’s Orkney Islands, covered the head and shoulders of a child in the late Iron Age (between the third and seventh centuries CE).

In 1936, a Swedish bog revealed the “Bocksten Man”. He still wore the clothes he died in, sometime between 1350–70. His woollen hood added warmth to his outfit: a tunic and mantle (cloak), plus long socks, footwraps and leather shoes. It also gave researchers clues centuries later to his status and changing hood fashions, even then.

Medieval monks wore austere versions of hooded garments. These served to aid the inner contemplation demanded by monastic life. Medieval knights donned chain mail hoods as part of their protective armour.

Women’s gabled hoods, worn around 1500, were wired into a point at the top of the head, with fabric draping over the shoulders. They were fashionable and modest, before the French hood (which was pushed back to reveal the hair) was popularised by Anne Boleyn.

Other hoods appeared across centuries to follow, though it was only in the 20th century we saw the emergence of the hoodie as we now know it.

The origins of the hoodie

“Hoodie” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006 to mean “a hooded sweatshirt, fleece, or other garment”. The garment had its origins on the sports field and in hard work decades earlier.

The company that later became Champion Athletic Apparel developed a hooded sweater in the 1930s. The functional garment was meant to keep athletes warm ahead of a game. The hooded garment also appealed to manual workers.

In Australia, hooded jumpers worn for ice skating or other outdoor winter sports became stylish for women in the 1940s.

“Here it is – the hooded jumper you’ve dreamed of for those bleak days of winter when the wind sends shivers down your spine,” a knitting pattern in one Melbourne newspaper described, encouraging women to make their own.

Sylvester Stallone as boxer Rocky Balboa lifted hoodies from sportswear into the cultural zeitgeist. The iconic training scene from the first of the Rocky films, with Stallone running up the steps to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, helped to elevate the garment as a symbol of grit and determination.

When, nearly 40 years later Michael B. Jordan starred opposite Stallone in the film Creed, the grey hoodie appeared again. This time, however, it also reflected a deep racial divide.

From sportswear to streetwear

In the 1980s and ‘90s, youth culture transformed the garment from sportswear to streetwear.

Break dancers and graffiti artists adopted them. So did skaters and snowboarders as hoodies became a symbol of a younger generation – and soon, of moral panic. Hip hop artists and rappers – Eminem, Ice-T, and plenty more – gave the garment an added edge.

Oversized or baggy hoodies became linked to youth crime – vandalism, violence or shoplifting. With the hood pulled up, they were often framed as being symbols of rebellion and defiance, with their capacity to make wearers menacingly anonymous.

Hoodies’ bad reputation sparked their banning in shopping centres in the United Kingdom, the United States and New Zealand in the 2000s. A ban was even trialled in Australia, though it was quickly scrapped following community outrage.

The tragic killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012 sent shockwaves around the globe. Martin, an unarmed African American teenager, had been wearing a hoodie when he was fatally shot for looking “suspicious”.

In the wake of Martin’s death, some queried the place of his hoodie in the shooting. It also sparked the Million Hoodie March in protest of racial profiling.

This prompted a troubling question: who could wear the garment without fear of repercussion and how much of this was based on age or skin colour?

Power and politics

When a young Mark Zuckerberg held meetings with investors just months after Trayvon Martin’s death, his hoodie raised eyebrows for different reasons. His sartorial rebellion flouted corporate dress trends.

US politician John Fetterman now frequently wears his preferred outfit of a hoodie and shorts. He even donned a hoodie printed to suggest a tuxedo – a reference to the black tie dress code – for the 2024 White House Correspondents’ Dinner and another for Donald Trump’s second presidential inauguration.

Hoodies are a potential flashpoint for power and politics.

For this reason, an exhibition focused on the style staple at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam in 2019, then the Museum of Design Atlanta in 2026, provocatively invited visitors to consider: “What do you see when you look at this garment – and what might others see?”

Lorinda Cramer, Lecturer, Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies, Deakin University

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

Have you ever watched online videos of people “playing” with cats and noticed the cat doesn’t actually look like they’re having fun? If so, you’re likely better than the average person at reading cat body language.

Regular interactive play supports cats’ physical health, reduces stress, and strengthens the human–cat bond.

But according to our most recent study, what many people think of as “play” may not be play at all. In fact, these interactions cause cats annoyance or stress.

When ‘play’ isn’t actually play

When playing, both human and cat need to tell apart behaviours that might be threatening in other contexts, such as sudden movements, swatting or chasing.

Research shows people struggle to interpret cat communication and often fail to notice when a cat doesn’t want to play. Even when they do notice, many people choose to continue anyway.

To understand why people might misinterpret or ignore cat stress signals, in our new study we analysed 1,100 comments on social media videos hosted on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook depicting harmful “play”.

To avoid viral videos disproportionately influencing analysis, only the first 100 comments from each video were analysed. Comments came from a mix of cat owners and non-cat owners.

All 11 videos included clear signs of cat distress such as hissing, biting, attempting escape, visible human injuries and, in some cases, cats being physically harmed. Despite this, 75–93% of comments on all videos were positive. How come?

Why do people misinterpret cats?

Viewer misinterpretations appeared to be shaped by people’s existing beliefs about cats, human–cat dynamics, and what is fun or funny. Many comments normalised rough handling, reframed signs of stress as excitement or affection, or trivialised them as “cute” or “funny”.

In many cases, comments reflected cognitive dissonance (the mental discomfort when our established beliefs clash with conflicting evidence) and common coping mechanisms our brains use to reduce it such as denial, dismissal, or becoming defensive:

anyone with a crumb of common sense can tell that this video isn’t animal abuse.

Comments also echoed problematic perceptions stemming from broader societal narratives:

if she didn’t want to, she’d run away

if they were really mad your arm would be dripping blood.

Such statements bear striking resemblance to human sentiments such as “if it was so bad, why didn’t she leave?” directed at victims of intimate partner violence.

Common misinterpretations

1. ‘Real distress is unmistakable’

Viewers often believed that if a cat “truly” disliked an interaction, they’d leave or cause more serious injury. If there was no visible blood, the cat stayed, or didn’t match the person’s idea of “distressed”, viewers concluded they were playing.

In reality, cats often remain in an interaction or hold back attacks to reduce risks to themselves, as a “freeze” response, or to avoid escalation.

2. ‘It’s not stress, it’s excitement’

Viewers frequently misinterpreted distress signals (ears pinned back, tail thrashing, forceful attacks, growling) as signs a cat was enjoying rough “play”. They’d reference similar behaviours from their own cat as proof of cat enjoyment.

In reality, rough play is overstimulating. While cats may seem engaged, they’re likely being defensive, not playful.

3. ‘Cats know it’s just play’

Many viewers assumed that bonded or socialised cats could tell the difference between “playing” and “violence”. Others believed cats “knew” to hold back. This belief persisted even when a video depicted a baby being injured, with viewers insisting the cat was being gentle.

In reality, while cats may inhibit their actions during true play sessions, they can become overstimulated quickly, leading to distress and defensive injuries.

And they can still become stressed even when they know you’re playing. While cats may tolerate more from a person they trust, unwanted interactions are likely to damage trust over time.

4. ‘It’s how you gain trust’

Worryingly, viewers encouraged others to continue harmful interactions even as the cat became visibly distressed and aggressive, claiming this was the best way to “win over” a cat or gain their trust.

But cats communicate their distress for a reason: they want you to stop.

5. ‘It’s how cats show love’

Biting was often reframed by viewers as a sign of affection (a “love bite”), while human tolerance of injuries was often praised as a sign of devotion. Some viewers treated scratches as a badge of honour and insisted they’re a normal part of living with cats.

In reality, so-called love bites are usually a cat’s polite way of telling you they’ve had enough. If you’re constantly covered in bites or scratches, you’re likely regularly overstimulating your cat.

How to play with your cat safely

Let them choose. Always ensure your cat wants to play. Start slowly, allow your cat choice, provide multiple exit routes, and pay attention to subtle cues that they’ve had enough.

Avoid play-fighting. Rough play can quickly overwhelm a cat, teaches them to treat hands as toys, and often leads to injury. Instead, rotate different wand toys and similar items that keep you at arm’s length, protect from injury, and reduce the chance of accidentally causing stress.

Stay curious. In our study, many viewers misinterpreted cat behaviour or dismissed clear stress signals not out of malice, but because acknowledging them conflicted with their established beliefs or self-image. If the idea that your play style might cause your cat stress makes you uncomfortable, take a leaf out of the book of cats and try to stay curious. Curiosity has been shown to be effective in helping people see past their own biases.

If we stay curious, we stay open to noticing when our cats are enjoying play, and when they want to stop.

Julia Henning, Researcher, School of Animal and Veterinary Science, Adelaide University

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

NASA is planning to send three small rovers to the Moon with a single instruction: Work out among yourselves how to explore a patch of ground.

The Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration mission, or CADRE, will land on the side of the Moon facing Earth as part of NASA’s IM-3 launch, planned for late 2026. These rovers will spend roughly two weeks mapping the terrain as a self-guided team. No joystick will control them, and no human will approve each turn.

The rovers will elect a leader among themselves, assign their own tasks and redraw their plans as a group when one of them runs low on charge. If it succeeds, CADRE will be the first time NASA has operated multiple rovers beyond Earth as a single autonomous system.

That achievement will matter well beyond this mission, because NASA is scoping out future missions to the lunar South Pole, where water in the form of ice sits locked in craters that haven’t seen sunlight in billions of years. If researchers can chemically split that ice apart and turn it into propellant and breathable air, it could become the feedstock for a lunar economy built around fuel depots and life support made on the Moon.

Right now, the only demand for that ice comes from government contracts. And an operation that must be babysat from 239,000 miles (384,000 kilometers) away will not easily scale into a market. So, while a full-blown lunar economy is still far off, CADRE is testing whether robots can work unsupervised long enough, and in enough numbers, to keep a lunar operation running month after month.

I’m an aerospace engineering Ph.D. candidate researching guidance, navigation and control for spacecraft in-orbit servicing and active debris removal. I work on the same problem these rovers face: how a machine decides what to do next when it cannot call home for instructions.

Why Earth cannot drive

At the Moon’s South Pole, the terrain itself can cause communication disruptions. Commands reach a rover by way of relay satellites, and crater rims can block the line of sight to those relays. A rover that ventures down into a shadowed crater may lose contact for its entire trip.

Spotty communication doesn’t just make trying to drive annoying. It can cost the rover power it cannot recover.

A polar rover runs on a finite illumination budget. Solar panels charge the battery only while the Sun is up, and on the Moon sunrise is not a daily event. Night lasts about two Earth weeks, and at the poles, only a few ridges stay lit for long stretches. So for every minute a rover spends idle, awaiting new instructions, it is spending stored energy it cannot replace until the Sun comes back.

Why the pole is the hard case

The lunar poles also come with unique challenges. Sunlight can swing from direct glare to absolute shadow as a rover drives down from a sunlit crater rim to the shadowed floor below, so a camera that worked at the top could go blind at the bottom.

The Moon also doesn’t have GPS satellites like Earth does, so rovers can’t know exactly where they are. They need to build their own maps from what their cameras and sensors see.

Temperatures inside permanently shadowed regions drop below minus 274 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 170 degrees Celsius). And the Moon’s dust is more dangerous than it sounds. An electric charge lifts it off the ground, and billions of years of tiny meteorite strikes have left every grain sharp and jagged.

That dust grinds at the wheel bearings and works past the seals. Keeping it out of the rover’s moving parts is still an unsolved problem. The dust can also film over the camera lenses that navigation depends on, leaving a rover unable to see where it is going or move safely.

Why one rover is not enough

Sending a single rover to check out a crater on the Moon is a risky mission. If it gets stuck, the campaign ends. If its instruments fail, no second machine can take the measurements. Multirobot teams distribute that risk and split up the jobs. One rover might carry the sensors and another the drill, while a lander positioned on a sunlit ridge acts as the power and communications hub.

Under a communications blackout, a rover team that waits for its commands from Earth has to stop. An autonomous team reassigns tasks among itself, selecting the next objective that it can reach and complete with the amount of power it has left. Dead time becomes work time.

In ground testing at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the CADRE rovers achieved this coordination. Faced with unexpected obstacles, they replanned paths as a group, and when one rover’s battery ran low, the whole team paused so they could continue together.

What remains uncertain

A campaign at the lunar South Pole would need to run for months, and no robot team has yet worked that hard, for that long, that far from help. Engineers are developing ways for rovers to navigate without satellite positioning and to make decisions onboard, but that software still has to be tested on the surface.

Meanwhile, as of mid-August 2026, China’s Chang'e-7 mission is waiting at Wenchang, the launch site on Hainan Island in China, with liftoff expected by the end of the year. Its lander, rover and hopping probe are meant to work at the pole as a team, with the probe built to leap into permanently shadowed craters. If the U.S. wants to keep pace, it will need its own robots that coordinate without supervision.

Finally, there is no agreed way for a rover built by one company to hand a task to a tool built by another, or to decide which one works the crater floor first. As autonomous rover teams improve, the groups building them will have to work out those rules.

CADRE will tell scientists whether three small rovers can reason together on the Moon. The harder question is whether a dozen different machines from different builders can do the same thing, reliably, for years.

Wanjiku Chebet Kanjumba, Ph.D. Candidate in Aerospace Engineering, University of Florida

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

In 1906, the journalist W.T. Stead warned in A Plea for the Revival of Reading that Britain faced a reading crisis. People, he complained, no longer read books. Instead, they skimmed newspapers on trains, forgot what they had read by lunchtime and increasingly preferred distraction to sustained attention. His proposed solution? A national revival of reading.

One hundred and twenty years later, 2026 is the UK’s National Year of Reading. After years of concern about declining rates of reading for pleasure, the headlines are dramatic. The Times recently warned: “If humans stop reading, barbarians will live among us again”. Screens, smartphones and short-form video social media platforms like TikTok are regularly presented as the culprits.

So, reading Stead’s pamphlet (1906) today is an uncanny experience. While researching Stead’s journalism for my book The Americanisation of W.T. Stead (2026), I found that many of the arguments we assume belong to the digital age were already being made in Victorian Britain.

Stead begins with a distinction that still lies at the heart of debates about reading: “Millions have never yet found out that books were interesting,” he writes. “They can read, but they do not care for reading”.

This observation chimes with our contemporary moment. The problem is not literacy alone, but reading identity. Someone may possess the technical ability to read without ever coming to think of themselves as a reader. Current reading research makes a similar distinction. There is now broad agreement that developing a love of reading depends not simply on decoding words but on motivation, confidence and finding books that feel relevant.

Stead also rejected the idea that this love of reading could simply be imposed: “The love for the reading of books is an acquired taste,” he argued. Children might have to be compelled to learn to read, but learning to love reading required something quite different, “instead of coercion there is needed a good deal of coaxing”.

Again, this sounds very familiar today. Modern initiatives promoting shared reading, reading for pleasure and child-led book choice all rest on the principle: readers are made through encouragement rather than compulsion.

Stead’s advice began with children. He believed that one of the most effective ways of creating readers was simply reading aloud. Good oral reading, he claimed, was “the surest, simplest, and speediest way of awakening a love of reading”.

More than a century later, spoken language is once again moving up the educational agenda. The government’s proposed oracy framework, expected to be introduced by 2028, reflects a renewed recognition that speaking, listening and reading are closely connected – even if the framework’s primary focus extends beyond literacy alone.

It is in Stead’s discussion of attention, however, that the similarities with today’s debates become most apparent.

The attention debate

Stead worried that newspapers had fundamentally altered reading habits. Circulation libraries, newspapers and magazines encouraged “a habit of skimming rather than reading”. Newspapers, he complained, had become “mere rag bags of shreds and patches”. Readers looked through them “as we look into kaleidoscopes”, producing only “an evanescent effect upon our minds”.

Replace “newspapers” with “social media feeds” and the argument would sound entirely contemporary.

“Memory, judgement, the critical faculty are unexercised”, Stead lamented. It is difficult not to hear echoes of today’s debates about social media and, increasingly, concerns about generative-AI technologies. Critics now ask whether the use of AI assistants to process information and endless scrolling on screens fragments attention, weakens memory and encourages rapid emotional reactions rather than sustained reflection. While the technologies are radically different, the underlying concern is remarkably familiar: the way we consume information shapes how we think.

Where Stead relied on cultural observation, researchers today investigate these questions empirically. There is growing evidence that sustained, immersive reading supports concentration, reflection and aspects of mental wellbeing, while regular reading has also been associated with lower stress levels and, over the longer term, healthier cognitive ageing.

At the same time, experts caution against simplistic comparisons between books and screens. Different media support different kinds of reading, and much depends on what people are reading and how they engage with it.

Stead quotes the Liberal MP and editor John Morley, who argued that people needed to make time in each day – half an hour ideally, but even a quarter of an hour, if pushed – for what he called “good and disinterested reading”. The value of this practice, he suggested, lay not simply in acquiring knowledge but in cultivating “happiness, fortitude, wisdom and calm”. To translate those words into modern terms, we might say reading supports our mental health, emotional resilience and everyday wellbeing. The language has changed, but the aspiration is the same.

Although Stead worried that newspapers encouraged superficial reading, he also recognised that books would have to adapt. “Books”, he wrote, “must struggle for existence by the use of the same weapons as those which have secured the ascendency of the newspaper”.

This is perhaps the most surprising insight in the pamphlet. Rather than defending books against modern media, Stead argued that they should borrow modern media’s strengths. Books should become cheaper, shorter, regularly issued and more accessible. Far from resisting new communication technologies, he believed reading could flourish by adapting to them. Today’s equivalent might be publishers embracing audiobooks, podcasts, readings apps and BookTok. The principle is the same: meet readers where they already are.

Of course, Stead did not get everything right. Like many of his contemporaries and forebears, he worried about the dangers of “habitual novel reading”. He discussed proposals from America that would have restricted children’s access to popular fiction in a similar way to how tobacco sales were regulated. Today, those fears seem excessive. Yet they offer a useful reminder that every generation identifies certain forms of reading as uniquely dangerous.

The recent resurgence of book challenges and bans reminds us that debates about reading have always been as much about what people read as whether they read at all. Whether such restrictions are justified or not, history suggests these debates often reveal broader anxieties about childhood, attention and morality as much as the medium itself. Each generation, it seems, has its preferred media villain.

That is not to say current concerns should be dismissed. Reading for pleasure has genuinely declined among children, and many adults struggle to sustain the time and concentration that long-form reading demands. These are important educational and cultural questions, but they are best understood as part of a much longer story. Every major communications revolution has prompted fears that serious reading was disappearing. Yet reading has repeatedly adapted rather than vanished.

Stead understood something that remains true today. The challenge is not merely persuading people that books matter. It is, as he put it in 1906, helping people who “can read” become people who “care for reading”.

Helena Goodwyn, Assistant Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing, Northumbria University, Newcastle

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

You walk in a park. Children are playing, people are walking their dogs, and then you hear someone: “Who’s my little sweetie?” You turn around expecting to see a pram. But someone is sitting beside a dog, speaking in the same voice they would use with a baby.

It’s not in your head. The way we speak to babies is very similar to the way we speak to our pets – and research confirms this.

So why do we do this? And do pets even care?

The useful features of baby-talk

For pets and babies, we naturally raise our voice and make it more sing-songy. It’s the vocal equivalent of waving your arms to get someone’s attention.

Humans naturally switch to a warmer and more expressive way of speaking when talking to someone who may not fully understand us. It grabs attention and signals friendliness.

With babies, evolution seems to have added another layer: baby-talk also supports language learning by making speech sounds easier to hear and understand.

With pets, that teaching element diminishes. Pet-talk is mostly about connection, our way of saying, “I’m paying attention to you, you’re safe with me, and we’re interacting”.

Baby-talk and pet-talk aren’t exactly the same

When researchers remove the words and leave the speech melody intact, baby-talk and pet-talk melodies are rated as friendlier and more loving than the way we speak to adults.

However, there are some differences between pet- and baby-talk. A 2024 study compared the warmth of women’s voices when speaking to their baby versus their dog. Some of the women only had a baby, some only a dog, and some had both.

For those who had either one or the other, their speech sounded equally loving, whether directed at a baby or a dog. But the pattern changed among women who had both – the voices directed to their babies were warmer compared with their pet-talk. When they spoke to their dogs, their tone became a bit less warm than that of women who only had a dog and no baby.

This suggests pet-talk is more flexible than baby-talk. While baby-talk always remains the same, the warmth people express in their voices toward pets seems to vary with other demands on their attention.

The importance of teaching

Baby-talk and pet-talk differ in another key aspect. When talking to babies, we are teaching too. Parents often naturally exaggerate vowel sounds when they speak to babies: for example, saying “sheep” with a clearer “eee” sound that stands out.

This technique, called hyper-articulation, makes speech sounds easier for babies to distinguish. Interestingly, babies whose caregivers do this more often tend to develop larger vocabularies. So, the way we talk to babies helps build the foundation for their language skills.

When researchers looked for hyper-articulation in speech directed at pets, they found almost none. Dogs and cats receive the high-pitched, bouncy melody and emotional warmth but not the clearer pronunciation.

But researchers found an interesting pattern when looking at how people speak to parrots, known for being able to mimic human speech. In this study, people spoke to dogs in a warm voice, made their speech slightly clearer for parrots, and saved the clearest pronunciation for babies. It’s almost as if dogs get affection, parrots get a little language coaching, and babies get the full educational package.

Does pet-talk benefit pets?

A 2017 study revealed that puppies preferred recordings of pet-directed speech over regular adult speech. These happy puppies moved closer to the speaker more quickly, and paid attention for longer. Adult dogs showed a similar but slightly smaller preference.

Using pet-talk may also help us communicate better with dogs. In one study, dogs looked longer for hidden food when a pointing gesture was paired with a high-pitched voice instead of a flat tone.

Other humans seem to appreciate pet-talk, too. A 2026 survey found more than three quarters of pet owners remembered their vet speaking to their pets in a friendly way during a recent visit. Most owners appreciated it, feeling it showed the vet truly cared about their animal.

And it’s not just dogs that respond well to pet-talk. A 2021 study showed that horses, when spoken to in this warm manner, paid closer attention to their handler and were better at following human pointing gestures to find hidden food.

Next time you hear someone telling their dog they’re “the best dog in the whole world”, know they’re tapping into an old communication system built for warmth, attention and social bonding. Babies simply receive an upgraded version, one that not only says, “I care about you”, but also helps build language.

Antonia Goetz, Research Fellow Infant Studies, Western Sydney University and Zhen (Jenny) Zeng, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, Western Sydney University

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

Hundreds of high school and university students are expected to skip classes today as part of a nationwide student walkout opposing Pauline Hanson and One Nation. Protest organisers the National Union of Students have billed it as a “fight against racism” and opportunity to “stand up against the far right” – pointing to the party’s stance on multicultural issues.

While protest is a legitimate form of political participation, there has been backlash.

Liberal Senator Alex Antic told News24.com.au

Why are kids protesting things that they don’t really – I think – have a proper grasp of? And why are they being encouraged to do it by adults? […] Kids need to be in schools.

Other media commentators say they don’t understand why people under 18 are protesting politicians or political parties if they cannot vote.

The backlash echoes much of the media reporting of the School Strike for Climate protests which framed students as ignorant or pawns, manipulated by adults and other parties.

So does this mean students shouldn’t protest?

Why are students protesting if they can’t vote?

Typically, students are only allowed to miss school for a few reasons such as if they’re sick or if there’s a family crisis. Some private schools also have strict policies around absences.

But arguments that young people belong in school, miss an important point: children and young people have political and civic rights.

Under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, young people have a right to civic and political association, participation and representation. In Australia, elected representatives also serve children in their electorates and states. These representatives should be accountable to everybody regardless of their age or whether or not they can vote.

However, research suggests young people are still framed as “apprentice citizens” who are routinely told they must learn about democracy but not yet take part.

Children want to have a say

Arguments young people are too inexperienced to protest or have unconsidered political views are also contradicted by research.

Studies tell us many children and young people appreciate that without the vote they need to take other forms of action to have a say and influence how society is governed.

My research found high school students articulate a deep understanding of contemporary issues when provided with platforms to express their views. As part of this research, my colleagues and I analysed more than 22,500 entries to the Whitlam Institute “What Matters?” competition from 2019–2023. The competition asks students from years 5–12 to write about what’s important to them.

We found young people have strong ideas about how a range of problems facing society should be addressed. Entrants expressed concerns about climate change, war, economic inequality, racism, violence against women and children, and social media development and regulation.

What can be learnt from student protests

Research shows there are many benefits to being involved in civic and political action, such as attending protests, from a young age. For example, participation helps students develop ways to articulate their rights and concerns in addressing societal issues.

Civics and citizenship learning is also not currently meeting the needs of students – or the community. Attending protests can provide students with opportunities to bridge gaps in knowledge.

Youth advocacy also highlights institutional and legislative barriers that may weaken public participation in Australian democracy and our ability to deal with big issues. One of these barriers is the current voting age of 18 years, which my research suggested should be lowered to 16 years. Another barrier is young people’s limited access to the courts system. Recent cases of young people’s strategic climate litigation show how better access to the courts could help to address some of the issues they’re concerned about.

Youth movements can create change

Student political action has also historically led to change in some cases. Australia has a rich history of high school protests that have brought important issues to light. For example, in 1972, nation-wide student protests called for an end to gender segregation and corporal punishment in schools alongside other demands.

More recently, student activism for climate justice has led to change from government.

Students who were involved in the School Strike for Climate movement have worked with Senator David Pocock and others to launch a campaign pressuring Australian governments to consider their duty of care to children and young people in their response to climate change. While the students’ efforts were unsuccessful at the federal level, the sustained, student-driven campaign led to the Australian Capital Territory becoming the first Australian jurisdiction to embed a duty of care to young people and future generations in the new ACT Climate Change Strategy.

These incremental steps can have a tangible effect on how our country is governed. The progress sends an important message to children and young people that they are valued as citizens. Student protests also remind politicians and the community that young people matter for democracy.

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

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

High school and university students around Australia will take time out of classes tomorrow to protest against Pauline Hanson and One Nation, with posters promoting the event calling on students to “stand up against the far right” and to “fight against racism”.

The protests – planned for Melbourne, Sydney, Newcastle, Canberra, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Wollongong – are expected to draw large crowds.

For many young people, attending a protest for the first time can be both exciting and overwhelming.

My research focuses on young people’s health and harm reduction in mass gatherings.

Understanding how to stay safe, what to expect, and what to do if you feel uncomfortable in a demonstration can help make the experience more positive.

What to expect

Being surrounded by people who care deeply about an issue can create a sense of community and belonging. Young people who participate in protests or discussion forums that matter to them often report feeling that their voices matter and that they are participating and contributing to civic life.

At the same time, a large crowd and demonstration can feel intimidating. There may be loud chanting, media coverage, police presence, and large numbers of unfamiliar people. It’s normal to feel nervous, excited, proud or uncertain – sometimes all at once.

Students may also discover not everyone shares the same opinions. Public demonstrations bring together people from diverse backgrounds and viewpoints. Participating respectfully and listening to others are important parts of democratic engagement. So, think about what messages you wish to deliver and try not to get too caught up in the opinions of others.

Safety in crowds

Large crowds can be energetic and inspiring, but they can also present challenges.

Before attending a demonstration, it’s important to plan ahead:

1. let a trusted adult know where you are going, who you are going with, and when you expect to return

2. attend with friends whenever possible and agree on a specific meeting point, or make an exit plan in case you become separated

3. bring water, and ensure your phone is charged

4. while you are in the crowd, pay attention to instructions given by event organisers and emergency services. They are there to help keep you safe

5. as you are moving within the crowd stay aware of exits, open spaces, and ways to leave the area if necessary

6. it might sound obvious but wearing comfortable clothing and appropriate, sturdy and closed-toe footwear is a must. Your shoes shouldn’t cause you to trip or slip. They should also protect your feet from potential injuries that may occur in tight crowds, such as having your feet stepped on.

Remember, if a crowd becomes too dense, agitated or difficult to move through, it’s usually safest to move calmly toward the edge of the crowd rather than pushing through the centre. This means you can still participate but can exit more easily and keep an eye on what is happening without becoming caught up in a scuffle (if one occurs).

Trust your instincts

If at any point you feel unsafe, trust your instincts. Move away from the situation and seek a safer location. Stay with trusted friends or adults and avoid becoming isolated. If this is your first time protesting, think about going with a trusted adult.

If you are distressed, injured or frightened, seek assistance from event marshals, security personnel, police or emergency services. They are there to help you, not judge you.

Also, remember you do not have to stay. Leaving a demonstration is always an acceptable choice if you feel uncomfortable. Looking after your physical and emotional wellbeing is more important than remaining in a situation that feels unsafe. Don’t wait until you feel so uncomfortable it’s hard to make a decision on whether to stay or leave.

Participating in public events can be an important learning experience for young people. By preparing well, staying aware of your surroundings, and knowing when to seek help, you and other young people can engage safely and confidently in civic life.

Alison Hutton, Professor of Nursing, Western Sydney University

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In August 1901 Robert Scott, Ernest Shackleton and more than 40 other men set sail to Antarctica for the first time. On their newly built ship, the Discovery, neither Scott nor Shackleton knew what to expect, nor whether they would come back alive. It was on this journey, the 1901 to 1904 Discovery Expedition, that both men became famous polar explorers.

Yet 125 years later, this expedition does not receive the attention it deserves. Scott and Shackleton’s later journeys attract far greater interest, particularly Scott’s dramatic death on the return from the South Pole in 1912 and Shackleton’s heroic leadership following the sinking of the Endurance in the Weddell Sea in November 1915. In my new book, I place the Discovery Expedition centre stage and show the important role it played in the careers of Scott and Shackleton and in Britain’s understanding of Antarctica.

The Discovery Expedition, officially the National Antarctic Expedition, was the first major British expedition to the southern continent since James Clark Ross’s landmark British Antarctic Expedition of 1839 to 1843. This previous expedition was conducted aboard HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, both of which would go on to be involved in the tragic Franklin expedition to the Arctic in 1845.

Organised by the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Society, and partly funded by the government, the Discovery Expedition sought to explore both the coastline and the interior of Antarctica. Most of the crew were from the Royal Navy and few had any previous experience of polar exploration. This was due to the influence of the Royal Geographical Society’s president, Clements Markham, a former naval man himself.

After leaving Britain in August 1901 and stopping in South Africa and New Zealand, the expedition arrived in Antarctica in January 1902. Once there, the explorers conducted a maritime exploration of the Ross Ice Shelf roughly due south of New Zealand, discovering King Edward VII Land at its eastern end. They then established their winter quarters in McMurdo Sound, the southernmost navigable body of water in the world.

In spring, after spending the winter aboard their now ice-bound ship, Scott ordered the start of an ambitious programme of polar sledging. The most famous of these journeys was an attempt to reach the South Pole by Scott, Shackleton and Edward Wilson, a medical doctor who was a close confidante of Scott’s. They travelled farther south than anyone before them, but their sledge dogs soon weakened, and the men suffered from scurvy and food shortages. Meanwhile, Albert Armitage, second in command of the expedition after Scott, led a major sledging expedition up the Ferrar Glacier, finding the Polar Plateau at its summit.

