In 1570, a Frenchman was arrested for smuggling clandestine correspondence between France and England. A passing comment in his interrogation document reveals that he also happened to be carrying a leather bag “in which there were three or four dozen balls of wool for playing tennis”.

The French term used was jeu de paume. This sport was played with the hand (palm), often gloved, rather than a racquet. This developed into the game that in English we usually refer to as “real tennis” (a different beast to the lawn tennis played at Wimbledon).

The interrogator believed that this cheap merchandise was simply a ruse for the man’s true purpose of communicating with Huguenot exiles. I have written a book, Huguenot Networks, based on this interrogation document, which will be published by Cambridge University Press later this year. But, as a historian, I was intrigued by both the number and makeup of the goods he was transporting. The wool, if wrapped tightly, could certainly have made these balls bouncy.

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By chance, I encountered similar objects in a small display in the Palazzo Te in Mantua in Italy. These balls had apparently been retrieved from the palace roof and several others had come from a nearby church. They were variously made of leather, cloth and string rather than wool, probably stuffed with earth or animal hair. Just like the handmade “real tennis” balls of today, they were harder and more variable in size than regular tennis balls, and usually not so colourful, although sometimes having a simple painted design on the outside.

Today, “real tennis” is known as the “sport of kings”, praised for testing agility and athletic prowess. The most famous court in England is at Hampton Court, but many others survive in the UK. For instance, there is one down the road from where I work at the University of Warwick, at Moreton Morrell in Warwickshire.

In the 16th century, real tennis attracted gamblers, meaning it became a later target for Puritans. Anne Boleyn is said to have placed a wager on a match she was watching on the day of her arrest. And Henry VIII, fittingly, supposedly played a match on the day Boleyn was executed.

And if there is any doubt about how dangerous tennis could be, several royal deaths in France are attributed to it. King Louis X of France was a keen player of jeu de paume. He was the first ruler to order enclosed indoor courts to be constructed. This later became popular across Europe.

In June 1316, after a particularly exhausting game, Louis X is said to have drunk a large quantity of chilled wine and soon afterwards died – probably of pleurisy, although there was some suspicion of poisoning.

Likewise, in August 1536, the death of the 18-year-old dauphin, eldest son of Francis I, was blamed on his Italian secretary, the Count of Montecuccoli, who had brought him a glass of cold water after a match. The count was subsequently executed despite a post-mortem suggesting that the prince had died of natural causes.

By the 16th century, there were two courts at the Louvre and many more around the city of Paris as well as at other royal residences. Ambassadors’ accounts describe frequent games between high-ranking courtiers and the king which could sometimes result in injury, especially if struck by one of the hard balls.

Our man carrying many tennis balls in 1570 had probably spotted a lucrative opportunity in response to rising demand. The French game had become increasingly popular in England under the Tudors.

By the Tudor period, no self-respecting European court was without its own purpose-built tennis courts where monarchs and their entourages tested their prowess and skill. They often did so before ambassadors, who could report back to their own rulers, making it a truly competitive international sport.

Thankfully, today’s game has far fewer dangers – there’s no risk of being hit by a ball full of earth or the fear of mortal retribution after beating an exhausted high-ranking opponent.

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Penny Roberts, Professor of Early Modern European History, University of Warwick

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

Wimbledon is all about strawberries and cream (and of course tennis). The club itself describes strawberries and cream as “a true icon of The Championships”.

While a meal at one of the club’s restaurants can set you back £130 or more, a bowl of the iconic dish is a modest £2.70 (up from £2.50 in 2024 – the first price rise in 15 years). In 2024 visitors munched their way through nearly 2 million berries.

Strawberries and cream has a long association with Wimbledon. Even before lawn tennis was added to its activities, the All England Croquet Club (now the All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club) was serving strawberries and cream to visitors. They would have expected no less. Across Victorian Britain, strawberries and cream was a staple of garden parties of all sorts. Private affairs, political fundraisers and county cricket matches all typically served the dish.

Alongside string bands and games of lawn tennis, strawberries and cream were among the pleasures that Victorians expected to encounter at a fête or garden party. As a result, one statistician wrote in the Dundee Evening Telegraph in 1889, Londoners alone consumed 12 million berries a day over the summer. At that rate, he explained, if strawberries were available year-round, Britons would spend 24 times more on strawberries than on missionary work, and twice as much as on education.

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But of course strawberries and cream were not available year-round. They were a delightful treat of the summer and the delicate berries did not last. Victorian newspapers, such as the Illustrated London News, complained that even the fruits on sale in London were a sad, squashed travesty of those eaten in the countryside, to say nothing of London’s cream, which might have been watered down.

Wimbledon’s lawn tennis championships were held in late June or early July – in the midst, in other words, of strawberry season.

Eating strawberries and cream had long been a distinctly seasonal pleasure. Seventeenth-century menu plans for elegant banquets offered strawberries, either with cream or steeped (rather deliciously, and I recommend you try this) in rose water, white wine, and sugar – as a suitable dish for the month of June.

They were, in the view of the 17th-century gardener John Parkinson, “a cooling and pleasant dish in the hot summer season”. They were, in short, a summer food. That was still the case in the 1870s, when the Wimbledon tennis championship was established.

This changed dramatically with the invention of mechanical refrigeration. From the late 19th century, new technologies enabled the global movement of chilled and frozen foods across vast oceans and spaces.

Domestic ice-boxes and refrigerators followed. These modern devices were hailed as freeing us from the tyranny of seasons. As the Ladies Home Journal magazine proclaimed triumphantly in 1929: “Refrigeration wipes out seasons and distances … We grow perishable products in the regions best suited to them instead of being forced to stick close to the large markets.” Eating seasonally, or locally, was a tiresome constraint and it was liberating to be able to enjoy foods at whatever time of year we desired.

As a result, points out historian Susan Friedberg, our concept of “freshness” was transformed. Consumers “stopped expecting fresh food to be just-picked or just-caught or just-killed. Instead, they expected to find and keep it in the refrigerator.”

Today, when we can buy strawberries year round, we have largely lost the excitement that used to accompany advent of the strawberry season. Colour supplements and supermarket magazines do their best to drum up some enthusiasm for British strawberries, but we are far from the days when poets could rhapsodise about dairy maids “dreaming of their strawberries and cream” in the month of May.

Strawberries and cream, once a “rare service” enjoyed in the short months from late April to early July, are now a season-less staple, available virtually year round from the global networks of commercial growers who supply Britain’s food. The special buzz about Wimbledon’s iconic dish of strawberries and cream is a glimpse into an earlier time, and reminds us that it was not always so.

Rebecca Earle, Professor of History, University of Warwick

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

In Raeden Richardson’s debut novel, The Degenerates, displacement and travel feature within the lives of aspiring outcasts in the wildly disparate cities of Bombay (Mumbai’s colonial precursor), in Melbourne’s inner-city lanes and southwest suburbs, and in downtown New York.

This is not strictly a novel about identity, nor assimilation. Not all its characters are Indians of the diaspora, but they all seek refuge from forms of oppression, be it caste-based, social or family violence.

Review: The Degenerates – Raeden Richardson (Text Publishing)

The Degenerates opens in 1976, with vivid snapshots of “illegal migrant workers” who leave their villages for Bombay’s Arabian sea slums, with dreams of saving enough money to buy a flat or start a family. The city is being gentrified, drugs get pedalled, arrests inevitably happen – but the lowly are not without humour, optimism and streetwise grace.

They attend “night school”, write in “cursive paragraphs”, learn “Keats and Byron” and “proper British English” from the nuns. Enterprising beggars are a familiar sight in Mumbai, and Richardson shows them to be a community tied to the legacies of colonialism.

‘Dear degenerates’

Richardson focuses on a shoe polisher from Western Maharashtra, Somnath Sunder Sonpate, who runs out of luck in Colaba’s Grant Road district, coming up against enforcers of Indira Gandhi’s mass sterilisation program: part of The Emergency from 1975 to 1977. This was a time of authoritarian rule, corruption, arrests, censorship and forced population control directed at the poor.

Somnath fails to narrowly escape the police and cannot produce a license, so he is sterilised. Meanwhile, Preeti, a woman he shares a tiffin (or meals) with, whose bed is made from the pages of old novels, gives birth in the street, without conception. This stroke of magic realism fuses the Christian belief in immaculate conception with the stigma of an oppressive Hindu caste system. Sadly, for Preeti, it is a double violence. At the hands of the beggar master, her tongue is cut out and she dies by incineration.

Somnath rescues her baby, and names her Maha. In a desperate struggle for survival, Somnath and baby Maha flee the city as stowaways, to arrive in the port of Melbourne.

The plight and flight of this street family rely on unlikely and extraordinary circumstances, establishing a mixed tone of surreal and tragicomic farce. They become squatters in Swan Street, Richmond, in Melbourne’s inner northeast. Then, in Degraves Street, Somnath labours as a shifty motorcycle mechanic in the chop shop and Maha eats herself into florid diabetes, becoming a consummate reader of history, scriptures and poetry.

When Somnath dies abruptly, Maha, also known as Mother Pulse, embraces her oddly divine manifestations. She receives letters on paper bags and napkins from outcasts, whom she addresses as “Dear degenerates”, imploring them to tell her their stories. She has them typed and printed into flyers, which are distributed under the windscreen wipers of cars. And so, the prayers and afflictions of the outcast – those who live precariously at the edges of society – are reclaimed and interwoven.

Critiquing privilege

There’s a hiatus in Maha’s story, as the narrative focus shifts to two selective school misfits, Titch and Skeater, or “ ” – a caesura – taking the place of his name. This grammatical marker becomes enigmatic of repression, private loss and what lies beyond the social fabric. The boys have a codependent, yet deeply poignant friendship at Melbourne High, until Skeater plunges into alcohol dependency.

Subsequent narrative sections cycle around Titch’s working friendship with Ginny, a Greek Australian bookseller and aspiring cryptocurrency trader. Both have troubled families: substance abuse, violence and mental health crises leave a path of brokenness. A survivor of abuse, Ginny escapes from her dysfunctional family in the suburbs with her sister, Marg, for a holiday in New York until her visa runs out. But Ginny’s caprices deviate from tourism brochures.

She befriends stylish, free-spirited Klein, an orphan fostered by an orphan, who self-medicates in burlesque nightclubs with “liquid green manza”. Ginny briefly stays with his queer family; with Gordon, an intern at the The Paris Review; and Shelley, a tall, bald, non-binary Mauritian saxophonist. Their caring and valiant efforts to secure Ginny’s blockchain trade and a working visa in New York are doomed to failure.

There’s more dialogue in this section of The Degenerates, albeit presented through a descriptive mode that frames the narrative action.

The novel’s structure fuses realist and fabulist elements. By turns capacious and wry, it also reads as Maha’s coming of age as she transforms from Dalit orphan to suburban diva. When Titch discloses his crimes of theft, she believes he is a reincarnation of her foster father, Somnath.

Her musings about rebirth and impermanence (“Here, gone”, “Many headed”) imply the plurality of a Hindu pantheon, but Maha is a standalone. Meanwhile, there’s something appealingly subversive and inherently Buddhist about the novel’s attention to small creatures like ants, a drug-intoxicated duckling, and even trilobites, extinct fossils who were “moved by the flux of life: hungering, feeding and hungering again”.

Refreshingly, Richardson’s abrupt sequences creak with a subtle critique of heteronormative culture, and of elite privilege under socialist democracy or late capitalism. There’s more than a hint of reproach aimed at those who too often speak on behalf of the Global South.

Maha’s low-caste mother, Preeti, is rendered speechless for claiming to possess special creative powers. But in its dance of minor perspectives, idiosyncrasies and conflations weaken the novel’s binding. The crystal meth Maha injects, leading to her gangrenous amputations, seems extraneous when diabetes is the cause.

In an interview, Richardson has spoken of urban spaces and laneways in Melbourne, where he was born, as being like a palimpsest. Indeed, the novel is infused with literary allusions and tropes which should be acknowledged.

Somnath’s forced sterilisation is strongly reminiscent of Ishvar’s in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, a novel also set in India’s 1975 Emergency period. Titch finds employment in Ginny’s bookshop after impressing her with the absurdity of citing the Russians: “The Tolstoy. The Dostoevsky. The Kafka.” Titch’s theft of drugs and cash faintly echo the transgressions of Raskolnikov, the impoverished student in Crime and Punishment. There is homage and a nod to foundational epistolary fictions such as Letter to Pessoa and To Silence.

Materially gritty

For all its flair and pastiche, The Degenerates retains a material grittiness. Like prose poured into blocks without line breaks, it reads like polished concrete. Each section or chunk is a cameo where the mundane become scenes of scrutiny, often with aesthetic appeal – whether it be Titch’s ants randomly in motion, the flow of water down drains, or the liquid in a case of contact lenses.

Richardson has a penchant for acronyms, such as MDMA, EDM, ATM, CBD, KFC, PVC, BMX. He seems to insist on brands and consumables, like Doritos, Mars bars, Freddo Frogs, Krispy Kremes. Telstra shops, Rebel Sport, Target, SnapChat and even the “Commbank app” make appearances.

Commodity fetishes animate the novel, however, its reliance on jargons of drug subculture and millennial crypto culture can be a strain to read, risking caricatures, at times bordering on cliché:

Bitcoin. Ethereum. Ripple, too. Even Paxos. ‘Look at the gains, yeah,’ he said.

The intense detail in Richardson’s descriptions slows down the action and depletes his characters of their psychological realities. Some of the most interesting “degenerates” – Somnath, Titch’s mother, and Skeater – make transitory appearances. This is, partly, because the author veers headlong into language’s potential for soundscapes, along with its capacity to explain and transcendentalise. Indeed, there’s an evangelical tone to the final section that deifies the writer’s task as being godlike.

When Maha’s hundreds of followers leave their families and jobs to join her in the mythic “Red Plains”, setting up “tents, tarpaulins and laundry lines”, we are told:

They watched her drive by the pages of Titch’s story. She was their creator. Their divine writer. They knew that Mother Pulse had dreamed them, her people, and set them in motion. It was true.

The passive register of omniscient narration stems Mother Pulse’s fully embodied voice, even as she furiously writes about her followers, while they seem content to be written about “with compassion and care”.

Richardson’s prose dazzles and sometimes overwhelms. However, the novel’s energy, precision, risk and charm generates scenes and outcast characters that are part of a community of marginal writing, to be read slowly against the canon, with all its literary categories, gates and privileges.

There are complex reasons why minority narratives struggle to thrive within the flow and counter-currents of a globalising, neo-colonial literary economy. The Degenerates is relevant for Australia in this era of hostile immigration policy, populist nationalism and protectionism.

It poses not merely questions of travel, but provocations of travel writing, eschewing middle-class fears and insecurities. Its rare gifts are humour, perversity, syncretism and empathy for those marginalised, and their stories.

Michelle Cahill, Adjunct, Department of English, School of Humanities, University of Tasmania

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

Temperatures have dropped in many parts of Australia which means runners, cyclists, rowers, hikers, or anyone physically active outside need to take extra precautions to stay safe and exercise in relative comfort.

Cold environments can also include high winds and water exposure, which present unique physiological, psychological and logistical challenges that can turn people off exercising.

While exercising in the cold does not typically increase injury risk, certain conditions can lead to a drop in whole body temperature (hypothermia) and impaired exercise performance.

One advantage to exercising in the cold is that it often feels easier, since the body perceives lower exertion levels compared to performing the same task in hot environments.

While it’s sometimes tempting to rug up and stay indoors when temperatures plummet, here are some tips for exercising in cold conditions.

1. Wear layers

Start exercising in a slightly chilled state (if you’re warm when you begin, take a layer off).

Strip down one layer as you warm up to avoid overheating and excessive sweating, which can lead to chilling later as you cool down.

Clothing recommendations include:

• inner (base) layer: wear a lightweight, moisture-wicking fabric (such as polyester) as a base layer to keep sweat away from your skin
• middle (insulating) layer: add a fleece or thermal layer if temperatures are close to freezing
• outer layer: a windproof, water-resistant jacket is essential in wet, windy or snowy conditions
• additional considerations: for hands and feet, wear gloves and opt for polyester socks. A beanie or headband is great for the head and ears because you lose a significant amount of heat from your head.

2. Warming up is crucial

In cold conditions, your muscles may take longer to warm up and may be at a greater risk of injury due to reduced blood flow (vasoconstriction), reduced flexibility and slower reaction times.

Spend about ten minutes (perhaps indoors) performing a structured warm-up. This should include dynamic stretches and exercises such as push-ups, leg swings, lunges, calf raises, squats and high knees before heading out.

This will help enhance blood flow, increase tissue temperature and improve your joints’ range of motion.

No matter what exercise type you choose, start slowly and gradually progress your intensity.

3. Be aware of the risks

Depending on the mode of activity, outdoor exercise can be riskier during winter due to slippery surfaces and reduced visibility.

If you are walking or running, shorten your steps and stride length when it’s wet to maintain control and prevent slips and falls.

If you are cycling, avoid sharp turns or sudden stops. Stick to well-lit areas and paths and try to exercise during daylight hours if possible.

Also, consider wearing bright or reflective clothing at night or in foggy conditions.

4. The importance of recovery

Spend a few minutes at the end of your workout for active recovery (walking and stretching) which helps prevent blood pooling and inflammation in the feet, while bringing the body’s systems back to homeostasis (resting breathing and heart rate).

When it’s extremely cold, get indoors immediately because your body temperature drops fast once you stop moving.

Change out of any damp clothes and have a warm shower or bath as soon as possible to help regulate body temperature and prevent hypothermia. Be aware of signs of hypothermia, which include shivering, slurred speech, cold pale skin and poor coordination, among others.

Other tips to consider

If it’s nearing or below 0°C with wind chill or rain or snow, perhaps opt for an indoor mode of exercise such as treadmill running, stationary cycling or cross-training to avoid unnecessary risks such as hypothermia, non-freezing cold injuries (such as trenchfoot) or freezing cold injuries (frostbite).

To ensure adequate hydration, it is recommended to consume about 500ml of fluid two hours before exercise and to continue to drink during and after exercising.

If you do brave the cold to exercise outside, is still advisable to wear sunscreen (SPF 30 or higher) on exposed skin during the day, since ultra violet radiation can still pass through clouds and is not related to temperature.

Overall, exercise in the cold can be safe and enjoyable with the right precautions and planning.

Harry Banyard, Senior Lecturer in Exercise and Sports Science, Swinburne University of Technology

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

People on TikTok tend to follow accounts that align with their own political beliefs, meaning the platform is creating political echo chambers among its users. These findings, from a study my collaborators, Yanlin Li and Homero Gil de Zúñiga, and I published in the academic journal New Media & Society, show that people mostly hear from voices they already agree with.

We analyzed the structure of different political networks on TikTok and found that right-leaning communities are more isolated from other political groups and from mainstream news outlets. Looking at their internal structures, the right-leaning communities are more tightly connected than their left-leaning counterparts. In other words, conservative TikTok users tend to stick together. They rarely follow accounts with opposing views or mainstream media accounts. Liberal users, on the other hand, are more likely to follow a mix of accounts, including those they might disagree with.

Our study is based on a massive dataset of over 16 million TikTok videos from more than 160,000 public accounts between 2019 and 2023. We saw a spike of political TikTok videos during the 2020 U.S. presidential election. More importantly, people aren’t just passively watching political content; they’re actively creating political content themselves.

Some people are more outspoken about politics than others. We found that users with stronger political leanings and those who get more likes and comments on their videos are more motivated to keep posting. This shows the power of partisanship, but also the power of TikTok’s social rewards system. Engagement signals – likes, shares, comments – are like a fuel, encouraging users to create even more.

Why it matters

People are turning to TikTok not just for a good laugh. A recent Pew Research Center survey shows that almost 40% of U.S. adults under 30 regularly get news on TikTok. The question becomes what kind of news are they watching, and what does that mean for how they engage with politics.

The content on TikTok often comes from creators and influencers or digital-native media sources. The quality of this news content remains uncertain. Without access to balanced, fact-based information, people may struggle to make informed political decisions.

Amid the debates over banning TikTok, our study highlights how TikTok can be a double-edged sword in political communication. It’s encouraging to see people participate in politics through TikTok when that’s their medium of choice. However, if a user’s network is closed and homogeneous and their expression serves as in-group validation, it may further solidify the political echo chamber.

When people are exposed to one-sided messages, it can increase hostility toward outgroups. In the long run, relying on TikTok as a source for political information might deepen people’s political views and contribute to greater polarization.

What other research is being done

Echo chambers have been widely studied on platforms like Twitter and Facebook, but similar research on TikTok is in its infancy. TikTok is drawing scrutiny, particularly its role in news production, political messaging and social movements.

TikTok has its unique format, algorithmic curation and entertainment-driven design. I believe that its function as a tool for political communication calls for closer examination.

What’s next

In 2024, the Biden/Harris and Trump campaigns joined TikTok to reach young voters. My research team is now analyzing how these political communication dynamics may have shifted during the 2024 election. Future research could use experiments to explore whether these campaign videos significantly influence voters’ perceptions and behaviors.

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

Zicheng Cheng, Assistant Professor of Mass Communications, University of Arizona

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

Around midday on June 13 last year, my colleagues and I were scanning the skies when we thought we had discovered a strange and exciting new object in space. Using a huge radio telescope, we spotted a blindingly fast flash of radio waves that appeared to be coming from somewhere inside our galaxy.

After a year of research and analysis, we have finally pinned down the source of the signal – and it was even closer to home than we had ever expected.

A surprise in the desert

Our instrument was located at Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara – also known as the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory – in remote Western Australia, where the sky above the red desert plains is vast and sublime.

We were using a new detector at the radio telescope known as the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder – or ASKAP – to search for rare flickering signals from distant galaxies called fast radio bursts.

We detected a burst. Surprisingly, it showed no evidence of a time delay between high and low frequencies – a phenomenon known as “dispersion”.

This meant it must have originated within a few hundred light years of Earth. In other words, it must have come from inside our galaxy – unlike other fast radio bursts which have come from billions of light years away.

A problem emerges

Fast radio bursts are the brightest radio flashes in the Universe, emitting 30 years’ worth of the Sun’s energy in less than a millisecond – and we only have hints of how they are produced.

Some theories suggest they are produced by “magnetars” – the highly magnetised cores of massive, dead stars – or arise from cosmic collisions between these dead stellar remnants. Regardless of how they occur, fast radio bursts are also a precise instrument for mapping out the so-called “missing matter” in our Universe.

When we went back over our recordings to take a closer a look at the radio burst, we had a surprise: the signal seemed to have disappeared. Two months of trial and error went by, until the problem was found.

ASKAP is composed of 36 antennas, which can be combined to act like one gigantic zoom lens six kilometres across. Just like a zoom lens on a camera, if you try to take a picture of something too close, it comes out blurry. Only by removing some of the antennas from the analysis – artificially reducing the size of our “lens” – did we finally make an image of the burst.

We weren’t excited by this – in fact, we were disappointed. No astronomical signal could be close enough to cause this blurring.

This meant it was probably just radio-frequency “interference” – an astronomer’s term for human-made signals that corrupt our data.

It’s the kind of junk data we’d normally throw away.

Yet the burst had us intrigued. For one thing, this burst was fast. The fastest known fast radio burst lasted about 10 millionths of a second. This burst consisted of an extremely bright pulse lasting a few billionths of a second, and two dimmer after-pulses, for a total duration of 30 nanoseconds.

So where did this amazingly short, bright burst come from?

A zombie in space?

We already knew the direction it came from, and we were able to use the blurriness in the image to estimate a distance of 4,500 km. And there was only one thing in that direction, at that distance, at that time – a derelict 60-year-old satellite called Relay 2.

Relay 2 was one of the first ever telecommunications satellites. Launched by the United States in 1964, it was operated until 1965, and its onboard systems had failed by 1967.

But how could Relay 2 have produced this burst?

Some satellites, presumed dead, have been observed to reawaken. They are known as “zombie satellites”.

But this was no zombie. No system on board Relay 2 had ever been able to produce a nanosecond burst of radio waves, even when it was alive.

We think the most likely cause was an “electrostatic discharge”. As satellites are exposed to electrically charged gases in space known as plasmas, they can become charged – just like when your feet rub on carpet. And that accumulated charge can suddenly discharge, with the resulting spark causing a flash of radio waves.

Electrostatic discharges are common, and are known to cause damage to spacecraft. Yet all known electrostatic discharges last thousands of times longer than our signal, and occur most commonly when the Earth’s magnetosphere is highly active. And our magnetosphere was unusually quiet at the time of the signal.

Another possibility is a strike by a micrometeoroid – a tiny piece of space debris – similar to that experienced by the James Webb Space Telescope in June 2022.

According to our calculations, a 22 micro-gram micrometeoroid travelling at 20km per second or more and hitting Relay 2 would have been able to produce such a strong flash of radio waves. But we estimate the chance the nanosecond burst we detected was caused by such an event to be about 1%.

Plenty more sparks in the sky

Ultimately, we can’t be certain why we saw this signal from Relay 2. What we do know, however, is how to see more of them. When looking at 13.8 millisecond timescales – the equivalent of keeping the camera shutter open for longer – this signal was washed out, and barely detectable even to a powerful radio telescope such as ASKAP.

But if we had searched at 13.8 nanoseconds, any old radio antenna would have easily seen it. It shows us that monitoring satellites for electrostatic discharges with ground-based radio antennas is possible. And with the number of satellites in orbit growing rapidly, finding new ways to monitor them is more important than ever.

But did our team eventually find new astronomical signals? You bet we did. And there are no doubt plenty more to be found.

Clancy William James, Senior Lecturer (astronomy and astroparticle physics), Curtin University

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

The winter school holidays will mean families across Aotearoa New Zealand will be looking for indoor activities to entertain children. With millions of visitors each year, museums focused on the country’s history will inevitably play host to local and international visitors.

Museums tend to enjoy a high level of trust among the public. They’re widely seen as neutral, factual sources of historical knowledge.

But like all forms of storytelling, museums present the past in particular ways. They narrate events from a certain group’s or individual’s perspective and explain why events unfolded in the way they did.

In this respect, museums are not so different from historical films. Consider the different ways two recent movies – 1917 and the remake of All Quiet on the Western Front – narrate the first world war.

In 1917, the storyteller takes the British side, encouraging viewers to invest in the bravery and endurance of British soldiers. But All Quiet on the Western Front is narrated from a German perspective, inviting viewers to grieve for German soldiers as victims of a political system that glorified war.

Museum exhibitions tell stories in a similar way. Visitors should be asking not just what story is told, but why.

Spoiler alert: it often has to do with national identity. Museums tell particular stories of the past because these stories support a particular image of New Zealand as a nation.

Four questions for your next museum visit

At its core, every story has two basic ingredients: actors and events. To turn these into a compelling narrative, the storyteller connects the events into a plot, so they build on each other. The storyteller also transforms actors into characters by giving them particular traits — brave, selfish, wise, cruel and the like. Museums do this, too.

As you move through a museum exhibition, try asking yourself the following questions:

1. Which historical events are included — and which are left out?

Every story begins somewhere. Museums choose which events to include and which to leave out, shaping how visitors understand what happened and why.

Take Te Papa’s Gallipoli: The Scale of Our War exhibition. It opens with the landing at ANZAC Cove but skips over events in the lead-up to WWI — such as Britain’s earlier moves to seize Ottoman territories like Cyprus and Egypt.

Leaving these out helps frame Gallipoli as a noble – albeit tragic – “coming of age” for New Zealand. But in reality, ANZAC soldiers were fighting to support Britain’s imperial ambitions in the Middle East.

2. How are events organised into a plot?

Museums don’t just say “this happened, then that happened”. They link events into a larger plot — a chain of cause and effect that explains how one thing led to another. This can happen through text, but also through spatial layout, lighting, sound and other techniques that guide visitors through rising and falling moments of narrative tension.

Often, museums use familiar plot types to connect events. One common example is the quest narrative — a story in which heroes must navigate unknown terrain, and where mistakes are part of the journey and threaten to derail the mission. It’s a bit like The Lord of the Rings: a journey full of challenges, wrong turns and personal growth.

At Te Kōngahu Museum of Waitangi, Aotearoa New Zealand’s Treaty story is told using this quest structure. The Treaty is presented as something unique and unfamiliar and the British, confronted with this unknown, fall back on familiar colonial practices — the “mistake” that led to the New Zealand wars.

Because this misstep is treated as part of the learning curve typical of any quest, the exhibition avoids harder questions about this violent part of history, and instead preserves the image of Aotearoa New Zealand as fundamentally tolerant and respectful.

3. Who are the main actors in the story — and who is missing?

Every story needs protagonists, and whose perspective frames the story matters. In many smaller regional museums, history is still told almost entirely from the viewpoint of European settlers. But what about Māori experiences of colonisation? Or the histories of Chinese communities and other migrants who arrived in the 1800s?

By focusing narrowly on European settlers as the main actors, these museums present a one-sided view of the past and construct an image of New Zealand as a European nation — one that expects others to assimilate.

4. How are the main actors characterised — and how are we meant to feel about them?

It’s not surprising that museums portray some actors positively and others less so. What’s more revealing is how certain individuals are elevated as symbols of the nation and how museums invite us to form personal connections with them.

In Te Papa’s Gallipoli exhibition, visitors can open drawers and boxes containing soldiers’ personal belongings. This intimate activity encourages us to feel close to these figures — not just learning about them, but identifying with them as embodying national qualities: bravery, resilience and a commitment to peace.

Why does this matter?

Historical museum narratives aren’t necessarily inaccurate — but, much like historical movies, they are selective. They highlight certain events, actors and cause-and-effect chains to tell a particular kind of story. Often, that story supports a specific idea of what it means to be an Aotearoa New Zealander.

By reading museum exhibitions with a critical eye, visitors can better understand not just the past, but how storytelling shapes national identity in the present — and imagine how it might be shaped differently.

Olli Hellmann, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Waikato

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

The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA), the organisation responsible for collating and publishing Australia’s music charts, has just announced the biggest overhaul of its methods in more than a decade.

From September, the ARIA charts will be divided according to the release date of entries. Anything older than two years will be moved into a new “ARIA on replay” chart, with the exception of some music re-entering the charts after more than a decade.

The stated aim of the reforms is to better connect Australian audiences with new, and particularly Australian, music. They are part of a series of interventions from different groups aimed at solving the nation’s ongoing music “crisis”.

Why is this happening?

ARIA is responding to two related trends through implementing this new chart system.

The first is that the charts are increasingly dominated by old “catalogue” music. Creative Australia reports the ARIA’s Top 100 charts went from having almost 100% new singles (less than two years old) in 2018, to 70% new singles in 2024.

This is related to a fundamental change in what is being counted.

