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Large kangaroos today roam long distances across the outback, often surviving droughts by moving in mobs to find new food when pickings are slim.

But not all kangaroos have been this way. In new research published today in PLOS One, we found giant kangaroos that once lived in eastern Australia were far less mobile, making them vulnerable to changes in local environmental conditions.

We discovered fossilised teeth of the now extinct giant kangaroo genus Protemnodon at Mount Etna Caves, north of Rockhampton, in central eastern Queensland. Analysing the teeth gave us a glimpse into the past movements of these extinct giants, hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Our results show Protemnodon did not forage across great distances, instead living in a lush and stable rainforest utopia. However, this utopia began to decline when the climate became drier with more pronounced seasons – spelling doom for Mount Etna’s giant roos.

Mount Etna Caves

The Mount Etna Caves National Park and nearby Capricorn Caves hold remarkable records of life over hundreds of thousands of years.

Fossils accumulated in the caves because they acted like giant pitfall traps and also lairs of predators such as thylacines, Tasmanian devils, marsupial lions, owls, raptors and the now-endangered ghost bats.

Large parts of the region were once mined for lime and cement. One of us (Hocknull) worked closely with mine managers to safely remove and stockpile fossil deposits from now-destroyed caves for scientific research which still continues.

As part of our study we dated fossils using an approach called uranium-series dating, and the sediment around them with a different technique called luminescence dating.

Our results suggest the giant kangaroos lived around the caves from at least 500,000 years ago to about 280,000 years ago. After this they disappeared from the Mount Etna fossil record.

At the time, Mount Etna hosted a rich rainforest habitat, comparable to modern day New Guinea. As the climate became drier between 280,000 and 205,000 years ago, rainforest-dwelling species including Protemnodon vanished from the area, replaced by those adapted to a dry, arid environment.

You are what you eat

Our study looked at how far Protemnodon travelled to find food. The general trend in mammals is that bigger creatures range farther. This trend holds for modern kangaroos, so we expected giant extinct kangaroos like Protemnodon would also have had large ranges.

Teeth record a chemical signature of the food you eat. By looking at different isotopes of the element strontium in tooth enamel, we can study the foraging ranges of extinct animals.

Varying abundances of strontium isotopes reflect the chemical fingerprint of the plants an animal ate, as well as the geology and soils where the plant grew. By matching chemical signatures in the teeth to local signatures in the environment, we could estimate where these ancient animals travelled to obtain food.

Eat local, die local

Our results showed Protemnodon from Mount Etna didn’t travel far beyond the local limestone in which the caves and fossils were found. This is much a smaller range than we predicted range based on their body mass.

We think the small foraging range of Protemnodon at Mount Etna was an adaptation to millions of years of stable food supply in the rainforest. They likely had little need to travel to find food.

Fossil evidence also suggests some species of Protemnodon walked on all fours rather than hopped. This would have constrained their ability to travel great distances, but is a great strategy for living in rainforests.

One question remains to be answered: if they didn’t need to move far to find food, why did they grow so big in the first place?

A local adaptation or a species trait?

The extinction of Australia’s megafauna – long-vanished beasts such the “marsupial lion” Thylacoleo and the three-tonne Diprotodon – has long been debated. It has often been assumed that megafauna species responded in the same way to environmental changes wherever they lived.

However, we may have underestimated the role of local adaptations. This particularly holds true for Protemnodon, with a recent study suggesting significant variation in diet and movement across different environments.

Similar small foraging ranges have been suggested for Protemnodon that lived near Bingara and Wellington Caves, New South Wales. Perhaps it was common for Protemnodon populations in stable habitats across eastern Australia to be homebodies – and this may have proved their Achilles’ heel when environmental conditions changed.

Extinction, one by one

As a rule, creatures with a small home range have a limited ability to move elsewhere. So if the something happens to their local habitat, they may be in big trouble.

At Mount Etna, Protemnodon thrived for hundreds of thousands of years in the stable rainforest environment. But as the environment became more arid, and resources increasingly patchy, they may have been unable to traverse the growing gaps between patches of forest or retreat elsewhere.

One key result of our study is that Protodemnon was locally extinct at Mt Etna long before humans turned up, which rules out human influence.

The techniques used in this study will help us to learn about how Australia’s megafauna responded to changing environments in more detail. This approach moves the Australian megafauna extinction debate away from the traditional continental catch-all hypotheses – instead we can look at local populations in specific sites, and understand the unique factors driving local extinction events.

Christopher Laurikainen Gaete, PhD Candidate, University of Wollongong; Anthony Dosseto, Professor of Geochemistry, University of Wollongong; Lee Arnold, Associate Professor in Earth Sciences, University of Adelaide, University of Wollongong, and Scott Hocknull, Senior Scientist and Curator, Geosciences, Queensland Museum, and Honorary Research Fellow, The University of Melbourne

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

There’s no shortage of things to feel angry about these days. Whether it’s politics, social injustice, climate change or the cost-of-living crisis, the world can feel like a pressure cooker.

Research suggests nearly one-quarter of the world’s population feels angry on any given day. While anger is a normal human emotion, if it’s intense and poorly managed, it can quickly lead to aggression, and potentially cause harm.

Feeling angry often can also have negative effects on our relationships, as well as our mental and physical health.

So how should you manage feelings of anger to keep them in check? Our new research suggests mindfulness can be an effective tool for regulating anger and reducing aggression.

What is mindfulness?

Mindfulness is the ability to observe and focus on your thoughts, emotions and bodily sensations in the present moment with acceptance and without judgement.

Mindfulness has been practised for thousands of years, most notably in Buddhist traditions. But more recently it has been adapted into secular programs to support mental health and emotional regulation.

Mindfulness is taught in a variety of ways, including in-person classes, residential retreats and through digital apps. These programs typically involve guided meditations, and practices that help people become more aware of their thoughts, feelings and surroundings.

Mindfulness is linked to a range of mental health benefits, including reduced anxiety, depression and stress.

Neuroscience research also suggests mindfulness is associated with reduced activity in brain regions linked to emotional reactivity, and greater activity in those involved in self-regulation (the ability to manage our thoughts, emotions and behaviours).

In this way, mindfulness could foster emotional awareness essential for the effective regulation of emotions such as anger. And when people are less overwhelmed by anger, they may be better able to think clearly, reflect on what matters and take meaningful action, rather than reacting impulsively or shutting down.

We reviewed the evidence

To better understand whether mindfulness actually helps with regulating anger and aggression, we conducted a meta-analysis. This is a study that combines the results of many previous studies to look at the overall evidence.

We analysed findings from 118 studies across different populations and countries, including both people who were naturally more mindful and people who were randomly assigned to take part in interventions aimed at increasing mindfulness.

People who were naturally more mindful were those who scored higher on questionnaires measuring traits such as present-moment awareness and non-judgmental thinking. We found these people tended to report less anger and behave less aggressively.

However, mindfulness isn’t just something you have or don’t have – it’s also a skill you can develop. And our results show the benefits of lower anger and aggression extend to people who learn mindfulness skills through practice or training.

We also wanted to know whether mindfulness might work better for certain people or in particular settings. Interestingly, our results suggest these benefits are broadly universal. Practising mindfulness was effective in reducing anger and aggression across different age groups, genders and contexts, including whether people were seeking treatment for mental health or general wellbeing, or not.

Some anger management strategies aren’t backed by science

To manage feelings of anger, many people turn to strategies that are not supported by evidence.

Research suggests “letting off steam” while thinking about your anger is not a healthy strategy and may intensify and prolong experiences of anger.

For example, in one experiment, research participants were asked to hit a punching bag while thinking of someone who made them angry. This so-called “cathartic release” made people angrier and more aggressive rather than less so.

Breaking things in rage rooms, while increasingly popular, is similarly not an evidence-based strategy for reducing anger and aggression.

On the other hand, our research shows there’s good evidence to support mindfulness as a tool to regulate anger.

Mindfulness may reduce anger and aggression by helping people become more aware of their emotional reactions without immediately acting on them. It can foster a non-judgmental and accepting stance toward difficult emotions such as anger, which may interrupt the cycle whereby anger leads to aggressive behaviour.

Mindfulness is not a magic bullet

All that said, it’s important to keep in mind that mindfulness is not a magic bullet or a quick fix. Like any new skill, mindfulness can be challenging at first, takes time to master, and works best when practised regularly.

It’s also important to note mindfulness may not be suitable for everyone – particularly when used as a standalone approach for managing more complex mental health concerns. For ongoing emotional challenges it’s always a good idea to seek support from a qualified mental health professional.

However, if you’re looking to dial down the impact of daily frustrations, there are plenty of accessible ways to give mindfulness a go. You can get started with just a few minutes per day. Popular apps such as Smiling Mind and Headspace offer short, guided sessions that make it easy to explore mindfulness at your own pace — no prior experience needed.

While mindfulness may not solve the problems that make us angry, our research shows it could help improve how we experience and respond to them.

Siobhan O'Dean, Research Fellow, The Matilda Centre for Research in Mental Health and Substance Use, University of Sydney; Elizabeth Summerell, Lecturer, School of Psychology, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Adelaide, and Tom Denson, Professor of Psychology, UNSW Sydney

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

Whether or not we’re alone in the universe is one of the biggest questions in science.

A recent study, led by astrophysicist Nikku Madhusudhan at the University of Cambridge, suggests the answer might be no. Based on observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, the study points to alien life on K2-18b, a distant exoplanet 124 light years from Earth.

The researchers found strong evidence of a chemical called dimethyl sulfide (DMS) in the planet’s atmosphere. On Earth, DMS is produced only by living organisms, so it appears to be a compelling sign of life, or “biosignature”.

While the new findings have made headlines, a look at the history of astrobiology shows similar discoveries have been inconclusive in the past. The issue is partly theoretical: scientists and philosophers still have no agreed-upon definition of exactly what life is.

A closer look

Unlike the older Hubble telescope, which orbited Earth, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is placed in orbit around the Sun. This gives it a better view of objects in deep space.

When distant exoplanets pass in front of their host star, astronomers can deduce what chemicals are in their atmospheres from the tell-tale wavelengths they leave in the detected light. Since the precision of these readings can vary, scientists estimate a margin of error for their results, to rule out random chance. The recent study of K2-18b found only a 0.3% probability that the readings were a fluke, leaving researchers confident in their detection of DMS.

On Earth, DMS is only produced by life, mostly aquatic phytoplankton. This makes it a persuasive biosignature.

The findings line up with what scientists already conjecture about K2-18b. Considered a “Hycean” world (a portmanteau of “hydrogen” and “ocean”), K2-18b is thought to feature a hydrogen-rich atmosphere and a surface covered with liquid water. These conditions are favourable to life.

So does this mean K2-18b’s oceans are crawling with extraterrestrial microbes?

Some experts are less certain. Speaking to the New York Times, planetary scientist Christopher Glein expressed doubt that the study represents a “smoking gun”. And past experiences teach us that in astrobiology, inconclusive findings are the norm.

Life as we don’t know it

Astrobiology has its origins in efforts to explain how life began on our own planet.

In the early 1950s, the Miller-Urey experiment showed that an electrical current could produce organic compounds from a best-guess reconstruction of the chemistry in Earth’s earliest oceans – sometimes called the “primordial soup”.

Although it gave no real indication of how life in fact first evolved, the experiment left astrobiology with a framework for investigating the chemistry of alien worlds.

In 1975, the first Mars landers – Viking 1 and 2 – conducted experiments with collected samples of Martian soil. In one experiment, nutrients added to soil samples appeared to produce carbon dioxide, suggesting microbes were digesting the nutrients.

Initial excitement quickly dissipated, as other tests failed to pick up organic compounds in the soil. And later studies identified plausible non-biological explanations for the carbon dioxide. One explanation points to a mineral abundant on Mars called perchlorate. Interactions between perchlorate and cosmic rays may have led to chemical reactions similar to those observed by the Viking tests.

Concerns the landers’ instruments had been contaminated on Earth also introduced uncertainty.

In 1996, a NASA team announced a Martian meteorite discovered in Antarctica bore signs of past alien life. Specimen ALH84001 showed evidence of organic hydrocarbons, as well as magnetite crystals arranged in a distinctive pattern only produced biologically on Earth.

More suggestive were the small, round structures in the rock resembling fossilised bacteria. Again, closer analysis led to disappointment. Non-biological explanations were found for the magnetite grains and hydrocarbons, while the fossil bacteria were deemed too small to plausibly support life.

The most recent comparable discovery – claims of phosphine gas on Venus in 2020 – is also still controversial. Phosphine is considered a biosignature, since on Earth it’s produced by bacterial life in low-oxygen environments, particularly in the digestive tracts of animals. Some astronomers claim the detected phosphine signal is too weak, or attributable to inorganically produced sulfur compounds.

Each time biosignatures are found, biologists confront the ambiguous distinction between life and non-life, and the difficulty of extrapolating characteristics of life on Earth to alien environments.

Carol Cleland, a leading philosopher of science, has called this the problem of finding “life as we don’t know it”.

Moving beyond chemistry

We still know very little about how life first emerged on Earth. This makes it hard to know what to expect from the primitive lifeforms that might exist on Mars or K2-18b.

It’s uncertain whether such lifeforms would resemble Earth life at all. Alien life might manifest in surprising and unrecognisable ways: while life on Earth is carbon-based, cellular, and reliant on self-replicating molecules such as DNA, an alien lifeform might fulfil the same functions with totally unfamiliar materials and structures.

Our knowledge of the environmental conditions on K2-18b is also limited, so it’s hard to imagine the adaptations a Hycean organism might need to survive there.

Chemical biosignatures derived from life on Earth, it seems, might be a misleading guide.

Philosophers of biology argue that a general definition of life will need to go beyond chemistry. According to one view, life is defined by its organisation, not the list of chemicals making it up: living things embody a kind of self-organisation able to autonomously produce its own parts, sustain a metabolism, and maintain a boundary or membrane separating inside from outside.

Some philosophers of science claim such a definition is too imprecise. In my own research, I’ve argued that this kind of generality is a strength: it helps keep our theories flexible, and applicable to new contexts.

K2-18b may be a promising candidate for identifying extraterrestrial life. But excitement about biosignatures such as DMS disguises deeper, theoretical problems that also need to be resolved.

Novel lifeforms in distant, unfamiliar environments might not be detectable in the ways we expect. Philosophers and scientists will have to work together on non-reductive descriptions of living processes, so that when we do stumble across alien life, we don’t miss it.

Campbell Rider, PhD Candidate in Philosophy – Philosophy of Biology, University of Sydney

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

The 1972 concert film Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii, back in cinemas this week, remains one of the most unique concert documentaries ever recorded by a rock band.

The movie captured the band on the brink of international stardom, released seven months before their breakout album Dark Side of the Moon, which would go on to sell 50 million copies and spend 778 weeks on the Billboard charts.

The film was the first time a rock concert took place in the ruins of an archaeological site. This intermingling of art and archaeology would change the way many thought of Pompeii.

The amphitheatre of Pompeii

The amphitheatre of Pompeii has quite a history as a venue for spectacles.

Constructed around 70 BCE, it was one of the first permanent constructed amphitheatres in Italy, designed to hold up to 20,000 spectators.

From graffiti and advertisements, we know it was used in antiquity for gladiatorial fights and displays and hunts of wild beasts and athletic contests.

Famously we are told by Roman historian Tactius in 59 CE a deadly brawl occurred between Pompeiians and residents of the nearby town of Nuceria during games, resulting in a ten-year ban on gladiatorial contests at the venue. The amphitheatre was destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE.

There is a long tradition of authors, artists, filmmakers and designers taking inspiration from the site and its destruction. A 13-year-old Mozart’s visit to the Temple of Isis at the site inspired The Magic Flute in 1791.

In the rock music era, Pompeii has inspired numerous artists, especially around themes of death and longing. Cities in Dust (1985) by Siouxsie and the Banshees was perhaps the most famous until Bastille’s 2013 hit Pompeii. In The Decemberists’ Cocoon (2002), the destruction of Pompeii acts as a metaphor for the guilt and loss in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

Since 2016, the amphitheatre has hosted concerts – with audiences this time. Appropriately, one of the first was a performance by Pink Floyd’s guitarist David Gilmour. His show over two nights in July 2016 took place 45 years after first playing at the site.

But how did Pink Floyd come to play at Pompeii in 1972?

Rethinking rock concert movies

It was the peak era of rock concert documentaries. Woodstock (1970) and The Rolling Stone’s Gimme Shelter (1970), and other documentaries of the era, placed the cameras in the audience, giving the cinema-goer the same perspective as the concert audience.

As a concept, it was getting stale.

Filmmaker Adrian Maben had been interested in combining art with Pink Floyd’s music. He initially pitched a film of the band’s music over montages of paintings by artists such as Rene Magritte. The band rejected the idea.

Maben returned to them after a holiday in Naples, realising the ambience of Pompeii suited the band’s music. A performance without an audience provided the antithesis of the era’s concert films.

The performance would become iconic, particularly the scenes of Roger Waters banging a large gong on the upper wall of the amphitheatre, and the cameras panning past the band’s black road case to reveal the band in the ancient arena.

It was as far away from Woodstock as possible.

The performance was filmed over six days in October 1971 in the ancient amphitheatre, with the band playing three songs in the ancient venue: Echoes, A Saucerful of Secrets, and One of These Days.

Ancient history professor Ugo Carputi of the University of Naples, a Pink Floyd fan, had persuaded authorities to allow the band to film and to close the site for the duration of filming. Besides the film crew, the band’s road crew – and a few children who snuck in to watch – the venue was closed to the public.

In addition to the performance, the four band members were filmed walking over the volcanic mud around Boscoreale, and their performances in the film both were interspersed with images of antiquities from Pompeii.

The movie itself was fleshed out with studio performances in a Paris TV studio and rehearsals at Abbey Road Studios.

Marrying art and music

Famously the Pink Floyd film blends images of antiquities from the Naples Archaeological Museum with the band’s performances.

Roman frescoes and mosaics are highlighted during particular songs. Profiles of bronze statues meld with the faces of band members, linking past and present.

Later scenes have the band backdropped by images of frescoes from the famed Villa of the Mysteries and of the plaster casts of eruption victims.

The band’s musical themes of death and mystery link with ancient imagery, and it would have been the first time many audience members had seen these masterpieces of Roman art.

Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii marked a brave experiment in rock concert movies.

Watching it more than 50 years later, it is a timepiece of early 70s rock and a remarkable document of a band on the brink of fame.

Because of their progressive rock sound, sonic experimentation and philosophical lyrics, it was often said by Pink Floyd’s fans that they were “the first band in space”. They even eventually had a cassette of their music played in space.

But many are not aware of their earlier roots in the dust of ancient Pompeii. The re-release of the film gives an opportunity to enjoy the site’s unlikely role in music history.

Pink Floyd at Pompeii – MCMLXXII is in cinemas from Thursday.

Craig Barker, Head, Public Engagement, Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney

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

Do you ever feel like you can’t stop moving after you’ve pushed yourself exercising? Maybe you find yourself walking around in circles when you come off the pitch, or squatting and standing and squatting again when you finish a run.

Sometimes the body knows what’s best for us, even if we’re not aware of the science.

Moving around after intense exercise actually helps the body recover faster. Here’s how it works – plus a tip for if you feel exactly the opposite (and just want to lie down).

What is ‘intense’ exercise?

There are different ways to measure exercise intensity. One is simply how hard it feels to you, known as the “rating of perceived exertion”.

This takes into account how fast you’re breathing, how much you’re sweating and how tired your muscles are. It also considers heart rate.

The average resting heart rate when you’re not exerting yourself is around 60–80 beats per minute, although this can vary between people.

The maximum healthy heart rate is based on subtracting your age from 220. So, if you’re 20 years old, that’s 200 beats per minute when you’re exercising as hard as you can.

This decreases as you age. If you’re 50 years old, your maximum heart rate would be around 170 beats per minute.

An increased heart rate helps pump blood faster to deliver fuel and oxygen to the muscles that are working hard. Once you stop exercising your body will begin its recovery, to return to resting levels.

Let’s look at how continuing to move after intense exercise helps do this.

Removing waste from the muscles

Whenever the body converts fuel into energy it also produces leftover substances, known as metabolic byproducts. This includes lactate (sometimes called lactic acid).

During intense exercise we need to burn more fuel (oxygen and glucose) and this can make the body produce lactate much more quickly than it can clear it. When lactate accumulates in the muscles it may delay their recovery.

We can reuse lactate to provide energy to the heart and brain and modulate the immune system. But to do this, lactate must be cleared from the muscles into the bloodstream.

After intense exercise, continuing to move your body – but less intensely – can help do this. This kind of active recovery has been shown to be more efficient than passive recovery (meaning you don’t move).

Returning blood to the heart

Intense exercise also makes our heart pump more blood into the body. The volume pumped to the muscles increases dramatically, while blood flow to other tissues – especially the abdominal organs such as the kidneys – is reduced.

Moving after intense exercise can help redistribute the blood flow and speed up recovery of the respiratory and cardiovascular systems. This will also clear metabolic byproducts faster.

After a long run, for example, there will be much more blood in your leg muscles. If you stand still for a long time, you may feel dizzy or faint, thanks to lowered blood pressure and less blood flow to the brain.

Moving your legs, whether through stretching or walking, will help pump blood back to the heart.

In fact around 90% of the blood returning from the legs via veins relies on the foot, calf and thigh muscles moving and pumping. The calf muscle plays the largest role (about 65%). Moving your heels up and down after exercising can help activate this motion.

What if you don’t feel like moving?

Maybe after exercise you just want to sit down in a heap. Should you?

If you’re too tired to do light movement such as stretching or walking, you may still benefit from elevating your legs.

You can lie down – research has shown blood from the veins returns more easily to the heart after exercise when you’re lying down, compared to sitting up, even if you’re still. Elevating your legs has an added benefit, as it reverses the effect of gravity and helps circulation.

Ken Nosaka, Professor of Exercise and Sports Science, Edith Cowan University

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

No one goes into the legal profession thinking it is going to be easy. Long working hours are fairly standard, work is often completed to tight external deadlines, and 24/7 availability to clients is widely understood to be a norm, particularly in commercial and international practice.

But too often, the demands of law can create an unhealthy workplace environment. In 2021, the stress of high workloads, low job control, and risks of secondary trauma led SafeWork NSW to categorise legal work as “high risk” for fatigue hazards – putting it alongside night shift work, emergency services, and fly-in, fly-out roles.

To investigate this problem, we surveyed about 1,900 lawyers across Victoria, New South Wales and Western Australia in March and April last year.

We asked them about their workplace culture and its impact on wellbeing, about their levels of psychological distress, and whether they had experienced disrespectful behaviours at work.

We also asked whether they intended to leave either their employer or the legal profession in the near future.

Their answers allowed us to identify the type of workplace culture that is harmful to lawyers’ wellbeing. Here’s why fixing this problem matters to us all.

Unhealthy environments

Among the professionals we surveyed, about half found themselves in a workplace culture with negative effects on wellbeing.

A third of this group said their workplaces were characterised by poor working relationships, self-interest and pressure to cut corners or bend rules.

These poorer workplace cultures involved higher levels of psychological distress and more disrespectful behaviours from superiors and coworkers.

They were also characterised by a lack of effective wellbeing supports such as mental health leave arrangements or workload allocation practices.

Long working hours were common. More than half of participants (53%) said they worked more than 40 hours per week and 11% said they put in more than 60 hours.

About a third of the lawyers we surveyed wanted to quit their firm, while 10% planned to leave the profession, within a year.

Society can’t afford to ignore this problem. Lawyer wellbeing can directly affect the quality of legal services and may even lead to disciplinary action against individual lawyers. All of this can undermine public trust and confidence in the justice system.

Workload ‘cannot be sustained’

We invited participants to explain why they intended to leave the profession. Their answers are telling.

One mid-career lawyer at a large firm said:

I am in my 11th year of practice working as a Senior Associate at a top-tier firm. To put it bluntly, the work rate at which I am currently operating, which is required to meet the billable targets and budgets set for us, cannot be sustained for my whole working life – it’s too much.

A small-firm junior lawyer talked of the workload issues described by many:

The pay is not worth the stress. I can’t sleep because I’m constantly worried about deadlines or making mistakes, and I got paid more when I was a bartender. I love the work, but it’s a very tough slog and damaging my own wellbeing – for what?

Our data showed junior lawyers take a lot of the pressure, reflected in higher-than-average levels of psychological distress. Equally concerning was the extent to which senior lawyers with practice management responsibilities also reported above average distress.

Our research also showed the challenges extended beyond private practice and into government, legal aid and corporate “in-house” settings.

As one mid-career legal aid lawyer put it:

Lack of debriefing and supports, lack of formal mentoring and supervision, mental health toll, high workload and poor workplace culture, lack of training and supports to deal with clients in crisis, [mean it’s] not [a] family-friendly profession.

The positives

There was also good news. Three themes stood out in the responses from the 48% who told us they worked in positive workplace cultures. This suggests where support should be targeted.

For nearly two thirds of our sample, having good colleagues was the most important wellbeing support. As one mid-career lawyer put it:

Informal support such as debriefing with colleagues has been most beneficial for me.

Good flexible working and (mental health) leave arrangements came across as the most important practical support employers could provide.

Good workload allocation practices - and a willingness from managers to “reach out to discuss work-life balance” - make a real difference to peoples’ experience.

It matters to the rest of us

The legal profession and its regulators have been engaging with the wellbeing problem for a while now. Our findings suggest there is still more to be done.

For the profession as a whole we felt that there was still a need to develop greater understanding of the specific wellbeing needs of both junior lawyers and those managing them, as these are the two groups experiencing the most distress.

Legal regulatory bodies should work to better understand how economic drivers of legal practice, such as high workloads and billing expectations, can have negative consequences for wellbeing, and whether any regulatory levers could lessen these impacts.

The authors would like to acknowledge the significant contribution of Stephen Tang, clinical psychologist, in undertaking data analysis and coauthoring the original report.

Vivien Holmes, Emerita Professor, Australian National University; Julian Webb, Professor of Law, The University of Melbourne; Susan Ainsworth, Professor of Management and Marketing, The University of Melbourne, and Tony Foley, Professor of Law, Australian National University

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

The Large Hadron Collider has been responsible for astounding advances in physics: the discovery of the elusive, long-sought Higgs boson as well as other new exotic particles, possible hints of new forces of nature, and more.

Located at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) on the border of France and Switzerland, the LHC is expected to run for another 15 years. Nevertheless, physicists are already planning what will come after it.

One of the most favoured proposals for CERN’s next step is the 70-year Future Circular Collider (FCC) project. More than three times the size of the LHC, this enormous proposed machine promises to resolve some mysteries of the universe – and undoubtedly reveal some new ones.

What will the Future Circular Collider do?

The LHC, which occupies a circular tunnel 27 kilometres in circumference, is currently the largest machine in the world. The FCC would be housed in a much larger 91km tunnel in the Geneva basin between the Jura mountains and the Alps.

The first stage of the FCC would be the construction and operation of a collider for electrons (the lightweight particles that make up the outer shell of atoms) and positrons (the antimatter mirror images of electrons). This collider would allow more precise measurements of the Higgs boson.

The second stage would be a collider for protons (heavier particles found in the cores of atoms). The LHC already collides protons, but the new collider would accelerate the protons up to more than seven times as much energy.

This increase in collision energy allows for the discovery of particles never produced by humanity before. It also brings with it technical challenges, such as the development of high-powered superconducting magnets.

Known unknowns

The most high-profile result from the LHC has been the discovery of the Higgs boson, which lets us explain why particles in the universe have mass: they interact with the so-called Higgs field which permeates all of space.

This was a great victory for what we call the Standard Model. This is the theory that, to the best of our current knowledge, explains all the fundamental particles in the universe and their interactions.

However, the Standard Model has significant weaknesses, and leaves some crucial questions unanswered.

The FCC promises to answer some of these questions.

For example, we know the Higgs field can explain the mass of heavy particles. However, it is possible that a completely different mechanism provides mass to lighter particles.

We also want to know whether the Higgs field gives mass to the Higgs boson itself. To answer these Higgs questions we will need the higher energies that the FCC will provide.

The FCC will also let us take a closer look at the interactions of very heavy quarks. (Quarks are the tiniest components of protons and some other particles.) We hope this may shed light on the question of why the universe contains so much more matter than antimatter.

And the FCC will help us look for new particles that might be dark matter, a mysterious substance that seems to pervade the universe.

Of course, there is no guarantee that the FCC will provide the answers to these questions. That is the nature of curiosity-driven research. You know the journey, but not the destination.

Competing colliders

The FCC is not the only major particle physics project under consideration.

Another is a proposed 20-kilometre machine called the International Linear Collider, which would likely be built in Japan.

The US has several projects on the go, mainly detectors of various kinds. It also supports an “offshore Higgs factory”, located in Europe or Japan.

One project that may concern the FCC’s backers is the planned 100 kilometre Chinese Electron Positron Collider (CEPC), which has significant similarities to the FCC.

This poses a dilemma for Europe: if China goes ahead with their project, is the FCC still worthwhile? On the other hand, CERN chief Fabiola Gianotti has argued that the FCC is necessary to keep up with China.

High costs

The decision on the FCC won’t be taken lightly, given the large cost associated with the project.

CERN estimates the first stage will cost 15 billion Swiss francs (around US$18 billion or A$28 billion at current exchange rates), spread out over 12 years. One third of this cost is the tunnel construction.

The size of the sum has attracted criticism. However, a CERN spokesperson told the Agence France-Press that up to 80% of the cost would be covered by the organisation’s current annual budget.

The second stage of FCC, which would reuse the 91km tunnel as well as some existing LHC infrastructure, is currently estimated to cost 19 billion Swiss francs. This costing carries a large uncertainty, as the second stage would not be commissioned until 2070 at the earliest.

Benefits beyond science

Pure science has not been the only benefit of the LHC. There have been plenty of practical technological spinoffs, from medical technology to open and free software.

One specific example is the Medipix chips developed for a detector at the LHC, which are now used across multiple areas in medical imaging and material science.

For the past 70 years, CERN has served as a fantastic model for peaceful and efficient international collaboration. Beyond its astonishing scientific output, it has also produced significant advances in engineering that have spread through society. Building the FCC will be an investment in both technology and curiosity.

Tessa Charles, Accelerator Physicist, Monash University and Ulrik Egede, Professor of Physics, Monash University

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

In 1945, when Yoko Ono was 12, her home city of Tokyo was firebombed. With her mother and siblings, she fled to the safety of a farming village in Nagano Prefecture. Food was scarce. During this time, Ono, as the eldest child, often had to help find provisions for her family. At one point, while she and her brother Keisuke were lying down looking up at the sky, she asked him to create a dream menu: if access was no obstacle, what foods would he choose?

Her prompt, fired by her imagination, inspired hope for better days ahead. Her brother believes this was her first work of conceptual art.

This is difficult to argue with, given so much of Ono’s art has recurring motifs of hope and joyful human interaction. David Sheff’s Yoko is the latest offering in a new generation of books revisiting Ono and her legacy within popular culture. It creates a portrait of an artist – now 92 – who has championed the power of positivity, no matter the adverse conditions.

Review: Yoko: A Biography – David Sheff (Simon & Schuster)

Ono’s career as a conceptual artist was well underway by the time she met John Lennon in 1966, when he visited her about-to-be-staged solo exhibition in London. Nonetheless, when the Beatles broke up in 1970, a misogynistic narrative swiftly blamed her for playing a substantial role in the band’s demise.

Journalists and fans accused Ono of being a “homewrecker” (Lennon was still married when they became a couple), but the conceptual artist’s even greater sin seemed to be that she was not a blonde, leggy model typical of rock-star girlfriends.

It is little wonder that, a few years later, some of her songwriting would call upon the image of the witch – a historical figure especially symbolic of women’s misrepresentation within society. Ono’s reclamation, through songs like Woman of Salem (1973) and Yes, I’m a Witch (1974) – also the title of her 2007 album – is fitting.

The 1968 release of the Lennon–Ono album Two Virgins, which featured experimental music and had the couple pose nude for its cover, prompted a moral panic. As Sheff writes,

people went from attacking Yoko as a homewrecker to accusing her of destroying Lennon as an artist. Talk of John being under Yoko’s spell percolated; she was forcing him to do outrageous – nutty, abhorrent – things.

Few would deny Ono – as artist, musician and woman – has experienced her own set of witch trials. Some still blame her for the Beatles’ breakup, see her conceptual art as nonsensical garbage, or believe her own musical output is nothing more than a screaming banshee’s wail.

Correctives to such unforgiving and tired narratives are necessary. This is why David Sheff’s biography is so important.

Biographer and ‘good friend’

Sheff admits from the outset that his position as biographer is paired with that of a longtime friend. But he also assures readers he did his “best to strip the varnish away” to reveal a more authentic Ono. That close proximity to his subject makes for a compelling account.

The journalist met Lennon and Ono in September 1980, spending several weeks with them to write a magazine profile. They were happy with the resulting article. The day after he spoke with them about it, Lennon was killed. Sheff became good friends with Ono and got to know their son Sean, becoming one of those who helped her survive “the season of glass” following Lennon’s murder.

In 2002, she and Sean “helped save the life” of Sheff’s son, during a period of homelessness and drug addiction. Ono later granted Sheff permission to title the memoir about his son “Beautiful Boy”, after Lennon’s song.

He interviews scores of family members, friends and colleagues, while drawing upon his own experiences with Ono. In a telling passage, which speaks to Ono’s interest in creative visualisation, Sheff explains that she:

believed that the words she used – in everything from song titles to conversation – would influence the future. She wanted to fill her brain with positive thoughts, not negative ones.