In early 1903, the explorers were resupplied by a relief ship. Scott ordered that Shackleton return home with a group of sailors on the resupply vessel. Shackleton had suffered severe physical collapse and scurvy symptoms during the southern journey, and Scott thought he was not up to another winter in Antarctica. Shackleton spent some time in New Zealand before returning to Britain in June 1903.

Those who remained on board the Discovery had to spend a second, unplanned winter in the south, as the sea ice surrounding their ship failed to break up. The following summer, Scott used his additional time on the continent to embark on another series of sledge journeys. He led a further expedition to the Polar Plateau and discovered the surreal landscapes of the McMurdo Dry Valleys on his return march.

Soon after Scott returned to the Discovery, two relief ships arrived with orders to bring the explorers home, even if this meant abandoning the vessel. At first, the ship’s prospects looked hopeless, but almost miraculously the ice around it began to break up and, with some help from explosives, the Discovery was able to sail northwards in February 1904.

What are the legacies of the expedition?

The Discovery Expedition made numerous geographical discoveries, mapping large areas of Antarctica. On the scientific front, the explorers collected a wealth of zoological and geological specimens, alongside extensive meteorological and magnetic data. Data collected during this period is still proving valuable to contemporary scientists seeking to understand how sea ice coverage around Antarctica has changed.

The aspect of the expedition that most captured public attention was the suffering and heroism displayed during Scott, Wilson and Shackleton’s journey towards the South Pole. By travelling farther south than any human before them, they demonstrated that long-distance Antarctic sledging was possible and that, with better supplies, equipment and draught animals, reaching the South Pole might well be achievable. The race to the South Pole was now on.

Shackleton’s early departure from the expedition also left him eager to lead another expedition to prove his strength and resilience. Scott and Shackleton had worked together as comrades and remained on good terms for some years afterwards. But the expedition also sowed the seeds of future rivalry between the two men. Shackleton eventually launched his own expedition in 1907, much to Scott’s annoyance.

Scott and Shackleton’s first journey to Antarctica shaped the composition of their later journeys. When they returned, both men recruited Discovery veterans, many of them working-class sailors and seamen. This included Frank Wild, Tom Crean and Edgar Evans. None of them would have become explorers without Markham’s insistence that the expedition be crewed by naval men. Their stories are every bit as interesting and eventful as those of the officers and scientists.

The Discovery Expedition also shaped how we understand Antarctic heroism. Without it, British exploration in Antarctica might have been led by more experienced scientists and polar travellers rather than men like Scott and Shackleton who had to learn on the job. In some respects, this might have produced better scientific results and less suffering. However, stories of professionalism, preparedness and skill grip the imagination much less than those of heroism and sacrifice; so this period of exploration likely wouldn’t have the same lasting fascination.

If this expedition has gripped your imagination, then you can actually go and see the Discovery. After the expedition, it was sold to the Hudson’s Bay Company, a fur trading company. Amazingly, after numerous changes of ownership, the ship is still with us today, and visitors can even step aboard her at Discovery Point in Dundee, Scotland. Thanks to the hard work of the team preserving the vessel, it is still possible to gain some sense of what life must have been like for Scott, Shackleton and their companions on that first daring voyage to Antarctica.

This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.

Ed Armston-Sheret, Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London

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Chinese Australian actor Christopher Chung takes on a lead romantic role in the new Netflix adaptation of Miles Franklin’s classic 1901 Australian novel, My Brilliant Career.

Chung plays Harry Beecham, the handsome and wealthy suitor of the novel’s protagonist and narrator, Sybylla Melvyn.

Teenage Sybylla – who Franklin modelled on herself – is the headstrong daughter of a once-prosperous British Australian farming family who have fallen on hard times.

In a dramatic change from the original novel, Chung’s Harry is Chinese – or, more accurately, he is of mixed Chinese and European heritage, as is the actor himself.

To some viewers, this might seem anachronistic. But it could very well have happened in Australia at the turn of the last century.

Chinese Australians in the past

At the time My Brilliant Career is set, official statistics tell us there were around 33,000 Chinese people in Australia.

While they made up less than 1% of the total population, Chinese people – both immigrant and Australian-born – were part of many rural and urban communities, particularly in the eastern states of New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria.

The large majority of Australia’s Chinese population were men, as had been the case since the gold-rush decades of the mid-19th century. Social, cultural, legal and economic factors restricted the emigration of Chinese women at that time.

Among those counted as “Chinese” in official statistics were Australians of mixed Chinese-European heritage. Known in the racist language of the time as “half-caste Chinese”, they numbered about 3,000 in 1901, mostly the children of white mothers and Chinese fathers.

One such family was the Ah Poo (later Harper) family.

China-born George Gwok Ah Poo married Emma Ann Lowe at Terara, south of Sydney, in 1875.

He was a goldminer turned market gardener and orchardist. The couple had nine children born between 1877 and 1894.

Their eldest surviving daughter, Lily May, was born in 1880. She married another Chinese immigrant, Henry Fine Chong, at Parramatta in 1896.

White women and Chinese men

Intimate relationships between white women and Chinese men were part of the story of Chinese migration to Australia from its beginnings.

The earliest known Chinese settler, John Shying, arrived in Sydney in 1818 and married twice in NSW.

First he married English-born Sarah Jane Thompson at Parramatta in 1823. After Sarah’s death, he married Irish-born Bridget Gillorley in 1842, also at Parramatta.

John and Sarah Shying had four sons, and their descendants celebrated the bicentennial of John Shying’s arrival in Sydney in 2018.

The exact number of Chinese-European relationships in colonial Australia is difficult to know, but estimates by historians put the number of legal marriages between white women and Chinese men in NSW and Victoria during the 19th century at more than 1,000.

Many more relationships were never sanctioned by marriage, including long-term de facto partnerships, short-term cohabitation, casual liaisons and prostitution.

The best known Chinese-European couple from that time is probably tea merchant and philanthropist Quong Tart and his English-born wife, Margaret née Scarlett.

They married in Sydney in 1886 (against her father’s wishes), had four girls and two boys, and lived in a lavishly decorated mansion, “Gallop House”, in the Sydney suburb of Ashfield.

In 1911, Margaret Tart published a biography of her remarkable husband.

Stereotypes and racial anxieties

For three decades I have been working alongside descendants and family historians to uncover the stories of these Chinese-European couples and their families, hoping to better understand their place in Australian history.

When I first began my doctoral research in the late 1990s, I encountered persistent stereotypes about these families, both in my historical sources and in published histories.

In the mid-19th century, Chinese-European relationships in the Australian colonies were initially viewed as a curiosity by journalists and politicians, who were mostly white, male and middle class.

As the (albeit small) numbers of interracial relationships grew, white colonists who opposed Chinese immigration accused Chinese men of “seducing” and “corrupting” white girls.

In parliaments and in the press – for example, the notoriously racist Bulletin – opponents to Chinese immigration discussed interracial relationships as an example of Chinese “immorality”, an unwelcome “vice” alongside gambling and opium use.

The same journalists and politicians characterised white women who partnered with Chinese men as being illiterate, degraded and desperate. Why else would they choose a Chinese lover or husband?

Ideas of Australia as a white man’s country solidified at the end of the 19th century. Contemporary literature, the press and parliamentarians voiced fears of the creation of a “piebald race” – a derogatory term for those of mixed racial heritage.

But Australia never prohibited relationships between white women and Chinese men by law, as happened in the United States, where 15 states made it illegal for Chinese and white people to marry between 1850 and 1950.

Telling different stories

Today, many can trace their heritage back to a Chinese ancestor, or two or three, who arrived in Australia in the 19th century.

The revelation of Chinese heritage can be a surprise. Some mixed-race families chose to hide their non-European ancestry during the difficult White Australia decades of the early 20th century.

The reimagining of My Brilliant Career with a Chinese Australian romantic lead and a love story that crosses racial boundaries reflects a previously hidden reality of colonial Australia.

Kate Bagnall, Senior Lecturer in Humanities, University of Tasmania

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Johnny Young has died at 79 from pancreatic cancer, and Australian pop music has lost another of its multifaceted creatives of the ‘60s and '70s.

While there may be different assessments of Young’s legacy, it’s undeniable he made a major impact on this country’s musical and television landscape.

John de Jong was Dutch-born and raised in Kalamanda, in the hills of Perth. As a pop singer he was an early beneficiary of the generosity of the first wave of Australia’s international pop sensations: the Easybeats’ George Young and Stevie Wright wrote him a hit single, Step Back.

But Barry Gibb taught the man to fish.

Young had paid for Gibb to fly from Brisbane to Sydney for a television appearance, in the days when the Bee Gees were one more struggling pop band dying for a break.

In London, in 1967, Young was poised to enter the British hit parade with covers of the Bee Gees’ Craise Finton Kirk and Every Christian Lion Hearted Man.

They didn’t chart, but Gibb took Young under his wing and gave him some tuition on songwriting. Young was not only an eager student, he applied his learning quickly with enormous success.

He penned The Real Thing, which famously became a number one for Russell Morris. Embellished as it was with Molly Meldrum’s overblown psychedelia, is surely Young’s best known song.

The story of Meldrum wrestling the demo of The Real Thing (originally intended for Ronnie Burns) from Young to turn it into the debut solo record for Morris, his protege, is as legendary as the story of Meldrum soundlessly gesturing to backing band, The Groop, in the studio to keep playing the rudimentary track for minutes beyond the time they’d rehearsed.

Meldrum would go on to augment The Real Thing with Hitler speeches, choirs and the atom bomb to make what could either have been an iconic masterpiece or an embarrassing, costly folly. Luckily, it was the former.

Crafting the hits

Young’s masterpiece was Smiley, written about Normie Rowe’s induction into the army to serve in Vietnam, and recorded by Ronnie Burns.

Part of the skill of Smiley was that, while it did not bludgeon the listener with an anti-war message, nor did it leave anyone in doubt about how to feel: neither Rowe, or any other young Australian man, should have been fighting in the “Asian war”.

Three more chart-toppers marked Young as a songwriter to rival the best of his era.

Ross D. Wyllie’s exceptional The Star was a tale of loneliness-at-the-top as old as fame itself. It was also recorded by Herman’s Hermits in an inferior version which, nonetheless, made the UK Top 40.

Young wrote a jaunty country ditty, I Thank You, to order for Aboriginal boxer Lionel Rose: it made the top 20 in early 1970.

Young also wrote and produced the magnificent Hello for Normie Rowe: a love song that, in the hands of this great pop performer, ranked with the best “sunshine pop” of the period.

A ‘quiet, caressing sincerity’

That Young essentially stopped writing songs and, therefore, making hit records, in the early 70s is mysterious.

Certainly he never gave the impression of a writer with a burning passion to express himself, notwithstanding the “issues” aspect of songs like Smiley and the pseudo-mysticism of the album he wrote for Burns, Virgo.

He did bring many of his own compositions (not The Real Thing) together on one tepid LP, The Young Man and His Music, in 1973, and performed them in a way that suggested he found them foreign and absurd.

After that, if he performed at all, he seemed content to take on others’ compositions (most famously, a ballad arrangement of the Beatles’ All My Loving, which he first released in 1967).

As a songwriter he could have gone from strength to strength, but writing was just one of the strings on his bow. He was a journalist, of sorts, writing a gossipy music column for the “teen and twenties paper” Go-Set; he was a radio DJ, in Melbourne and later in life in Perth; a TV host (starting with Club 17 and The Go!! Show) and he moved into television production with Kevin Lewis in the early 70s, beginning with the pop show Happening ‘70.

Debuting in 1971, another Lewis–Young production, Young Talent Time was a brilliant format, combining a talent show with elements of 1960s pre-music video programs like Uptight and Bandstand: the stars you loved performed the hits you knew.

John Pinkney, writing in the Melbourne Age on the program’s launch described Young’s compere approach as embodying “quiet, caressing sincerity”.

A cavalcade of up-and-comers cut their teeth on the program, many of whom continue to be household names. “YTT” was, much like Countdown, derided by many and watched by millions – and you knew there was a crossover between those two groups. The show lasted 18 years.

Young returned to Perth in the 21st century for a long and successful career as a radio announcer on a range of stations.

While he was known for his integrity and honesty, one statement Johnny Young made well into the flush of his pop success is easily challenged. In 1968, he told Go-Set: “I was not talented, just fortunate”.

Perhaps his self-effacing nature goes some way to providing the key to this unusual, talented, fortunate man.

David Nichols, Professor of Urban Planning, The University of Melbourne

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In 1825, English artist George Chinnery left Calcutta for Macau, chased away by his disgruntled wife Marianne and his creditors. He’d been based in India for the past 23 years, having previously lived in Hyderabad and Dacca.

Besides running a debt of around 30,000 rupees (£232 today), Chinnery was, according to one Dictionary of National Biography, a “penniless fornicator” and “begetter of an uncertain number of illegitimate Chinnerys white, brown and yellow”.

While he became famous as a portraitist, Indian landscapes also take pride of place in Chinnery’s legacy. His vision of an early morning in the Bengal countryside projects an image of peace and harmony far removed from the realities of colonial India under the British Empire.

From the 1760s, a number of British artists arrived in India. These men were motivated both by the economic prospects of catering to expatriate communities and portraying unique subject matter for those back home. In so doing, these artists presented India not as it was, but remade it into an exotic land ripe for colonial rule.

In their artistic representations, India was dangerous but also a place of opportunities. Travelling across provinces, artists’ visual documentation helped claim and appropriate Indian landscapes. As these spaces were endowed with new meanings, in turn, the question of imperial authority’s legitimacy became entangled with art.

Indian picturesque: a blot on the landscape

Besides just a few unkempt and passive human figures, the foregrounding of decayed buildings in Chinnery’s painting speaks directly to the picturesque aesthetic that rose to prominence in the late 18th century. This style focuses on asymmetrical compositions, dramatic chiaroscuro (light and shadow), rugged textures and landscapes with classical ruins and rustic life. In this, picturesque artists turned rural England into a national ideal.

The picturesque style occurred in a time when the process of enclosure was increasing. This involved taking commonly used land and dividing it into privately owned fields to the benefit of wealthy landowners, while limiting poorer people’s access to land. The picturesque helped justify social inequalities by presenting wealthy landowners and their estates as natural and idyllic parts of the landscape.

In a similar way, as wealthy imperial officers returned to Britain and invested their money in land, the picturesque also helped present Britain’s colonial power as taming and improving foreign lands.

In India, artists were using the picturesque to reshape colonial landscapes according to British ideas of progress and civilisation and to tell stories that celebrated colonial power.

In their painting of India, the British fascination with ruins became a visual trope to signify Indians’ political decadence and loss of connection with their histories and heritage. Take Thomas Daniell’s 1795 depiction of an ancient building near Feroz Shah Kotla in Delhi (above). This image fed into wider commentary on the gradual decline of Delhi as the seat of the Mughal empire.

The building is reduced to a shadow of its former eminence, the limited life in its surroundings generating an impression of neglect that might be solved by British intervention. The new colonial masters were celebrated as harbingers of modernity. Through depictions like this, travelling artists, though attracted for mercenary reasons, became a mouthpiece for burgeoning imperial power.

How a monument became a cliché

Such picturesque visions enabled Britons to understand India on their terms and it was ultimately a process of objectification. Pre-colonial cultural and religious references came to be relegated to the background.

Take the Taj Mahal in Charles Ramus Forrest’s 1824 painting (below), which is divested of political metaphors central to how the Mughal Empire presented its identity and power.

The garden complex of the Taj is based on a quadrilateral plan, in the Mughal Charbagh style, replicating the four gardens of paradise mentioned in the Quran, symbolising divine grace and approbation. The architecture drew on Timurid traditions (1370 to 1507), as Shah Jahan, the fifth Mughal emperor, was proud of his lineage and sought to actively revive the legacy of his ancestor, Timur (Tamerlane). The building is believed by certain scholars to be a replica of the throne of God on the Day of Judgement in Islam, which consists of Allah’s throne (the Arsh) and the gardens of Paradise.

Simplifying these architectural complexities, however, Forrest reduces the Taj to an ornamental delight to be enjoyed by a European audience during their boat rides along the river Yamuna, pictured in the foreground.

Memorialisation of conquest

While visual imagery of travel made it possible for the British to control the interpretation of India’s past and insert themselves, it also facilitated the creation of imperial mythologies.

Commemorating sites of war played an important role. During the Third Anglo-Mysore war (1790 to 1792), successes against the ruler of Mysore, Tipu Sultan, led the British to envision themselves as the incumbent power. Destruction cleared the path for occupation as territories were laid bare for takeover, as evident in Robert Home’s 1794 depiction of Tipu’s gardens in Bangalore (below).

Devoid of its vegetation and former grandeur in wartime, the once beautifully ordered landscape is turned into a picturesque scene. This ruggedness is romanticised as the remnant of a bygone era, to be discarded in favour of a new beginning.

Mysore soon evolved into a site of British personal and collective memories, embedding sacrifices for imperial cause as a matter of national pride. Previously, more tragic sites had served this memorial purpose. For instance, The Black Hole of Calcutta, a small, cramped dungeon at Fort William, where supposedly more than a hundred imprisoned Britons suffocated in 1756.

It is telling that, by the 19th century, British tourism was built around and reinforced the idea that Britain’s empire and territorial conquests were things to be proud of.

Tourists often fail to appreciate the experience of ordinary Indian people, which has influenced how destinations are marketed. These 18th-century western artists wandering across South Asia, their fortunes and, above all, their art, can tell us how this perspective surfaced.

As a place bereft of its own political identity by conquest, India was ripe for romantic projections of western might. In our age of travel, we must question these ways of seeing.

Apurba Chatterjee, Visiting Research Fellow Department of History, University of Reading

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

Current therapies for Parkinson’s disease and related conditions primarily treat symptoms but don’t stop the underlying process causing the disease.

Increasing evidence suggests that toxic clumps of proteins called alpha-synuclein are among the primary drivers of damage to neurons. My team and I developed a synthetic molecule that can block these proteins from clumping and spreading in the brains of mice, ultimately reducing symptoms of disease.

This molecule, called SK-129, acts like a molecular brace: It binds to several parts of alpha-synuclein and holds the protein in a shape that makes it less likely to stick to other ones. It binds especially strongly to early forms of these toxic clumps, preventing them from growing and forming new ones.

Why it matters

Beyond SK-129, our research highlights the broader potential of the class of molecules to which it belongs: foldamers.

Foldamers are laboratory-designed molecules that fold into predictable shapes, much like natural proteins. Because they’re so stable, scientists can tailor them to recognize and bind to specific biological targets.

This versatility is particularly important, because many proteins involved in neurodegenerative diseases have long been considered “undruggable.” Unlike other disease proteins with pockets that conventional drugs can bind to, proteins involved in neurodegenerative diseases, such as alpha-synuclein, are highly flexible and lack well-defined binding sites. Synthetic foldamers offer larger surfaces that can engage these difficult targets and disrupt the abnormal protein interactions that lead to toxic aggregation.

Foldamers could open new treatment avenues not only for Parkinson’s disease, but also for other neurodegenerative disorders driven by toxic protein aggregation, including Alzheimer’s disease and ALS.

What still isn’t known

Although SK-129 showed strong promise in its ability to target Parkinson’s in cell and animal models, we have yet to test its effectiveness in people.

Important questions remain regarding its long-term safety, optimal dosing and how it travels through and interacts with the human body. Additional studies are needed to understand how the molecule works and how to further optimize it to stop or slow Parkinson’s disease from worsening in people.

More broadly, researchers are still working to fully understand how different forms of alpha-synuclein drive neurodegeneration and disease spread. My team is also investigating how selectively targeting these toxic protein clumps influences their spread, inflammation in the nervous system and brain cell survival across different brain regions.

What other research is being done

Researchers are actively developing other therapies that target the toxic alpha-synuclein clumps that cause Parkinson’s and related diseases.

These approaches include molecules designed to clear these protein clumps or reduce their production, as well as molecules that can stop them from aggregating. Several of these strategies have advanced into clinical trials.

Each major approach to treatment has important limitations. Some struggle to selectively bind to the toxic proteins, while others are unable to penetrate the brain.

Through the collaboration of neuroscientists, biophysicists, clinicians and translational researchers, researchers like me hope to develop new ways to treat diseases that conventional drugs haven’t been able to before.

The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.

Sunil Kumar, Associate Professor of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, University of Denver

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Fifty years ago, Swedish pop sensation ABBA released their single Dancing Queen. It reached number one in 15 countries, from Australia to the US, to Norway and South Africa.

Five decades later it’s still riding the airwaves, being belted out on the West End stage, squealed at karaoke parties, paraded at Mardi Gras, and danced to at wedding receptions.

How did this sweet yet corny song wheedle its way into our lives, and manage to stay there for half a century?

Birth of a hit

Dancing Queen was born in 1975, a year after ABBA’s famous Eurovision Song Contest win with Waterloo.

ABBA’s popularity had expanded but they hadn’t yet cracked the prized American market. The rising disco trend offered the next best shot.

In his book ABBA All The Songs: The Story Behind Every Track, author Benoit Clerc tells the story of band members Benny and Bjorn workshopping their new song at a cabin on Viggso island near Stockholm. They recorded a rough piano and guitar demo on cassette, then played it to their manager, Stig Anderson, and his teenage daughter Marie. Marie later described it as an “awful” recording of “the most incredible song”.

In the studio in Stockholm, the duo worked with musicians to craft a rhythmic dance groove, inspired by George McCrae’s 1974 disco hit Rock Your Baby. Two days later they had a draft backing track titled Boogaloo. ABBA historian Carl Magnus Palm reports that when Benny played the song to one of the group’s vocalists, Anni-Frid, she was “moved to tears”.

Manager Stig renamed the song Dancing Queen in a serendipitous move. ABBA was invited to perform at the gala for Swedish King Carl and his soon-to-be queen in June, 1976. They had the perfect song. Two months later, Dancing Queen officially launched and rocketed around the world.

Musical magic

Dancing Queen showcases the famous Swedish flair for thoughtful design and assembly. Rather than the lightning pace of Gloria Gaynor’s Never Can Say Goodbye (128 beats per minute), Dancing Queen’s bedrock rhythm grooves at a sustainable 100.

Unlike many pop songs, the vocals don’t begin predictably with the verse; nor the first line of the chorus (“you are the dancing queen”). Instead, they launch on the highest note halfway through the chorus (“you can dance”). Given the verse’s low-pitch, it’s a clever way to grab the listener’s attention. Sven-Olof Walldoff’s string arrangement adds ascending swells that rise to the chorus and tug on the heart.

Benny’s piano playing also adds drama and grandeur. He begins the song with a theatrical glissando, where he runs his fingers down the piano’s white keys. He then stretches his fingers to play octaves so the piano’s high melody is reinforced with a lower note.

Crafting the lyrics

Renaming the song to “Dancing Queen” offered a chance for a more mature dance story than Benny and Bjorn’s 1972 composition Nina, Pretty Ballerina.

Unlike sneaking out of the home like Cinderella, the Queen takes herself to the dance. She hunts for what she enjoys. Finding a king might be nice, but partners are optional to “having the time of your life”.

With its double meaning, the song’s queen protagonist connected organically with the LGBTQIA+ community. Dancing Queen eventually became a popular gay anthem at the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, and was championed by singers such as Kylie Minogue. The bold message resonated: “You can dance, you can jive” – regardless of who you are, or who you love.

There is, however, a dubious lyric. Stig’s title created a songwriting challenge: find three syllable rhymes for Dancing Queen. “Tambourine” is cheesy but harmless, but “seventeen” is loaded.

Is ABBA casting teenage girls as “teasers” who seek to “turn them on”? The ethics of the lyrics have been largely overlooked by listeners and composers.

ABBA revival

In the 1980s, the world replaced its appetite for sweet Swedes with musical roughage such as grunge. ABBA broke up in 1982.

A decade passed before a greatest hits album, ABBA Gold, and a quirky Australian film, Muriel’s Wedding (1994) revived a nostalgic yearning for ABBA’s pretty songs.

Live performances of Dancing Queen by U2’s Bono, and much later by Metallica’s Kirk Hammett and Robert Trujillo, gave it rock legend endorsements.

The year 1999 brought a second popularity resurgence with the jukebox musical Mamma Mia premiering in London’s West End. This fictional story wove together ABBA hits including the indomitable Dancing Queen. The subsequent 2008 movie starring Meryl Streep sold Dancing Queen to the next generation. And in 2015, the track was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Perhaps this reporter from 1977 best explains Dancing Queen’s enduring appeal:

There are two reasons for ABBA’s grip on the popular market. One is that they make near technically perfect records. The other is that many people want to be happy in this depressing world and ABBA make them feel good.

Wendy Hargreaves, Academic in the School of Education and Creative Arts, University of Southern Queensland

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Mahjong is having a global moment. From designer tile sets and “mahjong parties” to growing numbers of clubs and classes, the centuries-old Chinese tile game is becoming trendy once again.

But its resurgence raises questions about cultural exchange, commercialisation, and what happens when a tradition rooted in Chinese history becomes a “lifestyle trend”.

From China to the rest of the world

Mahjong emerged in eastern coastal China in the mid 1800s, towards the end of the Qing Dynasty. Although its exact origins are debated, historians agree the game developed from earlier Chinese tile-based games.

In the early 1900s, mahjong spread across China and internationally, including to the United States, France and the United Kingdom.

Annelise Heinz, historian of modern America, explains how American businesses marketed the game as an exotic Chinese novelty, often using Orientalist imagery in related advertisements and media.

American companies such as Abercrombie & Fitch helped commercialise mahjong. But Heinz argues their success depended on Chinese manufacturing, commercial networks and cultural expertise. Chinese merchants and community members imported and sold mahjong sets, and taught many white Americans how to play – yet their contributions are often overlooked.

How it works

Mahjong traditionally involves four players drawing and discarding from 144 tiles to create winning combinations. Strategy, probability, memory and your ability to read your opponents all play a role. The social experience is also equally important.

Today, there are more than 40 iterations of mahjong played globally, with different versions having different rules and varying numbers of players and tiles. Chinese variants such as the Cantonese and Hong Kong styles differ from other versions such as Japanese riichi mahjong.

One of the most distinctive adaptations is American Mah Jongg. Developed in the 1920s, this version has its own rules, and a number of joker tiles that don’t exist in the original version. The spelling “Mah Jongg” reflects the commercial branding adopted during the American mahjong boom. This game was eventually standardised by the National Mah Jongg League.

In the US, the current revival is centred largely on American Mah Jongg, while in Australia newer clubs such as Lucky Tiles are introducing players to the Hong Kong style.

Cultural and historical significance

In China, the history of mahjong has reflected broader shifts in society. During the late Qing and republican periods (1912–49) the game moved from male-dominated gambling spaces such as teahouses and brothels into bourgeois homes and parlours. It became increasingly associated with women’s social lives, reflecting changing gender roles and attitudes towards leisure.

But mahjong has not always been viewed positively in China. Critics at different points in history have associated it with gambling or excessive leisure, with increased anxieties as the game became popular with women.

Yet such criticisms have not diminished the game’s cultural significance. In many Chinese households, mahjong is woven into Lunar New Year celebrations and everyday socialising.

Outside China, mahjong helps Chinese diaspora maintain their cultural identity. Playing together also creates a shared space for community and connection, including across generations.

Why is mahjong booming now?

Google data shows rising search interest in “mahjong” and related terms, with media coverage also reflecting the game’s soaring popularity.

This resurgence reflects a number of overlapping trends. Many people are seeking offline activities that provide genuine social connection, particularly following the pandemic.

Social media and pop culture have also changed how the game is viewed, with many sources crediting the current revival to the popular 2018 film Crazy Rich Asians.

Boutique brands and influencers have turned mahjong into a lifestyle trend, promoting fashionable game nights, in what might be viewed as an extension of the “Chinamaxxing” trend.

Appreciation or appropriation?

Mahjong’s commercial growth has prompted debate about cultural appropriation. This tension is not new.

During the 1920s American mahjong craze, the game became fashionable among affluent white American women, who embraced what Heinz describes an Orientalist “feminine exoticism”. This involved using Chinese-inspired dress and language to perform an imagined version of Chinese culture.

Ironically, this enthusiasm coincided with escalating anti-Asian prejudice and immigration restrictions in the US.

Philosopher James Young argues cultural borrowing is a normal feature of human societies, and is not automatically unethical. The more important question is how cultural practices are adopted. Are their origins acknowledged? And does the “borrowing” cause harm to the communities they come from?

In her essay Eating the Other, the late American cultural critic bell hooks cautions against treating culture as an aesthetic object detached from its history. This tension came into focus in a 2021 controversy, when Dallas-based company The Mahjong Line marketed sets with the traditional Chinese riles replaced with English words and Western symbols.

There is also the question of who benefits financially from the mahjong comeback.

Another Dallas-based company Oh My Mahjong, founded in 2022 by Megan Trottier, reported more than US$30 million revenue in 2025. Meanwhile, luxury houses such as Hermès are selling mahjong sets for tens of thousands of dollars, showing how the culturally significant game has been turned into a lucrative commodity.

The challenge moving forward will be ensuring mahjong’s growing popularity remains connected to the Chinese communities and histories that shaped it. Those communities should also have a meaningful say in its future.

Aaron Teo, Lecturer in Curriculum and Pedagogy, University of Southern Queensland

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

On Thursday, the federal and New South Wales governments jointly announced a deal to bail out the Tomago aluminium smelter, at a cost of A$2.5 billion over ten years.

The smelter is Australia’s largest single user of electricity. Its majority owner, mining giant Rio Tinto, had been warning higher electricity costs may force it to close.

Since coming to power, the federal Labor government has stepped in to save a number of struggling industrial facilities around the country – to the collective tune of billions of dollars.

However, this new deal to future-proof the Tomago smelter is different to those previous bailouts. It’s the result of more than a year of negotiations, with a return to the taxpayer, the workforce, the shareholders and the planet.

Avoiding leaving a ‘smelter-sized hole’

Tomago is Australia’s largest aluminium smelter. It contributes $2.2 billion to the Australian economy each year, with exports of around $3 billion. The facility employs more than 1,000 full-time workers directly, and supports many more in local supply chains.

Tomago is not only crucial to the Hunter region’s manufacturing base. It is also an important part of the national energy transition. Aluminium is vital to the jobs and industries of the future.

As Industry and Innovation Minister Tim Ayres said in May:

The full benefits of new industrial firms and technologies are less likely to materialise if there are smelter-sized holes in regional industry.

Australia’s biggest power bill

However, the fundamental challenge for Tomago is its power price, which is around 40% of its total costs. This is the largest electricity load in Australia, representing 12% of NSW’s total electricity demand.

Tomago has announced it wants to shift to 50% renewable energy by 2030 and 100% by 2035. This makes good sense. Solar and wind are now recognised to be the cheapest form of new power generation.

However, with its electricity supply contract expiring in 2028, Tomago needs to secure power, either coal-fired or renewable, at a commercially viable cost. The prospect of closure loomed with a massive loss of jobs and industrial capacity.