In 2014, ARIA expanded its sources from point-of-sale data (such as CD sales and iTunes downloads) to include plays on streaming services (such as Spotify and YouTube), which are now the most popular means of music consumption.

People will typically buy a physical/iTunes single or album once. But they might listen to a song on Spotify hundreds of times, and each of these listens count as far as the ARIA charts are concerned.

This explains the resurgence of old releases that find new audiences through media (such as Stranger Things boosting Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill), as well as perennial favourites that never seem to be dislodged (Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours album has been in the ARIA Top 50 albums chart for more than 400 weeks).

The second trend is the decline of Australian music in the charts. Research shows the ARIA’s singles and albums charts have become more homogeneous in recent decades, rather than more diversified.

Artists from North America and the United Kingdom are dominating Australian charts more than ever. Many of them sit in the charts for extended periods, at the expense of homegrown talent.

How streaming platforms changed the game

A major challenge for artists on streaming platforms is discoverability, or visibility.

Decisions made by platform-employed playlist curators and AI algorithms aren’t well understood, and are hard to influence. Yet they make a huge difference to how many people will encounter a piece of music.

The inclusion of streaming data in the ARIA charts back in 2014 was presented as a way to more accurately assess what people were listening to.

This new plan to separate old and new releases has a more interventionist agenda, attempting to “remove barriers for new Australian music”.

It can be seen as a response to the overarching narrative of a “crisis” plaguing the Australian music industry – one which extends to existential challenges for live music, and the careers of musicians and other industry workers.

The ARIA’s decision to put their finger on the scales of chart success shows how pressing this crisis narrative has become.

What difference will it make?

Even if Australian artists are better represented in future ARIA charts, material challenges will remain.

Actual sales and streams may remain relatively low. Even with millions of streams, the value returned to artists is often too small to maintain a living.

For most artists, a sustainable music career requires that visibility be translated into other revenue sources, such as live performances, merchandise sales, and media licensing deals.

That said, ARIA’s aim of increasing discoverability for local acts seems likely to have some pay-off. Acts with their names in the new charts will enjoy extra visibility and prestige. If even a small number of opportunities arise from this, it could make a big difference to them, the local industries surrounding them, and the local audiences that will discover them.

ARIA’s intervention is part of a patchwork of responses from industry, government, and communities to Australia’s music woes. Another recent response came from a New South Wales government scheme which will reward overseas headliners (through reduced venue fees) for including an Australian opening act in their show.

State and federal governments are also investing in local music development and export. The surprising exception to this is previous trailblazer Victoria, which recently cut almost all contemporary music funding.

ARIA’s new approach is emphasising the message that Australian music should be valued. Tracking how this approach plays out – as well as which Australian artists benefit – will help ensure a healthy music ecosystem in the future.

Catherine Strong, Associate Professor, Music Industry, RMIT University and Ben Green, Lecturer in Music Industry and Popular Culture, RMIT University

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

After 37 years at the helm, fashion industry heavyweight Anna Wintour is stepping down from her position as editor-in-chief of American Vogue.

It’s not a retirement, though, as Wintour will maintain a leadership position at global fashion and lifestyle publisher Condé Nast (the owner of Vogue and other publications, such as Vanity Fair and Glamour).

Nonetheless, Wintour’s departure from the US edition of the magazine is a big moment for the fashion industry – one which she has single-handedly changed forever.

Fashion mag fever

Fashion magazines as we know them today were first formalised in the 19th century. They helped establish the “trickle down theory” of fashion, wherein trends were traditionally dictated by certain industry elites, including major magazine editors.

In Australia, getting your hands on a monthly issue meant rare exposure to the latest European or American fashion trends.

Vogue itself was established in New York in 1892 by businessman Arthur Baldwin Turnure. The magazine targeted the city’s elite class, initially covering various aspects of high-society life. In 1909, Vogue was acquired by Condé Nast. From then, the magazine increasingly cemented itself as a cornerstone of the fashion publishing.

The period following the second world war particularly opened the doors to mass fashion consumerism and an expanding fashion magazine culture.

Wintour came on as editor of Vogue in 1988, at which point the magazine became less conservative, and more culturally significant.

Not afraid to break the mould

Fashion publishing changed as a result of Wintour’s bold editorial choices – especially when it came to the magazine’s covers. Her choices both reflected, and dictated, shifts in fashion culture.

Wintour’s first cover at Vogue, published in 1988, mixed couture garments (Christian Lacroix) with mainstream brands (stonewashed Guess jeans) – something which had never been done before. It was also the first time a Vogue cover had featured jeans at all – perfectly setting the scene for a long career spent pushing the magazine into new domains.

Wintour also pioneered the centring of celebrities (rather than just models) within fashion discourse. And while she leveraged big names such as Beyonce, Madonna, Nicole Kidman, Kate Moss, Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey, she also featured rising stars as cover models – often helping propel their careers in the process.

Wintour’s legacy at Vogue involved elevating fashion from a frivolous runway to a powerful industry, which is not scared to make a statement. Nowhere is this truer than at the Met Gala, which is held each year to celebrate the opening of a new fashion exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.

The event started as a simple fundraiser for the Met in 1948, before being linked to a fashion exhibit for the first time in 1974.

Wintour took over its organisation in 1995. Her focus on securing exclusive celebrity guests helped propel it to the prestigious event it is today.

This year’s theme for the event was Superfine: Tailoring Black Style. In a time where the US faces great political instability, Wintour was celebrated for her role in helping elevate Black history through the event.

Not without controversy

However, while her cultural influence can’t be doubted, Wintour’s legacy at American Vogue is not without fault.

Notably, her ongoing feud with animal rights organisation PETA – due to the her unwavering support for fur – has bubbled in the background since the heydays of the anti-fur movement.

Wintour has been targeted directly by anti-fur activists, both physically (she was hit with a tofu cream pie in 2005 while leaving a Chloe show) and through numerous protests.

This issue was never resolved. Vogue has continued to showcase and feature fur clothing, even as the social license for using animal materials starts to run out.

Fashion continues to grow increasingly political. How magazines such as Vogue will engage with this shift remains to be seen.

A changing media landscape

The rise of fashion blogging in recent decades has led to a wave of fashion influencers, with throngs of followers, who are challenging the unidirectional “trickle-down” structure of the fashion industry.

Today, social media platforms have overtaken traditional media influence both within and outside of fashion. And with this, the power of fashion editors such as Wintour is diminishing significantly.

Many words will flow regarding Wintour’s departure as editor-in-chief, but nowhere near as many as what she oversaw at the helm of the world’s biggest fashion magazine.

Jye Marshall, Lecturer, Fashion Design, School of Design and Architecture, Swinburne University of Technology and Rachel Lamarche-Beauchesne, Senior Lecturer in Fashion Enterprise, Torrens University Australia

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

After 37 years at the helm, fashion industry heavyweight Anna Wintour is stepping down from her position as editor-in-chief of American Vogue.

It’s not a retirement, though, as Wintour will maintain a leadership position at global fashion and lifestyle publisher Condé Nast (the owner of Vogue and other publications, such as Vanity Fair and Glamour).

Nonetheless, Wintour’s departure from the US edition of the magazine is a big moment for the fashion industry – one which she has single-handedly changed forever.

Fashion mag fever

Fashion magazines as we know them today were first formalised in the 19th century. They helped establish the “trickle down theory” of fashion, wherein trends were traditionally dictated by certain industry elites, including major magazine editors.

In Australia, getting your hands on a monthly issue meant rare exposure to the latest European or American fashion trends.

Vogue itself was established in New York in 1892 by businessman Arthur Baldwin Turnure. The magazine targeted the city’s elite class, initially covering various aspects of high-society life. In 1909, Vogue was acquired by Condé Nast. From then, the magazine increasingly cemented itself as a cornerstone of the fashion publishing.

The period following the second world war particularly opened the doors to mass fashion consumerism and an expanding fashion magazine culture.

Wintour came on as editor of Vogue in 1988, at which point the magazine became less conservative, and more culturally significant.

Not afraid to break the mould

Fashion publishing changed as a result of Wintour’s bold editorial choices – especially when it came to the magazine’s covers. Her choices both reflected, and dictated, shifts in fashion culture.

Wintour’s first cover at Vogue, published in 1988, mixed couture garments (Christian Lacroix) with mainstream brands (stonewashed Guess jeans) – something which had never been done before. It was also the first time a Vogue cover had featured jeans at all – perfectly setting the scene for a long career spent pushing the magazine into new domains.

Wintour also pioneered the centring of celebrities (rather than just models) within fashion discourse. And while she leveraged big names such as Beyonce, Madonna, Nicole Kidman, Kate Moss, Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey, she also featured rising stars as cover models – often helping propel their careers in the process.

Wintour’s legacy at Vogue involved elevating fashion from a frivolous runway to a powerful industry, which is not scared to make a statement. Nowhere is this truer than at the Met Gala, which is held each year to celebrate the opening of a new fashion exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute.

The event started as a simple fundraiser for the Met in 1948, before being linked to a fashion exhibit for the first time in 1974.

Wintour took over its organisation in 1995. Her focus on securing exclusive celebrity guests helped propel it to the prestigious event it is today.

This year’s theme for the event was Superfine: Tailoring Black Style. In a time where the US faces great political instability, Wintour was celebrated for her role in helping elevate Black history through the event.

Not without controversy

However, while her cultural influence can’t be doubted, Wintour’s legacy at American Vogue is not without fault.

Notably, her ongoing feud with animal rights organisation PETA – due to the her unwavering support for fur – has bubbled in the background since the heydays of the anti-fur movement.

Wintour has been targeted directly by anti-fur activists, both physically (she was hit with a tofu cream pie in 2005 while leaving a Chloe show) and through numerous protests.

This issue was never resolved. Vogue has continued to showcase and feature fur clothing, even as the social license for using animal materials starts to run out.

Fashion continues to grow increasingly political. How magazines such as Vogue will engage with this shift remains to be seen.

A changing media landscape

The rise of fashion blogging in recent decades has led to a wave of fashion influencers, with throngs of followers, who are challenging the unidirectional “trickle-down” structure of the fashion industry.

Today, social media platforms have overtaken traditional media influence both within and outside of fashion. And with this, the power of fashion editors such as Wintour is diminishing significantly.

Many words will flow regarding Wintour’s departure as editor-in-chief, but nowhere near as many as what she oversaw at the helm of the world’s biggest fashion magazine.

Jye Marshall, Lecturer, Fashion Design, School of Design and Architecture, Swinburne University of Technology and Rachel Lamarche-Beauchesne, Senior Lecturer in Fashion Enterprise, Torrens University Australia

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

The federal opposition has accepted an invitation from Treasurer Jim Chalmers for shadow treasurer Ted O'Brien to attend the August economic roundtable.

The acceptance contrasts with the position taken by former opposition leader Peter Dutton last term. He refused to attend the government’s jobs and skills summit although the Nationals leader David Littleproud did so.

The opposition’s decision is in line with the indication from its leader Sussan Ley that she wants to be more constructive than the Liberals were last term.

The roundtable, focused on productivity, has broadened into a meeting where tax reform is expected to figures heavily. Chalmers is looking for consensus for reforms but the extent to which that can be achieved remains to be seen.

Chalmers said on Tuesday he had provided the invitation to O'Brien “in good faith. I think it would be a good thing to have the shadow treasurer engaged at the economic reform roundtable.

"I think it will give us a better chance of making the kind of progress that we desperately need to see on reform and in our economy more broadly.”

Chalmers is still finalising the invitations, which will go to business, the union movement and civil society representatives.

O'Brien said he would engage at the roundtable “in a business-like fashion”.

He said the Coalition would be “constructive where we can and critical where we must”. It would hold the government to account and he would not be at the summit “to rubber stamp a talkfest”.

“It’s worth the treasurer knowing from the outset that I believe rhetoric is no substitute for reform. I want to see honesty in how the government defines the economic problems our nation faces, and I will be looking to tangible outcomes as real measures of success.”

On Wednesday Ley will appear at the National Press Club, speaking about her personal story, the Liberals’ federal election defeat, and some markers on policy areas where the Liberals will focus.

She will also outline some priority policy areas that she’ll champion during this parliamentary term.

In her address Ley will highlight “aspiration”, saying this is the “thread that connects every single part of Australian society”.

“Aspiration is the foundation of the Australian promise: that if you work hard, play by the rules, do your best for your kids and contribute to your community, you will be able to build a better life for yourself and your family.”

In her speech, part of which was released ahead of delivery, Ley acknowledges the opposition didn’t just lose the last election - “we got smashed. We respect the election outcome with humility. We accept it with contrition. And we must learn from it with conviction.”

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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

We all like to imagine we’re ageing well. Now a simple blood or saliva test promises to tell us by measuring our “biological age”. And then, as many have done, we can share how “young” we really are on social media, along with our secrets to success.

While chronological age is how long you have been alive, measures of biological age aim to indicate how old your body actually is, purporting to measure “wear and tear” at a molecular level.

The appeal of these tests is undeniable. Health-conscious consumers may see their results as reinforcing their anti-ageing efforts, or a way to show their journey to better health is paying off.

But how good are these tests? Do they actually offer useful insights? Or are they just clever marketing dressed up to look like science?

How do these tests work?

Over time, the chemical processes that allow our body to function, known as our “metabolic activity”, lead to damage and a decline in the activity of our cells, tissues and organs.

Biological age tests aim to capture some of these changes, offering a snapshot of how well, or how poorly, we are ageing on a cellular level.

Our DNA is also affected by the ageing process. In particular, chemical tags (methyl groups) attach to our DNA and affect gene expression. These changes occur in predictable ways with age and environmental exposures, in a process called methylation.

Research studies have used “epigenetic clocks”, which measure the methylation of our genes, to estimate biological age. By analysing methylation levels at specific sites in the genome from participant samples, researchers apply predictive models to estimate the cumulative wear and tear on the body.

What does the research say about their use?

Although the science is rapidly evolving, the evidence underpinning the use of epigenetic clocks to measure biological ageing in research studies is strong.

Studies have shown epigenetic biological age estimation is a better predictor of the risk of death and ageing-related diseases than chronological age.

Epigenetic clocks also have been found to correlate strongly with lifestyle and environmental exposures, such as smoking status and diet quality.

In addition, they have been found to be able to predict the risk of conditions such as cardiovascular disease, which can lead to heart attacks and strokes.

Taken together, a growing body of research indicates that at a population level, epigenetic clocks are robust measures of biological ageing and are strongly linked to the risk of disease and death

But how good are these tests for individuals?

While these tests are valuable when studying populations in research settings, using epigenetic clocks to measure the biological age of individuals is a different matter and requires scrutiny.

For testing at an individual level, perhaps the most important consideration is the “signal to noise ratio” (or precision) of these tests. This is the question of whether a single sample from an individual may yield widely differing results.

A study from 2022 found samples deviated by up to nine years. So an identical sample from a 40-year-old may indicate a biological age of as low as 35 years (a cause for celebration) or as high as 44 years (a cause of anxiety).

While there have been significant improvements in these tests over the years, there is considerable variability in the precision of these tests between commercial providers. So depending on who you send your sample to, your estimated biological age may vary considerably.

Another limitation is there is currently no standardisation of methods for this testing. Commercial providers perform these tests in different ways and have different algorithms for estimating biological age from the data.

As you would expect for commercial operators, providers don’t disclose their methods. So it’s difficult to compare companies and determine who provides the most accurate results – and what you’re getting for your money.

A third limitation is that while epigenetic clocks correlate well with ageing, they are simply a “proxy” and are not a diagnostic tool.

In other words, they may provide a general indication of ageing at a cellular level. But they don’t offer any specific insights about what the issue may be if someone is found to be “ageing faster” than they would like, or what they’re doing right if they are “ageing well”.

So regardless of the result of your test, all you’re likely to get from the commercial provider of an epigenetic test is generic advice about what the science says is healthy behaviour.

Are they worth it? Or what should I do instead?

While companies offering these tests may have good intentions, remember their ultimate goal is to sell you these tests and make a profit. And at a cost of around A$500, they’re not cheap.

While the idea of using these tests as a personalised health tool has potential, it is clear that we are not there yet.

For this to become a reality, tests will need to become more reproducible, standardised across providers, and validated through long-term studies that link changes in biological age to specific behaviours.

So while one-off tests of biological age make for impressive social media posts, for most people they represent a significant cost and offer limited real value.

The good news is we already know what we need to do to increase our chances of living longer and healthier lives. These include:

• improving our diet
• increasing physical activity
• getting enough sleep
• quitting smoking
• reducing stress
• prioritising social connection.

We don’t need to know our biological age in order to implement changes in our lives right now to improve our health.

Hassan Vally, Associate Professor, Epidemiology, Deakin University

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

An expert committee that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted on June 26, 2025, to cease recommending the use of a mercury-based chemical called thimerosal in flu vaccines. Only a small number of flu vaccines – ones that are produced in multi-dose vials – currently contain thimerosal.

Thimerosal is almost never used in vaccines anymore, but vaccine skeptics have falsely claimed it carries health risks to the brain. Public health experts have raised concerns that the committee’s action against thimerosal may shake public trust and sow confusion about the safety of vaccines.

The committee, called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, was meeting for the first time since Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. abruptly replaced its 17 members with eight handpicked ones on June 11.

The committee generally discusses and votes on recommendations for specific vaccines. For this meeting, vaccines for COVID-19, human papillomavirus, influenza and other infectious diseases were on the schedule.

I’m a pharmacist and expert on drug information with 35 years of experience critically evaluating the safety and effectiveness of medications in clinical trials. No evidence supports the idea that thimerosal, used as a preservative in vaccines, is unsafe or carries any health risks.

What is thimerosal?

Thimerosal, also known as thiomersal, is a preservative that has been used in some drug products since the 1930s because it prevents contamination by killing microbes and preventing their growth.

In the human body, thimerosal is metabolized, or changed, to ethylmercury, an organic derivative of mercury. Studies in infants have shown that ethylmercury is quickly eliminated from the blood.

Ethylmercury is sometimes confused with methylmercury. Methylmercury is known to be toxic and is associated with many negative effects on brain development even at low exposure. Environmental researchers identified the neurotoxic effects of mercury in children in the 1970s, primarily resulting from exposure to methylmercury in fish. In the 1990s, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration established limits for maximum recommended exposure to methylmercury, especially for children, pregnant women and women of childbearing age.

Why is thimerosal controversial?

Fears about the safety of thimerosal in vaccines spread for two reasons.

First, in 1998, a now discredited report was published in a major medical journal called The Lancet. In it, a British doctor named Andrew Wakefield described eight children who developed autism after receiving the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella. However, the patients were not compared with a control group that was vaccinated, so it was impossible to draw conclusions about the vaccine’s effects. Also, the data report was later found to be falsified. And the MMR vaccine that children received in that report never contained thimerosal.

Second, the federal guidelines on exposure limits for the toxic substance methylmercury came out about the same time as the Wakefield study’s publication. During that period, autism was becoming more widely recognized as a developmental condition, and its rates of diagnosis were rising. People who believed Wakefield’s results conflated methylmercury and ethylmercury and promoted the unfounded idea that ethylmercury in vaccines from thimerosal were driving the rising rates of autism.

The Wakefield study was retracted in 2010, and Wakefield was found guilty of dishonesty and flouting ethics protocols by the U.K. General Medical Council, as well as stripped of his medical license. Subsequent studies have not shown a relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism, but despite the absence of evidence, the idea took hold and has proved difficult to dislodge.

Have scientists tested whether thimerosal is safe?

No unbiased research to date has identified toxicity caused by ethylmercury in vaccines or a link between the substance and autism or other developmental concerns – and not from lack of looking.

A 1999 review conducted by the Food and Drug Administration in response to federal guidelines on limiting mercury exposure found no evidence of harm from thimerosal as a vaccine preservative other than rare allergic reactions. Even so, as a precautionary measure in response to concerns about exposure to mercury in infants, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the U.S. Public Health Service issued a joint statement in 1999 recommending removal of thimerosal from vaccines.

At that time, just one childhood vaccine was available only in a version that contained thimerosal as an ingredient. This was a vaccine called DTP, for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis. Other childhood vaccines were either available only in formulations without thimerosal or could be obtained in versions that did not contain it.

By 2001, U.S. manufacturers had removed thimerosal from almost all vaccines – and from all vaccines in the childhood vaccination schedule.

In 2004, the U.S. Institute of Medicine Immunization Safety Review Committee reviewed over 200 scientific studies and concluded there is no causal relationship between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism. Additional well-conducted studies reviewed independently by the CDC and by the FDA did not find a link between thimerosal-containing vaccines and autism or neuropsychological delays.

How is thimerosal used today?

In the U.S., most vaccines are now available in single-dose vials or syringes. Thimerosal is found only in multi-dose vials that are used to supply vaccines for large-scale immunization efforts – specifically, in a small number of influenza vaccines. It is not added to modern childhood vaccines, and people who get a flu vaccine can avoid it by requesting a vaccine supplied in a single-dose vial or syringe.

Thimerosal is still used in vaccines in some other countries to ensure continued availability of necessary vaccines. The World Health Organization continues to affirm that there is no evidence of toxicity in infants, children or adults exposed to thimerosal-containing vaccines.

This article was updated to include ACIP’s vaccine recommendations.

Terri Levien, Professor of Pharmacy, Washington State University

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

From July, eligible Australians will be screened for lung cancer as part of the nation’s first new cancer screening program for almost 20 years.

The program aims to detect lung cancer early, before symptoms emerge and cancer spreads. This early detection and treatment is predicted to save lives.

Why lung cancer?

Lung cancer is Australia’s fifth most diagnosed cancer but causes the greatest number of cancer deaths.

It’s more common in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, rural and remote Australians, and lower income groups than in the general population.

Overall, less than one in five patients with lung cancer will survive five years. But for those diagnosed when the cancer is small and has not spread, two-thirds of people survive five years.

Who is eligible?

The lung cancer screening program only targets people at higher risk of lung cancer, based on their smoking history and their age. This is different to a population-wide screening program, such as screening for bowel cancer, which is based on age alone.

The lung cancer program screens people 50-70 years old with no signs or symptoms of lung cancer such as breathlessness, a persisting cough, coughing up blood, chest pain, becoming very tired or losing weight.

To be eligible, current smokers must also have a history of at least 30 “pack years”. To calculate this you multiply the number of packets (of 20 cigarettes) you smoke a day by the number of years you’ve been smoking them.

For instance, if you smoke one packet (20 cigarettes) a day for a year that is one pack year. Smoking two packets a day for six months (half a year) is also a pack year.

People who have quit smoking in the past ten years but have accumulated 30 or more pack years before quitting are also eligible.

What does screening involve?

Ask your GP or health worker if you are eligible. If you are, you will be referred for a low-dose computed tomography (CT) scan. This uses much lower doses of x-rays than a regular CT but is enough to find nodules in the lung. These are small lumps which could be clumps of cancer cells, inflammatory cells or scarring from old infections.

Imaging involves lying on a table for 10-15 minutes while the scanner takes images of your chest. So people must also be able to lie flat in a scanner to be part of the program.

After the scan, the results are sent to you, your GP and the National Cancer Screening Register. You’ll be contacted if the scan is normal and will then be reminded in two years’ time to screen again.

If your scan has findings that need to be followed, you will be sent back to your GP who may arrange a further scan in three to 12 months.

If lung cancer is suspected, you will be referred to a lung specialist for further tests.

What are the benefits and risks?

International trials show screening people at high risk of lung cancer reduces their chance of dying prematurely from it, and the benefits outweigh any harm.

The aim is to save lives by increasing the detection of stage 1 disease (a small cancer, 4 centimetres or less, confined to the lung), which has a greater chance of being treated successfully.

The risks of radiation exposure are minimised by using low-dose CT screening.

The other greatest risk is a false positive. This is where the imaging suggests cancer, but further tests rule it out. This varies across studies from almost one in ten to one in two of those having their first scan. If imaging suggests cancer, this usually requires a repeat scan. But about one in 100 of those whose imaging suggests cancer but were later found not to have it have invasive biopsies. This involves taking a sample of the nodule to see if it contains cancerous cells.

Some people will be diagnosed with a cancer that will never cause a problem in their lifetime, for instance because it is slow growing or they are likely to die of other illnesses first. This so-called overdiagnosis varies from none to two-thirds of lung cancers diagnosed, depending on the study.

How much will it cost?

The Australian government has earmarked A$264 million over four years to screen for lung cancer, and $101 million a year after that.

The initial GP consultation will be free if your GP bulk bills, or if not you may be charged an out-of-pocket fee for the consultation. This may be a barrier to the uptake of screening. Subsequent investigations and consultations will be billed as usual.

There will be no cost for the low-dose CT scans.

What should I do?

If you are 50-70 and a heavy smoker see your GP about screening for lung cancer. But the greater gain in terms of reducing your risk of lung cancer is to also give up smoking.

If you’ve already given up smoking, you’ve already reduced your risk of lung cancer. However, since lung cancer can take several years to develop or show on a CT scan, see your GP if you were once a heavy smoker but have quit in the past ten years to see if you are eligible for screening.

This is the first article in our ‘Finding lung cancer’ series, which explores Australia’s first new cancer screening program in almost 20 years.

More information about the program is available. If you need support to quit smoking, call Quitline on 13 78 48.

Ian Olver, Adjunct Professsor, School of Psychology, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Adelaide

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

Since ChatGPT appeared almost three years ago, the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies on learning has been widely debated. Are they handy tools for personalised education, or gateways to academic dishonesty?

Most importantly, there has been concern that using AI will lead to a widespread “dumbing down”, or decline in the ability to think critically. If students use AI tools too early, the argument goes, they may not develop basic skills for critical thinking and problem-solving.

Is that really the case? According to a recent study by scientists from MIT, it appears so. Using ChatGPT to help write essays, the researchers say, can lead to “cognitive debt” and a “likely decrease in learning skills”.

So what did the study find?

The difference between using AI and the brain alone

Over the course of four months, the MIT team asked 54 adults to write a series of three essays using either AI (ChatGPT), a search engine, or their own brains (“brain-only” group). The team measured cognitive engagement by examining electrical activity in the brain and through linguistic analysis of the essays.

The cognitive engagement of those who used AI was significantly lower than the other two groups. This group also had a harder time recalling quotes from their essays and felt a lower sense of ownership over them.

Interestingly, participants switched roles for a final, fourth essay (the brain-only group used AI and vice versa). The AI-to-brain group performed worse and had engagement that was only slightly better than the other group’s during their first session, far below the engagement of the brain-only group in their third session.

The authors claim this demonstrates how prolonged use of AI led to participants accumulating “cognitive debt”. When they finally had the opportunity to use their brains, they were unable to replicate the engagement or perform as well as the other two groups.

Cautiously, the authors note that only 18 participants (six per condition) completed the fourth, final session. Therefore, the findings are preliminary and require further testing.

Does this really show AI makes us stupider?

These results do not necessarily mean that students who used AI accumulated “cognitive debt”. In our view, the findings are due to the particular design of the study.

The change in neural connectivity of the brain-only group over the first three sessions was likely the result of becoming more familiar with the study task, a phenomenon known as the familiarisation effect. As study participants repeat the task, they become more familiar and efficient, and their cognitive strategy adapts accordingly.

When the AI group finally got to “use their brains”, they were only doing the task once. As a result, they were unable to match the other group’s experience. They achieved only slightly better engagement than the brain-only group during the first session.

To fully justify the researchers’ claims, the AI-to-brain participants would also need to complete three writing sessions without AI.

Similarly, the fact the brain-to-AI group used ChatGPT more productively and strategically is likely due to the nature of the fourth writing task, which required writing an essay on one of the previous three topics.

As writing without AI required more substantial engagement, they had a far better recall of what they had written in the past. Hence, they primarily used AI to search for new information and refine what they had previously written.

What are the implications of AI in assessment?

To understand the current situation with AI, we can look back to what happened when calculators first became available.

Back in the 1970s, their impact was regulated by making exams much harder. Instead of doing calculations by hand, students were expected to use calculators and spend their cognitive efforts on more complex tasks.

Effectively, the bar was significantly raised, which made students work equally hard (if not harder) than before calculators were available.

The challenge with AI is that, for the most part, educators have not raised the bar in a way that makes AI a necessary part of the process. Educators still require students to complete the same tasks and expect the same standard of work as they did five years ago.

In such situations, AI can indeed be detrimental. Students can for the most part offload critical engagement with learning to AI, which results in “metacognitive laziness”.

However, just like calculators, AI can and should help us accomplish tasks that were previously impossible – and still require significant engagement. For example, we might ask teaching students to use AI to produce a detailed lesson plan, which will then be evaluated for quality and pedagogical soundness in an oral examination.

In the MIT study, participants who used AI were producing the “same old” essays. They adjusted their engagement to deliver the standard of work expected of them.

The same would happen if students were asked to perform complex calculations with or without a calculator. The group doing calculations by hand would sweat, while those with calculators would barely blink an eye.

Learning how to use AI

Current and future generations need to be able to think critically and creatively and solve problems. However, AI is changing what these things mean.

Producing essays with pen and paper is no longer a demonstration of critical thinking ability, just as doing long division is no longer a demonstration of numeracy.

Knowing when, where and how to use AI is the key to long-term success and skill development. Prioritising which tasks can be offloaded to an AI to reduce cognitive debt is just as important as understanding which tasks require genuine creativity and critical thinking.

Vitomir Kovanovic, Associate Professor and Associate Director of the Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning (C3L), Education Futures, University of South Australia and Rebecca Marrone, Lecturer Learning Sciences and Development, The Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning (C3L), Education Futures, University of South Australia

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

Imagine watching your favourite nature documentary. The predator lunges rapidly from its hiding place, jaws wide open, and the prey … suddenly goes limp. It looks dead.

For some animals, this freeze response – called “tonic immobility” – can be a lifesaver. Possums famously “play dead” to avoid predators. So do rabbits, lizards, snakes, and even some insects.

But what happens when a shark does it?

In our recent study, we explored this strange behaviour in sharks, rays and their relatives. In this group, tonic immobility is triggered when the animal is turned upside down – it stops moving, its muscles relax, and it enters a trance-like state. Some scientists even use tonic immobility as a technique to safely handle certain shark species.

But why does it happen? And does it actually help these marine predators survive?

The mystery of the ‘frozen shark’

Despite being well documented across the animal kingdom, the reasons behind tonic immobility remain murky – especially in the ocean. It is generally thought of as an anti-predator defence. But there is no evidence to support this idea in sharks, and alternative hypotheses exist.

We tested 13 species of sharks, rays, and a chimaera — a shark relative commonly referred to as a ghost shark — to see whether they entered tonic immobility when gently turned upside down underwater.

Seven species did, but six did not. We then analysed these findings using evolutionary tools to map the behaviour across hundreds of million years of shark family history.

So, why do some sharks freeze?