Some have refused to believe this benevolent Yoko Ono exists.

Privilege and emotional poverty

Ono was born on February 18 1933 in Tokyo, to one of Japan’s wealthiest families. Her father was a bank executive while her mother’s family, the Yasudas, were responsible for what later became Fuji Bank. Despite her privileged upbringing, which also saw her family move between Japan and the United States, she felt her parents were emotionally distant. As she grew older, she received mixed messages about what they saw as her purpose in life: was it marriage or a career?

Ono was the first woman to be accepted to study philosophy at the elite Gakushuin University in the fall of 1952, but soon left for the US to study at the women’s liberal arts college Sarah Lawrence, outside New York. There, she focused on composing music and writing poems and stories, while also investigating the city’s art scene – and met and married her first husband, composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, in 1956. Soon after, she was mixing with visual artists and composers like John Cage, who was both. By 1960, she was hosting art and music events at a loft she rented in New York’s bohemian downtown. Performing and exhibiting her own work soon followed.

Before she met and married Lennon, Ono was married a second time, in 1963, to Anthony Cox. Cox was an American painter, sculptor and film producer who rescued her from a mental hospital in Tokyo, where she was placed after a series of suicide attempts that followed a barrage of criticism of her work. “She was trying to connect through her work, but she’d never felt more alone,” Sheff writes.

With Cox, who she was still married to when she met Lennon, she had a daughter, Kyoko, in 1963. A year later – with her husband’s encouragement – a book called Grapefruit, filled with Ono’s “instruction pieces”, was published. Despite the deep despair she had felt, her life had turned around and she was newly motivated to share her art with the world.

Playful positivity

Sheff smartly conveys the first moments Ono and Lennon realised they were on the same wavelength: as artists and as people. In their first meeting, when Lennon visited Ono’s Indica exhibition in London, he climbed a ladder and held up a magnifying glass to the ceiling, where he saw the word yes.

Another piece he noticed was Painting to Hammer a Nail, which comprised a white wooden panel, a hammer on a chain, and a can of nails just beneath. He asked to hammer a nail in, but as the exhibit was not yet open, Ono did not want him to do it. After another moment, she agreed he could, if he paid five shillings to do so. Lennon then offered her an imaginary five shillings to hammer in an equally imaginary nail.

Ono was charmed by the playful response. Lennon was struck with the positivity and humour inherent in Ono’s work: it contradicted his view of avant-garde art as pretentious and overly self-serious.

Sheff points out Ono’s work often asks audiences to imagine and create with her. Famously, her “instruction pieces”, which first gained visibility during the 1960s (helped by her book Grapefruit), asked those interacting with the art to do something or think about certain things. Here, the artist and audience were actively working together.

In Self Portrait (1965), a mirror tucked into an envelope meant the portrait in question was not of Ono, but of the person glimpsing their reflection, Sheff writes. Ono did not summon her audience into a world of whimsy for whimsy’s sake, but into a space where artist and audience were co-creating new vantage points from which to admire the world’s everyday wonders.

Mrs Yoko Ono Lennon

By March 1969, Ono was officially Mrs Yoko Ono Lennon. Their marriage was life-changing in myriad ways: both truly felt they had found their perfect match. In 1975, they would welcome a son, Sean. The couple collaborated in art and music, but the union was not beloved by all.

Criticism of Ono ran the gamut from descriptions of her as an oddball interloper in Lennon’s music-making to outright racist remarks because she was Japanese. Sheff shares glimpses that depict just how mean-spirited some of the 1970s media coverage was. But despite the negativity the couple encountered, they enjoyed a loving, meaningful and productive partnership.

Ono’s world changed forever on December 8 1980, when her husband was shot and killed outside their New York home. She was beside him when it happened. Sheff recounts his memories of her unimaginable grief and the resilience she somehow found in the aftermath of Lennon’s murder. Since her husband’s death, she has dedicated a substantial portion of her life to championing Lennon’s legacy, as well as advocating for gun control in the US.

Ono’s own artistic accomplishments and place in the historical record are rightly given full attention throughout the book. Recent retrospective exhibits, including the Tate Modern’s 2024 Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind in London, demonstrate the longstanding cultural impact of her conceptual art. But Sheff also provides welcome insights into her musical career.

‘First female punk rocker’

Ono’s 1974 sold-out tour of Japan is a noteworthy inclusion, as her musical output has received more than its share of negative criticism. Even in 2025, there are memes that assert Ono’s music is unlistenable and among the worst ever created. Anyone familiar with her discography, however, knows most of her work features singing (not screaming). But it has been difficult to pry Ono’s reputation away from her more avant-garde forays into music.

In 2017, Ono was officially credited with co-writing 1971’s Imagine, with her late husband. A more holistic reappraisal of her music has been underway for some time too. Sean Lennon is quoted saying a good number of musicians from his generation always have appreciated and celebrated Ono’s more experimental sounds. As a musician himself, Sean is influenced and inspired by both parents’ work, and he has collaborated with his mother on several occasions.

Gen-X icon Kurt Cobain cited Ono as “the first female punk rocker”, Sheff writes, placing her in a genre where her so-called “screaming” would be a badge of honour, rather than worthy of derision. As a fellow Gen-Xer, I was delighted when, in the early 1990s, I discovered one of my favourite bands, Redd Kross, had helped create a Yoko Ono tribute band of sorts, the Tater Totz – who Sean mentions while discussing his generation’s appreciation of Ono.

Benevolent magic

This thoughtful, engaging biography prompts readers to put aside their preconceptions and reimagine Ono. It suggests she is a force of nature who has made a significant impact on our culture – for good, rather than ill. The book’s cover serves as a fitting preview: a black-and-white photo of its smiling subject.

Sheff asserts at the beginning that he is not looking to “depict Yoko as either a saint or a sinner”. Nonetheless, he offers a much-needed antidote for the decades of venomous critiques directed her way. Considering the amount of public ridicule that Ono has faced for a good portion of her 92 years, it is important more people have a better understanding of who she is, separating myth from reality.

Sheff’s Yoko works well towards achieving this goal. The book offers a nuanced portrait of both the woman and the artist, while showcasing Ono’s creative work as a form of benevolent magic.

Christine Feldman-Barrett, Senior Lecturer in Cultural Sociology, Griffith University

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

Starting high school is one of the most significant transitions young people make in their education. Many different changes happen at once – from making new friends to getting used to a new school environment and different behaviour and academic expectations.

What do young people think about this crucial time in their lives?

In our new research we spoke to ten students in Year 7 at a co-educational school in Perth, Western Australia in 2023. Students were interviewed in Term 3 and asked to share their thoughts about what the move to high school was like. We used a focus group to allow young people to explore their thoughts in a supportive environment.

Our current study is on a small scale. But it contributes to the growing body of research showing the importance of supporting students’ emotional wellbeing during school transitions.

Big changes take time

One of the key things students discussed was how it took time to adjust to high school.

This included managing their time to fit in new study commitments, such as homework for multiple subjects. They also had to locate new classrooms: “trying to go around the school and find them was hard”.

They noted how “different teachers have different rules […] so you gotta remember that and where you’re going”. Other students explained how there was “too much stuff for my brain to handle”.

As another student talked about the pressure to be organised:

It’s hard work going in from Year 6 primary school to Year 7. I can tell you that much. […] we’ve been expected from the first week to remember our timetable, be organised, not forget anything and know our classes […] it’s a lot of pressure and stress on you because we also get bucketloads of homework as well because we don’t get enough time to finish our work.

Adjusting to new friendship dynamics

Previous research has found when students start high school they are “more focussed on building new relationships and maintaining old friends”. They will then shift their focus to academic matters “later on”.

Students in our study certainly discussed the importance of friends. Some students had looked forward to making new friends and were enjoying being able to “make some proper friends that you can actually have a proper relationship with”.

Others spoke about their worries about not knowing anyone or having any friends (“I was always questioning myself. Am I going to make any friends?”). Others found their friendship groups changed from primary school (“I don’t talk to them as much […] it’s kind of not the same with them).

Students also talked about how working out new friendships took time.

you’ll find that yes, you might be friends […] but then you might find that they’re not the person who you thought they would be and you might not really want to be with them.

A lot more work

All students observed there was an increased workload of Year 7. Many students said they did not feel prepared for the volume of work and the time frames in which they were expected to complete it.

Some students "found it stressful to keep on top of work”. For some “the homework load and the amount of tests that we have and assessments” were the least enjoyable features of high school. They said it felt like in Year 7, “everything is about academics”.

But students also said they enjoyed being able to do a wider range of subjects. And the hands-on subjects such as cooking and design and technology helped them balance out more intense, academic subjects.

What can help Year 7s?

While students outlined challenges about moving from Year 6 to Year 7, they also identified three things to help make the transition easier.

1. A support network: students stressed it was important to have a support network, whether informally through fellow students, staff or a parent or formally with counselling. This is something schools can encourage with buddy groups or peer support.

2. Extra time: students talked about the importance of teachers giving them extra time to complete work and to get used to new places and processes at high school. They were grateful to teachers who “let you develop in the classroom”.

3. Transition programs: students said specific Year 7 transition programs – that prepare students for the new logistics and expectations – would also help. One student suggested a term in Year 6 should “replicate what it feels like to be in Year 7”.

Katherine Stevens, PhD Candidate, Education, Murdoch University and Peter R. Whipp, Dean and Head of School of Education, Murdoch University

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

After decades of Hollywood showcasing white-picket-fence celebrity smiles, the world has fallen for White Lotus actor Aimee Lou Wood’s teeth.

Wood was bullied for her looks in her youth and expressed gratitude for the positive comments she received about her teeth since appearing on White Lotus. She also joked that people shouldn’t take to drastic measures like filing teeth to copy her famous gap.

But social media influencers are promising that teeth filing is a quick way to achieve a straight smile. Some influencers even use electric nail drills to cut gaps between their front teeth.

A few of my patients admit to taking a nail file to “buff” or file jagged edges off their teeth. Many do this without understanding what they are cutting away.

Here’s why you should think twice about filing your teeth at home, and why we as dentists or orthodontists occasionally resort to this.

When might a dentist file a tooth?

Dentists and orthodontists occasionally file a tooth’s enamel, known as enameloplasty, to conservatively smooth-down a chipped tooth, or even-out a smile.

But adjustments to a person’s smile are minute, and always limited to the superficial enamel layer of the tooth.

Why don’t dentists routinely file teeth?

Dentists and orthodontists are particular about what and when we cut because teeth don’t grow back like fingernails or hair.

So what is a tooth? A tooth is like an egg, with an outer diamond-like lustrous crystal enamel coat that envelops the hard yet springy dentine.

The enamel and dentine envelop a central chamber – containing blood vessels, cells and nerves – called the pulp.

The outer periphery of the pulp is surrounded by and nourishes special dentine-making cells called odontoblasts.

The odontoblasts are similar to our bone-making cells but don’t have the capacity to regenerate. These cells eventually give way to age-related changes or trauma.

Our enamel-making cells die when our teeth cut through our gums as children, which means we can no longer make new, or repair damaged, enamel.

So damaged enamel or dentine on the outer surface of the tooth cannot self-repair.

Cutting your teeth without sealing and filling them can leave the tooth exposed, destroying the previously well-insulated pulp and causing sensitivity and pain.

Infections can occur because the bacteria from the plaque inside your mouth travels into the tooth and inflames the pulp.

And just like a cut on your skin, the pulp inflames and swells as part of the healing process. But your pulp is encased in a hard enamel-dentine chamber, so it has no room to expand and swell, leading to a throbbing toothache.

What can you do if you want to change your teeth?

You can change your smile without compromising the integrity of your teeth. Dentists can even create or close gaps.

And we will always offer conservative options, including “no treatment”, to keep as many of your teeth whole and healthy as possible.

Sometimes, your dentists and or orthodontists may offer options to:

• use braces to move teeth. Moving teeth can create a different smile, and sometimes change the shape and position of your jaws, lips and cheeks

• whiten teeth to remove superficial stains to make your smile look more visually even

• adapt white resin fillings or veneers to add and change the shape of teeth, with little or no tooth cutting required.

If you’re concerned about the look of your teeth, talk to your dentist or orthodontist about options that won’t damage your teeth and make them last the distance.

Don’t forget that Aimee Lou Wood’s iconic smile makes her stand out from the crowd. Your smile is what makes you special, and is part of who you are.

Arosha Weerakoon, Senior Lecturer and General Dentist, School of Dentistry, The University of Queensland

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

In a year filled with centenaries of famous novels, including Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Franz Kafka’s The Trial, another novel also quietly turns 100. William was published in 1925 by the once-celebrated, now largely forgotten, E.H. Young.

William was Young’s most successful novel. It sold more than 68,000 copies and was reprinted 20 times before 1948. It was William which established Young’s reputation as a great writer.

It follows the life of William and Kate Nesbitt and their grown-up children, tracing their trials and tribulations as modern life butts up against traditional values. One of the daughters, Lydia, leaves her husband to live with a novelist. William, a shipowner and the family’s steady centre, supports her. Kate, steeped in traditional respectability, cannot.

Two issues lie at the heart of the novel: the role of women and domestic life. Through Kate and William’s relationship, Young breaks new ground as a writer. She explores a later stage of life, when children have grown up. The husband and wife spend time alone and find themselves at odds.

This kind of astute characterisation exemplifies Young’s writing. As with many of Young’s novels, romantic love plays a very small part. The narrative emphasis falls, instead, on other types of relationships.

Women are seen to bear the main burdens of marriage and family life. Again and again, her characters rail against the smallness of middle-class female life and its social conventions.

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Place and psyche

The novel’s central tension plays out not only in the family, but also in the city they inhabit. William spans the docks and suburbs of fictional Radstowe, a thinly disguised Bristol.

As in Mrs Dalloway, place and psyche are deeply connected. Young uses the physical and social geography of Bristol to examine how women move through a world of unspoken rules.

Young lived in Bristol for 15 years. Most of her novels are set there – or rather in “Upper Radstowe”, her fictional version of real life suburban Clifton. She turned the city’s bridges, rivers and steep class divides into metaphors for the pressures placed on women navigating early 20th-century life.

In William, her characters feel real because they are flawed. The conflict between Lydia’s modern values and Kate’s traditional ones doesn’t resolve cleanly. Young isn’t interested in moralising. Instead, she observes. Her sharp wit, psychological acuity and feel for the rhythms of domestic life make William both an engrossing family novel and a quietly radical one.

Who was the woman behind Radstowe?

Emily Hilda Young was born in 1880 and died in 1949. She wrote 11 novels and was widely read in her day. Four of her novels were made into BBC radio dramas. Her 1930 novel Miss Mole was televised by the BBC in 1980.

Like many of her characters, Young led an unconventional life. During the first world war she worked as a stable hand and in a munitions factory. Her husband, a solicitor named Arthur Daniell, went off to fight. After Daniell was killed at Ypres in 1917, Young moved to London and got a job in a school where her married lover, Ralph Henderson, was the headmaster.

She was also a keen mountaineer in an era when there were few women climbers. She even pioneered and led others along a route, now known as Hope, in the Carneddau mountains in Eryri (Snowdonia) in 1915.

This quiet radicalism filters into her fiction. Her characters are often sharp-tongued, independent and disillusioned by the roles they’ve been expected to play.

It’s hard to place Young in a neat category, however. Her novels can hardly be described as romances. Love is often portrayed as destructive or imprisoning. Young was a feminist and campaigned for votes for women, but she saw human failings in both men and women. She admired strength of character in spite of gender.

If anything, she’s a 20th-century Jane Austen. Her narratives are witty portrayals of social and family life with psychological depth. In Young, though, there’s a mixture of openness and coldness, and a sarcastic sense of humour which emerges spontaneously. At times, it catches you off guard.

Like the best realist writers, Young’s world and its characters are richly drawn. And yet unlike Thomas Hardy or Leo Tolstoy, for instance, Young isn’t interested in tragedy or melodrama. Small troubles are overcome and people make up, even if it doesn’t result in a traditional happy ending.

Young’s legacy has faded, perhaps because her novels sit between genres: not quite realist, not quite modernist, not quite romantic. But as literary anniversaries prompt readers to revisit old favourites, there’s room to bring back overlooked voices.

For readers interested in the inner lives of women, in family dynamics, in novels where place and psychology are intertwined, E.H. Young is worth discovering. This year, rather than returning to the worlds of Clarissa Dalloway and Jay Gatsby, you could instead take a detour to Upper Radstowe, where quiet, deeply human dramas still unfold.

Rebecca Hutcheon, Research Fellow at the Faculty of Business and Creative Industries, University of South Wales

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

The new documentary One to One: John & Yoko offers an illuminating look into John Lennon’s post-Beatles activism with his partner Yoko Ono. It captures an early 1970s climate that was charged with political unrest and media saturation.

Rather than perpetuate the simplified myth of Lennon as a lone revolutionary figure, the film spotlights Ono’s equally influential role in their shared artistic and social endeavours. The film also highlights how Lennon and Ono aimed to galvanise a generation that had grown apathetic and disillusioned after the perceived failure of the 1960s “flower power” to deliver genuine social change.

The film adopts a pop-art, “channel surfing” aesthetic that situates the viewer in a recreated version of Lennon and Ono’s Greenwich Village apartment. This form plays on Lennon’s own television addiction. The story unfolds amid rapid cuts between Richard Nixon reelection speeches, anti-war demonstrations and playful consumer ads for laundry soap or ground beef – as if the viewer is surfing television channels.

These scenes coalesce into a surreal tapestry of commercialism and counterculture. The interplay echoes the way Lennon and Ono saw pop culture and radical activism as inescapably intertwined discourses. It underscores how even seemingly mundane aspects of consumer life impinged on their activism and vice versa.

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Lennon’s politics had emerged during his time as a Beatle, as evidenced in the song Revolution (1968). But it was Ono’s avant-garde sensibility that nudged him into more radical territory – both musically and socially.

I’ve researched Ono’s comedic artistry in her performance art. So I found the way One to One portrays Ono seamlessly blending her artistic principles with raw emotional outcries onstage especially compelling.

Her presence surfaces most powerfully in her onstage performance of Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow). There, her raw, piercing screams function as a form of cathartic protest rather than mere provocation. Despite widespread media ridicule (such as the infamous Chuck Berry footage that resurfaces on the internet every now and then), One to One clarifies that Ono’s screams constitute a highly personal mode of expression and resistance.

Later in the film, Lennon’s own raw performance of his song Mother (1970) reveals how much Ono’s techniques informed his own. The documentary explores the emotional origins behind Ono’s shrieks, situating them within the context of primal scream therapy. This provides an interesting background to Lennon’s own wailing on Mother, a song about the lingering feeling of abandonment he had experienced since childhood.

The film highlights a mutual borrowing. Lennon was not only the rock artist providing Ono exposure on the world’s stage but also a beneficiary of her experimental practices. Throughout the film, the couple are shown workshopping protest songs, connecting with countercultural figureheads such as poet Allen Ginsberg and activist Jerry Rubin, and aiding in counter-cultural protest of the American prison system.

This sense of reciprocity between the couple is at the core of One to One.

Complementary forces

The One to One Benefit Concerts in August of 1972 at Madison Square Garden are at the epicentre of this film. Far from a publicity stunt, the shows sought tangible outcomes. They ultimately raised over US$1.5 million (£1,149,000) for Willowbrook State School, a facility for children with disabilities. Coincidentally, Lennon and Ono learned about the school through watching TV.

The film includes an emotional scene of the children from Willowbrook playing in a park while Lennon performs Imagine. It shows how the song was never intended to canonise Lennon as a saint, but was rather to encourage social change.

Although their plans to bail out people in prison on a Free The People tour fell through, Lennon and Ono’s capacity for integrating live music with direct engagement resonates in the concert footage.

The film devotes considerable screen time to the concerts and crowd reactions. This portrays the physical energy of Lennon’s brand of rock ‘n’ roll and Ono’s more avant-garde flair as complementary forces. What emerges is a dynamic synergy, both onstage and off, that positions them as co-leaders of their own brand of pop activism.

Towards the end of the film is footage of Ono delivering a speech about the ridicule she has faced in society and performing the song Age 39 (Looking Over from My Hotel Window) at the First International Feminist Conference at Harvard University in 1973.

This segment includes home video footage of Ono walking among the witch sites of Salem, Massachusetts, symbolising her shifting role in society. She explains that she was “upgraded” from a “bitch” to a “witch”. One to One’s portrayal of Ono as a collaborator of Lennon’s rather than a reduction of her to a romantic partner points to how the narrative tide is changing, and Ono is finally getting her due recognition.

One to One captures a moment when their combined artistry, activism, and mutual exchange of vocal techniques converged – creating an indelible record of how two personalities shaped protest music, pop culture and each other.

Stephanie Hernandez, PhD Candidate, Literature and Music, University of Liverpool

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

Imagine suddenly losing the ability to move a limb, walk or speak. You would probably recognise this as a medical emergency and get to hospital.

Now imagine the doctors at the hospital run some tests and then say, “Good news! All your tests were normal, clear scans, and nothing is wrong. You can go home!” Yet, you are still experiencing very real and disabling symptoms.

Unfortunately, this is the experience of many people with functional neurological disorder. Even worse, some are blamed and reprimanded for exaggerating or faking their symptoms.

So, what is this disorder, and why is it so challenging to recognise and treat?

What is functional neurological disorder?

Neurological disorders are conditions that affect how the nervous system works. The nervous system sends and receives messages between the brain and other parts of your body to regulate a wide range of functions, such as movement, speaking, vision, thinking and digestion.

To the untrained eye, functional neurological disorder can resemble other conditions such as stroke, multiple sclerosis or epilepsy.

But, unlike these conditions, functional neurological symptoms aren’t due to damage or a disease process affecting the nervous system. This means the disorder doesn’t appear on routine brain imaging and other tests.

Functional symptoms are, instead, due to dysfunction in the processing of information between several brain networks. Simply put, it’s a problem of the brain’s software, not the hardware.

What are the symptoms?

Functional neurological disorder can produce a kaleidoscope of diverse and changing symptoms. This often adds to confusion for patients and make diagnosis more challenging.

Symptoms may include paralysis or abnormal movements such as tremors, jerks and tics. This often leads to difficulty walking or coordinating movements.

Sensory symptoms may involve numbness, tingling or loss of vision.

Dissociative symptoms, such as functional seizures and blackouts, are also common.

Some people experience cognitive symptoms including brain fog or problems finding the right words. Fatigue and chronic pain frequently coexist with these symptoms.

These symptoms can be severe and distressing and, without treatment, can persist for years. For example, some people with functional neurological disorder cannot walk and must use a wheelchair for decades.

Diagnosis involves identifying established diagnostic signs and ensuring no other diagnoses are missed. This process is best carried out by an experienced neurologist or neuropsychiatrist.

How common is it?

Functional neurological disorder is one of the most common medical conditions seen in emergency care and in outpatient neurology clinics.

It affects around 10–22 people per 100,000 per year. This makes it more common than multiple sclerosis.

Despite this, it is often under-recognised and misunderstood by health-care professionals. This leads to delays in diagnosis and treatment.

This lack of awareness also contributes to the perception that it’s rare, when it’s actually common among neurological disorders.

Who does functional neurological disorder affect?

This condition can affect anyone, although it is more common in women and younger people. Around two thirds of patients are female, but this gender disparity reduces with age.

Understanding of the disorder has developed significantly over the past few decades, but there’s still more to learn. Several biological, psychological, and social factors can predispose people.

Genetics, traumatic life experiences, anxiety and depression can increase the risk. Stressful life events, illness, or physical injuries can trigger or worsen existing symptoms.

But not everyone with the disorder has experienced significant trauma or stress.

How is it treated?

If left untreated, about half the people with this condition will remain the same or their symptoms will worsen. However, with the help of experienced clinicians, many people can make rapid recoveries when treatment starts early.

There are no specific medications for functional neurological disorder but personalised rehabilitation guided by experienced clinicians is recommended.

Some people may need a team of multidisciplinary clinicians that may include physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists, psychologists and doctors.

People also need accurate information about their condition, because understanding and beliefs about the disorder play an important role in recovery. Accurate information helps patients to develop more realistic expectations, reduces anxiety and can empower people to be more active in their recovery.

Treating common co-existing conditions, such as anxiety or depression, can also be helpful.

A dark history

The origins of the disorder are deeply rooted in the sexist history of its pre-scientific ancestor – hysteria. The legacy of hysteria has cast a long shadow, contributing to a misogynistic bias in perception and treatment. This historical context has led to ongoing stigma, where symptoms were often labelled as psychological and not warranting treatment.

Women with functional symptoms often face scepticism and dismissal. In some cases, significant harm occurs through stigmatisation, inadequate care and poor management. Modern medicine has attempted to address these biases by recognising functional neurological disorder as a legitimate condition.

A lack of education for medical professionals likely contributes to stigma. Many clinicians report low confidence and knowledge about their ability to manage the disorder.

A bright future?

Fortunately, awareness, research and interest has grown over the past decade. Many treatment approaches are being trialled, including specialist physiotherapy, psychological therapies and non-invasive brain stimulation.

Patient-led organisations and support networks are making headway advocating for improvements in health systems, research and education. The goal is to unite patients, their families, clinicians, and researchers to advance a new standard of care across the world.

Benjamin Scrivener, PhD Candidate, Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau

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

Earlier this year, scientists discovered a peculiar term appearing in published papers: “vegetative electron microscopy”.

This phrase, which sounds technical but is actually nonsense, has become a “digital fossil” – an error preserved and reinforced in artificial intelligence (AI) systems that is nearly impossible to remove from our knowledge repositories.

Like biological fossils trapped in rock, these digital artefacts may become permanent fixtures in our information ecosystem.

The case of vegetative electron microscopy offers a troubling glimpse into how AI systems can perpetuate and amplify errors throughout our collective knowledge.

A bad scan and an error in translation

Vegetative electron microscopy appears to have originated through a remarkable coincidence of unrelated errors.

First, two papers from the 1950s, published in the journal Bacteriological Reviews, were scanned and digitised.

However, the digitising process erroneously combined “vegetative” from one column of text with “electron” from another. As a result, the phantom term was created.

Decades later, “vegetative electron microscopy” turned up in some Iranian scientific papers. In 2017 and 2019, two papers used the term in English captions and abstracts.

This appears to be due to a translation error. In Farsi, the words for “vegetative” and “scanning” differ by only a single dot.

An error on the rise

The upshot? As of today, “vegetative electron microscopy” appears in 22 papers, according to Google Scholar. One was the subject of a contested retraction from a Springer Nature journal, and Elsevier issued a correction for another.

The term also appears in news articles discussing subsequent integrity investigations.

Vegetative electron microscopy began to appear more frequently in the 2020s. To find out why, we had to peer inside modern AI models – and do some archaeological digging through the vast layers of data they were trained on.

Empirical evidence of AI contamination

The large language models behind modern AI chatbots such as ChatGPT are “trained” on huge amounts of text to predict the likely next word in a sequence. The exact contents of a model’s training data are often a closely guarded secret.

To test whether a model “knew” about vegetative electron microscopy, we input snippets of the original papers to find out if the model would complete them with the nonsense term or more sensible alternatives.

The results were revealing. OpenAI’s GPT-3 consistently completed phrases with “vegetative electron microscopy”. Earlier models such as GPT-2 and BERT did not. This pattern helped us isolate when and where the contamination occurred.

We also found the error persists in later models including GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5. This suggests the nonsense term may now be permanently embedded in AI knowledge bases.

By comparing what we know about the training datasets of different models, we identified the CommonCrawl dataset of scraped internet pages as the most likely vector where AI models first learned this term.

The scale problem

Finding errors of this sort is not easy. Fixing them may be almost impossible.

One reason is scale. The CommonCrawl dataset, for example, is millions of gigabytes in size. For most researchers outside large tech companies, the computing resources required to work at this scale are inaccessible.

Another reason is a lack of transparency in commercial AI models. OpenAI and many other developers refuse to provide precise details about the training data for their models. Research efforts to reverse engineer some of these datasets have also been stymied by copyright takedowns.

When errors are found, there is no easy fix. Simple keyword filtering could deal with specific terms such as vegetative electron microscopy. However, it would also eliminate legitimate references (such as this article).

More fundamentally, the case raises an unsettling question. How many other nonsensical terms exist in AI systems, waiting to be discovered?

Implications for science and publishing

This “digital fossil” also raises important questions about knowledge integrity as AI-assisted research and writing become more common.

Publishers have responded inconsistently when notified of papers including vegetative electron microscopy. Some have retracted affected papers, while others defended them. Elsevier notably attempted to justify the term’s validity before eventually issuing a correction.

We do not yet know if other such quirks plague large language models, but it is highly likely. Either way, the use of AI systems has already created problems for the peer-review process.

For instance, observers have noted the rise of “tortured phrases” used to evade automated integrity software, such as “counterfeit consciousness” instead of “artificial intelligence”. Additionally, phrases such as “I am an AI language model” have been found in other retracted papers.

Some automatic screening tools such as Problematic Paper Screener now flag vegetative electron microscopy as a warning sign of possible AI-generated content. However, such approaches can only address known errors, not undiscovered ones.

Living with digital fossils

The rise of AI creates opportunities for errors to become permanently embedded in our knowledge systems, through processes no single actor controls. This presents challenges for tech companies, researchers, and publishers alike.

Tech companies must be more transparent about training data and methods. Researchers must find new ways to evaluate information in the face of AI-generated convincing nonsense. Scientific publishers must improve their peer review processes to spot both human and AI-generated errors.

Digital fossils reveal not just the technical challenge of monitoring massive datasets, but the fundamental challenge of maintaining reliable knowledge in systems where errors can become self-perpetuating.

Aaron J. Snoswell, Research Fellow in AI Accountability, Queensland University of Technology; Kevin Witzenberger, Research Fellow, GenAI Lab, Queensland University of Technology, and Rayane El Masri, PhD Candidate, GenAI Lab, Queensland University of Technology

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

In the 21st century, digital technology has changed many aspects of our lives. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is the latest newcomer, with chatbots and other AI tools changing how we learn and creating considerable philosophical and legal challenges regarding what it means to “outsource thinking”.

But the emergence of technology that changes the way we live is not a new issue. The change from analogue to digital technology began around the 1960s and this “digital revolution” is what brought us the internet. An entire generation of people who lived and worked through this evolution are now entering their early 80s.

So what can we learn from them about the impact of technology on the ageing brain? A comprehensive new study from researchers at the University of Texas and Baylor University in the United States provides important answers.

Published today in Nature Human Behaviour, it found no supporting evidence for the “digital dementia” hypothesis. In fact, it found the use of computers, smartphones and the internet among people over 50 might actually be associated with lower rates of cognitive decline.

What is ‘digital dementia’?

Much has been written about the potential negative impact from technology on the human brain.

According to the “digital dementia” hypothesis introduced by German neuroscientist and psychiatrist Manfred Spitzer in 2012, increased use of digital devices has resulted in an over-reliance on technology. In turn, this has weakened our overall cognitive ability.

Three areas of concern regarding the use of technology have previously been noted:

1. An increase in passive screen time. This refers to technology use which does not require significant thought or participation, such as watching TV or scrolling social media.

2. Offloading cognitive abilities to technology, such as no longer memorising phone numbers because they are kept in our contact list.

3. Increased susceptibility to distraction.

Why is this new study important?

We know technology can impact how our brain develops. But the effect of technology on how our brain ages is less understood.

This new study by neuropsychologists Jared Benge and Michael Scullin is important because it examines the impact of technology on older people who have experienced significant changes in the way they use technology across their life.

The new study performed what is known as a meta-analysis where the results of many previous studies are combined. The authors searched for studies examining technology use in people aged over 50 and examined the association with cognitive decline or dementia. They found 57 studies which included data from more than 411,000 adults. The included studies measured cognitive decline based on lower performance on cognitive tests or a diagnosis of dementia.

A reduced risk of cognitive decline

Overall, the study found greater use of technology was associated with a reduced risk of cognitive decline. Statistical tests were used to determine the “odds” of having cognitive decline based on exposure to technology. An odds ratio under 1 indicates a reduced risk from exposure and the combined odds ratio in this study was 0.42. This means higher use of technology was associated with a 58% risk reduction for cognitive decline.

This benefit was found even when the effect of other things known to contribute to cognitive decline, such as socioeconomic status and other health factors, were accounted for.

Interestingly, the magnitude of the effect of technology use on brain function found in this study was similar or stronger than other known protective factors, such as physical activity (approximately a 35% risk reduction), or maintaining a healthy blood pressure (approximately a 13% risk reduction).

However, it is important to understand that there are far more studies conducted over many years examining the benefits of managing blood pressure and increasing physical activty, and the mechanisms through which they help protect our brains are far more understood.

It is also a lot easier to measure blood pressure than it is use of technology. A strength of this study is that it considered these difficulties by focusing on certain aspects of technology use but excluded others such as brain training games.

These findings are encouraging. But we still can’t say technology use causes better cognitive function. More research is needed to see if these findings are replicated in different groups of people (especially those from low and middle income countries) who were underrepresented in this study, and to understand why this relationship might occur.

A question of ‘how’ we use technology

In reality, it’s simply not feasible to live in the world today without using some form of technology. Everything from paying bills to booking our next holiday is now almost completely done online. Maybe we should instead be thinking about how we use technology.

Cognitively stimulating activities such as reading, learning a new language and playing music – particularly in early adulthood – can help protect our brains as we age.