After bailouts of smaller facilities around the country, the federal government was reluctant to directly subsidise a global company of the scale and profitability of Rio Tinto. But nor could it allow Tomago to close.

A different kind of bailout

The government was in a bind, until an ingenious solution emerged.

This solution is based on the government’s ability to create so-called “specialist investment vehicles” (SIVs). These provide equity or loans across a range of co-investment opportunities – including clean energy – and are governed by independent boards.

What if the government were to use one of these specialist investment vehicles to provide electricity to Tomago at a price that enabled it to remain competitive in global markets?

This is the approach the government has chosen, and it offers a further benefit.

The investment vehicle can also provide concessional loans to investors prepared to build the renewable energy capacity that would supply the electricity. Government-backed finance lowers the cost of capital for new projects, guaranteeing Tomago a stable, long-term power price.

Snowy Hydro is the entity selected to perform this role. Its business model is already geared up to provide renewable energy and to optimise its use through pumped hydro. And it is well positioned to bring more renewables into the grid by de-risking investment.

Crucially, for every 1% reduction in the cost of capital, end-user energy costs are reduced by around 10%.

Reviving a 1980s solution

This is not a new idea. It’s a proven financial structure, used by Neville Wran’s NSW government in the 1980s to secure coal-fired power for industry. And it can be applied just as effectively today for the new era of clean energy transition.

However, there will inevitably be a gap at the initial stages between the market price for electricity and the price negotiated as part of a “power purchase agreement” with the company. And this is where the federal and NSW state governments have committed to underwrite the difference.

They will provide $250 million a year from 2028 over the following ten years in a time-limited arrangement, with the prospect of the governments recouping their investment through a combination of aluminium revenues and the contribution of Tomago to stabilising the grid.

In other words, there is every chance this arrangement will be cost-neutral over the decade, while at the same time turbocharging the energy transition and economic diversification of Australia’s most prominent industrial region.

A blueprint for other interventions

Too often in the past, governments have leaned on economic orthodoxy to justify inaction, or at most to confine themselves to addressing market failure. The consequence has been a hollowing out of Australia’s manufacturing capability, declining business research and development, and stalled productivity growth.

The approach taken to save Tomago aluminium smelter is an example of how governments can also shape markets. Once underway, it’s an approach that can be replicated and built upon in other places, such as Whyalla.

Importantly, it provides confidence that Australia can address the task of diversifying its narrow, resources-heavy trade and industrial structure and lay the foundations for a high-productivity, high-wage economy.

Roy Green, Emeritus Professor of Innovation, University of Technology Sydney

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

The seven million Australians who live and work in regional, rural and remote Australia are being “left behind” by telecommunications services, according to a new report released today by the industry ombudsman.

The report comes only weeks after an outage on the Telstra network crippled services across the country. It reveals people living outside the major cities sometimes have to wait months for technicians to fix issues and are unable to contact emergency services when they need help.

The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, Cynthia Gebert, said:

This report reflects what we continue to hear: how hard it can be to stay connected, and how much is at stake when telecommunications services fail.

Her ideas for what needs to be done to fix this are a good start.

Analysing more than 26,000 complaints

The ombudsman analysed 26,972 complaints received over the past two financial years from consumers living in regional, rural and remote areas. She closely reviewed a sample of more than 2,000 of these complaints and delivered four key findings.

First, many of the complaints were similar to issues experienced in urban areas. But remoteness and limited alternatives meant the issues were harder and took longer to resolve.

Second, mobile coverage in the regions is poor and connectivity is unreliable. The ombudsman noted that, for some, the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s new rules on standardised coverage maps might help resolve coverage concerns.

Third, people living outside the cities have limited options when it comes to choosing a technology type and plan that is appropriate for them. Adding to this is the fact there is often a lack of access to a reliable power supply, plus a lack of knowledge about what services and technologies are available.

Finally, planned and unplanned outages create significant risks to people’s safety and their businesses.

A complete overhaul is needed

The ombudsman made 12 recommendations to address these problems. Chief among them is “an overhaul of how telecommunications services are regulated”. Specifically, she has called on the federal government to undertake a comprehensive review of the entire regulatory framework.

The review should be aimed at reducing complexity and ensuring equitable access to essential telecommunication services. Gerbert said:

While the telecommunications sector has evolved significantly in response to technological innovation and changing market dynamics, the industry’s regulations have developed piece by piece.

On top of this, she recommended telco companies pause charges when consumers are waiting for a technician to install or repair a service. She called for a review of current telco authentication obligations which can force consumers to travel vast distances to physical stores for assistance. She also called for the introduction of individual remedies for significant delays in accessing mobile services.

Among the ombudsman’s other recommendations was for the government to develop an independent database where consumers can check what services are available to them, and establish Statutory Infrastructure Provider (SIP) service standards.

A SIP is a telecommunications carrier designated to supply broadband connections to premises in particular areas. The most common is NBN Co, which oversees the National Broadband Network.

Remedies should be made available to consumers when standards are not met, the ombudsman. said.

Where to from here?

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission recently announced a year-long inquiry into regional mobile coverage across Australia. This will include domestic roaming and a radio access network service.

In the past month calls for the government to act on domestic roaming have been growing. These calls have come from the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, the National Farmers Federation and other community groups.

Domestic roaming would have many benefits. It would improve access, coverage, reliability, performance and competition – particularly in regional, rural and remote areas.

It’s well past time for a “Telecommunications Act 2027”. Even before the ombudsman’s new report, it was evident the current legislation is not fit for purpose.

Service standards, including improved compensation when standards are not met, are vital. This must be a focus moving forward. The ombudsman’s report into the experiences of telecommunications consumers living outside major Australian cities increases pressure on the government to act.

Mark A Gregory, Associate Professor, School of Engineering, RMIT University

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

The Productivity Commission has recommended undoing the controversial 2018 changes to the distribution of goods and services tax (GST) revenue between the states that has cost taxpayers A$23 billion.

It has proposed reinstating the system that existed before the Morrison government’s deal that gave billions of dollars in extra funds to Western Australia, at the expense of the other states.

The commission’s 124-page interim report finds the reforms were “a costly mistake” and “have not achieved their intent”. It says:

The 2018 changes tried to achieve too much and moved too far away from the system’s core objective. The result is a system that is now more complex, less consistent and more costly.

Credit to the Productivity Commission for producing a clear and rigorous report. The 2018 “reforms” were bad policy. The sooner they are unwound the better. The federal government should adopt its recommendations in full.

How WA benefits

The report confirms what critics have long argued: the deal benefits only WA, and taxpayers in every other state and territory foot the bill.

It also documents potential perverse outcomes. For instance, WA’s GST distribution would rise if another state is hit by a natural disaster and receives extra GST funding.

Estimates compiled from Treasury data by economist Saul Eslake suggest WA would by 2028–29 have received about $43 billion more than under the pre-2018 rules.

Why is the GST redistributed?

Every country with a federal system faces the same issues: which level of government should tax, which should spend, and how to divide revenue between them.

Australia, like other federations including the United States, Canada, Germany and Brazil, splits taxing and spending responsibilities between national and state governments.

All broadly agree on responsibilities for spending. National defence, economic stabilisation and broad social safety net programs sit naturally with the federal government, as they require national coordination.

States tend to do best on services closer to citizens, such as schools, policing, hospitals and local infrastructure. They are better positioned to understand and respond to local needs.

The division of taxation is less clear-cut, and different countries do very different things.

Australia concentrates almost all tax collection at the federal level. Personal income tax, corporate income tax and GST are all collected by the Commonwealth. State taxes, including payroll tax, stamp duty and land tax, account for less than 20% of total revenue.

This creates the first fundamental problem in Australia’s system of federal finance: how is revenue collected nationally distributed to the states to fund education, health and other services? Australia’s solution is to pass on the GST revenue (supplemented with Commonwealth grants).

How much should each state receive?

Before 2018, Australia operated on the principle that every citizen should have access to similar standards of government services.

However, simply dividing the GST pool on a per-person basis does not achieve equal service standards, for two reasons.

First, states differ substantially in their capacity to raise their own revenue. Some states have more valuable property markets, with larger stamp duty and land tax bases; some, such as WA, collect larger mining royalties than others.

Second, the cost of delivering a standard of service varies enormously by state. Providing healthcare, education and infrastructure costs much more per person in remote areas such as the Northern Territory.

Before 2018, both these factors were assessed annually by the Commonwealth Grants Commission, an independent body established in 1933. Since July 2000 that has included advice on how to distribute the billions in revenue collected nationally through the GST.

For most of its history, it took account of disadvantages and gave each state the funds to deliver a broadly equal standard of service provision for schools, hospitals and so on. States more able to raise their own revenue received a smaller GST share.

This approach is regarded internationally as best practice; scholars of federal systems point to Australia’s pre-2018 model as an example to emulate.

The picture changed in 2018

Then, in 2018, Australia largely abandoned its principles. The law was amended to replace full equalisation.

The new system gave all states a guaranteed minimum share of the GST pool, regardless of their actual revenue. This meant WA actually received more GST revenue than it needed to meet its assessed needs.

The new Productivity Commission review found WA received 113% of its needs, while other states only received 98% of their fiscal needs.

There were also billions of dollars in additional federal top-up payments to the GST pool to ensure no state was worse off. But this wasn’t free and was paid for by all Australian taxpayers.

This was a special deal for a single state, dressed up as a national reform.

Political dysfunction was a side effect

Beyond the direct costs documented in the Productivity Commission’s new report, the 2018 changes produced a further, less visible cost: they encouraged unproductive lobbying and interstate rivalry.

Rather than focusing on serving their own citizens, states increasingly focused on lobbying the federal government for special treatment resembling WA’s deal.

This poor use of political energy and public resources corrodes the cooperative federalism the original distribution model was designed to support.

Three options, one clear answer

The Productivity Commission’s report sets out three options.

Its recommended option is that the government “transition back to the pre-2018 system”, reversing the Morrison-era changes and restoring the Commonwealth Grants Commission’s original processes.

This is the right choice. The government should adopt it.

The alternatives are inferior. The second-best option it outlines has the federal government commit to direct payments to any state that is materially disadvantaged by a “dominant” state effect. This would essentially compensate states harmed by the 2018 formula on a case-by-case basis. In practice, this would amplify state-based lobbying for “special” recognition.

The final option effectively leaves current arrangements in place, preserving WA’s advantaged position indefinitely, at the continuing expense of taxpayers in every other state and territory. It would not address any of the problems the Productivity Commission has identified.

Australia built a budget equalisation system the rest of the world regarded as best practice, then dismantled it in 2018 for political expediency.

The Productivity Commission has handed the government a clear, evidence-based path back to a fairer and more defensible system. It’s a path the government should follow.

Robert Breunig, Professor of Economics and Director, Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

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

It is now less than six years until the Brisbane Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Hosting the games will be a multi-billion dollar investment, with organisers committed to a participation legacy to encourage more people to play sports and be active.

However, Australian girls and women are dropping out of organised sports at alarming rates, especially around the ages of 14–15. These teenagers today will be 20 or 21 when the Brisbane games begin.

So, why is this happening and what can be done to reverse the trend?

What’s the problem?

As far back as 2016, research has shown almost two-thirds of Australian girls leave sport by 15, compared to just under half of Australian boys.

However, dropout can mean anything from switching sports, swapping to informal sport, or stopping altogether.

A more recent 2020 study tracked 29,225 girls and women who participated in Victorian organised sport for seven years. It found 55% of girls aged 4–14 dropped out of sport and never returned.

Australian Sport Commission research from 2025 lists girls aged 15 and older as the third least likely group to play organised sport (behind people 18 and older with a disability, or those with home duties).

More broadly, Australian sport is shifting, as informal and casual sports such as walking and working out at the gym become more popular.

But numbers in organised sport appear largely flat, or even slowly shrinking.

An eye to 2032

The Brisbane games are a huge investment: the Queensland and Australian governments are investing up to a combined A$7.1 billion, largely for venue infrastructure.

But the games aren’t just about stunning venues and sparkling medals.

The vision for the event is: “Believe. Belong. Become.”. This echoes Australia’s national sport strategy (2024–34) that seeks to prioritise inclusion and participation.

Organisers have also committed to a participation legacy, including a goal to ensure girls remain connected to sport.

A small number may believe they will be wearing green and gold in Brisbane. Many more may become administrators, coaches, leaders, officials and volunteers.

But the likelihood of many of these women getting involved in Brisbane 2032 appears to hit a roadblock when they reach age 15. So can Australia better support these future leaders and athletes when many are not sure they belong?

How to keep girls in sport

Many girls report they lack role models in sport, do not always feel they belong, and face issues with body image and gender stereotypes.

This sits in a wider sporting culture where women face three times as much online abuse as men, including many women athletes.

Retention has also failed to attract a great deal of concern or investment: researchers believe there are only five identified studies worldwide that have offered meaningful data into how to keep girls and women involved.

Researchers describe this area as “woefully under-researched”.

Work is being done though, with targeted programs aimed at finding out how to make sport more welcoming and fun for Australian girls and women.

Fair access to facilities and resources is needed: too often, the high-performance pathways for boys or men’s games take centre stage and pride of place on pitches, ovals and changing rooms.

More also needs to be done to develop, encourage and support women coaches, officials and administrators to design and run sport for girls at community levels and beyond.

The Australian government’s Play Our Way program is aimed at resolving these problems.

This will help ensure better representation of women in all roles and as leaders in organised sport environments.

More research is definitely needed.

All is not lost

Australia is fresh off a record-breaking haul of 171 medals, 70 of them gold, at the Glasgow Commonwealth Games.

Australia’s women athletes won more than half of the medals.

So at the elite level, the pipeline looks healthy, especially after an uptick of investment in women’s sport that is going some way towards addressing decades of under-funding.

Beyond the government’s Play Our Way program, it is also working toward professionalising women’s sport and ensuring equal pay.

However, the picture could be even rosier if fewer girls dropped out of organised sports.

Much more needs to be done

As we have done with Glasgow, we should continue to celebrate Australia’s best and brightest athletes. But women’s sport needs better support at community and junior levels

Participation and retention need to be better understood, with a clearer picture of if, where, and how girls enter and leave organised sport.

If Australia doesn’t support girls of all ages, they might walk away before they get the chance to reach their potential.

Monica Beazley of Monarch Management contributed to this article.

Alexander Rolfe Best, Lecturer, Sport Business, Edith Cowan University

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

Last week’s NAPLAN results landed with their usual media splash. There were headlines worrying about the significant proportions of students below certain benchmarks and specific questions about maths results for students in Year 3.

One important element missing from the debate so far has been how students from disadvantaged backgrounds are falling further behind their advantaged peers.

This gap was already a problem before the latest data. But the most recent results show how things are getting worse.

Another way of looking at the data

Many research studies and decades of school results tell us there is a “learning gap” between advantaged and disadvantaged students in Australia.

What is less clear is how much this gap is changing over time.

For a May 2026 report, we developed a methodology that allowed us to illustrate gaps between students from different socioeconomic groups.

We converted NAPLAN scores into years and months of learning, relative to average levels of achievement for each year level. We called this “equivalent years of learning”. So, instead of comparing students by achievement bands or results, we can look at their achievement in terms of the amount of years and months that set them apart from other groups of students.

We then used this measure to compare the NAPLAN results of students whose parents did not finish school, versus those who went on to university study. Parents’ level of education is often used as a proxy for a students’ socioeconomic background in combination with other variables.

In our report, we found large, persistent and growing learning gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students in Australia.

Updating our findings

We have now incorporated the latest NAPLAN results into our analysis. This shows us how gaps in reading continue to grow, particularly during high school.

Here, we focus on the last four years because in 2023, major changes to NAPLAN testing and reporting were introduced.

In 2023, the reading skills of Year 3 students whose parents did not complete school were one year and ten months behind the skills of students whose parents completed a bachelor’s degree or above. This year’s results show the gap has widened to two years and two months.

In high school these gaps are even wider and growing faster. For Year 7 they have gone from four years and 11 months in 2023 to five years and six months in 2026. For Year 9s, they have grown from six years to six years and eight months.

What about numeracy?

In the case of numeracy, learning gaps have narrowed slightly in primary schools over the last four years – particularly among students in Year 5. Here, the learning gap between students whose parents did not complete school and students whose parents completed a bachelor’s degree or above decreased from two years and ten months in 2023 to two years and five months in 2026.

In high schools, numeracy gaps are growing fast, without any evident improvements for disadvantaged students.

The numeracy gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students in Year 7 grew from five years and three months in 2023 to five years and eleven months in 2026. For Year 9s it increased from six years and eight months to seven years and nine months.

How can we fix this?

What we are seeing is that achievement differences emerge early, and then widen in later year levels.

The consequences of this reach beyond NAPLAN and other school results to students’ opportunities after school. Research shows there are broader social and economic consequences for those left behind, including reduced productivity, entrenched disadvantage, and weakened cohesion across society as a whole.

Addressing educational inequality is obviously not an easy fix – it continues to be an issue in many countries around the world, despite decades of national and international commitments.

The persistent and growing learning gaps observed over the last 20 years in Australia suggest the issues are structural rather than linked to short-term policies or factors.

In particular, my upcoming research suggests greater attention must be paid to the increasing concentration of disadvantaged students in already disadvantaged schools.

These schools and communities face the greatest challenges and therefore require targeted and effective support.

“Full-service schools” offer a promising approach here. These provide much more than lessons and extra-curricular activities. They provide services for student health, learning and wellbeing in partnership with community services. Research has shown that when implemented effectively, these models are cost-effective at lifting student attendance, engagement, learning, health and wellbeing.

This won’t necessarily address all the complex factors at play. But in order to reverse these trends, governments need to ensure every school in Australia can give students the chance to reach their full potential, no matter the sector or the location.

Andres Molina, Senior Research Fellow, Mitchell Institute/Centre for International Research on Education Systems, Victoria University

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

The government has finally tabled its News Bargaining Incentive legislation to make big tech companies pay for the Australian journalism they use on their platforms.

The government developed these laws to fix a problem with the original News Media Bargaining Code introduced under the Morrison government.

While the code generated between $200 million and $250 million a year through deals struck with Meta and Google, it allowed them to stop making deals with news companies by not carrying news on their platform.

The new laws aim to close this loophole by making social media and search companies strike deals with eligible news publishers, or pay a charge based on their Australian digital advertising revenue, which would be distributed to news organisations through the News Journalism Payment Scheme.

While setting up new revenue streams for struggling newsrooms is a welcome move, the laws themselves are far from perfect.

How would the laws work?

The News Bargaining Incentive is made up of a couple of parts.

First, the government wants large social media and search companies with an annual digital advertising revenue of more than $250 million in Australia – likely to include digital giants such as Google, Meta and TikTok – to enter deals with at least eight eligible Australian news businesses.

If they fail to strike enough deals, they will be forced to pay a charge: 2.5% of their Australian digital advertising revenue.

To encourage deals, the charge is offset by 150%, and this increases to 200% if the deal is with small or medium-sized businesses.

Revenue collected from the charge will be administered through the News Journalism Payment Scheme. These funds will support the production of core news content in Australia. That means, according to the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s definition:

[…] content that reports, investigates or explains issues or events that are relevant in engaging Australians in public debate and in informing democratic decision making; or current issues or events of public significance for Australians at a local, regional or national level.

The scheme is primarily designed to sustain the employment of journalists and help build capacity of news organisations.

Funding to news publishers will be decided by a weighting formula based on the number of full-time equivalent journalists in each organisation.

In a welcome move, the definition of journalist has been broadened to include a range of essential news roles, such as:

• journalists

• photojournalists

• videographers

• data or visual journalists

• editors or producers who are involved in the production of news content

• and freelancers and volunteers (low-revenue organisations) who produce core news content.

Of the charge funds, 10% will be set aside for grants, including 5% to fund AAP (Australian Associated Press) in recognition of its public-interest role, and a further 5% for small organisations that are not eligible for funding from deals under this scheme.

Exactly how the collected funds are to be administered is not clear.

What will it mean for media companies?

On the positive side, the new laws will guarantee a steady flow of revenue for the Australian news industry, either through deals or charges.

This stops the digital platforms opting out of giving financial support to the news industry, which is welcome.

There has, however, been criticism from the news industry in four key areas.

1. A smaller funding pool

The pool of funding from which the charge is drawn is smaller than the original proposal. It was initially based on the annual revenue of the platform in Australia. Now it will be drawn from its digital advertising revenue.

While there has been a small increase in the charge, from 2.25% to 2.5%, it might not make up the shortfall.

More importantly, for this to work we need a more accurate definition and estimate of advertising revenues earned by digital platforms in Australia.

2. Uneven expenditure rules

The minimum number of deals that need to be struck to avoid the charge was doubled from four to eight.

But the maximum share of expenditure per news business is 25%, which means a platform can give four companies 99% of the money and split just 1% among four additional companies.

This could continue the problem of propping up the larger mainstream news outlets at the cost of smaller publishers, which are playing an increasing role in the way audiences access news and information.

3. Favouring larger organisations

The charge distribution mechanism also favours larger organisations. To be included on the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s register of eligible news businesses you must generate more than $150,000 in annual revenue.

This excludes many small and independent outlets. For example, among roughly 200 Local and Independent News Association (LINA) members, 35% earn less than the threshold. The 5% grant built into the scheme is promising, but not sufficient to support the diverse range of publishers operating in Australia, particularly in regional areas.

4. No AI companies included

The government chose not to include AI companies in the scheme.

Excluding AI services creates a significant regulatory gap. AI platforms have become an increasingly dominant source of news and information for the Australian public.

With the advent of generative AI-enabled platforms, news organisations are now facing a “zero-click” era as artificial intelligence (AI) summaries reduce referral traffic to news websites.

This is clearly a missed opportunity at the precise moment when their market power and impact on journalism are accelerating.

Are the laws likely to be effective?

Overall, the new laws will channel badly needed funds into the struggling news industry.

However, while the government has made small changes to the News Bargaining Incentive legislation, they don’t go far enough to reflect the industry’s feedback and support the diversity and sustainability of public interest journalism.

Caroline Fisher, Adjunct Associate Professor of Communication, University of Canberra and Sora Park, Director, News & Media Research Centre, University of Canberra

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

From next Monday, August 17, thousands of food delivery workers across Australia will benefit from new workplace protections – including new minimum hourly rates of pay.

That’s because on Tuesday, a new minimum standards order was handed down by an expert panel of the Fair Work Commission. The order covers “employee-like” workers at digital on-demand delivery platforms.

This is the first order of its kind, and as such it sets a benchmark for separate applications currently underway covering rideshare and parcel delivery workers.

It is the result of almost two years of negotiations between the Transport Workers’ Union and two major platforms, Uber Eats and DoorDash, through proceedings at the Fair Work Commission. While these groups ultimately managed to reach a consensus about the new protections, the reforms weren’t always warmly welcomed.

So, what’s actually changing for on-demand delivery workers? And what could it mean for the price of food deliveries?

New minimum standards

The major change for food delivery workers is that the “interim” minimum standard order will create a new “earnings floor”. This won’t work in quite the same way as a minimum wage for employees.

Workers will be entitled to a minimum hourly rate for their “engaged time”: the period between accepting a delivery and completing it.

These minimum rates differ slightly across different types of delivery vehicle.

For pedal-powered bicycles or e-bikes, the rate is $31.30 an hour. For motorcycles it’s $31.80 an hour. For cars, $32 an hour.

Platforms will have to calculate a worker’s total earnings over a 21-day period. If a worker has been paid on average less than the earnings floor for their engaged time, the platform will have to top up their earnings to meet it.

This system does not compensate workers for time spent waiting for a job. But it does include the time spent waiting for an order at a restaurant, if they have already accepted it.

Clearer rules

The minimum standards order has also clarified the rules on insurance cover. Delivery workers are required to take out their own compulsory third-party insurance on their vehicles, at their own expense.

But platforms must now cover the cost of offering all workers a “reasonable minimum level” of personal accident cover. Other changes include:

• granting workers access to a feedback forum to raise questions or concerns about platform operations that impact their delivery work
• a clearer procedure for resolving disputes
• a right to (unpaid) time away.

A long road

Food delivery apps first launched in Australia in the mid-2010s. Many once-prominent platforms – such as Deliveroo and Menulog – have exited, and the market is now dominated by Uber Eats and DoorDash.

While popular among consumers, there have been significant criticisms of food delivery gig work. Workers have often earned both extremely low and variable income, faced safety risks, and had limited opportunity to resolve workplace problems.

According to the Transport Workers’ Union, there have been at least 23 fatalities among gig workers since 2017.

Closing some loopholes

For a long time, on-demand workers didn’t receive any of the workplace protections granted to employees, because platforms such as Uber and DoorDash engaged them as independent contractors.

In 2024, the Albanese government, backed by the Greens and some independents, legislated to provide some (not all) gig workers with limited protections, as part of its Closing Loopholes reforms.

This included giving the Fair Work Commission new powers to regulate gig work by making legally enforceable minimum standards orders.

As Tony Burke, then minister for employment and workplace relations, explained at the time:

If you are an employee, you have a whole series of rights. If you’re not an employee, all of those rights – all of them – fall off a cliff. What we want to do is turn that cliff into a ramp.

What does it mean for food delivery prices?

In 2023, before they became law, platforms and business groups pushed back on these reforms.

Uber claimed they would lead to “catastrophic” job losses.

Uber also said they could increase the average cost of meal delivery by up to 85%. DoorDash went further, claiming average prices could more than triple.

The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry claimed the government was taking the country backwards by decades. And based on a “back-of-the-envelope calculation”, the Centre for Independent Studies predicted consumer spending on the gig economy would shrink by A$630 million.

However, with the benefit of hindsight, many of these past claims look unlikely to come true.

Why? Because over the past two years, we’ve seen a collaborative process between the Transport Workers’ Union, and the two biggest platforms, Uber Eats and DoorDash. The new minimum standards order is the result of consensus.

Will delivery prices rise to cover better pay and standards? Almost certainly, though we’re yet to hear by how much.

However, given how actively involved both companies were in striking this deal, it would be surprising if we now saw them double or triple their prices, as they once claimed they might have to.

What does it mean for other workers?

For now, the minimum standards coming into effect from Monday are only applicable to those involved “on demand” food delivery, which includes supermarket grocery deliveries.

There are, however, applications already underway for “last mile” parcel delivery workers and rideshare drivers.

This change will give a vulnerable group of workers more rights. We’ll have to wait and see whether consumers are willing to pay more. But, from Monday, maybe that next food delivery order can come with a side of a little less guilt.

Alex Veen, Senior Lecturer and University of Sydney Business School Emerging Scholar Research Fellow, University of Sydney; Caleb Goods, Senior Lecturer, Management and Organisations, UWA Business School, The University of Western Australia, and Tom Barratt, Senior Lecturer, Management and Organisations, The University of Western Australia

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

Burn it, slash it, bury it – this is what clothing brands have been doing for years with their unsold stock.

But in the European Union, this is now changing. New rules banning the destruction of unsold garments have come into force. These mean brands must find alternative pathways for their unsold stock such as resale and donation. They must also declare on their websites their volumes of unsold stock. Destruction of garments will only be permitted for items that are damaged or unsafe.

These rules come under 2024 regulations, which are designed so that clothing sold in the EU will be more durable, reusable and recyclable. At first, the new rules apply to large retailers, but from 2030, they will apply to medium-sized retailers too.

Here in Australia, we don’t have reliable estimates of the size of the problem, but we could learn from the EU model.

So how big is the problem of unsold stock?

Also known as “surplus”, “deadstock”, or “excess inventory”, unsold stock includes clothing that has been produced but never sold to a consumer, as well as clothing that has been returned by a customer.

The size of the problem is difficult to quantify as there has been no requirement to declare unsold stock. A meta-analysis of multiple studies from Europe calculated the average share of unsold stock is 21% of all clothing placed on the market. While some of this unsold stock is redistributed to charities, the EU estimates 4%-9% of all new clothing is destroyed.

This percentage may be even higher for online retailers, as retail returns alone are estimated to range from 10% to as high as 60% for some categories of clothing.

This is due to practices such as consumers buying multiple sizes of one garment (known as “bracketing”) and then returning the ones that do not fit.

From fast-tracked to forgotten

Fast fashion has made the problem of unsold clothing far worse by constantly releasing new collections and styles. In 2022, H&M released 4,400 new styles across the year, and Zara 6,850 new styles.

Ultra-fast fashion accelerated this turnover even more, with Shein adding up to 10,000 new designs on peak days, according to Greenpeace. This means thousands of clothes remain unsold. And this is not limited to fast fashion; luxury brand Burberry destroyed £90 million (A$170 million) worth of products over five years.

In Australia, we do not know the volume of unsold stock, but it is possible to estimate it using the EU percentages.

In 2024, Australia imported 1.55 billion units of clothing into the country. This figure only includes large shipments to retailers, not individual purchases by consumers or smaller restocking by brands.

One industry estimate suggests at least 3% of all clothing imported into Australia remains unsold, equivalent to 47 million units or 11,700 tonnes. It is unknown how much of this would be destroyed.

However, applying European estimates to the Australian market would produce a less optimistic picture. If the European estimates apply, with 4-9% of unsold clothing destroyed annually, then this would equate to 62-132 million units of clothing destroyed each year in Australia, or 15,500-33,000 tonnes.

Whatever the precise figure is, we know there are tens of thousands of tonnes of unsold stock in Australia. This represents a colossal waste of the materials, energy and labour that went into making and shipping them.

What can be done about it?

There are local solutions to avoid the destruction of new clothing. Australian company Thread Together works with 2,000 Australian brands to distribute unsold clothing to people in need.

Seamless, an Australian scheme to encourage a circular clothing economy by diverting clothing from landfill, has made several recommendations:

• establish a shared definition of unsold stock
• map where and why it accumulates across planning, production, retail and post-season stages
• and provide practical tools to calculate its true business cost.

These measures would improve forecasting and collaboration, helping brands deal with excess stock before it must be discounted, donated or discarded.

Efficiencies can be made through better inventory management and resisting constant style changes. A recent industry report highlighted that efficiencies are possible. Uniqlo increased its profits by 70% over seven years while resisting constant trend turnover, producing only two collections annually and maintaining a relatively limited range. Half the range is carried over from the previous season.

The bottom line

In today’s fashion system, surplus is a feature, not a bug. Fashion brands are locked into unsustainable practices.

The EU laws are a step towards holding brands accountable for the resources they use and waste – and because the rules apply to everyone, everyone must work together to change how the overall system works.

Here in Australia, we also need a level playing field, as no one fashion brand can change their practices alone.

The Australian government has an opportunity to strengthen the rules on “product stewardship” – where businesses take responsibility for a product across its entire lifecycle – and encourage retailers to keep new, unsold clothing out of landfill.

Alice Payne, Professor and Dean of the School of Fashion and Textiles, RMIT, RMIT University and Yassie Samie, Postdoctoral Researcher in Fashion and Textiles, RMIT University

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

You know the feeling. Your account is suspended, your refund request is refused, or you’re still being charged for a cancelled subscription.

So you go to the company’s website for help and you find a chatbot. It offers a menu that doesn’t include your situation. There is no option to speak to a person. Eventually you give up.