Three main hypotheses

There are three main hypotheses to explain tonic immobility in sharks:

1. Anti-predator strategy – “playing dead” to avoid being eaten
2. Reproductive role – some male sharks invert females during mating, so perhaps tonic immobility helps reduce struggle
3. Sensory overload response – a kind of shutdown during extreme stimulation.

Our results don’t support any of these explanations.

There’s no strong evidence sharks benefit from freezing when attacked. In fact, modern predators such as orcas can use this response against sharks by flipping them over to immobilise them and then remove their nutrient-rich livers – a deadly exploit.

The reproductive hypothesis also falls short. Tonic immobility doesn’t differ between sexes, and remaining immobile could make females vulnerable to harmful or forced mating events.

And the sensory overload idea? Untested and unverified. So, we offer a simpler explanation. Tonic immobility in sharks is likely an evolutionary relic.

A case of evolutionary baggage

Our evolutionary analysis suggests tonic immobility is “plesiomorphic” – an ancestral trait that was likely present in ancient sharks, rays and chimaeras. But as species evolved, many lost the behaviour.

In fact, we found that tonic immobility was lost independently at least five times across different groups. Which raises the question: why?

In some environments, freezing might actually be a bad idea. Small reef sharks and bottom-dwelling rays often squeeze through tight crevices in complex coral habitats when feeding or resting. Going limp in such settings could get them stuck – or worse. That means losing this behaviour might have actually been advantageous in these lineages.

So, what does this all mean?

Rather than a clever survival tactic, tonic immobility might just be “evolutionary baggage” – a behaviour that once served a purpose, but now persists in some species simply because it doesn’t do enough harm to be selected against.

It’s a good reminder that not every trait in nature is adaptive. Some are just historical quirks.

Our work helps challenge long-held assumptions about shark behaviour, and sheds light on the hidden evolutionary stories still unfolding in the ocean’s depths. Next time you hear about a shark “playing dead”, remember – it might just be muscle memory from a very, very long time ago.

Jodie L. Rummer, Professor of Marine Biology, James Cook University and Joel Gayford, PhD Candidate, Department of Marine Biology, James Cook University

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

Julie Inman Grant, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, today addressed the National Press Club to outline how her office will be driving the Social Media Minimum Age Bill when it comes into effect in December this year.

The bill, often referred to as a social media ban, prevents under-16s having social media accounts. But Inman Grant wants Australians to consider the bill a “social media delay” rather than a ban.

When the ban was legislated in November 2024, the federal government carved out an exemption for YouTube, citing the platform’s educational purpose.

Inman Grant has now advised the government to remove this exemption because of the harm young people can experience on YouTube. But as she has also pointed out, there are new risks for young people that the ban won’t address – especially from generative artificial intelligence (AI).

Banning YouTube

According to eSafety’s new research, 37% of young people have encountered harmful content on YouTube. This was the highest percentage of any platform.

In her speech, Inman Grant argued YouTube had “mastered persuasive design”, being adept at using algorithms and recommendations to keep young people scrolling, and that exempting YouTube from the ban simply makes no sense in her eyes.

Her advice to Communications Minister Anika Wells, which she delivered last week, is to not exempt YouTube, effectively including that platform in the ban’s remit.

Unsurprisingly, YouTube Australia and New Zealand has responded with vigour. In a statement published today, the Google-owned company argues that

eSafety’s advice goes against the government’s own commitment, its own research on community sentiment, independent research, and the view of key stakeholders in this debate.

YouTube denies it is a social media platform and claims the advice it should be included in the ban is “inconsistent and contradictory”.

But given YouTube’s Shorts looks and feels very similar to TikTok, with shorter vertical videos in an endlessly scrolling feed, exempting YouTube while banning TikTok and Instagram’s Reels never appeared logically consistent.

It also remains the case that any public YouTube video can be viewed without a YouTube account. The argument that including YouTube in the ban would stop educational uses, then, doesn’t carry a lot of weight.

How will the ban work?

Inman Grant took great care to emphasise that the responsibility for making the ban work lies with the technology giants and platforms.

Young people who get around the ban, or parents and carers who help them, will not be penalised.

A raft of different tools and technologies to infer the age of users have been explored by the platforms and by other age verification and assurance vendors.

Australia’s Age Assurance Technology Trial released preliminary findings last week. But these findings really amounted to no more than a press release.

No technical details were shared, only high-level statements that the trial revealed age-assurance technologies could work.

These early findings did reveal that the trial “did not find a single ubiquitous solution that would suit all use cases”. This suggests there isn’t a single age-assurance tool that’s completely reliable.

If these tools are going to be one of the main gatekeepers that do or don’t allow Australians to access online platforms, complete reliability would be desirable.

Concerns about AI

Quite rightly, Inman Grant opened her speech by flagging the emerging harms that will not actually be addressed by new legislation. Generative AI was at the top of the list.

Unregulated use of AI companions and bots was of particular concern, with young people forming deep attachments to these tools, sometimes in harmful ways.

Generative AI has also made the creation of deepfake images and videos much easier, making it far too easy for young people to be harmed, and to cause real harm to each other.

As a recent report I coauthored from the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child highlights, there are many pressing issues in terms of how children and young people use and experience generative AI in their everyday lives.

For example, despite the tendency of these tools to glitch and fabricate information, they are increasingly being used in place of search engines for basic information gathering, life advice and even mental health support.

There are larger challenges around protecting young people’s privacy when using these tools, even when compared to the already privacy-averse social media platforms.

There are many new opportunities with AI, but also many new risks.

With generative AI being relatively new, and changing rapidly, more research is urgently needed to find the safest and most appropriate ways for AI to be part of young people’s lives.

What happens in December?

Social media users under 16, and their parents and carers, need to prepare for changes in young people’s online experiences this December when the ban is due to begin.

The exact platforms included in the ban, and the exact mechanisms to gauge the age of Australia users, are still being discussed.

The eSafety Commissioner has made her case today to include more platforms, not fewer. Yet Wells has already acknowledged that

social media age-restrictions will not be the end-all be-all solution for harms experienced by young people online but they will make a significant impact.

Concerns remain about the ban cutting young people off from community and support, including mental health support. There is clearly work to be done on that front.

Nor does the ban explicitly address concerns about cyberbullying, which Inman Grant said has recently “intensified”, with messaging applications at this stage still not likely to be included in the list of banned services.

It’s also clear some young people will find ways to circumvent the ban. For parents and carers, keeping the door open so young people can discuss their online experiences will be vital to supporting young Australians and keeping them safe.

Tama Leaver, Professor of Internet Studies, Curtin University

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

Have you had a tonsillectomy (your tonsils taken out), appendectomy (your appendix removed) or lumpectomy (removal of a lump from your breast)? The suffix “ectomy” denotes surgical removal of the named body part, so these terms give us a clear idea of what the procedure entails.

So why is the removal of the uterus called a hysterectomy and not a uterectomy?

The name hysterectomy is rooted in a mental health condition – “hysteria” – that was once believed to affect women. But we now know this condition doesn’t exist.

Continuing to call this significant operation a hysterectomy both perpetuates misogyny and hampers people’s understanding of what it is.

From the defunct condition ‘hysteria’

Hysteria was a psychiatric condition first formally defined in the 5th century BCE. It had many symptoms, including excessive emotion, irritability, anxiety, breathlessness and fainting.

But hysteria was only diagnosed in women. Male physicians at the time claimed these symptoms were caused by a “wandering womb”. They believed the womb (uterus) moved around the body looking for sperm and disrupted other organs.

Because the uterus was blamed for hysteria, the treatment was to remove it. This procedure was called a hysterectomy. Sadly, many women had their healthy uterus unnecessarily removed and most died.

The word “hysteria” did originally came from the ancient Greek word for uterus, “hystera”. But the modern Greek word for uterus is “mitra”, which is where words such as “endometrium” come from.

Hysteria was only removed as an official medical diagnosis in 1980. It was finally recognised it does not exist and is sexist.

“Hysterectomy” should also be removed from medical terminology because it continues to link the uterus to hysteria.

Common but confusing

About one in three Australian women will have their uterus removed. A hysterectomy is one of the most common surgeries worldwide. It’s used to treat conditions including:

• abnormal uterine bleeding (heavy bleeding)
• uterine fibroids (benign tumours)
• uterine prolapse (when the uterus protrudes down into the vagina)
• adenomyosis (when the inner layer of the uterus grows into the muscle layer)
• cancer.

However, in a survey colleagues and I did of almost 500 Australian adults, which is yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, one in five people thought hysterectomy meant removal of the ovaries, not the uterus.

It’s true some hysterectomies for cancer do also remove the ovaries. A hysterectomy or partial hysterectomy is the removal of only the uterus, a total hysterectomy removes the uterus and cervix, while a radical hysterectomy usually removes the uterus, cervix, uterine tubes and ovaries.

There are important differences between these hysterectomies, so they should be named to clearly indicate the nature of the surgery.

Research has shown ambiguous terminology such as “hysterectomy” is associated with low patient understanding of the procedure and the female anatomy involved.

Uterectomy should be used for removal of the uterus, in combination with the medical terms for removal of the cervix, uterine tubes and ovaries as needed. For example, a uterectomy plus cervicectomy would refer to the removal of the uterus and the cervix.

This could help patients understand what is (and isn’t) being removed from their bodies and increase clarity for the wider public.

Other female body parts and procedures have male names

There are many eponyms (something named after a person) in anatomy and medicine, such as the Achilles tendon and Parkinson’s disease. They are almost exclusively the names of white men.

Eponyms for female anatomy and procedures include the Fallopian tubes, Pouch of Douglas, and Pap smear.

The anatomical term for Fallopian tubes is uterine tubes. “Uterine” indicates these are attached to the uterus, which reinforces their important role in fertility.

The Pouch of Douglas is the space between the rectum and uterus. Using the anatomical name (rectouterine pouch) is important, because this a common site for endometriosis and can explain any associated bowel symptoms.

Pap smear gives no indication of its location or function. The new cervical screening test is named exactly that, which clarifies it samples cells of the cervix. This helps people understand this tests for risk of cervical cancer.

Language matters in medicine and health care

Language in medicine impacts patient care and health. It needs to be accurate and clear, not include words associated with bias or discrimination, and not disempower a person.

For these reasons, the International Federation of Associations of Anatomists recommends removing eponyms from scientific and medical communication.

Meanwhile, experts have rightly argued it’s time to rename the hysterectomy to uterectomy.

A hysterectomy is an emotional procedure with not only physical but also psychological effects. Not directly referring to the uterus perpetuates the historical disregard of female reproductive anatomy and functions. Removing the link to hysteria and renaming hysterectomy to uterectomy would be a simple but symbolic change.

Educators, medical doctors and science communicators will play an important role in using the term uterectomy instead of hysterectomy. Ultimately, the World Health Organization should make official changes in the International Classification of Health Interventions.

In line with increasing awareness and discussions around female reproductive health and medical misogyny, now is the time to improve terminology. We must ensure the names of body parts and medical procedures reflect the relevant anatomy.

Theresa Larkin, Associate Professor of Medical Sciences, University of Wollongong

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

Cars may be a modern phenomenon, but motion sickness is not. More than 2,000 years ago, the physician Hippocrates wrote “sailing on the sea proves that motion disorders the body”. In fact, the word nausea derives from the Greek naus, meaning ship.

Whether you’re in a ship, car, plane, or riding a rollercoaster, motion sickness (also called travel sickness or seasickness) can make you retch, vomit, sweat and become pale, and feel nauseated, dizzy and tired.

For some people, watching dizzying scenes in a television show or simply thinking about moving can make us feel woozy. Playing video games or using virtual reality headsets can also lead to motion sickness (in this case, called “cybersickness”).

But why does it happen? And why doesn’t it affect everyone?

What is motion sickness?

Motion sickness can happen in response to real or perceived motion.

We don’t understand the exact mechanisms underlying motion sickness, although there are various hypotheses.

The most accepted theory is that our brains like to know what’s going on around us. If our body is moving, but our brain can’t work out why, this creates some internal confusion.

Within our brains, the “vestibular system”, which includes sensory organs in your inner ear, helps maintain balance. It has trouble doing this when you’re constantly being moved around (for example, inside a car) and sends the signals throughout our body which make us feel woozy.

Supporting this theory, people who have damage to some parts of their inner ear systems can become completely immune to motion sickness.

Why does motion sickness affect some people and not others?

Very rough movement will make almost anyone motion sick. But some people are much more susceptible.

Women tend to experience motion sickness more than men. There is evidence that hormonal fluctuations – for example during pregnancy or some stages of the menstrual cycle – may increase susceptibility.

Some other conditions, such as vertigo and migraines, also make people more likely to experience motion sickness.

In children, motion sickness tends to peak between ages six and nine, tapering off in the teens. It is much rarer in the elderly.

In a car, the driver is normally in charge of the motion, and so their brain can anticipate movements (such as turning), leading to less motion sickness than for passengers.

Are some modes of transport worse?

Motion sickness is typically triggered by slow, up-and-down and left-to-right movements (low-frequency lateral and vertical motion). The more pronounced the motion, the more likely we are to get sick.

This is why you might feel fine during some stages of an air flight, but become nauseous during times when there is turbulence. It’s the same at sea, where the larger and more undulating the waves, the more chance there is passengers will feel sick.

Recent reports have suggested electric vehicles make motion sickness worse.

This may be because electric vehicles tend to launch from a standstill with a fast acceleration. Sudden movements like this can make some occupants more nauseous.

The silence of an electric vehicle is also unusual. Most of us are used to hearing the engine running and feeling the vehicle’s rumble as it moves. The silence in an electric vehicle removes these prompts, and likely further confuses our brain, making motion sickness worse.

Interestingly, when an electric vehicle is put into autonomous (self-driving) mode, the driver becomes just as susceptible to motion sickness as the passengers.

What helps motion sickness?

For some people it never goes away, and they remain susceptible to motion sickness for life.

But there are ways to manage symptoms, for example, avoiding travelling in bad weather, looking out the window and focusing on stable points (such as the aeroplane wing during a flight) or a distant stationary object (such as the horizon). This reduces conflicting signals in your brain.

It may also help to:

• avoid reading, or using a mobile phone

• sit in the front seat

• drive (instead of being a passenger)

• practise mindful breathing

• listen to pleasant music.

Medicines can help. Your doctor or pharmacist can recommend a variety of over-the-counter medications, such as antihistamines, which may help alleviate symptoms.

Some people find alternative treatments helpful, including ginger, anti-nausea wrist bands (sea-bands or pressure bands). However we still don’t have enough consistent scientific evidence to endorse these remedies.

There are longer-term options such as prescription medications and skin patches. However, many have potential side effects, so you should discuss these with a health professional.

Not all of these medications will be suitable for children. However, there are some options which may help alleviate serious cases, and these can be talked through with your family GP.

Does it ever go away?

Sometimes, repeated exposure to the activity (called habituation) can help reduce motion sickness. The ancient Romans and Greeks reported the more experienced a sailor became, the less prone they were to sea sickness.

While inconvenient, motion sickness may also have some evolutionary advantages. It’s thought species prone to motion sickness (including humans, fish, dogs, cats, mice and horses) avoid dangerous patches of rough water or high windy branches.

We’re safest when firmly on land and not moving at all. Perhaps motion sickness is simply one way that our body works to keep us out of harm’s way.

Christian Moro, Associate Professor of Science & Medicine, Bond University and Felicity Smith, PhD Candidate in Physiology, Bond University

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

Winter is here. As the days grow shorter and the skies turn darker, you might start to feel a bit “off”. You may notice a dip in your mood or energy levels. Maybe you’re less motivated to do things you previously enjoyed in the warmer months.

The “winter blues” can feel like an inevitable part of life. You might feel sluggish or less social, but you can still get on with your day.

However, if your winter blues are making everyday life difficult and interfering with your work and relationships, it could be the sign of something more serious.

Seasonal affective disorder is more than a seasonal slump – it’s a recognised psychiatric condition. Here’s what to look for and how to get help.

What is seasonal affective disorder?

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders officially recognises seasonal affective disorder as a recurrent major depressive disorder “with seasonal pattern”.

In other words, the condition shares many symptoms with major depressive disorder, but it also follows a seasonal rhythm. While this might be most common in winter, the disorder can also occur in summer.

Symptoms include:

• persistent low mood or feelings of sadness

• loss of interest in activities you once enjoyed

• low energy and fatigue, even after lots of sleep

• changes in appetite

• weight gain or weight loss

• difficulty concentrating

• sleeping more or less than usual

• feelings of hopelessness or worthlessness

• in some cases, thoughts of self-harm or suicide.

Research suggests seasonal affective disorder affects up to 10% of the global population.

Although it can affect anyone, it is more common in women, people aged between 18 and 30 years, and those living far from the equator, where winter daylight hours are especially limited.

A review of the Australian research on seasonal affective disorder showed the highest proportion of Australians with seasonal affective disorder was found in the most southern state, Tasmania (9% of the population).

What causes it?

Unfortunately, the exact cause of seasonal affective disorder is still poorly understood.

Some theories propose it is primarily caused by a lack of light in the environment, although we are not exactly sure how this leads to depression.

As sunlight is responsible for the production of vitamin D, some have suggested a lack of vitamin D is what causes depression. However, the evidence for such a link is inconclusive.

Others suggest a lack of light in winter delays the circadian rhythms which regulate our sleep/wake cycle. Poor sleep is related to many mental health difficulties, including depression.

Seasonal affective disorder can be treated

Fortunately, there are several evidence-based treatments for seasonal affective disorder. Relief may be found through a combination of approaches.

Bright light therapy is usually the first treatment recommended for seasonal affective disorder. It involves sitting near a specially designed lightbox (with a strength of 10,000 lux) for about 20 to 30 minutes a day to mimic natural sunlight and help regulate the body’s internal clock.

Cognitive behavioural therapy aims to help people develop some flexibility around the negative thoughts that might maintain seasonal affective disorder symptoms (for example, “I am worthless because I never get up to anything meaningful in winter”).

Lifestyle changes such as regular exercise, time spent outdoors (even on gloomy days), a balanced diet, and good sleep hygiene can all support recovery.

Antidepressants – especially selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) – may be prescribed when symptoms are moderate to severe, or when other treatments have not worked.

What else helps?

Even those without seasonal affective disorder might need to fight the winter blues. So, what works?

Prioritise social connection

Schedule regular, achievable and pleasant activities with friends, such as trivia at the pub or a brisk walk.

Reframe winter

Rather than dreading the cold, see if you can embrace what is special about this time of year. The mindset of “hygge” (a Danish and Norwegian term for cosiness and contentment) may help.

Let winter be your excuse for snuggling on your couch with a thick blanket and hot chocolate while catching up on books and TV shows. Or see if there are any winter-specific activities (such as night markets) where you live.

Maximise daylight

Taking a walk during lunchtime when the sun is out, even briefly, can make a difference.

The bottom line

If your “winter blues” last more than two weeks, start interfering with your daily life or feel overwhelming, then it might be time to seek professional help.

Speaking to your GP or mental health professional can help you get support early and prevent symptoms getting worse.

Kelvin (Shiu Fung) Wong, Senior Lecturer in Clinical Psychology, Swinburne University of Technology

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

So you’ve never been to a gym and are keen to start, but something’s holding you back. Perhaps you don’t know what to actually do in there or feel like you’ll just look stupid in front of everyone. Maybe you’re worried about injuring yourself.

It’s OK. Everyone starts somewhere. I did, too.

Resistance exercise (such as weight lifting) is really good for your health. Benefits include a reduced risk of osteoporosis-related fractures, reduced risk factors for chronic diseases such as diabetes, better sleep, improved mental health and, of course, stronger and bigger muscles.

So, how do people get started in the gym? Here’s what you need to know, and what the research says.

Worried about injury?

Don’t be. It’s probably less risky than lots of other forms of exercise you might already do or did in the past.

Team sports such as rugby and soccer, and strength-based sports such as powerlifting, weightlifting, and cross fit all have similar injury rates. They’re all in the vicinity of three to four injuries per 1,000 hours of participation.

Going to the gym has almost half this rate of injuries, at about 1.8 per 1,000 hours.

Let’s put that into context.

If you go to the gym three times per week for a one-hour session – and you do that every week of the year – you achieve approximately 156 hours of resistance training exercise a year.

So if the injury rate is about 1.8 injuries per 1,000 hours, that means that you could exercise for years in the gym without even a little niggle!

Some groups, such as young men under 40, may be at a greater risk of injury in the gym. So if that’s you, you may want to be a little more conscious about how fast you progress, and the types of exercises you do in the gym.

Compare these injury risk stats to the known risks of sedentary lifestyles, and the worry should go out the door.

In short, it’s a lot more dangerous to be sedentary than it is to go to the gym.

OK, how do I get started?

It’s fine to begin with what you feel most comfortable with. You don’t have to go straight to a ridiculously complex or challenging program.

However, that doesn’t mean you don’t need to put in the effort!

Most gyms can start you off by designing a workout program for you (you might have to pay for a personal training session). If you have a medical condition, find an accredited exercise physiologist. They’re trained to help you exercise safely.

It’s OK to start with gym machines, which are designed to make it easier to keep your movements consistent.

But keep your mind open about trying the free weights section (where the dumbbells, barbells and mirrors are). Benefits from this type of training may vary from what you get via machines.

That’s because a lot of the moves you do with free weights are what’s called compound exercises, meaning they work a lot of muscles and joints together at the same time. They’re really good for you. Examples of compound exercises include:

• squats
• lunges
• deadlifts
• bench presses
• hip thrusts
• kettle bell swings.

How much should I do in the gym?

Standard government physical activity recommendations state you should do muscle strengthening twice per week.

If you are new to the gym, you can make progress with a minimalist approach. For example, you may choose to only lift once or twice per week, compared with many seasoned gym-goers who might lift four or five times per week.

Recent research shows even those people already consistently lifting in a gym can maintain or slowly improve by doing just two sessions per week, in which each exercise is only performed for one set and the whole session lasts just 30 minutes or so.

So if you can stick to one hour per week (made up of two challenging half-hour sessions) then you will still be making progress.

How do I make my habit stick?

Sticking to the habit after the novelty has worn off is where many come unstuck.

Some research suggests it takes six weeks to form a gym habit, and that the more frequent the attendance in those first six weeks, the more likely the habit will stick.

At the one-year mark, the biggest predictor of regular attendance (defined as twice per week) was enjoyment. This was followed closely by the concept of self-efficacy (believing in yourself and your ability to stick to it), and social support.

This is really important.

Find what you like about the gym. Train the way that you enjoy. Find a friend to join the gym with. That will help you create the habit.

From there, you can progress the types and intensity of gym exercises you do.

I feel like a duck out of water

Every gym-goer felt this at first. I did too.

The confusion about which bit of the machine to sit on, pull, or push, is a tad overwhelming.

The sense of security in sticking to the familiar, shying away from the free weight area.

Remember: everyone is there to improve themselves and is on their own journey.

Most people won’t even notice that you are there, and most experienced gym-goers will be delighted to help if you’re unsure.

If that’s not your experience at your local gym, perhaps look for a new and more welcoming environment. Not all gyms and gym cultures are created equal.

Mandy Hagstrom, Senior Lecturer, Exercise Physiology. School of Health Sciences, UNSW Sydney

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

If it feels like your child’s diet consists entirely of breakfast cereal, chicken nuggets and snacks that’d outlast the apocalypse, you’re not alone.

Processed foods are the go-to for many kids, and for some, they’re the only foods they’ll eat.

Here’s why – and what you can do about it.

Processed foods and their prevalence in kids’ diets

Processed foods are any foods altered from their natural state.

While some food processing is beneficial – such as pasteurising milk to kill bacteria – the ones that cause parents concern are ultra-processed foods, which use industrial methods to enhance flavour, texture and shelf life by adding sugars, salt, fats and artificial flavours, colours and preservatives.

Parents know some ultra-processed foods all too well – they’re the fast and junk foods kids love. But others hide in plain sight, disguised as “healthy” convenience foods such as flavoured yoghurts and muffins.

Ultra-processed foods offer low-to-no nutrition, which is why dietary guidelines recommend limiting them. But these “discretionary foods” make up one-third of Aussie kids’ daily energy intake.

Why do kids find processed foods so appealing?

Basic biology

Ultra-processed foods are engineered to be addictive, with their added sugar, salt and fat activating kids’ brains’ reward system, releasing feelgood chemicals.

Evolution has hardwired humans to seek natural sugar- and fat-rich foods – a physiological response our hunter-gatherer ancestors developed to avoid starvation.

Food fussiness

One in two kids will experience a fussy eating phase – another survival response inherited from our ancestors, who avoided toxins by developing an aversion to unfamiliar and bitter foods.

Fussy eaters also favour ultra-processed foods, such as chicken nuggets, chips and breakfast cereals, because they’re familiar and non-threatening, often beige like breastmilk and kids’ first solid foods. Plus their blander flavours don’t overwhelm developing tastebuds.

Pester power

From sneaky YouTube ads to eye-level supermarket displays, kids are incessantly exposed to marketing that makes them crave – and demand – ultra-processed foods.

How processed foods impact kids’ health

Ultra-processed foods can impact kids’ health in a range of ways, contributing to:

• nutritional deficiencies. Kids filling up on ultra-processed foods are less likely to eat vegetables, fruits, whole grains and lean meats, producing a diet lacking in fibre and other key nutrients needed for growth and development

• childhood obesity. Ultra-processed foods are high in calories, unhealthy sugars, salt and fat, and often lack portion control, promoting overeating

• increased risk of diseases. Long-term overconsumption of ultra-processed foods is linked with a higher risk of developing a range of chronic diseases, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer.

Unhealthy eating habits can be hard to break, but positive diet and lifestyle changes – even later in childhood – can reverse these negative health effects.

Science-based tips for healthier eating habits

1. Eat together

Family mealtimes allow you to model healthy eating. Sit together around the table, share the same meal, and put devices away so everyone’s attention is on eating.

2. Introduce foods carefully

Research shows kids need eight to ten exposures before they willingly eat new foods. So offer them regularly, encourage tasting and don’t pressure them to eat.

While it’s tempting, avoid offering dessert as a reward for trying something healthy. Using treats as a reward increases kids’ preference for unhealthy foods.

Kids are also more likely to try new foods when they’re hungry, so avoid snacks one to preferably two hours before mealtimes.

3. Introduce variety to family favourites

Children are more open to trying new foods when there’s something familiar on their plate.

So, tweak family favourites by swapping ingredients, such as using lentils instead of beef in bolognese or roasting carrots to make “orange chippies”. Grating veggies into sauces also expands kids’ diets without overwhelming them.

4. Make food fun

Children respond positively when healthy foods are presented in fun ways, so include different colours, textures and shapes on their plate to hold their interest.

Changing meal locations – and enjoying an occasional outdoor picnic – is another simple way to make mealtimes feel special and fun.

5. Teach kids about the science of food

Teaching children in an age-appropriate way about the foods we eat promotes healthier eating, so:

• encourage kids to grow herbs and veggies so they understand where healthy food comes from: toddlers can harvest produce; older kids can plant and prune

• visit the greengrocer, fishmonger and butcher regularly so kids can see and explore the healthy foods on offer

• talk to toddlers about food in energy terms: “eating wholegrain toast helps you play longer”

• share fun facts with older kids: “fish has a special type of fat called omega-3 that makes us smarter”.

6. Involve kids in cooking

Spark kids’ interest in healthy meals by involving them in food preparation. Let them choose recipes and take on age-appropriate tasks such as mixing and chopping.

When kids help make a meal, they feel proud of their effort, and research shows they’re more likely to try what they’ve created.

It takes about two months to form a habit, so expect resistance along the way. But with perseverance, we can shift kids’ love of processed foods toward healthier choices, helping them establish healthy eating habits for life.

Nick Fuller is the author of Healthy Parents, Healthy Kids – Six Steps to Total Family Wellness.

Nick Fuller, Clinical Trials Director, Department of Endocrinology, RPA Hospital, University of Sydney

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

When you think about ticks, you might picture nightmarish little parasites, stalking you on weekend hikes or afternoons in the park.

Your fear is well-founded. Tick-borne diseases are the most prevalent vector-borne diseases – those transmitted by living organisms – in the United States. Each tick feeds on multiple animals throughout its life, absorbing viruses and bacteria along the way and passing them on with its next bite. Some of those viruses and bacteria are harmful to humans, causing diseases that can be debilitating and sometimes lethal without treatment, such as Lyme, babesiosis and Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

But contained in every bite of this infuriating, insatiable pest is also a trove of social, environmental and epidemiological history.

In many cases, human actions long ago are the reason ticks carry these diseases so widely today. And that’s what makes ticks fascinating for environmental historians like me.

Changing forests fueled tick risks

During the 18th and 19th centuries, settlers cleared more than half the forested land across the northeastern U.S., cutting down forests for timber and to make way for farms, towns and mining operations. With large-scale land clearing came a sharp decline in wildlife of all kinds. Predators such as bears and wolves were driven out, as were deer.

As farming moved westward, Northeasterners began to recognize the ecological and economic value of trees, and they returned millions of acres to forest.

The woods regrew. Plant-eaters such as deer returned, but the apex predators that once kept their populations in check did not.

As a result, deer populations grew rapidly. With the deer came deer ticks (Ixodes scapularis) carrying borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease. When a tick feeds on an infected animal, it can take up the bacteria. The tick can pass the bacteria to its next victim. In humans, Lyme disease can cause fever and fatigue, and if left untreated it can affect the nervous system.

The eastern U.S. became a global hot spot for tick-borne Lyme disease starting around the 1970s. Lyme disease affected over 89,000 Americans in 2023, and possibly many more.

Californians move into tick territory

For centuries, changing patterns of human settlements and the politics of land use have shaped the role of ticks and tick-borne illnesses within their environments.

In short, humans have made it easier for ticks to thrive and spread disease in our midst.

In California, the Northern Inner Coast and Santa Cruz mountain ranges that converge on San Francisco from the north and south were never clear-cut, and predators such as mountain lions and coyotes still exist there. But competition for housing has pushed human settlement deeper into wildland areas to the north, south and east of the city, reshaping tick ecology there.

While western black-legged ticks (Ixodes pacificus) tend to swarm in large forest preserves, the Lyme-causing bacterium is actually more prevalent in small, isolated patches of greenery. In these isolated patches, rodents and other tick hosts can thrive, safe from large predators, which need more habitat to move freely. But isolation and lower diversity also means infections are spread more easily within the tick’s host populations.

People tend to build isolated houses in the hills, rather than large, connected developments. As the Silicon Valley area south of San Francisco sprawls outward, this checkerboard pattern of settlement has fragmented the natural landscape, creating a hard-to-manage public health threat.

Fewer hosts, more tightly packed, often means more infected hosts, proportionally, and thus more dangerous ticks.