Greater engagement with technology across our lifespan may be a form of stimulating our memory and thinking, as we adapt to new software updates or learn how to use a new smartphone. It has been suggested this “technological reserve” may be good for our brains.

Technology may also help us to stay socially connected, and help us stay independent for longer.

A rapidly changing digital world

While findings from this study show it’s unlikely all digital technology is bad for us, the way we interact and rely on it is rapidly changing

The impact of AI on the ageing brain will only become evident in future decades. However, our ability to adapt to historical technological innovations, and the potential for this to support cognitive function, suggests the future may not be all bad.

For example, advances in brain-computer interfaces offer new hope for those experiencing the impact of neurological disease or disability.

However, the potential downsides of technology are real, particularly for younger people, including poor mental health. Future research will help determine how we can capture the benefits of technology while limiting the potential for harm.

Nikki-Anne Wilson, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA), UNSW Sydney

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

Seeing a medical specialist can leave you with significant out-of-pocket costs. Yet political parties have not adequately addressed this in their pre-election bids.

Labor has promised A$7 million to expand the government’s Medical Costs Finder website, which potentially allows you to compare specialists’ fees. But it hasn’t outlined a policy to lower these fees. The Coalition and the Greens have not addressed specialists’ fees directly.

During a cost-of-living crisis, this is a major omission.

Specialists’ fees are high, vary across specialties and across geographical regions.

That’s what we found when we used actual Medicare data to map costs across Australia to see a specialist doctor.

What we did and what we found

We used data from the national 2023 Medicare Benefits Schedule (or MBS) accessed from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. We calculated mean (average) fees charged by doctors in 17 specialties for initial face-to-face appointments after a GP referral.

Under MBS billing rules, different specialties use different item numbers (104 or 110) for an initial consultation. These attracted a different Medicare schedule fee ($91.80 and $161.90, respectively, as of January 2023). These schedule fees are what Medicare considers a fair price for doctors to charge.

Most patients pay the gap between 85% of the Medicare schedule fee and the specialist’s fee. This is their out-of-pocket cost. But that percentage can differ, depending on the circumstances. So not all patients have the same out-of-pocket costs for the same consultation.

We only looked at fees charged by private specialists at private clinics. We didn’t include free specialist care in public clinics. Nor did we look at GP fees.

We then looked at how specialists’ fees varied by patients’ geographical location to create some maps.

Use the map below to search for mean specialists’ fees and mean out-of-pocket costs for cardiology, rheumatology, neurology, and oral and maxillofacial surgery.

Fees for the other 13 specialties we looked at are available via maps on the HALE Hub’s Australian Healthcare Atlas website.

Which specialists charged the most?

Specialist fees varied substantially. On average, rheumatology had the highest fees, followed by neurology and immunology. Oral and maxillofacial surgery had the lowest fees, followed by general surgery.

Some specialties used the item number that attracted the $91.80 Medicare schedule fee. But almost all these specialists (except for general surgery) charged more than twice this amount (an average $183.60) in at least 80% of geographical areas.

Other specialties used the item number that attracted the $161.90 Medicare schedule fee. This included rheumatologists, which charged an average of over $323.80 (twice the schedule fee) in 17.6% of geographical areas. Neurologists charged the same amount in 19.2% of geographical areas.

Which parts of the country had the highest fees?

Certain states and territories consistently had higher fees for some specialties. For example:

• cardiology was most expensive in Western Australia, Australian Capital Territory and Queensland

• orthopaedics was most expensive in ACT, New South Wales and Queensland

• obstetrics was most expensive in ACT, WA and NSW.

High fees matter

Higher specialists’ fees directly translate to patients’ higher out-of-pocket costs. That’s because Medicare rebates are fixed, and private health insurance does not cover out-of-hospital consultations.

If patients avoid their initial consultation due to cost, their health can worsen over time, potentially leading to more expensive treatments later.

Higher specialists’ fees and the barrier to care could also entrench inequalities. That’s because people in lower socioeconomic groups already tend to have worse health.

What can I do?

You can use our maps to look at what specialists charge near you. Although the maps use 2023 data and look at average fees and out-of-pocket costs, you can get a general idea. Then you can call specialists’ offices and the receptionist will tell you how much the doctor charges for an initial appointment.

If there are several referral options, comparing fees will help you make an informed decision about your health care, alongside wait times, geographical location, quality of care and other factors. You can discuss these issues with your GP so they can refer you to the best available specialist for your circumstances.

What else can we do?

1. Make fees transparent

Patients often do not know how much a specialist consultation costs until they arrive at the doctor’s office. GPs typically do not refer to specialists based on their fees and often don’t know them anyway.

The government’s Medical Costs Finder website relies on doctors voluntarily reporting their fees. But only a few report them.

If re-elected, the Labor government says it will upgrade the website to display the average fee charged by every eligible specialist (other than GPs) using Medicare data, without asking doctors to spend time inputting their fees.

This is a welcome move. But the government should also mandate disclosure of fees on the website, which would be more up-to-date than looking back through past Medicare data.

2. Doctors need more advice, and can help

Specialists in Australia can charge what they like, and as we’ve found, sometimes way above the Medicare schedule fee.

But professional medical colleges can provide guides on how to set “reasonable” fees. They can also develop codes of conduct about fee practices, and counsel members who consistently charge high fees.

Once specialists’ fees are more transparent, GPs can inform patients about fee variations and options for more affordable care.

3. We need more public clinics

Government could also open more public clinics that offer free specialist care for those who cannot afford large gap fees in private clinics. This type of investment may be warranted in some low-socioeconomic areas if we’re aiming for all Australians to receive the specialist care they need.

Yuting Zhang, Professor of Health Economics, The University of Melbourne and Chenhao Liang, Foundation Fellow and Data Analyst, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne

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

When parents are concerned about their child’s development, they often seek an assessment to address concerns and identify any conditions, such as autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or learning disorders.

Common worries include difficulties making friends, focusing on tasks, or meeting educational goals.

It might seem counter-intuitive but assessments are starting to focus on a child’s strengths during this process. This can create powerful opportunities to improve child and family outcomes, particularly when too much of the focus is on challenges in the family home, school and play settings.

There is, however, a lack of evidence about how to do such assessments and how certain strengths can be used in assessment.

In a new research paper, we have developed a strengths checklist for parents, carers and clinicians to more easily identify children’s skills, talents and positive qualities – and understand the type of support they need at home, school or socially.

The aim was to provide an easy way for parents and clinicians to identify strengths in children, and to provide a method for studying the role of strengths in development. This assessment can be used alongside more established assessments of challenges.

Why highlight a child’s strengths?

Focusing on a child’s strengths can have a powerful impact on children and parents. It can boost a child’s motivation, self-esteem, cognitive skills, language development, problem-solving abilities and build stronger relationships.

For parents and caregivers, it can increase their own feelings of self-worth and improve the quality of their relationship with their own children.

When parents and caregivers believe in their child’s abilities and encourage their strengths, children and families thrive.

However, there are many gaps in research about how to apply a strengths-based approach in the context of a neurodevelopmental assessment.

Currently, while the basic principle of incorporating strengths is clear, clinicians need to rely on intuition and creativity to guide their practices.

We have long needed better evidence-based methods to guide this.

This is where our research comes in

Our new study used the Sydney Child Neurodevelopment Research Registry, which aims to improve the neurodevelopmental assessment processes and the evidence for what works for families and clinicians. We asked caregivers to identify their child’s strengths on their first assessment visit.

Nearly 700 caregivers reported an average of 2.8 strengths about their children. Using these themes, we developed a child strengths checklist to use for clinical assessments.

We showed caregivers identified six categories of child strengths: cognitive and intellectual, social and interpersonal, hobbies and passions, character and personality, physical, and resilient behaviours.

Some caregivers might report that while their child had difficulty with peer interactions, they were also kind, affectionate, honest and caring.

Other caregivers described concerns about cognitive delays, but they also described how children persevered and persisted with tasks.

Analysing the data qualitatively – where we read caregiver transcripts and extracted themes – we captured the richness and detail of unique strengths. In total, we identified 61 unique strengths.

With community representatives and clinicians, we used this to develop a strengths-based checklist we’re calling the Child Autism and Neurodevelopment Strengths Checklist, or the CANS checklist.

This type of research will provide the evidence needed to be able to implement national guidelines and to develop better evidence about how strengths can be used to improve outcomes. We want to develop best practices for combining concerns and strengths into feedback, support plans and intervention strategies.

What can caregivers and clinicians do now?

Support schemes including the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) often require families to highlight what children can’t do. Still, there are some practical ways caregivers and clinicians can ensure a child’s strengths are kept front and centre.

For caregivers, along with discussing concerns, reflect on and talk with your clinicians about your child’s strengths. Make sure clinicians keep these in mind when devising supports.

For both caregivers and clinicians, it can be helpful to think about characteristics often seen as challenges – such as a strong need for routine – as also potential strengths. It may lead to new ways of supporting children. With the right environment and support, these traits can be valuable assets in a child’s development.

For clinicians, consider how a child’s strengths can inform your assessment and intervention strategies. Make sure you don’t only focus on what children can’t do or need support with.

Communicate clearly about the child’s strengths and consider how these strengths can:

• support the child’s long-term development and goals. If the child thrives on routine and pays close attention to details, showing them how to embrace these strengths can teach them how to use them to reach their own goals and to be more independent

• be the target of an intervention. Everyone needs to experience success. Designing activities around strengths can make intervention more enjoyable and engaging, and the effects are more likely to be long-lasting

• be used to support the wellbeing of families. Helping families focus on each other’s strengths and improve the way family members talk about and support one another creates a positive environment where they can all feel valued, respected and cared for.

By focusing on strengths, we want to create more effective and personalised support for children with neurodevelopmental conditions to reach their full potential.

Building a strong, evidence-based approach will help ensure children’s strengths are consistently considered in assessments and intervention planning. 

Adam Guastella, Professor and Clinical Psychologist, Michael Crouch Chair in Child and Youth Mental Health, University of Sydney; Kelsie Boulton, Senior Research Fellow in Child Neurodevelopment, Brain and Mind Centre, University of Sydney, and Natalie Silove, Neurodevelopmental Paediatrician and Associate Professor, University of Sydney

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

Pope Francis has died on Easter Monday, aged 88, the Vatican announced. The head of the Catholic Church had recently survived being hospitalised with double pneumonia.

Cardinal Kevin Farrell’s announcement began:

Dear brothers and sisters, with deep sorrow I must announce the death of our Holy Father Francis. At 7:35 this morning, the Bishop of Rome, Francis, returned to the house of the Father.

There were many unusual aspects of Pope Francis’ papacy. He was the first Jesuit pope, the first from the Americas (and the southern hemisphere), the first to choose the name “Francis” and the first to give a TED talk. He was also the first pope in more than 600 years to be elected following the resignation, rather than death, of his predecessor.

From the very start of his papacy, Francis seemed determined to do things differently and present the papacy in a new light. Even in thinking about his burial, he chose the unexpected: to be placed to rest not in the Vatican, but in the Basilica of St Mary Major in Rome – the first pope to be buried there in hundreds of years.

Vatican News reported the late Pope Francis had requested his funeral rites be simplified.

“The renewed rite,” said Archbishop Diego Ravelli, “seeks to emphasise even more that the funeral of the Roman Pontiff is that of a pastor and disciple of Christ and not of a powerful person of this world.”

Straddling a line between “progressive” and “conservative”, Francis experienced tension with both sides. In doing so, his papacy shone a spotlight on what it means to be Catholic today.

Between a rock and a hard place

Francis was deemed not progressive enough by some, yet far too progressive by others.

His apostolic exhortation (an official papal teaching on a particular issue or action) Amoris Laetitia, ignited great controversy for seemingly being (more) open to the question of whether people who have divorced and remarried may receive Eucharist.

He also disappointed progressive Catholics, many of whom hoped he would make stronger changes on issues such as the roles of women, married clergy, and the broader inclusion of LGBTQIA+ Catholics.

The reception of his exhortation Querida Amazonia was one such example. In this document, Francis did not endorse marriage for priests, despite bishops’ requests for this. He also did not allow the possibility of women being ordained as deacons to address a shortage of ordained ministers. His discerning spirit saw there was too much division and no clear consensus for change.

Francis was also openly critical of Germany’s controversial “Synodal Way” – a series of conferences with bishops and lay people – that advocated for positions contrary to Church teachings. Francis expressed concern on multiple occasions that this project was a threat to the unity of the Church.

At the same time, Francis was no stranger to controversy from the conservative side of the Church, receiving “dubia” or “theological doubts” over his teaching from some of his Cardinals. In 2023, he took the unusual step of responding to some of these doubts.

Impact on the Catholic Church

In many ways, the most striking thing about Francis was not his words or theology, but his style. He was a modest man, even foregoing the Apostolic Palace’s grand papal apartments to live in the Vatican’s simpler guest house.

He may well be remembered most for his simplicity of dress and habits, his welcoming and pastoral style and his wise spirit of discernment.

He is recognised as giving a clear witness to the life, love and joy of Jesus in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council – a point of major reform in modern Church history. This witness has translated into two major developments in Church teachings and life.

Love for our common home

The first of these relates to environmental teachings. In 2015, Francis released his ground-breaking encyclical, Laudato si’: On Care for Our Common Home. It expanded Catholic social teaching by giving a comprehensive account of how the environment reflects our God-given “common home”.

Consistent with recent popes such as Benedict XVI and John Paul II, Francis acknowledged climate change and its destructive impacts and causes. He summarised key scientific research to forcefully argue for an evidence-based approach to addressing humans’ impact on the environment.

He also made a pivotal and innovative contribution to the climate change debate by identifying the ethical and spiritual causes of environmental destruction.

Francis argued combating climate change relied on the “ecological conversion” of the human heart, so that people may recognise the God-given nature of our planet and the fundamental call to care for it. Without this conversion, pragmatic and political measures wouldn’t be able to counter the forces of consumerism, exploitation and selfishness.

Francis argued a new ethic and spirituality was needed. Specifically, he said Jesus’ way of love – for other people and all creation – is the transformative force that could bring sustainable change for the environment and cultivate fraternity among people (and especially with the poor).

Synodality: moving towards a Church that listens

Francis’s second major contribution, and one of the most significant aspects of his papacy, was his commitment to “synodality”. While there’s still confusion over what synodality actually means, and its potential for political distortion, it is above all a way of listening and discerning through openness to the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

It involves hierarchy and lay people transparently and honestly discerning together, in service of the mission of the church. Synodality is as much about the process as the goal. This makes sense as Pope Francis was a Jesuit, an order focused on spreading Catholicism through spiritual formation and discernment.

Drawing on his rich Jesuit spirituality, Francis introduced a way of conversation centred on listening to the Holy Spirit and others, while seeking to cultivate friendship and wisdom.

With the conclusion of the second session of the Synod on Synodality in October 2024, it is too soon to assess its results. However, those who have been involved in synodal processes have reported back on their transformative potential.

Archbishop of Brisbane, Mark Coleridge, explained how participating in the 2015 Synod “was an extraordinary experience [and] in some ways an awakening”.

Catholicism in the modern age

Francis’ papacy inspired both great joy and aspirations, as well as boiling anger and rejection. He laid bare the agonising fault lines within the Catholic community and struck at key issues of Catholic identity, triggering debate over what it means to be Catholic in the world today.

He leaves behind a Church that seems more divided than ever, with arguments, uncertainty and many questions rolling in his wake. But he has also provided a way for the Church to become more converted to Jesus’ way of love, through synodality and dialogue.

Francis showed us that holding labels such as “progressive” or “conservative” won’t enable the Church to live out Jesus’ mission of love – a mission he emphasised from the very beginning of his papacy.

Joel Hodge, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Theology and Philosophy, Australian Catholic University and Antonia Pizzey, Postdoctoral Researcher Research Centre for Studies of the Second Vatican Council, Australian Catholic University

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

The death of Pope Francis has been announced by the Vatican. I first met the late Pope Francis at the Vatican after a conference called Saving Our Common Home and the Future of Life on Earth in July 2018. My colleagues and I sensed something momentous was happening at the heart of the church.

At that time, I was helping to set up the new Laudato Si’ research institute at the Jesuit Hall at the University of Oxford. This institute is named after the pope’s 2015 encyclical (a letter to bishops outlining church policy) on climate change.

Its mission is rooted in the pope’s religiously inspired vision of integral ecology – a multidisciplinary approach that addresses social and ecological issues of equality and climate breakdown.

Originating from Argentina, Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pope, witnessed firsthand the destruction of the Amazon and the plight of South America’s poorest communities. His concern for justice for vulnerable communities and protection of the planet go hand in hand with his religious leadership.

In his first papal letter, Laudato Si’, he called for all people, not just Catholics, to pay more attention to the frailty of both our planet and its people. What we need is no less than a cultural revolution, he wrote. As a theologian, I recognise that he inspired significant change in three key ways.

1. At global climate summits

It’s no coincidence that Pope Francis released Laudato Si’ at a crucial moment in 2015 prior to the UN climate summit, Cop21, in Paris. A follow-up exhortation, or official statement, Laudate Deum, was released in October 2023, just before another UN climate summit, Cop28 in Dubai.

Did the decisions at these global meetings shift because of the influence of Pope Francis? Potentially, yes. In Laudate Deum, Pope Francis showed both encouragement and some frustration about the achievements of international agreements so far.

He berated the weakness of international politics and believes that Cop21 represented a “significant moment” because the agreement involved everyone.

After Cop21, he pointed out how most nations had failed to implement the Paris agreement which called for limiting the global temperature rise in this century to below 2°C. He also called out the lack of monitoring of those commitments and subsequent political inertia. He tried his best to use his prominent position to hold power to account.

Promoting a general moral awareness of the need to act in ecologically responsible ways, both in international politics and at the local level is something that previous popes, Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI also did. But, Pope Francis’s efforts went beyond that, by connecting much more broadly with grassroots movements.

2. By advocating for Indigenous people

Cop28 marked the first time that close to 200 countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels. Pope Francis’s interventions potentially helped shift the needle just a little in the desired direction.

His emphasis on listening to Indigenous people may have influenced these gatherings. Compared with previous global climate summits, Cop28 arguably opened up the opportunity to listen to the voices of Indigenous people.

However, Indigenous people were still disappointed by the outcomes of Cop28. Pope Francis’s lesser-known exhortation Querida Amazonia, which means “beloved Amazonia”, was published in February 2020.

This exhortation resulted from his conversations with Amazonian communities and helped put Indigenous perspectives on the map. Those perspectives helped shape Catholic social teaching in the encyclical Fratelli Tutti, which means “all brothers and sisters”, published on October 3 2020.

For many people living in developing countries where extractive industries such as oil and gas or mining are rife, destruction of land coincides with direct threats to life. Pope Francis advocated for Indigenous environmental defenders, many of whom have been inspired to act by their strong faith.

For example, Father Marcelo Pérez, an Indigenous priest living in Mexico, was murdered by drug dealers just after saying mass on October 23 2023 as part of the cost of defending the rights of his people and their land.

While 196 environmental defenders were killed globally in 2023, Pope Francis continued to advocate on behalf of the most marginalised people as well as the environment.

3. By inspiring activism

I’ve been speaking to religious climate activists from different church backgrounds in the UK as part of a multidisciplinary research project on religion, theology and climate change based at the University of Manchester. Most notably, when we asked more than 300 activists representing six different activist groups who most influenced them to get involved in climate action, 61% named Pope Francis as a key influencer.

On a larger scale, Laudato Si’ gave rise to the Laudato Si’ movement which coordinates climate activism across the globe. It has 900 Catholic organisations as well as 10,000 of what are known as Laudato Si’ “animators”, who are all ambassadors and leaders in their respective communities.

Our institute’s ecclesial affiliate, Tomás Insua, based in Assisi, Italy, originally helped pioneer this global Laudato Si’ movement. We host a number of ecumenical gatherings which bring together people from different denominations and hopefully motivate churchgoers to think and act in a more climate-conscious way.

Nobody knows who the next pope might be. Given the current turmoil in politics and shutting down of political will to address the climate emergency, we can only hope they will build on the legacy of Pope Francis and influence political change for the good, from the grassroots frontline right up to the highest global ambitions.

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Celia Deane-Drummond, Professor of Theology, Director of Laudato Si' Research Institute, Campion Hall, University of Oxford

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

Beneath the surface of the Southern Ocean, vast volumes of cold, dense water plunge off the Antarctic continental shelf, cascading down underwater cliffs to the ocean floor thousands of metres below. These hidden waterfalls are a key part of the global ocean’s overturning circulation – a vast conveyor belt of currents that moves heat, carbon, and nutrients around the world, helping to regulate Earth’s climate.

For decades, scientists have struggled to observe these underwater waterfalls of dense water around Antarctica. They occur in some of the most remote and stormy waters on the planet, often shrouded by sea ice and funnelled through narrow canyons that are easily missed by research ships.

But our new research shows that satellites, orbiting hundreds of kilometres above Earth, can detect these sub-sea falls.

By measuring tiny dips in sea level – just a few centimetres – we can now track the dense water cascades from space. This breakthrough lets us monitor the deepest branches of the ocean circulation, which are slowing down as Antarctic ice melts and surface waters warm.

Dense water helps regulate the climate

Antarctic dense water is formed when sea ice grows, in the process making nearby water saltier and more dense. This heavy water then spreads across the continental shelf until it finds a path to spill over the edge, plunging down steep underwater slopes into the deep.

As the dense water flows northward along the seafloor, it brings oxygen and nutrients into the abyss – as well as carbon and heat drawn from the atmosphere.

But this crucial process is under threat. Climate change is melting the Antarctic ice sheet, adding fresh meltwater into the ocean and making it harder for dense water to form.

Past research has shown the abyssal circulation has already slowed by 30%, and is likely to weaken further in the years ahead. This could reduce the ocean’s ability to absorb heat and carbon, accelerating climate change.

Our research provides a new technique that can provide easy, direct observations of future changes in the Southern Ocean abyssal overturning circulation.

Satellites and sea level

Until now, tracking dense water cascades around Antarctica has relied on moorings, ship-based surveys, and even sensors attached to seals. While these methods deliver valuable local insights, they are costly, logistically demanding, carbon-intensive, and only cover a limited area.

Satellite data offers an alternative. Using radar, satellites such as CryoSat-2 and Sentinel-3A can measure changes in sea surface height to within a few centimetres.

And thanks to recent advances in data processing, we can now extract reliable measurements even in ice-covered regions – by peering at the sea surface through cracks and openings in the sea ice.

In our study, we combined nearly a decade of satellite observations with high-resolution ocean models focused on the Ross Sea. This is a critical hotspot for Antarctic dense water formation.

We discovered that dense water cascades leave a telltale surface signal: a subtle but consistent dip in sea level, caused by the cold, heavy water sinking beneath it.

By tracking these subtle sea level dips, we developed a new way to monitor year-to-year changes in dense water cascades along the Antarctic continental shelf. The satellite signal we identified aligns well with observations collected by other means, giving us confidence that this method can reliably detect meaningful shifts in deep ocean circulation.

Cheap and effective – with no carbon emissions

This is the first time Antarctic dense water cascades have been monitored from space. What makes this approach so powerful is its ability to deliver long-term, wide-reaching observations at low cost and with zero carbon emissions – using satellites that are already in orbit.

These innovations are especially important as we work to monitor a rapidly changing climate system. The strength of deep Antarctic currents remains one of the major uncertainties in global climate projections.

Gaining the ability to track their changes from space offers a powerful new way to monitor our changing climate – and to shape more effective strategies for adaptation.

Matthis Auger, Research Associate in Physical Oceanography, University of Tasmania

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

Far from causing trade frictions, an Australian buyout of the Port of Darwin lease may provide a lifeline for its struggling Chinese parent company Landbridge Group.

Both Labor and the Coalition have proposed such a buyout based on national security grounds.

But neither party has placed a dollar amount on a potential buyout, preferring to seek out private investors first. Any enforced acquisition would need to provide fair market value compensation to Landbridge.

The previous Northern Territory government leased the port to Landbridge for 99 years in 2015. The A$506 million contract was supported by the then Turnbull government.

Finding a buyer

This could put Australian taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars. Private investors might baulk at taking on a port lease that has consistently lost money for many years.

It is not clear why the national security situation has changed. The latest government inquiry found there were no security risks requiring Landbridge to divest their lease.

The more pressing risk threatening the port is a financial one.

Troubled times

If Landbridge Group, which holds the lease through its Australian subsidiary, declares insolvency, it will no longer be able to sustain the port’s operations. And the terminal could not support itself.

Several hundred employees would lose their jobs, and serious disruptions to trade and cruise ship tourism would follow.

The Australian media reported last November that the Port of Darwin racked up losses of $34 million in the 2023–24 financial year. Yet this figure is overshadowed by the financial liabilities Landbridge has in China.

Where the problems started

The problems started with Landbridge Group’s ambitious expansion between 2014 and 2017.

In that time it shelled out almost $5 billion on international and Chinese assets. Purchases included Australian gas producer WestSide Corporation Ltd, ($180 million in 2014); the Port of Darwin lease ($506 million in 2015); and another port in Panama ($1.2 billion in 2016). Landbridge reportedly planned to plough a further $1.5 billion into that port.

In China, the Landbridge Group also signed a partnership deal with Beijing Gas Co in 2019 to construct a huge liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal at its main port site in Rizhao City, Shandong Province. The planned co-investment was worth $1.4 billion.

Rushing to invest

This was a heady time for Chinese private firms to invest overseas. Their often charismatic founders took advantage of the central government’s devolution of approval powers to the provinces and dressed up their pet investment projects as Belt and Road initiatives.

Much of this breakneck expansion was funded by high-interest bonds issued on the Chinese commercial interbank debt markets or so-called shadow banking.

Most private Chinese firms did not have easy access to the generous bank loans available to state-owned enterprises.

Landbridge, a private firm controlled by Shandong entrepreneur Ye Cheng and his sister Ye Fang, was no exception. They borrowed heavily to fund their acquisitions.

Mounting debt

Unfortunately, Landbridge’s income from its Chinese and international operations has not kept pace with its debt obligations. As early as 2017, the group was already struggling to pay debts.

By 2021, Landbridge had been sued by at least 14 major financial or trade creditors. Outstanding judgment debts were issued by the Shanghai People’s Court amounting to about $600 million.

Since then, all of the group’s main assets have been frozen in lieu of payment. Unpaid debts and interest amounting to more than $1 billion have been passed on to state asset management companies to collect or sell off at knockdown prices, an indication the group is effectively insolvent.

Time to restructure

In early 2025, a restructuring committee was formed by the local government in Rizhao City, where Landbridge is headquartered. Its job is to find a way to keep the company’s Rizhao Port operating and avoid losing thousands of local jobs.

As recently as 2021, Ye Cheng was still ranked among the top 300 richest entrepreneurs in China, with an estimated net worth of more than $3 billion.

He is currently on the hook for his company’s debts after mortgaging all his business assets and giving personal guarantees to major creditors. He has also been fined by China’s corporate regulator for failing to lodge any annual financial reports for Landbridge Group since 2021.

Landbridge’s plans to develop its Panama port were cut short and its lease there was terminated in 2021 due to financial shortfalls.

Ye’s next move?

Ye Cheng may be unwilling to sell off his remaining overseas assets as this would be an admission of defeat. Yet an enforced buyout of the Darwin Port lease arranged by Australia may provide his businesses with a temporary financial lifeline in China.

It would also absolve Landbridge of its previously announced commitments to invest about $35 million in expanding Darwin Port’s infrastructure.

Far from causing trade frictions between Australia and China, such an enforced buyout – or more accurately, a bail-out – should be privately welcomed by both Landbridge and the Chinese government.

Colin Hawes, Associate professor of law, University of Technology Sydney

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

The Fair Work Commission has found award pay rates in five industrial awards covering a range of female-dominated occupations and industries do not provide equal pay.

This important decision should narrow the gender pay gap.

The commission proposed significant increases to award pay rates covering thousands of workers including pharmacists, early childhood education and care workers, psychologists, physiotherapists and some other health workers.

The Fair Work Commission’s review of the five “priority” awards was undertaken following the Labor government’s changes to the Fair Work Act in 2022. The changes require the commission to take account of the need to achieve gender equality in setting modern award rates of pay.

Who is covered by the latest review?

The five priority modern awards reviewed by the expert panel are:

1. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Workers and Practitioners and Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services Award 2020

2. Children’s Services Award 2010

3. Health Professionals and Support Services Award 2020

4. Pharmacy Industry Award 2020

5. Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services Industry Award 2010.

The commission examined the evidence and found many pay rates in the five modern awards do not reflect the value of the work undertaken in these female-dominated occupations and industries.

The commission found pay rates in these awards are not equal to pay rates for comparable work, due to the work largely being done by women.

Skills typically required to work with and to provide care and support to people, sometimes referred to as “soft” skills, have not been valued as much as the so-called “hard” skills required in male-dominated technical roles.

Past attempts were not successful

Before the Labor government’s 2022 changes to the Fair Work Act, almost all attempts by unions to have industrial tribunals address gender pay inequity failed.

One major barrier to success was a requirement that discrimination be demonstrated. The need to prove gender undervaluation of work largely done by women by referring to “comparable” jobs largely undertaken by men has also been a problem.

Now, under an amended Fair Work Act, the Fair Work Commission is able to examine the skills required in feminised jobs to assess the work’s value without needing to find a male comparison.

The commission’s decision that a total increase of 14% in award rates for pharmacists is justified will take effect in three phases, starting in July 2025.

The commission’s decisions on pay increases for workers covered by the other four awards, including proposed increases of 23% for Certificate III qualified childcare workers, have been put forward as provisional views only. The expert panel will begin consultations on these views in May.

Some concerns remain

The commission’s proposal for remedying gender undervaluation in one of the awards, covering a broad range of workers in social and community services, including disability workers, is puzzling.

The remedy appears to risk undermining past pay gains won for many social and community services workers because of proposed changes in the classification structure. These changes may not take account of the complexity and diversity of skills used by workers in the wide range of roles covered by the award.

Reflecting this, unions have expressed concerns the proposals for changes to this award may have the unintended consequence of reducing pay and hurting careers for some workers.

The final pay increases and their timing for workers covered by the four awards other than the pharmacy award will be made following consultations with unions, employers and funding bodies, including federal and state governments.

Following last week’s decision, one large employer group is arguing employers in private hospitals and the early childhood education and care sectors cannot afford the proposed pay increases.

They are calling on the government to fund increases in the industries that are largely government funded, including the early childhood education and care sector.

The funding picture so far

The Labor government supported the Fair Work Commission’s gender undervaluation review when it was announced in 2024. At the time the government also made clear it was their view any large pay increases would need to be phased in.

The government did fully fund increases for aged care workers, which it said came to a total investment of A$17.7 billion.

The government has also funded a 15% pay increases for early childhood workers gained through a multi-enterprise agreement covering hundreds of centres. The first increase of 10% came into effect in December, with a further 5% increase due in December 2025.

Better pay in care and support occupations was identified by the Labor government as essential to the sustainability and growth of the care and support economy.

The Coalition has not made any commitments regarding funding for any pay increases awarded in the gender undervaluation proceedings. The Coalition spokeswoman on workplace relations, Michaelia Cash, said the Coalition would examine the decision and its implications.

The Coalition did not support the larger Secure Jobs Better Pay legislation that included the gender equality changes.

Fiona Macdonald, Policy Director, Centre for Future Work at the Australia Institute and Adjunct Principal Research Fellow, RMIT University

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

Being a university student has long been associated with eating instant noodles, taking advantage of pub meal deals and generally living frugally.

But for several years, researchers have been tracking how students are not getting enough food to eat. This can have an impact on their mental and physical health as well as their academic performance.

In new research, we look at how the problem is getting worse.

Our research

In March 2022 and March 2024, we surveyed University of Tasmania students about their access to food.

More than 1,200 students participated in the first survey and more than 1,600 participated in the second. Students were recruited through university-wide emails and social media and included both undergraduate and postgraduate students from a range of disciplines.

We used an internationally recognised survey to assess food insecurity. It can tell us whether students are struggling and to what extent.

It asked simple but revealing questions about financial barriers to food, such as “In the past 12 months, did you ever skip meals because there wasn’t enough money for food?” or “Did the food you bought just not last, and you didn’t have money to get more?”

Students were then classified as “food secure” or as one of three levels of food insecurity:

1. marginally food insecure: students were worried about running out of food

2. moderately food insecure: students were compromising on the quality and variety of food they ate

3. severely food insecure: students were often skipping meals or going without food altogether.

Regularly going without food

We found overall, food insecurity among students increased from 42% in 2022 to 53% in 2024.

The proportions of those experiencing marginal or moderate levels of food insecurity was stable (at about 8% and 17–18% respectively). But the number of students experiencing severe food insecurity jumped from 17% to 27%.

While food insecurity increased among most groups, younger students, those studying on campus and international students were the most at risk.

Although our study focused on the University of Tasmania, similar rates of food insecurity have recently been reported at other regional and metropolitan universities across the country. This suggests it is a widespread issue.

National data on food insecurity in the general Australian population is limited, with no regular government monitoring. The 2024 Foodbank Hunger Report estimates 32% of Australian households experienced food insecurity, including 19% with severe food insecurity.

Why is this happening?

While our study didn’t directly explore the causes of student hunger, rising inflation, high rents and limited student incomes are likely factors.

The surveys happened during a time of sustained inflation and rising living costs. We know rents, groceries and other essentials have all gone up. But student support payments have not kept pace over the study period.

What can we do?

To address food insecurity among students, coordinated action is needed across universities and state and territory governments.