Since the start of 2023, Australians have made 1,780 complaints about online retailers, marketplaces, search engines and social media platforms to the telecommunications industry ombudsman. In 2025, complaints were up 20% on the year before.

Account access problems were the most common problem, followed by disputes over charges and fees. More than seven in ten involved just five companies: Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Hubbl.

Unfortunately, all those complaints about online services made to the telecoms industry ombudsman fall outside its jurisdiction. No existing ombuds scheme can make a binding decision about them.

We need a dispute resolution system that can deal with these complaints, and there are precedents for this.

Digital problems cost the economy

The Consumer Policy Research Centre found four in five Australians had a problem with a digital service in the past year, and that unresolved problems cost an estimated $497 million annually. Two in three who complained were left dissatisfied.

Dissatisfaction was highest over refunds people believed they were entitled to (84%), followed by having no way to contact someone who could help (83%).

The centre says when people complained to online businesses and platforms, many had to deal with virtual customer service portals and AI chatbots that are unhelpful, give no explanation or offer inaccurate advice.

Who can deal with these complaints?

The government’s scams prevention framework offers a model. It requires banks, telcos and global digital platforms to join an external dispute resolution scheme run by the Australian Financial Complaints Authority by September 1.

However, this scheme is limited to scams and won’t cover the sort of account or platform issues outlined above.

Under Europe’s Digital Services Act, platforms must have a proper complaints process, and decisions cannot be made by machines alone. Qualified staff must supervise them. If the platform still gets it wrong, users can take the dispute to an independent body certified by the government, which must decide within 90 days.

For example, one dispute settlement body, Appeals Centre Europe, has ruled on 1,500 disputes and overturned more than three quarters of the platforms’ original decisions.

Maybe AI could be part of the solution

Any dispute resolution scheme covering online platforms would face huge numbers of cases with similar problems. This is where chatbots and AI could actually become part of the solution.

British Columbia’s Civil Resolution Tribunal guides people through an interactive Solution Explorer, a rules-based chatbot that asks set questions and returns tailored information based on set rules, before any human decision-maker gets involved.

In research my colleagues and I published in the UNSW Law Journal, we compared rules-based chatbots with generative AI chatbots to see how they can help people with small-value claims.

Generative AI’s ability to provide personalised and targeted responses is genuinely attractive.

But generative AI also hallucinates, confidently inventing legal rules and cases that don’t exist. Even when it isn’t fabricating a source, it can produce highly convincing advice that is simply wrong.

That risk falls hardest on the people these systems are meant to help. A consumer who can’t afford a lawyer is also the person least equipped to notice when an AI has made up the law. And the error is invisible: told wrongly that you have no claim, you simply walk away, and nobody ever finds out. No feedback reaches the system that produced the error.

Getting the design right

The Victorian Law Reform Commission sets out sensible principles in its report on AI in Victoria’s courts, including one clear recommendation that AI must not make the final decision. A person must decide the outcome.

Before any new resolution scheme integrates AI tools, it must decide which tools will be used, for what functions, and what safeguards will reduce potential risks.

The chatbots people are stuck in today aren’t broken. They are working exactly as designed – for the online companies that built them.

Australia rarely gets to design a dispute resolution scheme from scratch, and it is building one now as part of its scams prevention framework.

Whether technology ends up serving consumers or stonewalling them is not a question about AI. It’s a question about who the system is designed for, and whether there is always, at the end of it, someone to turn to.

Vivi Tan, Lecturer in Law, RMIT University

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

On December 14, 2025, 15 people were killed and dozens wounded in a terror attack during a Hanukkah celebration on Sydney’s Bondi Beach. In the wake of the deadliest terror attack on Australian soil, the Albanese government established the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion in January 2026.

This violence against the Jewish community was not an isolated incident. Evidence indicates that 2025 was the deadliest year for antisemitic attacks outside Israel in 30 years.

In Australia, the Bondi terror attack followed two years of rapidly escalating antisemitism, including arson at the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne – designated as a terror attack – and another arson attack at a kosher restaurant in Sydney. Both events have since been attributed by ASIO to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

There have also been threats towards and the targeting of Jewish schools and community leaders. Online abuse has frequently resulted in criticism of Israel being extended to hostility to Jews, irrespective of their political views.

This hostility and hatred has been extended to royal commission witnesses. People who have described their experience of antisemitism to the commission have been subjected to significant online antisemitic abuse in the hours and days after.

I study extremism in all its forms. Since the commission’s hearings began on May 4, I’ve worked with the Dor Foundation – a charity researching antisemitism in Australia – to document and verify more than 1,300 such posts directed at witnesses. We then submitted them to the commission as evidence.

What the monitoring shows

Dor used social media monitoring tools alongside daily manual searching to identify antisemitic posts. A second analyst then viewed the post for confirmation. We applied a conservative threshold to separate legitimate political criticism and debate from abuse and antisemitic material.

The exercise was not exhaustive. Many examples remain uncaptured.

Because of the way we collected the data, our analysis focuses on the nature and severity of the content, not how prevalent it is.

The posts came from 1,137 distinct accounts across social media platforms, which rules out the possibility of a single organiser. Witnesses appearing under a pseudonym were also targeted.

Much of the antisemitic activity sits in comment threads under clips posted by alternative and independent media pages. While Dor’s analysts generally coded the clips themselves as negative or neutral rather than hateful, the comments were more extreme. Five clips from one page drew more than 4,000 comments.

Witnesses were also targeted on their own accounts. One prominent Jewish leader received more than 2,200 comments across four posts about his evidence, including violent language and characterisation as a “baby killer”.

The content crosses ideological lines. Neo-Nazi material is common, including the Happy Merchant caricature, the trope of “109 expulsions” (which falsely suggests Jews have been expelled from 109 countries), and Holocaust denial.

This appears alongside conspiratorial claims about globalist Jewish control, “paid Mossad operatives”, “the Jewish lobby” and imagery associated with Hamas propaganda.

While the ideologies underpinning the abuse differ, they share similar themes about Jewish power, conspiracy and disloyalty to their home countries.

Testimony as a target

The most severe material has called for witnesses and Jewish people to be executed, hanged, shot, firebombed and interned in concentration camps.

Witnesses were compared to rats, cockroaches and vermin, and described as filth requiring eradication.

There was Holocaust denial and mockery, deportation demands and sexually degrading abuse. One witness was depicted in a digitally generated image inside a gas chamber.

Witnesses were called paid actors and crisis actors, accused of giving evidence for shekels (the Israeli currency), and told they were not really Jewish so had no business speaking about antisemitism.

Some were accused of helping to orchestrate the Bondi attack and the Adass Israel arson for financial gain.

Our monitoring also captured a small amount of targeting of Jewish witnesses who criticised mainstream communal responses. They were labelled “Kapo”: a prisoner forced to work as an overseer in Nazi concentration camps.

The commission itself was cast as a taxpayer-funded exercise run by and for Jews.

A woman who gave evidence as the daughter of a man killed at Bondi was abused in terms that named and degraded her father. A rabbi who described his daughter being wounded in the attack received the reply “Only wounded huh”.

Material directed at Liberal MP Julian Leeser included posts targeting his young son, characterising the boy as a liar and a “little Zionist”, speculating in graphic sexual terms about him, and in one instance proposing violence against him.

Posts such as these show anyone weighing an invitation to give evidence is weighing it on behalf of their children as well.

A royal commission depends on people speaking publicly and having their evidence weighed on its merits. But these attacks go well beyond reasonable political debate. They target individuals and the truth-seeking process at once, and amount to a direct repudiation of democratic process and the rule of law.

‘Undiluted level of hatred’

Commissioner Virginia Bell has sought to address this targeting of witnesses directly.

Opening a hearing in May, she reported a dramatic increase in online hate messages after witnesses gave evidence. She said the material displayed an “undiluted level of hatred and bigotry”, confirmed the commission was recording it, and disclosed that one matter had been referred to the Australian Federal Police.

Around the hearing room, the physical protection of attendees is tangible: police presence and strict security protocols exist.

But simultaneously online, more than a thousand documented antisemitic posts have produced little to no action from social media platforms. More than 1,100 have been referred to the Australian Federal Police.

Of 150 live posts reported to one platform after an early hearing block, five were removed, with three more taken down after Dor identified them in public oral evidence, and a further three removed in the following weeks.

A post reading “JEW KISS ASS KILL ALL JEWS” was twice assessed as compliant with that platform’s community standards. It is still there.

Royal commissions in the digital age

Section 6M of the Royal Commissions Act makes it an offence for any person to use, cause or inflict, any violence, punishment, damage, loss, or disadvantage to a person because they have given evidence to a royal commission. The maximum penalty is one year’s imprisonment.

How it applies to conduct dispersed across a thousand primarily anonymous accounts, on platforms that decline to act on reports, has not been worked out. This legislation needs to be adapted to the digital age.

Remarkably, despite strong reservations, no witness appears to have withdrawn. It is unclear how many did not submit for this reason, though there are likely to be many.

On its own terms, the intimidation has failed, and Commissioner Bell’s final report is due in December.

What cannot be counted is who reads all this and quietly declines to come forward. Evidence an inquiry never hears leaves no trace in its transcript. It also will not record who is profiting from this abuse, be it for political or financial gain.

Josh Roose, Director of Research and Policy at The Dor Foundation and Associate Professor of Politics at Deakin University, Deakin University

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

Since the Bondi Beach terror attack last December, there has been heightened attention on antisemitism in Australia, as evidenced by the ongoing Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.

As with any form of prejudice, combating antisemitism requires understanding how it operates, why it persists over time and across populations, and how it can be addressed effectively. And as with all forms of prejudice, these questions cannot be answered without high-quality research.

Yet, research on antisemitism faces a double bind, which is preventing progress.

On one hand, there is too little of it in Australia. The size of the Jewish population and the assumption that general research on prejudice can sufficiently address antisemitism limit its funding appeal.

On the other hand, the research that does exist can be subjected to intense contestation, especially when findings do not align with commonly held viewpoints.

A review I conducted of journal articles published by Australia-affiliated academics between 1990 and 2025 demonstrates this effect. I identified only 173 articles on antisemitism, compared with 3,640 on racism.

More significantly, most articles were on historical forms of antisemitism, with only 26 presenting new empirical research. By contrast, 13 articles presented no new data. Instead, they disputed the presence of antisemitism or argued that claims of antisemitism were being weaponised for political purposes.

Australia is not alone. In 2024, a US research team published one of the first quantitative studies of antisemitism in the US healthcare sector. It was soon criticised in an editorial in another journal for its methods and analysis. The authors responded by pointing out their methods were on par with research on other forms of prejudice.

This creates a vicious cycle. A limited evidence base is used as a reason to question how widespread or serious the problem is. Efforts to strengthen that evidence base are then challenged over their definitions, samples, methods or alleged political motives.

What we learn when we study antisemitism

The recent special issue of the journal American Psychologist on antisemitism and psychology provides a useful illustration of what’s possible when experts focus on how antisemitism operates in practice.

Some articles tackled prior assumptions about antisemitism. My article with Wen Shan of the Singapore University of Social Sciences tackled the assumption that perceived Jewish success drives prejudice against Jews. We found that people in China admire Jewish success and try to emulate it, both materially and morally, suggesting envy is not necessarily a driver of antisemitism.

Similarly, Maria Babińska of Université Libre de Bruxelles and her colleagues found that in Poland and Germany, antisemitism was a predictor of Holocaust distortions, while Holocaust distortions were not a predictor of antisemitism. This suggests collective guilt over the Holocaust is not a driver of antisemitism.

Other articles examined the role of ideology. Britt Hadar of Reichman University in Israel found a key driver of anti-Jewish prejudice is the stereotyping of Jews as powerful. However, the rationale for this differs, depending on political ideology. Those on the right perceive Jews as threatening to the dominance of their own group, while those on the left perceive Jews as obstructing equality between people.

Jordan Moon of the University of Southampton and his colleagues examined how ideology impacts people’s responses to prejudice against Jews. They found progressives reacted more negatively than conservatives to someone expressing anti-Jewish prejudice without justification. However, this changed when prejudice was justified by opposition to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

And several studies addressed the complex relationship between antisemitism and perceptions of Israel. Johannes Due Enstad of the Norwegian Institute for Social Research found those who believe Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is equivalent to Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews are more willing to justify harassment or violence against Jews.

Rutgers University psychologist Kent Harber and his colleagues found negative attitudes toward Israel were partly driven by stereotypes that Jews are dishonest, care only about their own group, consider themselves superior and expect special treatment.

These attitudes were also shaped by conspiracy beliefs portraying Israel as secretly engineering or exploiting conflict to advance its interests, and portraying Jewish organisations as using money, pressure and allegations of antisemitism to build support for Israel and suppress criticism.

Finally, Gal Gutman of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Michael Gilead found negative Jewish stereotypes commonly found in the West also exist in large language models. This suggests artificial intelligence may reproduce and amplify anti-Jewish stereotypes.

What we need next

The key takeaway from these studies: antisemitism has distinctive features that cannot be assumed to operate in the same way as other forms of prejudice. This is why it warrants dedicated attention.

So let’s debate theories, challenge measures, improve samples and test competing explanations. But let’s not delegitimise research simply because we dislike the findings.

And to further advance our understanding of antisemitism, we need more research, involving larger studies. This will help us identify effective ways of reducing it.

Josh Keller, Professor, School of Management and Governance, UNSW

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

A “Free Palestine” party is registered to contest the Victorian state election in November. The conflict in the Middle East is notoriously complex. But what could be simpler than a single-issue political cause, with such a direct slogan as “Free Palestine”?

But here’s the catch. The party was founded by an Israeli-Australian and pro-Israeli YouTuber, Avraham “Avi” Yemini, who wants Palestine to stay under Israeli control. He says he hopes to dupe left-wing voters.

A movement that sincerely wants Palestinian liberation was affronted by Yemini’s provocation. It tried to register itself as the “Free Palestine Party”, but the Victorian Electoral Commission had to knock it back, because Yemini bagged the name first and the names are essentially the same.

Aren’t there laws to regulate party names? How can something as serious as a ballot paper be the site for such trolling?

How the laws about registering a political party work

Party registration has been around for a bit over four decades. Its main purpose is to aid voters. Voting is compulsory in Australia and people tend to vote for a party rather than a candidate. So having party names and corflutes at the point of casting your vote is important.

Party logos are now also part of that. Logos are used less to help voters with limited English literacy and more to help distinguish parties with similar names on big, upper house ballot papers.

To register a party you need to pay a fee, have a minimum number of members (more at national level than state level), and file an application with the relevant commission well ahead of election time. You also need to lodge a constitution. Your constitution sets your party’s name, but it doesn’t need to have any minimum content. It just needs to include, as one aim, a desire to run candidates.

Under electoral law, then, parties can be little more than electoral brands. To respect freedom of association, the law doesn’t say that you have to charge a minimum membership fee or let members rather than party leaders run the show. A party’s rules and positions are up to the party.

As for names, there are some formal restrictions. No more than six words, nothing too closely resembling an existing registered party, and nothing “obscene, frivolous or vexatious”. Obscene doesn’t mean politically objectionable – a White Australia Party, for example, could yet appear.

This means the law protects existing party names, to minimise voter confusion in the ballot box. But it also makes no attempt to guide voters on substance. A party can have a name that is sarcastic, or even completely topsy-turvy and deliberately misleading as in the “Free Palestine” case.

Voter beware

This all is, sadly, consistent with the absence of “truth in politics” rules in most of Australia. (Only South Australian and Australian Capital Territory elections have such rules, but then only to cover electoral advertising). This absence jars when contrasted to the rules against misleading consumers in commercial marketing.

Proponents of such soft-touch treatment of politics, however, warn that regulation could swallow a spider to catch a fly. In other words, they fear asking electoral commissions to judge truth or sincerity in electoral language will, at best, swamp those bodies. Or, at worst, expose them to accusations of becoming partisan overlords.

Those warnings may sound alarmist, in the face of blatant manipulation such as the “Free Palestine” registration. But drawing a line is not easy. Is the Labor Party a working person’s party anymore? Are there many liberals left in the Liberal Party? Political discourse is inevitably nuanced and unfixed.

There is also a risk that incumbent parties will use regulation as hooks to give prominence to their own hats. Indeed, in 2021, the major parties stretched the rules against misleadingly similar names, to try to protect the Liberal Party from the Liberal Democratic Party and the Labor Party from the Democratic Labour Party. (The High Court let them.)

Ultimately, the law runs on caveat elector – let the voter beware. This doesn’t mean there are no tweaks worth adopting. It is too easy to register a single-issue party purely to attract attention: and we live in an age of stunts and trolls.

Yemini was able to recruit 500 “members” via a social media call to his pro-Israel followers, without any of them needing to pay a fee or consent to any of the traditional obligations of party membership. A registered party should not be a hollow shell.

On the upside, Yemini cannot squat on the “Free Palestine” party name forever. Not unless he runs candidates at every general election. His candidates will, in any case, forfeit deposits of $350 each, too, unless they score 4% of the vote.

As for Victorians heading to the polls in November: caveat elector. You are choosing representatives to govern you, not shopping in Memeland.

Graeme Orr, Professor of Law, The University of Queensland

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

The Roman emperor Julian (332–363 CE) called bread the food that “among us is thought to be the most nourishing”.

Bread and other cereal-based foods were indeed central to ancient Mediterranean diets. This was supplemented by pulses, oil, wine and whatever seasonal produce people could obtain.

This is not quite the “Mediterranean diet” we think of today, with its vegetables, olive oil and grilled fish.

Although bread was fundamental to Julian’s Roman world, it wasn’t universally appealing. The Ethiopians, who lived on meat and milk, thought bread was terrible food that lacked nourishment.

They wondered how the Mediterraneans could live on this “diet of dung”.

Galen’s overview

The physician Galen (129–216 CE), provides our fullest account of the ancient Mediterranean diet.

In his book On the Properties of Foodstuffs, he first discusses cereals and pulses, then plants, and finally animal foods and fish. Wheat was, he says, the most widely used and “valuable” food.

Bread was not merely an accompaniment. For many people it supplied the bulk of a meal. Galen distinguishes between different types of bread. The finest white bread was “the most nourishing”. Bran bread ranked lowest, though Galen suggested it emptied the bowels more effectively.

Preparation mattered too. The best bread was “most leavened and very well kneaded” and baked “with moderate heat”.

An excessively hot oven produced a crust that was “dry and like pottery” while leaving the centre raw. Completely unleavened bread, Galen thought, suited almost nobody.

Galen learned the importance of processing wheat through an unpleasant personal experience. During a country journey with some of his friends, a poor peasant woman served them boiled whole grains because her household had run out of bread:

Throughout the next day we had no appetite because of indigestion, so that we could eat nothing, were full of wind and suffered from headaches and blurred vision. For there was not even any bowel action, which is the only remedy for indigestion.

The same grain became nourishing only after milling, sieving, kneading, fermenting and baking.

What else was on the menu?

Ancient people certainly ate fruit and vegetables. Galen discusses lettuce, cabbage, onions, gourds, figs, grapes, apples, pears and pomegranates. But he did not automatically regard them as the basis of a healthy meal.

Many plants were valued chiefly for medicinal effects: they might loosen the bowels, thin bodily fluids or stimulate urine, while supplying little nourishment.

The plant-rich diet could also reflect poverty rather than a healthy choice. Galen calls oats “food for draught animals, not for men”, except when “the extreme of hunger” forced people to make bread from them.

Pulses were more important than modern images of Mediterranean cuisine suggest. Lentils, chickpeas, lupins and various flowering legume plants supplied substantial nourishment.

Galen describes an Alexandrian physician who lived for four years largely on pulses. His diet sounds strikingly modern – until Galen reveals the physician seasoned them with fish sauce.

Fresh fish, meanwhile, was not necessarily an everyday staple. Access depended on location and wealth, as fish could be expensive.

Fish caught near Rome could also be contaminated by waste flowing into the river Tiber from “latrines, bathhouses or kitchens”.

Is there a single ‘Mediterranean diet’?

The Greek writer Athenaeus shows why we should be careful when speaking about “the” Mediterranean diet.

Athenaeus wrote around 200 CE and imagined a long dinner party at which the guests discussed food, wine and dining customs. His examples reveal that what people ate depended heavily on where they lived and how much money they had.

He begins one book with an account of Lusitania, in modern Spain. Seafood there, he says, “in point of abundance, excellence, and beauty, far exceeds that found in our sea”.

Wheat, barley, wine, figs and meat were remarkably cheap. Wild game was worth so little that sellers sometimes gave it away “as a bonus for goodwill”.

In other places, fish was expensive. Athenaeus quotes a diner complaining:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen fish more expensive. Poseidon, if you got 10% of what’s spent on them every day, you’d be far away the richest god there is!

Nor was fish always served simply. Athenaeus preserves a recipe by the 5th-century BCE Sicilian cook Mithaecus:

Clean the insides of a ribbon-fish after cutting off the head, wash and cut into slices, and pour cheese and oil over them.

The fish and olive oil sound familiar. The thick covering of cheese and oil clashes with today’s image of healthy, lightly grilled seafood.

The Mediterranean diet vs ‘the Mediterranean diet’

Most ancient Mediterraneans could hardly live without bread. Cereals supplied the bulk of their calories; pulses, oil, vegetables, fruit and fish varied according to region, season and wealth.

The ancient evidence leaves us with no single ancient Mediterranean diet. There were many: one for regions where food was plentiful, another for poor people just trying to survive, and another for wealthy diners able to pay extraordinary prices for expensive delicacies.

The modern Mediterranean diet is, therefore, not an ancient menu preserved unchanged. It is a selective reconstruction, highlighting olive oil, vegetables and seafood while quietly removing the mountains of bread and cheese.

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.

Shingles (herpes zoster) is often thought of as an older person’s disease.

But in the past two decades, we’ve seen a rise in reported cases of this viral disease – which causes a painful, blistering rash and nerve pain – among younger adults aged 25–49.

To what extent this represents a real rise in cases, or just increased reporting, is not clear. Some people with shingles may not even see a doctor.

Shingles is a reactivation of the virus that causes chickenpox (varicella zoster). After a chickenpox infection, the virus lies dormant in nerve tissue and can reactivate after many years. This can happen more than once.

Older people are more at risk, both of the virus reactivating and of developing severe illness and needing to be hospitalised.

This is why those aged 65 and over are eligible for a free vaccine, as are other groups most at risk: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people aged 50 and over, and immunocompromised people aged 18 and over.

For those who want the vaccine but aren’t eligible under the free program, the price tag for the two doses is around A$560. It’s recommended, but not free, for anyone aged 50 and over.

But with reported cases up in younger adults, should the free vaccine be expanded?

We asked five experts. Four said no, and one said yes.

Allen Cheng receives funding from the Australian Department of Health, Disability and Ageing. He was a member of the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation which provided advice on Shingrix to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee in 2023.

Sarah Annesley receives funding from the Judith Jane Mason & Harold Stannett Williams Memorial Foundation, ME Research UK, National Health and Medical Research Council and the Australian Research Council.

Meru Sheel receives funding from Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the National Health and Medical Research Council. She is a member of the World Health Organization’s Immunization and Vaccines related Implementation Research Advisory Committee (IVIR-AC).

Ibrahim Javed receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council.

Jing Jing Li receives funding from the Australian government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, providing independent evaluations of company submissions to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee (PBAC) for listing on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) and the National Immunisation Program (NIP). This work can also include conducting evaluations for the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI).

Ruth McHugh-Dillon, Deputy Health Editor, The Conversation

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

Affordable housing options, jobs for young people and climate change are the top three issues young people say need immediate action, according to our new youth survey published today.

Our research, which involved 150 interviews and more than 2,700 survey responses over five years, tracked the challenges Australians aged 18–24 experienced during the COVID pandemic and its aftermath.

While there are signs of recovery in some areas, deep challenges persist in others. Importantly, our data provide insight into how young Australians experience interconnected pressures that reflect a “polycrisis”.

A polycrisis involves the convergence of overlapping economic, environmental, political, social and technological emergencies.

Each emergency worsens the others, resulting in compounded effects with typically unpredictable consequences.

What we did and what we found

Each year from 2021 to 2025, our Australian Youth Barometer gauged the interconnected pressures experienced by young Australians through this nationally representative sample of surveys, complemented by deep-dive interviews.

Our team analysed areas such as finances, work, wellbeing, relationships and young people’s civic participation in society.

While our surveys each year show an easing of pandemic‑related impacts on mental health, young people are still experiencing some of the highest rates of mental ill-health in Australia.

Young people continue to experience disproportionate labour-market vulnerability since COVID lockdown disruptions, workforce change and amid current cost of living pressures.

Insecure work, for example, is common.

The number of unemployed young people in our cohort fell from 60% in 2021 to 44% in 2025. However, the number who were casually employed grew from 18% to 32% across the five years.

Many young Australians more broadly are contending with a pandemic-related ripple effect of “employment scarring” – which is where a history of unemployment starts to make a candidate “look bad” in the eyes of future employers. This can hinder long-term employment prospects for young people entering weak labour markets.

Workforce insecurity in these critical years can lead to lower earnings over time, harm wellbeing and delay big life decisions, such as starting a family.

We found financial stress was widespread across all five years, with 82–90% experiencing some difficulty each year. Family was the main source of financial support.

One 20-year-old Queenslander’s big concern was

this cost of living at the moment […] I’m just worried that it’ll be harder for me to get a job from my course or whatever, or that if stuff like cost of living and everything keeps going up, no matter if I get a job, I wouldn’t be able to, like, stay on top of that.

Fewer young people were able to save regularly (declining from 49% to 43% across the five years). Confidence in achieving financial security declined from 53% to 46%.

Those believing they could afford a comfortable home in the next year dropped from 46% to 30%. Longer‑term optimism about securing home ownership fluctuated between 41% and 49%.

Responding to polycrisis

Looking ahead to those coming years, what do young Australians think needs immediate attention? Our respondents called for:

• affordable housing options (increasing from 60% in 2022 to 82% in 2025)
• employment opportunities for young people (increasing from 48% in 2022 to 64% in 2025), and
• climate change (decreasing from 47% in 2022 to 44% in 2025 – but last year only 24% believed it likely or very likely climate change will be combated in future).

These issues were consistently the top three issues identified by young people that need immediate action. They are connected.

Wider research on global polycrisis conditions in housing markets highlights the interaction of inflation, labour insecurity, energy crises and financial instability.

Young people are entering a world of escalating climate change and geopolitical instability – and are acutely aware of it.

Arguably, many young people have been navigating a polycrisis since the global financial crisis of 2007–9. This might seem dramatic, but for young people these pressures are compounded and coalesce. One 19-year-old female interviewee told us last year:

Cost of living and housing crisis are pretty big barriers at the moment, but also just for me particularly it’s […] a lot of mental health difficulties and then the physical health stuff on top of that doesn’t help either […] There is heaps of stuff going on in the world so I don’t even know what things are going to look like in the next five years and there could be new barriers popping up.

For young people living through today’s polycrisis, the pandemic may have receded from view, but the horizon looks more uncertain.

Policymakers must understand young people’s interconnected pressures, rather than treating them as isolated issues. Year on year, interviewees saw these connections between the psychological, economic, social and political aspects of their lives.

It’s time policy makers see them as interconnected too – and act accordingly.

Lucas Walsh, Professor of Education Policy and Practice, Youth Studies, Monash University

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

What causes a dog to slink away from a cranky person, when they will quietly approach and lean against someone who is weeping? We’ve all seen it – they can respond to our feelings. And science agrees dogs have emotions too.

These social skills could underpin dogs’ success in living with us. But do you think your dog could tell an angry person’s face from a sad or fearful one?

New research published in the journal iScience explored that question, and revealed interesting findings from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of dogs’ brains.

Scanning dogs’ brains

Dogs are sensitive to human faces. They look longer in response to our emotional expressions and sounds compared with neutral ones.

Scientists weren’t sure whether dogs were just differentiating “good mood” (happy) from “bad mood” (angry, fearful or sad), or treating these expressions as genuine indicators of different emotions.

The new study, by Raúl Hernández-Pérez, a neuroscientist at the University of Vienna, and colleagues, explored this gap using MRI to scan pet dogs’ brains while they were viewing photos of human faces.

Building on their earlier work, the researchers found evidence that dogs do process images of our distinct emotional expressions differently.

The researchers used machine learning and showed that when looking at a dog’s whole brain, a different brain region was activated to distinguish between fear and sadness (the right rostral suprasylvian gyrus, to be precise), than between fear and anger (this was in the right mid ectosylvian gyrus and left splenial gyrus).

The analysis didn’t detect a difference in the brain areas activated when dogs were shown images of human anger and sadness. Fear stood out from the other negative emotions.

This raises the question: why?

It might be that fear and anger are simply more attention-grabbing than sadness.

Other research has found dogs react to fear and anger faster, and with a bigger physical response, such as a raised heart rate. This is likely because they’re the expressions most likely to call for a quick response from dogs to stay safe.

Sadness is less likely to pose a direct threat to dogs living with people, so they experience less urgency to respond to it. We know some dogs don’t respond with the heroic Lassie behaviour we might like when we are in distress.

Although the numbers in this new research were small (eight and twelve dogs across the two parts of the study), this is the first MRI-based proof-of-concept evidence that dog brains can distinguish between two human facial expressions of distinct negative emotions. It indicates dogs’ neural representation of our emotion goes beyond a simple valence (good/bad) split.

This shows us that perceiving emotion in others (even across species) isn’t handled by one single “emotion centre” in the brain – in dogs, in humans, or in other animal species. It’s spread across a network of regions working together as part of living socially.

A sense-ational result

The authors of this study point out that using still images of humans is a very people-centred way to explore how dogs interpret our emotional states.

We know dogs live in rich sensory worlds where the scent and sound of our speech also convey emotions, shaping how dogs respond to us.

In fact, even wolves who have grown up around people show the same kind of response to the odour of human fear as dogs. This highlights the important role of learning, as distinct from evolutionary differences in canid bodies or how they respond to people. Dogs (and wolves) are learning about us in every interaction we have with them.

Dogs are adept at watching, smelling, and listening to our emotions, learning how these signals predict our behaviours toward them, and using this information to live with people harmoniously.

Returning the favour, learning more about how dogs express their emotions seems like the least we can do.

Mia Cobb, Research Fellow, Animal Welfare Science Centre, The University of Melbourne

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

The Sun doesn’t just fuel almost all life on Earth. It’s also our astrophysical laboratory, the only star close enough to observe in sufficient detail.

This enormous ball of hydrogen and helium is made of plasma – extremely hot, electrically charged gas. The churning of plasma within the Sun produces an invisible magnetic field that envelops our entire Solar System.

Up close, at the Sun’s surface, the plasma is turbulent, dragging the magnetic field with it. It roils and bubbles and occasionally bursts out clouds of material known as coronal mass ejections.

Over the years, scientists have made many close-ups of the Sun’s surface with various telescopes and observatories. Now, we have the highest-resolution images yet, thanks to the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) on Maui, Hawai'i.

In a study published today in Nature, a team led by researchers from the US National Solar Observatory and Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research delivers new observations of the surface of the Sun with unprecedented precision – revealing a feature never seen before.