Six counties across these ranges, all surrounding and including San Francisco, account for 44% of recorded tick-borne illnesses in California.

A lesson from Texas cattle ranches

Domesticated livestock have also shaped the disease threat posed by ticks.

In 1892, at a meeting of cattle ranchers at the Stock Raiser’s Convention in Austin, Texas, Dr. B.A. Rogers introduced a novel theory that ticks were behind recent devastating plagues of Texas cattle fever. The disease had arrived with cattle imported from the West Indies and Mexico in the 1600s, and it was taking huge tolls on cattle herds. But how the disease spread to new victims had been a mystery.

Editors of Daniel’s Texas Medical Journal found the idea of ticks spreading disease laughable and lampooned the hypothesis, publishing a satire of what they described as an “early copy” of a forthcoming report on the subject.

The tick’s “fluid secretion, it is believed, is the poison which causes the fever … [and the tick] having been known to chew tobacco, as all other Texans do, the secretion is most probably tobacco juice,” they wrote.

Fortunately for the ranchers, not to mention the cows, the U.S. Department of Agriculture sided with Rogers. Its cattle fever tick program, started in 1906, curbed cattle fever outbreaks by limiting where and when cattle should cross tick-dense areas.

By 1938, the government had established a quarantine zone that extended 580 miles by 10 miles along the U.S.-Mexico border in South Texas Brush Country, a region favored by the cattle tick.

This innovative use of natural space as a public health tool helped to functionally eradicate cattle fever from 14 Southern states by 1943.

Ticks are products of their environment

When it comes to tick-borne diseases the world over, location matters.

Take the hunter tick (Hyalomma spp.) of the Mediterranean and Asia. As a juvenile, or nymph, these ticks feed on small forest animals such as mice, hares and voles, but as an adult they prefer domesticated livestock.

For centuries, this tick was an occasional nuisance to nomadic shepherds of the Middle East. But in the 1850s, the Ottoman Empire passed laws to force nomadic tribes to become settled farmers instead. Unclaimed lands, especially on the forested edges of the steppe, were offered to settlers, creating ideal conditions for hunter ticks.

As a result, farmers in what today is Turkey saw spikes in tick-borne diseases, including a virus that causes Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, a potentially fatal condition.

It’s probably too much to ask for sympathy for any ticks you meet this summer. They are bloodsucking parasites, after all.

Still, it’s worth remembering that the tick’s malevolence isn’t its own fault. Ticks are products of their environment, and humans have played many roles in turning them into the harmful parasites that seek us out today.

This article has been updated to clarify that ticks spread alongside the deer population.

Sean Lawrence, Assistant Professor of History, West Virginia University

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

In a few days, a new satellite that can detect changes on Earth’s surface down to the centimetre, in almost real time and no matter the time of day or weather conditions, is set to launch from India’s Satish Dhawan Space Centre near Chennai.

Weighing almost 3 tonnes and boasting a 12-metre radar antenna, the US$1.5 billion NISAR satellite will track the ground under our feet and the water that flows over and through it in unprecedented detail, providing valuable information for farmers, climate scientists and natural disaster response teams.

Only when the conditions are right

Satellites that image the Earth have been an invaluable scientific tool for decades. They have provided crucial data across many applications, such as weather forecasting and emergency response planning. They have also helped scientists track long-term changes in Earth’s ecosystems and climate.

Many of these Earth observation satellites require reflected sunlight to capture images of Earth’s surface. This means they can only capture images during daytime and when there is no cloud cover.

As a result, these satellites face challenges wherever cloud cover is very common, such as in tropical regions, or when nighttime imagery is required.

The NISAR satellite – a collaboration between the national space agencies of the United States (NASA) and India (ISRO) – overcomes these challenges by using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technology to take images of the Earth. This technology also gives the satellite its name. NISAR stands for NASA-ISRO SAR.

So what is SAR technology?

SAR technology was invented in 1951 for military use. Rather than using reflected sunlight to passively image the Earth’s surface, SAR satellites work by actively beaming a radar signal toward the surface and detecting the reflected signal. Think of this as like using a flash to take a photo in a dark room.

This means SAR satellites can take images of the Earth’s surface both during the day and night.

Since radar signals pass through most cloud and smoke unhindered, SAR satellites can also image the Earth’s surface even when it is covered by clouds, smoke or ash. This is especially valuable during natural disasters such as floods, bushfires or volcanic eruptions.

Radar signals can also penetrate through certain structures such as thick vegetation. They are useful for detecting the presence of water due to the way that water affects reflected radar signals.

The European Space Agency used the vegetation-penetrating properties of SAR signals in its recent Biomass mission. This can image the 3D structure of forests. It can also produce highly accurate measurements of the amount of biomass and carbon stored in Earth’s forests.

Sang-Ho Yun, Director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore’s Remote Sensing Lab, is a key proponent of using SAR for disaster management. Yun has previously used SAR data to map disaster-affected areas across hundreds of natural disasters over the last 15 years, including earthquakes, floods and typhoons.

NISAR, which is due to launch on June 18, will significantly build on this earlier work.

Monitoring Earth’s many ecosystems

The NISAR satellite has been in development for over a decade and is one of the most expensive Earth-imaging satellites ever built.

Data from the satellite will be supplied freely and openly worldwide. It will provide high-resolution images of almost all land and ice surfaces around the globe twice every 12 days.

This is similar in scope to the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 SAR satellites. However, NISAR will be the first SAR satellite to use two complementary radar frequencies rather than one, and will be capable of producing higher resolution imagery compared with the Sentinel-1 satellites. It will also have greater coverage of Antarctica than Sentinel-1 and will use radar frequencies that penetrate further into vegetation.

The NISAR satellite will be used to monitor forest biomass. Its ability to simultaneously penetrate vegetation and detect water will also allow it to accurately map flooded vegetation.

This is important for gaining a deeper understanding of Earth’s wetlands, which are important ecosystems with high levels of biodiversity and massive carbon storage capacity.

The satellite will also be able to detect changes in the height of Earth’s surface of a few centimetres or even millimetres, because changes in height create tiny shifts in the reflected radar signal.

The NISAR satellite will use this technique to track subsidence of dams and map groundwater levels (since subsurface water affects the height of the Earth’s surface). It will also use the same technique to map land movement and damage from earthquakes, landslides and volcanic activity.

Such maps can help disaster response teams to better understand the damage that has occurred in disaster areas and to plan their response.

Improving agriculture

The NISAR satellite will also be useful for agricultural applications, with a unique capability to estimate moisture levels in soil with high resolution in all weather conditions.

This is valuable for agricultural applications because such data can be used to determine when to irrigate to ensure healthy vegetation, and to potentially improve water use efficiency and crop yields.

Further key applications of the NISAR mission will include tracking the flow of Earth’s ice sheets and glaciers, monitoring coastal erosion and tracking oil spills.

We can expect to see many benefits for science and society to come from this highly ambitious satellite mission.

Steve Petrie, Earth Observation Researcher, Swinburne University of Technology

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

Ever since the first fragments of pterosaur bone surfaced nearly 250 years ago, palaeontologists have puzzled over one question: how did these close cousins of land-bound dinosaurs take to the air and evolve powered flight? The first flying vertebrates seemed to appear on the geological stage fully formed, leaving almost no trace of their first tentative steps into the air.

Taken at face value, the fossil record implies that pterosaurs suddenly originated in the later part of the Triassic period (around 215 million years ago), close to the equator on the northern super-continent Pangaea. They then spread quickly between the Triassic and the Jurassic periods, about 10 million years later, in the wake of a mass extinction that was most likely caused by massive volcanic activity.

Most of the handful of Triassic specimens come from narrow seams of dark shale in Italy and Austria, with other fragments discovered in Greenland, Argentina and the southwestern US. These skeletons appear fully adapted for flight, with a hyper-elongated fourth finger supporting membrane-wings. Yet older rocks show no trace of intermediate gliders or other transitional forms that you might expect as evidence of pterosaurs’ evolution over time.

There are two classic competing explanations for this. The literal reading says pterosaurs evolved elsewhere and did not reach those regions where most have been discovered until very late in the Triassic period, by which time they were already adept flyers. The sceptical reading notes that pterosaurs’ wafer-thin, hollow bones could easily vanish from the fossil record, dissolve, get crushed or simply be overlooked, creating this false gap.

For decades, the debate stalled as a result of too few fossils or too many missing rocks. This impasse began to change in 2020, when scientists identified the closest relatives of pterosaurs in a group of smallish upright reptiles called lagerpetids.

From comparing many anatomical traits across different species, the researchers established that pterosaurs and lagerpetids shared many similarities including their skulls, skeletons and inner ears. While this discovery did not bring any “missing link” to the table, it showed what the ancestor of pterosaurs would have looked like: a rat-to-dog-sized creature that lived on land and in trees.

This brought new evidence about when pterosaurs may have originated. Pterosaurs and lagerpetids like Scleromochlus, a small land-dwelling reptile, diverged at some point after the end-Permian mass extinction. It occurred some 250 million years ago, 35 million years before the first pterosaur appearance in the fossil record.

Pterosaurs and their closest kin did not share the same habitats, however. Our new study, featuring new fossil maps, shows that soon after lagerpetids appeared (in southern Pangaea), they spread across wide areas, including harsh deserts, that many other groups were unable to get past. Lagerpetids lived both in these deserts and in humid floodplains.

They tolerated hotter, drier settings better than any early pterosaur, implying that they had evolved to cope with extreme temperatures. Pterosaurs, by contrast, were more restricted. Their earliest fossils cluster in the river and lake beds of the Chinle and Dockum basins (southwest US) and in moist coastal belts fringing the northern arm of the Tethys Sea, a huge area that occupied today’s Alps.

Scientists have inferred from analysing a combination of fossil distributions, rock features and climate simulations that pterosaurs lived in areas that were warm but not scorching. The rainfall would have been comparable to today’s tropical forests rather than inland deserts.

This suggests that the earliest flying dinosaurs may have lived in tree canopies, using foliage both for take-off and to protect themselves from predators and heat. As a result of this confined habitat, the distances that they flew may have been quite limited.

Changing climates

We were then able to add a fresh dimension to the story using a method called ecological niche modelling. This is routinely used in modern conservation to project where endangered animals and plants might live as the climate gets hotter. By applying this approach to later Triassic temperatures, rainfall and coastlines, we asked where early pterosaurs lived, regardless of whether they’ve shown up there in the fossil record.

Many celebrated fossil sites in Europe emerge as poor pterosaur habitat until very late in the Triassic period: they were simply too hot, too dry or otherwise inhospitable before the Carnian age, around 235 million years ago. The fact that no specimens have been discovered there that are more than about 215 million years old may be because the climate conditions were still unsuitable or simply because we don’t have the right type of rocks preserved of that age.

In contrast, parts of the south-western US, Morocco, India, Brazil, Tanzania and southern China seem to have offered welcoming environments several million years earlier than the age of our oldest discoveries. This rewrites the search map. If pterosaurs could have thrived in those regions much more than 215 million years ago, but we have not found them there, the problem may again lie not with biology but with geology: the right rocks have not been explored, or they preserve fragile fossils only under exceptional conditions.

Our study flags a dozen geological formations, from rivers with fine sediment deposits to lake beds, as potential prime targets for the next breakthrough discovery. They include the Timezgadiouine beds of Morocco, the Guanling Formation of south-west China and, in South America, several layers of rock from the Carnian age, such as the Santa Maria Formation, Chañares Formation and Ischigualasto Formation.

Pterosaurs were initially confined to tropical treetops near the equator. When global climates shifted and forested corridors opened, pterosaurs’ wings catapulted them into every corner of the planet and ultimately carried them through one of Earth’s greatest extinctions. What began as a tale of missing fossils has become a textbook example of how climate, ecology and evolutionary science have come together to illuminate a fragmentary history that has intrigued paleontologists for over two centuries.

Davide Foffa, Research Fellow in Palaeobiology, University of Birmingham; Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, Royal Society Newton International Fellow in Palaeontology, UCL, and Emma Dunne, Assistant Professor in Paleobiology, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg

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

People have been celebrating the summer solstice with elaborate rituals since prehistoric times. But humans aren’t the only species to take mark June 21 as a special time. Studies are showing the summer solstice is an important cue for plants too.

Recent studies, including one of my own, have proposed that trees may use the longest day of the year as a key marker for their growth and reproductive cycles. The solstice seems to act like a calendar reminder for trees.

Many people think of plants as nice-looking greens. Essential for clean air, yes, but simple organisms. A step change in research is shaking up the way scientists think about plants: they are far more complex and more like us than you might imagine. This blossoming field of science is too delightful to do it justice in one or two stories.

This story is part of a series, Plant Curious, exploring scientific studies that challenge the way you view plantlife.

For example, at the solstice, trees growing in cold places slow down the creation of new wood cells and focus their energy on finishing already formed but still incomplete cells. This ensures trees have time to complete cell construction before winter hits. Incomplete cells are damaged by freezing winter temperatures, rendering them useless for water transport the following year.

Along similar lines, trees use the solstice to fine-tune the “winding down”, or senescence, of their leaves in preparation for autumn. Senescence allows the tree to reabsorb critical nutrients from the leaves before they fall. This process is timed to balance missing out on sunlight from “winding down” too early, against leaving it too late and losing nutrients if still-green leaves are killed by autumn frosts.

Satellite observations of forests, and controlled experiments in greenhouses, reveal that warmer temperatures immediately prior to the solstice cause the onset of leaf browning to start earlier that autumn. In contrast, warmer temperatures just after the solstice slow down the senescence process.

This means a longer transition period from green to fully brown leaves. This fine-tuning enables trees to extend the period of photosynthesis in years when temperatures stay warmer for longer, so they don’t miss out on these favourable conditions.

But not all scientists is convinced. From an evolutionary perspective, the solstice may not be the best seasonal marker for timing these transitions. For example, in forests in the far north, leaves do not appear until early June, only days before the solstice, and the growing season can extend late into October. In these forests, using the solstice to initiate the winding down process makes little sense for trees that have only just started growing for the year.

Nevertheless, there is more consensus about plants using the solstice to synchronise reproduction.

In many plants, especially trees from the temperate mid-latitudes, the number of seeds they produce varies dramatically year on year, known as masting. A large European beech tree can produce hundreds of thousands of seeds in a bumper year (a “mast event”) and forgo reproduction altogether in other years.

Beech trees vary their annual seed production in step, often on a continental scale. They do this to increase the efficiency of their reproduction.

A small moth, Cydia fagiglandana, lays its eggs in beech flowers. When the grubs hatch, they eat and destroy the developing seeds. Cycles of famine and bumper years help protect their seeds from these moths.

UK beech trees typically lose less than 5% of their seeds to Cydia because the cycles starve the moths into low numbers ready for masting years. But when trees are out of sync, seed loss can increase to over 40%.

For decades we have known that beech mast events happen in the year after a warm summer. These warmer temperatures trigger an increase in the formation of flower buds. More flower buds usually lead to a greater crop of seeds that autumn.

Scientists have long puzzled over how beech trees across Europe seem to use the same seasonal window to control mast events. Their seed production is determined by temperatures in late June and early July, irrespective of where they grow in Europe. But how can a beech tree know the date?

In my team’s 2024 study, we showed that they use the solstice as a seasonal marker. As soon as the days start to shorten after the solstice, beech trees across Europe seem to simultaneously sense the temperature.

Anywhere temperatures are above average in the weeks following the solstice can expect to have a mast event the next year. Weather conditions in the weeks before the solstice, by contrast, seem to be irrelevant. As seen on weather maps, warm and cool spells tend to occur simultaneously over large areas.

This allows beech trees to maximise the synchrony of their reproduction, whether that is investing in a mast year (warm temperatures), or forgoing reproduction for a year (low temperatures). Using a fixed marker like the solstice is the key to achieving this synchrony, and the benefits that come from it.

The evidence for this phenomenon has come from observations across dozens of forests across Europe. However, my research group is collaborating with about a dozen other groups in Europe to test this effect by manipulating the temperature of beech branches before and after the solstice at different sites. Ongoing research I am involved with seems to show flowering genes are activated at the summer solstice.

Also, studies into the circadian rhythms of plants show they have mechanisms in their molecules that allow them to detect and respond to tiny changes in day length. This is the basis for that extraordinary scale of synchronised reproduction.

If the weather is warm over the next month or so, then there is a good chance that beech trees in your local area will have heavy seed crops next autumn. What’s more, trees across the UK and into northern and central Europe will probably be doing the same.

Andrew Hacket-Pain, Senior Lecturer, School of Environmental Sciences, University of Liverpool

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

With her latest album Something Beautiful debuting at number four in the Billboard 200 and in contention to reach the top of the UK album charts, Miley Cyrus’s commercial appeal appears as strong as ever.

Something Beautiful is Cyrus’s 9th studio album, described by the singer-songwriter as an attempt to bring the divine into the day to day. It’s an ambitious, sprawling record, but, despite its commercial success, its eclecticism has led to a polarised reaction among critics.

Negative reviews are, of course, not uncommon, and we need look no further than The New York Times’ 1969 review of Abbey Road to see that even the most celebrated and acclaimed artists aren’t immune to the critic’s poison pen. But, while some degree of criticism is inevitable for all artists, when it comes to discussing experimentation and musical identity, female and male artists seem to be treated differently.

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During her Billboard Music Awards woman of the year speech in 2016, Madonna commented that “there are no rules – if you’re a boy. If you’re a girl, you have to play the game.” In the same year Björk observed that female artists are criticised if they sing about anything other than their boyfriends. She might have been exaggerating a little, but Björk’s and Madonna’s points are clear: if you’re a woman in music, you should stay in your proverbial box.

Most of the negative reviews that Something Beautiful received were along these lines. Pitchfork, for example, criticised Cyrus’s “nonsensical lyrics” (translation: stick to writing about relationships). The i Paper claimed her weird and experimental choices created a distance from her listeners (translation: don’t do anything your fans won’t like). They also condemned the lack of accessible, radio-friendly pop (translation: be one-dimensional). And the Guardian said that it fell short of the hits that made her a star (translation: as Beach Boy Mike Love allegedly said, “don’t fuck with the formula”).

For two of Cyrus’s male contemporaries, Justin Bieber and Harry Styles (both around one year her junior), it’s a very different story. While the Guardian also notes the absence of “hits” on Bieber’s 2020 album Changes, instead of presenting it as a negative as it did with Cyrus, it’s seen as a sign of maturity on a fitfully lovely album by a pop star who no longer wants chart domination.

In the case of Styles’ 2019 album Fine Line, artistic innovation was praised by the Guardian, which observed that the most endearing moments occur when he experiments. And where Pitchfork lambasted Something Beautiful’s genre-hopping eclecticism for being tonally confused, Fine Line is praised for the “incredible” sound produced due to its “flock of influences”.

Identity politics

Cyrus has been told by critics that she must choose between being an accessible pop star or an unconventional artist and “can’t have it both ways”.

Even if she did decide to plump for one camp or the other rather than ably straddling both, it’d still be debatable as to whether the ever-fickle critics would be satisfied.

Pitchfork’s 2020 review of Cyrus’s album Plastic Heart suggests it’d be a “no” in their case, at least. Complaining that the heavier songs on the album sounded like “canned, Muzak versions of rock songs”, the publication proposed that Cyrus might sound like an actual rock star if paired with someone like producer Jonathan Rado.

When Cyrus and Rado did collaborate on Something Beautiful, however, they remained unimpressed. You just can’t please some people. Thankfully, Cyrus is either oblivious to such noise or chooses to ignore it, and recently teased that Something Beautiful is merely “the appetizer” for a “an extremely experimental” upcoming album.

In an era where formulaic pop music dominates the charts and AI-generated content threatens to make things even more generic, we should be encouraging the idiosyncrasies of our female artists, not labelling them as having identity problems when they are brave enough to be different.

In her woman of the year’ speech, Madonna also noted that, as a female artist, “to age is a sin: you will be criticised, you will be vilified, and you will definitely not be played on the radio”. Perhaps, then, Cyrus’s biggest offence isn’t her refusal to become a stereotype or her desire to experiment and make music that she likes. It’s daring to grow up.

Glenn Fosbraey, Associate Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Winchester and Sarah Shawcross, Music Educator, Lecturer & Songwriter, University of Winchester

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

Our experience of the world often involves hearing our environment before seeing it. Whether it’s the sound of something moving through nearby water, or the rustling of vegetation, our fear of the unseen is rooted in our survival instincts as a species.

Cinematic sound and music taps into these somewhat unsettling instincts – and this is exactly what director Steven Spielberg and composer John Williams achieved in the iconic 1975 thriller Jaws. The sound design and musical score work in tandem to confront the audience with a mysterious killer animal.

In what is arguably the film’s most iconic scene, featuring beach swimmers’ legs flailing underwater, the shark remains largely unseen – yet the sound perfectly conveys the threat at large.

Creating tension in a soundtrack

Film composers aim to create soundscapes that will profoundly move and influence their audience. And they express these intentions through the use of musical elements such as rhythm, harmony, tempo, form, dynamics, melody and texture.

In Jaws, the initial encounter with the shark opens innocently with the sound of an offshore buoy and its clanging bell. The scene is established both musically and atmospherically to evoke a sense of isolation for the two characters enjoying a late-night swim on an empty beach.

But once we hear the the low strings, followed by the central two-note motif played on a tuba, we know something sinister is afoot.

This compositional technique of alternating between two notes at an increasing speed has long been employed by composers, including by Antonín Dvořák in his 1893 work New World Symphony.

John Williams reportedly used six basses, eight cellos, four trombones and a tuba to create the blend of low frequencies that would go on to define his entire Jaws score.

The bass instruments emphasise the lower end of the musical frequency spectrum, evoking a dark timbre that conveys depth, power and intensity. String players can use various bowing techniques, such as staccato and marcato, to deliver dark and even menacing tones, especially in the lower registers.

Meanwhile, there is a marked absence of tonality in the repeating E–F notes, played with increasing speed on the tuba. Coupled with the intensifying dynamics in the instrumental blend, this accelerating two-note motif signals the looming danger before we even see it – tapping into our instinctive fear of the unknown.

The use of the two-note motif and lower-end orchestration characterises a composition style that aims to unsettle and disorientate the audience. Another example of this style can be heard in Bernard Herrmann’s car crash scene audio in North by Northwest (1959).

Similarly, in Sergei Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite, the opening of the second movement (Dance of the Pagan Gods) uses an alternating D#–E motif.

The elasticity of Williams’ motif allows the two notes to be played on different instruments throughout the soundtrack, exploring various timbral possibilities to induce a kaleidoscope of fear, panic and dread.

The psychology behind our response

What is it that makes the Jaws soundtrack so psychologically confronting, even without the visuals? Music scholars have various theories. Some suggest the two notes imitate the sound of human respiration, while others have proposed the theme evokes the heartbeat of a shark.

Williams explained his approach in an interview with the Los Angeles Times:

I fiddled around with the idea of creating something that was very … brainless […] Meaning something could be very repetitious, very visceral, and grab you in your gut, not in your brain. […] It could be something you could play very softly, which would indicate that the shark is far away when all you see is water. Brainless music that gets louder and gets closer to you, something is gonna swallow you up.

Williams plays with the audience’s emotions throughout the film’s score, culminating in the scene Man Against Beast – a celebration of thematic development and heightened orchestration.

The film’s iconic soundtrack has created a legacy that extends beyond the visual. And this suggests the score isn’t just a soundtrack – but a character in its own right.

By using music to reveal what is hidden, Williams creates an intense emotional experience rife with anticipation and tension. The score’s two-note motif showcases his genius – and serves as a sonic shorthand that has kept a generation behind the breakers of every beach.

Alison Cole, Composer and Lecturer in Screen Composition, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney

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

There are many routes to artistic obscurity. The surest path, of course, is to have never been discovered in the first place. But this wasn’t the case with the late Eric Smith (1919-2017).

His story is not that of Vincent Van Gogh or Vivian Maier, who only achieved fame after death. Nor did he go out of his way to try and remain obscure, like Ron Gittens or James Hampton.

Rather, Smith’s is a story of a major artist who quite simply, and unexpectedly, vanished from public life.

A new exhibition at the Macquarie University Art Gallery, which I am co-curating, will display a range of Smith’s work – including paintings from the last four decades of his career that have never been shown before.

From fame to phantom

Smith was an artist constantly in search of ways to “express truths in our times”, and employed diverse ways of doing so across a career that included religious paintings, portraits and large abstract works.

Between his breakthrough year in 1956, when he won the first of six Blake Prizes with The Scourged Christ, and 1982, when he won the last of his three Archibalds with a portrait of Peter Sculthorpe, Smith was as lauded as an artist could be.

He had a significant role in launching Australian abstract expressionism in the famous group show, Direction 1. His art was installed in churches and public buildings, and collected by major institutions. He was quoted and photographed in the press.

Then, while working as prolifically as ever, he seemed to disappear. Why?

The death of Rudy Komon

Rudy Komon was a Czech emigrant and a larger than life bon vivant and gallerist who launched the careers of many of Australia’s finest painters.

Komon represented Smith, who he called “meister”, from 1963 and throughout the most publicly productive part of Smith’s career. Smith even won the 1981 Archibald with a painting of Komon.

However, Komon died the following year.

And according to David Taylor, an art collector and later a patron of Smith’s, “Eric’s art career died with him”.

“When Rudy died Eric had no one to connect him to the art world anymore. He was a modest man and no self-publicist,” Taylor explained to me.

“It was pretty much only me that was left buying his paintings.”

And there were a lot of paintings. Despite Smith’s exhibiting career grinding to a near halt, with no major-gallery shows after 1989, he spent the next four decades on an 8am to 6pm studio regime punctuated only by lunch and tea breaks.

“He’d finish just in time for the 6pm news”, Barbara Smith told me.

Barbara is Smith’s daughter and the manager of his legacy.

“Dad was always driven by what he saw as the challenges in his work and resolving them in the studio.”

Smith was also heavily self-critical. He admitted to destroying more than half of his artistic output – completely repainting or throwing away paintings that didn’t meet his vision.

At the age of 90, ever the self-critic and despite his successes, he said to his family: “You can’t change styles like I did and hope to get anywhere.”

Forms that express deeper feelings

Smith converted to Catholicism in the 1950s and was a life-long consumer of art-history and philosophy. These tendencies can be seen in his 1950s religious paintings and later abstract works.

In the 1950s he found inspiration in the works of the Fauvist painter Georges Rouault, and later in the works of Alfred Manessier. We see these influences in the bold outlines and church-window-esque colours used in paintings such as The Raising of Lazarus (1953) and The Scourged Christ (1956).

Smith’s later large abstract paintings such as Eternity I (1998), Orange Dawn (1999) and Untitled (Fools Gold) (2004) are evidence of his artistic quest to “find forms that express the deeper feelings” he wanted to convey.

Some of these later works share concerns aligned with Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman’s explorations of the “sublime” (influenced by Immanuel Kant’s ideas on the sublime), Richard Pousette-Dart’s soulful paintings of geometric forms, and Paul Partos rectangular forms representing inner emotions.

Smith was also skilled in portraiture, as evidenced by his depictions of fellow artists Leonard Hessing, Norman Lindsay, Louis James and Hector Gilliland, as well as his Archibald-winning portrait of Rudy Komon.

His luminous Portrait of Diane (1998), a family friend and patron, is a particularly powerful image which Smith described as his Mona Lisa.

It’s easy to see why writer and critic Paul McGillick argues Smith should be considered “one of Australia’s most visionary portraitists”.

Yet, without exhibitions and dealers and auctioneers to champion him over the decades, Smith’s work has largely vanished from the public.

Then again, “not having exhibitions didn’t bother him too much, it was the painting and process that really mattered to him,” said Barbara.

An exhibit 40 years in the making

Luckily for posterity, a number of Smith’s masterpieces survived his destructive self-critique.

These works, which are now mostly privately held, will be on display at Eric Smith: The metaphysics of paint. It is the first major exhibition of Smith’s work since the 1980s, and the first retrospective or survey of his work since his death in 2017.

“I’m sure Dad would have been extremely excited and honoured,” Barbara said.

Eric Smith: The metaphysics of paint is showing at the Macquarie University Art Gallery from June 19 to August 1.

Tom Murray, Professor in Screen Media and Creative Arts, Macquarie University

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

Pterosaurs were an amazing group of flying reptiles that occupied the skies around the same time that dinosaurs roamed on land. Appearing in the fossil record around 230 million years ago, pterosaurs survived until 66 million years ago, when an asteroid impact helped wipe them, and many other life forms, out.

The pterosaurs are often the animals in the background, while the dinosaurs occupy the foreground. However, they are worthy of much more recognition than they are commonly given, not just as interesting ancient animals, but because they could also inspire aircraft designs.

Pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to evolve powered flight. They were in the air 80 million years before birds and around 180 million years before bats. However, their flight apparatus was rather different to either. The wings of bats are supported by multiple digits (like our fingers). Birds use feathers as structural units in the wings.

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But pterosaurs primarily had one finger to support their wings. Their main wing was composed of a single giant “spar” – a structural unit – made of up of the bones of the arm and the greatly elongated fourth finger, with a membrane that stretched from the tip of the finger down to the ankle. This membrane acted as a flight surface.

As a group, pterosaurs were diverse – some were specialist fishers, filter feeders, terrestrial predators, insect hunters, seed crackers, and more. Some could climb well and many species were highly mobile on the ground.

They also got very large. The biggest pterosaurs had wingspans of over 10m and could weigh over 250kg. Even the smallest pterosaurs could fly: juveniles with 10cm wingspans were probably capable of flight within days or even hours of hatching.

The bones of pterosaurs, like those of birds and many dinosaurs, were filled by extensions of the lungs called air-sacs, and they were extremely thin walled. This made the skeletons of the animals very stiff for their weight (rather important when flying). It also made their skeletons very fragile after death, and so pterosaur fossils are rare.

However, in a handful of sites around the world – most notably in Germany, Brazil and China – where the preservation of fossils is exceptionally good, we have huge numbers of pterosaur fossils with both complete skeletons and a lot of soft tissue. This gives us an incredible insight into the shape and structure of their wings and how they flew.

In addition to the main wing surface, pterosaurs had two other smaller subsidiary surfaces that would have given them extra control. At the front of the main wing sitting in the crux of the elbow was a small membrane between the wrist and the base of the neck, supported by a unique long wrist bone called the pteroid.

At the back of the body, earlier pterosaurs had a single large sheet of membrane between the legs, supported in the middle by a long tail and on each side by long fifth toes on the feet. Later pterosaurs split this rear membrane and had only a small piece of membrane running from the ankle on each leg to the base of a short tail.

As well as the outer skin-like layers, the wings had at least three major layers, comprising blood vessels, a layer of muscles, and a layer of stiffening fibres. Some might well have had extensions of the airsacs in the main wing membranes too, which could presumably be inflated and deflated to a degree. The wing as a whole was therefore extremely elastic and flexible.