Universities often run food pantries to provide students with basic supplies, but they also need more long-term supports for students.

Institutions could expand subsidised meal programs, offer regular free or subsidised grocery boxes and ensure healthy, low-cost food is consistently available on campus.

State governments can reduce the financial stress that contributes to food insecurity by expanding stipends and support for students on unpaid clinical placements in the state system. They could also expand public transport concessions to all students, including international students.

The federal government can raise Youth Allowance and Austudy to reflect real living costs. The new Commonwealth Prac Payment could be expanded beyond teaching, nursing, midwifery and social work to cover all students undertaking mandatory unpaid placements. The government’s plan to raise HECS-HELP repayment thresholds could also ease the financial pressure on recent graduates.

Katherine Kent, Senior Lecturer in Nutrition and Dietetics, University of Wollongong

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

In 2002, Haiti’s former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide argued that France should pay his country US$21 billion.

The reason? In 1825, France extracted a huge indemnity from the young nation, in exchange for recognition of its independence.

April 17, 2025, marks the 200th anniversary of that indemnity agreement. On Jan. 1 of this year, the now-former president of Haiti’s Transitional Presidential Council, Leslie Voltaire, reminded France of this call when he requested that France “repay the debt of independence and reparations for slavery.” In March, tennis star Naomi Osaka, who is of Haitian descent, added her voice to the chorus in a tweet wondering when France would pay Haiti back.

As a scholar of 19th-century Haitian history and culture, I’ve dedicated a significant portion of my research to exploring Haiti’s particularly strong legal case for restitution from France.

The story begins with the Haitian Revolution.

France instituted slavery in the colony of Saint-Domingue on the western third of the island of Hispaniola – today’s Haiti – in the 17th century. In the late 18th century, the enslaved population rebelled and eventually declared independence. In the 19th century, the French demanded compensation for the former enslavers of the Haitian people, rather than the other way around.

Just as the legacy of slavery in the United States has created a gross economic disparity between Black and white Americans, the tax on its freedom that France forced Haiti to pay – referred to as an “indemnity” at the time – severely damaged the newly independent country’s ability to prosper.

The cost of independence

Haiti officially declared its independence from France on Jan. 1, 1804. In October 1806, following the assassination of Haiti’s first head of state, the country was split into two, with Alexandre Pétion ruling in the south and Henry Christophe ruling in the north.

Despite the fact that both Haiti rulers were veterans of the Haitian Revolution, the French had never quite given up on reconquering their former colony.

In 1814, King Louis XVIII, restored as king after the overthrow of Napoléon earlier that year, sent three commissioners to Haiti to assess the willingness of the country’s rulers to surrender. Christophe, crowned king in 1811, remained obstinate in the face of France’s exposed plan to bring back slavery. Threatening war, the most prominent member of Christophe’s cabinet, Baron de Vastey, insisted,“ Our independence will be guaranteed by the tips of our bayonets!”

In contrast, Pétion, the ruler of the south, was willing to negotiate, hoping that the country might be able to pay France for recognition of its independence.

In 1803, Napoléon had sold Louisiana to the United States for US$15 million. Using this number as his compass, Pétion proposed paying the same amount. Unwilling to compromise with those he viewed as “runaway slaves,” Louis XVIII rejected the offer.

Pétion died suddenly in 1818, but Jean-Pierre Boyer, his successor, kept up the negotiations. Talks, however, continued to stall due to Christophe’s stubborn opposition.

“Any indemnification of the ex-colonists,” Christophe’s government stated, was “inadmissible.”

Once Christophe died in October 1820, Boyer was able to reunify the two sides of the country. However, even with the obstacle of Christophe gone, Boyer repeatedly failed to successfully negotiate France’s recognition of independence. Determined to gain at least suzerainty over the island – which would have made Haiti a protectorate of France – Louis XVIII rebuked the two commissioners Boyer sent to Paris in 1824 to try to negotiate an indemnity in exchange for recognition.

On April 17, 1825, Charles X, brother to Louis XVIII and the new French king, performed a sudden about-face. Charles X issued a decree stating that France would recognize Haitian independence but only at the price of 150 million francs – or nearly twice the 80 million francs the U.S. had paid for the Louisiana territory.

Baron de Mackau, whom Charles X sent to deliver the ordinance, arrived in Haiti in July, accompanied by a squadron of 14 brigs of war carrying more than 500 cannons.

His instructions stated that his “mission” was “not a negotiation.” It was not diplomacy either. It was extortion.

Amid the threat of violent war and a looming economic blockade, on July 11, 1825, Boyer signed the fatal document, which stated, “The present inhabitants of the French part of St. Domingue shall pay … in five equal installments … the sum of 150,000,000 francs, destined to indemnify the former colonists.”

French prosperity built on Haitian poverty

Newspaper articles from the period reveal that the French king knew the Haitian government was hardly capable of making these payments, as the amount was nearly six times Haiti’s total annual revenue. The rest of the world seemed to agree that the agreement was absurd. One British journalist noted that the “enormous price” constituted a “sum which few states in Europe could bear to sacrifice.”

Forced to borrow 30 million francs from French banks to make the first two payments, it was hardly a surprise to anyone when Haiti defaulted soon thereafter. Still, a subsequent French king sent another expedition in 1838 with 12 warships to force the Haitian president’s hand. The 1838 revision, inaccurately labeled “Traité d’Amitié” – or “Treaty of Friendship” – reduced the outstanding amount owed to 60 million francs, but the Haitian government was once again ordered to take out crushing loans to pay the balance.

It was the Haitian people who suffered the brunt of the consequences of France’s theft. Boyer levied draconian taxes in order to pay back the loans. And while Christophe had been busy developing a national school system during his reign, under Boyer, and all subsequent presidents, such projects had to be put on hold. Moreover, researchers have found that the independence debt and the resulting drain on the Haitian treasury were directly responsible not only for the underfunding of education in 20th-century Haiti, but also for the lack of health care and the country’s inability to develop public infrastructure.

A 2022 analysis by The New York Times, furthermore, revealed that Haitians ended up paying more than 112 million francs over seven decades, or $560 million – estimated between $22 billion and $44 billion in today’s dollars. Recognizing the gravity of this scandal, French economist Thomas Piketty has argued that France should repay at least $28 billion to Haiti in restitution.

A debt that’s both moral and material

Former French presidents, from Jacques Chirac to Nicolas Sarkozy to François Hollande, have a history of punishing, skirting or downplaying Haitian demands for recompense.

In May 2015, when Hollande became only France’s second head of state to visit Haiti, he admitted that his country needed to “settle the debt.” Later, realizing he had unwittingly provided fuel for the legal claims already prepared by attorney Ira Kurzban on behalf of the Haitian people, Hollande clarified that he meant France’s debt was merely “moral.”

To deny that the consequences of slavery were also material is to deny French history itself. France belatedly abolished slavery in 1848 in its remaining colonies of Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion and French Guyana, which are still territories of France today. Afterward, the French government demonstrated once again its understanding of slavery’s relationship to economics when it financially compensated the former “owners” of enslaved people.

The resulting racial wealth gap is no metaphor. In metropolitan France, 14.1% of the population lives below the poverty line. In Martinique and Guadeloupe, in contrast, where more than 80% of the population is of African descent, the poverty rates are 38% and 46%, respectively. The poverty rate in Haiti is even more dire at 59%. And whereas the gross domestic product per capita – the best measure of a country’s standard of living – is $44,690 in France, it’s a mere $1,693 in Haiti.

These discrepancies can be viewed as the concrete consequences of stolen labor from generations of Africans and their descendants.

In recent years, French academics have begun to increasingly contribute to the conversation about the longitudinal harms the indemnity brought to Haiti. Yet what effectively amounts to a statement of “no comment” has historically been the only response from France’s current government under President Emmanuel Macron.

On April 17, 2025, the bicentennial of the indemnity ordinance, Macron finally broke his silence. In an official communiqué, Macron acknowledged the “heavy financial indemnity” his country imposed upon Haiti and announced “a joint Franco-Haitian commission responsible for examining our common past and shedding light on all its dimensions.” But he did not address the question of reparations.

Many Haitians were rightfully not satisfied: the only initiative from France that would really matter, they said, would be one detailing how it plans to provide economic recompense to the Haitian people.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on June 30, 2020.

Marlene L. Daut, Professor of French and African American Studies, Yale University

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

Tech giant Google has just suffered another legal blow in the United States, losing a landmark antitrust case. This follows on from the company’s loss in a similar case last year.

Social media giant Meta is also currently embroiled in a landmark legal battle in the US that could change not only how it operates, but how millions of people around the world communicate.

Hearings in the Meta case commenced earlier this week in a court in Washington DC, after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg failed to settle the case for US$450 million. Brought by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the suit alleges Meta broke antitrust laws and illegally secured a monopoly over social media platforms.

Along with Google and Meta, Amazon and Apple are also currently facing significant antitrust challenges in the US.

All of these actions are continuing despite major changes in both the FTC and the US Department of Justice as a result of the election of Donald Trump.

Collectively, these cases represent a substantial regulatory push to examine and potentially curb the market power of big tech. So what are all of these cases about exactly? What are the next steps in each of them? And what might they mean for consumers?

The cases against Google

The case Google just lost was related to online advertising.

The US Department of Justice alleged Google had behaved anticompetitively to monopolise the complex digital advertising technology market. This market facilitates the buying and selling of online ads.

The US district judge, Leonie Brinkema, agreed Google has a monopoly over the tools used by online publishers to host ad space, and the software that facilitates transactions between online publishers and advertisers.

In her ruling, Judge Brinkema said Google had “wilfully engaged in a series of anticompetitive acts” which ultimately resulted in it obtaining “monopoly power in the open-web display publisher ad server market”.

Google has said it will appeal the decision. The Department of Justice will ask the court to require Google to divest parts of its ad tech business when the remedies phase of this trial starts later this month.

The second case involving Google is related to internet search.

The Department of Justice argued Google used exclusionary agreements, such as paying Apple billions annually to be the default search engine on iPhones, to lock out competitors.

In August 2024, a federal judge ruled Google acted illegally to maintain its search monopoly.

The case has now moved to the remedies phase. A crucial remedies trial is scheduled to begin next week. During this, the court will hear arguments on what actions should be taken against Google. Potential remedies could be significant, with regulators previously suggesting measures such as restrictions on Google’s Android operating system or even forcing the sale of its Chrome browser.

Google has stated its intention to appeal this ruling as well.

The case against Meta

The FTC’s case against Meta alleges the tech giant illegally maintained a monopoly in the market for “personal social networking services”.

The core of the FTC’s argument is that Meta employed a “buy-or-bury” strategy to eliminate competitive threats.

This allegedly involved acquiring nascent rivals, most notably Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, specifically to neutralise them before they could challenge Facebook’s dominance.

The FTC points to internal communications as evidence of anticompetitive intent. These include Mark Zuckerberg’s statement, “It is better to buy than compete”. They also include an internal memo which showed Zuckerberg considered spinning off Instagram in 2018 over concerns about antitrust scrutiny.

The commission argues Meta’s actions stifled innovation and harmed consumers by limiting choices. It’s seeking to force Meta to divest, or sell off, both Instagram and WhatsApp.

Meta vigorously defends its actions. It argues it does not hold a monopoly, facing fierce competition from platforms such as TikTok, YouTube and X (formerly Twitter).

The company contends the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were pro-competitive, allowing Meta to invest billions to improve and scale the apps, ultimately benefiting users. A key defence point is that the FTC itself reviewed and approved both deals over a decade ago.

The trial is expected to last eight weeks.

The cases against Apple and Amazon

In March 2024, the Department of Justice, along with several states, sued Apple, alleging it illegally maintains a monopoly in the smartphone market.

The lawsuit claims Apple uses its control over the iPhone ecosystem to stifle competition and innovation by, for example, degrading messaging quality between iPhones and Android devices and limiting the functionality of third-party digital wallets and smartwatches.

Apple filed a motion to dismiss the case in August 2024. The litigation is in its early stages and is expected to continue for several years.

In September 2023, the FTC, joined by numerous states, also sued Amazon.

The lawsuit alleges the tech giant unlawfully maintains monopoly power in both the market for “online superstores” (where consumers shop) and “online marketplace services” (for third-party sellers).

The FTC claims Amazon uses interlocking anticompetitive tactics. These include punishing sellers for offering lower prices elsewhere, coercing sellers into using its services, degrading search results with excessive ads, and charging exorbitant seller fees.

In late 2024, the presiding judge largely denied Amazon’s attempt to dismiss the core federal claims, allowing the case to proceed.

A trial is currently scheduled for October 2026.

Major structural changes could come

Taken together, these lawsuits represent the most significant antitrust enforcement push against major technology firms in the US in decades. They signal a fundamental re-examination of how competition laws apply to fast-evolving digital platforms and ecosystems.

The outcomes could potentially lead to major structural changes. These changes could include the forced breakup of companies such as Meta, or significant behavioural remedies restricting how these firms operate.

Regardless of the specific results, the decisions in these cases will likely set crucial legal precedents. In turn, these will profoundly shape the future competitive landscape for technology. They will also likely influence regulation globally, and impact innovation and investment across the digital economy.

What the cases do not reflect is the change in independence of regulatory bodies in the US, where consistency with White House policy is now paramount. The outcomes will surely test the relationship between Trump and the “tech bros” who’ve, quite literally, been at his side recently.

Rob Nicholls, Senior Research Associate in Media and Communications, University of Sydney

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

A New South Wales Senate inquiry into public toilets is underway, looking into the provision, design and maintenance of public toilets across the state.

Whenever I mention this inquiry, however, everyone nervously laughs and the conversation moves on. It’s not something people feel comfortable talking about.

Yet, a public toilet goes to the heart of what a city provides for its inhabitants and visitors. It is a critically important piece of public infrastructure that sets the tone for public behaviour, expectations and conduct.

And we could be doing so much better with our public toilets.

An important first impression

Public toilets communicate social values. They show how we provide for our citizens and what we expect of them in return.

A public toilet is often the first thing someone new to a place sees and wants; it creates an important first impression.

As communication theorist Paul Watzlawick said, “One cannot not communicate.” Infrastructure is no exception.

So public toilets play an important social role and, through their design, help communicate and shape relationships between citizens.

They not only provide relief for our urgent bodily needs; in them, we are equal humans. External hierarchies are largely removed.

Their appearance and design influences whether we feel cared for, trusted and appreciated, seen and acknowledged.

This is reflected in what members of the public have said to the current NSW senate inquiry. One submission, for instance, noted:

It’s important that public toilets don’t look like prisons.

If they are perceived as such, then the message is we can’t be trusted. We are assumed to damage or destroy them and behave like criminals.

Public toilets should be appealing, inviting, visually interesting – and anticipate and provide for the many different needs for which people visit them.

Designing and maintaining with this in mind means they’ll delight the user, rather than making them feel like a criminal.

Might that not then help inspire a sense of gratitude toward governments, ratepayers and taxpayers and, by extension, broader society?

Costs, yes. But also benefits

Access to adequate public toilets is a basic right. But they are also used to administer medication, breastfeed, care for children, access drinking water and find a quiet place to rest. Public toilets are often the only private space in public.

So, how can a communal space like the public bathroom evolve accordingly? One issue emerging in several inquiry submissions so far is the issue of public toilets being routinely locked at night.

As one submission writer puts it:

We don’t have a curfew, we are aloud (sic) out at night. If you don’t want people pissing in the street, then leave them open.

Cost is the greatest concern. Councils know how much their toilet blocks cost, but not how many people use them.

A submission from Blacktown City Council states their 218 public toilets cost more than A$15 million annually, involving six staff and three vehicles to service these facilities.

This equals more than $68,800 per toilet per year.

On the other hand, good public toilets could help grow the economy. A submission by Guide Dogs Australia quotes Deloitte Access Economics estimates that inclusive public spaces could add $12.7 billion to Australia’s economy annually and boost GDP by about $1.2 billion through increased workforce participation.

And a submission by Bathurst Regional Access Committees notes:

The disability tourism trade is worth well over $8 billion dollars annually. Tourism is what keeps many regions alive.

Decent and accessible toilets may even help attract more people to a local area, activating public spaces and building community.

Flipping the toilet script

We need to flip the way we think about public toilets and those who clean them.

They must radiate thoughtful care, pride, civic engagement and delight.

Australian urban designer David Engwicht’s community consultation approach to public space provides a great blueprint. He advocates recognising that place making is similar to home making; it can create memorable and potentially transformative experiences. It can help bring us into the present, creating a feeling of rootedness and connection.

The toilet can transcend its shameful, dirty, grimy image and last resort status. It can become a privilege to maintain, clean and keep in pristine condition for the public good.

The public toilet could become a valuable asset, an attraction, a sought after destination, a jewel in the crown of the government’s public offering.

They could be pieces of enchanting infrastructure sponsors line up to support.

Tokyo toilets

The Tokyo Toilet project is a great example.

In this project, 17 toilets were designed by world-leading Japanese architects and designers and their cleaners’ uniforms by a famous fashion designer.

The toilets were equipped with custom high quality toilet paper, cleaned three times a day, and given their own stunning interactive website.

German filmmaker Wim Wenders even made a feature film, Perfect Days, about a man who cleans these toilets.

These toilets, sponsored by the non-profit Nippon Foundation in collaboration with Shibuya City government and Shibuya Tourism Association, represent a highly innovative approach.

Here, the public toilet is celebrated as an international attraction, while providing an excellent service to the public.

Christian Tietz, Senior Lecturer in Industrial Design, UNSW Sydney

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

Have you ever sat with a cup of tea at the end of a weeding session, with a feeling close to happiness? Or returned from the local garden centre with a bag of potting mix and some plants – and soon the sight of your newly planted herbs or flowers makes your heart feel inexplicably lighter?

Perhaps you’re in hospital recovering from surgery, as I was only a little time ago. I regained consciousness in an advanced recovery unit, a dimly lit space with no windows where everything felt slightly surreal and too intense.

I was receiving the best possible care, yet I had a desperate sense of having been cut loose from my life, and even from my body, as it was monitored and medicated throughout the night. Who knows where things might go from here, I thought. Yet I almost didn’t care.

In the morning, I was wheeled away to a room on an upper floor. It was a space flooded with natural light and with a view of a wintry, cloudy sky and distant treetops.

When a friend arrived with a posy of flowers, I found myself smiling for the first time since leaving home. As well as the pleasure of her company, there was a surge of delight at the presence of flowers. Their soft colours soothed something in me that had been clutched tight in fear since my first glimpse of the stark, frankly terrifying operating theatre.

A history of healing

Perhaps now, more than ever, we could all use some green relief, as we deal with a world that seems to only grow more anxiety-inducing and uncertain.

In May, Australians will vote in what has been called “the cost-of-living election”. Housing prices (and homelessness) have soared, too, with one study putting the rise in housing value between March 2020 and February 2024 at 32.5%.

Elsewhere, war rages in Ukraine, Gaza, and other countries, and the world order is wobbling in the wake of the US elections – particularly this week, when Donald Trump’s tariffs sparked a stock market crash not seen since COVID (until he changed his mind yesterday and it recovered) and led to predictions of a recession.

What evidence is there that the natural world can have a healing effect?

In most cultures throughout history, medicine and botany have been closely entwined, and gardens have been associated with healing the body, mind, and spirit. From around the 4th century BCE, Greece had healing centres known as “asclepieia”, after the god of medicine, Asclepius.

In medieval Europe, monasteries kept medicinal gardens. In England, hospitals and asylums were set within landscaped grounds in the belief the tranquillity of the setting played an important role in lifting patients’ mood. Both male and female inmates of 19th-century asylums often worked in the gardens, in what was seen as a healing process administered by the place itself.

Inevitably, the creep of urbanisation saw the garden landscapes of many such institutions greatly reduced, yet the health benefits to patients of connecting with nature remains undiminished.

Flowers and healing

An explanation for the uplifting effect of those flowers in my hospital room may be found in numerous studies that have shown, post-surgery, patients in rooms with plants and flowers have shorter recovery times, require fewer analgesics, and experience lower levels of anxiety. Partly, it is a response to beauty.

As psychiatrist Sue Stuart-Smith writes in The Well Gardened Mind, the human response to beauty involves brain pathways “associated with our dopamine, serotonin, and endogenous opioid systems and damp down our fear and stress responses”. She continues: “Beauty calms and revitalises us at the same time.” We humans have an affinity for patterns and order, she writes. “The simple geometrics we find in nature are perhaps most concentrated and compelling in the beauty of a flower’s form.”

There has been a trend towards banning flowers from hospital wards, on health grounds. Reasons include a suspicion bacteria lurk in the flower water, as well as safety concerns around patients or nursing staff knocking over vases during night shifts.

Florence Nightingale, in her Notes on Nursing, commented on the beneficial effects of flowers on her patients. She added that they recovered more quickly if they could spend time outside, or at least had a room with adequate natural light. “It is a curious thing to observe how almost all patients lie with their faces turned to the light, exactly as plants always make their way towards the light.” Even if lying on a particular side caused pain, patients still preferred it, Nightingale noted – because “it is the side towards the window”.

Our compulsion to turn towards the natural world is known as “biophilia”. The term was first coined in the 1960s, by German–American social psychologist and psychoanalyst, Erich Fromm. He described it as “the passionate love of life and all that is alive”, speculating that our separation from nature brings about a level of unrecognised distress.

In the 1980s, biologist and ecologist Edward O. Wilson, in his book Biophilia, asserted that all humans share an affinity with the natural world. “The urge to affiliate with other forms of life is to some degree innate,” he wrote.

In hospital, as my body began its tentative recovery from the shock of surgery, I remembered a line popularly attributed to the French Impressionist painter, Claude Monet: “What I need most are flowers, always, and always.” Through his paintings, notably his studies of waterlilies, and the garden he established at Giverny, which welcomes visitors to the present day, Monet’s flowers continue to calm and revive us with their transcendent beauty.

Perhaps the simplest way to forge a connection with nature lies in our own suburban gardens, if we are lucky enough to have them. Aside from the pleasure of creating pleasing spaces, contact with the soil bacteria Mycobacterium vaccae has been shown to trigger the release of serotonin in the brain. Serotonin, a natural antidepressant, strengthens the immune system. An added bonus is that when we harvest edible plants, our brain releases dopamine, flushing our systems with a gentle rush of satisfaction and pleasure.

Regular doses of serotonin and dopamine were never more needed than during the pandemic, when lockdowns unleashed a sudden fervour for gardening.

In her book The Garden Against Time, Olivia Laing writes that “over the course of 2020, three million people in Britain began to garden for the first time, over half of them under forty-five”. And it wasn’t just in Britain, where garden centres ran out of plants and compost as people set to work transforming the spaces where they were confined.

Australia experienced a similar surge in interest, with the ABC reporting sales of herb and vegetable plants shot up 27%, joining toilet paper and pasta on the list of panic buys. In the United States, Laing writes, 18.3 million people started gardening, “many of them millennials”. American seed company W. Atlee Burpee “reported more sales in the first March of lockdown than at any other time in its 144-year history”.

Laing writes:

crouched on the threshold of unimaginable disaster, death toll soaring, no cure in sight – it was reassuring to see the evidence of time proceeding as it was meant to, seeds unfurling, buds breaking, daffodils pushing through the soil; a covenant of how the world should be and might again.

It is precisely this “evidence of time proceeding as it was meant to” that has the power to hold humans calmly in place. We may imagine we want more than this from life; despising dullness, we think we crave excitement and change. But given the option, few would choose to wake to an Orwellian “bright cold day in April” to find “the clocks were striking thirteen”, which is how it felt during those nightmarish early days of the COVID-19 crisis.

Life on earth does still feel somewhat bright and cold, its future somewhat bleak; it is as if Orwell’s dystopian vision is at last catching up with us.

Who would believe an activity so apparently humble as gardening could come to the rescue of millions of stressed and fearful people? Yet gardeners seem to know this instinctively.

Tending ourselves

In the book In Kiltumper: a Year in an Irish Garden, co-written with her husband, Niall Williams, Irish writer and gardener Christine Breen describes the ordeal of undergoing cancer treatment through the Irish healthcare system. Following an oncology appointment in Galway, the couple drives home towards west Clare, or as Christine puts it: “back to the garden, where there is safety”.

Christine’s husband Niall confirms that, although the medical community might dismiss the healing power of working in a garden as “airey-fairy”, in Christine’s case, even while weak from chemotherapy, “going about the flower beds, trying to do exactly the same work she had always done” meant continuity.

It represented “carrying on living, because that is one of the prime lessons any garden teaches you: the garden grows on”. He speculates that after many years together, garden and gardener become one: “when we tend it, we tend some part of ourselves”.

If we know this, we too often forget. Consequently, garden centres rarely top the list of most desirable destinations, and gardening has been traditionally represented as fussy and domestic. Weeding and mowing are seen as chores that, if possible, are to be avoided.

In her book Why Women Grow, Alice Vincent writes that gardening has “so many associations, of neatness and nicety; a prissiness that feels deeply removed […] from the sex and death and life on show in every growing thing.” She writes: “When we garden, we change how a small part of the world works.”

Doubtless, it was this sense of being able to change one’s world, of seizing control, that appealed to so many of us during the pandemic. And if we got our hands into the soil, we were rewarded with much-needed infusions of serotonin.

In literature, too, people suffering physically or mentally, or both, have often sought refuge or found solace in a garden.

For many readers, their first encounter with the transformative nature of gardening was Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic children’s book, The Secret Garden. In it, a spoilt yet neglected child, Mary Lennox, is orphaned in India when her parents and their servants succumb to cholera. She is bundled off to Yorkshire, England, to a daunting atmosphere of secrecy and neglect at Misselthwaite Manor, into the care of an uncle she has never met. There, Mary soon discovers the key to a garden that has been locked for years following her aunt’s death.

In her efforts to restore life to the neglected garden, Mary herself is restored, gradually shedding the lonely, helpless persona of her Indian childhood. When she discovers the manor’s other tightly held secret – her sickly, bedridden cousin, Colin – Mary manages to get him, too, out of the house and into the garden. The outcome is healing for the children, and eventually for Mary’s grieving uncle.

Green prescriptions

For a real-life example of green relief, in The Well Gardened Mind, Sue Stuart-Smith describes how her grandfather – a submariner in the first world war – was taken prisoner during the Gallipoli campaign. After a series of brutal labour camps in Turkey, the last of them in a cement factory, he eventually escaped.

But after the long journey home he was so severely malnourished he was given only a few months to live. Crucial to regaining his health was the devoted nursing by his fiancée, followed by a year-long horticultural course set up to rehabilitate ex-servicemen.

A psychiatrist as well as a gardener, Stuart-Smith writes of the therapeutic effects of working with our hands in a protected space. She describes how gardening allows our inner and outer worlds “to coexist free from the pressures of everyday life”.

Gardens, she writes, are an “in-between space which can be a meeting place for our innermost, dream-infused selves and the real physical world”. In a garden, we are able to hear and process our own, sometimes turbulent, thoughts.

In 1986, after being diagnosed HIV positive, the English artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman retreated to the Kent coast near the nuclear power station at Dungeness. In The Garden Against Time, Olivia Laing writes that at Prospect Cottage, Jarman

began with stones, not plants: the grey flints he called dragon’s teeth, revealed by the tide on morning walks.

Gradually he established a garden in the inhospitable soil, seeing it as “a therapy and a pharmacopoeia” – and “a place of total absorption”.

It was this capacity to slow or stop time, as much as its wild and sportive beauty, that made it such a paradise-haunted place.

The pandemic spread waves of turbulence across the globe. In April 2021, as part of its post-COVID recovery plan, the government of the United Kingdom launched a two-year green social prescription pilot.

Project-managed by the National Health Service, the program worked across seven test sites: areas disproportionately affected by the pandemic. These included people living in deprived areas and people with mental health conditions, many of them from ethnic minority communities.

Over the course of the two-year program, more than 8,500 people were referred to a green social prescribing activity. Green networks were established in all seven test sites. Findings showed positive improvements in mental health and wellbeing – and green social prescribing is ongoing, proof of the program’s lasting impact.

In recent times, doctors in some countries are writing green prescriptions, rather than scripts for medication. And not just for mental health problems, but for physical conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes and lung diseases.

In the late 1990s, New Zealand became one of the first countries where GPs used green prescriptions to encourage patients to increase their levels of physical activity. Japanese clinicians have been advocating “shinrin-yoku”, or forest bathing for decades. In Finland, with its long dark winters, five hours a month is regarded as a “minimum dose” of contact with nature.

Aside from the physical benefits, time spent in a garden can provide a mood boost for those of us who feel oppressed by calendars, and by clock time’s relentless march. In her 2018 memoir Life in the Garden, Penelope Lively writes:

To garden is to elide past, present and future; it is a defiance of time. You garden today for tomorrow, the garden mutates from season to season, always the same but always different.

Perhaps no group of people stands in greater need of time-defiance than those of us entering the final decades of our lives. Time is short, and we know it. But as now 92-year-old Lively wrote seven years ago: “A garden is never just now; it suggests yesterday and tomorrow; it does not allow time its steady progress.”

Gardening as defiance

My mother pottered in her garden until she was in her early 90s, pruning roses, pulling weeds, planting annuals and throwing down fertiliser. She’d wrestle her walker across the lawn to perch on its seat while she did the watering, before retreating to an armchair in the back room of her house, from where she could admire her achievements.

Gardening in extreme old age was, for her, an act of defiance – against time, and against her children, who nagged about the possibility of a fall and insisted she wear an emergency call button. It was a defiance, too, of the common view that old people should relinquish their homes with gardens and move into something more manageable.

On the face of it, not having a garden to maintain in old age makes perfect sense, but it may come at the expense of our human impulse to seek connection with living things, specifically those in the natural world. So ingrained is our instinct to connect with nature, it appears to survive even when other systems and connections have broken down.

A friend whose Alzheimer’s-afflicted husband is in residential care reports he is constantly finding odd containers, filling them with soil, and planting cuttings gathered from the care home’s garden. He crams them onto his windowsill, even planting in teacups when there is nothing else to hand.

Accustomed to gardening throughout his adult life, his impulse to work with living things persists in defiance of dementia. My friend reflects her mother used to do the same, only she would take pieces from the home’s fake indoor plants, then complain bitterly when they did not grow.

In the care facility my friend visits daily, women pick flowers in the grounds to decorate their walkers, and when there are no flowers they’ll use pictures of flowers cut from magazines. Cutting out paper flowers seems like the action of someone whose garden has been lost, but who still feels a powerful desire to connect with beauty and the natural world.

Imagined gardens

The theories of 20th-century historian Theodore Roszak, in his book The Voice of The Earth, founded the ecopsychology movement.

He believed “humans connect with nature through the ecological unconscious, which is the core of human identity”. Human nature, he wrote, is “densely embedded in the world we share with animal, vegetable, mineral”. He believed reconnecting with nature helps people become more aware of their connection to all living things.

So what are we to do if the garden has been lost?

The French writer Colette, whose books were full of botanical detail, did not cease gardening even when age and arthritis kept her bedridden. Rather than physical gardens, Colette roamed imagined gardens.

There is nothing so terrible about not having a garden any more. The worrying thing would be if the future garden, whose reality is of no importance, were beyond my grasp. But it is not.

Colette planned her “tomorrow garden”, specifying pansies “with wide faces, beards, and moustaches – that look like Henry VIII”. Nothing is too difficult for the imaginative gardener. “An arbour? Naturally I shall have an arbour. I’m not down to my last arbour yet.”

Imagining a garden may seem fanciful. Yet it is less so if considered in the context of embodied semantics – a process where brain connectivity during a thought-about action mirrors the connectivity that occurs during the actual action. (For example, thinking about running or swimming can trigger some of the same neural connections as the physical actions.)

It’s been shown that habitual negativity rewires the brain. Ultimately, it damages it by shrinking the hippocampus: one of the main areas destroyed by Alzheimer’s disease.

But gardens, with their earth-centred sense of time and season, are optimistic places. Watching things grow, deadheading spent flowers and saving seed for the return of spring, are just some of the forward-looking aspects of gardening and perhaps it works as well if the plants and flowers are imagined.

It is logical to go further and ask whether a positive habit, such as imagining a garden, has the potential to help rewire one’s brain in a good way. Imagined gardening is really a form of self-guided imagery, a practice with many applications in the treatment of pain, stress, anxiety and depression.

As we age, ideally we would find ways of getting our hands into the healing soil. Suggestions for gardening in old age, and extreme old age, include introducing raised beds to reduce bending, or working with potted plants.

A friend in her late 70s, with an enviable garden, swears by her Garden Group. Around a dozen friends come together for working bees in each other’s gardens. “You can get a huge amount done in an hour-and-a-half,” she says. Afterwards, they share morning tea – so it is a social as well as practical endeavour. My own best tip is to garden little and often. Committing to half an hour a day, or even 15 minutes, adds up nicely over the course of a week.

American poet May Sarton wrote of gardening as “an instrument of grace”. She regarded the natural world as the great teacher. From the Benedictine Monastery of Saint Paul de Mausole at Saint-Remy-de-Provence, Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his mother: “But for one’s health, as you say, it is very necessary to work in the garden and see the flowers growing.”

Like Monet, Van Gogh needed flowers. We all do. It’s just that many of us forget this during the push and pull of daily life. And in forgetting, we lose touch with our biophilic natures.

Carol Lefevre, Visiting Research Fellow, Department of English and Creative Writing, University of Adelaide

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

“Avoid screens before bed” is one of the most common pieces of sleep advice. But what if the real problem isn’t screen time − it’s the way we use social media at night?