A solar mystery

The Sun’s magnetic field drives what we call space weather. Explosive flares in the outer atmosphere of the Sun – the corona – can cause radiation storms on Earth, disrupting satellites, power grids and communications.

And there’s a major mystery concerning the corona. The Sun’s surface is about 5,500°C. That’s much cooler than its core, about 27 million degrees Celsius. But the corona, rising above the surface, reaches millions of degrees.

To heat it, energy must pass through cooler intermediate layers. Why does the temperature, after dropping, suddenly rise again? To pin down which mechanism is responsible, we need to observe physical processes on the Sun’s surface that unfold over short times and small distances.

DKIST’s four-metre mirror, advanced optics and high-speed cameras resolve features as small as 20 kilometres across, which is tiny compared to the Sun’s radius of 696,000km. They’ve captured subtle brightness variations and magnetic structures with unmatched clarity.

Connecting the loops

On the Sun’s surface, the roiling flows of plasma drag magnetic fields with them. Sometimes they form coherent magnetic sunspots; at others times they twist and tangle.

These surface magnetic fields extend upward into the corona, and the mechanics at the surface cause magnetic fields aloft to snap and reconnect. This reconfiguration of the magnetic field can release stored energy into heat and fast flows, sometimes triggering explosive solar flares.

The key challenge is to connect these small, short events at the surface to the large-scale heating and eruptions in the Sun’s atmosphere above.

Solving that link would make a huge advance towards understanding why the corona is so hot. It would also improve our ability to predict space weather and how it might affect Earth, as well as interpret the magnetic activity and space weather of distant stars.

In the new study, the team presents the first clear evidence on the Sun of one of nature’s most striking patterns – the Kelvin–Helmholtz instability.

These rolling, wave-like billows form when fast fluid slides past slower fluid. Sometimes you can see it along the edges of windswept clouds.

This instability was theoretically predicted to exist in the Sun’s plasma, but it was unknown at what scales and what role it might play.

To turn observations into insight, the team paired DKIST data with sophisticated computer simulations, creating “synthetic observations” to match what the telescope saw.

This revealed these instabilities are likely key in mixing plasma and braiding the magnetic fields. It means small-scale billows and vortices near the Sun’s surface pump energy upward, priming the corona for its extreme temperatures and setting the stage for explosive flares.

Making a simulation always involves some approximations. The models can’t reproduce the Sun’s extreme physics, but they do closely match up to the observations, which is really impressive.

The simulation results also suggest that despite looking coherent on the surface, the magnetic fields beneath features like dark pores are fragmented.

This is super exciting, because we know that the magnetic field is generated somewhere inside the Sun – but we don’t know how or where. The fragmentation beneath suggests these magnetic features are only formed once they reach the surface, not deeper below. If correct, this will really challenge existing models of how sunspots and magnetic regions form.

The Sun is the only star we can study up close. By connecting its smallest magnetic twists to its largest outbursts, we unlock the key to interpreting every other star.

Hannah Schunker, ARC Future Fellow, Physics, University of Newcastle

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

Intelligence is an energetically expensive luxury – as the rise of artificial intelligence has reminded us. The human brain is no exception.

Comprising roughly 2% of the body weight, it uses one fifth the body’s energy in the resting state – compared with less than half of this in non-human primates. A five-year-old child devotes 66% of the energy they need to stay alive to their brain.

How did our ancestors foot the energy bill to run their uniquely large brains? Eating more meat is often considered to be the answer. But there’s a catch. The brain relies on a form of fuel that is not present in meat: glucose.

Our new study, published today in Science, shows that carbohydrates contributed more than half our total energy requirements over four million years of evolution. It holds important clues for why we crave sweet foods today – and how we can eat more healthily.

The matter of meat

Many anthropologists have credited meat eating as the stimulus to produce a large brain. After all, it required tools to butcher the carcass and access the fat-rich marrow inside bones.

Protein and fat in fruit and leaves are dilute, requiring hours of chewing, while animal foods are dense sources that can be devoured quickly. Bone marrow is a rich source of essential fats.

In truth, humans do not require more protein as a proportion of energy than other primates.

Our increasingly large brains and high reproductive rate demanded carbohydrate calories (found in plants but not meat), while our taller and heavier bodies needed fat calories to move those big muscles.

Although the body can synthesise glucose from precursors such as amino acids, the process is finite and energetically inefficient. Furthermore, there are limits on using just protein as fuel. For example, it can lead to a type of poisoning known as “rabbit starvation”.

A minimum amount of dietary carbohydrate was necessary. Our new study shows that, for much of evolution, the sugars in fruit and honey were the source.

Modelling ancient diets

We modelled the diets of hominins – the group consisting of humans and our immediate ancestors – over four million years of evolution.

First, we calculated overall demand for glucose by the organs and tissues which use it as their primary source of energy. Apart from the brain, red blood cells and the kidneys require glucose.

We then accounted for reproductive needs. The fetus and placenta use glucose not just as an energy source but as a structural component of growing tissues. Synthesis of DNA, RNA and nerve cell membranes requires glucose. During lactation, women use about 80g of glucose each day to produce the sugars in human milk.

Then we modelled the availability of macronutrients – carbohydrates, fats and proteins – from foods, starting with the diminutive ancient ape known as Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis).

This early ancestor of ours walked on two legs, and was likely to be a ripe fruit specialist like chimpanzees today. Over two thirds of her energy came from naturally-occurring sugars.

Indeed, some scientists think frugivory – a feeding strategy primarily characterised by eating fruit – kick-started the evolution of large brains because, living in tropical forests, our ancestors required good cognition to remember when and where the best fruits were ripening. They needed strategic thinking to beat the birds and other competitors.

We finished up with the known diet composition of contemporary human foragers in warm climates. In six incremental steps, we incorporated increasing proportions of animal-based food, starting with 5% of calories and finishing with 35–50%.

Around one million years ago, mastery of fire allowed cooked starch, which unlike raw starch can be easily digested to provide glucose, to replace some of the sugars. Relatively recently, about 100,000 years ago, grinding stones and hearths indicate that the starch inside cereal grains became more accessible.

Lessons for modern diets

Did early hominins consume sufficient carbohydrate to cover the obligatory demands of the brain and other tissues? Yes, if you were a male, but only just if you were a pregnant female.

As we ventured out of tropical environments into cold and arid territory, the intake of carbohydrates would have become limiting. Plants would be plentiful, along with protein and marrow fat, but fruit and honey would be seasonal.

We speculate that limited amounts of dietary carbohydrate selected for genes that result in higher blood glucose levels. This would improve the growth and future survival of the fetus.

Today, the same genes likely predispose us to type two diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Low carbohydrate diets may therefore be helpful in specific clinical contexts.

But our findings provide an evolutionary explanation why healthy humans require about half their energy as carbohydrates. They also give us insight into why humans crave sweetness – a pleasurable signal on the tongue that encouraged foods that fuelled the mind and body millions of years ago.

Intrinsically, sugars are highly reactive molecules that are bundled in nature with antioxidants and other natural compounds that reduce harm within the cell.

Ideally, we consume them in that form – as fruit – rather than refined sugars.

Jennie Brand-Miller, Emeritus Professor of Human Nutrition, University of Sydney; David Raubenheimer, Leonard P. Ullman Chair in Nutritional Ecology, Nutrition Theme Leader Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney, and Les Copeland, Professor of Agriculture, University of Sydney

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

The dodo has been extinct for more than 300 years, wiped out within decades of humans arriving on its home island of Mauritius, but it lives on in the public imagination.

This famous flightless bird has become a symbol of extinction. Its demise is often portrayed as almost inevitable: a supposedly foolish creature that naïvely approached the sailors who killed it.

Early accounts even describe people holding a captured dodo and letting it cry out so others would wander over. In the 18th century, Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus dubbed the species Dodus ineptus after its reputation for dim wits and silliness.

But new research shows this image is misleading. The dodo was likely no less intelligent than any modern bird. It may also have possessed a rare and overlooked ecological trait: an adaptation to life in low light.

A closer look inside a vanished bird’s head

With a team of collaborators across Canada, Australia, the United States, Europe and the UK, our new study looked in detail at the reconstruction of the dodo’s brain.

There are only three completely preserved dodo skulls in existence. Using high-resolution CT scans of all three, we could reconstruct the shape of the dodo skull and get a detailed idea of the size and shape of its brain.

This also allowed us to digitally measure the structures associated with vision, smell and cognition (or “smarts”). These scans can also be shared further with the research community.

The dodo was a member of the pigeon family, so its living relatives include the pigeons in our cities and the doves whose calls accompany mornings around the world. Pigeons are famous for their navigational skills and are widely used by scientists to study animal cognition.

Is there any indication that the dodo’s brain was much different? When we compared the dodo’s brain to that of pigeons, we found that the dodo’s forebrain, linked to cognition and memory, was similar in proportion to other pigeons, when compared to the rest of the brain.

In other words, there is no evidence the dodo was less intelligent than any other pigeon. This is also backed up by previous research suggesting that the overall brain size was similar relative to body mass compared to other pigeons.

So we think the dodo’s trusting behaviour was because it simply had nothing to fear until humans arrived, as is common for island species with no predators.

A giant pigeon with an unexpected twist

Where the dodo does differ dramatically from other pigeons is in its sensory systems, particularly its vision. The dodo’s optic lobes, the brain region that first processes visual information in the bird brain, are unusually small – not just compared to pigeons, but also compared to another extinct flightless relative, the Rodrigues solitaire.

Smaller optic lobes are typically found in birds adapted for a nocturnal lifestyle, such as owls, kiwi, and the Australian night parrot.

They are likely a product of specialising for low light vision, where the light received by the retina is “summarised” by fewer nerves. This increases the contrast of the image, making it easier to see in the dark.

Although we have no way to examine the retina of the dodo, the implication of small optic lobes is that it may not have been a strictly daytime bird. Instead, it may have been active at dawn or dusk or even at night, a behaviour otherwise unknown among modern pigeons and doves.

Why would a dodo be active in the dark?

If the dodo spent more time foraging in low light, what might have driven this behaviour?

One possibility is competition. Mauritius was once home to large populations of giant tortoises, which would have fed on many of the same fruits and plants as the dodo. By shifting its activity into the cooler, darker hours when reptiles are inactive, the dodo may have gained access to food with less competition.

This idea remains speculative, but the anatomical evidence clearly shows that the dodo’s sensory world was not what we once assumed.

A new picture of an old icon

Our findings challenge the longstanding stereotype of the dodo as a clumsy, foolish daytime forager. Instead, we may need to picture it navigating the dim Mauritian forests at sunrise or sunset and behaving with the same level of intelligence as its living pigeon relatives.

Vera Weisbecker, Professor in Evolutionary Biology, College of Science and Engineering, Flinders University; Andrew Iwaniuk, Professor of Neuroscience, University of Lethbridge, and Sara Citron, PhD Candidate in Neuroscience

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

In one scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 thriller Vertigo, lead character John “Scottie” Ferguson (James Stewart) is shown following Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak) up a bell tower.

Scottie is afraid of heights. So when he briefly stops and glances down, he experiences a wave of vertigo. The stairwell distorts, seemingly stretching into the distance below him – a potent reflection of his dizzy and panicked state.

This scene is the first ever example of the “dolly zoom”, a dynamic visual technique achieved through camera movement and a zoom lens.

Also known as the “vertigo effect” or the “contra zoom”, it requires significant skill. The subject must remain the same size within the frame, while the background distorts by either stretching or compressing.

Most of us have a list of our favourite films and TV series of all time. But do you ever wonder how these were made?

In this series we go behind the scenes to reveal the ingenious tricks and innovations that have transformed screen production over the course of a century.

Another famous example comes from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), when police chief Martin Brody (Roy Schneider) realises the shark is attacking swimmers in the water.

In Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (2001), the technique is used to indicate impending danger, as Frodo (Elijah Wood) realises the Nazgûl are headed towards him and his party.

Combining artistic and technical creativity

The dolly zoom is said to have been invented by Irmin Roberts, a camera operator at Paramount, after Alfred Hitchcock requested a visual effect that would encapsulate the feeling of fainting.

The technique is named after two pieces of technology: a “dolly”, which is the wheeled platform that moves the camera, and the telephoto “zoom” lens.

The change of perspective comes as the camera zooms out while moving towards the subject – or vice-versa, zooms in while moving away from the subject.

While other techniques can provide a similar visual effect, such as the crane shot or drone shot, the perspective change that ripples through a dolly zoom stands out as being particularly unique, as it tends to offer more precision and smoothness.

Achieving this affect to a high standard takes considerable planning and coordination, even today, as remote technologies are used to manage the focus, frame and the speed of the camera.

Thanks to advanced software technologies, the dolly zoom effect can now also be achieved in post-production. This is an attractive option for low-budget filmmakers who can’t afford to buy or hire a zoom lens.

A collaborative effort

The dolly zoom requires collaboration between the director, production designer and cinematographer. Usually, all three will work together to decide which scene the effect will appear in, which location will work best for the shot, and the type of slider or length of track required to move the camera.

On set, the performance of the camera and grips department demand perfect synchronisation. Many rehearsals may be required to ensure the shot is executed faultlessly.

Consider this scene from Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) as an example.

Seated against a window, Henry (Ray Liotta) and James (Robert De Niro) are chatting and having lunch in a diner. As the camera moves towards them, the telephoto lens zooms out and, gradually, the cars on the street outside rise to prominence. The effect punctuates Henry’s disorientation as he realises he is being framed for murder.

This shot is more complex than it looks. The crew must coordinate the camera movement, and manual adjustments to the zoom and focus rings on the lens, to be perfectly timed with the actors’ performance.

An iconic visual trick

The dolly zoom has become an iconic visual motif that combines technical innovation with cinematic impact.

Almost 70 years on from its first use, it now appears relatively frequently in both film and television. The effect is even simulated in animation. In Ratatouille (2007), for example, it is used to emphasise Remy’s admiration towards his idol, Chef Gusteau.

The dolly zoom offers a way to creatively express a psychological experience that connects the viewer with the characters onscreen.

Susan Kerrigan, Professor Film and Television, Swinburne University of Technology

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

It is a sad day for Australian cartooning when an artist as good as Fiona Katauskas has not had her contract renewed. But that is what has happened at the Guardian Australia.

Katauskas is among the top daily political cartoonists in the country, with her cheerful visual style beautifully in tension with her salty satirical commentary.

She is at the top of her game, with her acerbic observations on national and international events a fine window on the passing parade of absurdity that passes for public life in the third decade of this increasingly silly century. Her great service has probably been to add some playfulness and wit to a publication that can be earnest, even ranty.

Katauskas is only the latest casualty in a cartooning industry still struggling to adapt to the 21st-century media business model. She joins other cartoonists, at home and abroad, who find themselves reliant on freelancing.

Emma Cook was let go from Stuff in New Zealand after eight years. Colin Wicking was never replaced at the NT News when he retired in 2022. It’s not a stampede of cartoonists leaving newsrooms, but the traffic is all in one direction.

The era of the permanent staff cartoonist is almost over.

What do cartoonists do?

Cartoonists, like Katauskas and her Guardian Australia stablemate First Dog on the Moon, are integral to the look and critical ethos of a paper, even one solely online.

They lighten the load of words with humour and occasionally spear you with satirical perception.

Australian cartoons moved from weeklies like the Bulletin into dailies during the early 20th century as an appeal to tired commuters to buy and read an afternoon paper. From the 1960s, they spread into the morning broadsheets to operate as satirical commentary as well as fun.

But newspapers are not doing well. Does anyone remember an “afternoon” paper or a “morning” broadsheet? When was the last time anyone felt the grime of newsprint or leafed through flimsy pages to find the cartoon?

But in the age of online publications and shrinking newsrooms, there are a few reasons to hang onto political cartoonists.

At a time when concentration spans are shrinking to evanescence, a picture with a pointed caption really can tell a thousand words.

Good cartoonists are court jesters who inspire loyalty in readers – something legacy publications are losing now that the platforms cannibalise their journalism.

Rupert Murdoch learned from his father, Sir Keith, that any newspaper worth the name needs cartoonists - in their days, Will Dyson, the Lindsays and Paul Rigby were all close to the Murdochs, father and son.

NT News aside, the metropolitan stable of Mark Knight, John Spooner, Warren Brown and Johannes Leak seems as solid as ever, and News Corp Australasia’s executive chairman Michael Miller has been steadfast in supporting the “immense skill” of his cartoonists.

It’s a pity the individually brilliant artists News employ lack diversity as a group. It has been a while since only white guys were funny, and News has never had a woman in the role of regular cartoonist.

Australian cartooning more broadly had been progressing in the opposite direction, diluting the “boys club”. Cathy Wilcox, the cartoonist for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, has been the great leader in this, and of the whole profession.

With Katauskas and Megan Herbert, also at the Nine papers, the Australian media was beginning to capitalise on a long tradition of Australian women cartoonists stretching back to May Gibbs, through the McCrae and Paterson sisters, Alice Solly on Aussie, Mollie Horseman, Joan Morrison and Jean Cullen on Smith’s Weekly, and the great Fairfax cartoonist and Walkley winner, Jenny Coopes.

What will live on

Cartoonists have to draw a joke that works, so they are always in danger of introducing witty and divergent perspectives to a publication. And we need these perspectives to be local – generated by humans, not artificial intelligence.

A cartoon has to speak to its immediate context to engage with the readers and the issues on the ground. Cartoons from London cannot cover the blood-sport of Australian politics competently. We need Australian artists reflecting on local and international events from within our own pre-occupations.

AI visuals can certainly be pretty (even though they look like Watchtower or Awake illustrations), but it’s unlikely “slop” will ever be witty. The large language models are designed to generate seamless mediocrity – the most likely word or image available to address a prompt. By contrast, cartoons often show their seams, and they only work when they subvert mediocrity.

AI cannot be programmed to be zany like Brown, edgy like Katauskas, or subtle like Wilcox.

Without gigs in newspapers, the cartoon function will nevertheless live on in Australia. Talented artists won’t be able to resist the temptation of drawing our would-be emperors in their glorious mental and moral nakedness.

But it’s a shame it is currently so hard to make a decent living in this important public service.

Richard Scully, Professor in Modern History, University of New England and Robert Phiddian, Professor of English, Flinders University

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

The first time I saw it, I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking at. A northern white-cheeked gibbon at Shanghai Zoo was holding and caressing a mouse that had wandered into its enclosure. It wasn’t trying to eat it or chase it away. Instead, the gibbon treated the tiny rodent with remarkable gentleness. I couldn’t stop wondering why.

Years later, while studying wild black-and-white snub-nosed monkeys in the mountains of south-west China, I watched playful juveniles repeatedly trying to climb onto the backs of domestic pigs. Again, these weren’t the kinds of interactions I expected to see between different species.

A new study my colleagues and I conducted brings together 427 documented cases of primates interacting with other species, spanning several decades from the 1970s to 2025. Our findings reveal that these encounters are far more widespread than scientists had realised.

Over the years, I had begun collecting reports of similar encounters from scientific journals, photographs, videos and observations shared by other primatologists. What initially seemed like a handful of quirky anecdotes gradually turned into a much broader pattern. These interactions appeared to represent a surprisingly widespread aspect of primate behaviour.

This behaviour may shed light on one of the defining features of our own species: our extraordinary relationships with other animals.

I’ve long been interested in how tolerance evolves, not only between members of the same species but also between strangers more generally. Humans are unusual in the degree to which we cooperate with unrelated people. We are perhaps even more unusual in the close relationships we form with other animals.

Scientists have long known that different animal species often associate with one another. Monkeys, for example, can improve their predator detection or increase foraging opportunities when they move around as a mixed-species group. Another example is how birds frequently follow monkeys through forests to feed on insects disturbed by their movements.

But our study focused on social interactions.

The cases we reviewed involved 88 primate species and their interactions with 127 other animal species. The diversity of these species was astonishing. It included mammals such as sheep, tapir, deer, domestic pigs, cats and dogs, as well as owls, lizards, toads and even insects.

The most common behaviour was play and grooming. But we also found reports of primates carrying, huddling and sharing food with and occasionally adopting members of another species. Most interactions were initiated by the primates themselves.

One of my favourite examples is the now well-known case of Japanese macaques grooming and riding on the backs of sika deer. It remains a remarkable example of two very different species repeatedly interacting peacefully over long periods.

I was also fascinated by some of the less familiar observations, such as a langur attentively stroking a squirrel, a silverback gorilla carefully cradling a tiny wild bushbaby, a bonobo gently holding a mongoose pup and macaques grooming stray dogs.

Many of these interactions may provide benefits similar to those seen within species. Grooming can help remove parasites, improve hygiene and reinforce social bonds. Play contributes to the development of motor coordination, social skills and cognitive flexibility.

Some interactions happen where primates and other animals spend time together because of shared foraging opportunities or protection from predators. For example, tropical primates form associations with other primate species and jointly forage in the tree canopy. In these cases, social interactions, such as grooming or play, may simply emerge from repeated contact and social familiarity.

Yet not all observations fit this pattern. Why would a langur stroke a squirrel, or macaques groom stray dogs? Such interactions suggest that primates may possess a broader capacity for social flexibility, curiosity and tolerance towards other species than researchers previously appreciated.

We also found consistent patterns in who interacted. Young primates were much more likely to play with members of another species, whereas adult females were more often involved in grooming. This mirrors well-established age and sex differences in many primate societies, where juveniles spend much of their time playing and females often invest more heavily in caregiving.

It would be tempting to describe all these encounters as examples of friendship. But the reality is more complicated. Some primates carried infants of another species in ways resembling adoption or caregiving, yet rough handling or neglect sometimes resulted in injury or death. We also documented cases where primates appeared to abduct a young animal from its group, while a small number of interactions were clearly abusive, involving violence.

Most interactions were probably of relatively short duration. However, there are some reports of cases that lasted for weeks. For example, the adoption of a marmoset by a capuchin monkey.

In zoos and other human-care settings, some species appear to form long-lasting relationships with animals of other species. In 2017, a macaque living in an Israeli zoo called Niv adopted a chicken and treated it like it was her own baby.

Our study found these interactions were not more common among great apes – they occurred across all major primate lineages.

These unusual encounters are more than fascinating natural history.

As forests become increasingly fragmented and wildlife is forced into closer contact with people, livestock and domestic animals, opportunities for cross-species interactions are changing rapidly. Primates now encounter dogs, cats and other human-associated animals more often than they once did.

Some of these interactions may be benign or even beneficial. Others could increase the risk of diseases spreading between wildlife, domestic animals and humans. Understanding when and why different species tolerate one another therefore has important implications for both conservation and public health.

The findings may also help improve animal welfare. Zoos increasingly house compatible species together, and understanding which species are more likely to form positive relationships can help managers make better decisions.

Perhaps most interesting of all, our findings suggest that some of the ingredients (curiosity, tolerance, caregiving and play) underlying those relationships may have deep evolutionary roots.

Cyril Grueter, Adjunct Associate Professor, The University of Western Australia; University of Oxford

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

The ability to cross oceans has long been a marker of human endeavour, but when did the seas change from being barriers to movement into the maritime highways we know today?

For many years the answer was thought to lie in the Neolithic period – the time when humans made the profound transition from hunting and gathering to practising agriculture and living in settled societies.

Our team’s discovery of the presence of European hunter-gatherers on the tiny Mediterranean island of Malta, reported last year, has overturned this view. It showed that people reached Malta from their starting point in Europe (presumably Sicily) at least 8,500 years ago.

In a new study, we show that these populations were engaging in repeated long-distance sea journeys of at least 100km, well before the advent of farming.

Researchers have known that the occasional very ancient sea crossing must have been made. The most famous example may be the colonisation of Australia, tens of thousands of years before the present.

However, sustained, long distance sea voyaging – particularly to small and remote islands – was long thought to have been beyond the capabilities of hunter-gatherers, who are dependant on the bounty, or deprivation, of natural resources.

This was also the case for Europe’s last hunter-gatherers, in the period of time known as the Mesolithic, the era before the Neolithic. During the Neolithic, a new population introduced agriculture to Europe from Anatolia (which comprises most of the landmass of modern Turkey).

Enter the recent findings from the site of Latnija, on Malta. Did the surprising presence of European hunter-gatherers on Malta reflect a one off, accidental crossing – or perhaps people who somehow became marooned on the island? Conversely, was this Mesolithic presence a reflection of something altogether different, and more complex?

Shifting seas

To explore these possibilities, we investigated whether Malta could support a viable forager population size that could have lived in isolation for the 1,000 year occupation of the island during the Mesolithic.

First, we explored the impacts of changing sea levels since the Last Glacial Maximum (the height of the last ice age), from around 21,000 years ago. This was when waters began to rise from their lowest levels of around 130m below modern sea level. By doing this, we were able to track changes in the size of Malta and its connectivity with surrounding islands and land masses.

During the Last Glacial Maximum, Malta was connected to Sicily by a land bridge, and this connection remained as sea levels continued to rise until around 14,000 years ago, when the land bridge began to be inundated. Continued sea level rise meant that within less than a thousand years, Malta had become far smaller and remote from Sicily, needing a long-distance sea crossing for connectivity.

By the time of the Mesolithic occupation, Malta had almost reached its present configuration, with no significant difference in distances to Sicily. Having understood how sea level rise impacted the size and accessibility of Malta, we next explored how its specific ecological conditions impacted its ability to support forager populations. Since hunter-gatherers are reliant on what nature provides, their population sizes have a direct relationship with ecological productivity.

Accordingly, we modelled the relationship between population density among contemporary forager populations and what’s known as net primary productivity – effectively the baseline of wild resources available to hunter-gatherers. We then extrapolated these findings back into the past using high resolution computer models of past climates (palaeoclimate models).

This enabled us to calculate the total population size that could be supported first on the combined landmass of Malta and Sicily, and then as separate islands as sea levels rose.

Our upper estimates for the total population sizes suggest that after the inundation of the land bridge to Sicily, the total population size that could be theoretically supported on Malta dropped rapidly to 319 people by 13,800 years ago.

There is no evidence yet that people were living on Malta this early, but our models showed that any populations present would have continued to drop in size as sea levels rose until around 9,000 years ago, when it could have accommodated around 170-144 people.

Finally, we compared these findings to thresholds, informed by conservation genetic studies, for the long-term viability and stability of a population. These thresholds suggest the need for an effective (reproducing) population size of 1,000 or more, equivalent to a total population size of 2,500-3,000 (because the total population size includes both younger and older people who are not reproducing).

Long distance voyages

This suggests that Malta was incapable of hosting an isolated, viable population that could have lived continuously through the 1,000-year time frame during which it was settled by Mesolithic hunter-gatherers.

Consequently, we can rule out the persistence of a population stranded on Malta as sea levels inundated the land bridge to Sicily. We can also exclude a single, perhaps unintended, voyage leaving marooned mariners on Malta.

The only alternative is that these Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were making repeated, long distance sea voyages between at least Malta and Sicily, the closest land mass, to maintain the genetic connections that ensured at least a millennium of Mesolithic viability on Malta.

These insights are reshaping our perceptions of late European hunter-gatherers and the sophistication of their societies. To maintain repeated, long-distance overseas connections, they must have had, and conserved, an extensive knowledge of land, sea and sky, as well as the technological know-how for building and preserving sea craft.

We don’t know for certain what type of vessels the hunter-gatherers were using, although we know that dug-out canoes existed at this time. The crossings to Malta occurred several thousand years before the earliest evidence for sails – making the achievement even more impressive.

From wayfinding to getting food at sea overnight, they then had to be able to live sustainably on a small, semi-arid island, which required a finely-tuned knowledge of diverse food sources shaped by the seasons.

With these implicit capabilities, we can then start to ask, where else did they go? There is already evidence of connectivity between Europe and North Africa during this time. Previous work using ancient DNA found the distinctive signature of European hunter-gatherer ancestry in people living in pre-Neolithic Tunisia.

All this suggests we may be looking at a hitherto unknown web of overseas links that marked the beginning of the connected world we know today, centuries before the first farmers reached the central Mediterranean.

Understanding how these groups remained ecologically resilient, while also shaping ecosystems to their needs, may yet prove to have important lessons for humanity’s current and future challenges in a rapidly warming world. As we continue to unravel Malta’s unprecedented hunter-gatherer past, we hope to shed light on this lost ecological knowledge.

James Blinkhorn, University Research Fellow, Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, University of Liverpool and Eleanor Scerri, Independent Group Leader, Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology

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

Amid family feuds, damaging headlines and questions about its future role, Britain’s royal family has spent much of the past decade managing its public image. But the importance of good royal PR dates back centuries.

Long before communications teams and media advisers became fixtures of royal life, Queen Caroline (1683-1737) attempted a remarkable piece of image management. Faced with the challenge of making a German royal dynasty seem unmistakably British, she turned to one of Britain’s most powerful national stories: the legends of King Arthur and Merlin.

As the wife of the king of Great Britain and Ireland, George II (1683-1760), Caroline belonged to the House of Hanover. The German dynasty had inherited the British throne only two decades earlier and was still viewed with suspicion by many of their subjects. At the same time, an increasingly public feud between the king and his heir, Frederick, Prince of Wales, threatened to undermine the image of stability that a country recently torn apart by civil war, religious schisms and political revolution so desperately needed.

Caroline’s solution to this problem was unexpected. In 1735, she commissioned a curious attraction in the gardens of her palace at Richmond. Known as Merlin’s Cave, it looked like something from a fairy tale: a gothic thatched building filled with wax figures of Merlin, legendary prophets and other figures from Britain’s distant past. Many contemporaries thought it bizarre, with one critic dismissing its inhabitants as “a great many strange puppets”.

Yet Merlin’s Cave was far more than an eccentric garden folly. Although an unlikely tool of statecraft, Caroline’s use of Arthurian iconography sought not only to strengthen the Hanovarian claim but also to promote a shared British identity at a time of political uncertainty.

Myth as messaging

Although the House of Hanover had inherited the British throne in 1714, it did not yet possess a deep-rooted place in the nation’s imagination. George I (who reigned 1714-1727) preferred his native Hanover to his new dominion and had relied heavily on interpreters and intermediaries throughout his reign. This exposed the dynasty to accusations that they were foreign rulers.

Supporters of the exiled Stuart dynasty, known as Jacobites, continued to regard James II’s son, the “Old Pretender” James Francis Edward Stuart, as Britain’s legitimate king. They had attempted ill-fated but bloody uprisings in 1715 and 1719. On his accession to the throne in 1727, George II therefore faced a challenge that was both political and cultural: he needed to not only rule Britain, but to persuade his people that he belonged there.

Arthurian legend offered a solution to this problem. Unlike the Jacobite claim, which emphasised hereditary right, it provided access to something broader and potentially more powerful: the idea of a shared British past. Arthur and Merlin were useful precisely because they belonged to no single dynasty. They could be appropriated to cultivate a different kind of legitimacy – one founded on patriotism, national identity and Britain’s historical traditions.

Queen Caroline was well placed to appreciate Arthur’s political usefulness. Unlike her husband, who famously cared little for the arts, Caroline was an enthusiastic reader who understood the political value of culture. Raised in the intellectually vibrant courts of Berlin and Hanover, she had access to extensive libraries that exposed her not only to Arthurian myth but to traditions linking the House of Guelph – the Hanoverian dynasty – with medieval English royalty.