This would have given pterosaurs extraordinary control over their wings. All of this makes them an intriguing model for future aircraft design.

Flight challenge

Aircraft wings are not (and cannot) be perfectly stiff. Adding flexibility, or better still, actual shape changing potential, could give them substantial performance benefits. But stiffness and flexibility need to be balanced. Problems with aeroelasticity – the tendency of a soft wing to vibrate in ways that greatly reduce performance (or even cause flight to fail outright) – limit how pliable the wings can be.

Pterosaurs had multiple mechanisms to address this challenge, from passive mechanisms, such as fibres within the wing, to active mechanisms, such as the muscles that ran throughout the wing and could tighten on demand. This wing tensioning anatomy is*is?* among the most sophisticated aeroelastic control systems known to science.

The key to applying our knowledge of pterosaurs to future aircraft design comes not in closely mimicking the exact shape and form of pterosaurs, but instead, in understanding and extracting core principles from their anatomy.

The membranous wings of pterosaurs were great at changing shape. The leading edge could lie flat or depress to a sharp angle, thanks to the small anterior membrane. The main wing surface could change its curvature, or camber. There is even evidence that the wing could manage what is called reflex camber – a shape in which the trailing edge of the wing curves upwards.

Even the stiff portion of the wing (the spar) made of bone and surrounding muscles, was mobile – through motions of the shoulder, elbow, and wrist and flexibility within the bone itself near the wingtip. This soft, shape changing structure gave pterosaurs exceptional control over their moment-to-moment wing performance, optimising for lower speed or higher speed within fractions of a wingbeat. This would have made them particularly adept at slow speed flight – good for tight turns and precise, soft landings.

Greater manoeuvrability and pinpoint landings are a premium for autonomous vehicles working in busy environments – such as cities or natural disaster zones full of debris. So future survey and rescue drones could take lessons from pterosaur wing control systems.

The jointed, flexible wing anatomy of pterosaurs also meant that the wings could fold tightly, and unlike the wings of birds, the folded wings of pterosaurs doubled as powerful walking limbs. Because the hands contacted the ground while walking, the forelimbs were available to help push the animals into the air during take-off leaps. Mathematical models predict half-second launch times, from a standing start, in even the largest pterosaurs.

The exceptional mechanical loads associated with these launches were handled by one of the highest stiffness-to-weight skeletons to ever evolve. This folded-wing, rapid-launch system has great potential for applications to future technologies.

So much so, in fact, that a prototype folding wing system modelled on pterosaurs has already undergone some testing (through a Nasa-funded university project on which one of the authors, Michael Habib, consulted). A folding, flapping wing that doubles as a launch system could allow future drones to take off with limited space – perhaps while on ships at sea. It could also be used to allow small flying drones to land and launch again out of craters on Mars.

The red planet has just enough atmosphere to make flapping wing and rotor wing systems work. But it’s energetically costly and hovering is tough – better to land, measure and launch again. Similarly, rapid take offs from uneven terrain, precise landings, tight turns, and on demand tweaks to improve performance are all features that could be applied to the drones of the future, in wingsuits, and more.

As the control systems for drones become increasingly driven by intelligent software, we will need a new generation of hardware to match. Pterosaurs may hold the keys to unlocking a future of highly manoeuvrable autonomous aerial vehicles that are competent in harsh conditions and urban environments. These would be ideal for search and rescue or surveys in locations that are too dangerous for humans.

So despite having been extinct for 66 million years, the pterosaurs have huge potential as the inspiration for aircraft design. Sometimes looking back can be the best way to look forward.

David Hone, Senior Lecturer in Zoology, Queen Mary University of London; Liz Martin-Silverstone, Technical Specialist in Earth Sciences , University of Bristol, and Michael Habib, Adjunct Professor, Biology, College of the Canyons

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

To the discerning eye, other mountains are visible – giants between 23,000 and 26,000 feet high. Not one of their slenderer heads even reaches their chief’s shoulder. Beside Everest they escape notice, such is the pre-eminence of the greatest. (George Mallory, 1922)

The climbing season on Mount Everest peaks in late May and early June every year. Extreme weather patterns at this location and altitude mean the main climbing season is remarkably short, perhaps only a few weeks between the winter freeze and monsoon storms.

Even within that time, the precise location of the jetstream that accelerates wind speeds at the summit creates pinchpoints of ideal climbing conditions, leading to images of long queues of mountaineers at particularly challenging points such as the Hillary Step – named after one of the two men who first climbed Everest on May 29 1953.

In the 30 years after Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay first stood at the summit, only 150 men and women matched their feat. But since then, the number of climbers has sky-rocketed. In 2019, a record 877 people summited the mountain, and in 2024 ascents were only just shy of this.

Rebecca Stephens, the first British woman to climb Everest in 1993, has described how the “global obsession with the world’s highest mountain is shaping its future and the future of the people who work on it”.

Stephens said her ascent in 1993, when there was only one commercial expedition on the mountain, felt like a watershed moment. Since then, commercial expeditions have mushroomed on Everest’s southern base camp on the Khumbu glacier (altitude: 5,364 metres), which now boasts a wide range of facilities including coffee shops and party tents.

The explosion of interest in climbing Everest has been aided by the fact that, despite its altitude and dangers, it is far from the most difficult high-altitude mountain. A member of the Tibet Mountaineering Association who had summited five times told me, on a good day, Everest was “very straightforward” – and that climbing Denali in Alaska (North America’s tallest peak) had been much more difficult.

By the end of 2024, there had been 12,884 ascents and 335 deaths on Everest, a survival rate of 97.4%. But the so-called “death zone” above 8,000 metres, combined with avalanches, extreme weather and frostbite, will always present significant hazards to the people who visit these slopes.

This climbing season, a Scottish former marine described quitting his attempt 800 metres below the summit after encountering two dead climbers. Meanwhile, four other ex-British special forces soldiers including UK government minister Alastair Carns used xenon gas and hypoxia training to travel to Everest and summit in under a week – leading to concerns that this could further increase the number of people attempting to scale the increasingly crowded mountain.

But while images of high-altitude queues and stories of occasional fatalities hog the headlines, most visitors to Everest do not attempt to climb it. And by far the majority of these tourists are on the “other side of Everest”, in China-administered Tibet.

China’s “economic miracle”, combined with its desire to develop peripheral regions, has meant that Qomolangma (the Tibetan name for Everest) is now easily accessible, with tarmacked roads all the way to the northern base camp at Rongbuk (altitude: 5,150 metres).

From having lower numbers of visitors than the Nepalese side 20 years ago, the Tibetan side of Everest now welcomes more than half a million tourists a year – the vast majority from mainland China. Short Chinese holidays mean most of these visits are whistlestop trips that also take in the nearby high-altitude cities of Lhasa and Shigatse. Because of the lack of altitude acclimatisation time, many tourists carry oxygen bottles or wear oxygen backpacks during their visits.

Retracing the earliest routes

To better understand the impact of tourism on Everest, I visited the Tibetan side in June 2024 as a guest of Linsheng Zhong, professor of human and tourism geography at China’s Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research.

The date of our visit was significant, being a century since the disappearance of early Everest adventurers George Mallory and Sandy Irvine on June 8 1924. We set out to examine both the human and environmental changes that have occurred over the intervening hundred years – using century-old journals and photographs as a baseline.

As geographers rather than high-altitude mountaineers, our aim was to retrace some of the reconnaissance routes used by the British in the 1920s – a time when Nepal was closed to foreign visitors. Between 1921 and 1924, three expeditions organised by the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club visited Tibet with the aim of being the first recorded people to climb Mount Everest. None, as far as we know, reached the top – and the remains of the two leaders of the final expedition, Mallory and Irvine, were only discovered on Everest many years later.

While the vistas are equally spectacular today, climate change has had a significant impact on glaciers throughout the region. Recent scientific estimates suggest that there has been between a 26% and 28% reduction in the glaciers surrounding Everest between the 1970s and 2010.

In 1921, the leader of the first expedition, Charles Howard-Bury, camped just below the Langma pass – the highest but most direct easterly route to Everest – and photographed “a peak of black rock with a glacier just below it”. It is apparent from this “slider” comparison, using a photograph I took from the same spot, how much this hanging glacier has retreated over the past century.

The human impact on Everest

Everest’s permanent northern base camp at Rongbuk in Tibet now welcomes up to 3,000 visitors a day in high season. Tourists are initially disgorged into a regimented tented village – modern versions of Tibetan yak herder accommodation.

Some of these jet-black tents, made from thick yak hair which breathes when dry and is waterproof when wet, provide simple (but heated and oxygenated) accommodation for the hardier tourists who want to be at the mountain early for the best photo opportunities.

Wandering up the astroturf lining the central boulevard, we meet a range of souvenir sellers before reaching the “world’s highest post office” and a circular plaza commemorating the various scientific and political achievements of the region. The near-landscape is largely brown: when he was here, Mallory described the contrast between the rain-shadowed “monotonously dreary, stony wastes” of Rongbuk with the beauty of the snowy mountains looming above.

Today, a boardwalk takes tourists marginally further to Rongbuk monastery – founded in 1902 and rebuilt after being damaged during the Chinese Cultural Revolution – and a final viewpoint of the north face of Everest. A yellow sandstone band is clearly visible just below the summit – evidence that this mighty mountain was once at the bottom of the ocean.

The mood on our trip was a sharp contrast to my visit in November 2007, when our Tibetan guide had been keen to evade any security checkpoints (albeit to maximise his personal profit, rather than any ethical standpoint). With only a few thousand annual, mostly international, visitors, the facilities back then were very limited, beyond a warning to tourists to proceed no further or face significant fines – and a shiny new sign proclaiming mobile phone coverage.

However, we were able to walk to the snout of the Rongbuk glacier, a jumble of shattered sandstone rocks at the terminal moraine. Today, tourists cannot go far beyond the monastery and are corralled on new boardwalks.

Tourism has brought rapid economic change to this region of the Tibetan plateau – including diversifying from traditional livelihoods. Central government efforts to reduce overgrazing in the fragile ecosystem have led to a system of payments to traditional herders – and a drop in livestock numbers from a peak of nearly 1 million in 2008 to below 700,000 today.

In contrast, the permanent human population of the Qomolangma National Nature Preserve (the protected area that includes the Tibetan side of Everest) has more than doubled since the 1950s to more than 120,000 people, with especially accelerated growth over the last decade coinciding with the rise in tourism. The Pang La pass which crosses into the Rongbuk valley, described as “desolate” by English mountaineer Alan Hinkes in the 1980s, is now festooned with souvenir shops and mobile coffee baristas.

Concern about the environmental impacts of these tourists led to the introduction of a fleet of electric buses in 2019, with visitors instructed to park their vehicles in the small town of Tashi Dzom before taking a 30-minute electric bus ride to the northern Everest base camp.

Now there are plans to move the bus transfer station to a gleaming new park centre closer to the main highway, to save tourists having to drive the numerous switchbacks over the Pang La pass to Tashi Dzom, then negotiate traffic jams and parking challenges nearer the peak.

This is partly to cope with another western import to China: the concept of the “road trip”. For Chinese car enthusiasts, the 5,000-kilometre Route 318 from Shanghai to the foot of Everest is now one of their most popular long-distance drives.

‘The most beautiful valley in the world’

We visited the east and north faces of Everest in Tibet armed with photographs and accounts from those three early British expeditions more than a century ago – the first recorded attempts to climb the world’s highest mountain.

The first (1921) expedition led by Howard-Bury, an army lieutenant-colonel, botanist and future Conservative MP, was a detailed scientific and topographical survey of the area. In their attempts to find a route to the summit, approaches via the northern (Rongbuk) and eastern (Kama) valleys were reconnoitred.

Although less visited than the Khumbu base camp in Nepal or the Rongbuk base camp in Tibet, the eastern approach to Everest via the Kama valley is a wonderful trek with unobstructed views of the immense eastern face of Everest. Howard-Bury described the allure of the valley which remains today:

We had not been able to gather much information locally about Mount Everest. A few of the shepherds said that they had heard that there was a great mountain in the next valley to the south … They called this the Kama valley, and little did we realise at the time that in it, we were going to find one of the most beautiful valleys in the world.

The valley is accessed from the settlement of Kharta, a small-but-booming town on the banks of the Bong Chu-Arun river. Just below Kharta, the river enters a steep gorge, dropping from nearly 4,000m to 2,000m as it enters Nepal. Today, the Kama valley route is becoming popular with Chinese trekkers, although there are very limited facilities to deal with their impact on the area – notably, the human and plastic waste.

The 1921 expedition selected Kharta as the location of its second base camp after several months of exploration at Rongbuk. All were relieved to find such an amenable climate and greenery after the dry and cold of the Tibetan plateau. With the help of the dzongpen (village head) and a local fixer, they rented a farmhouse where many of the photos from the expedition were later developed. Located in a grove of poplar and willow with small streams trickling along its boundary, we also visited this farmhouse – now owned by a Tibetan farmer who cheerily showed us around and introduced the three generations of his family.

The British expeditions’ investigations of the Kama valley are of particular interest as this valley sits on the climatic boundary between drier and wetter areas to the north and south of the Himalayan range. Howard-Bury described thick mists coming up the Kama valley each evening, providing significant moisture to the region:

As usual, in the evening, the clouds came up and enveloped us in a thick mist … When we started the following morning, there was still a thick Scotch mist which made the vegetation very wet … On the opposite side of the valley were immense black cliffs descending sheer for many thousand feet.

Still evident today, this precipitation, combined with great variations in altitude and temperature, supports a profusion of plants – as well as animal life that our predecessors described as “extraordinarily tame”. Now as then, in summer, the hillsides are covered with the yellow, white and pink flowers of rhododendrons and azealas, and huge juniper trees grow in the lower valley. Howard-Bury described spending “the whole afternoon lying among the rhododendrons at 15,000 feet – admiring the beautiful glimpses of these mighty peaks revealed by occasional breaks among the fleecy clouds”.

Adorned with prayer flags, the high passes are still used by local people as portals to the sacred Kama valley. In 1921, when he crossed the Langma pass to enter this “sanctuary”, Mallory wrote that the grumblings of his previously stubborn porters had suddenly transformed into “great friendliness” and “splendid marching” – such that they were “undepressed with the gloomy circumstance of again encamping in the rain”. Descending into the Kama valley, Howard-Bury effused:

To the west, our gaze encountered a most wonderful amphitheatre of peaks and glaciers. Three great glaciers almost met in the deep green valley that lay at our feet. One of these glaciers evidently came down from Mount Everest.

While the topography here remains largely unchanged, the very significant reduction in the volume of the central glacier is evident in these comparison images:

In 1921, the expedition wrote that the outflow from the Kangshung glacier (which descends from Everest) had to “hurl itself into a great ice cavern” in order to flow under the Kandoshang glacier (from Makalu, the world’s fifth-highest peak) and become the Kama river. Today, as a result of glacial retreat, that ice cavern is no longer present and the main stream from the Kangshung glacier flows unimpeded along the snout of the Kangdoshang glacier.

Further up the valley, the 1921 expedition established another base camp in the high meadows towards the head of the valley at Pethang Ringmo, which, as well as a final camp stop for trekking groups today, remains an important grazing area for migratory yak herders. These herders were important sources of information for the early explorers, but today there is some evidence of overgrazing. Howard-Bury commented:

We found ourselves among pleasant grassy meadows – it was a most delightfully sunny spot at 16,400 feet, right under the gigantic and marvellously beautiful cliffs of Chomolönzo – now all powdered over with the fresh snow of the night before and only separated from us by the Kangshung glacier, here about a mile wide. Great avalanches thunder down its sides all day long with a terrifying sound.

A century later, avalanches continue to show us this is a dynamic landscape in a state of constant flux. Often, we would glimpse the rapid tumbling of ice and snow in a long white cloud, rushing down the steep couloirs seconds before the terrifying sound reaches you – reminding us of one of the major threats to climbers.

At the head of the Kama valley, the Kangshung face of Everest is perhaps the most impressive of all the sides of the mountain, towering some two miles above the glacier below. Both the north-east (Tibetan) and south-east (Nepalese) ridges – the most popular routes to the summit – are clearly visible from here. The Kangshung face itself was not climbed successfully until an assault by an American team in 1983, and the first British ascent of Everest without oxygen by Stephen Venables in 1988.

While initially, the mountains and peaks look remarkably similar to the 1920s, the drop in the level of the glacier quickly becomes apparent. The ordered glacial flow has been replaced by rocky detritus and numerous perched lakes, leaving a lunar-like landscape.

During his first visit, and despite having spent much of his life in the mountains of Europe, Mallory wrote that he was in awe of the vista here:

Perhaps the astonishing charm and beauty here lie in the complications half-hidden behind a mask of apparent simplicity, so that one’s eye never tires of following up the lines of the great arêtes, of following down the arms pushed out from their great shoulders, and of following along the broken edge of the hanging glacier covering the upper half of this eastern face of Everest.

While Everest was the prize sought by all the expeditions, the sight of the Makalu massif, dominating the Kama valley to the south, appears to have had a greater impact on both the climbers. Howard-Bury claimed it was by “far the more beautiful mountain of the two”, while Mallory “saw a scene of magnificence and splendour even more remarkable than the facts suggest”. He wrote:

Among all the mountains I have seen, and, if we may judge by photographs, all that ever have been seen, Makalu is incomparable for its spectacular and rugged grandeur. It was significant to us that the astonishing precipices rising above us on the far side of the glacier as we looked across from our camp – a terrific awe-inspiring sweep of snow-bound rocks – were the sides not so much of an individual mountain, but rather of a gigantic bastion or outwork defending Makalu.

In fact, according to Howard-Bury, “the shepherds would insist that Makalu was the higher of the two mountains, and would not believe us when we said that Mount Everest was the higher”.

The future of the Everest region

This historical comparison of hundred-year-old images and quotes represents both the enduring mountains but also the rapid changes that the Himalayas now face. Forces of tourism on one hand and climate change on the other are posing huge challenges for these marginal environments.

Our research shows that tourist and climbing activity is having significant impacts on the region. The causes are both directly at the mountain but also at home, particularly in the damage that all of our consumptive lifestyles are having on Himalayan glaciers.

Of course, these activities have also brought much-needed development opportunities to local populations, and the residents of both the Nepalese and Tibetan sides are generally much better off than populations in less-visited areas of their respective countries.

The expected redesignation of the Qomolangma National Nature Preserve as a national park in the current Chinese central government plan may bring opportunities for further management locally as the crowds continue to grow. However, we also identified a shortfall in protecting the significant cultural heritage and longstanding spiritual relationship to the mountain, which is often eclipsed by its physical size.

Perhaps a more balanced relationship to the mountain and its people is required, one that reevaluates our rather unhealthy obsession with just one peak. Reading the accounts from the 1920s, one is aware that there was a deep reverence for the region – not only from local people but also from its British visitors.

In the intervening years, summit bids on the Tibetan side have historically been much lower than in Nepal. Closed to outsiders for much of the latter half of the last century, Tibetan ascents briefly became more popular in the 1990s and 2000s, with a few well-organised commercial operators. But closures in 2008 during Olympic preparations, and again during the COVID pandemic from 2020 to 2023, once again meant a much-reduced number of attempts.

Combined with less reliance on foreign exchange, China has been able to exert much more control on the climbing industry, and in 2024 did not charge a permit fee at all, preferring to ensure climbers were appropriately experienced. There may be merit in this approach, as no one was killed on the Tibetan side in 2024, as opposed to the eight climbers who perished on the southern side.

But on both sides of the mountain, it is highly unlikely that our global obsession with Everest will wane. As longtime chronicler Alan Arnette notes, the mountain has an “immutable attraction that is oddly perverse”. So, it is important we continue to monitor the changes in this dynamic landscape wrought by both its visitors and climate change.

To counter the rising commercialisation of both mountaineering and mountain tourism requires, above all, greater respect for our mountains and the people who reside on them. According to Lakhpa Puti Sherpa, president of the Nepal Mountain Academy, notes:

The Himalayan mountains are holy spots – and we, the Sherpas, worship them. Before climbing any mountain we worship it, begging apologies on having to step on it on the top, and asking to absolve the sin we are going to incur from this particular violence.

Watch more image comparisons of the Everest expeditions here. All historical photographs are published courtesy of the Royal Geographical Society. Slider comparisons built using Juxtapose.

For you: more from our Insights series:

• Fifty years ago, Junko Tabei became the first woman to summit Everest – why do so few people know her story?

• A century ago, the women of Wales made an audacious appeal for world peace – this is their story

• ‘Deep inside, something told me I had found the earliest human ancestor; I went numb’ – Yohannes Haile-Selassie on his lifetime quest to discover ancient humanity

To hear about the latest Insights articles and much more besides, join the hundreds of thousands of people who subscribe to our daily newsletter.

Carl Cater, Associate Professor in Tourism Marketing, Swansea University

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

Jaws turns 50 on June 20. Last year, Quentin Tarantino called Stephen Spielberg’s film “possibly the greatest movie ever made”. Though he was quick to add that it isn’t the best film in terms of script, cinematography or acting, he was convinced that its overall quality as a movie remains unmatched.

I’m not so sure if Jaws is the best movie ever made – but it’s certainly the movie that I like to watch the most. It is as fascinating and multilayered as it is entertaining and depressing. As a researcher of political propaganda, I believe that Jaws had political purpose.

I have watched Jaws well over 50 times and still, with every viewing, I spot a new detail. Just last week I noticed that when police chief Brody (Roy Scheider) leaves his office after the first shark attack, he opens a gate in a white picket fence.

The white picket fence is often used to symbolise the American dream and Brody’s actions are likely intended to symbolise the disruption to the dream’s pursuit of capitalism as he seeks to close the beaches and potentially ruin the town’s tourism season.

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The film was released in June 1975. Just in time for summer holidays spent splashing in the waves (or not!). However, despite its continued acclaim, it didn’t win any of the big Academy Awards in 1976. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest dominated that year. Composer John Williams did, however, win the Oscar for best original score, which I assume you are now humming in your head.

The film is based on the book by Peter Benchley, published a year earlier in 1974. The book’s plot is somewhat different to the film. For example, Matt Hooper – the shark specialist played by Richard Dreyfuss in the film – is eaten by the shark, possibly as an act of retribution for his sins on land. He survives in the film.

Benchley was US president Lyndon Johnson’s (1963-1969) communications advisor before he became an author and so knew Washington’s priorities well. The film was then commissioned before the book had time to become a commercial success, which is somewhat unusual.

The shark – powerful, mysterious, dark eyed, stalking the American people and killing without emotion – represents the threat posed by communism. The defeat of this “menace” will require the reunification of American society following its disastrous and fractious involvement in the Vietnam war and political scandals like Watergate.

Hence, the white public sector worker (Brody), the scientist (Hooper) and the military veteran (Quint), put their differences aside to band together on a rickety and ill-equipped boat – the Orca – which was possibly meant to symbolise the wobbling US of its time.

So while Jaws is a parable of societal repair, it is also a story of exclusively white unification amid external threats. The civil rights movement and Vietnam are inextricably linked through the service of young black men to the cause, and yet black characters are conspicuous by their absence from the book and the film. The only black presence in the book is an anonymous gardener who rapes wealthy white women.

Human will to dominate the natural world

In the book, the horror focuses upon human, rather than animal, behaviour. This comes in the form of political corruption, mafia influence, adultery, snobbery, racial prejudice, community disconnect and dishonest journalism. And it occurs as much on land as it does at sea. There is a large section midway through the book where the shark plays no part in the, at times, highly sexual plot.

Spielberg removed many of the undercurrents and insinuations of the book for his adaptation. The film gives less attention to life in the town of Amity and focuses largely on the shark and the horror of its actions.

The irony is that so many characters feel personally offended by an animal capable of instinct alone, when they as humans – capable of reason and choice – behave so badly towards each other. Indeed, the lack of an eco-centric character to defend the shark in both the book or the film is telling.

The overwhelming horror is instead found in the treatment of the shark and the assertion that it must be killed rather than respected and left alone. Indeed, Jaws represents a parable of the modern human perception of battle against nature. Wherein Brody, Hooper and Quint, despite their differences, are united in their assumption of human superiority and their perspective that the problem ought to be dealt with using violence.

The story of Jaws also speaks to George Orwell’s essay Shooting an Elephant from 1936. It captured the author’s dilemma while working as a police officer in colonial Burma when an elephant disrupted the regular process of capitalism by trampling through a local market.

The philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno referred to the enlightenment as having created a “new barbarity” wherein humans are engaged in a project of destruction. Here then, a shark has had the audacity to behave in an inconvenient way to man’s profiteering from tourism and must be killed.

Indeed, one of the biggest criticisms of the film, which Spielberg has subsequently acknowledged, is its inaccurate representation of shark behaviour and the extent to which the film’s success contributed to the decline of the species.

Ultimately then, Jaws – the book, the film and the reaction of audiences to it – serves as a testimony to the role played by fear within human decision-making. The fear of “others”. Fear of the unknown. Fear of the natural world. Fear of loss of status or reputation.

It’s a testament to the susceptibility of humans to become insular and violent when they are scared, but also to the distorting influence of propagandists in determining what they ought to be afraid of.

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

Colin Alexander, Senior Lecturer in Political Communications, Nottingham Trent University

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

In The Spare Room, Judy Davis lights up the stage with a singularly vivid performance.

Adapted by Eamon Flack from Helen Garner’s 2008 novel of the same name, Davis plays sharp-tongued Helen (or Hel) to the irrational Nicola (Elizabeth Alexander), who visits seeking alternative treatments for her cancer-ridden body.

But unfortunately, the production does not match Davis’ star performance.

A shaky reality

Set and costume, by Mel Page, echo Garner tropes: bed linen, windows, back door onto shared backyard with family as neighbours, curtains, lounge, kitchen, vodka, music, bicycle and miniature pink backpack.

But I’m increasingly unable to suspend belief in stage designs whose purpose is to mimic reality. A curtain is used inconsistently to indicate a change of space. The kitchen table is appropriated for medical professionals’ desks and magician’s table without any change of lighting or further demarcation of space and time.

Kitchens and cooking are important to Garner’s domestic settings. There’s a brief smashing of apricot kernels. Bananas, licorice bullets and lemonade get a mention. But Hel’s chopping of a limp celery comes out of nowhere, and means very little.

If the adaptation is going to use food, meal preparation and cooking, then use it substantially as a motif.

For time changes, Hel yells out the day. The pace is speedy, with Davis firing off dialogue and scampering across stage. We get no sense of the dragging time that Hel experiences as carer.

The same actors playing multiple characters without much change of physical appearance lacks credulity. Nicola, in particular, is presented as a cliché of an older, suburban woman – not Garner’s wealthy bohemian. Nicola is based on Jenya Osborne – a friend of Garner and her third husband, Murray Bail, who described Osborne as “alternative virtually everything”.

Garner is the queen of sustained metaphor. In the novel, a broken mirror and a creature scuttling in dried leaves are early images of death.

In Flack’s adaptation, the mirror is only spoken of, accompanied by a strum across the cello by Anthea Cottee (music composed by Steve Francis).

There may have been a flourish of flamenco on the cello as Hel prances in imitation of the liveliness of her granddaughter, Bess (who is only referred to once), but it is too unimpactful to recall.

At one point, Hel plays on a toy piano accompanying the cello, a comedic reference to Garner’s most acclaimed novel The Children’s Bach (1984).

On death and dying

The clearest image of dying and death is central in the play: a magician’s show that Hel has to review. “The most beautiful things happen secretly and privately”, the magician (Alan Dukes) says, as he whisks away then recovers various objects.

A failure of both Garner’s book and the stage adaptation is that Hel complains of exhaustion after only a few weeks caring for Nicola. But many people spend years caring for a sick loved one, giving up another possible trajectory of their own lives.

The balance is wrong, too, between the humanity of Hel and Nicola: the audience guffawed at Hel’s exasperated wit and Nicola’s investment in fraudulent therapies. This, perhaps, is a feature of Garner’s work. While Garner is self-critical in her writing, she also consistently exposes others.

Bail is critical of Garner’s use of their friend’s life as fodder for a novel. He writes:

[Osbourne] was all kindness and consideration, which was rewarded as she was dying by being portrayed in [Garner’s book], where her harmless foolishness was pitied and scorned.

In Garner’s novel, Nicola and Hel “[dissect] with cheerful meanness the latest escapades” of her ex-husband. But in the play, Hel recounts her acts of revenge against him in their Sydney flat, drawing on Garner’s third diary, How to End a Story: Diaries 1995–1998, published in 2021. Bail is not named in either play or novel, but fans of Garner’s work know of whom she speaks.

The play is part monologue by Davis. Monologues and choruses effectively give oversight and insight to the narrative, but here it only further spotlights Hel’s story, not Nicola’s who is the one dying in pain.

With some details in the dialogue of Nicola’s dying processes – and with her plan to take an entourage for residency in an expensive hotel – Hel then “handed her over”.

As the play opens with a reference to the life-filled antics of Hel’s granddaughter, we know that the granddaughter, now assumed to be recovered from a cold, can be handed over to her. It is a rational ending, but lacking vitality.

The Spare Room is at Belvoir, Sydney, until July 13.

Moya Costello, Adjunct Lecturer in Creative Writing, Southern Cross University

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

Travel back 20,000 years into the last Ice Age, to a time when the upper reaches of the Blue Mountains were treeless and the ridgelines and mountain peaks laden in snow and ice.

At an elevation of 1,073 metres, you will find Dargan Shelter, an ancient rock shelter resembling a large amphitheatre. Looking around, you could easily assume this cold and barren high country was too difficult for people to spend time in.

But our new research, published today in Nature Human Behaviour, indicates Dargan Shelter was occupied as early as the last Ice Age and repeatedly visited during this cold period.

Our excavation results provide the earliest known evidence of high-altitude occupation in Australia, establishing the Blue Mountains as Australia’s most archaeologically significant periglacial landscape – that is, an area which goes through seasonal freezing and thawing.

Cultural perspectives

This is a highly significant landscape concentrated with tangible and intangible cultural values for Aboriginal people.

For millennia, Aboriginal people have passed down the knowledge and stories of Country.

Knowing our Ancestors have lived here, in this Country, for thousands of years was on our minds as the team headed down into the site where we would sit alongside our Ancestors of yesterday.

We chose this site because of its location on a known Aboriginal travelling route, high elevation and its potential to hold deep deposits.

Archaeologically, a deep and undisturbed deposit is one of the most important things to look for. The sediment buildup over time preserves cultural material, and allows us to reconstruct past activities by associating cultural objects within distinct layers or bands of time.

When we enter the site, we pay respects to the Country and Ancestors before us. As part of the opening of the site for the archaeological works, a lyrebird song and dance were performed and, magically, a handful of lyrebirds began approaching the cave and singing out as if they were communicating between the current and old worlds through song.