Sleep deprivation is one of the most widespread yet overlooked public health issues, especially among young adults and adolescents.

Despite needing eight to 10 hours of sleep, most adolescents fall short, while nearly two-thirds of young adults regularly get less than the recommended seven to nine hours.

Poor sleep isn’t just about feeling tired − it’s linked to worsened mental health, emotion regulation, memory, academic performance and even increased risk for chronic illness and early mortality.

At the same time, social media is nearly universal among young adults, with 84% using at least one platform daily. While research has long focused on screen time as the culprit for poor sleep, growing evidence suggests that how often people check social media − and how emotionally engaged they are − matters even more than how long they spend online.

As a social psychologist and sleep researcher, I study how social behaviours, including social media habits, affect sleep and well-being. Sleep isn’t just an individual behaviour; it’s shaped by our social environments and relationships.

And one of the most common yet underestimated factors shaping modern sleep? How we engage with social media before bed.

Emotional investment in social media

Beyond simply measuring time spent on social media, researchers have started looking at how emotionally connected people feel to their social media use.

Some studies suggest that the way people emotionally engage with social media may have a greater impact on sleep quality than the total time they spend online.

In a 2024 study of 830 young adults, my colleagues and I examined how different types of social media engagement predicted sleep problems. We found that frequent social media visits and emotional investment were stronger predictors of poor sleep than total screen time. Additionally, pre-sleep cognitive arousal and social comparison played a key role in linking social media engagement to sleep disruption, suggesting that social media’s effects on sleep extend beyond simple screen exposure.

I believe these findings suggest that cutting screen time alone may not be enough − reducing how often people check social media and how emotionally connected they feel to it may be more effective in promoting healthier sleep habits.

How social media disrupts sleep

If you’ve ever struggled to fall asleep after scrolling through social media, it’s not just the screen keeping you awake. While blue light can delay melatonin production, my team’s research and that of others suggests that the way people interact with social media may play an even bigger role in sleep disruption.

Here are some of the biggest ways social media interferes with your sleep:

• Presleep arousal: Doomscrolling and emotionally charged content on social media keeps your brain in a state of heightened alertness, making it harder to relax and fall asleep. Whether it’s political debates, distressing news or even exciting personal updates, emotionally stimulating content can trigger increased cognitive and physiological arousal that delays sleep onset.

• Social comparison: Viewing idealized social media posts before bed can lead to upward social comparison, increasing stress and making it harder to sleep. People tend to compare themselves to highly curated versions of others’ lives − vacations, fitness progress, career milestones − which can lead to feelings of inadequacy and anxiety that disrupt sleep.

• Habitual checking: Social media use after lights out is a strong predictor of poor sleep, as checking notifications and scrolling before bed can quickly become an automatic habit. Studies have shown that nighttime-specific social media use, especially after lights are out, is linked to shorter sleep duration, later bedtimes and lower sleep quality. This pattern reflects bedtime procrastination, where people delay sleep despite knowing it would be better for their health and well-being.

• Fear of missing out, or FOMO: The urge to stay connected also keeps many people scrolling long past their intended bedtime, making sleep feel secondary to staying updated. Research shows that higher FOMO levels are linked to more frequent nighttime social media use and poorer sleep quality. The anticipation of new messages, posts or updates can create a sense of social pressure to stay online and reinforce the habit of delaying sleep.

Taken together, these factors make social media more than just a passive distraction − it becomes an active barrier to restful sleep. In other words, that late-night scroll isn’t harmless − it’s quietly rewiring your sleep and well-being.

How to use social media without sleep disruption

You don’t need to quit social media, but restructuring how you engage with it at night could help. Research suggests that small behavioral changes to your bedtime routine can make a significant difference in sleep quality. I suggest trying these practical, evidence-backed strategies for improving your sleep:

• Give your brain time to wind down: Avoid emotionally charged content 30 to 60 minutes before bed to help your mind relax and prepare for sleep.

• Create separation between social media and sleep: Set your phone to “Do Not Disturb” or leave it outside the bedroom to avoid the temptation of late-night checking.

• Reduce mindless scrolling: If you catch yourself endlessly refreshing, take a small, mindful pause and ask yourself: “Do I actually want to be on this app right now?”

A brief moment of awareness can help break the habit loop.

Brian N. Chin, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Trinity College

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

About 14% of Australians experienced personal fraud last year. Of these, 2.1 million experienced credit card fraud, 675,300 were caught in a scam, 255,000 had their identities stolen and 433,000 were impersonated online.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics latest Personal Fraud Survey, between July 2023 and June 2024, Australians lost A$2.1 billion through credit card fraud.

This was up almost 9% from the previous year. Even after reimbursements, the loss was still $477 million.

These figures do not include financial loss through identity theft, or phishing, romance, computer support and dodgy financial advice scams.

Why the increase?

Research shows the more frequently we use technology, the more likely we are to be scammed. Monica Whitty from the Cyber Security Centre, University of Warwick, found victims of cyber-frauds were more likely to score high on impulsivity measures like ‘urgency’ and engage in more frequent online routine activities that place them at great risk of becoming scammed.

We communicate via email, we shop online, use dating apps and allow technicians to remotely access our computers. Meanwhile, amazing “get rich quick” opportunities are apparently being liked by our friends on our socials almost every day.

But too many of us do not stop and think, “is this legitimate?” It is no wonder we see personal fraud and scams increase every year.

While the Australian Bureau of Statistics figures suggest older Australians (aged 45 and over) are more exposed to card fraud, research has found demographics are not a significant predictor of fraud victimisation.

Taking risks

Being too trusting, drives complacency, which produces gullibility. Think about an online dating sites. The site uses a multi-factor authenticator, it requires you to authenticate your photo, password protect your profile and read the scam warnings.

A site’s apparent legitimacy increases your trust. Research has found if you perceive a platform to be legitimate you could be exposed to romance fraud. Fraudsters may be operating within a site, even if it is legitimate.

Another strong predictor of exposure to online fraud is self-control. Self-control theory predicts individuals with low self-control tend to pursue their own self-interest without considering the negative consequences.

Simply, if the investment scheme looks “too good”, they will mostly likely click on the link and get scammed.

Giving away too much

Some individuals are prone to self-disclosing personal information online – and scammers love personal information. Self-disclosure is defined as the amount of information a person decides to make common knowledge.

Sometimes, we disclose, even when we don’t intend to. A common phishing technique on social media is status updates that read, “Your porn star name is your first pet’s name and the first street you lived on.”

They’re interesting, funny and bring on a healthy dose of nostalgia, but the answers to those questions that you tap in for all to see are also most likely to be your security questions on your bank accounts.

The most common scams in 2023-2024:

• Buying or selling scams (1.4% or 308,200)
• Information request or phishing scams (0.7% or 148,800)

What is the government doing to protect me?

The Australian government recently passed legislation which targets scams. It places increased responsibilities on banking and finance, telecommunications and digital platforms organisations to protect customers.

Suspicious numbers can now be accompanied a warning of “potential fraud” on your smartphone screen. Banks are also informing customers about the latest scams. Some banking transactions can verify the identity of the payment recipient, to ensure the details you have match the actual account holder.

While these will not stop all scams, they are a step towards reducing the number of victims and the amount of money lost to fraudulent approaches.

Six steps to protect yourself

There are some small but powerful steps we can all take to reduce the likelihood of financial harm.

1. Passwords: it is important to have strong, unique passwords across your accounts. Using a password manager can help with this.

2. Multi-factor authentication: many platforms will allow you to add extra layers of security to your account by using one-time passwords, authenticator apps, or tokens.

3. Review privacy settings: be aware of the different settings on your accounts and ensure you are in control of what information you provide and what can be accessed by others.

4. Be vigilant: know what you see and hear may not be real. The person or company you are communicating with may not be authentic. It is okay to be sceptical and take time to do your own checks.

5. Money transfers: never send money you are not willing to lose. Too often, people will send money before realising it is a scam. Never feel rushed or forced into any financial decision. It is OK to say no.

6. Credit monitoring: if you know or suspect you have been scammed, you can enact a credit ban, meaning no one can access your details or take further action in your name. This can be a good short-term solution.

And if you are scammed …

Anyone can report money lost in a scam to ReportCyber, the Australian online police reporting portal for cyber incidents. If you have received scam texts or emails, you can report these to Scamwatch, to assist with education and awareness activities.

Gary Mortimer, Professor of Marketing and Consumer Behaviour, Queensland University of Technology

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

Young Australians will shape the upcoming federal election. For the first time, Gen Z and Millennials are the dominant voter bloc, outnumbering Baby Boomers.

But over the past couple of years, we’ve heard stories from around the world about how Gen Z (people born between 1997 and 2012) are discontent with democracy. In the United States, just 62% of Gen Z voters believe living in a democracy is important, compared with nearly 90% of other generations.

Globally, more than one in three young people support a strong leader who disregards parliaments and elections. This proportion is higher than among any older generation.

Our recent research suggests Gen Z Australians aren’t immune to feeling disengaged with democracy. In fact, we found high rates of political disaffection among the country’s youngest voters, and those who didn’t vote, at the last federal election.

Our research

On the face of it, the situation seems better in Australia than elsewhere. According to Australian Election Study data, more than 85% of Gen Z voted at the 2022 federal election.

And, again according to the study, the majority seem content with mainstream parties. While Gen Z people support the Greens and minor parties more than their elders, around 60% of them voted for the Labor Party and the Coalition in 2022.

But we wanted to dig deeper. So in 2023, we asked around 1,500 Gen Z Australians nationwide whether they voted or not in 2022, and why.

This enabled us to look at three distinct groups: those who voted; those who enrolled but did not vote (whom we call “abstainers”); and those who did not enrol to vote at all (whom we call “unregistered”).

We found almost half of Gen Z who voted said the main reason was not out of a sense of duty or to support a party, but simply to avoid getting fined.

While our survey can’t say how this compares to other generations, we know from the 2022 election study that 63% of Gen Z adults said they would have voted even if not compulsory, compared with almost 90% of other generations.

Our research also shows almost a third of Gen Z citizens who didn’t register to vote said they either didn’t know they had to or they didn’t know how. This is troubling, given the efforts of the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) to get everyone on the roll.

Those who don’t vote

Our survey revealed if you’re a Gen Z Australian who didn’t vote (whether as abstainer or unregistered), you’re more likely to be unemployed, less politically interested and have less faith in democracy as the best system of government. You’re also more likely to have been born outside Australia.

More than 50% of abstainers and 70% of unregistered Gen Z attributed their non-participation to a sense of disengagement, either from the whole political process or from parties and politicians specifically.

Not participating, however, doesn’t mean you’re entirely alienated from society. Non-voters in our study are actually more likely to be members of organisations such as charities or church groups. But they are more alienated from the democratic process.

Curiously, we found non-voters were no more likely than voters to hold negative views towards political parties. When asked questions such as whether they agreed that “parties do not care about people like me” and “parties are all the same”, there were no significant differences between these two groups.

While this may sound like good news for parties, the less cheerful reality is the lack of difference is because Gen Z voters are just as sceptical as non-voters about political parties.

So why does Gen Z vote?

Enthusiasm towards parties has little to do with why Gen Z goes to the ballot box. Just 11% of them said the main reason they turned out in 2022 was because “there was a party or candidate I wanted to vote for”.

Only around one in five said their primary motivation was because “I thought that voting makes a difference”.

Instead, by far the most important reason for casting a vote was “I did not want to get fined”. This was the main driver for 47% of Gen Z Australians.

On one hand, this seems like a great advertisement for compulsory voting with enforced penalties. Even a small fine like the $20 for not voting in a federal election is enough to get many Gen Z people to vote.

On the other, if the key motivation is just to avoid a fine, it’s not a great sign of a healthy democracy.

What can be done?

Based on our research, there are a few things that might engage Gen Z more with parties and democracy.

One is better information. Our survey showed there are still some Gen Z people who don’t know about their obligation to register or how to do it. The AEC has made great strides in increasing youth enrolment over the past decade, but there remains work to be done.

Being present on the platforms Gen Z use to get their news might help. From that perspective, the AEC’s decision to join TikTok earlier this year was a wise one.

Ultimately, the main onus lies with the political parties. If Gen Z are not motivated to support them, perhaps this tells us more about how parties engage with young people and their concerns, than it does about young people themselves.

If the major parties can devote more attention to what matters to Gen Z, such as the cost of living, rent affordability, and climate change, they would not only address what are objectively pressing issues – they might also help reconnect young generations with politics and democracy.

Correction: An earlier version of this story said the Australian Electoral Commission didn’t have a TikTok account. The copy has been updated to reflect that the AEC joined the platform earlier this year._

Sofia Ammassari, Research Fellow, Griffith University; Duncan McDonnell, Professor of Politics, 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.

Australians are being urged to roll up their sleeves for a flu vaccine amid rising cases of influenza.

It’s an opportune time to think about other vaccines too, particularly because some vaccines can be given at the same time as the flu vaccine.

One is the COVID vaccine.

Should you get another COVID shot?

More than five years since COVID was declared a pandemic, we hear much less about this virus. But it’s still around.

In 2024 there were 4,953 deaths involving COVID. This is nearly 20% lower than in 2023, but still nearly five times that of influenza (1,002).

Vaccines, which do a very good job at reducing the chances of severe COVID, remain an important tool in our ongoing battle against the virus.

Case numbers don’t tell us as much about COVID anymore as fewer people are testing. But based on other ways we monitor the virus, such as cases in ICU and active outbreaks in residential aged care homes, there have essentially been two peaks a year over recent years – one over summer and one over winter.

This doesn’t mean we can predict exactly when another wave will happen, but it’s inevitable and may well be within the next few months. So it’s worth considering another COVID vaccine if you’re eligible.

Who can get one, and when?

There are several risk factors for more severe COVID, but some of the most important include being older or immunocompromised. For this reason, people aged 75 and older are recommended to receive a COVID booster every six months.

In the slightly younger 65 to 74 age bracket, or adults aged 18 to 64 who are immunocompromised, booster doses are recommended every 12 months, but people are eligible every six months.

Healthy adults under 65 are eligible for a booster dose every 12 months.

Healthy children aren’t recommended to receive boosters but those who are severely immunocompromised may be eligible.

What COVID shots are currently available?

We’ve seen multiple types of COVID vaccines since they first became available about four years ago. Over time, different vaccines have targeted different variants as the virus has evolved.

While some vaccine providers may still offer other options, such as the older booster that targeted the Omicron variant XBB.1.5, the recent JN.1 booster is the most up-to-date and best option.

This is a relatively recently updated version to improve protection against some of the newer strains of COVID that are circulating. The new booster only became available in Australia in late 2024.

This booster, as the name suggests, targets a subvariant called JN.1. Although JN.1 has not been the dominant subvariant in Australia for some time, this shot is still expected to provide good protection against circulating subvariants, including new subvariants such as LP.8.1, which is descended from JN.1.

While it’s great we have an updated booster available, unfortunately uptake remains poor. Only 17.3% of people 75 and over had received a COVID vaccine in the six months to March.

Getting a flu and COVID shot together

Data from more than 17,000 people who completed a survey after receiving the JN.1 booster shows that while 27% reported at least one adverse event following vaccination, the majority of these were mild, such as local pain or redness or fatigue.

Only 4% of people reported an impact on their routine activities following vaccination, such as missing school or work.

If you choose to get the flu vaccine and the COVID vaccine at the same time, they’ll usually be given in different arms. There shouldn’t be a significant increase in side effects. What’s more, getting both shots at the same time doesn’t reduce your immune response against either vaccine.

Now is the ideal time to get your flu vaccine. If you’re eligible for a COVID booster as well, getting both vaccines at the same time is safe and can be very convenient.

We’re conducting trials in Australia, as are scientists elsewhere, of combined vaccines. One day these could allow vaccination against COVID and flu in a single shot – but these are still a way off.

If you’re not sure about your eligibility or have any questions about either vaccine, discuss this with your GP, specialist of pharmacist. Australian state and federal government websites also provide reliable information.

Paul Griffin, Professor, Infectious Diseases and Microbiology, The University of Queensland

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

You may have seen ads by Apple promoting its new Clean Up feature that can be used to remove elements in a photo. When one of these ads caught my eye this weekend, I was intrigued and updated my software to try it out.

The feature has been available in Australia since December for Apple customers with certain hardware and software capabilities. It’s also available for customers in New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The tool uses generative artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse the scene and suggest elements that might be distracting. You can see those highlighted in the screenshot below.

You can then tap the suggested element to remove it or circle elements to delete them. The device then uses generative AI to try to create a logical replacement based on the surrounding area.

Easier ways to deceive

Smartphone photo editing apps have been around for more than a decade, but now, you don’t need to download, pay for, or learn to use a new third-party app. If you have an eligible device, you can use these features directly in your smartphone’s default photo app.

Apple’s Clean Up joins a number of similar tools already offered by various tech companies. Those with Android phones might have used Google’s Magic Editor. This lets users move, resize, recolour or delete objects using AI. Users with select Samsung devices can use their built-in photo gallery app to remove elements in photos.

There have always been ways – analogue and, more recently, digital – to deceive. But integrating them into existing software in a free, easy-to-use way makes those possibilities so much easier.

Using AI to edit photos or create new images entirely raises pressing questions around the trustworthiness of photographs and videos. We rely on the vision these devices produce in everything from police body and traffic cams to insurance claims and verifying the safe delivery of parcels.

If advances in tech are eroding our trust in pictures and even video, we have to rethink what it means to trust our eyes.

How can these tools be used?

The idea of removing distracting or unwanted elements can be attractive. If you’ve ever been to a crowded tourist hotspot, removing some of the other tourists so you can focus more on the environment might be appealing (check out the slider below for an example).

But beyond removing distractions, how else can these tools be used?

Some people use them to remove watermarks. Watermarks are typically added by photographers or companies trying to protect their work from unauthorised use. Removing these makes the unauthorised use less obvious but not less legal.

Others use them to alter evidence. For example, a seller might edit a photo of a damaged good to allege it was in good condition before shipping.

As image editing and generating tools become more widespread and easier to use, the list of uses balloons proportionately. And some of these uses can be unsavoury.

AI generators can now make realistic-looking receipts, for example. People could then try to submit these to their employer to get reimbursed for expenses not actually incurred.

Can anything we see be trusted anymore?

Considering these developments, what does it mean to have “visual proof” of something?

If you think a photo might be edited, zooming in can sometimes reveal anomalies where the AI has stuffed up. Here’s a zoomed-in version of some of the areas where the Clean Up feature generated new content that doesn’t quite match the old.

It’s usually easier to manipulate one image than to convincingly edit multiple images of the same scene in the same way. For this reason, asking to see multiple outtakes that show the same scene from different angles can be a helpful verification strategy.

Seeing something with your own eyes might be the best approach, though this isn’t always possible.

Doing some additional research might also help. For example, with the case of a fake receipt, does the restaurant even exist? Was it open on the day shown on the receipt? Does the menu offer the items allegedly sold? Does the tax rate match the local area’s?

Manual verification approaches like the above obviously take time. Trustworthy systems that can automate these mundane tasks are likely to grow in popularity as the risks of AI editing and generation increase.

Likewise, there’s a role for regulators to play in ensuring people don’t misuse AI technology. In the European Union, Apple’s plan to roll out its Apple Intelligence features, which include the Clean Up function, was delayed due to “regulatory uncertainties”.

AI can be used to make our lives easier. Like any technology, it can be used for good or bad. Being aware of what it’s capable of and developing your visual and media literacies is essential to being an informed member of our digital world.

T.J. Thomson, Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication & Digital Media, RMIT University

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

Languages are windows into the worlds of the people who speak them – reflecting what they value and experience daily.

So perhaps it’s no surprise different languages highlight different areas of vocabulary. Scholars have noted that Mongolian has many horse-related words, that Maori has many words for ferns, and Japanese has many words related to taste.

Some links are unsurprising, such as German having many words related to beer, or Fijian having many words for fish. The linguist Paul Zinsli wrote an entire book on Swiss-German words related to mountains.

In our recently-published study we took a broad approach towards understanding the links between different languages and concepts.

Using computational methods, we identified areas of vocabulary that are characteristic of specific languages, to provide insight into linguistic and cultural variation.

Our work adds to a growing understanding of language, culture, and the way they both relate.

Our method

We tested 163 links between languages and concepts, drawn from the literature.

We compiled a digital dataset of 1574 bilingual dictionaries that translate between English and 616 different languages. Since many of these dictionaries were still under copyright, we only had access to counts of how often a particular word appeared in each dictionary.

One example of a concept we looked at was “horse”, for which the top-scoring languages included French, German, Kazakh and Mongolian. This means dictionaries in these languages had a relatively high number of

1. words for horses. For instance, Mongolian аргамаг means “a good racing or riding horse”
2. words related to horses. For instance, Mongolian чөдөрлөх means “to hobble a horse”.

However, it is also possible the counts were influenced by “horse” appearing in example sentences for unrelated terms.

Not a hoax after all?

Our findings support most links previously highlighted by researchers, including that Hindi has many words related to love and Japanese has many words related to obligation and duty.

We were especially interested in testing the idea that Inuit languages have many words for snow. This notorious claim has long been distorted and exaggerated. It has even been dismissed as the “great Eskimo vocabulary hoax”, with some experts saying it simply isn’t true.

But our results suggest the Inuit snow vocabulary is indeed exceptional. Out of 616 languages, the language with the top score for “snow” was Eastern Canadian Inuktitut. The other two Inuit languages in our data set (Western Canadian Inuktitut and North Alaskan Inupiatun) also achieved high scores for “snow”.

The Eastern Canadian Inuktitut dictionary in our dataset includes terms such as kikalukpok, which means “noisy walking on hard snow”, and apingaut, which means “first snow fall”.

The top 20 languages for “snow” included several other languages of Alaska, such as Ahtena, Dena'ina and Central Alaskan Yupik, as well as Japanese and Scots.

Scots includes terms such as doon-lay, meaning “a heavy fall of snow”, feughter meaning “a sudden, slight fall of snow”, and fuddum, meaning “snow drifting at intervals”.

You can explore our findings using the tool we developed, which allows you to identify the top languages for any given concept, and the top concepts for a particular language.

Language and environment

Although the languages with top scores for “snow” are all spoken in snowy regions, the top-ranked languages for “rain” were not always from the rainiest parts of the world.

For instance, South Africa has a medium level of rainfall, but languages from this region, such as Nyanja, East Taa and Shona, have many rain-related words. This is probably because, unlike snow, rain is important for human survival – which means people still talk about it in its absence.

For speakers of East Taa, rain is both relatively rare and desirable. This is reflected in terms such as lábe ||núu-bâ, an “honorific form of address to thunder to bring rain” and |qába, which refers to the “ritual sprinkling of water or urine to bring rain”.

Our tool can also be used to explore various concepts related to perception (“smell”), emotion (“love”) and cultural beliefs (“ghost”).

The top-scoring languages for “smell” include a cluster of Oceanic languages such as Marshallese, which has terms such as jatbo meaning “smell of damp clothing”, meļļā meaning “smell of blood”, and aelel meaning “smell of fish, lingering on hands, body, or utensils”.

Prior to our research, the smell terms of the Pacific Islands had received little attention.

Some caveats

Although our analysis reveals many interesting links between languages and concepts, the results aren’t always reliable – and should be checked against original dictionaries where possible.

For example, the top concepts for Plautdietsch (Mennonite Low German) include von (“of”), den (“the”) and und (“and”) – all of which are unrevealing. We excluded similar words from other languages using Wiktionary, but our method did not filter out these common words for Plautdietsch.

Also, the word counts reflect both dictionary definitions and other elements, such as example sentences. While our analysis excluded words that are especially likely to appear in example sentences (such as “woman” and “father”), such words could have still influenced our results to some extent.

Most importantly, our results run the risk of perpetuating potentially harmful stereotypes if taken at face value. So we urge caution and respect while using the tool. The concepts it lists for any given language provide, at best, a crude reflection of the cultures associated with that language.

Charles Kemp, Professor, School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne; Ekaterina Vylomova, Lecturer, Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne; Temuulen Khishigsuren, PhD Candidate, The University of Melbourne, and Terry Regier, Professor, Language and Cognition Lab, University of California, Berkeley

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

From dire wolves to woolly mammoths, the idea of resurrecting extinct species has captured the public imagination. Colossal Biosciences, the Dallas-based biotech company leading the charge, has made headlines for ambitious efforts to bring back long-lost animals using cutting edge genetic engineering.

It recently announced the birth of pups with key traits of dire wolves, an iconic predator last seen roaming North America more than 10,000 years ago. This followed on the heels of earlier project announcements focused on the woolly mammoth and the thylacine. This all fuels a sense that de-extinction is not only possible but imminent.

But as the science advances, a deeper question lingers: how close must the result be to count as a true return? If we can only recover fragments of an extinct creature’s genome – and must build the rest with modern substitutes – is that really de-extinction, or are we simply creating lookalikes?

To the public, de-extinction often evokes images of Jurassic Park-style resurrection: a recreation of a lost animal, reborn into the modern world. In scientific circles, however, the term encompasses a variety of techniques: selective breeding, cloning, and increasingly, synthetic biology through genome editing. Synthetic biology is a field that involves redesigning systems found in nature.

Scientists have used selective breeding of modern cattle in attempts to recreate an animal that resembles the auroch, the wild ancestor of today’s breeds. Cloning has been used to briefly bring back the pyrenean ibex, which went extinct in 2000. In 2003, a Spanish team brought a cloned calf to term, but the animal died a few minutes after birth.

This is often cited as the first example of de-extinction. However, the only preserved tissue was from one female animal, meaning it could not have been used to bring back a viable population. Colossal’s work falls into the synthetic biology category.

These approaches differ in method but share a common goal: to restore a species that has been lost. In most cases, what emerges is not an exact genetic copy of the extinct species, but a proxy: a modern organism engineered to resemble its ancestor in function or appearance.

Take the case of the woolly mammoth. Colossal’s project aims to create a cold-adapted Asian elephant that can fulfil the mammoth’s former ecological role. But mammoths and Asian elephants diverged hundreds of thousands of years ago and differ by an estimated 1.5 million genetic variants. Editing all of these is, for now, impossible. Instead, scientists are targeting a few dozen genes linked to key traits like cold resistance, fat storage and hair growth.

Compare that to humans and chimpanzees. Despite a genetic similarity of around 98.8%, the behavioural and physical differences between the two are huge. If comparatively small genetic gaps can produce such major differences, what can we expect when editing only a tiny fraction of the differences between two species? It’s a useful rule of thumb when assessing recent claims.

As discussed in a previous article, Colossal’s dire wolf project involved just 20 genetic edits. These were introduced into the genome of a gray wolf to mimic key traits of the extinct dire wolf. The resulting animals may look the part, but with so few changes, they are genetically much closer to modern wolves than their prehistoric namesake.

Colossal’s ambitions extend beyond mammoths and dire wolves. The company is also working to revive the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger), a carnivorous marsupial that was once native to mainland Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea. The last example died at Hobart Zoo in 1936. Colossal is using a genetic relative called the fat-tailed dunnart – a tiny marsupial – as the foundation. The goal is to engineer the dunnart’s genome to express traits found in thylacines. The team says it is developing an artificial uterus device to carry the engineered foetus.

Colossal also has a project to revive the dodo, a flightless bird that roamed Mauritius until the 1600s. That project will use the Nicobar pigeon, one of the dodo’s closest living relatives, as a basis for genetic reconstruction.

In each case, the company relies on a partial blueprint: incomplete ancient DNA, and then uses the powerful genome editing tool Crispr to edit specific differences into the genome of a closely related living species. The finished animals, if born, may resemble their extinct counterparts in outward appearance and some behaviour – but they will not be genetically identical. Rather, they will be hybrids, mosaics or functional stand-ins.

That doesn’t negate the value of these projects. In fact, it might be time to update our expectations. If the goal is to restore ecological roles, not to perfectly recreate extinct genomes, then these animals may still serve important functions. But it also means we must be precise in our language. These are synthetic creations, not true returns.

Technology to prevent extinction

There are more grounded examples of near-de-extinction work – most notably the northern white rhinoceros. Only two females remain alive today, and both are infertile. Scientists are working to create viable embryos using preserved genetic material and surrogate mothers from closely related rhino species. This effort involves cloning and assisted reproduction, with the aim of restoring a population genetically identical to the original.

Unlike the mammoth or the thylacine, the northern white rhino still has living representatives and preserved cells. That makes it a fundamentally different case – more conservation biology than synthetic biology. But it shows the potential of this technology when deployed toward preservation, not reconstruction.

Gene editing also holds promise for helping endangered species by using it to introduce genetic diversity into a population, eliminate harmful mutations from species or enhance resilience to disease or climate change. In this sense, the tools of de-extinction may ultimately serve to prevent extinctions, rather than reverse them.

So where does that leave us? Perhaps we need new terms: synthetic proxies, ecological analogues or engineered restorations. These phrases might lack the drama of “de-extinction” but they are closer to the scientific reality.

After all, these animals are not coming back from the dead – they are being invented, piece by piece, from what the past left behind. In the end, it may not matter whether we call them mammoths or woolly elephants, dire wolves or designer dogs. What matters is how we use this power – whether to heal broken ecosystems, to preserve the genetic legacy of vanishing species or simply to prove that we can.

But we should at least be honest: what we’re witnessing isn’t resurrection. It’s reimagination.

Timothy Hearn, Senior Lecturer in Bioinformatics, Anglia Ruskin University

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

Electronic microchips are at the heart of the modern world. They’re found in our laptops, our smartphones, our cars and our household appliances. For years, manufacturers have been making them more powerful and efficient, which increases the performance of our electronic devices.

But that trend is now faltering because of the increased cost and complexity of manufacturing chips, as well as performance limits set by the laws of physics. This is happening just as there’s a need for increased computing power because of the boom in artificial intelligence (AI).

An alternative to the electronic microchips we currently use are photonic chips. These use light instead of electricity to achieve higher performance. However, photonic chips have not yet taken off due to a number of hurdles. Now, two papers published in Nature address some of these roadblocks, offering essential stepping stones to achieving the computing power required by complex artificial intelligence systems.

By using light (photons) instead of electricity (electrons) for the transport and processing of information, photonic computing promises higher speeds and greater bandwidths with greater efficiency. This is because it does not suffer from the loss of electrical current due to a phenomenon known as resistance, as well as unwanted heat loss from electrical components.

Photonic computing is also particularly suited for performing what are known as matrix multiplications – mathematical operations that are fundamental to AI.

Those are some of the benefits. The challenges, however, are not trivial. In the past, the performance of photonic chips has generally been studied in isolation. But because of the dominance of electronics in modern technology, photonic hardware will need to be integrated with those electronic systems.

However, converting photons into electrical signals can slow down processing times since light operates at higher speeds. Photonic computing is also based around analogue operations rather than digital ones. This can reduce precision and limit the type of computing tasks that can be carried out.

It’s also difficult to scale them up from small prototypes because large-scale photonic circuits cannot currently be fabricated with sufficient accuracy. Photonic computing will require its own software and algorithms, compounding the challenges of integration and compatibility with other technology.

The two new papers in Nature address many of these hurdles. Bo Peng, from Singapore-based company Lightelligence, and colleagues demonstrate a new type of processor for photonic computing called a Photonic Arithmetic Computing Engine (Pace). This processor has a low latency, which means that there is a minimal delay between an input or command and the corresponding response or action by the computer.

The large-scale Pace processor, which has more than 16,000 photonic components, can solve difficult computing tasks, demonstrating the feasibility of the system for real world applications. The processor shows how integration of photonic and electronic hardware, accuracy, and the need for different software and algorithms can be resolved. It also demonstrates that the technology can be scaled up.

This marks a significant development, despite some speed limitations of the current hardware.

In a separate paper, Nicholas Harris, from California-based company Lightmatter, and colleagues describe a photonic processor that was able to run two AI systems with accuracy similar to those of conventional electronic processors. The authors demonstrated the effectiveness of their photonic processor through generating Shakespeare-like text, accurately classifying movie reviews and playing classic Atari computer games such as Pac-Man.

The platform is also potentially scalable, though in this case limitations of the materials and engineering used curtailed one measure of the processor’s speed and its overall computational capabilities.

Both teams suggest that their photonic systems can be part of scalable next generation hardware that can support the use of AI. This would finally make photonics viable, though further refinements will be needed. These will involve the use of more effective materials or designs.

Demosthenes Koutsogeorgis, Associate Professor of Photonic Technologies, School of Science & Technology, Nottingham Trent University and Matthew Spink, PhD Researcher, School of Science & Technology, Nottingham Trent University

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

In TikTok’s latest viral beauty trend “the morning shed,” beauty influencers “shed” hair and skin products that have been worn overnight. These include hair styling items, skin masks and creams, and physical products such as chin straps and mouth tape, which are intended to help with breathing through the night and keep away the drooping of the jaw that happens with age.

While this trend has come under fire for alleged unsustainability and over-consumerism, it is only the latest beauty fad in a long line of time and money consuming “hacks” that women have been undertaking for centuries. From tapeworms to tuberculosis, women have taken part in a laundry list of beauty hacks in order to meet appearance ideals, many of which have been dangerous, painful and even deadly.

As far back as the ancient Egyptians, women ground up toxic substances to make eyeliner and eye shadow. These were dangerous when inhaled as a powder (such as during the grinding process) and could cause irritation of the skin when applied. And yet somehow, heavy metal poisoning is among the least dangerous of these historic beauty trends.