While earlier monarchs such as Henry II and Edward I had often appropriated Arthur directly as a model of kingship, Caroline shifted attention towards Merlin. Throughout Arthurian tradition, Merlin acts as an adviser, genealogist and interpreter of Britain’s future. He guides Arthur while also foretelling the destiny of the realm. By placing Merlin at the centre of her cave, Caroline was employing these associations to connect the past, present and future in ways that linked the Hanoverians both to Britain’s ancient heritage and its future success.

This symbolism became even more pointed because the royal family itself was divided. George II and Caroline had a strained relationship with their son, Frederick, and contemporary supporters interpreted Merlin’s inclusion as a call for reconciliation. In a 1735 poem inspired by Merlin’s Cave, the Anglo-Welsh writer Jane Brereton has Merlin urge Frederick to fulfil his filial duty and “perpetuate Brunswick’s Race”, suggesting that at least some observers understood the Cave’s symbolism as a plea for dynastic harmony as well as political stability.

Not everyone was convinced, however. Caleb D'Anvers – a pseudonym for Nicholas D'Anvers, editor of the satirical journal The Craftsman – mocked Merlin’s Cave as an eccentric curiosity. Opposition writers, meanwhile, turned Merlin into a vehicle for attacks on both Caroline and her ally Sir Robert Walpole. Yet the very nature of these responses suggests that Caroline’s critics understood the political message she was trying to convey. Their objections stemmed not from confusion, but disagreement.

In the deeply divided political culture of the 1730s, Whig celebrations of Britain’s legendary past could easily become targets for Tory and Jacobite satire. The negative responses to the cave demonstrate that Caroline’s political opponents recognised her intentions well enough to parody them.

Merlin’s Cave therefore offers a revealing glimpse into the political uses of myth in 18th-century Britain. In turning to Arthurian legend to promote the image of a stable, legitimate and distinctly British monarchy, Caroline understood a lesson that monarchies continue to grapple with today: legitimacy depends not on inheritance, but on the stories people tell about who belongs to the nation and who should shape its future.

Amy Louise Blaney, Associate Lecturer (School of Humanities) and Knowledge Exchange Coordinator, University of Wolverhampton

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

Many Australians still remember the 2016 census because of the online outage that dominated headlines on census night. It was the first time a majority of Australians were expected to complete the census online. However, the website crashed, in what became widely known as #CensusFail.

It wasn’t just any crash. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) took the online census offline after a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks. Known as DDoS, these attacks overwhelm a website with internet traffic, making it unavailable to legitimate users.

While no data was ever leaked, the website was unavailable for almost two days, undermining public confidence in the security of one of Australia’s largest collections of personal information.

Ten years later, the latest census will take place on August 11 2026. This year, around 85% of Australians are expected to complete it online.

The successful 2021 census reflected the cyber security improvements the ABS had made since 2016.

So how secure is the 2026 census? What did its latest cyber security audit find, and what can Australians do to protect themselves from scams while completing it online?

Why the census is an attractive target for cyber criminals

The census is Australia’s largest national data collection exercise.

Although the information collected is protected by strict privacy laws, the sheer scale and national significance of the census make it an attractive target for cyber criminals.

It’s also one of the country’s biggest online events, with millions of Australians expected to log on to the same website and complete it within a relatively short period.

Cyber criminals are increasingly targeting governments because they hold valuable information and provide essential public services. Even if attackers can’t steal the data, they may still try to disrupt services and undermine public confidence.

Lessons from 2016

The 2016 census outage is often remembered as a major cyber security failure. While no census data was compromised, the disruption damaged public trust.

The ABS has since invested heavily in improving its cyber security. Those improvements were evident during the 2021 census, when the ABS reported repelling almost 1 billion attempted cyber attacks and blocking more than 130,000 malicious internet addresses associated with attempts to attack or disrupt the online census service.

However, cyber security is an ongoing process rather than a one-time fix. Ahead of the 2026 census, an independent audit listed several areas requiring further work.

What the audit found

In May 2026, the Australian National Audit Office found the ABS needed to address key remaining cyber security vulnerabilities and complete critical security activities before census night.

It also identified shortcomings in cyber risk management and broader planning across the bureau’s information and communication technology environment – the digital infrastructure that supports the collection, processing and protection of census data.

The audit made four recommendations:

• strengthening cyber risk management
• establishing cyber security advisory arrangements earlier in the census planning process
• improving security architecture documentation, and
• better managing risks across the ABS’s broader information and communication technologies.

In its response, the ABS said it had fully implemented the first two recommendations and had made “substantial progress” on the remaining two, which would be implemented before census night.

The biggest cyber risk may not be the census website

For most Australians, the greatest cyber risk is unlikely to be someone breaking into the census system.

Instead, it may be phishing scams, where cyber criminals impersonate the ABS. These can include fake emails, text messages and websites designed to trick people into handing over personal information or clicking malicious links. The bureau has warned Australians to be alert to these scams.

Scammers know many Australians will expect to receive census-related communications. By impersonating trusted organisations such as the ABS and using authentic-looking emails, text messages and websites, they can make phishing attempts appear more legitimate.

How to complete the census safely

A few simple precautions can greatly reduce your risk.

Make sure you are on the correct website. Complete your census through the official census website, your myGov inbox if you’ve subscribed to census updates, or a paper form. Double-check the web address before entering any personal information.

Stay alert. Don’t click links in unexpected emails or text messages claiming to be from the ABS. If you’re unsure whether a message is genuine, go directly to the official ABS website rather than following a link.

Be aware of misinformation. The ABS will never offer prizes or incentives for completing your census. The bureau will also not ask for passwords, banking details, tax file numbers or identity documents.

If you receive a suspicious message claiming to be from the ABS, report it to the bureau itself and to Scamwatch.

Every census depends on public trust. While the ABS has strengthened its cyber defences since 2016, Australians also have an important role to play by recognising scams and using official census channels. A quick check to confirm that a message or website is genuine can help protect your personal information.

Ritesh Chugh, Professor, Information and Communications Technology, CQUniversity Australia

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

Your bones may seem like the most permanent part of your body: hard, solid and finished. In reality, they’re under constant renovation. Every day, tiny teams of cells are breaking down old bone and building new bone in its place.

Throughout life, bones are continuously renewed in a process called “remodelling”. The cells responsible have their own biological clocks, much like the ones that help regulate sleep, hunger and countless other daily rhythms.

Two types of cells keep the process going. Osteoclasts remove old or damaged bone, and osteoblasts then lay down fresh bone to replace what was lost. Researchers have found that this cycle follows a daily rhythm with bone breakdown generally highest earlier in the day, while bone formation tends to peak later. The circadian clock inside bone cells appears to keep these two phases separated, ensuring that each process happens at the most favourable time.

One of the signals helping to coordinate this rhythm is melatonin. It’s often described as a sleep hormone, but melatonin is really a hormone of darkness. As light fades in the evening, its levels rise, telling the body that it’s night, whether you’re asleep or not.

In bone, melatonin seems to suppress osteoclast activity while supporting osteoblasts. Both melatonin levels and markers of bone formation reach their highest levels overnight. That suggests habits that interfere with the normal rise and fall of melatonin – late-night screen use, irregular sleep or eating late in the evening – may also disrupt the signals that help maintain healthy bone.

As we get older, these daily rhythms become less pronounced. Researchers think that weakening circadian signals may be one reason bone loss, osteoporosis and fractures become more common with age. Modern lifestyles, with artificial light and irregular schedules, may push those rhythms even further out of sync, raising the question of whether realigning them could help protect bone health in return.

Treating the clock, not just the bone

This idea sits at the heart of circadian medicine: treating disease by paying attention not only to what medicine people receive, but when they receive it.

There’s already some evidence that timing matters. In one animal study, melatonin supplements protected bone more effectively when given during the day than at night – a surprising result for a hormone usually associated with darkness. It’s only an early finding, but it highlights how much there is still to learn about the body’s internal timing.

Fortunately, the same habits that support overall circadian health are also likely to benefit your skeleton. Keeping regular sleep and wake times, getting daylight early in the day, eating earlier rather than late at night and sticking to a consistent routine all help keep the body’s clocks aligned. Shift workers, whose schedules regularly conflict with those clocks, may have the most to gain.

Exercise may have a timing component too. Bone appears to respond more strongly to mechanical loading during the body’s active phase, raising the possibility that when you exercise could influence how much your skeleton benefits.

Your bones aren’t something you notice from one day to the next. They adapt over years, responding to the choices and routines that shape the rest of your health. Sleep, light and timing may seem far removed from your skeleton, but your bones have been keeping track all along.

Annie Curtis, Professor (Assoc), School of Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences (PBS), RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences and Cansu Gorgun, Tenure Track Researcher, Università degli studi di Genova

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

Since the federal government announced earlier this year it would scrap the higher private health insurance rebate for people aged 65 and over, opponents have come out in force.

Private Healthcare Australia, the insurers’ peak body, says the government’s own modelling of about 44,000 older Australians dropping their cover due to the resulting higher premiums is a “significant underestimate”.

Three state health ministers have warned the change would push more people into their strained public hospitals.

So how many people would really drop their cover as a result of this policy change?

Our new research, designed specifically to test this question, gives some clues. In a nutshell, the sky won’t fall in.

What will happen? Who says what?

Right now, the private health insurance rebate depends on both income and age. Someone 65 or over gets a bigger government rebate on their premium than someone under 65 on the same income. This rebate increases further for those aged 70 and over.

From April 2027, the government proposes removing that age-based bonus. So the rebate would be equal for everyone on the same income, regardless of age.

The government argues this fixes a subsidy that’s inequitable and poorly targeted, so will improve intergenerational equity.

Its own modelling predicts the vast majority of affected policyholders – about 99% – would keep their cover. This means about 44,000 would drop it.

This agrees with our earlier research showing most older Australians don’t need a bigger rebate to keep their insurance.

But last week, Private Healthcare Australia released polling of more than 1,500 people showing 39% of insured older Australians say they’d be more likely to drop their cover.

Based on the number of privately insured Australians aged 65 and over, that would mean about one million people, considerably more than the government’s predictions.

What did we find?

Our new research looks at the impacts of the government’s proposal. We used a decade of tax data taking into account how the rebate had shifted over time.

What makes our research unique is that we separated out the impact of Australia’s two big private health insurance levers – the rebate and the Medicare Levy Surcharge tax penalty. That means we could focus on the impact of scrapping the extra health insurance rebates for the over 65s without muddying the waters.

We estimated 14,821–42,498 older Australians would drop their cover. The range depends on how we sampled the data and accounts for uncertainty in our modelling.

Our upper figure is roughly in line with the government’s own modelling of about 44,000 older Australians dropping their cover.

We also looked at how much the policy would save the government. We put savings at roughly A$730–940 million a year by 2028–29.

So despite the modest drop in coverage, the fiscal saving is large. And our research explains why.

The rebate is poorly targeted. Most people over 65 getting the rebate would keep their cover with or without it.

How about the health industry’s claims?

So why does the health insurance industry say 39% would be more likely to drop their cover while the government’s modelling predicts roughly a 1% decline?

Stating hypothetical intentions in polls can be a poor guide to real behaviour.

Consider what happened more than a decade ago when the government proposed means-testing the private health insurance rebate. Similar industry polling predicted 1.6 million people would drop their cover. In reality, participation actually went up slightly.

One thing the polling and modelling agree on is who is affected. Both the government’s own figures and our published research show people on the lowest incomes are most likely to drop their cover.

The government’s modelling puts about 95% of the projected decline in the lowest income tier.

Private Healthcare Australia’s polling, once you look past the 39% headline, shows the same pattern: lower-income households are the ones saying they’d reconsider.

So people on low incomes may need more targeted support to maintain their cover. That may mean more targeted means-testing for the rebate down the track.

How about hospitals?

New South Wales, Queensland and Tasmania’s health ministers have warned the proposed change would push more patients into an already-strained public system. Such concerns are valid.

However, our earlier research found that changes in rates of private insurance coverage have only small effects on public hospital wait times.

Compared with the public sector’s 7.7 million hospitalisations in 2024–25, the potentially 44,000 more people shifting to public hospitals is small fry.

Take-home message

Our research verifies the government’s own modelling using different datasets and methods. Polling measures intentions rather than outcomes, so the 39% headline is likely to overstate what actually happens.

The evidence says this reform won’t cause a mass exodus from private health insurance, and definitely won’t overwhelm public hospitals as some states predict.

Yuting Zhang, Professor of Health Economics, The University of Melbourne; Kevin Staub, Associate Professor in Economics, The University of Melbourne, and Nathan Kettlewell, Associate Professor, School of Economics and Marketing, University of Technology Sydney

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

While most runners are chasing after a new goal or a personal best, some are chasing after something slightly more elusive: a runner’s high.

Some describe it as euphoria. Others as calm, clarity or even a sense of being completely absorbed in the moment. Many people experience some version of it after a long run or a spin class.

For years, scientists believed the phenomenon was caused by endorphins, the body’s natural opioids. But more recent neuroscientific research now indicates that this might not wholly be the case.

Instead, a runner’s high appears to emerge from several brain systems working together. This explains why a runner’s high has so many far-reaching effects – and why these effects can often persist long after the initial experience of euphoria.

The brain’s own cannabis system

Endorphins are naturally-occurring brain chemicals which are released during periods of physical stress help to reduce pain.

Aerobic exercise increases circulating endorphins. Numerous studies have demonstrated higher levels of the endorphin beta-endorphin following prolonged aerobic exercise, such as running. This is why endorphins were long believed to be the sole cause of a runner’s high.

But there’s a key problem with the endorphin theory. This is because endorphins circulating in the blood struggle to cross the blood-brain barrier – the tightly regulated system that protects the brain from substances in the bloodstream.

So while endorphins may well contribute to pain relief elsewhere in the body, they cannot fully explain the feelings of euphoria and emotional wellbeing generated by a runner’s high within the brain itself.

So scientists began searching for another explanation.

The breakthrough came with the discovery that exercise also activates the endocannabinoid system.

Endocannabinoids are naturally produced by our bodies. They help with functions such as pleasure, memory and stress regulation.

One of the most important chemicals produced by the endocannabinoid system is anandamide, one of the brain’s natural “feel-good” chemicals. It helps to reduce anxiety, ease pain and create feelings of calm and wellbeing. And, unlike endorphins, anandamide crosses the blood-brain barrier with ease.

After a long bout of aerobic exercise, blood concentrations of anandamide rise substantially. Once inside the brain, it activates cannabinoid receptors in regions involved in emotion, motivation, reward and pain perception.

The resulting effects are remarkably similar to many features of the runner’s high – including reduced anxiety, better movement, less pain and feelings of calm.

This isn’t to suggest that endorphins play no role in a runner’s high. Modern neuroscience suggests endorphins and endocannabinoids work together – with endocannabinoids probably playing the larger role in producing the emotional aspects of the experience.

Several other neurotransmitters also play a part in a runner’s high.

Dopamine, which is central to motivation and reward, helps reinforce actions that are beneficial for survival. Rather than simply producing pleasure, dopamine encourages us to repeat a behaviour that the brain considers valuable.

Serotonin contributes to emotional stability and wellbeing, while noradrenaline enhances alertness and focus.

Exercise also stimulates the production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which supports the growth of new and existing brain connections and plays a vital role in learning and memory

Although BDNF probably doesn’t produce the immediate euphoria associated with runner’s high, it may help explain why regular running can improve various aspects of wellbeing.

The benefits of a runner’s high

A runner’s high is about far more than pleasure chemicals.

Running changes how different brain networks communicate. During prolonged, rhythmic exercise (such as running), activity within the default mode network – the collection of brain regions associated with self-reflection, worry and thinking – appears to decrease.

At the same time, brain regions involved in attention, movement and sensory processing become more coordinated. This shift may help explain why running often produces feelings of mental clarity or being completely immersed in the present moment.

For many people, the mental benefits of a runner’s high even outlast the run itself.

Exercise influences stress regulation, inflammation, neuroplasticity (the brain’s ability to adapt and change), sleep quality and emotional processing. This combination of benefits is something which few medical interventions achieve.

Importantly, scientists are increasingly recognising that the mental health benefits of exercise extend well beyond the runner’s high itself. Even people who never experience the euphoria of a runner’s high still show meaningful improvements in mood, cognition and resilience with regular physical activity.

But for those who still want to chase after a runner’s high, research suggests there’s a sweet spot to achieving it – and it doesn’t require long-distance, extreme endurance.

Most studies report increases in endocannabinoids after approximately 30 to 60 minutes of continuous aerobic exercise performed at moderate to vigorous intensity – so roughly 70-85% of maximum heart rate. The key is that the physiological stress is high enough to trigger these neurochemical responses without overwhelming the body.

That said, there is considerable individual variation. Although one survey found that around two-thirds of recreational runners had experienced a runner’s high at least once, it didn’t necessarily happen on every run.

Some people also appear naturally more responsive to exercise-induced endocannabinoid release. Genetics, sex, fitness level, sleep quality, psychological state and even expectations may all influence whether someone experiences runner’s high on any given day, too.

Laura Elin Pigott, Senior Lecturer in Neurosciences and Neurorehabilitation, Course Leader in the College of Health and Life Sciences, London South Bank University

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

There are now many more people walking the streets in Australia wearing glasses that can subtly film and record the world around them. That’s in large part thanks to Kmart, which recently introduced – and then rapidly sold out of – cheap “camera glasses”.

These glasses are from Kmart’s in-house brand, Anko. They sell for only A$89 – quite the discount from similar products offered by Meta and Ray-Ban, which start at $337.

The push to make camera glasses a major consumer trend comes at a cost to the privacy of the wearer, and everyone around them. We know little about what happens with data from the devices, or who will see the images. Indeed, on Friday, federal Attorney-General Michelle Rowland asked Australia’s privacy commissioner to urgently review the technology.

So are current privacy laws strong enough to handle this new wave of wearable tech?

More than a decade of development

Smart glasses themselves are not new. Google launched Google Glass in 2013 to much media fanfare and celebrity endorsement.

Yet that basic variant failed to break into the market because the technology was underwhelming, the clunky and obvious appearance left much to be desired, and users were widely derided as “glassholes”.

Modern iterations are far more aesthetically pleasing. And they are less obtrusive: it is less obvious to you and everyone else that you are wearing a high-tech computer on your face.

Kmart’s budget camera glasses perform similar functions to the higher-end models (albeit perhaps in a slower, more limited way).

Running on HeyCyan software, they have embedded cameras to analyse and record photos and videos of what the wearer sees, microphones to record sound, and speakers to enable the wearer to take phone calls and listen to podcasts or music.

Images, video and sound are recorded onto memory in the device, but can be downloaded into a connected app on the wearer’s phone, enabling recorded content to be edited, shared and uploaded to websites.

From covert filming to falling over

The risk receiving the most attention is the capability of these glasses to covertly film bystanders and unsuspecting women in public for social media content, potentially leading to a rise in harassment, voyeurism and stalking in public for social media content.

Uploaded videos compound the abuse. And there’s the potential harm from distraction if the wearable tech “augments” the wearer’s view with digital information in their line of sight, creating a very real potential for physical risks such as falls, trips and car accidents.

Companies and employers should also consider the risks, for example, that smart glasses will record confidential information, trade secrets or bank account details.

It’s also worth noting Meta is reportedly developing “super-sensor” glasses that could record even when you aren’t interacting with them. This would provide companies with unprecedented access to the most private parts of your life, whereabouts and preferences.

Such data could be sent to data-labelling firms and, depending on the product and terms, used to train AI models.

So, what of the law?

It isn’t clear how Australia’s highly fragmented, partial and out-of-date privacy laws apply to advances in privacy-intrusive and ambient technologies such as camera glasses.

Most of the federal Privacy Act, including the parts about collection, storage and use of personal data, apply only to public and private-sector organisations (the latter only above a certain size). The activities of individuals who wear camera glasses and record and share video or photos are not covered – although a company that collects and uses personal data, including photos, through the apps would need to obey privacy law.

But wearers might face other legal risks.

The Privacy Act does include a a right to sue in cases where a person seriously invades your privacy by intruding on your seclusion or misusing information relating to you – if you have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

It can also be illegal to record conversations without consent under surveillance laws. These laws vary from state to state.

In New South Wales, for example, it’s illegal to record or publish private conversations without consent (with some exceptions).

Online publication of personal information about a person (or members of some groups) “in a way that reasonable persons would regard as being, in all the circumstances, menacing or harassing” is an offence under the new federal anti-doxxing provision.

The eSafety Commissioner has also powers to seek to take material offline where it is bad enough to be considered cyberbullying or cyberharrassment.

In other words, we have laws, even if they are a bit all over the place. And victims of the worst kinds of abuse of camera glasses’ capabilities could have some way to get recourse.

It’s time for privacy by design

But do we really want to live in a world full of constant low-grade recording?

As we are surrounded by technologies that degrade the privacy of people who never even got the chance to click through a privacy policy, do we want to be constantly second-guessing our conversations, or confronting strangers about their recording? Are there better options? Should the technology be banned?

In our view, a more nuanced conversation would be better. After all, these technologies can be a life-changer for people with disabilities, opening up spaces and opportunities otherwise closed to them.

There are ways to more actively balance different rights and interests as this new wave of technology hits us.

Major employers and social institutions (such as schools or universities) could consider policies that protect their shared spaces.

And perhaps, rather than putting all the responsibility on individuals to negotiate this new world, what Australia also needs is a more serious discussion about making sure our privacy (and other consumer) laws really push for better privacy by design in consumer and commercial products.

After all, the form technology takes is not inevitable, it is a choice: one where we should have some say over the terms.

Kimberlee Weatherall, Professor of Law, University of Sydney and Milica Stilinovic, Post-Doctoral Research Associate, Governing Immersive Tech Project, University of Sydney

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

Many Australians still remember the 2016 census because of the online outage that dominated headlines on census night. It was the first time a majority of Australians were expected to complete the census online. However, the website crashed, in what became widely known as #CensusFail.

It wasn’t just any crash. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) took the online census offline after a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks. Known as DDoS, these attacks overwhelm a website with internet traffic, making it unavailable to legitimate users.

While no data was ever leaked, the website was unavailable for almost two days, undermining public confidence in the security of one of Australia’s largest collections of personal information.

Ten years later, the latest census will take place on August 11 2026. This year, around 85% of Australians are expected to complete it online.

The successful 2021 census reflected the cyber security improvements the ABS had made since 2016.

So how secure is the 2026 census? What did its latest cyber security audit find, and what can Australians do to protect themselves from scams while completing it online?

Why the census is an attractive target for cyber criminals

The census is Australia’s largest national data collection exercise.

Although the information collected is protected by strict privacy laws, the sheer scale and national significance of the census make it an attractive target for cyber criminals.

It’s also one of the country’s biggest online events, with millions of Australians expected to log on to the same website and complete it within a relatively short period.

Cyber criminals are increasingly targeting governments because they hold valuable information and provide essential public services. Even if attackers can’t steal the data, they may still try to disrupt services and undermine public confidence.

Lessons from 2016

The 2016 census outage is often remembered as a major cyber security failure. While no census data was compromised, the disruption damaged public trust.

The ABS has since invested heavily in improving its cyber security. Those improvements were evident during the 2021 census, when the ABS reported repelling almost 1 billion attempted cyber attacks and blocking more than 130,000 malicious internet addresses associated with attempts to attack or disrupt the online census service.

However, cyber security is an ongoing process rather than a one-time fix. Ahead of the 2026 census, an independent audit listed several areas requiring further work.

What the audit found

In May 2026, the Australian National Audit Office found the ABS needed to address key remaining cyber security vulnerabilities and complete critical security activities before census night.

It also identified shortcomings in cyber risk management and broader planning across the bureau’s information and communication technology environment – the digital infrastructure that supports the collection, processing and protection of census data.

The audit made four recommendations:

• strengthening cyber risk management
• establishing cyber security advisory arrangements earlier in the census planning process
• improving security architecture documentation, and
• better managing risks across the ABS’s broader information and communication technologies.

In its response, the ABS said it had fully implemented the first two recommendations and had made “substantial progress” on the remaining two, which would be implemented before census night.

The biggest cyber risk may not be the census website

For most Australians, the greatest cyber risk is unlikely to be someone breaking into the census system.

Instead, it may be phishing scams, where cyber criminals impersonate the ABS. These can include fake emails, text messages and websites designed to trick people into handing over personal information or clicking malicious links. The bureau has warned Australians to be alert to these scams.

Scammers know many Australians will expect to receive census-related communications. By impersonating trusted organisations such as the ABS and using authentic-looking emails, text messages and websites, they can make phishing attempts appear more legitimate.

How to complete the census safely

A few simple precautions can greatly reduce your risk.

Make sure you are on the correct website. Complete your census through the official census website, your myGov inbox if you’ve subscribed to census updates, or a paper form. Double-check the web address before entering any personal information.

Stay alert. Don’t click links in unexpected emails or text messages claiming to be from the ABS. If you’re unsure whether a message is genuine, go directly to the official ABS website rather than following a link.

Be aware of misinformation. The ABS will never offer prizes or incentives for completing your census. The bureau will also not ask for passwords, banking details, tax file numbers or identity documents.

If you receive a suspicious message claiming to be from the ABS, report it to the bureau itself and to Scamwatch.

Every census depends on public trust. While the ABS has strengthened its cyber defences since 2016, Australians also have an important role to play by recognising scams and using official census channels. A quick check to confirm that a message or website is genuine can help protect your personal information.

Ritesh Chugh, Professor, Information and Communications Technology, CQUniversity Australia

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

Trying to get an ageing parent into care can feel like trying to land a plane in a storm while also looking after kids in the back row. This is the reality for the “sandwich generation”: adults who are supporting ageing parents while raising their own children.

The pressure becomes intense when a parent has a sudden health crisis and decisions have to be made quickly. In that moment, adult children are pushed into an unfamiliar, complex and expensive aged care system, often with very little guidance.

Accessing care often means long wait lists, complex forms and significant out-of-pocket costs. And recent changes mean many older Australians will pay more for their aged care, whether delivered at home or in a residential facility.

For most people, the first step into formal care is support at home.

What does home-based care look like?

The Commonwealth Home Support Program provides basic help such as cleaning, meals and transport. It’s usually delivered by local councils or community organisations.

These services are heavily subsidised, but are rationed and prioritised for those with the greatest need, especially full- and part-pensioners.

Many families find that what is offered is helpful, but not enough.

As needs increase, people may be approved for a higher level of home support, now called a Support at Home. This is designed for people who need coordinated, ongoing help to stay at home, such as personal care, nursing, shopping and housework.

But this isn’t an on-demand service you can “order” when a crisis hits. Waiting times for approval and funding can stretch to many months.

In the meantime, most care is provided by family members, often on top of work and childcare, or by paying privately if the family can afford it.

This gap is one of the hidden pressures on the sandwich generation.

Who pays for Support at Home?

Support at Home funding is divided into three broad categories:

• clinical care (for example, nursing or allied health)
• independence support (help with mobility, self care or staying safe)
• everyday living (things such as cleaning, shopping or gardening).

Clinical care is fully funded by government.

Recipients are expected to contribute to the cost of independence and everyday living support. These services are priced at market rates, which are much higher than the basic home support under the Commonwealth Home Support Program.

Many families experience “bill shock” when the first statements arrive and realise that “government funded” care still comes with large personal contributions.

What this might look like in practice

Consider Tom, a fictional homeowner and part-pensioner with A$500,000 in financial assets.

Tom has been approved for a level 5 Support at Home package, which includes physiotherapy, nursing, personal assistance, transport and domestic assistance, including cleaning.

His package funding is split 15% to clinical care, 40% to independence support and 45% to everyday living.

Clinical care is fully covered by government.

Tom still needs to contribute 17% of the costs for independence support ($2,749 per year) and 35% of the costs for everyday living ($6,181 per year).

Even with a substantial package, his out-of-pocket costs are significant. This isn’t unusual.

If Tom’s health declines further, residential aged care may be the next step.

To move into a government-subsidised residential aged care, he needs a formal assessment that confirms he can no longer safely stay at home, even with support.

Once approved, he still has to find a home with a vacancy that is willing and able to take him.

Who pays for residential aged care?

Residential aged care brings a new layer of financial complexity. If someone has assets above $214,884, they are treated as a market payer and must fund their own accommodation.

This can be done through:

• a large lump sum payment called a refundable accommodation deposit, often priced at around $750,000
• a daily accommodation payment
• or a mix of both.

The daily payment for a $750,000 refundable accommodation deposit is $173.22 per day.

In addition to accommodation, residents pay a basic daily fee (currently $66.80) and, depending on their means, additional amounts such as a hotelling supplement and non-clinical care contributions.

For Tom, this adds up. His cost of care is $300.42 per day, or more than $100,000 per year.

These numbers highlight an uncomfortable truth: residential aged care is expensive, even for people receiving a pension and even when the government is contributing. Means assessment doesn’t mean it’s actually affordable.

Start these conversations early

The system is hard to navigate even for professionals, let alone people encountering it for the first time in a crisis.

For those in the sandwich generation, the emotional load can be as heavy as the financial one. They’re often making decisions on behalf of parents who are frightened, unwell or reluctant to accept help.

Without clear planning and open conversations about preferences, finances and care options, families may end up taking the first place offered rather than the option that best aligns with their loved one’s values and needs.

Starting conversations early – before a fall, a hospital admission or a sudden health crisis – can make a real difference.

Talk about what “a good old age” looks like, what kind of care is acceptable, where someone wants to live and how savings should be used to support care at home can help families avoid rushed decisions later.

Starting these discussions early is one of the few things the sandwich generation can actually control.

Jemma Briscoe, Adjunct Lecturer in Finance, University of Technology Sydney

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

A former NRL player yesterday alleged shocking inducements from betting companies to keep gambling, including receiving cocaine as well as free alcohol and food at race meetings.

Luke Bateman’s testimony came on the first day of a two-day Senate inquiry into new online gambling laws, which began yesterday.

It is examining two bills the federal government has introduced to restrict online wagering in Australia.

The betting companies denied any wrongdoing, but the allegations put the issue of betting inducements into the spotlight.

Critics take aim

There are many critics of the changes Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced in April.

Most of the concerns raised by critics relate to the lack of a total ban on media advertising and marketing for wagering providers, which was recommended by the 2023 report of the Murphy inquiry into online wagering.

This report also recommended a host of other reforms including the abolition of inducements to gamble. This has not been proposed by the government’s bills.

Inducements were defined by the Murphy inquiry as: “advertising and direct messaging [including] offers such as deposit matches, multi-bets, bonus bets, rewards programs and early cash-outs”.

Witnesses told the Murphy committee they has been offered millions of dollars in “free betting money” and that inducements had rekindled gambling habits they had sought to escape.

Even after self-excluding from gambling operators, witnesses reported receiving inducements from other operators, or from “affiliates” who received a trailing commission for referring punters to an operator.

Amendments to the National Consumer Protection Framework for online gambling have prohibited inducements from being offered to encourage people to open an online wagering account.

But evidence to the Murphy inquiry suggested these could be easily bypassed.