We do not know who exactly the Aboriginal people who moved through the Blue Mountains in the deep past were, nor where they came from. But Dargan Shelter was probably an important stopover point for people to attend gatherings and ceremonies that could have included people from the western interior, the Cumberland coastal plains, and Country to the north and south.

Finds from the Dargan Shelter excavation

New evidence provides definitive proof of repeated occupation in this once frozen high-altitude landscape. It is now believed to be the oldest occupied site in Australia at high elevation.

We unearthed 693 stone artefacts, including 117 flakes from stratigraphic layers older than 16,000 years, and documented a small amount of faded rock art, including a child-sized hand stencil and two forearm stencils.

Charcoal from hearths (campfires) underwent radiocarbon dating, indicating Dargan Shelter had been continuously occupied since 22,000 to 19,000 years ago.

Among the findings, most of the stone tools were locally sourced and made. But, very interestingly some stones from the Jenolan Caves area, approximately 50 kilometres to the south-west, and the Hunter Valley region, 150 km to the north, were also found. This indicates people were travelling into this mountainous region from both the north and south.

We found a sandstone grinding slab, dated to 13,000 years ago, consistent with shaping bone or wooden artefacts such as needles, awls, bone points and nose points. A basalt anvil with impact marks consistent with cracking hard woody nuts and seed shells was dated to 8,800 years ago.

Greater Blue Mountains and world heritage

The Blue Mountains was listed as a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) World Heritage area in 2000 for its outstanding biodiversity values.

Although the cultural heritage is remarkably intact and connected with an environmental system and natural features, the parallel nomination for cultural values listing failed due to a paucity of archaeological and cultural heritage information.

Our new research should be considered in a nomination for the UNESCO World Heritage area to also encompass cultural heritage alongside biodiversity.

The Blue Mountains landscape shrouds a silent yet rich tapestry of Aboriginal heritage.

Our people have walked, lived and thrived in the Blue Mountains for thousands of years. The mountains are a tangible connection to our Ancestors who used them as a meeting place for sharing, storytelling and survival. They are a part of our cultural identity.

We need to respect and protect our heritage for the benefit of all Australians.

Our results align Australia for the first time with ice age data from the world’s other inhabited continents, including sites in other places not traditionally thought of as cold climates, such as Mexico and Spain.

We now have a truly global story of people entering and living in high-altitude landscapes during the last ice age.

The continuation of research projects like this one, and the invaluable evidence it provides across the region, will allow Aboriginal people with connections to the Blue Mountains to begin to stitch back together much of the history and many of the stories that until now have had gaps.

The more we discover and piece together the movements, ceremonies and stories, the stronger we are as a community.

Erin Wilkins, Aboriginal Cultural Educator, Trainer and Facilitator, Indigenous Knowledge; Amy Mosig Way, Archaeologist, Australian Museum, and Lecturer in Archaeology, University of Sydney; Leanne Watson, Artist, Educator, Book Illustrator, Indigenous Knowledge, and Wayne Brennan, First Nations Mentor, University of Sydney

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

Every three seconds, someone in the world develops dementia. Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia, accounting for between 60% and 70% of all cases.

Although scientists have made significant progress in understanding the disease, there’s still no cure. That’s partly because Alzheimer’s disease has multiple causes – many of which are still not fully understood.

Two proteins which are widely believed to play central roles in Alzheimer’s disease are amyloid-beta and tau. Amyloid-beta forms sticky plaques on the outside of brain cells. This disrupts communication between neurons. Tau accumulate inside brain cells, where it twists into tangles. This ultimately leads to cell death. These plaques and tangles are the hallmark features of Alzheimer’s disease.

This understanding, known as the amyloid hypothesis, has shaped research for decades and led to treatments that aim to clear amyloid from the brain. Monoclonal antibody drugs have been approved in recent years for this purpose.

But they only work in the early stages of the disease. They do not reverse existing damage and may cause serious side-effects such as brain swelling and bleeding. Most importantly, they only target amyloid-beta, leaving tau untreated.

But in a surprise twist, recent research published by my colleagues and me has found that a protein from Helicobacter pylori – a bacteria best known for causing stomach ulcers – can block the toxic buildup of both amyloid-beta and tau. This unexpected finding may point to a new strategy for the fight against Alzheimer’s disease.

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Our discovery began with a very different question. We were initially studying how H pylori interacts with other microbes. Some bacteria form protective communities called biofilms, which rely on amyloid assemblies (similar in structure to the plaques which form in the brain) as a structural scaffold. This led us to wonder: could H pylori influence bacterial biofilms by also interfering with amyloid assemblies in humans?

We turned our attention to a well-known H pylori protein called CagA. While half of the protein is known to trigger harmful effects in human cells (referred to as the C-terminal region), the other half (the protein’s N-terminal region) may have protective properties. To our surprise, this N-terminal fragment, called CagAN, dramatically reduced the formation of both bacterial amyloids and biofilms in the bacterial species Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas.

Encouraged by these results, we tested whether the same protein fragment could block the buildup of human amyloid-beta proteins. To do this, we incubated amyloid-beta molecules in the lab: some were treated with CagAN, while others were left as normal. We then tracked amyloid formation using a fluorescence reader and an electron microscope.

We found that treated samples had far less amyloid clump formation during the testing period. Even at very low concentrations, CagAN almost completely stopped amyloid-beta from forming amyloid aggregates.

To understand how CagAN worked, we used nuclear magnetic resonance (which allows us to look at how molecules interact with each other) to examine how the protein interacts with amyloid-beta. We also used computer modelling to investigate possible mechanisms. Remarkably, CagAN also blocked tau aggregation – suggesting it acts on multiple toxic proteins involved in Alzheimer’s disease.

Blocking the disease

Our study has shown us that a fragment from the Helicobacter pylori protein can effectively block the buildup of the two proteins that are implicated in Alzheimer’s disease. This suggests that bacterial proteins – or drugs modelled after them – could someday block the earliest signs of Alzheimer’s.

What’s more, the benefits may extend beyond Alzheimer’s disease.

In additional experiments, the same bacterial fragment blocked the aggregation of IAPP (a protein involved in type 2 diabetes) and alpha-synuclein (linked to Parkinson’s disease). All of these conditions are driven by the accumulation of toxic amyloid aggregates.

That a single bacterial fragment could interfere with so many proteins suggests exciting therapeutic potential. Though these conditions affect different parts of the body, they may be linked through cross-talk between amyloid proteins – a shared mechanism that CagAN could help disrupt.

Of course, it’s important to be clear: this research is still at an early stage. All of our experiments were conducted in lab settings, not yet in animals or humans. Still, the findings open a new path.

Our study also uncovered the underlying mechanisms for how CagAN blocked the amyloid-beta and tau from forming amyloid aggregates. One of the ways in which CagAN did this was by preventing the proteins from coming together to form clumps. They also prevented small, premature amyloid aggregates from forming as well. In the future, we will continue the detailed mechanism study and evaluate the effects in animal models.

These results also prompt a question: could H pylori, long seen only as harmful, also have a protective side? Some studies have hinted at a connection between H pylori infection and Alzheimer’s disease, though the relationship remains unclear. Our discovery adds a new layer to this discussion, suggesting that part of H pylori may actually interfere with the molecular events that lead to Alzheimer’s disease.

That means in the future, we may need to take a more precise and personalised approach. Instead of aiming to eliminate H pylori completely with antibiotics, it might be more important to understand, in different biological contexts, which parts of the bacterium are harmful, and which might actually be beneficial.

As medicine continues to move toward greater precision, the goal may no longer be to wipe out every microbe, but to understand how some of them might work with us rather than against us.

Gefei Chen, Associate professor, Karolinska Institutet

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

Our experience of the world often involves hearing our environment before seeing it. Whether it’s the sound of something moving through nearby water, or the rustling of vegetation, our fear of the unseen is rooted in our survival instincts as a species.

Cinematic sound and music taps into these somewhat unsettling instincts – and this is exactly what director Steven Spielberg and composer John Williams achieved in the iconic 1975 thriller Jaws. The sound design and musical score work in tandem to confront the audience with a mysterious killer animal.

In what is arguably the film’s most iconic scene, featuring beach swimmers’ legs flailing underwater, the shark remains largely unseen – yet the sound perfectly conveys the threat at large.

Creating tension in a soundtrack

Film composers aim to create soundscapes that will profoundly move and influence their audience. And they express these intentions through the use of musical elements such as rhythm, harmony, tempo, form, dynamics, melody and texture.

In Jaws, the initial encounter with the shark opens innocently with the sound of an offshore buoy and its clanging bell. The scene is established both musically and atmospherically to evoke a sense of isolation for the two characters enjoying a late-night swim on an empty beach.

But once we hear the the low strings, followed by the central two-note motif played on a tuba, we know something sinister is afoot.

This compositional technique of alternating between two notes at an increasing speed has long been employed by composers, including by Antonín Dvořák in his 1893 work New World Symphony.

John Williams reportedly used six basses, eight cellos, four trombones and a tuba to create the blend of low frequencies that would go on to define his entire Jaws score.

The bass instruments emphasise the lower end of the musical frequency spectrum, evoking a dark timbre that conveys depth, power and intensity. String players can use various bowing techniques, such as staccato and marcato, to deliver dark and even menacing tones, especially in the lower registers.

Meanwhile, there is a marked absence of tonality in the repeating E–F notes, played with increasing speed on the tuba. Coupled with the intensifying dynamics in the instrumental blend, this accelerating two-note motif signals the looming danger before we even see it – tapping into our instinctive fear of the unknown.

The use of the two-note motif and lower-end orchestration characterises a composition style that aims to unsettle and disorientate the audience. Another example of this style can be heard in Bernard Herrmann’s car crash scene audio in North by Northwest (1959).

Similarly, in Sergei Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite, the opening of the second movement (Dance of the Pagan Gods) uses an alternating D#–E motif.

The elasticity of Williams’ motif allows the two notes to be played on different instruments throughout the soundtrack, exploring various timbral possibilities to induce a kaleidoscope of fear, panic and dread.

The psychology behind our response

What is it that makes the Jaws soundtrack so psychologically confronting, even without the visuals? Music scholars have various theories. Some suggest the two notes imitate the sound of human respiration, while others have proposed the theme evokes the heartbeat of a shark.

Williams explained his approach in an interview with the Los Angeles Times:

I fiddled around with the idea of creating something that was very … brainless […] Meaning something could be very repetitious, very visceral, and grab you in your gut, not in your brain. […] It could be something you could play very softly, which would indicate that the shark is far away when all you see is water. Brainless music that gets louder and gets closer to you, something is gonna swallow you up.

Williams plays with the audience’s emotions throughout the film’s score, culminating in the scene Man Against Beast – a celebration of thematic development and heightened orchestration.

The film’s iconic soundtrack has created a legacy that extends beyond the visual. And this suggests the score isn’t just a soundtrack – but a character in its own right.

By using music to reveal what is hidden, Williams creates an intense emotional experience rife with anticipation and tension. The score’s two-note motif showcases his genius – and serves as a sonic shorthand that has kept a generation behind the breakers of every beach.

Alison Cole, Composer and Lecturer in Screen Composition, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney

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

In Australia, there are around 235,000 emergency service volunteers who help communities respond and recover after natural disasters and other traumatic events.

These include volunteers with metropolitan and rural fire services and other rescue organisations.

As natural disasters grow more frequent and severe with climate change we rely on these volunteers now more than ever. Yet volunteer numbers are shrinking.

Our new research reveals an important but often hidden toll from natural disasters – the mental health of emergency service volunteers, who risk physical and emotional burnout.

In our study, we interviewed 32 Victorian State Emergency Service (SES) and Country Fire Authority (CFA) volunteers. They told us they’re often not getting adequate support.

Exposure to death

Death is something commonly hidden behind clinical curtains. But for emergency service volunteers, exposure to dying and death is just part of the job. Death on jobs arrives unpredictably – on roads, in burned homes, after storms, floods and suicides.

Given their work often takes place in the local community, victims are frequently known to the volunteer, which can further complicate grief. As one participant told us:

You’re bound to come across someone you know, or someone you love at some point […] in a bad situation.

Another recounted a colleague’s experience:

It wasn’t until the next day that she found out that she actually knew the deceased person, but didn’t recognise them.

Volunteers described often being first on scene to assist but not fully prepared for what they find. They recounted experiences including retrieving children who had drowned, watching people dying on the roadside, and finding burnt and maimed human remains.

These encounters provoke intense emotional responses, from shock and sadness to feeling powerless and vulnerable. For many, feelings of helplessness and grief reverberate into everyday life. As one volunteer told us:

I was in a semi-breaking-down sort of place […] having flashbacks […] struggling to hold emotions and do my day job.

A lack of formal support

We identified over-reliance on informal team support and individual resilience to cope with difficult emotions.

Structured debriefs depended on leadership and team dynamics. Leaders with “tough it out” mindsets unintentionally perpetuated stigma around seeking help. One participant explained:

People generally will just sit there and not talk about how they feel […] They’re feeling ashamed or embarrassed.

The mindset of some teams seems to be that those who can’t manage the demands of the job should leave. One volunteer said:

It’s mostly very hard and tough. But if you’re going to survive in the game, you gotta be hard.

Support programs exist, but often focus on major disasters rather than the more everyday jobs. Referral depends on leaders flagging those seen as at-risk or individual volunteers asking for support. One participant explained:

We do a debrief with peer support, but some people put on a brave face […] There needs to be more follow up.

What’s more, support is sometimes difficult to access. One participant, a team leader, explained what happened when a volunteer in their team wasn’t coping:

I called the mechanisms that [we] were told that we need to access. I’ve got somebody here that’s suicidal, nobody escalated it. I still hadn’t heard back six hours later.

Importantly, our findings also highlighted that a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work. For some, peer support is a lifeline for processing experiences and building resilience, but not for others.

Five women killed. And the peer support was all over us. You know, we got to the stage where it was ridiculous. We’ve had enough, we don’t want this. It re-traumatises people who want to move on.

Protecting those who protect us

Talking to emergency service volunteers from only two organisations in one jurisdiction may limit the extent to which we can generalise our findings to other regions, countries or cultures.

However, Victoria does have the second largest number of emergency service volunteers in Australia (behind New South Wales).

Emergency service volunteers are extremely proud and passionate about serving their community and show up with care, calm and strength. But our findings show this comes at a personal cost, especially without the right supports.

Volunteer exposure to death and dying must be recognised as a serious occupational health and safety issue, not just an emotional side effect of the job. We need proactive, not reactive reform if we want to recruit, retain and protect the people we count on in a crisis.

Legislators and organisations should work collaboratively with emergency service volunteers to develop and implement responsive and consistent support services, culture and leadership.

Without targeted, systemic and consistent support, we risk the future of our community-based emergency response. It’s time to protect those who protect us.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636.

Natalie Roche, PhD Candidate, Centre for Ergonomics and Human Factors, La Trobe University and Rwth Stuckey, Associate Professor, Ergonomics, Safety and Health, La Trobe University

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

Last week, the Queensland government launched the ambitious Destination 2045 tourism plan, which aims to make the state a global leader in tourism. The plan highlights that one in six jobs in tropical north Queensland are supported by tourism.

However, earlier this year the same government tentatively withdrew support from a campaign to add Cape York to the UNESCO World Heritage List.

If the goal is to position Queensland as a leader in tourism, then linking Cape York’s landscapes to the World Heritage brand would certainly help achieve that.

Consultation is key

In June 2024, Steven Miles, Labor’s then-premier in Queensland, and Tanya Plibersek, the federal environment minister, announced they had placed seven of the cape’s national parks on Australia’s tentative World Heritage list.

In January, however, the newly elected Liberal-National government, under Premier David Crisafulli, ordered a review of the decision. The government cited concerns over a lack of sufficient consultation around the nomination.

If a lack of consultation is the main issue, there is an opportunity for the Crissafulli government to thoughtfully reopen negotiations.

Getting this step right could help conserve and encourage tourism to one of Australia’s most diverse landscapes – in line with the Destination 2045 plan.

How to get onto (and kicked off) UNESCO’s list

Cape York covers some 137,000 square kilometres. According to the 2021 census, it has a population of less than 8,000 people, including 3,678 Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders.

Inscription to the World Heritage list doesn’t mean the entire cape would be listed – just specific sites and landscapes within it.

It’s usually the responsibility of a country’s various governments to convince UNESCO, in a nomination bid, a certain place has the necessary “outstanding universal value” and meets at least one of UNESCO’s ten selection criteria.

Sites that are physically altered or damaged after receiving World Heritage status can be de-listed, either by a state party or by UNESCO. This has happened in Oman, Germany, the United Kingdom and Georgia.

We also recently saw the Murujuga Cultural Landscape in Western Australia, with its extraordinary record of rock engravings (petroglyphs), denied World Heritage inscription. This was mainly due to the threat of ongoing damage from industrial emissions from Woodside Energy’s nearby Karratha gas plant.

World Heritage status: a risk or benefit?

A carefully considered World Heritage inscription doesn’t necessarily block industries and tourism from the listed area.

Many of the archaeological sites of the Willandra Lakes World Heritage Area in New South Wales are located on sheep stations. These stations, established in the late 19th century, have individual property plans that ensure the sites are conserved while remaining viable for agricultural activity.

Another example is the tourism seen at the extraordinary eel trap system of Budj Bim in southwest Victoria. Budj Bim is one of Australia’s most recent additions to the World Heritage list. It is also the first site to be inscribed solely for its cultural value.

The Budj Bim eel traps were engineered some 6,600 years ago, and represent one of the world’s oldest aquaculture systems.

This cultural landscape is now home to a thriving tourism program that attracts thousands of visitors each year. The World Heritage listing ensures there are enough resources for the Gunditjmara Traditional Owners running the site to improve the health of Country through cultural and environmental management.

World Heritage often boosts international tourism, funding opportunities and local branding. The Lake District in the UK is a good example of this, although the site has faced some controversy recently.

While Queensland’s current government has cited concerns over planning restrictions, these types of concerns are typically based on perception rather than proven harm. In Queensland, they were also clearly addressed in government memos and communications.

Tasmania’s forestry sector resisted World Heritage expansion (there were four expansions between 1989–2013), yet tourism in the region remains economically valuable.

It’s unlikely the Cape York nominations would threaten the pastoral or mining industries, since most of the nominated sites are already protected as national parks.

What makes a World Heritage site?

The list of Cape York sites submitted for World Heritage consideration has some strong contenders. Quinkan Country is undoubtedly the most significant site on the list, distinguished by its diversity and richness of Aboriginal paintings and engravings.

But the list isn’t exhaustive. There are several other Aboriginal cultural landscapes in Cape York that also deserve to be considered by UNESCO. These include the giant shell mounds around Weipa, Jiigurru (Lizard Island), and the Flinders Island Group with its extraordinary rock art galleries.

Moving forward

World heritage listings in Cape York have great potential to allow Aboriginal people to care for the landscapes and create tourism infrastructure that centres Aboriginal perspectives.

Appointing Aboriginal rangers in the Flinders Island Group could help deliver a unique and sustainable cultural tourism experience, similar to that provided at the World Heritage-listed Kakadu National Park. Destination 2045 highlights the importance of developing Aboriginal ranger programs in such landscapes to boost cultural tourism and economic growth.

The Crisafulli government now has the opportunity to meaningfully engage with the Traditional Custodians of the Cape York landscapes that have been put forth. We argue that the World Heritage listing outcome could help the cape’s economic development and support its communities.

Michael Westaway, Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Archaeology, School of Social Science, The University of Queensland; Anna M. Kotarba-Morley, Future Making Research Fellow, University of Adelaide; Denis Rose, Indigenous Knowledge Holder, Indigenous Knowledge; Olivia Arnold, PhD candidate, The University of Queensland, and Rylee Smith, Leadership Academy Coordinator at Cape York Institute for Policy & Leadership, Indigenous Knowledge

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

In Australia, an estimated one in ten men experience mental health issues such as anxiety and depression before and after their child is born (the perinatal period).

Alongside emotional ups and downs and exhaustion, new dads may also be facing greater practical demands, such as caring for the baby, supporting their partner, and providing financially.

It’s not surprising, then, that becoming a dad may be linked to increased psychological distress. But it’s concerning because many men don’t access help. There’s also growing evidence a father’s mental state may affect his developing child in the short and long term.

Our new review brings together the international evidence about the relationship between fathers’ mental health and children’s development for the first time.

We found consistent associations between dads’ psychological distress before and after birth and poorer outcomes in children’s social, emotional, cognitive, language and physical development, from birth until the early teens.

The good news? There are effective ways to intervene early.

Barriers to getting help

There are complex reasons why new fathers might not access help for mental distress.

Notably, a 2024 review of Australian and international research found fathers are not routinely asked in health-care settings about their wellbeing at any point before the birth of a child, or after – when support is often most needed.

Men may also feel they need to be strong and push past tough emotions to “get on” with looking after the family.

They may be reluctant to acknowledge their own difficulties, and instead avoid the issue, through strategies such as working excessively, or using alcohol or other drugs.

Working hours can also make accessing services difficult.

As a result, men may have trouble recognising mental distress and it may go undetected by the people around them and in the wider health-care system.

We don’t know the true impact

Research on early risk factors for poorer child development is around 17 times more likely to focus on mothers’ health and lifestyle, compared to fathers.

This focus is understandable, given up to one in five women experience perinatal anxiety or depression in the transition to motherhood.

Strong evidence links mothers’ mental distress to poorer child outcomes. For example, mothers experiencing perinatal anxiety or depression may withdraw and find it difficult to interact with their child. This may be linked to delays in children’s developing social and emotional skills.

Yet similar research on fathers has been lacking.

This imbalance affects health policy and clinical practice, leaving many fathers feeling excluded from family health care. The impact on their children has also been poorly understood.

What we looked at

Our new research aimed to understand how men’s mental health before and after birth is related to their child’s development, from birth through adolescence.

We looked at the findings from 84 longitudinal studies which track people over long periods of time, including from Australia, Europe, Asia and North America.

The review included any study that measured an association between perinatal depression, anxiety or stress in fathers (biological or adoptive) and child development. These included social and emotional skills, thinking and problem-solving, language, physical development and motor skills.

Our study had three main findings

First, mental distress in fathers during pregnancy and after birth was consistently linked to poorer development in their children.

Specifically, this included lower ratings on social, emotional, cognitive, and language skills, such as the capacity to interact with others, understand feelings, process information and communicate. It also affected physical health outcomes, such as body weight, sleep and eating patterns.

Second, associations were evident from early development (infancy) through to the early teens (13 years). This suggests that, without support, a father’s perinatal mental distress may be related to child development well beyond infancy.

Third, fathers’ mental distress after birth was more strongly related to how children developed than their mental distress during pregnancy.

This is not surprising, because it’s when fathers begin to interact with infants and may more directly influence their development.

So, what should change?

Our findings underscore that getting in early to support dads – both before and soon after the arrival of a new child – is crucial.

Routine screening for signs of mental distress is effective in identifying mothers who might benefit from help. This could be extended to all parents, through family planning, antenatal and postpartum clinics, and GP check-ups.

Research shows 80% of men see a GP or allied health practitioner in the year before having a baby. Asking about other aspects of wellbeing – such as sleep quality – can be an effective and non-stigmatising way to ease into conversations about mental health.

This can help connect men with support services earlier, to improve their health and their children’s.

What should men look out for?

Studies suggest men may often express their distress through relationship strain, rather than sadness. They may also report self-harm, suicidal ideation and feeling isolated.

Common signs a new dad might be struggling with mental health include:

• fatigue
• sleep problems
• difficulty concentrating
• racing heart
• sweating
• muscle tension
• changes in appetite
• feeling worried or out of control
• irritability
• anger
• increased use of alcohol or other drugs.

Is there support?

Options for men who want more support include counselling, peer group support and online apps that use mindfulness and cognitive behaviour therapy to help manage moods.

For fathers needing more immediate support, crisis support services offer 24/7 live counselling via chat, telephone or video:

• PANDA
• MensLine
• For When
• 13YARN.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14. In an emergency in Australia, call triple 0.

Delyse Hutchinson, Associate Professor, Clinical Psychologist, and NHMRC Leadership Fellow, SEED Centre for Lifespan Research, School of Psychology, Deakin University; Genevieve Le Bas, Clinical Psychologist and Research Fellow, Deakin University; Jacqui Macdonald, Associate Professor in Psychology, Deakin University; Samantha Teague, Senior Research Fellow in Psychology, James Cook University, and Stephanie Aarsman, Research Fellow, Deakin University

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

If you have cancer, a disease such as diabetes or dementia, or need to manage other complex health conditions, you often need expert care from a specialist doctor.

But as our new Grattan Institute report shows, too many people are forced to choose between long waits in the public system or high costs if they go private.

Governments need to provide more training for specialist doctors in short supply, make smart investments in public clinics, and regulate the extremely high fees a small number of private specialists charge.

High fees, long waits, missed care

Fees for private specialist appointments are high and rising.

On average, patients’ bills for specialist appointments add up to A$300 a year. This excludes people who were bulk billed for every appointment, but that’s relatively rare: patients pay out-of-pocket costs for two-thirds of appointments with a specialist doctor.

Increasing GP costs make national headlines, but specialist fees have risen even more – they’ve grown by 73% since 2010.

People who can’t afford to pay with money often pay with time – and sometimes with their health, as their condition deteriorates.

Wait times for a free appointment at a public clinic can be months or even years. In Victoria and Queensland, people with an urgent referral – who should be seen within 30 days – are waiting many months to see some specialists.

High fees and long waits add up to missed care. Every year, 1.9 million Australians delay or skip needed specialist care – about half of them because of cost.

Distance is another barrier. People in regional and remote areas receive far fewer specialist services per person than city dwellers (even counting services delivered virtually). Half of remote communities receive less than one specialist appointment, per person, per year. There are no city communities where that’s the case.

Train the specialists we’ll need in the future

Specialist training takes at least 12 years, so planning ahead is crucial. Governments can’t conjure more cardiologists overnight, or have a paediatrician treat elderly people.

But at the moment there are no regular projections of the specialists we’ll need in the future, nor planning to make sure we get them. Government-funded training places are determined by the priorities of specialist colleges, which approve training places, and the immediate needs of public hospitals.

As a result, we’ve got a lot of some types of specialist and a shortage of others. We’ve trained many emergency medicine specialists because public hospitals rely on trainees to staff emergency departments 24/7. But we have too few dermatologists and ophthalmologists – and numbers of those specialists are growing slower than average.

The lack of planning extends to where specialist training takes place. Doctors tend to put down roots and stay where they train. A shortage of rural training places leads to a shortage of rural specialists.

To fix these problems, governments need to plan and pay for training places that match Australia’s future health needs. Governments should forecast the need for particular specialties in particular areas. Then training funding should be tied to delivering the necessary specialist training places.

To fill gaps in the meantime, the federal government should streamline applications for overseas specialists to move here. It should also recognise qualifications from more similar countries.

More public clinics where they’re needed most

Public clinics don’t charge fees and are crucial in ensuring all Australians can get specialist care. But governments should be more strategic in where and how they invest.

There are big differences in specialist access across the country. After adjusting for differences in age, sex, health and wealth, people living in the worst-served areas receive about one-third fewer services than people in the best-served communities.

Governments should fund more public services in areas that need it most. They should set a five-year target to lift access for the quarter of communities receiving the least care in each specialty.

We estimate 81 communities need additional investment in at least one specialty – about a million extra appointments in total. Some communities receive less care across the board and need investment in many specialties.

With long waiting times and unmet need, governments should also make sure they’re getting the most out of their investment in public clinics.

Different clinics are run in very different ways. Some have taken up virtual care with a vengeance, others barely at all. One clinic might stick to traditional staffing models, while the clinic down the road might have moved towards “top of scope” models where nurses and allied health workers do more.

Governments should lay out an agenda to modernise clinics, encouraging them to adopt best practices. And they should introduce systems that allow GPs to get quick written advice from specialists to reduce unnecessary referrals and ensure services can focus on patients who really need their care.

Curb extreme fees

Even with more public services, and more specialists, excessive fees will still be a problem.

A small fraction – less than 4% – of specialists charge triple the Medicare schedule fee, or more, on average. These can only be described as extreme fees.

In 2023, an initial consultation with an endocrinologist or cardiologist who met this “extreme fee” definition cost an average of $350. For a psychiatrist, it was $670.

There is no valid justification for these outlier fees. They’re beyond the level needed to fairly reward doctors’ skill and experience, they aren’t linked to better quality and they don’t cross-subsidise care for poorer patients. Incomes for average specialists – who charge much less – are already among the highest in the country. Nine of the top ten highest-earning occupations are medical specialties.

The federal government has committed to publishing fee information, which is a positive step. But in some areas, it can be hard to find a better option, and patients may be hesitant to shop around.

The federal government should directly tackle extreme fees. It should require specialists who charge extreme fees to repay the value of the Medicare rebates received for their services that year.

Specialist care has been neglected long enough. The federal and state governments need to act now.

Peter Breadon, Program Director, Health and Aged Care, Grattan Institute and Elizabeth Baldwin, Senior Associate, Grattan Institute

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

As consumption of traditional news continues to fall, audiences are turning to social media personalities and influencers for their information. These figures are increasingly shaping public debates.

But Australian news audiences are sceptical. More Australians believe social media influencers are a major misinformation threat than other sources, according to new research.

The Digital News Report: Australia 2025, released today, also reveals general news avoidance remains high, with 69% of people saying they try not to engage with it. This is particularly the case among women, young people and those in regional areas.

So if people don’t want to engage with traditional news, but are suspicious of influencers, how can we ensure they get reliable information when they need it? There are some solutions.

Suspicious of influencers

The Digital News Report: Australia is part of a global annual survey of digital news consumption in 48 countries, commissioned by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.

The survey was conducted by YouGov in January and February 2025. The data are weighted for age, gender and region. Education and political quotas were also applied.

For the 11th iteration of this study in Australia, we surveyed 2,006 online Australian adults. We asked people about sources and platforms they believe to be major misinformation threats.

More than half of participants said online influencers/personalities are the major risk (57%), followed by activists (51%), foreign governments (49%), Australian political actors (48%), and the news media (43%).

This is in stark contrast to the United States, where national politicians are seen as posing the biggest threat of misleading information (57%) and is ten percentage points higher than the global average of 42 countries in the survey (47%).

Navigating truth online

The report also finds Australians continue to be the most concerned about what is real or fake online, with 74% saying they are worried about it.

This is especially true on social media, where Australians see Facebook (59%) and TikTok (57%) as the two platforms that are the biggest threat of spreading misinformation.

Given the proportion of people using social media as their main source of news has increased (26%, up eight percentage points since 2016) and TikTok is the fastest growing social media platform for news (14%, up 13 percentage points since 2020), concern about misinformation will likely remain an issue in Australia.