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In China, foot binding is an example of a painful and life altering treatment first recorded around the 10th century. The feet were usually bound before the arch of the foot had developed (aged four to nine).

The process involved forcefully curling the toes towards the sole of the foot until the arch broke then the foot would be tightly bandaged to keep it in this position. Small feel were coveted at the time. Thankfully, this practice was banned in the early 1900s after almost 200 years of opposition from both Chinese and western sources.

In Europe, the Renaissance period saw a new wave of beauty hacks, from arsenic baths (which bleach the skin to a near translucent white) to Belladonna drops (literal poison) used on the eyes to induce an aroused or watery-eyed look. Many women who used these tactics ended up poisoned or blind.

During the reign of Elizabeth I, the “English rose” look was all the rage. Women would blood let for a perfectly pale pallor, or paint their faces with “Venetian ceruse” or “Venetian white” – otherwise known as lead paint. The use of Venetian ceruse is one of the suspected causes of death of Elizabeth I.

In the Victorian era and early 1900s, women often engaged in dangerous practices to achieve the coveted pale skin, red lip and small waist that was the height of fashion. This aesthetic could be achieved by contracting tuberculosis (a lung infection that was often fatal), taking tapeworm pills, consuming mercury to look forever young, or chewing arsenic wafers to make skin pale.

My own research has shown that sociocultural pressures to look a certain way are experienced differently across the world. I found that white western women experience some of the highest appearance pressures, followed by east Asian women. Although these decline a little with age for white western women, they persist in Asian women and never reach the lower levels seen elsewhere. I found the lowest levels of sociocultural pressure and the highest levels of body appreciation in Nigeria.

As the “morning shed” proves, women still go to great lengths to meet culturally shaped standards, particularly under conditions of higher economic inequality – something that is getting worse in many countries. For example, in the United States, cities which have higher economic inequality see higher spend on beauty products and services, such as beauty salons or women’s clothing.

With the advent of social media, especially short-form content like TikTok, Reels and YouTube Shorts, the speed at which beauty trends rise and fall has been expedited and globalised. These trends range from the painful lip suction women undertook to get big lips like the celebrity Kylie Jenner, to the normalisation of botox and fillers, to laser hair removal of every unwanted follicle.

The “morning shed” is just the latest evolution in skin care trends, which started as health-focused, with an emphasis on sun protection and moisturisation. It has since morphed into a study in over-consumption and over-commitment of time and money in the pursuit of staying ever youthful.

Louise N Hanson, PhD in Social and Developmental psychology, Durham University

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

This spring, Babe is returning to cinemas to mark the 30th anniversary of its release in 1995. The much-loved family film tells the deceptively simple but emotionally powerful story of a piglet who saves his bacon through intelligence, kindness and hard work.

Babe becomes the trusted ally of both farmer and farmyard animals and, like so many Hollywood heroes before and since, he refuses to stay in his lane.

It’s a film which, on paper, really shouldn’t work and which sounds alarm bells to any self-respecting children’s literature scholar like me. It takes an expertly crafted English children’s book with tasteful black-and-white illustrations – Dick King-Smith’s The Sheep Pig (1983) – and turns it into an all-singing, all-dancing technicolour extravaganza.

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The film inserts new episodes and characters – an evil cat, a plucky duck and (most alarmingly) a brace of brattish kids. And it replaces a perfectly good, does-what-it-says-on-the-tin book title with the cutesy moniker of the piglet star.

It shouldn’t work … but it really, really does. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it’s one of the most successful film adaptations of a children’s book of all time.

It met with both commercial and critical success, making over US$254 million at the box office and being nominated for no less than seven Academy Awards, one of which it secured for visual effects.

So, what exactly is so special about Babe? It was one of the first films which, thanks to the then-cutting edge combination of animatronics and visual effects, delivered convincing talking animals who, endowed with the gift of speech, could themselves “look like movie stars”. But with all the jaw-dropping technological advances of the last 30 years, how has this film managed to stand the test of time so well?

The answer in part is that its source material is exceptionally strong. The Sheep Pig is written with restraint and economy, but also great warmth and relish. King-Smith has immense fun, wallowing in words like the proverbial pig in muck, and putting it all to the service of a story whose core values are easy to get behind. The Sheep Pig is a soft-power parable which advocates for brains over brawn, for respectful communication and common decency.

But the excellence of a film’s bookish bedrock is no guarantee of success. Indeed, the brilliance of a book can often be something of a liability. Think of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, or any of the film and TV adaptations of Noel Streatfeild’s superb Ballet Shoes. With Babe, though, the book is catalyst rather than straitjacket, an enabling prompt which initiates a new work of equal strength and quality.

The pacing is well judged, the look of the film lush, and there are several actual laugh-out-loud moments – including the duck’s panicked realisation that “Christmas means carnage!” Above all, it’s a film with immense emotional intelligence and power.

Recognised for its visual effects, it also succeeds in large part because of the strength of its soundscape and score. There’s one scene in particular which really soars, and which takes on the elephant in the room: the human habit of eating pigs.

Babe is so shocked and upset on learning this fact from the evil cat (who else?) that he loses the will not just to win in the sheepdog trial, but to live at all. The supremely taciturn Father Hoggett must act to make amends and save his pig protégé.

In an astonishingly moving act of love, this man of few words takes the sickly and sick-at-heart pig onto his lap and sings to him. At first a gentle crooning, the farmer’s expression of care and affection soon swells to an out-and-out bellow, accompanied by a wild, caution-to-the-wind dance.

It’s difficult to imagine a more lyrically apt song than the 1977 reggae-inflected hit based on the powerful tune of Camille Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3 in C Minor: “If I had words”, it begins. It’s a moment of huge emotional force and intensity, in which the gaping abyss of age and species difference are bridged through music and dance.

James Cromwell as Farmer Hoggett, here and throughout the film, is tremendous, his reserved performance a key factor in its success. The role – which he almost didn’t take because of the paucity of lines – was career-defining, and prompted personal epiphanies which flow naturally from this scene.

First, Cromwell never ate meat again. Second, he has spoken (with visible emotion) of the delivery of the film’s final pithy-but-powerful line of approbation – “That’ll do pig, that’ll do” – as a moment of communion with his father on catching sight of his own artificially aged reflection in the camera lens. “My life changed, and I owe it to a pig,” the actor concludes.

Babe is a film and an adaptation with many qualities. It’s wholesome without ever being sickly. But above all, it has an emotional force which worked on actors and audiences alike and which, 30 years later, remains undiminished.

Kiera Vaclavik, Professor of Children's Literature & Childhood Culture, Queen Mary University of London

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

I had been looking forward to the National Gallery’s exhibition Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350 for several reasons.

First, it was many years in the making. Its curator, Professor Emerita Joanna Cannon of the Courtauld Institute of Art, had been working on it for a decade or so. Duccio, one of the exhibition’s featured artists and one of the greatest Italian painters of the middle ages, had a major show in Siena in 2003. Another featured artist, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, had a smaller exhibition in the same city in 2017.

Second, the National Gallery’s late medieval Italian paintings had not been seen for two years because of the refurbishment of the Sainsbury Wing. That is, except for a select few displayed in an excellent exhibition on Saint Francis of Assisi in 2023.

Last, there was the publicity generated by the Metropolitan Museum’s iteration of this show – complete with a tantalising video tour by two of its curators.

The National Gallery’s take on the most exciting 50 years of Siena’s artistic production makes the most of its ground floor gallery rooms, enabling conversations between objects and medium.

The exhibition is a remarkable achievement: a pleasure for the eye and commendable for its ability to make medieval religious art accessible.

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Britain’s love affair with Sienese painting is well documented from the late 19th century at least. But this exhibition focuses on much more than the celebrated four painters – Duccio, Simone Martini and Ambrogio Lorenzetti and his brother Pietro.

The wealth of Siena’s visual culture is represented with illuminated manuscripts; sculptures in marble, ivory, terracotta and walnut; reliquaries (containers for holy relics) and croziers (hooked staves) made from gold and enamel; and rugs and silks.

Panels with protagonists painted in bright reds, blues, pinks and greens with tiny brushstrokes using pigments mixed with egg on gilded backgrounds abound. But there are also frescoes, detached from their original mural setting, yet able to tell the story of their making and meaning.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Annunciation (1344) is defined only by lines brushed on wet plaster using a red pigment (sinoper). This was a common initial step to set the composition, over which another layer of plaster would be applied again with contours painted but now filled with colour.

In another room, a beautifully modelled painted head of Jesus split into two, carved by Lando di Pietro (1338), is all that remains of a larger crucifix after bombing by allies in the second world war. It is the only known work of the sculptor. He was identified by the personal handwritten prayers concealed within the sculpture, which are displayed next to it.

The showstoppers

The curators have managed to do what could not be achieved in Siena in 2003: bring Duccio’s three triptychs into a single venue. The first two are shown just a few metres apart, to enable comparison and close viewing of all sides. Their painted backs and the geometric motifs behind their folding wings enable us to understand them as three-dimensional, portable objects.

The Crucifixion triptych, bought by Prince Albert in 1845 and lent to the exhibition by King Charles, is not too far from the pair, inviting comparison.

Duccio’s Healing of the Man Born Blind finds itself reunited with seven of its companions for the first time since 1777. This is the closest reconstruction we’ll ever get of the back predella (a box-like shelf with images that supported the main panels) of Siena cathedral’s enormous double-sided high altarpiece (known as the Maestà), which was carried in procession through the city streets in 1311.

Originally painted on a massive horizontal poplar plank, the individual episodes depicting Jesus’s ministry were sold on the art market in the 19th century and dispersed across two continents. A ninth panel which probably started the narrative has never been found, although you wouldn’t know it from this display.

Nothing can distract from close viewing – you’ll want to enjoy it for as long as you can stand. This privileged view is unusual in an exhibition and possibly comes close to that enjoyed by the clergy during processions or pilgrimages in Siena cathedral. A photo montage of the reconstructed altarpiece is tiny and displayed on the wall opposite the reconstructed predella, alongside the panels originally on the front predella.

The other showstopper is Pietro Lorenzetti’s altarpiece. It’s usually on the high altar of the church of Santa Maria della Pieve in Arezzo, but has been lent by the diocese and placed on a low plinth. This allows us to imagine just how immense Duccio’s Maestà must have been.

This altarpiece represents the most popular formula created in early 14th-century Siena. These were large polyptychs of five (or seven) vertical panels usually displaying the virgin and child in the centre, surrounded by saints relevant to the locality and patrons.

The Arezzo polyptych is approximately three metres in height and width, with three registers but has lost its predella, having been dismantled and relocated several times. The type was so popular that it, and the Sienese painters who created it, were in demand throughout Tuscany and beyond.

Each of the objects displayed in this exhibition merits a long look. Since there are over 100, my last reflection will be on another extraordinary reunion: a small gilded glass icon depicting once again the virgin, child and saints above the Annunciation (1347). Its double-sided reliquary frame still contains 17 relics.

It’s conceived as a miniature altarpiece, imitating the basic shape of the larger Sienese altarpieces on display. It also uses the same materials in addition to glass that has been gilded, incised and painted in red, blue and green.

Such precious materials and meticulous craft testify to the richness of Sienese art during the first half of the 14th century.

Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350 is at the National Gallery until June 22.

Louise Bourdua, Professor of Art History, University of Warwick

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

There has been little new in pre-election promises for Australia’s aged-care workers, providers or the 1.3 million people who use aged care.

In March, Labor announced A$2.6 billion for another pay rise for aged-care nurses in addition to previous pay increases.

There’s been nothing substantial on aged care from Labor or the Opposition since.

Major changes are scheduled for the sector later this year, four years after the damning Royal Commission report into aged care. Yet no additional funding has been announced.

Estimates suggest funding is short around $5 billion to address losses by residential care providers or the shortfall in Home Care Packages.

What can we expect this year?

A new Aged Care Act will come into force on July 1 with a much greater emphasis on the rights of older people to get the care that suits their needs. This will mean:

• a new system to regulate aged care

• a new independent complaints commissioner

• a new Support at Home program for older people who want to live at home, and in the community

• changes to fees for residential aged care.

But a number of problems remain and it is not clear the reforms being introduced this year will fix them.

Access is still an issue

Access to aged care continues to be a problem, particularly in rural and remote areas. The system is difficult to navigate for often vulnerable and confused consumers and their families.

The government relies heavily on the My Aged Care website to inform older people and their families about aged care options. But this provides only basic information and it is difficult to get individualised support.

There is also a “digital divide” for a significant group who are unfamiliar with, and lack confidence in, using online services.

So we need a much greater emphasis on providing local “one stop shops” for personalised support and advice, particularly when people first enter the aged-care system. These services could be provided through Centrelink or new regional aged-care offices.

About one-third of older people say they need help to live at home. But to get assistance you need an aged-care assessment and that process too needs improving.

Waiting times for assessment have blown out, with reported delays of up to five months.

Older people prefer to stay at home

There are some concerns the number of new aged-care beds is not increasing fast enough. For instance, there are shortages of residential aged care in particular areas such as Canberra.

But admission times to residential aged care generally have not increased and occupancy rates are declining. This suggests older people would prefer home to residential care.

Yet increased demand for home-care packages is not being met.

For those who need more intensive services at home, waiting times remain stubbornly and unacceptably long because there aren’t enough home care packages.

Despite years of complaints, there are still more than 80,000 people on the waiting list for care at home.

The new Support at Home program will introduce an eight-level system of support. The highest level of home-care funding will increase to $78,000 to bridge the gap between funding for home and residential care. But many more intensive care packages for home care will be needed to reduce waiting times.

The Support at Home program also introduces significantly higher out-of-pocket costs for older people. Such costs for everyday services – such as meals, cleaning and gardening – currently funded through the Commonwealth Home Support Program will increase significantly.

Most controversially, there will also be greater out-of-pocket costs for “independence” services including personal care, social support, respite care and therapy.

Staff shortages still a concern

For aged-care providers, chronic workforce shortages are still the biggest problem. Recent increases in wages for aged-care workers, including nurses, are a step in the right direction. But wages are still low.

It remains hard to attract staff, staff turnover is high and staff are under-trained, risking the quality of care. Shortages are particularly acute in rural areas.

The aged-care industry is calling for streamlined migration, better training and incentives for regional workers to make up the shortfall. But so far no new election announcements have been made.

No real reform

Despite changes we’ll see from July, the organisation and financing of aged care remains fundamentally unchanged.

Overall, Australia’s aged-care system is still heavily privatised and fragmented. In 2022-23 there were 923 home-care providers, 764 residential-care providers and 1,334 home-support providers, nearly all in the private and not-for-profit sectors.

The Commonwealth continues to manage the sector through a cumbersome combination of highly centralised regulation and prescriptive funding contracts.

It has not put into place an effective, regional management structure to plan, organise and govern the sector to drive quality, innovation, equity, responsiveness and efficiency.

Nor has the Commonwealth been willing to adequately finance the system either through a levy, a social insurance scheme or via increased taxation. Instead, it’s upping the reliance on user fees to meet the cost of providing services.

Hal Swerissen, Emeritus Professor of Public Health, La Trobe University

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

Many of us turn to Sudoku, Wordle or brain-training apps to sharpen our minds. But research is increasingly showing one of the best ways to boost memory, focus and brain health is exercise.

Our new research reviewed data from more than 250,000 participants across 2,700 studies. We found exercise helps boost brain function – whether it’s walking, cycling, yoga, dancing, or even playing active video games such as Pokémon GO.

Moving your body improves how we think, make decisions, remember things and stay focused – no matter your age.

What the science says

Our review adds to a growing body of research that shows regular physical activity improves three key areas of brain function:

• cognition, which is your overall ability to think clearly, learn and make decisions

• memory, especially short-term memory and the ability to remember personal experiences

• executive function, which includes focus, planning, problem-solving and managing emotions.

We conducted an umbrella review, which means we looked at the results of more than 130 high-quality research reviews that had already combined findings from many exercise studies. These studies usually involved people starting a new, structured exercise program, not just tracking the exercise they were already doing.

To assess the effects on cognition, memory and executive function, the original studies used a range of brain function tests. These included things like remembering word lists, solving puzzles, or quickly switching between tasks – simple activities designed to reliably measure how well the brain is working.

The improvements were small to moderate. On average, exercise led to a noticeable boost in cognition, with slightly smaller but still meaningful gains in memory and executive function.

The benefits showed up across all age groups, though children and teens saw major gains in memory.

People with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) showed greater improvements in executive function after physical activity than other population groups.

The brain started responding fairly quickly – many people experienced improvements after just 12 weeks of starting regular exercise.

Generally, the greatest benefits were seen in those doing at least 30 minutes of exercise on most days of the week, aiming for a total of about 150 minutes per week.

What’s happening in the brain?

Activities such as walking or cycling can increase the size of the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for memory and learning.

In one study, older adults who did aerobic exercise for a year grew their hippocampus by 2%, effectively reversing one to two years of age-related brain shrinkage.

More intense workouts, such as running or high-intensity interval training, can further boost neuroplasticity – the brain’s ability to adapt and rewire itself. This helps you learn more quickly, think more clearly and stay mentally sharp with age.

Another reason to get moving

The world’s population is ageing. By 2030, one in six of people will be aged over 60. With that comes a rising risk of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive decline.

At the same time, many adults aren’t moving enough. One in three adults aren’t meeting the recommended levels of physical activity.

Adults should aim for at least 150 of moderate exercise – such as brisk walking – each week, or at least 75 minutes of more vigorous activity, like running.

It’s also important to incorporate muscle-strengthening exercises, such as lifting weights, into workouts at least twice a week.

Everyday movement counts

You don’t need to run marathons or lift heavy weights to benefit. Our study showed lower-intensity activities such as yoga, tai chi and “exergames” (active video games) can be just as effective – sometimes even more so.

These activities engage both the brain and body. Tai chi, for instance, requires focus, coordination and memorising sequences.

Exergames often include real-time decision-making and rapid response to cues. This trains attention and memory.

Importantly, these forms of movement are inclusive. They can be done at home, outdoors, or with friends, making them a great option for people of all fitness levels or those with limited mobility.

Although you may already be doing a lot through daily life – like walking instead of driving or carrying shopping bags home – it’s still important to find time for structured exercise, such as lifting weights at the gym or doing a regular yoga class, to get the full benefits for your brain and body.

Real-life applications

If you’re a grandparent, consider playing Wii Sports virtual tennis or bowling with your grandchild. If you’re a teenager with signs of ADHD, try a dance class, and see if it impacts your concentration in class. If you’re a busy parent, you might be more clear-headed if you can squeeze a 20-minute yoga video session between meetings.

In each of these cases, you’re not just being active, you’re giving your brain a valuable tune-up. And unlike most brain-training apps or supplements, exercise delivers far reaching benefits, including improved sleep and mental health.

Workplaces and schools are starting to take note. Short movement breaks are being introduced during the workday to improve employee focus.

Schools that incorporate physical activity into the classroom are seeing improvements in students’ attention and academic performance.

Exercise is one of the most powerful and accessible tools we have for supporting brain health. Best of all, it’s free, widely available and it’s never too late to start.

Ben Singh, Research Fellow, Allied Health & Human Performance, University of South Australia and Ashleigh E. Smith, Associate Professor, Healthy Ageing, University of South Australia

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

There is a moment in the film Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears when the camera pans around the ballroom to discover Phryne Fisher’s creator Kerry Greenwood and her partner David Greagg seated at a dinner table, beaming and elegant in their finest 1920s evening wear.

Also appearing in this scene are many of the Phryne Fisher fans who helped bring the movie to the screen when producers Fiona Eagger and Deb Cox asked for help. The initial crowdfunding target of A$250,000 was reached within 48 hours. A day later the total had risen to $400,000, making this the most successful crowdfunding campaign for an Australian film at the time.

Watching Miss Fisher on film at the Sun Theatre in Yarraville in 2022, at an event organised by Sisters in Crime Australia, seated next to Kerry and surrounded by her fans, was an experience to remember. When we got to the ballroom scene, everyone cheered. Kerry was clearly thrilled.

A great legacy

Kerry died last week after suffering ill health for a number of years. The tributes are beginning to flow in from across the world from her many fans and followers. She has left us a great legacy in the form of her many books and our memories of the author herself. She was as witty, colourful and charming as her heroine, Miss Phryne Fisher.

Phryne was not Kerry’s only fictional creation, although she was her first significant success and will probably continue to be her most revered and influential character. She also wrote the Corinna Chapman series about a Melbourne-based baker, as well as many stand-alone novels in a variety of genres. She was astonishingly prolific.

In 1989, I had the pleasure of meeting with Kerry shortly after the publication of Cocaine Blues, the first in what would come to be the Phryne Fisher series. I well remember suggesting that it would make a great period crime drama.

That would not come about until 2012, after Eagger and Cox acquired the rights and produced three seasons for the ABC. The show was later acquired by the streamers, found a new international audience, and spawned a Chinese adaptation, Miss S.

Kerry and I first met in Mietta’s restaurant, just off Collins Street in Melbourne, where we sat at a small table in an elegant art deco bar, drinking gin and smoking up a storm. She recounted, in her inimitable way, how she had been trying to write a novel about highwaymen, but had been persuaded by her then publishers, Hilary McPhee and Diana Gribble, to write something different.

She had at some point written a thesis about the strikes on the Melbourne wharfs in 1928 and 1929, and had read every newspaper she could find, so she already had the perfect historical backdrop for a crime novel set in the period. The idea for Miss Fisher came to her on the tram going home.

When it was later suggested that her charming female action hero might bear some similarity to the Saint or James Bond, Kerry trenchantly responded with the comment that Phryne “had fewer product endorsements and a better class of lovers”. This was indeed true.

Kerry was always a stylish writer and Cocaine Blues opens with brief first paragraph that does not waste time in getting the story moving:

The glass in the French window shattered. The guests screamed. Over the general exclamation could be heard the shrill shriek of Madame St Clair, wife of the ambassador ‘Ciel! Mes Bijoux!’

It was with great glee that Kerry informed me that Madame St Clair’s exclamation was a direct steal from The Adventures of Tintin, as created by the Belgian comic artist Hergé. When I admitted to also loving Tintin, at our next meeting Kerry presented me with her French edition of Les Bijoux de La Castafiore (The Castafiore Emerald), in which the line does indeed appear. I treasure it still.

The anecdote reveals not only the eclectic range of Kerry’s sources (and the fact that she read French and was something of a polymath), but also her generosity.

A wealth of entertainment

Phryne might well be Kerry’s alter ego, in her care for the waifs and strays that she encounters, her concern for the poor and downtrodden, and in her passionate pursuit of justice, not forgetting that Kerry was a barrister who worked full-time as a criminal defence lawyer for Legal Aid.

When Phryne Fisher first appeared in 1989, there were relatively few Australian crime writers being published, and even fewer women. The crime writing scene now is very different. Carmel Shute from the Australian chapter of Sisters in Crime informed me that over 150 crime fiction and true crime books by women will be published in Australia in 2025. This has to be a record. It is testimony to the increasing popularity of a literary form which women have embraced as a way to tell the stories that matter to them.

Quite a few of those books sit within what has often been characterised as the “cosy” genre: a subgenre of crime fiction to which Kerry’s crime fiction certainly belongs. Until recently, cosy crime has tended to be underrated, compared to the kind of “gritty” crime fiction that wins accolades.

This has obscured the achievement of crime fiction such as Kerry’s, in which historical and contemporary social issues are reflected back to us in ways that give us pause, even as they are presented in a form designed to entertain.

This is Kerry’s legacy: a wealth of entertainment with a heart. Her novels are provocations to care about social justice. She was a true original, a great friend, and a valued mentor. She will be much missed, even as her creativity will continue to inspire.

Sue Turnbull, Senior Professor of Communication and Media Studies, University of Wollongong

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

As part of their federal election campaign, the Coalition announced plans to limit the number of international students able to commence study each year to 240,000, “focused on driving […] housing availability and affordability”.

This announcement was criticised as a “fact free zone” by the Property Council.

The Coalition proposal falsely equates high immigration with housing shortages. Studies indicate limiting international students will have minimal impact on housing supply. Most international students stay in student housing or share house accommodation, not suitable or desirable for many Australians to live in.

History shows us Australia has previously gone through periods of high migration and economic uncertainty. But history also shows us, if we are willing to adapt and innovate, high immigration and housing affordability can co-exist.

Lessons from Australia’s gold rush

The discovery of gold in Victoria caused Melbourne’s population to explode.

In 1851, Melbourne’s population was 77,000. Within a decade, that figure had more than quadrupled to 540,000.

As a young colony, the Victorian government actively recruited British and Irish migrants, subsidising fully or partially the cost of the sea voyage to Australia.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing: competition across migrant groups developed, and new Chinese immigrants in particular were singled out. Europeans staged violent anti-Chinese riots, which included the murder of three Chinese migrants.

To accommodate new migrants, the Victorian colonial government expanded housing supply in two ways.

First, in 1852 Lieutenant-Governor Charles La Trobe permitted the establishment of Canvas Town, essentially a tent city on the southern bank of the Yarra River.

There were problems in Canvas Town: disease was common, sanitation nonexistent, and crime rife. But Canvas Town provided newcomers protection from the elements. Canvas Town was officially disbanded in 1854, although people continued to live in tents across Melbourne as they awaited the construction of more permanent housing.

Second, prefabricated iron houses were imported to Melbourne from Britain to overcome supply shortages. These British-built “kit homes” were dismantled, every component labelled and then shipped to Australia for assembly.

Rapidly-built homes appeared in Port Melbourne, North Melbourne, Fitzroy, Collingwood and Richmond. Three such examples still exist today in South Melbourne.

Gold Rush Victoria reminds us of the importance of nimble government intervention in the housing market to offset housing pressures and mitigate anti-foreigner sentiments.

Responding to migrants after World War II

One hundred years later, Australia was again facing an immigration and population boom. Australia faced housing shortages in the post-World War II years, as the population grew from 7.6 million to 10.5 million people between 1947 and 1961.

In the era of post-war shortages and rationing, Australians worried about the impacts of the new arrivals on employment and social issues such as crime.

The arrival of displaced persons and assisted migrants from Europe strained existing housing stock. Some new and existing Australians resorted to squatting and other forms of temporary housing.

Commonwealth and state governments took leading roles in housing construction.

Between 1947 and 1961, Australia’s housing stock increased by 50% compared with a 41% increase in population. Australian governments directly contributed to 24% of this increase in stock, or 221,700 homes.

As the minister for immigration, Harold Holt said in 1950, “migrant labour was helping to solve Australia’s housing problems, not aggravating it” by working in essential industries that produce housing materials.

Once again, prefabricated homes were part of the solution.

But on-site construction also had a role to play and could capitalise on the skills of new migrants, particularly in the new migrant town of Elizabeth, South Australia.

Migrants also pooled their resources and constructed homes for their community.

In Wexcombe, Western Australia, 12 British families formed a building group. Within three years, they had built new homes for each family.

Eras of innovation

In the 1850s and 1950s, increased immigration triggered bigotry and xenophobia. However, governments at this time were focused on nation building.

Even if this was largely focused on supporting new white migrants, many politicians resisted the temptation to fan social divisions for political gain.

Instead, during the Gold Rush and post-World War II eras, Australian governments assisted individuals to adapt and innovate to new circumstances and create novel forms of housing.

Australian history gives us episodes where we see our society under strain and yet capable of addressing social issues with innovation and adaptability, while welcoming migrants.

Rachel Stevens, Lecturer, Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic University

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

Along with the many benefits of artificial intelligence – from providing real time navigation to early disease detection – the explosion in its use has increased opportunities for fraud and deception.

Large and small businesses and even the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) may be hit with fraudulent reimbursement claims, which are almost impossible to distinguish from legitimate receipts and invoices.

Individuals also need to be wary.

Look at the photos of the receipts shown below. One documents a genuine transaction. The other was created using ChatGPT. Can you spot the fake?

Now have a look at this one.

You possibly couldn’t – and that’s exactly the point. Systems which can reproduce near perfect counterfeits of legitimate financial documents are increasingly prevalent and sophisticated.

Last week, OpenAI released an improved image generation model which can create images with photorealistic outputs including text.

Why should we care?

Fraud involving fake financial documents is a massive global issue. The international Association of Certified Fraud Examiners estimate organisations lose approximately 5% of revenue to fraud each year.

In its 2024 report, the association documents losses exceeding US$3.1 billion across 1,921 cases. Billing and expense fraud constitute 35% of asset misappropriation cases, with firms reporting median losses of US$150,000 per incident.

Most concerning, fraudsters primarily conceal these crimes by creating fake documents or altering files, exactly what AI now simplifies.

Fake documents enable fraud in various ways. An employee might create a fictitious receipt for a business lunch that never happened, or a contractor might fabricate receipts for expenses never incurred. In each case, the fraudster uses counterfeit documentation to extract money they’re not entitled to.

This problem is likely more widespread than recognised. A 2024 survey revealed 24% of employees admitted to expense fraud, with another 15% considering it.

Even more concerning, 42% of UK public sector decision makers confessed to submitting fraudulent claims.

AI removes barriers to deception

Understanding how AI technology may lead to a surge in potential fraud requires examining the classic “fraud triangle”. This explains that fraud requires three elements: incentives, rationalisation and opportunity.

Historically, technical barriers limited the ability to create fake documentation even when motivation existed.

AI eliminates these barriers by making fake documentation easy to create. Research confirms when opportunity expands, fraud increases.

When fake claims become everyone’s problem

When fake receipts support tax deductions, we all pay.

Consider a marketing consultant earning $120,000, who uses an AI image generator to create several convincing receipts for non-existent expenses totalling $4,000. At their marginal tax rate of 30%, this fraud saves them about $1,200 in taxes – if they are not caught.

The Australian Taxation Office estimates a $2.7 billion annual annual gap from incorrectly over-claimed deductions by small businesses. With digital forgery becoming more accessible, this gap could widen significantly.

Fake receipts and invoices

Consumers are also becoming increasingly vulnerable to scammers using AI-generated receipts and invoices.

Imagine receiving what looks like an official invoice from your energy provider. The only difference? The payment details direct funds to a scammer’s account.

This is already occurring. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission reported more than $3.1 billion lost to scams in 2023, with payment redirection fraud growing rapidly.

As AI tools make creating and editing convincing business documentation easier, these scam numbers have the potential to increase.

The growing threat

This vulnerability for both businesses and consumers is amplified by our increasing reliance on digital documentation.

Today, many businesses issue receipts in digital formats. Expense management systems typically require employees to submit photos or scans of receipts. Tax authorities also accept electronically stored documentation.

With paper receipts becoming increasingly rare and paper’s physical security features gone, digital forgeries become nearly impossible to spot through visual inspection alone.

Is digital authentication the answer?

One potential countermeasure is the Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) standard. The C2PA standard embeds AI generated images with verifiable information about file origin.

However, a major weakness remains, as users can remove metadata by taking a screenshot of an image. For businesses and tax authorities, digital authentication standards are just part of the answer to sophisticated digital forgery. Yet reverting to paper documentation isn’t feasible in our digital era.

Seeing is no longer believing

AI’s ability to create realistic fake financial documents fundamentally changes our approach to expense verification and financial security.

The traditional visual inspection of receipts and invoices is rapidly becoming obsolete.

Businesses, tax authorities and individuals need to adapt quickly by implementing verification systems that go beyond simply looking at documentation.

This might include transaction matching with bank records, and automated anomaly detection systems that flag unusual spending patterns. Perhaps the use of blockchain technology will expand to help verify transactions.

The gap between what AI can create and what our systems can reliably verify continues to widen. So how do we maintain trust in financial transactions in a world where seeing is no longer believing?

Matthew Grosse, Director of the Master of Business Analytics, Senior Lecturer, Accounting, University of Technology Sydney

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

Once floodwaters subside, talk of planned retreat inevitably rises.

Within Aotearoa New Zealand, several communities from north to south – including Kumeū, Kawatiri Westport and parts of Ōtepoti Dunedin – are considering future relocations while others are completing property buyouts and categorisations.

Planned retreats may reduce exposure to harm, but the social and cultural burdens of dislocation from land and home are complex. Planning, funding and physically relocating or removing homes, taonga or assets – and even entire towns – is challenging.

Internationally, research has focused on why, when and how planned retreats occur, as well as who pays. But we explore what happens to the places we retreat from.

Our latest research examines 161 international case studies of planned retreat. We analysed what happens beyond retreat, revealing how land use has changed following withdrawal of human activities.

We found a wide range of land use following retreat. In some cases, comprehensive planning for future uses of land was part of the retreat process. But in others we found a failure to consider these changing places.

Planned retreats have happened in response to various climate and hazard risks, including sea-level rise and coastal erosion, tsunami, cyclones, earthquakes, floods and landslides.

The case studies we investigated range from gradual transitions to sudden changes, such as from residential or business activities to conservation or vacant lands. In some cases, “sea change” is evident, where once dry land becomes foreshore and seabed.

Through our research, we identified global “retreat legacies”. These themes demonstrate how communities across the world have sought similar outcomes, highlighting primary land-use patterns following retreat.

Nature legacies

The case studies show significant conversions of private to public land, with new nature and open-space reserves. Sites have been rehabilitated and floodplains and coastal ecosystems restored and reconnected.

Open spaces are used for various purposes, including as nature, community, stormwater or passive recreational reserves. Some of these new zones may restrict structures or certain activities, depending on the risk.

For example, due to debris flow hazard in Matatā in the Bay of Plenty, only transitory recreation or specific low-risk activities are allowed in the post-retreat environment because of the high risk to human life.