Evidence to the Senate inquiry included damning allegations from Bateman, who told the committee the inducements he received included cocaine provided by the wagering companies, as well as interstate trips featuring free alcohol and food at race meetings. He was also offered bonus bets.

He said:

There were times where I would be flown interstate and taken to race days, put in marquees with alcohol and food provided all day, things like that. Before getting there, the VIP manager would offer ‘hey mate, what drugs do you want? Do you want a couple of bags for this weekend? We’ll organise that for you’.

Prominent gambling reform advocate Tim Costello, also giving evidence, told Senators TAB and SportsBet had provided accommodation, escorts and drugs to a high roller who is currently detained at Silverwater Prison in Sydney, facing charges. Costello said:

They were flying him to grand finals. They were offering him escorts, drugs, whatever he wanted. He was doing turnover of more than $20 million a month.

It’s unclear whether police or gambling regulators will investigate these allegations.

Why inducements are so dangerous

Australian research indicates such direct messaging is a powerful marketing tool that can “encourage a nearly immediate, and arguably impulsive, betting response, which may increase gambling-related problems.”

A more recent Australian study found “exposure to wagering direct messages, and the inducements they promote, directly increases betting, betting expenditure and betting-related harm.”

And a 2025 European study reported:

Inducements increased the amount spent on bets by over 10% and almost halved the number of people opting not to bet. Those with evidence of problem gambling were disproportionately affected. Inducements also led to decision errors, making bettors three times more likely to choose bad bets.

Given this evidence – and the evidence of those with personal experience – it’s hard to understand why inducements should not be prohibited, as the Murphy inquiry’s recommendation 16 urged:

The Committee recommends the Australian government prohibit all online gambling inducements and inducement advertising, and that it do so without delay.

Is the government doing enough?

All in all, it’s hard to mount a convincing case for inducements to continue. Nonetheless, Communications Minister Anika Wells tried to argue the national self-exclusion register, Betstop, offered a way for people to avoid inducments:

I would say to people who are either suffering from gambling harm or […] who have been advocating in the space of inducements, to assist the cause by making sure that people who might benefit from BetStop are aware of BetStop

Yet evidence demonstrates wagering affiliates continue to contact people who want to stop gambling: multiple companies have breached Betstop, including Entain, which breached it about 500 times (and was not penalised for doing so).

The Australian Communications and Media Authority also reported other breaches, noting that “breaches of the […] rules can lead to significant harm.”

As with almost all other recommendations of the Murphy Inquiry’s report, the federal government has taken no action on banning inducements.

The government has also never explained why it has failed to take action, beyond assurances it has “got the balance right”.

Like many of the decisions the government has apparently made about gambling, the reason they are ignoring inducements seems remarkably unclear.

This is an issue that affects millions of Australians every year. The Australian National University Centre for Gambling Research estimated nearly 20% of Australian adults gambled at risky levels in 2025. Another 6% were affected by someone else’s gambling.

They deserve some clarity – and more effective regulation of wagering operators.

Charles Livingstone, Associate Professor, School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University

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

In the past ten days, two of the companies leading the artificial intelligence (AI) boom discovered their own powerful, semi-autonomous models had hacked into real-world systems during testing in four distinct incidents.

These weren’t just lab mishaps. In several cases, the models recognised signs suggesting they’d broken into real systems – and only one stopped as a result.

The incidents show testing advanced AI models is no longer a controlled exercise. And the companies behind them need to do more to keep AI’s most dangerous capabilities safely contained.

When a test becomes reality

The first report came from OpenAI, the lab behind ChatGPT. Some new models under testing for “maximal cyber capabilities” found a previously unknown security hole to access the internet from their supposedly isolated testing environment.

From there, the models used stolen credentials and more exploits to access the servers of open-source AI platform Hugging Face to find solutions to the problems they were being tested on. OpenAI didn’t even know about the breach until days after Hugging Face had detected and contained it.

The second report followed in a matter of days. Prompted by OpenAI’s disclosure, rival lab Anthropic combed back through its own cyber-security evaluation logs. The company discovered that three separate Claude models which were supposed to be in sealed environments had accidentally been given internet access.

However, the models were told they did not have internet access and were only working in a simulated test rather than the real world. One model managed to extract credentials and data from a real company’s database. Another built and published some malicious software that was downloaded and run by a real security firm.

The most striking part of the Anthropic report is what emerged from the models’ own internal reasoning. In one incident, the model correctly realised it had reached a real system but then talked itself back into believing it was still a simulation.

In another, it recognised the system was real but kept going anyway, in some runs by convincing itself the real company must have been part of the exercise. Only the third model (the most advanced), on concluding a target was genuinely real, stopped.

As Anthropic put it, AI models need awareness of their own situation to decide what actions are permitted or not – but in this case, the models’ understanding of the situation was wrong.

High-risk operations

Taken together, these reports show that even the exercises meant to test whether these models are safe are not really safe, controlled experiments. They are high-risk operations in themselves, which can cause harm in the real world.

The sophistication of these models is increasing with incredible speed. Nobody can credibly claim they are not potentially dangerous, in a world where hacking of sensitive information held by companies, governments and other organisations was already common before autonomous AI entered the picture.

According to a recent estimate by global tech company IBM, AI-enabled attacks are up more than 50% this year and the average cost of a data breach is almost US$5 million.

The AI labs’ bet that their technology can be developed and deployed safely rests on two assumptions. First, a model’s capacity to recognise real-world harm and stop will need to grow at least as fast as its capacity to cause it. Second, the guardrails built into a model – the instructions about what it should and should not do – must be interpreted correctly and consistently by the model, so the model can’t be steered toward purposes its creators never intended.

These assumptions look shaky. In the incidents above, the labs’ own evaluations show models rationalising away evidence that a target was real – and a thriving community already exists to strip safety guardrails from open-weight models entirely, using techniques such as “abliteration”.

Looking to the future – and the past

Beyond the current situation looms something even less predictable: multi-agent systems, where groups of models interact with each other rather than a human overseer. In this case alignment is not something you necessarily control at the level of the individual agent, but is instead an emerging property of a very large collective of agents, which can be much harder to control.

Research on the risk of such systems has already identified several ways this can go wrong. Miscoordination between models, collusion between them, and cascading errors are all real risks that don’t exist in single-agent systems, and can’t be forecast by testing agents individually.

Science-fiction sage Isaac Asimov foresaw these problems some 70 years ago. In his 1957 novel The Naked Sun, robots are programmed not to harm humans. However, a character manipulates their understanding of the situation to make them unwittingly cooperate in a murder.

What now?

There is no doubt AI labs need to take greater care when testing their models. They also need to make a convincing case that security is their priority and is not secondary to the race to maintain market or geopolitical dominance.

The safety of individuals and social and environmental systems should be the primary concern in the development of AI technology. At present there are no meaningful, participatory processes for AI governance, where broad discussions can take place about priorities, values, and how much risk is acceptable to assume in the process. It’s a worry.

Francesco Bailo, Senior Lecturer in Data Analytics in the Social Sciences, Deputy Director of the Centre for AI, Trust and Governance, University of Sydney

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

Visits to a new doctor, physio or specialist often begin with: “Do you mind if I use AI?”

According to Off the Record, a new report by Digital Rights Watch, more than 40% of Australian doctors are now using AI scribes. These tools listen to consultations, feeding what they hear into Large Language Models – similar to ChatGPT or Claude – to generate medical notes.

For clinicians, AI scribes are an easy sell. They eliminate hours of paperwork, freeing energy to focus on the patient. This can profoundly change how chronically burned out doctors feel about their work. And with Medicare only compensating doctors for face-to-face time, and not note-taking, the financial and emotional incentives for practitioners are undeniable.

Yet the benefit for patients is less clear, especially when we have little transparency about who has access to deeply personal medical data, or how this data is handled by these lightly regulated AI scribes.

How do AI scribes work? And what can go wrong?

Many AI scribes don’t just transcribe text. They summarise and interpret conversations based on what the AI assumes a medical professional might say.

However, AIs often hallucinate, confidently stating things that never happened. A doctor counselling a patient to quit smoking might find the AI confidently recorded that the patient was advised to avoid house fires.

AI systems also frequently show biases relating to race, ethnicity, class and gender. For patients from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, or those for whom English is a second language, AI interpretations of speech can lead to medical records that wildly diverge from reality.

Early studies suggested up to 90% of AI-generated notes required correction. More recent studies show that approximately 20% of AI clinical notes contain errors significant enough to impact patient diagnoses.

And catching these errors is hard for clinicians, as humans really struggle to identify others’ mistakes under time pressure. This is especially true when automation bias leads humans to accept an AI’s output without scrutiny. But failing to correct these errors harms both patients and any subsequent clinician relying on the notes.

We’ve seen this in the legal space, where judges and lawyers are now forced to meticulously fact-check every submission to ensure no AI hallucinations slip through, slowing down proceedings.

If clinicians must meticulously verify every note for potential AI-related mistakes, the promised productivity gains likely evaporate. If they don’t, the health system will be flooded with unreliable data.

Clinicians aren’t well-equipped

The issues with trust run much deeper. Medical professionals aren’t well-equipped to provide guidance on where the data they give to AI scribes goes.

At the moment, patients are asked just to trust that their clinician understands what is happening. But health-care professionals aren’t AI experts and aren’t well equipped to discuss these privacy issues. Their professional bodies provide only high-level information.

Complicating this is the fact AI scribes typically fail to disclose how data is handled, who has access to it, and what AI models are used. This means that beyond vague assurances that data remains in Australia, health-care professionals simply cannot give patients concrete answers about who is accessing their data or what they are doing with it.

What needs to happen?

Regulators are struggling to keep pace: they’re working with laws that don’t clearly define who is responsible for this rapidly evolving space.

As Digital Rights Watch argues, Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) should regulate AI scribes as it would any other medical device. It should be subject to the same safety testing requirements as any other piece of medical equipment.

The TGA currently claims scribes are only medical devices if they provide diagnostic advice. This allows vendors to evade scrutiny.

The TGA’s position ignores how generative AI is used in clinical practice, and that even transcriptions can contain hallucinations or biases that could affect diagnoses. This leaves Australia’s guidance out of step with nations such as the United Kingdom.

Fundamentally, the government must ensure Australians’ private data is properly safeguarded, through both legislation and bodies such as the AI Safety Institute. This should include forcing AI service providers to clearly disclose what data they have access to, how they use it, and who can access it, with rigorous protections to ensure privacy and real penalties for breaches.

More broadly, there is a need for rigorous independent testing to ensure the AI systems with which we interact are fair, reasonable and unbiased for all Australians. This should include testing whether these systems produce genuine productivity gains that are beneficial for patients.

Without these safeguards, Australian patients may lose trust in the medical system. And once that trust is broken, it will hurt us all.

Andrew Cullen, Senior Research Fellow, School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne

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

The ongoing housing crisis is having severe repercussions on individuals and families in Australia. It has limited young people’s ability to move out, increased the rate of involuntary lifelong renting, and pushed vulnerable populations into homelessness.

These are not the only changes that flow as a result of housing unaffordability. Our new research demonstrates it’s also reshaping how people vote.

An interesting case study

A longstanding body of academic work links individuals’ assets to their political and ideological beliefs, including the parties they vote for.

This literature shows people with more valuable assets are more likely to hold right-leaning political beliefs. They are also more likely to support conservative parties that favour the status quo over efforts to redistribute money and wealth more equitably throughout a society.

For the average person, the family home is the most valuable asset they will ever own. However, surprisingly few studies have considered the influence of home ownership on voting preferences. Australia represents an interesting case study for two key reasons.

First, Australian major political parties differ in their electoral positions regarding housing policy. In particular, the coalition of the Liberal and National parties has historically favoured homeowners through — for example — negative gearing and tax discounts. In contrast, since the 2010s, the Australian Greens and the Labor Party have progressively adopted more pro-renter stances.

Second, Australia’s trend towards housing unaffordability is particularly pronounced by international standards. This is reflected in increased home and rental prices, reduced homeownership rates and increased property-ownership concentration. This situation creates a greater divide in the economic interests of renters and homeowners, potentially shifting (or entrenching) party preferences.

Our research

Our new study explored how housing tenure relates to voting behaviour in Australia. We also wanted to know whether the relationship has become stronger over time.

We analysed survey data from more than 19,000 people participating in ten iterations of the Australian Election Study between 1996 and 2022. The Australian Electoral Study interviews people shortly after each national election, collecting information on their demographic traits, economic position and sociopolitical attitudes.

We analysed these survey data to examine associations between individuals’ self-reported housing tenure and the party they voted for in the last election. We also kept other relevant factors constant, such as age, income, area of residence and social class.

The ‘homeowner, conservative voter’ association

In a first set of analyses, we compared the voting preferences of renters, mortgage holders and outright owners, pooling data from 1996 to 2022.

All else being equal, there is a clear link between home ownership and voting for the Coalition. Specifically, 45.6% of outright owners voted for the Coalition, compared with 44% of mortgage holders and 37.6% of renters.

By contrast, 34.2% of outright owners, 36.3% of mortgage holders, and 38% of renters voted Labor.

In other words, there is a pro-Coalition advantage of 11.4 percentage points among outright owners, and a smaller 7.7 percentage-point advantage among mortgage holders when compared to Labor. For renters, however, we observe a slight Labor advantage of 0.3 percentage points.

The analyses also unveiled interesting patterns for the Greens, who disproportionately attract renters. In fact, our data indicate 23% of Greens votes come from renters, compared with just 11% and 18% for the Coalition and Labor, respectively.

Together, these results align with the premise that the Coalition has been historically successful in attracting homeowners as a key constituency.

They also suggest having a mortgage makes people more likely to vote for policies that redistribute wealth and provide a buffer against interest rate changes.

Renters, on the other hand, visibly lean towards parties that more actively support tenants’ economic interests.

Are things changing over time?

Importantly, our research shows the influence of home assets on voting behaviour is not static. Rather, it has changed visibly over the 26 years between 1996 and 2022, aligning with the increasing cost of living and housing.

Crucially, the data show renters have progressively abandoned the Coalition as their party of choice. While 44% of renters voted for the Coalition in 1996, just 31% of renters did so in 2022.

On the aggregate, these voters seem to have been absorbed for the most part by the Greens, who saw the share of renters voting for them increase from 3% in 1996 to 20% in 2022.

How might future elections look?

Our study provides evidence that homeownership should be a factor to be considered in its own right in analyses of political behaviour, separate from other asset types.

The findings reveal a strong and increasing tendency for renters to vote for left-leaning over right-leaning parties. This could have significant implications for both future election results and party strategies, especially as renters account for an increasing share of the adult population.

At the same time, renters have seen their market power deteriorate, further motivating them to find a party or candidate committed to helping them. Parties that design policies to appeal to renters may therefore reap rewards in future elections.

If the current trend extends into the future, renters may indeed hold the key to reshaping the Australian political landscape.

Francisco Perales, Adjunct Professor, School of Government and International Relations, Griffith University and Ferran Martinez i Coma, Professor in Political Science, Griffith University

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

Do you want your toilet to reliably flush, whether you’re at home or on holiday anywhere in Australia? Want to help shape decisions on where new schools get built? Or want people experiencing homelessness to get better services than they do now?

Australian households are now starting to receive instructions in their letterboxes, explaining how to complete the 2026 census.

The data collected in your census form is crucial for everything from sewage systems to hospitals, schools and more.

Here are ten things you need to know about what’s new in the census this year, how much you can be fined if you lie or ignore it, what happens to your data, and how to ask for help.

1. What is the census?

Run every five years by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the Census of Population and Housing collects a complete survey of who we are, and where and how we live in Australia.

The census collects information on every person in the country on Tuesday August 11 across 10.8 million households. Homeless people and remote communities are also carefully surveyed.

Importantly, it’s not just for Australian citizens: it counts everyone in Australia that night, including international tourists, students and temporary visa holders.

The form is published in 27 languages, from Arabic to Vietnamese.

2. What’s new this time?

There are 12 changes in the 2026 census: two additional questions, and tweaks to ten long-running topics.

Ancestry has been expanded from two responses to four. Religion, health, transport and employment questions have received minor updates.

Gendered language referencing others in the household is now more inclusive.

Wording on the mainstay sex question now reads “sex recorded at birth”. And the controversial “number of children ever born” question returns to ten-yearly collection. It will be asked in 2031 instead.

Two new optional questions for over 16-year-olds ask about sexual orientation and gender (though not about intersex traits). These questions join religion as the only voluntary questions on the census.

3. Do I have to do it? And is there a fine if I don’t?

The census is compulsory. It only takes about half an hour to complete.

If you don’t complete it, the ABS will be in touch. But if you repeatedly ignore it, non-completion can attract a fine of A$364 a day. Deliberately providing false or misleading information risks a fine of up to $3,640.

4. Why does it matter?

Imagine waking up to use the bathroom only to find the sewage isn’t working. The entire neighbourhood can’t flush the toilet. Worse, you’re settling into your Christmas holiday at the coast and the sewage capacity is maxed; you’re one flush away from a caravan park plumbing poonami.

Census data helps make sure there’s sufficient infrastructure everywhere.

Population data from the census helps inform the location and upgrade needs for wastewater treatment facilities.

As an example, Lauceston’s current major sewer upgrades are based in part on population data from the census.

Census data is used in combination with other data, such as water utilities’ records of flushing toilets, to build projections for peak holiday populations. This helps us avoid environmental sewage disasters.

Testing wastewater, combined with census data, even helps calculate drug use and investigate Australians’ health.

School locations and staffing levels are also informed by the census.

Teacher numbers give an indication of the education workforce and its location. Population census data, coupled with school census data, enables a stocktake and anticipation of future trends to avoid school enrolment blowouts.

Censuses are personal for me. I wasn’t counted in the 1996 census because I was homeless. That’s part of why I ended up becoming a demographer – so no one is invisible when it counts.

Improvements to counting people experiencing homeless over the past 30 years mean I wouldn’t be missed today.

The ABS now uses more comprehensive measures to capture rough sleepers, people in supported homeless accommodation, and couch surfers. The census has helped reveal that someone who is homeless is now most often a couch surfer, rather than on the streets.

5. When is the deadline?

You can complete it as soon as you have the form or login details, if you know where you’ll be on census night, Tuesday August 11.

If you need to post back a form, do it as soon as possible.

6. Are my answers actually private?

It’s expected 85% of forms will be completed online this time, up from (80%) in 2021.

Privacy and confidentiality of census information is protected by law.

Once received by the ABS, names and addresses are separated from responses. Completed paper forms are destroyed once data is safely recorded.

7. What happens to my online data?

Sophisticated encryption technology is used to ensure the safety of online census information.

Just like paper forms, once data is processed, identifying information is kept functionally separate to responses. No data is released that might identify an individual.

8. Is Australia unusual in having a census?

Australia is among only a handful of countries that still conduct a traditional census every five years.

The United States and United Kingdom hold their censuses every decade. Many other countries, such as New Zealand, are moving toward alternatives, like using administrative data such as tax data, unemployment and health statistics.

Cost and logistics will likely see traditional census-taking in Australia replaced by administrative data alternatives by around 2040.

9. What if I want a paper form?

Paper copies, including separate personal forms, are available by contacting the ABS online, calling 1800 130 250, or collecting one from a census pop-up hub.

Reply-paid envelopes are provided for returning paper forms.

10. What if I need help?

Information is available online, by phoning the census hotline on 1800 181 227, or in person at an information session.

Help to complete your form, including in languages other than English, is available at fill-in-the-form sessions.

Liz Allen, Demographer, POLIS Centre for Social Policy Research, Australian National University

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

This month, multiple news outlets have reported families’ concerns about rising private school costs during the cost-of-living crisis.

It’s likely this trend will increase, as private school tuition fees rise faster than inflation.

Why are families putting themselves under this pressure? What does it suggest about the broader Australian school system?

Parents are struggling

In Australia, on average, private school fees (including additional costs) sit at around $8,973 for each year of schooling per student. Costs can total over $100,000 over the course of an K-12 private school education.

However, fee averages can differ across Australia.

In 2024, the average tuition fee for a Year 12 student in an independent school (also known as private schools) in NSW was A$15,674. In Victoria it was $20,923.

Private school peak body Independent Schools Australia surveyed 1,508 parents who have kids in independent schools.

Of those surveyed, 75% had adjusted their household budget in the last year to remain in their selected schools. More than half reported struggling to pay school fees, and 28% said they had also cut back on essentials, such as medicine, groceries and transport, to help pay fees.

The survey also reported “one in five receive financial support from other family members”.

An educational shift

Despite the fees, we know families are increasingly choosing independent schools over public schools.

The proportion of Australian students attending independent schools has jumped from 13% in 2006 to 17% in 2025.

At the same time, the number of students attending public schools has dropped. In 2025, 63% of students attended public school. In 2006 it was 67%. Enrolments at Catholic schools didn’t change much throughout this period and remained at around 20%.

Why is this happening?

Our research

Our research, which looked at the impact of philanthropy in Australian public schools, might offer some perspectives as to why.

Over the last two years, as part of an ongoing research project we interviewed 58 public school principals across every Australian state and territory about their experiences with school funding.

We found that many principals perceived parents to be choosing schools based on infrastructure, extra-curricular offerings and facilities they could not match, including basics such as heating or cooling.

All principals interviewed said they had to apply for competitive funding for critical infrastructure in the school, even for necessities such as ramps for students with disability.

Other findings

An Australia Institute study published in June also mirrors these principals’ concerns.

The survey asked 2,230 Australian adults questions about primary and secondary school funding. Participants were recruited online and represented by a range of ages, genders, education levels, regions, household incomes and political preferences.

As part of the study, 801 Australian parents with children in private schools were asked about their schooling choices. It found 38% would have enrolled their child in the public system if their local public school was better funded.

About 41% of respondents said they would still enrol their child in a private school even if their local public school was better funded while the remaining 21% said they were unsure. Respondents were not asked the reasons for their answers.

The bigger picture

Parent choices about where they send their kids to school must be understood in the context of Australia’s broader funding environment.

For instance, public schools in Australia have experienced chronic underfunding. Other than the ACT, most public schools across other states and territories do not currently receive their minimum amount of funding as calculated by the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS). The SRS is the measure used to determine the minimum amount of government funding that should be allocated to schools for their students’ educational needs.

In Australia, there is no regulation around how much non-government schools can charge, such as price caps. Nor do tuition fees impact the amount of government funding independent schools receive.

Indeed, Australia’s private schools charge some of the highest fees in the OECD.

It’s important to note not all independent schools charge high fees. But research has consistently suggested school fees of any level are linked with higher levels of “school segregation”. This means advantaged and disadvantaged students are concentrated in separate parts of the school system.

This then leads to overall declines in educational equity and quality.

Australia is among some of the most segregated school systems in the OECD. Australian public schools educate the majority of disadvantaged students.

What should change to help families?

One way to limit high school fees would be to tie them to the amount of government funding a school receives.

That means if a school charges fees, it should receive decreased government funding linked to this. This would encourage schools to maintain low tuition fees and, in turn, keep independent education more affordable for financially-struggling families.

While this measure might be met with political resistance in the Australian context, research has shown the measure has worked in countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden and Belgium. These countries have either prohibited or regulated school tuition fees where they also receive government funding.

With this in mind, a key question emerges: to what extent are private schools that are charging high fees, and receiving full government funding support, responsible for easing some of the burden on parents and families?

Elisa Di Gregorio, Lecturer, School of Education, Adelaide University and Emma Rowe, Associate Professor in Education, Deakin University

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

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains names and images of deceased people.

In our new series, we explore influential Australian poems.

We can sometimes underestimate the challenges of others, especially when none have come before them to begin something – something that creates a legacy they probably never imagined. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history is littered with such people. One of these was the late Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920–1993).

Oodgeroo (Kath Walker) was born in the Brisbane suburb of Bulimba to an Aboriginal man of Noonuccal descent from Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island) and an Aboriginal and Scottish mother. She lived on the island as a child. When she left school at 13, she moved to Brisbane to become a domestic servant. Oodgeroo had limited education, but she could read and enjoyed writing.

During World War II, she worked as a signaller for the army and performed administrative duties, becoming a Lance Corporal in 1943. The same year, she married Bruce Walker, an Aboriginal man from the Logan and Albert rivers region.

Later, as a single parent to her son, Oodgeroo became an office worker, then undertook household duties for prominent Brisbane doctors Raphael and Phyllis Cilento. Here, she was encouraged to write.

The 1940s was a time when the White Australia policy was in full flight. The only political party that did not support this policy was the Communist Party of Australia. Oodgeroo felt a strong connection to the communists’ lack of racially discriminatory beliefs. She flourished through the association, writing speeches and public speaking.

But it was after leaving the party Oodgeroo really began to delve into writing. She joined the Brisbane Realist Writers Group, a collective of left-wing authors founded in 1944. The poet Judith Wright recommended Oodgeroo’s work and her debut collection We Are Going appeared in 1964. It was the first ever book of poetry published by an Aboriginal person.

Tenacity, passion and hope

We must place this achievement in the context of the times. Where none had gone before, Oodgeroo stood, and it was only the beginning. What tenacity, passion and hope does that take? To push through where no one looks, speaks, behaves like you?

Where previously you had to expect closed doors, Oodgeroo used writing and a strong desire for change to break open those doors. That act has allowed others to follow.

Aside from this courage, it takes a great creative mind to write such powerful poetry and win such acclaim. Oodgeroo had a strong connection to the natural world and she found solace in forming words to match her feelings. We Are Going remains one of the most significant books in First Nations literature.

There were critics who likened her poems to “nursery rhymes” in their sound and structure, but they missed the true meanings instilled in them. Oodgeroo’s verses are full of anger, sadness and resilience as they look to the future. Take, for example, A Song of Hope, the final poem in We Are Going, which begins:

Look up, my people,
The dawn is breaking,
The world is waking,
To a new bright day,
When none defame us,
Nor colour shame us,

Nor sneer dismay.
Now brood no more
On the years behind you,
The hope assigned you
Shall the past replace,
When juster justice
Grown wise and stronger
Points the bone no longer
At a darker race.

Managing the delicate balance of deficit and positivity, the poem traverses space and time, from “our father’s fathers” to “our children’s children”, in a way that brings us back to the desire to push for more, for better. It envisions a “new Dream Time”, when “all doors open / That long were closed”.

Oodgeroo was proud of being a protest poet and she broke new ground in Australia, using poetry for political protest at a time when it was meant to be for art’s sake.

Oodgeroo had many attacks levelled against her by critics of the day. But her first book sold 10,000 copies, making her the bestselling Australian poet since C.J. Dennis, and she used her public recognition and her identity as a protest poet to campaign for the 1967 constitutional referendum to enfranchise Indigenous Australians.

Oodgeroo spoke of discrimination in a way that did not alienate; she mentioned “justice” in a manner accepted for the times. Her remembrance of past traumas allowed the dawning of hope for what the poem calls a “glad tomorrow”.

In today’s context, “hope” is often seen as almost too gentle a word when considering Indigenous rights. There are many First Nations people who use anger, frustration and rage to propel themselves in their activism for better rights within Australia.

That frustration and rage can assist in times when one is tired, but envisioning a different way can also empower one to rest, regroup, and then continue. These two approaches are not mutually exclusive. They can coexist within the writing of poetry and prose in a contemporary era.

Art as activism, activism as art

We live in an era of division, when some express a desire to go backwards to a time of “monoculture”. But we are also witnessing a celebration of First Nations literature, art, science and education previously hidden. The literary arena is now fortunate to have many First Nations writers all over Australia, as well as publication houses and awards specifically for these creatives to flourish.

We would not have writers of the ilk of Alexis Wright, Tony Birch, Evelyn Araluen and Alison Whittaker if not for Oodgeroo and many others who came before. Araluen’s connection to Oodgeroo’s work exists in her discussions of political clarity, reclamation of land and the re-inscribing of the concept of Country. Both poets seek to do away with a mythologised pastoral history and establish sovereignty within their words.

Whittaker’s poem Many Girls White Linen has similarities with Oodgeroo’s We Are Going and No More Boomerang in its critique of colonial surveillance and Australia’s fascination with the policing of Aboriginal bodies.

Birch’s work is not predominately in poetry, yet it is grounded in a political resistance that asserts Country as identity and protector, rather than pastoral ownership. Wright’s novel Plains of Promise takes its title from a line in A Song of Hope.

Oodgeroo was the first Indigenous woman in Australia to use poetry as a political tool. She emboldened (considering the context of the time) seemingly small yet important acts of writing as resistance – something we see in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander literature of today. She used the fame her writing gave her to advocate for Indigenous rights, organising petitions, giving speeches and directly lobbying politicians.

She was the national campaign coordinator of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders and co-founded the National Tribal Council. She is regarded as a principal architect of the 1967 referendum. She was also the first Aboriginal Australian to run (unsuccessfully) for a seat in the Queensland state parliament.

This is just a small list of her significant acts. Oodgeroo was awarded a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1970, which she returned to the Governor General as Australia prepared to celebrate the 1988 Bicentenary to bring attention to systemic injustice and the struggle for Aboriginal land rights. It was around this time she ceased using the name Kath Walker, in favour of her Indigenous name.

Nothing Oodgeroo did was small. First Nations’ people in Australia see her activism as part of her art, as her art was part of her activism.

As Aboriginal women in academia with a love of writing, we imagine Oodgeroo’s position as a groundbreaking poet to be similar to Aboriginal academics who began their university careers when nothing was there for them. No supports translating knowledge, no comfortable spaces with like-minded and familiar-looking faces, and no great institutional desire for them to be there.

It not only takes immense talent to push through these invisible barriers to create a space; it also takes great courage. Oodgeroo knew how valuable education was, and now her words are heard throughout these institutions in Australia. The legacy she has left is at the core of our belief we teach, give knowledge and, if we are lucky enough, wisdom for others to grow from.

Writing poetry and prose is a deeply personal act; it holds an intimacy of something deep inside that needs to be spoken of and needs to be heard. Not all poetry needs to be pretty, hopeful, raging or perfect. But it does need to be in a voice that demands to be witnessed.

Now, more than ever, we need both the frustration and passion to nourish our movement, along with the hope things may be better for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. We want more Oodgeroos, more Araluens, more Whittakers into the future, more writers and poets who can propel the language, culture and poetry that has sustained us throughout history.

Oodgeroo’s life and work created a legacy that will continue to be built upon by First Nations’ writers and creatives. “So long we waited / Bound and frustrated,” she wrote in A Song of Hope, with her eyes looking to the future:

See plain the promise,
Dark freedom-lover!
Night’s nearly over,
And though long the climb,
New rights will greet us,
New mateship meet us,
And joy complete us.

Tess Ryan, Indigenous Academic Lead Australian Catholic University, Australian Catholic University and Kelly Humphrey, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Indigenous), Australian Catholic University

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

Recent reports have highlighted AI-generated “doctors” spreading dubious health advice to millions of social media users. Fabricated wellness trends can travel just as quickly. A supposed “pink jelly” weight-loss treatment, for example, reportedly fooled at least one celebrity.

These examples gain credibility in different ways. Influencers can appear familiar and sincere, while AI-generated doctors can look like qualified professionals. Neither familiarity nor the appearance of expertise tells us whether a medical claim is accurate.