This problem is not necessarily with the platform itself, but who audiences pay attention to when they are on it.

On TikTok, Australians are more likely to turn to information shared by influencers, particularly younger audiences.

Less or more intervention?

Deciding what is true or fake online is a complex issue. This was highlighted during the political debate over the federal government’s controversial Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill, which was eventually withdrawn late last year.

Much hinged on questions around who gets to decide what the truth is, and who might be responsible for tackling it. Is it the job of digital platforms to remove harmful and misleading content? Or do audiences need more media literacy education? Or both?

As debate over how to reduce harm while balancing free speech continues, we asked people about the removal of harmful and offensive social media content.

One third (33%) say social media and video networks like TikTok and YouTube are not removing enough harmful or offensive content.

Fewer people (21%) think platforms are removing too much.

This indicates Australians want more action from social media companies.

Boosting media literacy

The data also tell us improving news literacy across the community may be key to tackling the problem.

We asked people what they do when they come across suspicious information. Thirty-nine percent said they fact-check using trusted news sources, official websites and search engines.

But there were important differences in fact-checking behaviours between those who had received some kind of news literacy education and those who had not.

People who had received training about how the news works were much more likely to use a reputable news source or go to an official website to verify information.

However, few people have had such education, with only 24% of those surveyed saying they had received some.

The data show not only are people with news literacy education more likely to fact-check, they also avoid news less, have higher interest in it, are more likely to trust the news, and more inclined to pay for it.

This suggests increasing news literacy can help users navigate the complex online environment, and could also have both civic and economic benefits.

While there is no single solution to reducing misinformation online, this year’s data points to two key areas for further action: increasing access to media literacy training for all Australians, and compelling digital platforms to remove more misleading and harmful content.

Sora Park, Professor of Communication, News & Media Research Centre, University of Canberra; Ashleigh Haw, Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media, University of Canberra; Caroline Fisher, Associate Professor of Communication, University of Canberra, and Kieran McGuinness, Postdoctoral Fellow, News & Media Research Centre, University of Canberra

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

If you’ve been on social media lately – perhaps scrolling in the middle of the night, when you know you shouldn’t but you just can’t sleep – you might have seen those videos promoting a get-to-sleep technique called “cognitive shuffling”.

The idea, proponents say, is to engage your mind with random ideas and images via a special formula:

1. pick a random word (such as “cake”)
2. focus on the first letter of the word (in this case, C) and list a bunch of words starting with that letter: cat, carrot, calendar and so on
3. visualise each word as you go along
4. when you feel ready, move onto the next letter (A) and repeat the process
5. continue with each letter of the original word (so, in this case, K and then E) until you feel ready to switch to a new word or until you drift off to sleep.

It’s popular on Instagram and TikTok, but does “cognitive shuffling” have any basis in science?

Where did this idea come from?

The cognitive shuffling technique was made famous by Canada-based researcher Luc P. Beaudoin more than a decade ago, when he published a paper about how what he called “serial diverse imagining” could help with sleep.

One of Beaudoin’s hypothetical examples involved a woman thinking of the word “blanket”, then thinking bicycle (and imagining a bicycle), buying (imagining buying shoes), banana (visualising a banana tree) and so on.

Soon, Beaudoin writes, she moves onto the letter L, thinking about her friend Larry, the word “like” (imagining her son hugging his dog). She soon transitions to the letter A, thinking of the word “Amsterdam”:

and she might very vaguely imagine the large hand of a sailor gesturing for another order of fries in an Amsterdam pub while a rancid accordion plays in the background.

Sleep soon ensues. The goal, according to Beaudoin, is to think briefly about:

a neutral or pleasant target and frequently [switch] to unrelated targets (normally every 5-15 seconds).

Don’t try to relate one word with another or find a link between the words; resist the mind’s natural tendency toward sense-making.

While the research into this technique is still in its infancy, the idea is grounded in science. That’s because we know from other research good sleepers tend to have different kinds of thoughts in bed to bad sleepers.

People with insomnia are more focused on worries, problems, or noises in the environment, and are often preoccupied with not sleeping.

Good sleepers, on the other hand, typically have dream-like, hallucinatory, less ordered thoughts before nodding off.

Sorting the pro-somnolent wheat from the insomnolent chaff

Cognitive shuffling attempts to mimic the thinking patterns of good sleepers by simulating the dream-like and random thought patterns they generally have before drifting off to sleep.

In particular, Beaudoin’s research describes two types of sleep-related thoughts: insomnolent (or anti-sleep) and pro-somnolent (sleep-promoting) thoughts.

Insomnolent thoughts include things such as worrying, planning, rehearsing, and ruminating on perceived problems or failings.

Pro-somnolent thoughts on the other hand involve thoughts that can help you fall asleep, such as dream-like imagery or having a calm, relaxed state of mind.

Cognitive shuffling aims to distract from or interfere with insomnolent thought. It offers a calm, neutral path for your racing mind, and can reduce the stress associated with not sleeping.

Cognitive shuffling also helps tell your brain you are ready for sleep.

In fact, the process of “shuffling” between different thoughts is similar to the way your brain naturally drifts off to sleep. During the transition to sleep, brain activity slows. Your brain starts to generate disconnected images and fleeting scenes, known as hypnagogic hallucinations, without a conscious effort to make sense of them.

By mimicking these scattered, disconnected, and random thought patterns, cognitive shuffling may help you transition from wakefulness to sleep.

And the preliminary research into this is promising. Beaudoin and his team have found serial diverse imagining helps to lower arousal before sleep, improve sleep quality and reduce the effort involved in falling asleep.

However, with only a small number of research studies, more work is needed here.

It didn’t work. Now what?

As with every new strategy, however, practise makes perfect. Don’t be disheartened if you don’t see an improvement straight away; these things take time.

Stay consistent and be kind to yourself.

And what works for some won’t work for others. Different people benefit from different types of strategies depending on how they relate to and experience stress or stressful thoughts.

Other strategies to help create the right conditions for sleep include:

• keeping a consistent pre-bedtime routine, so your brain can wind down
• watching your thoughts, without judgement, as you lie in bed
• writing down worries or to-do lists earlier in the day so you don’t think about them at bedtime.

If, despite all your best efforts, night time thoughts continue to impact your sleep or overall wellbeing, consider seeking professional help from your doctor or a trained sleep specialist.

Melinda Jackson, Associate Professor at Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, School of Psychological Sciences, Monash University and Eleni Kavaliotis, Research Fellow in the Sleep, Cognition, and Mood Laboratory at Monash University, Monash University

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

Ever find yourself unable to stop scrolling through your phone, chasing that next funny video or interesting post?

Or maybe you’ve felt a rush of excitement when you achieve a goal, eat a delicious meal, or fill your online shopping cart.

Why do some experiences feel so rewarding, while others leave us feeling flat? Well, dopamine might be responsible for that. Here’s what it does in our brains and bodies.

It’s a chemical messenger

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter – a chemical messenger that facilitates communication between the brain and the central nervous system. It sends messages between different parts of your nervous system, helping your body and brain coordinate everything from your movement to your mood.

Dopamine is most known for its role in short-term pleasure, and the boost we get from things such as eating tasty foods, drinking alcohol, scrolling social media or falling in love.

Dopamine also assists with learning, maintaining focus and attention, and helps us store memories.

It even plays a role in kidney function by regulating the levels of salt and water we excrete.

Conversely, low levels of dopamine have been linked to neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease.

How dopamine motivates us to pursue pleasure

Dopamine is not just active when we do pleasurable things. It’s active beforehand and it drives us to pursue pleasure.

Say I go to a cafe and decide to buy a doughnut. When I bite into the doughnut, it tastes fantastic. Dopamine surges and I experience pleasure.

The next time I walk past the cafe, dopamine is already active. It remembers the doughnut I had last time and how delicious it was. Dopamine drives me to walk back into the cafe, purchase another doughnut and eat it.

From an evolutionary perspective, dopamine was incredibly important and it ensured survival of the species. It motivated behaviours such as hunting and foraging for food. It reinforced the pursuit of finding shelter and safety and keeping away from predators. And it motivated people to seek out mates and to reproduce.

However, modern technology has amplified the effects of dopamine, leading to negative consequences. Activities such as excessive social media use, gambling, consuming alcohol, drug use, sex, pornography and gaming can stimulate dopamine release, creating cycles of addiction and compulsive behaviours.

Our dopamine levels can vary

Our brain is constantly releasing small amounts of dopamine at a “baseline” rate. This is because dopamine is crucial to the functioning of our brain and body, irrespective of pleasure.

Everyone has a different baseline, influenced by genetic factors such as our DRD2 dopamine receptor genes. Some people produce and metabolise dopamine faster than other people. Our baseline levels can also be influenced by sleep, nutrition and stress in our lives.

Given we all have a baseline of dopamine, our experience of pleasure at any given time is relative to our baseline rate and relative to what has come before.

If I play games on my phone all morning and get a dopamine release from that, then I eat something tasty for morning tea, I may not experience the same level of fulfilment or enjoyment that I would have had I not played those games.

The brain works hard to regulate itself and it won’t allow us to be in a constant state of dopamine “highs”. This means we can build a tolerance to certain exciting activities if we seek them out too much, as the brain wants to avoid being in a state of constant dopamine “highs”.

Healthy ways to get a dopamine boost

Thankfully, there are healthy, non-addictive ways to boost your dopamine levels.

Exercise is one of the most effective methods for boosting dopamine naturally. Physical activities such as walking, running, cycling, or even dancing can trigger the release of dopamine, leading to improved mood and greater motivation.

Research has shown listening to music you enjoy makes your brain release more dopamine, giving you a pleasurable experience.

And of course, spending time with people whose company we enjoy is another great way to activate dopamine.

Incorporating these habits into daily life can support your brain’s natural dopamine production and help you enjoy lasting improvements in motivation, mood and overall health.

Anastasia Hronis, Clinical Psychologist, University of Technology Sydney

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

In less than three years, artificial intelligence technology has radically changed the assessment landscape. In this time, universities have taken various approaches, from outright banning the use of generative AI, to allowing it in some circumstances, to allowing AI by default.

But some university teachers and students have reported they remain confused and anxious, unsure about what counts as “appropriate use” of AI. This has been accompanied by concerns AI is facilitating a rise in cheating.

There is also a broader question about the value of university degrees today if AI is used in student assessments.

In a new journal article, we examine current approaches to AI and assessment and ask: how should universities assess students in the age of AI?

Why ‘assessment validity’ matters

Universities have responded to the emergence of generative AI with various policies aimed at clarifying what is allowed and what is not.

For example, the United Kingdom’s University of Leeds set up a “traffic light” framework of when AI tools can be used in assessment: red means no AI, orange allows limited use, green encourages it.

For example, a “red” light on a traditional essay would indicate to students it should be written without any AI assistance at all. An “amber” marked essay would perhaps allow AI use for “idea generation” but not for writing elements. A “green” light would permit students to use AI in any way they choose.

In order to help ensure students comply with these rules, many institutions, such as the University of Melbourne, require students to declare their use of AI in a statement attached to submitted assessments.

The aim in these and similar cases is to preserve “assessment validity”. This refers to whether the assessment is measuring what we think it is measuring. Is it assessing students’ actual capabilities or learning? Or how well they use the AI? Or how much they paid to use it?

But we argue setting clear rules is not enough to maintain assessment validity.

Our paper

In a new peer-reviewed paper, we present a conceptual argument for how universities and schools can better approach AI in assessments.

We begin by making the distinction between two approaches to AI and assessment:

• discursive changes: only modify the instructions or rules around an assessment. To work, they rely on students understanding and voluntarily following directions.

• structural changes: modify the task itself. These constrain or enable behaviours by design, not by directives.

For example, telling students “you may only use AI to edit your take-home essay” is a discursive change. Changing an assessment task to include a sequence of in-class writing tasks where development is observed over time is a structural change.

Telling a student not to use AI tools when writing computer code is discursive. Developing a live, assessed conversation about the choices a student has made made is structural.

A reliance on changing the rules

In our paper, we argue most university responses to date (including traffic light frameworks and student declarations) have been discursive. They have only changed the rules around what is or isn’t allowed. They haven’t modified the assessments themselves.

We suggest only structural changes can reliably protect validity in a world where AI use means rule-breaking is increasingly undetectable.

So we need to change the task

In the age of generative AI, if we want assessments to be valid and fair, we need structural change.

Structural change means designing assessments where validity is embedded in the task itself, not outsourced to rules or student compliance.

This won’t look the same in every discipline and it won’t be easy. In some cases, it may require assessing students in very different ways from the past. But we can’t avoid the challenge by just telling students what to do and hoping for the best.

If assessment is to retain its function as a meaningful claim about student capability, it must be rethought at the level of design.

Thomas Corbin, Research fellow, Center for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning, Deakin University; Danny Liu, Professor of Educational Technologies, University of Sydney, and Phillip Dawson, Professor and Co-Director, Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning, Deakin University

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

If you live in the southern hemisphere and have been stopped in your tracks by a recent sunset, you may have noticed they seem more vibrant lately. The colours are brighter and bolder, and they linger longer in the sky.

Why are sunsets “better” at some times of the year compared to others? We can use science to explain this.

There are many ingredients for a “good” sunset, but the main three are clear skies, low humidity, and the Sun sitting low in the sky.

From light to colour

To understand why we get such vibrant sunsets in the colder months of the year, we first need to know how colours appear in the sky.

All visible light is actually energy that travels in waves; the length of those waves determines the colour that our eyes see.

Although sunlight might look white to us, it’s actually a mix of different wavelengths of light that make up all the visible colours – from fiery reds and oranges (longer wavelengths) to deep blues and purples (shorter wavelengths).

These individual colours become visible when sunlight is “scattered”, which is precisely what happens when it passes through the invisible gas molecules in Earth’s atmosphere – mostly nitrogen and oxygen.

When sunlight hits these molecules, it’s absorbed and shot back out (scattered) in different directions. Blue and violet light is scattered more strongly than red and orange light – this is also why the sky looks blue during the day.

The path of the Sun

In the middle of the day when the Sun is high in the sky, sunlight travels a more direct path through the atmosphere.

But when the Sun is closer to the horizon, the path is less direct. This means that during sunrises and sunsets, sunlight travels through more of Earth’s atmosphere. And more atmosphere means more scattering.

In fact, during sunsets, the blue and violet light encounters so many oxygen and nitrogen molecules that it is completely scattered away. What we’re left with is the longer wavelengths of light – the reds and oranges. In other words, more atmosphere means more fiery sunsets.

But why are sunsets especially magnificent during winter? One reason is the Sun’s position in the sky during different times of the year.

Earth rotates on its axis every 24 hours, giving us day and night. But this axis isn’t perfectly “upright” relative to the Sun – it’s tilted at an angle of about 23.5 degrees. This tilt is why we have seasons. The southern hemisphere is tilted towards the Sun around the start and end of the calendar year (southern summer), and away from the Sun around the middle of the year (southern winter).

Because of this tilt, the Sun sits lower in the sky during winter, which is why the days are shorter. And because the Sun sits lower, it spends more time near the horizon as it rises and sets. That’s why winter sunsets often seem to last longer.

The quality of the air

Humidity and air quality also play a big role when it comes to vibrant winter sunsets.

In winter, humidity is typically much lower than in the warmer summer months, meaning there’s less moisture in the air. Humid air often contains tiny water droplets, which can scatter incoming sunlight. This scattering is slightly different to how the oxygen and nitrogen molecules scatter light – here, even red and orange light can be affected.

When humidity is high, the extra scattering by these small water droplets can cause sunsets to appear softer or more washed out.

In drier winter air, with fewer of these water droplets in the way, sunlight can travel through the atmosphere with less interference. This means the colours can shine through more vividly, making for crisper and more vibrant sunsets.

If you’re looking to a catch a spectacular sunset, you’ll want to wait for a nice, clear winter’s evening. Cloud cover and air pollution can block the sunlight and mute the colours we see.

So the next time you find yourself wrapped up in a warm jumper at dusk, be sure to look up – there could be a spectacular light show playing out just above you.

Chloe Wilkins, Associate Lecturer and PhD Candidate, Solar Physics, University of Newcastle

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

Brian Wilson, leader, songwriter and producer of the Beach Boys, has passed away at age 82.

He leaves behind a legacy of beautiful, joyous, bittersweet and enduring music, crafted over a career spanning six decades.

While this news isn’t unexpected – Wilson was diagnosed with dementia last year and entered a conservatorship after the loss of his wife, Melinda – his passing marks the end of a long and extraordinary chapter in musical history.

A life of music

Formed in the early 1960s in Hawthorne California, the Beach Boys were built on a foundation of family and community: brothers Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson, their cousin Mike Love, and school friend Al Jardine.

Growing up, the Wilson household was a turbulent place; their father, Murry Wilson, was strict and at times violent. Music was the one way in which the family could connect.

During these early years Brian discovered the sounds that would shape his musical identity: Gershwin, doo wop groups, early rock and roll, and, a particular favourite, the vocal group the Four Freshmen, whose tight-harmony singing style Wilson studied meticulously.

It was an unexpected combination of influences for a pop band. Even from the Beach Boys’ earliest recordings – the surf, the cars, the girls – the stirrings of the complexity and musical adventurousness Wilson is known for is audible. Listen to the unexpected structure of The Lonely Sea (1962), the complex chords of The Warmth of the Sun (1963), or the subtle modulation in Don’t Worry Baby (1964).

These early innovations hinted at a growing creativity that would continue to evolve over the rest of the 1960s, and beyond.

A story of resilience

In later years, Brian Wilson often appeared publicly as a fragile figure. But what stands out most in his story is resilience.

His ability to produce such an expansive and diverse catalogue of work while navigating difficult family relationships, intense record label pressures, misdiagnosed and mistreated mental health conditions, addiction and much more, is extraordinary. Wilson not only survived, but continued to create music.

He eventually did something few Beach Boys’ fans would have imagined – he returned to the stage.

Wilson’s unexpected return to public performance during the Pet Sounds and SMiLE tours in the early 2000s began a revival interest in the Beach Boys, and a critical reconsideration of their musical legacy. This continues with a consistent release of books, documentaries, movies and podcasts about Wilson and the legacy of the Beach Boys’ music.

The focus of a thesis

I grew up near Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast in Queensland. Their early songs about an endless summer had a particular resonance to my hometown, even if, like Brian Wilson, I only admired the beach from afar.

I chose to study the Beach Boys’ music for my PhD thesis and spent the next few years charting the course of their musical development from their early days in the garage to creating Pet Sounds just five years later.

I was fascinated by how a band could create such a ground-breaking volume of work and progress so quickly from the delightful, yet wobbly Surfin’ to the complex arrangements of God Only Knows.

To understand their music, I spent years listening to Beach Boys’ tracking sessions, take after take, to hear how their songs were so cleverly and delicately put together.

What struck me just as powerfully as the music itself was the sound of Brian Wilson’s voice in those recordings. Listening to Wilson leading hours of tracking sessions was to hear an artist at the top of their game – decisive, confident, funny, collaborative and deeply driven to make music that would express the magic he heard in his mind, and connect with an audience.

One of the more unexpected discoveries in my analysis of the Beach Boys’ music came from their lyrics. Using a word frequency tool to examine all 117 songs in my study, I found that the most common word was “now”.

In many cases, it appears in a conversational sense – “Well, she got her Daddy’s car, and she cruised through the hamburger stand now” – but on a broader level, it perfectly encapsulates what Brian Wilson’s music offered so many listeners.

He created an endless present: a world where the sun could always be shining, where you could feel young forever, and you could visit that world any time you needed to.

In 2010, I had the remarkable experience of meeting Brian Wilson in his dressing room before his performance at the Enmore Theatre in Sydney. He was funny and kind. He sat at a small keyboard, taught me a harmony and for a moment, we sang Love and Mercy together.

It was one of the most magical moments of my life. It is also one of Wilson’s most enduring sentiments: “love and mercy, that’s what we need tonight”.

Farewell and thank you, Brian. Surf’s up.

Jadey O'Regan, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Music, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney

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

Imagine you’re a copper miner in southeastern Europe in the year 3900 B.C.E. Day after day you haul copper ore through the mine’s sweltering tunnels.

You’ve resigned yourself to the grueling monotony of mining life. Then one afternoon, you witness a fellow worker doing something remarkable.

With an odd-looking contraption, he casually transports the equivalent of three times his body weight on a single trip. As he returns to the mine to fetch another load, it suddenly dawns on you that your chosen profession is about to get far less taxing and much more lucrative.

What you don’t realize: You’re witnessing something that will change the course of history – not just for your tiny mining community, but for all of humanity.

Despite the wheel’s immeasurable impact, no one is certain as to who invented it, or when and where it was first conceived. The hypothetical scenario described above is based on a 2015 theory that miners in the Carpathian Mountains – in present-day Hungary – first invented the wheel nearly 6,000 years ago as a means to transport copper ore.

The theory is supported by the discovery of more than 150 miniaturized wagons by archaeologists working in the region. These pint-sized, four-wheeled models were made from clay, and their outer surfaces were engraved with a wickerwork pattern reminiscent of the basketry used by mining communities at the time. Carbon dating later revealed that these wagons are the earliest known depictions of wheeled transport to date.

This theory also raises a question of particular interest to me, an aerospace engineer who studies the science of engineering design. How did an obscure, scientifically naive mining society discover the wheel, when highly advanced civilizations, such as the ancient Egyptians, did not?

A controversial idea

It has long been assumed that wheels evolved from simple wooden rollers. But until recently no one could explain how or why this transformation took place. What’s more, beginning in the 1960s, some researchers started to express strong doubts about the roller-to-wheel theory.

After all, for rollers to be useful, they require flat, firm terrain and a path free of inclines and sharp curves. Furthermore, once the cart passes them, used rollers need to be continually brought around to the front of the line to keep the cargo moving. For all these reasons, the ancient world used rollers sparingly. According to the skeptics, rollers were too rare and too impractical to have been the starting point for the evolution of the wheel.

But a mine – with its enclosed, human-made passageways – would have provided favorable conditions for rollers. This factor, among others, compelled my team to revisit the roller hypothesis.

A turning point

The transition from rollers to wheels requires two key innovations. The first is a modification of the cart that carries the cargo. The cart’s base must be outfitted with semicircular sockets, which hold the rollers in place. This way, as the operator pulls the cart, the rollers are pulled along with it.

This innovation may have been motivated by the confined nature of the mine environment, where having to periodically carry used rollers back around to the front of the cart would have been especially onerous.

The discovery of socketed rollers represented a turning point in the evolution of the wheel and paved the way for the second and most important innovation. This next step involved a change to the rollers themselves. To understand how and why this change occurred, we turned to physics and computer-aided engineering.

Simulating the wheel’s evolution

To begin our investigation, we created a computer program designed to simulate the evolution from a roller to a wheel. Our hypothesis was that this transformation was driven by a phenomenon called “mechanical advantage.” This same principle allows pliers to amplify a user’s grip strength by providing added leverage. Similarly, if we could modify the shape of the roller to generate mechanical advantage, this would amplify the user’s pushing force, making it easier to advance the cart.

Our algorithm worked by modeling hundreds of potential roller shapes and evaluating how each one performed, both in terms of mechanical advantage and structural strength. The latter was used to determine whether a given roller would break under the weight of the cargo. As predicted, the algorithm ultimately converged upon the familiar wheel-and-axle shape, which it determined to be optimal.

During the execution of the algorithm, each new design performed slightly better than its predecessor. We believe a similar evolutionary process played out with the miners 6,000 years ago.

It is unclear what initially prompted the miners to explore alternative roller shapes. One possibility is that friction at the roller-socket interface caused the surrounding wood to wear away, leading to a slight narrowing of the roller at the point of contact. Another theory is that the miners began thinning out the rollers so that their carts could pass over small obstructions on the ground.

Either way, thanks to mechanical advantage, this narrowing of the axle region made the carts easier to push. As time passed, better-performing designs were repeatedly favoured over the others, and new rollers were crafted to mimic these top performers.

Consequently, the rollers became more and more narrow, until all that remained was a slender bar capped on both ends by large discs. This rudimentary structure marks the birth of what we now refer to as “the wheel.”

According to our theory, there was no precise moment at which the wheel was invented. Rather, just like the evolution of species, the wheel emerged gradually from an accumulation of small improvements.

This is just one of the many chapters in the wheel’s long and ongoing evolution. More than 5,000 years after the contributions of the Carpathian miners, a Parisian bicycle mechanic invented radial ball bearings, which once again revolutionized wheeled transportation.

Ironically, ball bearings are conceptually identical to rollers, the wheel’s evolutionary precursor. Ball bearings form a ring around the axle, creating a rolling interface between the axle and the wheel hub, thereby circumventing friction. With this innovation, the evolution of the wheel came full circle.

This example also shows how the wheel’s evolution, much like its iconic shape, traces a circuitous path – one with no clear beginning, no end, and countless quiet revolutions along the way.

Kai James, Professor of Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology

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

Everyone has heard of Nasa, a name synonymous with every aspect of space exploration. Yet talk about Esa, the European Space Agency, is more likely to result in a blank stare.

Esa is not such a highly recognised brand, yet it has been central to the development of space exploration and to space science in Europe, delivering world class science at the frontiers of knowledge and allowing the continent to compete commercially with the wider world.

Europe compares favourably with the US on the level of space science it delivers, and Esa has sometimes “gone boldly” where even Nasa has not. Now that Esa has turned 50 years old, it’s a good time to look at the organisation’s history, celebrate its achievements and look towards the future of European space in its hands.

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As an agency, Esa is completely unique. While all other space agencies are federal in nature, funded directly by the government to which they belong, Esa is more like a club. European countries form the club’s membership and each pays a contribution, based on gross domestic product (GDP), to cover the cost of activities.

Esa has its origins in two separate agencies, one to develop a launch system, the European Launch Development Organisation (Eldo) and a second to develop spacecraft, the European Space Research Organisation (Esro). These came into existence in 1964, when the conventions governing them were signed.

Esro was hugely successful, establishing itself as a leader in space exploration, but Eldo had many political, cost and technological challenges.

As a result, Eldo was downsized and merged with Esro to form Esa in 1975, with ten founding members: Belgium, Germany, Denmark, France, United Kingdom, Italy, The Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and Spain. Ireland joined later that year. The membership has continued to expand alongside the enlargement of the European Union, although not all Esa members are part of the EU and vice versa. Fortunately for the UK, withdrawal from the EU did not mean leaving Esa.

At present, Esa has 23 member states, three associate members and cooperation agreements with five others, including Canada. The enormous diversity of membership of Esa makes it a complex organisation.

It is led by a council and a director general. The council represents the member states (with Canada also having seat on council). The director general is appointed by the council to represent the agency in the delivery of the programme. They oversee the agency’s various functions in space such as human spaceflight, Earth observation and space science.

About every three years, the council meets at ministerial level to consider funding, agree budgets for the following three-year period and set the direction of travel for the agency. The focus on representation and input from member states allows for wide engagement between Esa and the space community at-large. However, the price of this “democracy” can sometimes be seen in bureaucratic processes.

Measuring the contribution of Esa is not straightforward across the complexities of the organisation, but some benefits and successes are very clear. A relatively small country, like the UK, could never deliver science on the scale and scope of an organisation like Nasa. Membership of Esa allows us to join with other countries to compete at this level.

Europe has an independent ability to launch satellites into space in the form of the Arianespace company, which was created by Esa and the French space agency (Cnes). Esa also has an astronaut programme and access to the International Space Station, with the agency having provided part of the space station’s structure. The agency has leading space, planetary and Earth observation science programmes.

Scientists, companies and the public in member states benefit from all the investment in Esa. Esa has also had some unique successes. It was the first space agency to land a probe on an icy moon, Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, and on a comet.

Esa’s Copernicus Earth observation programme uses satellites to monitor the health of our planet, helping understand climate change and supporting the lives of individuals through improvements to agriculture and air pollution. In space science, the Gaia mission has provided a high precision map of our galaxy, revolutionising our knowledge in every area of astronomy.

Esa’s success has been built on thoughtful and regular planning. In the next few years, we will see Esa land a rover on Mars, to search of evidence of life. Large new space observatories are under development to study gravitational waves and X-rays from the Universe.

We are about to embark on the next phase of space science, called “Voyage 2050”. This will look towards landing on an icy moon in the outer solar system in search of a sub surface ocean and possible life within it.

Esa is not a perfect organisation. Its wide membership can make it challenging to organise projects and take decisions about the direction of the agency. However, it is not subject to the whim of any single government, and it offers a stable backdrop to space activities across Europe.

Without it, our economies, social capital and science programmes would be poorer. Therefore, I would like to toast Esa on its 50th birthday, say thanks for all it has given me as a space scientist throughout my career and wish it an amazing future.

Martin Barstow, Professor of Astrophysics and Space Science, University of Leicester

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

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has taken centre stage across various industries. From AI-generated art to chatbots in customer service, every sector is seemingly poised for disruption.

It’s not just in your news feed every day – venture capital is pouring in, while CEOs are eager to declare their companies “AI-first”. But for those who remember the lofty promises of other technologies that have since faded from memory, there’s an uncanny sense of déjà vu.

In 2017, it was blockchain that promised to transform every industry. Companies added “blockchain” to their name and watched stock prices skyrocket, regardless of whether the technology was actually used, or how.

Now, a similar trend is emerging with AI. What’s unfolding is not just a wave of innovation, but a textbook example of a tech hype cycle. We’ve been here many times before.

Understanding the hype cycle

The tech hype cycle, first defined by the research firm Gartner, describes how emerging technologies rise on a wave of inflated promises and expectations, crash into disillusionment and, eventually, find a more realistic and useful application.

Recognising the signs of this cycle is crucial. It helps in distinguishing between genuine technological shifts and passing fads driven by speculative investment and good marketing.

It can also mean the difference between making a good business decision and a very costly mistake. Meta, for example, invested more than US$40 billion into the metaverse idea while seemingly chasing their own manufactured tech hype, only to abandon it later.

When buzz outpaces reality

In 2017, blockchain was everyone’s focus. Presented as a revolutionary technology, blockchain offered a decentralised way to record and verify transactions, unlike traditional systems that rely on central authorities or databases.

US soft drinks company Long Island Iced Tea Corporation became Long Blockchain Corporation and saw its stock rise 400% overnight, despite having no blockchain product. Kodak launched a vague cryptocurrency called KodakCoin, sending its stock price soaring.

These developments were less about innovation and more about speculation, chasing short-term gains driven by hype. Most blockchain projects never delivered real value. Companies rushed in, driven by fear of missing out and the promise of technological transformation.

But the tech wasn’t ready, and the solutions it supposedly offered were often misaligned with real industry problems. Companies tried everything, from tracking pet food ingredients on blockchain, to launching loyalty programs with crypto tokens, often without clear benefits or better alternatives.