Planning and investment in new open-space zones range from basic rehabilitation (grassed sites) to established parks and reserves, such as the Grand Forks riverfront greenway which borders rivers in the twin US cities of Grand Forks, North Dakota, and East Grand Forks, Minnesota. This area now hosts various recreational courses and connected trails as well as major flood protection measures.

Nature-based adaptations are a key function in this retreat legacy. For example, Project Twin Streams, a large-scale environmental restoration project in Waitakere, West Auckland, has transformed former residential sites into drainage reserves to make room for rivers in the floodplain.

Importantly, not all retreats require significant land-use change. Continued farming, heritage preservation and cultural activities show that planned retreats are not always full and final withdrawals from a place.

Instead, they represent an adapted relationship. While sensitive activities are relocated, other practices may remain, such as residents’ continued access to the old village of Vunidogoloa in Fiji for fishing and farming.

Social and economic legacies

Urban development in a small number of retreated sites has involved comprehensive spatial reorganisation, with planning for new urban esplanades, improved infrastructure and cultural amenities.

One example is the comprehensive infrastructure masterplan for the Caño Martín Peña district in San Juan, Puerto Rico, which involves communities living along a tidal channel. The plan applied a community-first approach to retreat. It integrated infrastructure, housing, open space, flood mitigation and ecological planning.

Alternatively, the decision to remove stopbanks and return the landscape to a “waterscape” can become a tourism feature, such as in the marshlands of the Biesbosch National Park in the Netherlands. A museum is dedicated to the transformed environment.

Where there was no post-retreat planning or site rehabilitation, ghost towns such as Missouri’s Pattonsburg leave eerie reminders of the costs of living in danger zones.

Vacant and abandoned sites also raise environmental justice and ecological concerns about which retreat spaces are invested in and rehabilitated to avoid urban blight and environmental risks. Retreat sites may include landfills or contaminated land, requiring major site rehabilitation.

The 12 case studies from Aotearoa New Zealand demonstrate a range of new land uses. These include new open-space reserves, the restoration of floodplains and coastal environments, risk mitigation and re-development, and protection measures such as stopbanks.

Moving beyond retreat

Our research highlights how planned retreats can create a transition in landscapes, with potential for a new sense of place, meaning and strategic adaptation.

We found planned retreats have impacts beyond the retreat site, which reinforces the value of spatial planning.

The definition and practices of “planned or managed retreat” must include early planning to account for the values and uses the land once had. Any reconfigurations of land and seascapes must imagine a future well beyond people’s retreat.

Christina Hanna, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Planning, University of Waikato; Iain White, Professor of Environmental Planning, University of Waikato; Pip Wallace, Senior lecturer in Environmental Planning, University of Waikato, and Raven Cretney, Senior lecturer in Environmental Policy, Lincoln University, New Zealand

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

You may have seen ads by Apple promoting its new Clean Up feature that can be used to remove elements in a photo. When one of these ads caught my eye this weekend, I was intrigued and updated my software to try it out.

The feature has been available in Australia since December for Apple customers with certain hardware and software capabilities. It’s also available for customers in New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The tool uses generative artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse the scene and suggest elements that might be distracting. You can see those highlighted in the screenshot below.

You can then tap the suggested element to remove it or circle elements to delete them. The device then uses generative AI to try to create a logical replacement based on the surrounding area.

Easier ways to deceive

Smartphone photo editing apps have been around for more than a decade, but now, you don’t need to download, pay for, or learn to use a new third-party app. If you have an eligible device, you can use these features directly in your smartphone’s default photo app.

Apple’s Clean Up joins a number of similar tools already offered by various tech companies. Those with Android phones might have used Google’s Magic Editor. This lets users move, resize, recolour or delete objects using AI. Users with select Samsung devices can use their built-in photo gallery app to remove elements in photos.

There have always been ways – analogue and, more recently, digital – to deceive. But integrating them into existing software in a free, easy-to-use way makes those possibilities so much easier.

Using AI to edit photos or create new images entirely raises pressing questions around the trustworthiness of photographs and videos. We rely on the vision these devices produce in everything from police body and traffic cams to insurance claims and verifying the safe delivery of parcels.

If advances in tech are eroding our trust in pictures and even video, we have to rethink what it means to trust our eyes.

How can these tools be used?

The idea of removing distracting or unwanted elements can be attractive. If you’ve ever been to a crowded tourist hotspot, removing some of the other tourists so you can focus more on the environment might be appealing (check out the slider below for an example).

But beyond removing distractions, how else can these tools be used?

Some people use them to remove watermarks. Watermarks are typically added by photographers or companies trying to protect their work from unauthorised use. Removing these makes the unauthorised use less obvious but not less legal.

Others use them to alter evidence. For example, a seller might edit a photo of a damaged good to allege it was in good condition before shipping.

As image editing and generating tools become more widespread and easier to use, the list of uses balloons proportionately. And some of these uses can be unsavoury.

AI generators can now make realistic-looking receipts, for example. People could then try to submit these to their employer to get reimbursed for expenses not actually incurred.

Can anything we see be trusted anymore?

Considering these developments, what does it mean to have “visual proof” of something?

If you think a photo might be edited, zooming in can sometimes reveal anomalies where the AI has stuffed up. Here’s a zoomed-in version of some of the areas where the Clean Up feature generated new content that doesn’t quite match the old.

It’s usually easier to manipulate one image than to convincingly edit multiple images of the same scene in the same way. For this reason, asking to see multiple outtakes that show the same scene from different angles can be a helpful verification strategy.

Seeing something with your own eyes might be the best approach, though this isn’t always possible.

Doing some additional research might also help. For example, with the case of a fake receipt, does the restaurant even exist? Was it open on the day shown on the receipt? Does the menu offer the items allegedly sold? Does the tax rate match the local area’s?

Manual verification approaches like the above obviously take time. Trustworthy systems that can automate these mundane tasks are likely to grow in popularity as the risks of AI editing and generation increase.

Likewise, there’s a role for regulators to play in ensuring people don’t misuse AI technology. In the European Union, Apple’s plan to roll out its Apple Intelligence features, which include the Clean Up function, was delayed due to “regulatory uncertainties”.

AI can be used to make our lives easier. Like any technology, it can be used for good or bad. Being aware of what it’s capable of and developing your visual and media literacies is essential to being an informed member of our digital world.

T.J. Thomson, Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication & Digital Media, RMIT University

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

Australians are being urged to roll up their sleeves for a flu vaccine amid rising cases of influenza.

It’s an opportune time to think about other vaccines too, particularly because some vaccines can be given at the same time as the flu vaccine.

One is the COVID vaccine.

Should you get another COVID shot?

More than five years since COVID was declared a pandemic, we hear much less about this virus. But it’s still around.

In 2024 there were 4,953 deaths involving COVID. This is nearly 20% lower than in 2023, but still nearly five times that of influenza (1,002).

Vaccines, which do a very good job at reducing the chances of severe COVID, remain an important tool in our ongoing battle against the virus.

Case numbers don’t tell us as much about COVID anymore as fewer people are testing. But based on other ways we monitor the virus, such as cases in ICU and active outbreaks in residential aged care homes, there have essentially been two peaks a year over recent years – one over summer and one over winter.

This doesn’t mean we can predict exactly when another wave will happen, but it’s inevitable and may well be within the next few months. So it’s worth considering another COVID vaccine if you’re eligible.

Who can get one, and when?

There are several risk factors for more severe COVID, but some of the most important include being older or immunocompromised. For this reason, people aged 75 and older are recommended to receive a COVID booster every six months.

In the slightly younger 65 to 74 age bracket, or adults aged 18 to 64 who are immunocompromised, booster doses are recommended every 12 months, but people are eligible every six months.

Healthy adults under 65 are eligible for a booster dose every 12 months.

Healthy children aren’t recommended to receive boosters but those who are severely immunocompromised may be eligible.

What COVID shots are currently available?

We’ve seen multiple types of COVID vaccines since they first became available about four years ago. Over time, different vaccines have targeted different variants as the virus has evolved.

While some vaccine providers may still offer other options, such as the older booster that targeted the Omicron variant XBB.1.5, the recent JN.1 booster is the most up-to-date and best option.

This is a relatively recently updated version to improve protection against some of the newer strains of COVID that are circulating. The new booster only became available in Australia in late 2024.

This booster, as the name suggests, targets a subvariant called JN.1. Although JN.1 has not been the dominant subvariant in Australia for some time, this shot is still expected to provide good protection against circulating subvariants, including new subvariants such as LP.8.1, which is descended from JN.1.

While it’s great we have an updated booster available, unfortunately uptake remains poor. Only 17.3% of people 75 and over had received a COVID vaccine in the six months to March.

Getting a flu and COVID shot together

Data from more than 17,000 people who completed a survey after receiving the JN.1 booster shows that while 27% reported at least one adverse event following vaccination, the majority of these were mild, such as local pain or redness or fatigue.

Only 4% of people reported an impact on their routine activities following vaccination, such as missing school or work.

If you choose to get the flu vaccine and the COVID vaccine at the same time, they’ll usually be given in different arms. There shouldn’t be a significant increase in side effects. What’s more, getting both shots at the same time doesn’t reduce your immune response against either vaccine.

Now is the ideal time to get your flu vaccine. If you’re eligible for a COVID booster as well, getting both vaccines at the same time is safe and can be very convenient.

We’re conducting trials in Australia, as are scientists elsewhere, of combined vaccines. One day these could allow vaccination against COVID and flu in a single shot – but these are still a way off.

If you’re not sure about your eligibility or have any questions about either vaccine, discuss this with your GP, specialist of pharmacist. Australian state and federal government websites also provide reliable information.

Paul Griffin, Professor, Infectious Diseases and Microbiology, The University of Queensland

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

The 2025 federal election coincides with a period of profound global uncertainty, as the Trump administration wreaks havoc on the free trade system and longstanding alliances.

The events of recent months have underscored how, at each election, the voters in a democracy set their country on a path. Here in Australia, voters will be choosing whom to trust with tackling our challenges and making the most of the opportunities before us.

These turbulent times internationally only reinforce the need for us to be clear-eyed about the challenges facing Australia, and where our strengths lie in addressing them.

The big five challenges

We see five overlapping domestic policy challenges that must be tackled by whoever wins the next election, to ensure prosperity for current and future generations.

First, we must plan and deliver over the next 25 years the economic transformation that accompanies decarbonisation.

Addressing climate change is not a task we can delay or abandon, but it will be neither easy nor cheap. The next government can either work to build a credible plan, to orient long-term investment in a renewable energy future, or leave a legacy for the next generation of even greater costs and unreliability, and missed opportunities.

Second, we must increase the availability and affordability of housing in Australia. Housing is a fundamental human need, and when the housing system fails to deliver enough homes in the places people need and want to live, the consequences are both social and economic. In particular, our broken housing system sits at the centre of growing inequality in Australia.

Third, as the structure of our economy changes, becoming less reliant on routine and manual labour, Australia must deepen its talent pools and boost productivity to meet the needs of our society and lift economic dynamism. We must improve our school systems, expand access to high-quality early childhood education and care, dismantle barriers in the labour market that prevent people from making the most of their skills and experience, and be rapid adopters of the best global practices and technology.

Fourth, we are in the midst of the retirement of the Baby Boomer generation. An ageing population is placing increasing demands on public services, government budgets and our workforce. We need to get better at tackling chronic disease in our health system, and we need to shore-up our retirement and aged-care systems for the demographic change that we have long known is coming.

Fifth, we cannot continue to have high expectations for public services and infrastructure, without raising the money to pay for them. Tax reform has sat in the too-hard basket for too long. In particular, income tax breaks for superannuation and housing have become too generous, and unfairly place the tax burden on younger, less wealthy taxpayers.

And we need to implement sensible savings. Swingeing cuts may seem easy and appealing on the surface, but real savings will take more thinking than that: to make hospitals more efficient, to better target the NDIS, to get smarter in how we spend public money in procuring big infrastructure and defence projects.

A position of strength

None of these challenges is new: they were waiting for us as we emerged from the COVID crisis. Fortunately, we are not starting from scratch.

In several areas, the federal government has made a start. But whoever forms government after the 2025 election must stay the course on difficult reforms while also finally confronting the reforms that neither side of politics has effectively tackled since the start of the century.

Australia occupies a position of relative strength to tackle these challenges. We have a highly educated and skilled population, a more manageable fiscal position than many of our counterparts, stronger public institutions, and less polarisation in our politics.

The reform clock is ticking

Why, then, has reform proved so hard in Australia? Perhaps we have taken our strengths for granted, perhaps we have been content to leave problems for our future selves to solve. We cannot continue in this way.

The fundamentals of Australia’s prosperity have been our success in opening our economy and society to the world, while maintaining a strong social safety net, and ensuring economic benefits are broadly shared and that each new generation sees opportunity to build a rewarding life. Failing to tackle the Big Five challenges above risks unpicking these foundations.

Vested interests have been successful in thwarting reforms in the public interest for decades in Australia. Or perhaps the politics of opposition have proved so successful as to kill the prospect for bipartisan agreement on necessary, evidence-backed change.

Equally, it falls to the media to hold politicians to account over the facts and evidence that support their claims. Politicians should be firmly tested on what they propose to do with the power they seek, and how they intend to advance the interests of all Australians. This is one of the most important safeguards against empty promises that will do nothing to make us better off, or even take us backwards.

The reform clock is ticking. The winner of the 2025 election will have to get to work, quickly, on building a better Australia.

Aruna Sathanapally, Chief Executive, Grattan Institute, Grattan Institute

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

About 14% of Australians experienced personal fraud last year. Of these, 2.1 million experienced credit card fraud, 675,300 were caught in a scam, 255,000 had their identities stolen and 433,000 were impersonated online.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics latest Personal Fraud Survey, between July 2023 and June 2024, Australians lost A$2.1 billion through credit card fraud.

This was up almost 9% from the previous year. Even after reimbursements, the loss was still $477 million.

These figures do not include financial loss through identity theft, or phishing, romance, computer support and dodgy financial advice scams.

Why the increase?

Research shows the more frequently we use technology, the more likely we are to be scammed. Monica Whitty from the Cyber Security Centre, University of Warwick, found victims of cyber-frauds were more likely to score high on impulsivity measures like ‘urgency’ and engage in more frequent online routine activities that place them at great risk of becoming scammed.

We communicate via email, we shop online, use dating apps and allow technicians to remotely access our computers. Meanwhile, amazing “get rich quick” opportunities are apparently being liked by our friends on our socials almost every day.

But too many of us do not stop and think, “is this legitimate?” It is no wonder we see personal fraud and scams increase every year.

While the Australian Bureau of Statistics figures suggest older Australians (aged 45 and over) are more exposed to card fraud, research has found demographics are not a significant predictor of fraud victimisation.

Taking risks

Being too trusting, drives complacency, which produces gullibility. Think about an online dating sites. The site uses a multi-factor authenticator, it requires you to authenticate your photo, password protect your profile and read the scam warnings.

A site’s apparent legitimacy increases your trust. Research has found if you perceive a platform to be legitimate you could be exposed to romance fraud. Fraudsters may be operating within a site, even if it is legitimate.

Another strong predictor of exposure to online fraud is self-control. Self-control theory predicts individuals with low self-control tend to pursue their own self-interest without considering the negative consequences.

Simply, if the investment scheme looks “too good”, they will mostly likely click on the link and get scammed.

Giving away too much

Some individuals are prone to self-disclosing personal information online – and scammers love personal information. Self-disclosure is defined as the amount of information a person decides to make common knowledge.

Sometimes, we disclose, even when we don’t intend to. A common phishing technique on social media is status updates that read, “Your porn star name is your first pet’s name and the first street you lived on.”

They’re interesting, funny and bring on a healthy dose of nostalgia, but the answers to those questions that you tap in for all to see are also most likely to be your security questions on your bank accounts.

The most common scams in 2023-2024:

• Buying or selling scams (1.4% or 308,200)
• Information request or phishing scams (0.7% or 148,800)

What is the government doing to protect me?

The Australian government recently passed legislation which targets scams. It places increased responsibilities on banking and finance, telecommunications and digital platforms organisations to protect customers.

Suspicious numbers can now be accompanied a warning of “potential fraud” on your smartphone screen. Banks are also informing customers about the latest scams. Some banking transactions can verify the identity of the payment recipient, to ensure the details you have match the actual account holder.

While these will not stop all scams, they are a step towards reducing the number of victims and the amount of money lost to fraudulent approaches.

Six steps to protect yourself

There are some small but powerful steps we can all take to reduce the likelihood of financial harm.

1. Passwords: it is important to have strong, unique passwords across your accounts. Using a password manager can help with this.

2. Multi-factor authentication: many platforms will allow you to add extra layers of security to your account by using one-time passwords, authenticator apps, or tokens.

3. Review privacy settings: be aware of the different settings on your accounts and ensure you are in control of what information you provide and what can be accessed by others.

4. Be vigilant: know what you see and hear may not be real. The person or company you are communicating with may not be authentic. It is okay to be sceptical and take time to do your own checks.

5. Money transfers: never send money you are not willing to lose. Too often, people will send money before realising it is a scam. Never feel rushed or forced into any financial decision. It is OK to say no.

6. Credit monitoring: if you know or suspect you have been scammed, you can enact a credit ban, meaning no one can access your details or take further action in your name. This can be a good short-term solution.

And if you are scammed …

Anyone can report money lost in a scam to ReportCyber, the Australian online police reporting portal for cyber incidents. If you have received scam texts or emails, you can report these to Scamwatch, to assist with education and awareness activities.

Gary Mortimer, Professor of Marketing and Consumer Behaviour, Queensland University of Technology

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

Once upon a time, children fought for control of the remote to the sole family television. Now the choice of screen-based content available to kids seems endless. There are computers, tablets, phones and gaming consoles offering streaming services, online content and apps.

Children also use devices at school, with digital literacy part of the Australian curriculum from the start of school.

The speed and scale of this change has left parents, researchers and policymakers scrambling to catch up. And it has inevitably led to concerns about screen use, as well as guidelines about limiting their use.

Our new study looks at the links between digital technology use and young children’s wellbeing, specifically for those aged four to six.

Our comprehensive analysis shows children who spend longer periods using digital technologies are more likely to have social, emotional and behavioural difficulties. However, we can’t say at what age or level of screen use these negative effects are likely to become evident.

But for parents trying to navigate a world where technology is all around us, our study also shows there are things they can do to help their kids use screens in healthier ways.

Our study

We carried out a systematic review of the research literature on children’s use of digital devices since 2011 (after the Apple iPad was launched). This means we examined all the available peer-reviewed research on digital devices and their impact on wellbeing for children.

We also focused on ages four to six age as it is a time when children are developing rapidly and beginning school. Other studies have focused on particular types of device. But we included all kinds of digital devices in our search – from televisions to phones, tablets and gaming consoles – to make sure we could provide comprehensive analysis of what kids are using.

The studies came from 20 countries, including Australia, China, the United States, Turkey, Germany and Canada. They were almost exclusively based on parents’ reports of their children and include more than 83,000 parents.

4 areas of child wellbeing

From this, we analysed the relationship between children’s technology use and the following four areas:

1. psychosocial wellbeing: an overall measure that captures children’s happiness, as well as social and emotional adjustment.

2. social functioning: children’s social skills, including how well they get along with their peers.

3. the parent-child relationship: the level of closeness or conflict between parents and their children.

4. behavioural functioning: the absence of behavioural difficulties such as tech-related tantrums, hyperactivity, depression or anxiety.

We did this with a meta-analysis – a statistical method that uses data from multiple studies to draw conclusions.

What we found

Our analysis found more digital technology use in young children was associated with poorer wellbeing outcomes across the four areas.

It is important to note correlation doesn’t equal causation. The scope of the research means at this point, it is not possible to identify the exact reasons behind the negative relationships.

But we do know the more time children spent watching TV, playing on iPads or apps, the more likely they were to have problems with behaviour, social skills, their relationship with their parents, and their emotional wellbeing.

But tech use is more than just time

Our research also brought together emerging evidence which shows the relationship between digital tech use and child wellbeing is complex.

This means the type of content children consume, and the context in which they consume it, can also have a bearing on their wellbeing. The research shows there are several ways parents can guide their children to potentially mitigate the negative links with social, emotional and behavioural wellbeing.

With this in mind, how can you encourage healthier screen use?

3 tips for kids and screens

1. Keep an eye on the clock

The research cannot provide a specific “time limit” for screen use. But you can still be mindful of how much time your child spends on devices both at home and at school – moderation is key.

Try and mix screen time with other activities, such as time outside or time with friends and family, books or imaginary play.

2. Seek out quality

Research shows encouraging high-quality educational content during screen use may curb negative links between tech use and wellbeing.

Consider swapping fast-paced cartoons and time spent on lots of short clips with educational viewing, for example ABC kids programs that promote learning.

Introduce your child to age-appropriate educational and interactive games that challenge them and encourage them to be creative.

3. Use tech together

Tech time isn’t just for kids – parents can also join in.

Solo tech use may reduce opportunities for positive social interactions. But watching or playing with friends or family opens up opportunities for conversation, working together and learning.

This could include watching a movie together and talking about the characters, working on an online puzzle together or learning new coding skills together.

Jacquelyn Harverson, PhD Candidate, School of Psychology, Deakin University; Louise Paatsch, Professor of Education, Deakin University, and Sharon Horwood, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, Deakin University

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

You’re about to recycle your laptop or your phone, so you delete all your photos and personal files. Maybe you even reset the device to factory settings.

You probably think your sensitive data is now safe. But there is more to be done: hackers may still be able to retrieve passwords, documents or bank details, even after a reset.

In fact, 90% of second-hand laptops, hard drives and memory cards still contain recoverable data. This indicates that many consumers fail to wipe their devices properly before resale or disposal.

But there are some simple steps you can take to keep your personal information safe while recycling responsibly.

The data security risks

Discarded or resold electronics often retain sensitive personal and corporate information. Simply deleting files or performing a factory reset may not be sufficient. Data can often be easily recovered using specialised tools. This oversight has led to alarming incidents of data leaks and breaches.

For example, 42% of used storage devices sold on eBay still contained sensitive data, despite sellers following methods to erase data. This included passport images, school records, and corporate documents.

Another 2022 study found that improperly erased internet-connected devices stored private data, making them vulnerable to exploitation. European e-waste exported to Ghana also contained classified corporate and government files, exposing security risks beyond personal identity theft.

A major wireless provider in the United States failed to securely decommission storage devices. This lead to a data breach affecting 14 million customers.

Similarly, in 2021 improperly discarded medical hard drives exposed over 100,000 confidential patient records.

Why standard factory resets are not enough

Many people believe performing a factory reset fully erases their data. But this is not always the case.

An analysis of secondhand mobile devices found that 35% still contained recoverable data after being reset and resold. This highlights the risks of relying solely on factory resets.

On older devices or those without encryption, residual data can still be recovered using forensic tools.

iPhones use hardware encryption, making resets more effective, while Android devices vary by manufacturer.

Best practices for secure disposal

To protect your personal and organisational information, consider these measures before disposing of old devices:

Data wiping

Personal users should use data-wiping software to securely erase their hard drive before selling or recycling a device.

However, for solid-state drives, traditional wiping methods may not be effective. This is because solid-state drives store data using flash memory and algorithms, which prolong a device’s lifespan by distributing data across memory cells and can prevent direct overwriting.

Instead, enabling full-disk encryption with software such as BitLocker on Windows or FileVault on Mac before resetting the device can help to ensure data is unreadable.

On Android phones, apps such as Shreddit provide secure data-wiping options. iPhones already encrypt data by default, making a full reset the most effective way to erase information.

Businesses that handle customer data, financial records or intellectual property must comply with data protection regulations. They could use certified data-wiping tools that meet the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology’s guidelines for media sanitisation or the US Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ standard for sanitising storage. These guidelines are globally recognised.

Many companies also choose third-party data destruction services to verify compliance and enhance security.

Physical destruction

If the data is highly sensitive, physically destroying the storage medium (such as a hard drive) is the most secure option. Common methods include degaussing (using a strong magnetic field), shredding, disintegration, melting, and drilling.

However, some of these techniques can be hazardous if not handled by professionals. They also make a hard drive or device unsuitable for resale and instead require it to be taken to a waste recovery centre so the rare earth metal components can be recovered.

Certified recycling services

Use reputable e-waste recyclers who adhere to strict data destruction protocols to ensure your information does not fall into the wrong hands. Look for certifications such as R2, e-Stewards, or AS/NZS 5377, which ensure compliance with industry security standards. An online database run by sustainable electronics organisation SERI of R2-certified facilities around the world can help with this.

Safe selling and donating practices

Before selling or donating devices, conduct a thorough data wipe. Be cautious of devices linked to cloud accounts, and remove all personal information to prevent unauthorised access. Resetting alone may not be enough.

Legal and regulatory considerations for businesses

Different regions have strict data-protection laws that impose legal and financial penalties for improper disposal of sensitive data.

It’s important for businesses to consider the legal standards for handling and disposing personal information in whatever region they’re operating in, whether that be Europe, the United States, Australia or elsewhere.

Before recycling or selling an old device, take the necessary steps to ensure your data is completely erased. Identity theft, financial fraud and data breaches are real risks. But they can be prevented with the right precautions.

A few extra steps now can protect your information and ensure responsible recycling.

Ritesh Chugh, Associate Professor, Information and Communications Technology, CQUniversity Australia

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

Anthony Albanese has announced that the government will ensure the Port of Darwin, currently leased by the Chinese company Landbridge, is returned to Australian hands.

“Australia needs to own the Port of Darwin,” the prime minister declared late Friday.

Albanese rang a Darwin radio station after Labor got wind of the fact that Opposition Leader Peter Dutton would on Saturday announce a Coalition government would return the port back to local control.

Both the government and opposition are promising that, if necessary, they would bring the port’s lease into public ownership.

Albanese said the government had been seeking a local buyer, but was prepared to acquire the port’s lease if that was the only solution.

“We prefer that it be through superannuation funds or some other vehicle that doesn’t mean direct taxpayer’s funds, but we’re prepared to go down the road of taxpayer direct involvement, as well.”

Asked to clarify whether the options were that the port remain privately owned or that it be returned to be a government asset, Albanese said, “yes, they are.”

The Northern Territory government leased the port to Landbridge in 2015 for about $500 million. The lease was for 99 years.

The federal government at the time was not directly involved in the deal, but the Northern Territory government sought advice from the Defence Department and security agencies, which didn’t raise objections. Later, US President Barack Obama chided then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull for not giving the Americans a heads-up.

The Chinese deal has caused serious controversy in the years since.

When Dutton was defence minister in the Morrison government, his department did a review of the lease.

A statement on Friday from Dutton and shadow ministers said a Coalition government would seek a private operator to take over the lease, but if one could not be found within six months, the government would acquire it “as a last resort”.

It would use the Commonwealth’s “compulsory acquisition powers”, and the government would then compensate the Landbridge Group.

“In the current geopolitical environment, it is vital that this piece of critical infrastructure, which is directly opposite to the Larrakeyah Defence Precinct, is operated by a trusted, Commonwealth approved entity.

"We will appoint a specialist commercial adviser to work with the Northern Territory Government and officials from the Departments of Treasury, Finance, Defence and Infrastructure to provide advice and engage with potential new operators of the port.”

Dutton said that a Coalition government would not allow the port to be leased by any entity that is “directly or indirectly controlled by a foreign government, including any state-owned enterprise or sovereign wealth fund.”

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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

Australia faces crisis-level workforce shortfalls in security and defence. Recruiting more people to the defence force is now an urgent matter of national security.

So, comments – such as those recently made by a Liberal candidate that we “need to remove females from combat corps” in order to “fix” the military – come at the worst possible time.

Such beliefs are not just unhelpful. They are dangerous.

Without women in the national security workforce, and in combat roles, Australia will fail to hit its recruitment targets – at a time of critical international insecurity.

Why is it so hard to attract women to the defence force?

We know women are interested and engaged in international affairs.

So, why don’t they want to join the defence force? In short, we don’t know – but we desperately need to find out.

Women make up just 20.7% of the Australian Defence Force (ADF).

Compared with a decade ago, this is an improvement. But the improvement has stalled. The latest figure represents a mere 0.1% increase compared with 2021 figures.

This is serious.

Australia’s recruitment problems put at risk our ability to:

• conduct maritime patrols
• defend against cyber attacks
• maintain force readiness.

Other democratic states worldwide are also struggling to achieve recruitment targets.

Despite ambitious multi-year government programs aimed a boosting women’s participation in national security, and thousands of pages of reports and reviews on the issue, results have been limited and inconsistent.

Most attempts to attract more women are focused on workplace improvements.

Efforts include:

• improving recruitment and promotion policies
• initiatives to address gender discrimination and sexual harassment
• questioning whether the inherently hierarchical structures of defence agencies is to blame.

Of the many government reviews and audits analysing the question, the vast majority focused on such workplace solutions.

But what if the problem doesn’t lie in the workplace, but rather in wider society?

What if one factor dissuading women was the archaic idea women just don’t really belong in the military at all?

Societal attitudes matter

The Liberal candidate who made the recent comments about women in combat roles has now been replaced. It’s positive to see his party saying such views are “inconsistent with the party’s position.”

However, the incident suggests doubt remains in some quarters about women’s readiness to serve and take up combat roles.

There’s a dearth of research on why exactly Australian women appear reluctant to join the ADF. Some of the reasons may be linked to the perception the ADF has a problem with sexual assault or sexism.

But broader social gender norms matter too. When women hear comments reinforcing the idea national security is primarily a male field, they may simply not see a future for themselves or their daughters in it.

A recent US study found 60% of teenage girls “have never considered joining the military or pictured themselves in uniform”.

A passing glance at American politics demonstrates the often precarious position of women already working in national security. There, in recent months, debate has turned to:

• critics questioning the presence of women in Trump’s Secret Service detail
• coverage of old comments by Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth espousing a view women should not fight
• Trump’s claim it was “common sense” a Black Hawk helicopter crash this year was caused by diversity, equity and inclusion policies
• Trump’s broader crackdown on initiatives on diversity and inclusion in the military and decision to fire the Chief of Naval Operations (who was a woman).

Trump’s America is not Australia, of course. But the recent backlash against women in the US security and defence arenas shows how quickly previous progress can be unwound.

Could these debates be having a chilling effect on women in Australia who might otherwise consider a career in the military?

More research is required to answer that question. But it’s possible public denigration of women in these roles deters women from seeking them at all, and may reinforce attitudes of those seeking to keep women out.

Broadening the talent pool

Australia’s own response to supporting diversity in the military has been mixed. In 2013, Chief of Army David Morrison made international headlines for a powerful speech about diversity.

But Morrison faced criticism in the aftermath. Petitions called for his resignation and condemnation after he spoke about gender equality (and not veterans’ welfare) at an awards ceremony. He was criticised for caling for non-gendered language in Defence workplaces.

Women make vital contributions to critical and creative thinking and decision-making in national security.

Women in the military can do jobs men cannot do. Think, for example, of women who served in Afghanistan or Iraq, where it would be culturally unacceptable for a male soldier to talk to and work with local women. These were roles female soldiers were able to take up.

Including women in defence increases the available talent pool, addressing pressing issues of workforce capability in the ADF.

Australia’s national security requires women to be part of our military, including in combat roles. Without them, recruitment targets will fail. It is not diversity, equality and inclusion: it is reality.

It is critically important to Australia’s national security we resist the trend from the United States. We must find out what’s stopping women from joining our defence force and address those problems urgently.

Sarah Percy, Professor of International Relations, The University of Queensland; Danielle Chubb, Associate Professor of International Relations, Deakin University; Elise Stephenson, Deputy Director, Global Institute for Women's Leadership, Australian National University; Maria Rost Rublee, Professor, International Relations Social and Political Sciences, The University of Melbourne, and Rebecca Strating, Director, La Trobe Asia, and Professor of International Relations, La Trobe University

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

“Sometimes you need to eat an entire cucumber.”

So begins a series of viral videos by TikTok “cucumber guy” Logan Moffitt, who has raked in millions of views for his cucumber salad videos. He’s also inspired thousands of copycat videos showcasing cucumbers as a hero ingredient in salads and other dishes.

This trend has reportedly caused a surge in cucumber demand, leading to cucumbers being sold out in several stores in Australia and internationally.

But what’s actually happening in your body when you eat an entire cucumber? Let’s review the science of cucumbers.

Cucumbers 101

Cucumbers (Cucumis sativus) are technically fruit that belong to the gourd family Cucurbitaceae. This family includes pumpkins, melons and zucchinis.

Cucumbers originated from India over 3,000 years ago. They grow on vining plants and are typically harvested while still firm and unripe.

Cucumbers are mostly water (96%), which is why Logan Moffitt has been described as the most hydrated person on the internet.

Based on our calculations using the Australian Nutrient Reference Values, if you “ate an entire cucumber” (300g), you would consume:

• about 11% of your daily carbohydrate needs (an important energy source)

• about 5% of your daily fibre needs (fibre aids in digestion and gut health)

• more than 50% of your daily vitamin K needs (important for bone health and blood clotting)

• about 10% of your daily vitamin C needs (important for immune health, skin health and wound healing)

• about 10% of your daily potassium needs (potassium regulates blood pressure and helps with muscle function).

Unsurprisingly, there are no modern scientific studies that have specifically examined the health impacts of consuming an entire cucumber daily.

However, cucumbers also contain cucurbitacins (especially in the skin) which researchers think may help with inflammation and could be a potential anti-cancer agent.

More broadly, people have used cucumbers to:

• help in digestion and weight loss

• support heart health

• reduce pain from sunburn and swelling on the skin.