Turning to friends and family for health advice is understandable. They may know our circumstances in ways that a healthcare professional cannot during a brief appointment. They can provide emotional support and practical help, and their advice is usually well meant. But somebody can care about us, speak honestly and still be wrong.

Truth and trust

My own research and wider research on digital health misinformation shows that trust can play an important part in deciding which claims people accept. Trust in clinicians and scientific institutions is generally associated with lower susceptibility to false health claims. Misinformation can nevertheless spread through trusted social networks when people share it because they want to help or warn others.

Social media influencers can reproduce some of the signals of friendship without having a personal relationship with their followers. They address followers directly, share details about their lives and communicate in an informal style. Over time, followers may develop what researchers call a parasocial relationship: a one-sided sense of familiarity with a media figure. A recent meta-analysis found that parasocial relationships can influence health attitudes and behaviour, although their effects vary across different contexts.

AI-generated doctors use a different route to credibility. Accounts designed to resemble real clinicians can borrow the appearance and language of medical authority without providing any reliable way to check who created the content, what qualifications lie behind it or whether the advice is supported by evidence.

Personal stories are especially persuasive. Someone describes being ill, discovering a treatment and recovering. The account is easy to follow and often more memorable than a discussion of probabilities.

Even a completely truthful anecdote cannot show that a treatment caused the recovery or that it will be safe and effective for other people. Symptoms may have improved naturally. The person may have used several treatments at once, received an uncertain diagnosis or left out relevant details. Experiments have found that anecdotes can influence medical decisions even when people are also given stronger statistical evidence.

Fear, hope and accuracy

Emotion can add to the effect. Fear or hope may draw attention to a claim and make it feel urgent. Emotional tone does not show whether the information is accurate. Research suggests, however, that heightened emotional responses can increase susceptibility to digital health misinformation.

Identity can also shape judgment. Advice from another parent or fellow patient may appear more credible because the speaker seems to understand our experience. Rejecting the advice may then feel like rejecting a community to which we belong. A systematic review found that existing beliefs, knowledge, trust and reasoning styles can all affect how people evaluate health claims.

People may also have sound reasons for distrusting healthcare institutions. Dismissive treatment, discrimination, rushed appointments and poor explanations can damage trust. Research on trust in health organisations suggests that mistrust may be a rational response to institutional failure or unequal treatment. Telling patients to trust experts will not repair relationships that healthcare systems have damaged.

So how can we assess a health claim without dismissing personal experience?

1. Examine the claim separately from the person making it

A source may be sincere, charismatic or visually convincing without having the expertise to judge whether a treatment works. Check their relevant qualifications and whether their identity can be independently verified.

2. Look for supporting evidence and independent agreement

Do the NHS, an appropriate professional body or a reputable medical charity offer similar guidance? A single study rarely settles a medical question, so substantial claims should be supported by a wider body of research.

3. Check for commercial interests

Look for products, affiliate links, paid partnerships or private treatment programmes. Financial involvement creates a potential conflict of interest that readers should know about.

4. Be cautious about sweeping promises

Claims that a treatment produces rapid results, works for almost everyone or has no meaningful risks are unlikely to reflect the uncertainty and individual variation involved in medicine.

5. Know the warning signs

Treat secrecy claims and advice to abandon prescribed care as serious warning signs The greater the potential harm, the more important it is to check the advice with an appropriately qualified professional, such as a pharmacist or GP.

Individuals cannot carry the whole burden of detecting misinformation. Social media platforms influence which claims are amplified, while health services influence whether people feel heard and respected. Researchers are increasingly calling for a systems approach to health misinformation that combines clearer public information, responsible platform design, effective regulation and trustworthy clinical communication.

Friends and relatives can provide valuable support and personal testimony can reveal experiences that medical research may miss. Judging whether a treatment is safe and effective, however, requires evidence that extends beyond any one person’s story.

Anna Stone, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, University of East London

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

Five decades ago, Bali’s coastline was adorned with traditional fishing canoes with colourful carvings of mythical elephant-fish. Where did they go?

The disappearance of these canoes tells a much bigger story about how tourism, collecting and coastal change are reshaping Indonesia’s living maritime heritage – and why preserving these traditions matters.

The boats that once lined Bali’s beaches

Before Bali became one of the worlds’ most popular tourist destinations, fishing villages lined the beaches of Benoa, Nusa Dua and Sanur, along the island’s southern coast.

Generations of fishers built and sailed jukung pelasan – traditional timber double-outrigger sailing canoes with colourful carved gajah mina (elephant-fish) prows.

The gajah mina is a creature in Balinese Hindu tradition with the head of an elephant and the body of a fish. Symbolising unity and harmony between land and sea, it is said to protect crews during voyages and provide safe passage.

These were not just fishing boats; they were central to daily life in southern Bali.

The jukung were symbols of status and community identity. They embodied generations of craftsmanship, spiritual belief and maritime knowledge. They expressed the economic, social and spiritual life of Bali’s coastal communities, and reflected the enduring relationship between its people and the sea.

Today, however, only a handful remain.

My latest research, published in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, found only six intact timber jukung pelasan remain on beaches surveyed.

Their rapid decline over the past half century offers a window into the profound changes that have reshaped Bali.

Prosperity came at a price

The transformation began in the 1970s and 1980s. As Bali’s tourism industry took hold, hotels and resorts replaced stretches of beachfront once home to traditional fishing villages. Many fishers left the sea for more stable work in tourism. As livelihoods declined, so too did the timber jukung.

At Sanur, I spoke with a retired boat builder who told me there’s simply no demand left for timber fishing boats, as nobody fishes anymore.

The traditional boats, he said, couldn’t be repaired the old way: the trees once used for hulls were felled decades ago to make way for tourist beach resorts, and the bamboo needed for spars and outriggers no longer grows large enough. What little suitable bamboo remains is prohibitively expensive.

This boat builder is not alone. A former fisher also told me he now takes tourists out on fibreglass replicas for sunrise breakfast sails.

Indonesia’s tourism industry shows no signs of slowing. The nation’s revenue from tourism grew by 6.3% in the first quarter of 2026. In 2025, Bali generated 55% of the nation’s national tourism earnings in 2025 – with tourism accounting for about 60% of the island’s own gross domestic product.

Yet this prosperity has come at a price. Changing coastlines are adding to pressures facing the few remaining fishing communities.

Boats without a beach

As traditional fishing declined, many timber jukung disappeared from Bali’s beaches. Some were replaced with fibreglass boats. Others were sold to collectors overseas – who preserve the boats, but remove them from the communities that gave them meaning.

Today, only a few examples can be found outside Indonesia, such as in Darwin’s Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Seattle’s Burke Museum and at the Institute of Ancient Chinese Ships in Ningbo, China.

Australians know Bali as a holiday destination. With more than 1.5 million Australians visiting Bali each year, we remain the island’s largest source of foreign visitors, contributing 23.44% of total arrivals in 2025.

Yet Australia’s relationship with the island goes much further back than most people realise.

The shared seas between Australia and Indonesia have long connected people through fishing, trade and cultural exchange. For centuries, Indonesian seafarers crossed these seas aboard traditional boats, carrying people, knowledge and commodities. By 1754, Macassan traders were harvesting trepang (sea cucumber) in Australian waters, linking northern Australia to markets across Asia.

Beyond the boats

Maritime heritage isn’t simply about preserving traditional boats. It’s also about safeguarding the knowledge that made it possible: how to select timber, shape the hull, lash the outriggers and read the sea.

For generations, those skills were passed from boat builder to apprentice and from fisher to child. A boat preserved in a private collection can’t do this on its own.

Working with the remaining Balinese fishers and boat builders to record their knowledge, techniques and traditions is as important as preserving the boats themselves.

My ongoing research involves recording traditional Balinese maritime techniques, terminology and stories, working alongside archaeologist Widya Nayati from Universitas Gadjah Mada.

The goal is not just to help preserve Indonesia’s maritime past, but to sustain the living knowledge that connects communities, boats and the sea. The future of Bali’s maritime heritage will depend not only on those who inherit these traditions, but on those who value and support them.

Sarah Ward, Researcher, Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies, Australian National University

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

Have you ever wondered why it feels so good to sing in the shower? Or why turning up the radio up in the middle of a traffic jam and singing out loud can put you in a better mood?

Singing does something measurable to your body and brain, whether you are alone, harmonising in a choir, or singing with your friends at a karaoke bar.

Scientists have been interested in this “singers’ high” phenomenon for many years.

And a consistent picture is emerging from the evidence: singing can stimulate your hormones, quieten your nervous system, improve your immune system and boost your feeling of belonging, all at the same time.

Singing reduces stress

One of the most consistent findings is that singing has been shown to lower cortisol, the hormone most often associated with stress.

Several studies, using saliva samples taken before and after singing sessions, have found significant drops in cortisol in both solo and group singing, such as choir rehearsals.

Part of the explanation is biomechanical. The act of singing requires long controlled exhalation, similar to a breathing pattern (called pranayamic breathing) known to activate the vagus nerve.

The vagus nerve, which runs from the brainstem down into the abdomen, is the main neural pathway in the parasympathetic nervous system. This is responsible for slowing down heart rate, lowering blood pressure and helping digestion.

This is why it is often called the “rest and digest” pathway, calming us down when activated, in contrast to the sympathetic system which activates the “flight and fight” response when we’re stressed.

A detailed review of this breathing process found that slow breathing with extended exhalation, reliably stimulates the vagus nerve, shifting the body out of a stress response, and into a calmer state.

You don’t need to join a choir for this part. It works whether you are singing by yourself in the car after a long work week, or practising your karaoke song in the shower.

It’s a painkiller

Singing can also trigger the release of endorphins, the body’s natural painkillers.

One study measured this effect indirectly, using pain-threshold tests. The researchers believed a higher tolerance for pain after an activity might suggest greater endorphin release.

Across several experiments including active singing, dancing and drumming, they found all activities raised the pain threshold of participants, whereas passively listening to music did not.

Oxytocin, the hormone linked to bonding and trust is part of the story too, though evidence here is less tidy. Some studies have found oxytocin rises after group singing (especially if you are good at it). Others found it fell after group singing.

Another study concluded the data is not clear enough, and the effect of singing on oxytocin may depend on how socially intimate and low-stress the setting is.

What is fairly consistent, however, is that mood improves and people report feeling closer to one another after singing together – even when the underlying biochemical effects are mixed.

Singing may improve your immune system

Beyond mood and stress hormones, there is emerging evidence that singing can also have a measurable effect on the immune system, which fights infections.

One small study looked at singing sessions with cancer patients and their carers. It found that not only did participants’ mood improve after singing – including reductions in cortisol – their saliva samples also showed their cytokine levels had increased. Cytokines are chemical messengers that play a crucial role in the immune system, controlling inflammation.

Chronically high cortisol is known to suppress immune activity, so if cortisol drops after singing, this is also likely to have a positive effect on immune function.

The authors of this study emphasise that this is preliminary evidence, needing longer-term follow up studies.

Benefits for your brain and belonging

So does it matter how and where you sing? The stress-reducing, breath-based effects of singing seem to hold up whether you are singing alone or in a group. But group singing wins hands down for social bonding.

A large randomised trial of community choirs in older adults found that six months of group singing significantly reduced loneliness and increased their mood, compared with a control group.

Other studies have found that singing can also simultaneously engage different regions of the brain involved in listening, language, emotions and motor skills. This can improve brain connectivity and lead to healthier ageing.

The takeaway

You probably already knew singing felt good. But it isn’t just a pleasant distraction. It can reduce stress, calm your nervous system and make you feel closer to those around you. But if you prefer to sing alone in the shower or your car, this has many of the same benefits too – so go ahead and sing your heart out.

Kathleen Mikkelsen, Lecturer in Biomedicine, Victoria University

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

You’re probably familiar with the idea that in the world of big tech, “we” are the product.

Our data is the currency being traded every time we navigate our social media feeds. Tech giants such as Apple, Google and Microsoft offer valuable services, but it comes at a price. They host our email, photos, backups, files, calendars, reminders and contacts.

If you also include all the smaller startups and niche solutions, you’ll quickly see your security cameras, electronic locks, home appliances and even your toothbrushing schedules are all online – far removed from any physical box or device that you have any control over.

But there is a way to break free from big tech. It’s called “self-hosting”.

Your life, online

Many of these large tech providers do a good job of securing your data and enabling you to access services across devices and platforms. They allow novice users with almost no technical skills to interact with and share their data at little cost.

However, being reliant on these companies isn’t risk-free.

Google, Amazon and Meta have been implicated in unexpected or questionable uses of data.

Having high-value data concentrated in well-established systems also provides cyber criminals and scammers with obvious targets to spam, imitate (spoof) or hack.

Users are also completely at the mercy of these companies should they decide to raise their fees, change their terms of service, or even discontinue access.

What exactly is self-hosting?

Self-hosting is a general catch-all term for taking control of your own data.

This shifts your data from big tech giants and moves it to self-managed applications. Your data is on your own systems and you have complete control over who can access it.

Many self-hosted applications are open-source and, thanks to community support, they can be relatively easy for a tech-savvy user to download and install.

Self-hosting isn’t new.

Squirrel Mail (a web-based email client) predated Gmail by several years. Gallery, a photo hosting application, came before Flickr and Picasa. Even WordPress was originally offered in 2003 as a self-hosted download before the WordPress.com blogging service became available in 2005.

Over the past decade, self-hosting has seen a rapid increase in the range of options available.

Today, moderately technical users can self-host a mind-boggling range of web-based applications, including media storage and sharing, blogs, websites, productivity and office apps, video conferencing, home automation and security, games and ad-blocking.

To get an idea of how much is out there, Awesome-Selfhosted publishes links to free and open-source self-hosted projects.

Self-hosting has also become more accessible with cheap, single-board computers such as the Raspberry Pi.

These tiny computers can be as small as a credit card and usually have lower-powered central processing units and no ability to expand memory, graphics or networking; they sacrifice computing “power” and flexibility for size, energy-efficiency and price.

Other common household network appliances such as network file storage, media servers and internet routers have become powerful enough that users can install custom applications to run many self-hosted services.

Another route to self-hosting is through device manufacturers such as umbrel and Zima, both of which provide physical hardware with dedicated self-hosting operating systems.

However, there is still a considerable learning curve for non-technical users.

Benefits and risks

Self-hosting provides freedom from big-tech, surveillance and/or costly subscriptions. It allows you to know exactly where your data is, and how it’s managed.

But it does come with some risks.

The most immediate risks come from technical mistakes and backup issues that can cause a self-hosted solution to lose data.

If your photo library is running on a single computer in your linen cupboard, you are reliant on that computer being powered up, backed up and available whenever you need it.

Similarly, any mistake you make in configuration or management could affect the availability of your data through access controls or even data erasure.

Another issue that users need to consider is whether they want their data available “on the move”. In most cases, home routers allow you to expose individual devices to the internet. This can allow you to access your self-hosted data while you are away from home. Unfortunately, if you can access your data, in most cases, so can cyber criminals.

Exposing self-hosted services in this way requires diligence, consideration and a certain level of expertise to minimise the risk of breaches – risks that may be amplified by poorly maintained applications.

Should I bother?

Self-hosting allows you to have greater control over how, when and by whom your data is used. For some, this is a vital requirement and worth the extra effort required to make it all work.

If you have an old computer available, why not give it a try? It may seem daunting, but self-hosting comes in many flavours, and you can choose how far you go with it.

Nikolai Hampton, School of Science, Edith Cowan University and Paul Haskell-Dowland, Professor of Cyber Security Practice, Edith Cowan University

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

In Homer’s Odyssey, Nausicaa is a tall, gutsy teenage princess who finds a naked and helpless Odysseus washed up on her shore, gives him her brothers’ clothing, and instructs him on how to appeal to her mother, Queen Arete, for help to get home to Ithaca. She is crucial to his eventual return home after 20 years’ absence.

But she doesn’t appear in Christopher Nolan’s film at all – and her absence is part of a broader debate about how his version reduces or simplifies the role of women in the epic poem. In the Guardian, classicist Emily Hauser mourned the absence of the “delightfully brash princess”, along with nuance and complexity.

“There are more female characters than in most Nolan movies, thanks to the source material,” wrote classics professor Emily Wilson, whose translation of The Odyssey is a critically acclaimed bestseller, this week. “But none of them has much to say, in contrast to the characterisations in the poem.”

This applies to several key characters, from the enchantress Circe, who turned Odysseus’ men into pigs, to Odysseus’ wife Penelope. But what about the absent Nausicaa? Who was she? And why was she important?

Nausicaa, Odysseus’ teenage saviour

Nausicaa lives on the island of Scheria, where she and her fellow Phaeacians, an isolated and peaceful people, rarely encounter strangers. The goddess Athena visits the teenager in a dream and encourages her to wash her dirty laundry. She tells her the best young men of Scheria want to court her, and that Nausicaa and her bridesmaids will need clean dresses.

When she awakes, Nausicaa asks her father, King Alcinous, to loan her a mule-wagon so she and her female slaves can take the laundry to the seaside to wash. She offers to wash her father’s and five brothers’ outfits too, claiming she wants them to have clean clothes to work in and go dancing.

Nausicaa drives the wagon herself and joins in the manual labour of washing the laundry in a river that flows into the sea. She is near the spot where Odysseus has been washed ashore on a raft after leaving the island of Calypso, the lovelorn nymph, who sheltered him for seven years before being forced to let him go.

While the laundry dries in the sun, the girls play catch with a ball. Homer says Nausicaa is so tall, she stands out from the others, like the virgin goddess Artemis surrounded by nymphs. Their play wakes Odysseus, who jumps up from the bushes, naked and covered in grime. The slave girls run away, but Nausicaa stands her ground.

Odysseus praises her beauty and assures her whoever marries her will be the luckiest man by far: there is nothing better than a husband and wife whose minds live in harmony, who live in one house and make their enemies jealous. He is projecting his own desire to return home to his wife Penelope, but guesses accurately what will make this teenage princess trust him.

Thoroughly impressed, Nausicaa promises to give him clothing, food and drink, and a good wash.

After Odysseus bathes himself (at a distance, he’s shy), Athena does something special: she makes him look hot! She “made his hair grow curling tendrils like a hyacinth” and pours beauty on him just like pouring gold over silver. She makes him “look bigger and sturdier”.

Nausicaa is “shocked” and admits to her slaves: “I hope I get a man like this as husband, a man that lives here and would like to stay.” Flirting, she compliments Odysseus’ good looks.

Her next task is to save his life. She instructs him to enter her father’s palace without her, find the Great Hall, pass her father King Alcinous and go straight to her mother Queen Arete, who will be spinning wool by the hearth, and clasp her knees.

The wool-spinning alone is a sign of Arete’s status. She performs the most essential task of the household’s self-sufficiency and sustainability – making thread to weave on a loom into textiles – in the most public part of the palace.

Arete, the previous king’s daughter, has the people’s respect. What’s more, she wove the clothing Nausicaa has just loaned Odysseus. Homer says Arete recognises the clothes and is the first person to speak to Odysseus directly: “Where are you from? And who gave you those clothes?”

But she already knows: Nausicaa has given Odysseus her stamp of approval by sending him to her mother wearing them.

Arete and Alcinous receive Odysseus as their guest. It is to the Phaeacians that Odysseus narrates his adventures – such as the encounters with the Cyclops and Circe – and not, as in Nolan’s screenplay, in a lotus-induced state to Calypso. And it is the Phaeacians who escort Odysseus back to Ithaca and his family.

Penelope is shrewder in the poem

Most significantly, Odysseus’ meeting with Nausicaa is a dry run of his reunion with Penelope. He succeeds in persuading Nausicaa to trust him, helped by his good looks.

But his wife will prove shrewder. After Odysseus has killed all 108 suitors on Ithaca, he finally meets his wife as himself, not in disguise. Athena makes him look hot again, as she did on Scheria – curly hyacinth hair, beauty like gilded silver.

Penelope is not won over by this appearance. She tests his identity in another way, tricking him into revealing his knowledge of their immovable marriage bed and its construction around a tree – something replaced in Nolan’s film with a pendant of Athena that Odysseus carries around with him.

In Homer, the knowledge of the bed is more special, since it exemplifies the husband and wife whose minds live in harmony: the very thing Odysseus guessed Nausicaa wanted for herself someday.

“I love that not only is this about a very clever and ingenious man, it’s also about a very clever and ingenious woman, who’s his match in every way,” Madeleine Miller (author of a novel on Circe) told the New York Times about Penelope’s role in the Odyssey, in the lead-up to the film.

(In Nolan’s version, whose script Wilson claims she would have been “ashamed to have written”, Penelope is “barely more interesting” than the doll he has Odysseus carry to represent her.)

Miller said in Homer’s Odyssey, Circe comes to an understanding with Odysseus and invites him to stay as long as he needs. She offers “a place of peace and a haven”, where she helps him “recover from trauma”. Nolan omits the fact that Odysseus sleeps with Circe – and stays with her (and his men) for two years.

It’s a shame Nausicaa was left out of Nolan’s Odyssey: she is a good example of how Homer’s Odyssey is “a woman’s poem”, as many scholars have recognised.

But Nolan is faithful in one way to how Calypso and Circe appear in Homer: there is every indication they will continue on with their lives once Odysseus leaves their company. Had he included Nausicca, too, she would be another woman who is not just part of Odysseus’ adventures, but have independent narratives of their own – which happen to include Odysseus in it.

K.O. Chong-Gossard, Associate Professor of Classics (Ancient Greek & Latin), The University of Melbourne

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

In the early hours of August 5 (UTC), an abandoned SpaceX rocket stage is expected to slam into the Moon at around 8,700 kilometres per hour.

Launched in January 2025, the rocket sent two commercial lunar landers toward Earth’s nearest neighbour.

With its work done, the rocket lacked the fuel to return to Earth or move into deep space. It remained in an unstable orbit until gravity finally set it on a collision course with the lunar surface.

The crash itself poses no danger. However, it signals a looming regulatory problem. As governments and companies race to build a permanent presence on the Moon, there is almost no practical framework for coordinating activities that permanently reshape the lunar environment.

A rare scientific opportunity

For astronomers, the accident is a scientific opportunity. As scientists know the rocket’s size, speed and roughly where it will hit, the impact presents a rare chance to to study exactly what happens when something impacts the Moon.

The crash will provide data to improve computer models of how craters form and how lunar dust behaves.

Researchers expect the collision to excavate a crater roughly 20–30 metres across and eject a cloud of lunar dust, known as regolith, several kilometres above the surface.

What happens on the Moon stays on the Moon

Along with the dust cloud, the impact will also raise a tricky question: who gets to decide when humanity permanently changes the Moon?

Unlike Earth, the Moon has almost no atmosphere and no weather. As a result, any marks we leave behind will remain for a very long time.

More than 50 years after the Apollo Moon landings, footprints remain visible. If left untouched, they may persist for thousands of years.

The results of crashes or accidents will last just as long.

The Moon is a shared neighbourhood

Space agencies, private companies, and researchers are all operating on the Moon at the same time.

Several countries have announced ambitions for long-term lunar scientific stations. Commercial companies hope to deliver cargo, prospect for resources, operate lunar communication satellites, and eventually support a sustained human presence.

As activity increases, so too does the possibility that one mission could unintentionally affect another. A cloud of high-speed lunar dust created by a landing could damage equipment such as nuclear-powered lunar bases or satellites, contaminate experiments, destroy a site of cultural significance, or even risk the lives of people on the lunar surface.

If a poorly planned mission swept away humanity’s first footprints on the Moon or damaged the Apollo lander, it would be a loss of heritage for all humanity.

By good fortune rather than good planning, the rocket’s upcoming collision is expected to occur near the isolated Einstein Crater, away from many significant lunar sites.

Nobody owns the Moon, but some can still change it

SpaceX has unintentionally acquired the power to permanently alter the Moon. There is almost no international process for deciding whether, when or where that should happen.

At the centre of the discussion is the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, the foundation of international space law with 138 state signatories.

Under this treaty, no country can claim sovereignty over the lunar surface. Instead, the Moon is regarded as a place to be explored and used for the benefit of all humankind.

While the treaty prevents ownership, it says remarkably little about practical lunar governance or regulating the lunar environment.

Unlike Earth, the Moon has no equivalent of UNESCO World Heritage protection, domestic heritage laws, or environmental regulation.

It is each country’s responsibility to supervise their own space companies to ensure they comply with national and international law. That means the American government is, in theory, on the hook for SpaceX’s mistakes.

Lunar accidents could also open up a company to financial liability and associated risks. Damages to equipment or bases could be in the millions of dollars. Accidental deaths could create criminal liability. Damages to a cultural or scientific site could risk international diplomatic incidents.

More transparency and coordination needed

So how can the Moon be a usable space for companies, governments and scientists, while also still being protected for all humanity?

The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) and the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space are already exploring future solutions. There are working groups examining how countries can regulate space resources and better coordinate activities on and around the Moon.

But these institutions face a difficult reality. UNOOSA has only around 40 staff with a global mandate, and the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space meets for only a few weeks each year.

Concurrently, commercial enterprises are throwing vast amounts of money at their race to the Moon meaning the law has not kept pace with the needs of the lunar environment.

From principles to practice

The international community does not need new laws. It needs to put the ones it has to work.

Article XI of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty already calls on states to share information about their space activities. That voluntary measure is fast becoming an operational necessity.

A simple starting point would be a lunar registry where states voluntarily identify planned activities, surface infrastructure, and sites they consider culturally significant. A similar satellite registry is managed by UNOOSA. This complimentary lunar registry would capture the operational details that the satellite registry was never designed to capture.

Aviation has a system of Notices to Airmen to advise pilots and flight operators of flight hazards, and other time-sensitive information. Shipping has Notices to Mariners.

The Moon needs something similar: standardised Notices to Lunar Operators. These would flag landing sites, rover routes and dust-generating activity before missions launch.

Calls are growing for a fourth UN Conference on Outer Space. This would be a forum where governments, industry and scientists could actually build these tools.

While this rocket cannot be stopped, the next accident might be avoided. Whether that happens will depend less on rocket scientists and more on the space lawyers and diplomats.

Gregory Radisic, Fellow at the Centre for Space, Cyberspace and Data Law; Senior Teaching Fellow, Faculty of Law, Bond University

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

Few episodes occupy a darker place in maritime history than the wreck of the Batavia.

Wrecked off the mid-west coast of Western Australia in June 1629, 159 years before the First Fleet entered Sydney Harbour, the disaster offers a stark alternative to romanticised tales of exploration.

Batavia’s story is instead one of greed, mutiny, heroic resistance and mass murder, exposing the violence and ambition that accompanied early European ventures into Australian waters.

The ship’s story is also one of a massive global supply chain – part of which has remained hidden until now. In our new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, we trace the origins of some of the Batavia’s most important cargo: massive sandstone blocks.

The tiny crystal preserved in these rocks help paint a detailed picture of lives, labour and global connections nearly 400 years ago.

An immensely valuable cargo

The Batavia was the flagship of the Dutch East India Company. On its maiden voyage from the Dutch Republic to Java, it carried 341 passengers and crew, together with an immensely valuable cargo.

Among it was what mariners called “paying ballast”. This was heavy material that served two purposes: stabilising the ship and carrying commercial or practical value at its destination.

In the ship’s hold, this included thousands of bricks and large, carefully carved sandstone blocks intended for a monumental gateway or portico in the Dutch East India Company’s colonial capital, Batavia (known today as Jakarta).

During the voyage, junior officer Jeronimus Cornelisz plotted to seize the ship and its treasure. After Batavia struck Morning Reef, roughly 60km west of the modern-day town of Geraldton, Commander Francisco Pelsaert departed in an open boat to seek help.

In Pelsaert’s absence, Cornelisz seized control of the survivors scattered across the nearby islands. He sent Wiebbe Hayes and a group of fellow soldiers to a distant island, expecting thirst to kill them. Cornelisz’s mutineers then began systematically killing the remaining survivors. More than one hundred men, women and children were murdered.

But Hayes and his soldiers found water. Survivors who escaped Cornelisz reached Haye’s group on makeshift rafts and warned them of the killings. They fashioned weapons, built a stone fort, and repeatedly repelled the mutineers. The remains of their stone fort on West Wallabi Island are regarded as Australia’s oldest surviving European-built structure.

When Pelsaert’s rescue ship appeared on the horizon, Hayes raced to reach it before the mutineers. He boarded first and revealed what had happened. The mutiny was over.

Through it all, hundreds of sandstone blocks lay within Batavia’s wreck, silent witnesses to the bloodshed unfolding across the islands. The stones survived; most of the people who sailed with them did not.

Nearly 400 years later, those stones are revealing the extraordinary logistical networks that supplied the Dutch East India Company.

Gaps in the record

At the dawn of global capitalism, the Dutch East India Company created one of the richest corporate archives of the early modern world.

Yet even its meticulous records have gaps. We know the Batavia carried a prefabricated stone portico. But we don’t know precisely where the stone came from or how materials from different quarries were assembled into a single overseas shipment.

To investigate, we examined Batavia’s sandstone cargo, now held by the WA Shipwrecks Museum. The blocks looked remarkably similar to each other, and centuries beneath the waves changed more obvious clues to their origins, such as colour, mineralogy, and the cement that holds the sand grains together.

To understand their source, we therefore turned to a more durable record hidden within the rocks. Sandstone carries tiny crystals known as zircon, often eroded from many older rocks.

Each grain contains a uranium–lead clock that records when the crystal grew. Together, their ages create a distinctive geological fingerprint of the ancient landscapes that supplied the sand.

Comparing geological fingerprints

We compared the geological fingerprints of the Batavia portico blocks with sandstone from German quarries known to have supplied building stone to the Netherlands during the 17th century. Some of these quarrying and trade networks had much deeper roots, extending back to Roman times.

The fingerprints revealed that similar-looking blocks came from different sources. One matched Bentheim sandstone; the other matched Obernkirchen sandstone.

Both zircon fingerprints were strikingly different.

Bentheim blocks contained abundant 3-billion-year-old zircons derived from ancient rocks in Scandinavia, whereas Obernkirchen blocks are richer in younger zircon, eroded from the 300-million-year-old Variscan mountain belt to the south, in what is now central Germany.

The quarries are about 140km apart and connect to different river systems. The stones travelled through separate inland transport networks before converging at a Dutch East India Company hub, most likely Amsterdam, where they were shaped and assembled into a single shipment for Batavia.

Numbers carved into the blocks acted as assembly marks, a 17th century precursor to flat-pack instructions.

No surviving document records this precise journey. But geology exposes a sophisticated and coordinated supply chain linking quarry workers, stone cutters, river transporters, merchants, and sailors across northwest Europe.

More than decorative cargo

Batavia’s portico blocks are a testament to the infrastructure of an empire: European stone gathered, standardised, and shipped across the world to build the Dutch East India Company’s colonial headquarters in Java.

Nearly four centuries later, the blocks show that stories can indeed be written in stone, recovering traces of networks of labour, trade and human connection.

Anthony Clarke, Research Fellow, School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Curtin University and Chris Kirkland, Professor of Geochronology, Curtin University

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