In the end, about 90% of enterprise blockchain solutions failed by mid-2019.

The generative AI déjà vu

Fast-forward to 2023, and the same pattern started playing out with AI. Digital media company BuzzFeed saw its stock jump more than 100% after announcing it would use AI to generate quizzes and content. Financial services company Klarna replaced 700 workers with an AI chatbot, claiming it could handle millions of customer queries.

The results were mostly negative. Klarna soon saw a decline in customer satisfaction and had to walk back its strategy, rehiring humans for customer support this year. BuzzFeed’s AI content push failed to save its struggling business, and its news division later shut down. Tech media company CNET published AI-generated articles riddled with errors, damaging its credibility.

These are not isolated incidents. They’re signals that AI, like blockchain, was being over hyped.

Why do companies chase tech hype?

There are three main forces at play: inflated expectations, short-term view and flawed implementation. Tech companies, under pressure from investors and media narratives, overpromise what AI can do.

Leaders pitch vague and utopian concepts of “transformation” without the infrastructure or planning to back them up. And many rush to implement, riding the hype wave.

They are often hindered by a short-term view of what alignment with the new tech hype can do for their company, ignoring the potential downsides. They roll out untested systems, underestimate complexity or even the necessity, and hope that novelty alone will drive the return on investment.

The result is often disappointment – not because the technology lacks potential, but because it’s applied too broadly, too soon, and with too little planning and oversight.

Where to from here?

Like blockchain, AI is a legitimate technological innovation with real, transformative potential.

Often, these technologies simply need time to find the right application. While the initial blockchain hype has faded, the technology has found a practical niche in areas like “asset tokenization” within financial markets. This allows assets like real estate or company shares to be represented by digital tokens on the blockchain, enabling easier, faster and cheaper trading.

The same pattern can be expected with generative AI. The current AI hype cycle appears to be tapering off, and the consequences of rushed or poorly thought-out implementations will likely become more visible in the coming years.

However, this decline in hype doesn’t signal the end of generative AI’s relevance. Rather, it marks the beginning of a more grounded phase where the technology can find the most suitable applications.

One of the clearest takeaways so far is that AI should be used to enhance human productivity, not replace it. From people pushing back against the use of AI to replace them, to AI making frequent and costly mistakes, human oversight paired with AI-enhanced productivity is increasingly seen as the most likely path forward.

Recognising the patterns of tech hype is essential for making smarter decisions. Instead of rushing to adopt every new innovation based on inflated promises, a measured, problem-driven approach leads to more meaningful outcomes.

Long-term success comes from thoughtful experimentation, implementation, and clear purpose, not from chasing trends or short-term gains. Hype should never dictate strategy; real value lies in solving real problems.

Gediminas Lipnickas, Lecturer in Marketing, University of South Australia

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

You may have come across those “what I eat in a day” videos on social media, where people – usually conventionally attractive influencers wearing activewear – list everything they consumed that day.

They might seem like harmless fun but in fact they can reinforce dangerous ideas about food, weight and body image.

I’ve worked with people with eating disorders who watch these videos and have seen first hand how harmful this content can be.

Here’s what the research says and what you need to know.

Videos that promote ‘health’ can be unhealthy

“What I eat in a day” videos have been popular for over a decade, with views reaching in the billions.

They target both men and women and many claim to promote health and nutrition. Yet videos such as these can do more harm than good.

Very few of these creators have formal qualifications in health or nutrition, increasing the potential for misinformation.

They often depict low calorie diets, exclude entire food groups or promote “clean eating” (a problematic idea at best).

Some even encourage dangerous behaviours such as skipping meals, eating very little or using laxatives to purge food.

They can also send harmful messages about body image. Many such videos use beauty filters to create images promoting unrealistic body ideals.

These videos often feature shots of how the person looks from the front, the side, in the gym, and in tight, form-fitting clothes. There may even be some “before and after” weight loss pics, sending the harmful message this should be everyone’s goal.

The subtext is clear: “eat what I eat in a day and you can look like me”.

But that’s not just a dangerous idea – it’s a totally false and erroneous one.

Knowing what a certain person “eats in a day” doesn’t mean you’ll look like them if you follow their lead.

In fact, a 24-hour rundown of one person’s food intake doesn’t even provide accurate information about that person’s nutritional health – let alone yours.

You are not them

Like our health, our nutritional needs are unique to us and can vary day to day.

What constitutes a “healthy” choice for one person might be totally different for another depending on things such as:

• genetics
• environment
• age
• what we enjoy eating
• how much energy we use and
• our medical history.

Links between health and diet are best examined over time, not in a single day.

Basing our food intake on a brief snapshot of what someone else eats is unlikely to lead to better health. It might leave you worse off overall.

5 ways these videos can affect mental health

What we watch online can affect our mood, behaviour and body image.

Alarm bells should ring if you frequently see these videos and notice you’re doing or experiencing these five things:

1. disordered eating. Eating less than your body needs, skipping meals, cutting out entire food groups, binge eating and purging are all signs of disordered eating that can lead to serious mental health problems such as eating disorders

2. low mood. Watching videos promoting low-calorie diets can worsen our mood; you might find yourself feeling deflated after comparing yourself to others (or rather, to the version of themselves they promote online)

3. poor body image. Research shows watching “what I eat in a day” videos can leave people feeling worse about their bodies and appreciating them less

4. obsessive thinking and anxiety. Obsessing over the “perfect” diet can increase anxiety about food and eating. Diets that encourage a very detailed approach to nutrition – including breaking meals down into components such as carbohydrates and proteins or weighing food – can further fuel obsessive thoughts

5. narrow life focus. Having your social media feed filled with these types of videos can create an overemphasis on the importance of food, eating and body image on your self-worth. This ultimately affects your health and wellbeing.

OK, so what can I do?

If you’re encountering “what I eat in a day” videos often and find they’re affecting your mood, eating behaviour or sense of self-worth you can try to:

• understand that these videos are not tailored to your individual health or nutritional needs and that many contain harmful messaging
• avoid engaging with videos that promote disordered eating, idealised beauty standards or that make you feel bad after you watch them
• unfollow accounts that regularly post such videos, or tap “not interested” on the TikTok video to stop the algorithm showing you more of them
• balance your social media feed with content focused on other areas of life besides food and eating (such as art, design, animals, books, sports or travel). Fill your feed with interests that improve your personal sense of wellbeing
• consider taking regular breaks from social media and seeing if you feel better overall.

If you do want to view posts about food, seek out creators attempting to buck these negative trends by focusing more on fun and taste.

And if you’re experiencing low mood, disordered eating or body image issues, seek help from your local GP. They can connect you with practitioners who provide evidence-based therapies such as cognitive behavioural therapy.

If you have a history of an eating disorder or suspect you may have one, you can contact the Butterfly Foundation’s national helpline on 1800 334 673 (or via their online chat).

Ultimately, “what I eat in a day” videos aren’t really helpful. They contain very little useful information to guide your health or nutritional goals.

If you are considering making changes to your diet, it’s important to consult a qualified professional, such as an accredited practising dietitian, who can learn about your situation and monitor any risks.

Catherine Houlihan, Senior Lecturer in Clinical Psychology, University of the Sunshine Coast

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

For two centuries, scholars have sparred over the roots of the Piasts, Poland’s first documented royal house, who reigned from the 10th to the 14th centuries.

Were they local Slavic nobles, Moravian exiles, or warriors from Scandinavia?

Since 2023, a series of genetic and environmental studies led by molecular biologist Marek Figlerowicz at the Poznań University of Technology has delivered a stream of direct evidence about these enigmatic rulers, bringing the debate onto firmer ground.

Digging up the dynasty

Field teams have now opened more than a dozen crypts from the Piast era. The largest single haul came from Płock Cathedral in what is now central Poland.

The exhumed bones were dated between 1100 and 1495, matching written records. Genetic analysis showed several individuals were close relatives.

“There is no doubt we are dealing with genuine Piasts,” Figlerowicz told a May 2025 conference.

The Poznań group isolated readable DNA from 33 individuals (30 men and three women) believed to span the dynasty’s full timeline.

Surprise on the Y chromosome

The male skeletons almost all carry a single, rare group of genetic variants on the Y chromosome (which is only carried and passed down by males). This group is today found mainly in Britain. The closest known match belongs to a Pict buried in eastern Scotland in the 5th or 6th century.

These results imply that the dynasty’s paternal line arrived from the vicinity of the North Atlantic, not nearby.

The date of that arrival is still open: the founding clan could have migrated centuries before the first known Piast, Mieszko I (who died in 992), or perhaps only a generation earlier through a dynastic marriage. Either way, the new data kill the notion of an unbroken local male lineage.

Yet genetics also shows deep local continuity in the wider population. A separate survey of Iron Age cemeteries across Poland, published in Scientific Reports, revealed that people living 2,000 years ago already shared the genetic makeup seen in early Piast subjects.

Another project that sequenced pre-Piast burials drew the same conclusion: local Poles were part of the broader continental gene pool stretching from Denmark to France.

In short, even if the Piasts were exotic rulers, they governed a long-established community.

A swamp tells its tale

While the DNA work progressed, another Poznań team dug into the history of the local environment via samples from the peaty floor of Lake Lednica near Poznań, the island-ringed stronghold often dubbed the cradle of the Piast realm.

Their study of buried pollen, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows an abrupt switch in the 9th century: oak and lime pollen plummet, while cereal and pasture indicators soar. Traces of charcoal and soot point to widespread fires.

The authors call the shift an “ecological revolution”, driven by slash-and-burn agriculture and the need to feed concentrated garrisons of soldiers guarding local trade routes carrying amber and slaves.

Modelling boom and bust

Using this environmental data, historians and complexity scientists constructed a feedback model of population, silver paid as tribute to rulers, and fort-building. As fields expanded, tributes rose; as tributes rose, chiefs could hire more labour to clear more forest and build forts.

The model reproduces the startling build-out of ramparts at Poznań, Giecz and Gniezno around 990. It also predicts collapse once the silver stopped flowing.

Pollen data indeed show the woodlands recovered to some extent after 1070, while archaeological surveys record abandoned hamlets and shrinking garrisons.

The early Piast state rode a resource boom as the Piasts controlled part of the amber and slave trade routes that linked the shores of the Baltic Sea to Rome.

The impact of Mieszko’s conversion to Christianity on that lucrative trade remains subject to scholarly debate.

Reconciling foreigners and locals

How do these strands fit together? Evidence of a Scottish man in the Piast paternal line does not necessarily imply a foreign conquest. Dynasties spread by marriages as well as by swords.

For example, Świętosława (the sister of the first Piast king, Bolesław the Brave), married the kings of both Denmark and Sweden, and her descendants ruled England for a time. The networks of Europe’s nobility were highly mobile.

Conversely, the stable genetic profile of ordinary folk suggests that, whoever sat on the ducal bench, most people remained where their grandparents had farmed.

The broader research engine

None of this work happens in isolation. Poland’s National Science Centre has bankrolled a 24-person team across archaeology, palaeoecology and bioinformatics since 2014, generating 16 peer-reviewed papers and a public database of ancient genomes.

Conferences at Lednica and Dziekanowice now bring historians and molecular biologists to the same table. The methodological pay-off is clear: Polish labs can now process their own ancient DNA rather than exporting it to Copenhagen or Leipzig.

What still puzzles researchers

Three questions remain. First, does that British-leaning male line really start with a Pict? The closest known match to the Piasts may change as new burials are sequenced.

Second, how many commoners carried the same genetic variant? Spot samples from Kowalewko and Brzeg hint that it was rare among locals, but the data set is small.

Third, why did the silver dry up so fast? Numismatists suspect a shift in Viking routes after 1000 AD, yet the matter is far from settled.

A balanced verdict

Taken together, the evidence paints a nuanced picture. The Piasts were probably not ethnic Slavs in the strict paternal sense, yet they ruled, and soon resembled, an overwhelmingly Slavic realm.

Their meteoric rise owed less to outsider brilliance than to the chance alignment of fertile soils, cheap labour, and an export boom in amber and captives.

As geneticists conduct more DNA sequencing of remains, such as those of princes in crypts at Kraków’s Wawel castle, and palaeoecologists push their lakebed pollen samples back to 7th century, we can expect further surprises.

Darius von Guttner Sporzynski, Historian, Australian Catholic University

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

Since the late 19th century, sauropod dinosaurs (long-necks like Brontosaurus and Brachiosaurus) have been almost universally regarded as herbivores, or plant eaters.

However, until recently, no direct evidence – in the form of fossilised gut contents – had been found to support this.

I was one of the palaeontologists on a dinosaur dig in outback Queensland, Australia, that unearthed “Judy”: an exceptional sauropod specimen with the fossilised remains of its last meal in its abdomen.

In a new paper published today in Current Biology, we describe these gut contents while also revealing that Judy is the most complete sauropod, and the first with fossilised skin, ever found in Australia.

Remarkably preserved, Judy helps to shed light on the feeding habits of the largest land-living animals of all time.

Plant-eating land behemoths

Sauropod dinosaurs dominated Earth’s landscapes for the entire 130 million years of the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. Along with many other species, they died out in the mass extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous 66 million years ago.

Ever since the first reasonably complete sauropod skeletons were found in the 1870s, the hypothesis that they were herbivores has rarely been contested. Simply put, it is hard to envisage sauropods eating anything other than plants.

Their relatively simple teeth were not adapted for tearing flesh or crushing bone. Their small brains and ponderous pace would have prevented them from outsmarting or outpacing most potential prey.

And to sustain their huge bodies, sauropods would have had to eat regularly and often, necessitating an abundant and reliable food source – plants.

Although the general body plan of sauropods seems pretty uniform – stocky, on all fours, with long necks – these behemoths did vary when we look more closely.

Some had squared-off snouts with tiny, rapidly replaced teeth confined to the front of the mouth. Others had rounded snouts, with much more robust teeth, arranged in a row that extended farther back in the mouth. Neck length varied greatly (with some necks up to 15 metres long), as did neck flexibility. In addition, a few of them had taller shoulders than hips.

Absolute size varied too – some were less enormous than others. All of these factors would have constrained how high above ground each species could feed and which plants they could reach.

Food in the belly

Sauropod discoveries are becoming more regular in outback Queensland, thanks largely to the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum in Winton.

In 2017, I helped the museum unearth a roughly 95-million-year-old sauropod, nicknamed Judy after the museum’s co-founder Judy Elliott.

We soon realised this find was extraordinary. Besides being the most complete sauropod skeleton and skin ever found in Australia, Judy’s belly region hosted a strange rock layer. It was about two square metres in area and ten centimetres thick on average, chock-full of fossil plants.

The fact this plant-rich layer was confined to Judy’s abdomen and located on the inside surface of the fossil skin, made us wonder – had we unearthed the remains of Judy’s last meal or meals?

If so, we knew we had something special on our hands: the first sauropod gut contents ever found.

Multi-level feeding

Analysis of Judy’s skeleton, which was prepared out of the surrounding rock by volunteers in the museum’s laboratory, enabled us to classify her as a Diamantinasaurus matildae.

We scanned portions of Judy’s gut contents with X-rays at the Australian Synchrotron in Melbourne and at CSIRO in Perth, and with neutrons at Australia’s Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation in Sydney.

This enabled us to digitally visualise the plants – which were preserved as voids within the rock – without destroying them.

We did destructively sample some small portions of the gut contents to figure out their chemical make-up, along with the skin and surrounding rock.

This revealed the gut contents were turned to stone by microbes in an acidic environment (stomach juices, perhaps), with minerals likely derived from the decomposition of Judy’s own body tissues.

Judy’s gut contents confirm that sauropods ate their greens but barely chewed them – their gut flora did most of the digestive work.

Most importantly, we can tell Judy ate bracts from conifers (relatives of modern monkey puzzle trees and redwoods), seed pods from extinct seed ferns, and leaves from angiosperms (flowering plants) just before she died.

Conifers then, as now, would have been huge, implying Judy fed well above ground level. By contrast, flowering plants were mostly low-growing in the mid-Cretaceous.

Based on other specimens (especially teeth), scientists previously thought Diamantinasaurus browsed plants relatively high off the ground. The conifer bracts in Judy’s belly support this.

However, Judy was not fully grown when she died, and the angiosperms in her belly imply lower-level feeding, as well. It seems likely, then, that the diets of some sauropods changed slightly as they grew. Nevertheless, they were life-long vegetarians.

Judy’s skin and gut contents are now on display at the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum in Winton. I’m not sure how I’d feel about having the remains of my last meal publicly exhibited for all to see posthumously, but if it helped the cause of science, I think I’d be OK with it.

Stephen Poropat, Research Associate, School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Curtin University

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

Released 50 years ago, Sunday Too Far Away deals episodically with a group of shearers led by Foley (Jack Thompson), and the events leading up to the national shearers’ strike of 1956.

The shearers are a ragtag group held together by rum, unionism and competitiveness – as Foley must deal with the camp cook from hell, as well as a threat to his “gun” status.

As we celebrate the anniversary, it is hard to overstate its importance for the Australian film industry and for its producer, the South Australian Film Corporation (SAFC).

The beginnings of a funding body

After the Liberal and Country League had held control over the state government for 32 years under a “Playmander”, named for premier Thomas Playford, the Labor party, lead by Don Dunstan, was elected in 1970 on a progressive platform.

As part of Dunstan’s project of moving the state’s economy away from its Playford-era reliance on manufacturing to more knowledge-based service industries, the SAFC was founded in 1972.

Central to Dunstan’s plan was the imperative that the SAFC should produce feature films – despite an initial consultant’s report that advised against this.

Dunstan’s plan was visionary, making South Australia the first state government to directly produce features. But it was also flawed.

The Dunstan government authorised the SAFC to borrow A$400,000 (approximately $5 million in 2025 money) for the production of up to five features per year, with the remainder of the budgets coming from Commonwealth funds and private investors.

The plan was that the SAFC’s productions would be self-supporting within five years, with the initial pump-priming loans repaid.

By 1973 a slate of features was in the works, though none would reach production.

One of these was Gallipoli, to be made in conjunction with Melbourne-based Crawford Productions, with screenwriter John Dingwell attached.

The film was shelved, but Dingwell maintained his relationship with Matt Carroll, the SAFC’s head of feature production. They developed a script titled Shearers, based on anecdotes from one of Dingwell’s relatives.

Sunday Too Far Away (as the film was retitled) was budgeted at $231,000, with the Commonwealth Government’s Australian Film Development Corporation, established in 1970 to invest in local films, providing half this figure.

An ‘emotional experience’

Gil Brealey, the SAFC’s first CEO, was desperate to get a feature started and was prepared to find the whole of the budget if necessary. (The SAFC would put up an additional $14,000 in budget overruns caused by wet weather in the semi-arid locations around Port Augusta and Quorn.)

It was a remarkable demonstration of maximum involvement by a government body intent on intervening dramatically to generate a production industry in a state that would otherwise lose out to the larger states on the eastern seaboard.

At the recent 50th anniversary screening hosted by the SAFC, producer Matt Carroll referred to the film shoot as “an extraordinary emotional experience” for all involved, stressing the strong camaraderie among the actors, which mirrored that of the shearers in the film.

It is useful to compare Sunday to 1971’s Wake in Fright.

Both centre on rural male mateship, but while Wake in Fright is revolted by it, Sunday strives for an elegiac celebration that might have drawn from Henry Lawson, of union-based mateship as the only defence again the harshness of life.

Fraught politics

Brealey and the SAFC were functioning under enormous political pressure for this film to be not only a critical, but also a popular success.

From the outset, the SAFC had been identified with Dunstan, and it was under almost daily attack in Parliament, led by Liberal frontbencher Stan Evans.

Quoted in the Adelaide Advertiser in May 1975, Evans denounced the SAFC “for actively producing and manufacturing films when its role under the Act precluded it from this field”.

He was joined in these attacks by elements of the local press, as well as a handful of filmmakers who felt slighted by talent imported by Brealey.

The board was forced to issue a statement, complaining of

a very small vocal minority who, apparently, find the success of the corporation personally offensive and make every effort to ‘knock’ its work.

The acceptance of the film into the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, the first Australian film bestowed the honour, was a godsend. It went on to win eight of the 12 awards on offer at the Australian Film Institute Awards.

Brealey wryly told me that “we had this appalling reputation in Adelaide and everyone else thought we were marvellous”.

The film renaissance

In order to shore up its local standing, the SAFC ran a film day at the Adelaide Festival Centre, culminating in a “world premiere” of Sunday attended by Gough Whitlam.

The next day, the SAFC released the film itself in Adelaide, hiring the Warner cinema where it ran for 26 weeks under an arrangement that gave the producer the entire gross, less the exhibitor’s expenses.

Brealey was extremely suspicious of Australian distributors. Roadshow distributed the film throughout the rest of Australia. By October, they were reporting box office grosses of over $182,000 – though the SAFC had only received $11,000 in returns.

The bitter lesson was that SAFC had clearly been founded on overly optimistic expectations of returns to producers. Feature production in Australia would need on-going government support.

The success of Sunday Too Far Away, followed closely by Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Storm Boy (1976) succeeded in establishing the SAFC as a prime mover in Australian film.

Locally, it won bipartisan local support for the SAFC and nationally it established a model for emulation by other states.

It demonstrated that Australian films could combine local and international appeal, and that government agencies had a vital role at the heart of the film renaissance.

Michael Walsh, Associate Professor, Screen and Media, Flinders University

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

Was Jane Austen the first writer to show how it really feels to be a middle-aged woman?

Before Austen, literature’s iconic perimenopausal woman was the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, who regales the medieval pilgrims with a scandalous account of her five marriages, including the fact she enjoyed sex with her last husband despite a 20-year age gap.

It’s very All Fours (Miranda July’s wildly popular midlife crisis novel from 2024). The Wife of Bath is charismatic and original, but not hugely sympathetic. Then there’s Gertrude in Hamlet, another middle-aged lady with a vibrant sex life and an ambivalent attitude to her adult son.

Micro-portraits of women of a certain age – foggy, tired, rather bad-tempered, with diminishing bone-density, putting on the pounds – are scattered across Jane Austen’s six finished novels.

Lady Bertram in Mansfield Park sits on the sofa all day “thinking more of her pug than her children”. And there’s Mrs Musgrove in Persuasion, whose “large fat sighings” for her dead son, and her tendency to talk too much, amuse Anne Eliot. Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice is the most flamboyant of these middle-aged women: irritating but hugely alive and oddly sexy, determined to stay in the game socially, if only by way of her five daughters.

Alongside these vignettes, Austen makes us think about why realist novels, as a genre, resist paying close attention to the uncomfortable transitional period of menopause for women. Why, in other words, so many 18th and 19th-century novels left many of the crucial parts of women’s lives unseen.

‘Menopausal bore’ Miss Bates

Her situation should secure your compassion. It was badly done, indeed! You, whom she had known from an infant, whom she had seen grow up from a period when her notice was an honour, to have you now, in thoughtless spirits, and the pride of the moment, laugh at her, humble her …

Austen fans will quickly recognise this passage as Emma Woodhouse’s most shaming moment. Mr. Knightly is scolding Emma after their ill-fated outing to Box Hill, where she has impulsively and cruelly ridiculed their older friend and neighbour, Miss Bates.

Miss Bates is an ordinary middle-aged woman, childless and unmarried. She has very little money and is caring for her “failing mother”. Emma has made a mean joke about Miss Bates being boring. The older woman catches her drift and is flustered and hurt. It’s an excruciatingly recognisable moment in which Emma oversteps the mark to score cheap points and impress the other young people. Mr. Knightly points out, none too compassionately, Emma’s failure of compassion.

But the thing is: Emma’s right. What makes Miss Bates an important character is that she is entirely unimportant, or as Austen tells us early on: “a woman neither young, handsome, rich, nor married.” Miss Bates is a menopausal bore. But Austen’s brilliant stroke was to make her the moral centre of gravity in Emma.

Miss Bates is a stealth proxy for Austen herself, who was born into a well educated but relatively poor family. She was one of eight children with a clergyman father who had no independent income. Austen knew that without marrying well she would face an adult life of genteel impoverishment, dependent on charity from wealthier brothers. She knew she was headed for Miss Bates’ fate, caring for an ailing mother, with very little money.

I felt a pang for Miss Bates when I first read Emma in my late teens. Now, in middle age, I see a whole life and person in the few scenes Austen gives us. Miss Bates belongs to a cluster of Austen’s characters who are liable to distraction and poor health, who are overwrought and anxious and manage social interactions unskillfully. For many of these women, their children have grown up, their husbands are elderly, or they’re unmarried and childless.

They’re confronting what it will mean to grow old and infirm in Regency England.

But I can see why Emma forgets to feel compassion for Miss Bates and her plight. Novels didn’t generally ask readers to think deeply about these marginal female characters, down on their luck and too old to be interesting to the plot. Indeed, Miss Bates is the kind of character novels discouraged readers from paying much attention to.

The continuing ‘rage for Jane’

It’s the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth this year, and if anything, the rage for Jane has increased. Last year, there was the charming new film Jane Austen Wrecked My Life. A Netflix adaptation of Pride and Prejudice is in production, written by Dolly Alderton, and starring Emma Corrin and Jack Lowden (Slow Horses), with Olivia Coleman as Mrs Bennet.

But we’ve stayed fixated on the unlikely couplings and happy endings, overlooking what those endings owe to the women whose stories never take centre stage. When we read Austen’s novels for their stories, we see a densely textured and non-conformist landscape of very different lives and experiences.

Austen paid attention to the women novels had been invented to ignore, allowing readers to see their thoughts far more clearly. She made them relatable, endowing them with the vulnerability that came from us being able to see they wanted things they couldn’t have.

These women often remain at the edges of the action. Miss Bates in Emma, of course. Mrs. Smith in Persuasion, just a few years older than the heroine Anne Elliot, in vastly different circumstances.

Austen makes it clear Mrs. Smith is of no use to a marriage plot, since she is “a widow and poor […] living in a very humble way, unable even to afford herself the comfort of a servant, and of course almost excluded from society.” But again, Austen presents Mrs Smith as worthy of the reader’s attention because of “that elasticity of mind, that disposition to be comforted, that power of turning readily from evil to good, and of finding employment which carried her out of herself”, which give her inner strength.

And younger women who don’t fit the patterns and requirements of marriage novels are shown with a complexity usually missing from the genre. Colonel Brandon’s ward Eliza, in Sense and Sensibility, falls pregnant out of wedlock, and Austen encourages readers to feel compassion and understand her situation, although Eliza’s social world has judged her harshly.

Mary Bennet, the least charming and playful sister in Pride and Prejudice, is nerdy, coded as possibly neurodivergent or queer: she avoids social gatherings, studies all the time and takes no pleasure in male company. She’s also called Mary, suggesting an echo with the radical feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote a decade before Austen.

When Lydia describes a fun afternoon riding in the coach, Mary replies dourly,

Far be it from me, my dear sister, to depreciate such pleasures. They would doubtless be congenial with the generality of female minds. But I confess they would have no charms for me.

Austen could have scorned Mary Bennet for being a bluestocking, but instead her vulnerability elicits compassion because she can’t fit in to the social world thrust upon her.

Austen’s capacity to depict vulnerable women clearly, even if only fleetingly, is one of her greatest achievements as a writer. And it’s the moral gravity and visibility of characters on the social and sexual margins of Austen’s novels that gives happier, more normcore characters and stories their heft.

There’s a whole gallery of characters in Austen novels who are NPCs (non-player characters) from the viewpoint of the marriage plots, but who are struggling with many of the same feelings as the main players. Sometimes Austen writes these characters for laughs, but there’s always a moment where we see them laid bare, exposed, wanting something they can’t have, soliciting our compassion.

Mrs. Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice, is depicted as erotically alive and probably still quite attractive in her mid 40s – which we know because she’s quite flirty with the young men and socially confident. She’s vulgar and embarrassing, but that’s partly because she has middle-aged desires, which her daughters don’t like.

There’s a moment late in the novel where Lizzie sees that her father exposes her mother to repeated social humiliation by not bothering to help out. Our sense of Mrs. Bennet changes completely. But fascinating as the Bennets’ middle-aged marital dynamic might be, it stays on the margins of the story. Novels were not created to accommodate later-life longings and hormonally driven mood swings.

Solving compassion through novels

The realist novel had come into being precisely to solve the problem of compassion. The premise of novels, which depicted daily life in ways that felt familiar and plausible, trained readers in the social value of feeling adequately and correctly for other people.

Robinson Crusoe (1719) is usually called the first novel in English, and the genre rapidly became a phenomenon. In a Britain with a fast-expanding overseas empire, a rising middle class, rapidly growing cities, new levels of prosperity and widespread leisure, people wanted and needed a popular kind of writing that could show them what ordinary life was like for other people – and what it felt like to be inside another person’s mind and body.

Samuel Richardson achieved this spectacularly with his mid-century novels Pamela and Clarissa, showing with unprecedented intimacy the under-the-skin experience of being a vulnerable young woman in a rigid society where marriage and inheritance counted for everything.

As Ian Watt and countless other literary critics have explained, novels emerged to do the imaginative work philosophers René Descartes, John Locke, David Hume and others had made possible with books such as Essay Concerning Human Understanding and A Treatise of Human Nature. They had explained what human inwardness was and offered a working picture of how humans perceived the world and made social choices and decisions.

The 18th-century novelists Austen learned from (Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Frances Burney, Ann Radcliffe and others) reflected the Enlightenment idea people could know much more about others’ inner lives than in previous eras. By understanding their own and other people’s thoughts and feelings, 18th-century Britons believed, humans could be happier and make better social judgments.

But the realist novel hadn’t been created to pay attention to middle-aged nobodies like Miss Bates. Novels weren’t built to spotlight women on the blurry borders of social hierarchies, who weren’t rich or young or beautiful. Novels were interested in young women and men who could marry, change their social standing, make fortunes and pass their newly created social and financial capital to children.

The menopausal, the hormonally dysregulated, queer characters and anyone else at the margins of social and sexual viability were, quite literally, non-narratable. There were no readymade story arcs for such people in early realist fiction, because in the social ideologies of the day, no story arcs were needed for them.

We see Austen was challenging and questioning the constraints of the novel itself. Even as she perfected the marriage plot, she pushed back against its core assumptions.

It’s Miss Bates who provides the occasion for one of the most moving and important lines in Austen’s oeuvre. Despite her many disadvantages, “she was a happy woman, and a woman whom no one named without good-will”. What Austen is telling us in that unassuming sentence is that women do not need youth or beauty or wealth or good marriages to be happy. They do not, in other words, need marriage plots.

What they need is deep feeling and compassionate curiosity from the people around them – during all the stages of their lives.

Sophie Gee, Vice Chancellor's Fellow, English literature, University of Sydney

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