Can cucumbers help with hydration?

Given they’re about 96% water, cucumbers could meaningfully increase daily fluid intake when eaten in moderate amounts.

For example, an entire cucumber (about 300g) would contribute roughly 288 millilitres of water, which is just over one cup. We need plenty of water each day, so this additional intake could be helpful for some people.

Their high water content, combined with essential electrolytes like potassium, makes them a refreshing snack, especially in hot weather or after exercise.

While cucumbers can contribute to daily hydration, they shouldn’t replace drinking water. Adding cucumbers to meals or snacks could be a tasty way to stay hydrated, but you still need to drink water.

Can someone eat too many cucumbers?

Cucumbers can be a great addition to a healthy diet. Yet, relying on them too heavily might have unexpected downsides.

Cucumbers are generally easy to digest and low in fermentable carbohydrates (FODMAPs), which means they are unlikely to cause bloating for most people in moderate amounts.

However, when eaten in large amounts, some people may experience digestive discomfort, especially if they’re sensitive to fibre or have a history of irritable bowel issues.

Being low in carbohydrates, fats and protein, cucumbers are unsuitable as a primary food source. In other words, you can’t just live on cucumbers. They don’t provide the essential nutrients needed for energy, muscle maintenance and overall health.

If someone were to primarily eat cucumbers over an extended period, they could be at risk of undernutrition.

What about adding MSG ‘(obviously)’?

Many of the cucumber-based dishes on TikTok also include ingredients such as garlic, soy sauce, fish sauce, sesame oil and sugar – all well known to home cooks who like to boost flavour in their own dishes.

Moffitt is also fond of saying “MSG, obviously”, when listing his favourite cucumber salad ingredients.

MSG is monosodium glutamate, also known as food additive 621, an umami substance added to enhance the flavour of many Asian dishes.

Despite past scare campaigns about MSG, it is safe and authorised for consumption in Australia and other countries.

Typically, MSG is consumed at about 0.5g per serving, but some people report sensitivities at higher doses, such as over 3g.

It’s also worth noting that many foods – including tomatoes, mushrooms, and parmesan cheese – naturally contain glutamate, the main component of MSG.

So, should I eat an entire cucumber?

Well, like any food, moderation and variety are key.

Cucumbers are a refreshing and hydrating addition to a balanced diet, and work best nutritionally when paired with ingredients from other food groups.

For example, to create a balanced meal, try combining cucumbers with protein-rich foods like tuna, chicken, eggs, or marinated tofu, along with whole grains such as wholemeal bread, pasta, or rice. This combination will help you to consume essential nutrients for sustained energy and overall health.

And if you are looking for tailored dietary advice or a tailored meal plan, it’s always best to speak with an accredited practising dietitian.

Lauren Ball, Professor of Community Health and Wellbeing, The University of Queensland and Pui Ting Wong (Pearl), PhD Candidate, Culinary Education and Adolescents' Wellbeing, The University of Queensland

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

MyMedicare is a scheme that encourages patients to register with a regular GP practice to improve their health. But few patients have enrolled.

Since its launch in October 2023, only about 10% of patients have signed up.

The Albanese government’s 2023-24 budget allocated A$19.7 million over four years to implement MyMedicare. So if we are to get value for money from the scheme, we need to find out why patients are not signing up, and address any barriers to them doing so.

Other countries have similar schemes, as we outline in recent research. Here’s what we can learn from these to boost uptake of MyMedicare in Australia.

What is MyMedicare?

MyMedicare is a voluntary patient registration scheme. Patients nominate a GP or GP practice as their preferred provider and see the same GP or health-care team over time, a concept known as “continuity of care”.

Continuity of care is linked to earlier detection of health issues, better management of chronic (long-term) conditions, fewer avoidable hospital visits, and improved patient satisfaction.

Patients registered for MyMedicare have longer telehealth consultations. People living in residential aged care have more regular visits from their GP. From July this year, GP practices may offer patients more support for their chronic diseases.

There are also benefits for GP clinics that sign up for MyMedicare. They receive incentives to offer certain patients longer telehealth consultations. Practices also receive incentives to manage the health of registered aged care patients.

These incentives help practices invest in improved services and resources. From July, this may include better chronic disease management and enhanced team-based care (for instance, better liaison between GPs and allied health workers as part of someone’s health team).

How many patients have signed up?

Since MyMedicare’s launch in 2023 until March 19 this year, more than 2.6 million patients have registered for MyMedicare, according to Department of Health and Aged Care statistics provided to The Conversation.

That’s about 10% of Australia’s population. This raises concerns about how aware patients are of the scheme, how engaged they are with it, and possible barriers to registration.

GP practices that provide services to patients who would benefit from the new longer telehealth services or provide care to people in aged care were encouraged to register those patients in MyMedicare as a priority. So perhaps other patients have yet to sign up.

GP practices have been quicker to sign up. Since its launch, health department statistics provided to The Conversation show 6,469 practices had registered for MyMedicare until March 19 this year.

That’s about 80% of GP practices in Australia.

Who’s most likely to register?

We don’t know which patient groups sign up for MyMedicare. The health department told The Conversation patients can provide details of their sex, location (such as metropolitan, regional, rural and remote areas), linguistic background, and disabilities when they sign up. But this is voluntary, and these data have only been available for collection since March 2024.

However, here’s what we learned when we looked at other countries’ patient enrolment schemes:

• men are less likely to enrol than women, and recent immigrants have significantly lower registration rates compared to long-term residents. These highlight potential barriers to access for certain populations

• patients in suburban, rural or small urban areas have higher registration rates, whereas those in large metropolitan centres and lower socioeconomic groups register less

• patients with mental illness or substance use disorders have lower registration rates, pointing to challenges in engaging vulnerable populations.

How do other countries do it?

We also looked at how other countries set up their schemes to see what we can learn.

New Zealand: high uptake through financial incentives

New Zealand has successfully implemented a voluntary patient registration system by offering incentives to enrolled patients. These include lower co-payments for consultations and cheaper prescriptions.

This approach encourages people to register with a general practice rather than a specific GP. Some 95% of the population was registered by January 2025.

Quebec, Canada: tailored registration programs, but low uptake

Quebec has several voluntary registration programs for different groups of patients. These include ones for family medicine, vulnerable patients and a general program.

However, registration rate remains low, at 14.7-32.2%, depending on the program.

British Columbia, Canada: incentive-driven registration

British Columbia offers three voluntary registration programs – one for chronic diseases, another for complex care and a general program.

These use “capitation funding”, where GPs receive payments based on the number of patients they care for.

Participation rates vary widely across the three programs, with 45.5-79% of the population registered.

The differences in registration rates across these systems highlight the importance of how schemes are designed and implemented.

What can Australia learn?

If MyMedicare is to improve access and continuity of care, targeted strategies – such as outreach for immigrants and lower-income groups, and better support for people with mental health issues – will be essential.

Australia could also look to how countries with higher rates of patients signing up have designed their systems. This could include considering whether more financial incentives for patients to enrol is warranted, which has been successful in New Zealand.

Jialing Lin, Research fellow, International Centre for Future Health Systems, UNSW Sydney

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

Being labelled a “nice guy” was once considered a form of flattery. Today, however, anyone privy to the world of dating and romance will know this isn’t necessarily a compliment.

The term has been unofficially reappropriated by women to describe a certain kind of man – one who presents as being “nice”, but feels entitled to some kind of attention from a woman in exchange for this niceness.

We need to take this attitude seriously, since the more it is normalised, the more likely it is to put women at risk.

When flowers become stalking

Plenty of women have shared their experience of being sent abusive texts after they rejected or ignored a man while online dating. The Instagram account @ByeFelipe, which has more than 400,000 followers, frequently features posts of “nice men” weaponizing their niceness on dating apps.

In one example, a woman tells a man she doesn’t want to have sex with him on their first meeting, and he responds by calling her “trash”, “ugly”, “old” and a “bitch”.

In my ongoing research on violence against women I have talked to hundreds of women who’ve been stalked by a man. In Australia, one in five women will be stalked. And women are eight times more likely to be stalked by a man than by another woman.

Often, the stalking is preceded by certain performances, such as the man repeatedly leaving flowers by the woman’s door. As one woman told me:

We are so used to being told that ‘bad guys’ are men who are physically abusive. When a guy is ‘nice’, it’s hard to believe he’s dangerous. It’s easier for women to ignore the signals of danger, because they are told that he has to be a good guy because he’s doing all these things. He even used feminist buzzwords. He’d say, ‘I believe in equality. I’m a feminist myself’.

Another described how a man kept telling her, “I’m in touch with my emotions. I wear my heart on my sleeve” – but that she had to escape the relationship after he threatened her.

Blaming women for feelings of inadequacy

The “nice guy” trope can create a narrative in which men feel victimised by women. As sociologist Michael Kimmel explains, this can lead to a sense of aggrieved entitlement, and men blaming women for their own feelings of inadequacy.

I’ve witnessed this while working with male inmates in a private capacity. Working in prisons in Sweden, I spoke to dozens of men who were convicted sex offenders and/or who had killed their wives or ex-partners.

All of them told me they reacted with violence when women rejected them romantically. None of the men I spoke to took responsibility for killing the woman. Instead, they justified their crimes and/or blamed the women.

The ‘nice guy’ in pop culture

Pop culture and media both have played a role in normalising the “nice guy” trope, which has now taken on different meanings in different groups – from misogynistic men in incel communities to women calling out men on dating apps.

Traditionally, the romance movie genre has portrayed highly persistent men as charming, or even admirable. In films such as There’s Something About Mary (1998) and Groundhog Day (1993), the “nice guy” obsessively pursues the woman while ignoring her wish to be left alone.

In these stories, obsessive behaviour is rewarded because the “nice guy” eventually gets the girl. In real life, the same behaviours can cross the line into harassment and stalking.

A more realistic depiction comes from the 1993 film I Can Make You Love Me, also known as Stalking Laura. This film is based on the true story of mass murderer Richard Farley.

Farley became obsessed with his coworker Laura Black in the 1980s. He love-bombed her, left her gifts such as letters and baked goods, called her every few hours, and even showed up to her apartment and her aerobics class. When he asked her out, Laura politely declined.

Farley would go on to shoot Laura in the shoulder in a killing spree that left her and three others injured, and seven more people dead. This event prompted California to pass the first anti-stalking laws in the United States.

Real-world consequences

Another horrifying example of an entitled “nice guy” was Elliot Rodger. In 2014, the then 22-year-old used knives, guns and his car to murder six people and injure 13 near the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Rodger described himself as a “supreme gentleman” and couldn’t understand why women wouldn’t have sex with him. In a chilling video posted before the attack, he said:

I will slaughter every spoiled, stuck-up, blond .... I see inside there. All those girls I’ve desired so much, they would have all rejected me and looked down upon me as an inferior man if I ever made a sexual advance towards them while they throw themselves at these obnoxious brutes.

More than ten years later, there’s no shortage of men who share Rodger’s victim mentality and violent sentiments. Yet there is a lack of research into how such attitudes can contribute to real-world harm.

As masculinity studies theorists argue, these attitudes are not the product of individual pathology, but are a much larger problem linked to societal ideas about masculinity. They are created by sexist ideology in culture, and are spread through socialisation.

Robert Farley and Elliot Rodger weren’t the first men, nor the last, to think they had entitlements over women just because they followed a social script of acting “nice”. If we can understand how this attitude grows and festers among men, we might be able to stop it at its start.

Jamilla Rosdahl, Senior Lecturer, The University of Melbourne

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

When American soldiers liberated the Mauthausen Nazi concentration camp in Austria 80 years ago this May, Spanish prisoners welcomed them with a message of antifascist solidarity.

The Spaniards hung a banner made from stolen bed sheets over one of Mauthausen’s gates. In English, Spanish and Russian, it read: “The Spanish Antifascists Greet the Liberating Forces.”

Both American servicemen and Spanish survivors remember the camp’s liberation as a win in their shared fight against extremism, my research on the Spanish prisoners in Mauthausen finds. They all understood the authoritarian governments of Nazi Germany, Italy and Spain as fascist regimes that used extremist views rooted in intolerance and nationalism to persecute millions of people and imperil democracy across Europe.

World War II, the Holocaust and the horrors of Nazi violence have no modern equivalent. Nevertheless, extremism is now threatening democracy in the United States in recognizable ways.

As the Trump administration executes summary deportations, works to suppress dissent, fundamentally restructures the federal government and defies judges, experts warn that the country is turning toward authoritarianism.

As a scholar of the Mauthausen camp, I believe that understanding how American soldiers and Spanish prisoners experienced its liberation offers a valuable lesson on the real and present dangers of extremism.

‘We knew then why we had to stop Hitler’

In 1938, the Nazis established Mauthausen, a forced labor camp in Austria, with an international prisoner population. My research shows that the Nazis murdered 16,000 Jews and 66,000 non-Jewish prisoners at Mauthausen between 1938 and 1945, including 60% of the roughly 7,200 Spaniards imprisoned there.

The Spanish prisoners were committed antifascist resistors sent there in 1940 and 1941. Known as Republicans or Loyalists, they had fought against Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War and Adolf Hitler in World War II.

The young men with the 11th Armored Division of the U.S. Army who liberated Mauthausen would never forget the moment they discovered the camp. It was May 5, 1945, just days before the war ended in Europe. A platoon led by Staff Sgt. Albert J. Kosiek was repairing bridges in this tucked-away corner of Austria when a Swiss Red Cross delegate alerted them to a large Nazi concentration camp nearby.

Mauthausen’s international survivors were among the Nazis’ last prisoners to be freed.

George Sherman was a 19-year-old tank gunner from Brooklyn when his patrol found Mauthausen. He was Jewish and had read about the Nazi camps in Europe in the Army’s newspaper.

Still, seeing a concentration camp with his own eyes was alarming.

“The piles of bodies” struck him, he remembered in an oral history recorded for the University of South Florida in 2008. So did “these people walking around like God knows – skeletons and whatnot.”

Sgt. Harry Saunders, a 23-year-old radio operator from Chicago, also remembered the moment he saw the Mauthausen survivors. They were men and women of all nationalities.

“The live skeletons, the people that were in the camp, it was indescribable, it was such a shock,” he said in a 2002 interview for the Mauthausen Memorial’s Oral History Collection in Vienna.

One of the Spanish prisoners at Mauthausen, Francesc Boix, had stolen a camera from the SS in the chaotic moments before the camp’s liberation. Boix photographed Sgt. Saunders rumbling into the concentration camp on an armored car.

Saunders kept that photograph for the rest of his life. It captured a moment of clarity for him.

“When we liberated Mauthausen, we really knew then why we had to stop Hitler and why we really went to war,” he said in the interview.

Frank Hartzell, a technical sergeant with the 11th Armored Division, was 20 when he helped to liberate Mauthausen. He turned 100 this year. We met in mid-March 2025 and discussed his wartime experience.

“What I saw and experienced appalled me,” Hartzell told me.

The outrage has stayed with him for 80 years.

‘Starved and crippled but alive’

The American liberators toured the gas chambers and the crematory ovens in Mauthausen.

Maj. Franklin Lee Clark saw the dead stacked up in “piles like cord wood to the point that they had to bring in bulldozers and make mass graves,” and took photos to document it.

Soldiers from the 11th Armored Division directed locals to bury the men and women murdered by the Nazis. The local Austrians claimed they had not known about their town’s concentration camp. But a farmer who lived nearby had been upset about all the dead bodies visible from her property. She filed a complaint asking the Nazis either to stop “these inhuman deeds” or do them “where one does not see it.”

The American liberators made sure that the townspeople could no longer look away from the murderous rampage carried out in their backyards.

While Boix was taking photos of American soldiers during liberation, the soldiers were taking photos of the welcome banner the Spaniards had painted.

On the back of one snapshot, a Signal Corps soldier typed out his impressions of their message: “I really know what that word (antifascist) means. We liberated these prisoners in the Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz, Austria. They were Poles, Hungarians and Spanish Loyalists (remember the Loyalists?). They had men and women in this camp. Starved and crippled but alive.”

After Mauthausen was liberated, the freed Loyalists set to work documenting the Nazis’ crimes. Along with his countrymen Joan de Diego, Casimir Climent and others, Spanish survivor Joaquín López Raimundo compiled lists of Mauthausen victims and their Nazi captors. Using the Nazis’ own typewriters, they spent two weeks listing the names and personal details of Spanish victims of Mauthausen and of the SS who had killed them.

The result was page after page of evidence they handed over to American war crimes investigators and the International Red Cross.

Boix, meanwhile, gave the Americans hundreds of photo negatives he had rescued from the camp’s photography lab.

Boix later testified about these images in the war crime trials at Nuremberg and Dachau. He described seeing the Nazis beat, torture and murder their victims in Mauthausen and then photograph the bodies. For 2½ years, Boix stole the photographic evidence of their crimes.

He “could not keep those negatives because it was so dangerous,” he testified at Dachau, so he “hid them in various places until the liberation.”

A lifelong vaccine against extremism

For the American liberators, their up-close view of the horrors of Mauthausen and their interactions with the Spanish antifascist survivors was a lifelong vaccine against extremism.

They witnessed how a fascist leader tore the world apart. They saw with their own eyes the death and destruction of political extremism.

When I interviewed Hartzell, he expressed concern that the United States is going down a dangerous path.

“The USA today is not the USA I fought and came close to dying for,” Hartzell told me.

As American Mauthausen liberator Maj. George E. King warned an interviewer in 1980:

“This is the lesson we have to learn: It could happen here.”

Sara J. Brenneis, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Spanish, Amherst College

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

The term “lore” has, well, a whole lot of lore. Now essential online slang, the word can be traced back to Old English, where it referred primarily to learning, as in the act of teaching or being taught.

Over time, lore came to be associated with more informal knowledge, passed on through word of mouth. The term “folklore,” the “lore of the people”, was coined by the British writer William J. Thoms in 1846. As a result, lore largely slipped out of common usage. By 2024, however, it had made the shortlist for the Oxford word of the year (the title was taken by “brainrot”).

So, how did “lore” come to hold such contemporary relevance? And what does it mean today? The answer can be found, at least in part, in fandom, where “lore” is used to refer to the body of knowledge that exists around a person, fictional universe or character.

Fandom has long facilitated deep dives into media in which fans analyse, discuss and track their favourite storylines and character arcs. This has been particularly true of the science fiction and fantasy genres, due to their complex and expansive narrative universes.

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In 1969, science fiction fan and writer Bjo Trimble self-published the first edition of Star Trek Concordance. It was an unofficial reference book for the television series featuring timelines, plot summaries, character biographies and more – information that might now be described as Star Trek lore.

Since then, fans of Star Trek and countless other television shows have continued to create zines, write fan fiction, organise conventions and develop vast and ongoing archives of fan-works. Through such practices, fans develop what media expert Henry Jenkins has described as collective intelligence, as each fan contributes small parts of knowledge to a whole – or, to the lore.

Fandom has, of course, come a long way since the early days of Star Trek. Fan activities have now moved online, where their reach and visibility has significantly increased. Television has changed too, shifting towards the narrative complexity and innovation made possible, in part, by the active engagements of fandoms.

Where fandom was once a niche (and often derided) activity, in recent years fan culture has gone mainstream. From direct communication between fans and producers to the creative possibilities of transmedia storytelling (where productions circulate official content across platforms in ways that echo fan-ish expansions of narrative worlds) media is increasingly inviting audiences to participate in the investigating, cataloguing and circulating of lore.

Pop lore – from K-pop to Gaylor Swift

A powerful example of lore inspiring transmedia storytelling can be found in K-pop. Well known South Korean bands engage with their fans not only through their music, but also with “concepts” (themes that span styling, music and other media) and ever-expanding storytelling universes.

Take, for example, mega-boyband BTS’s meta narrative of the Bangtan Universe. It’s a fictional alternate universe which spans music videos, webtoons (digital comics), short films, mobile games, books and more. This kind of cross-platform storytelling encourages BTS fans to piece together the “lore” of the respective universe.

Storytelling is also central to the popularity of singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, described by Teen Vogue as “the queen of easter eggs”. These hidden messages and inter-textual references can be found in the star’s lyrics, videos, fashion, interviews and even manicures, and produce an expansive archive of Swift lore.

A subsection of Swift lore is known as Gaylor – where fans collate “evidence” that they believe shows that Swift is queer. It is, in part, an example of the expansive possibilities of fandom for queer audiences. But it also speaks to the ethical tensions of fandom and parasocial relationships, as fan-created lore can develop into invasive expectations of celebrities.

Dropping lore on TikTok

As digital media has grown to become part of our daily lives, “lore” has grown too. Today it goes beyond fictional universes and celebrities to also include everyday people and their online stories.

YouTube first invited users to “broadcast yourself” in 2005, and opportunities to do so have only expanded since then, notably with the rise of TikTok.

On TikTok, some users tell stories about their lives and experiences, or their “lore”. In these short videos, lore is “dropped” (revealed) about notable events, defining experiences, relationships (such as ex-lore) and family stories (such as dad lore).

These playful retellings remake real life through narrative conventions of heroism, romance and comic misadventure, while other videos offer ironic commentary on lore-dropping itself.

There is at once authenticity, performance and play here. Stories are, in part, ephemeral, as lore comes and goes in the fast-paced flow of digital content. Circulating via hashtags, however, stories are connected, responded to and remade, facilitating digital intimacies.

The circulation of lore is, at once, user generated and algorithmically curated. In the context of what researchers have described as the datalogical turn (where big data and adaptive algorithms become increasingly central to shaping and understanding society) and the rise of affective capitalism (in which feelings, desires and experiences are capitalised on for economic gain), personal lore also becomes valuable data to be commodified.

Lore then, is an old word with a distinctly contemporary iteration. It’s representative of the ever-expanding convergences of digital media, identity and intimacy.

Kate McNicholas Smith, Lecturer in Television Theory, University of Westminster

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

Oviraptorosaurs are weird dinosaurs, which look a bit like flightless birds. But these ancient animals aren’t just funny looking fossils. As my team’s new research shows, they can help us understand how our own forelimbs evolved and challenge what scientists think about the T rex.

Covered in feathers and equipped with a strong, sharp beak, oviraptorosaurs ranged in size from a house cat to a giraffe. They could easily be mistaken for birds if not for the sharp claws on their hands. The oviraptorosaurs lived during the Cretaceous period (between 145 and 66 million years ago) and belonged to a group of dinosaurs called theropods. This is a group of mainly meat-eating dinosaurs with hollow bones that includes the T rex and velociraptor.

Theropod dinosaurs and humans share a common feature: we walk on two legs and use our front limbs for functions other than walking. Although some dinosaurs – the birds – stretched their forelimbs into wings and used them for flight, others, shrunk them instead. Short forelimbs, missing one or more fingers are most famous in the T rex, but many other theropods also evolved shorter arms and hands.

The widespread view among scientists of their shrunken forelimbs as “useless” comes from a 1979 paper. It argues evolution selected for increased head and hindlimb size in the T rex and the arms became smaller as an evolutionary byproduct. So, when my team at the University of Edinburgh analysed patterns of arm evolution in a group of oviraptorosaurs, we expected to find that forelimb reduction and finger loss would be linked.

Instead, we found the opposite. Our study is the latest example of growing evidence that the reduced forelimbs of certain theropods retained some kind of function. Until now, many palaeontologists assumed dinosaurs which evolved shorter arms and lost their fingers did so because they weren’t using them.

Oviraptorosaurs are the perfect group to study finger loss in theropods. Although modern birds did not evolve directly from oviraptorosaurs, they share many features with them. Oviraptorosaurs had toothless beaks, they were covered in feathers, and they sat on carefully constructed nests, with their eggs arranged in neat rings and partly buried. Most of these dinosaurs had long arms with three clawed fingers on each hand, perfect for grasping prey. With one exception.

Oksoko avarsan had stumpy arms and only two functional fingers. It lived in Mongolia during the Late Cretaceous period (about 72-66 million years ago) and would have shared its habitat with a gigantic relative of the T rex called Tarbosaurus. Oksoko did – technically – have a third digit but it was a useless leftover from a time when their ancestors needed all three fingers. In fact, Oksoko’s hands and forelimbs are far more similar to a T rex or a Tarbosaurus than to any of its oviraptorosaurian cousins.

It’s important to understand how theropod forelimbs evolved because they are some of the only animals, alongside humans, to become bipedal. This means they no longer rely on their forelimbs for moving around, whether that’s by walking, climbing, or flying. Their arms were free to evolve new functions. Many of them used their long arms and fingers for grasping. Others, like Oksoko, explored different and more specialised functions.

My team’s research, which analysed how the length of each arm bone changed over time, shows that these dinosaurs lost their third finger in a separate process to the shortening of their arms. This goes against the idea that their arms were functionless. If their forelimbs shrunk because the oviraptorosaurs were not using them, their fingers and forelimbs should have become shorter at the same time. Instead, their arms seem to have shrunk first.

Previous research shows one group of oviraptorosaurs, called the Heyuanninae, expanded their range during the Late Cretaceous (about 100-94 million years ago). They moved from the area that is now southern China into the Gobi Desert in northern China and southern Mongolia. The reduction in arm length coincided with this expansion in their range.

Then Oksoko lost its third finger. Although some other closely related oviraptorosaurs had relatively short third fingers, in none of them was it as reduced as in Oksoko.

Forelimb reduction and finger loss in this group of dinosaurs could have been caused by the new habitat. Once they had moved into the Gobi Desert, they would have come up against new survival challenges. For example, they might have had to adapt to new food sources or different predators. Something about their new habitat favoured dinosaurs with shorter arms and fewer fingers, causing them to evolve their stumpy, two-fingered forelimbs.

We think they started using their arms for a whole new purpose. It’s possible Oksoko used its arms for digging. Oksoko might have lost its third finger, but its first finger is another story. This digit is thick and strong-looking, with a large claw on the end. We can see scars and ridges where its muscles used to be attached to its bones. These show that Oksoko had strong arms.

Rather than reaching and grasping like other oviraptorosaurs, Oksoko could have used its small but mighty forelimbs for scratch-digging. This could have been useful for finding food, such as plant roots and burrowing insects, or for building nests in the ground.

The holotype fossil (the fossil which leads to the naming of a new species) of Oksoko was the most important fossil in our analysis. Originally found by poachers in Mongolia, this fossil was nearly lost to science. Authorities rescued it at the border of Mongolia in 2006 and it was taken to the Institute of Palaeontology, but wasn’t fully studied until 2020. It was Oksoko’s strange two-digit forelimbs that made us want to investigate finger evolution.

Despite the similarities in the size and shape of their forelimbs, it unlikely that T rex and Oksoko used their arms for the same thing. Oksoko was a small herbivore. T rex was a giant carnivore – it was so massive that it couldn’t have reached the ground to dig, even if it tried. But Oksoko shows us that theropod forelimbs can get shorter and lose digits without becoming functionless. And that begs the question: are T rex’s arms as useless as they’re often portrayed?

My team’s new research shows that our initial assumption – that forelimb and digit reduction are caused by function loss in oviraptorosaurs – is probably wrong. Instead, arm-shrinking and finger loss seem to be caused by adaptation to a new environment and the adoption of a new function. This is an example of how evolution can mould forelimbs to suit different habitats and uses.

It is also a step forward in understanding how theropods evolved such an amazing diversity of forelimb shapes and sizes.

Milly Mead, PhD student in Palaeontology and Evolution, University of Edinburgh

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

The “music” of starquakes – enormous vibrations caused by bursting bubbles of gas that ripple throughout the bodies of many stars – can reveal far more information about the stars’ histories and inner workings than scientists thought.

In new research published in Nature, we analysed the frequency signatures of starquakes across a broad range of giant stars in the M67 star cluster, almost 3,000 light years from Earth.

Using observations from the Kepler space telescope’s K2 mission, we had a rare opportunity to track the evolution of stars during most of their journey through the giant phase of the stellar life cycle.

In doing so, we discovered that these stars get stuck “playing the same part of their tune” once their turbulent outer layer reaches a sensitive region deep inside.

This discovery reveals a new way to understand the history of stars – and of the entire galaxy.

The sound of starquakes

Starquakes happen in most stars (like our Sun) that have a bubbling outer layer, like a pot of boiling water. Bubbles of hot gas rise and burst at the surface, sending ripples through the entire star that cause it to vibrate in particular ways.

We can detect these vibrations, which occur at specific “resonant frequencies”, by looking for subtle variations in the brightness of the star. By studying the frequencies of each star in a group called a cluster, we can tune into the cluster’s unique “song”.

Our study challenges previous assumptions about resonant frequencies in giant stars, revealing they offer deeper insights into stellar interiors than previously thought. Moreover, our study has opened new ways to decipher the history of our Galaxy.

The melody of a stellar cluster

Astronomers have long sought to understand how stars like our Sun evolve over time.

One of the best ways to do this is by studying clusters – groups of stars that formed together and share the same age and composition. A cluster called M67 has attracted a lot of attention because it contains many stars with a similar chemical makeup to the Sun.

Just as earthquakes help us study Earth’s interior, starquakes reveal what lies beneath a star’s surface. Each star “sings” a melody, with frequencies determined by its internal structure and physical properties.

Larger stars produce deeper, slower vibrations, while smaller stars vibrate at higher pitches. And no star plays just one note – each one resonates with a full spectrum of sound from its interior.

A surprising signature

Among the key frequency signatures is the so-called small spacing – a group of resonant frequencies quite close together. In younger stars, such as the Sun, this signature can provide clues about how much hydrogen the star still has left to burn in its core.

In red giants the situation is different. These older stars have used up all the hydrogen in their cores, which are now inert.

However, hydrogen fusion continues in a shell surrounding the core. It was long assumed that the small spacings in such stars offered little new information.

A stalled note

When we measured the small spacings of stars in M67, we were surprised to see they revealed changes in the star’s internal fusion regions.

As the hydrogen-burning shell thickened, the spacings increased. When the shell moved inward, they shrank.

Then we found something else unexpected: at a certain stage, the small spacings stalled. It was like a record skipping on a note.

We discovered that this stalling appears during a specific stage in the life of a giant star — when its outer envelope, the “boiling” layer that transports heat, grows so deep that it makes up about 80% of the star’s mass. At this point the inner boundary of the envelope reaches into a highly sensitive region of the star.

This boundary is extremely turbulent, and the speed of sound shifts steeply across it — and that steep change affects how sound waves travel through the star. We also found that the stalling frequency is distinctively determined by the star’s mass and chemical composition.

This gives us a new way to identify stars in this phase and estimate their ages with improved precision.

The history of the galaxy

Stars are like fossil records. They carry the imprint of the environments in which they formed, and studying them lets us piece together the story of our galaxy.

The Milky Way has grown by merging with smaller galaxies, forming stars at different times in different regions. Better age estimates across the galaxy help us reconstruct this history in greater detail.

Clusters like M67 also provide a glimpse into the future of our own Sun, offering insight into the changes it will experience over billions of years.

This discovery gives us a new tool – and a new reason to revisit data we already have. With years of seismic observations from across the Milky Way, we can now return to those stars and “listen” again, this time knowing what to listen for.

Claudia Reyes, Postdoctoral Fellow, Research School of Astronomy & Astrophysics, Australian National University

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

The upcoming Wuthering Heights adaptation by Saltburn director Emerald Fennell has courted controversy since it was first announced, with Fennell’s choice of leading lady and man drawing internet critics.

Playing tragic heroine Catherine Earnshaw is the 34-year-old blonde Margot Robbie, and as tortured Heathcliff will be fellow Aussie, the 27-year-old Jacob Elordi. If you’re familiar with Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel then you know the ages, vibes and looks are just off.

Now fans of the book are aghast in response to a series of leaked photographs of Margot Robbie wearing an elaborate white wedding gown.

Some were quick to point out the historical inaccuracy of the wedding gown, while others argued that “the tradition of a white wedding dress wouldn’t have come around until after the story took place”.

But is that really true? And what would Catherine Earnshaw have actually worn on her wedding day in the late-18th century?

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Most 18th-century brides would have probably worn their Sunday best on their wedding day. This was their finest day dress in the current fashion.

While it may have been an expensive dress, it wouldn’t necessarily have been a purpose-made wedding gown – unless the bride was very wealthy. Significantly, and unlike most wedding dresses today, the gown would also have been worn again on other social occasions.

Brontë tells us nothing about Cathy’s wedding clothes and very little about Cathy and Edgar Linton’s wedding day, which takes place in 1783. However, as the bride of a wealthy landowner she would likely have chosen to have a wedding gown specially made for the occasion in rich silk or satin.

The dress would have been a testament to her new family’s social standing. It would likely have featured a tightly fitted bodice with a low, round neckline characteristic of the period, a sash, and close-fitting, three-quarter length sleeves with a frill.

The wide skirts would have been open to reveal a longer petticoat underneath, or they might have been looped up with ribbons to form three layers in the popular “polonaise” style of the day.

By contrast, the wedding dress that Margot Robbie has been pictured wearing is much more reminiscent of the silhouette in vogue in 1840.

In fact, it appears to take direct inspiration from Queen Victoria’s wedding gown which she wore to marry Albert in February of that year – almost six decades after Cathy’s fictional wedding takes place. Like Queen Victoria’s wedding gown, Robbie’s features a similar off-the-shoulder neckline, short, puffed sleeves and a deep V-shaped bodice.

A white dress?

Queen Victoria is often credited with having started the trend for wearing a white wedding dress. But while she certainly helped to popularise the white gown in the 1840s, she was by no means the sole originator of the tradition. Women were married wearing white long before she chose to do so and they continued to marry wearing dresses of other colours long after.