As debate rages about the federal government’s plan to lift the tax on earnings on superannuation balances over A$3 million, it’s worth revisiting why we offer super tax breaks in the first place, and why they need to be reformed.

Tax breaks on super contributions mean less tax is paid on super savings than other forms of income. These tax breaks cost the federal budget nearly $50 billion in lost revenue each year.

These tax breaks boost the retirement savings of super fund members. They also ensure workers don’t pay punitively high long-term tax rates on their super, since the impact of even low tax rates on savings compounds over time.

But they disproportionately flow to older and wealthier Australians.

Two thirds of the value of super tax breaks benefit the top 20% of income earners, who are already saving enough for their retirement.

Few retirees draw down on their retirement savings as intended, and many are net savers – their super balance continues to grow for decades after they retire.

By 2060, Treasury expects one-third of all withdrawals from super will be via bequests – up from one-fifth today.

Superannuation in Australia was intended to help fund retirements. Instead, it has become a taxpayer-subsidised inheritance scheme.

The tax breaks aren’t just inequitable; they are economically unsound. Generous tax breaks for super savers mean other taxes (such as income and company taxes) must be higher to make up the forgone revenue. That means the burden falls disproportionately on younger taxpayers.

The government should go further

The government’s plan to increase the tax rate on superannuation earnings for balances exceeding $3 million from 15% to 30% is one modest step towards fixing these problems. The tax would only apply to the amount over $3 million, not the entire balance.

This reform will affect only the top 0.5% of super account holders – about 80,000 people – and save more than $2 billion a year in its first full year.

Claims that not indexing the $3 million threshold will result in the tax affecting most younger Australians, or that it will somehow disproportionately affect younger generations, are simply nonsense.

Rather than being the biggest losers from the lack of indexation, younger Australians are the biggest beneficiaries. It means more older, wealthier Australians will shoulder some of the burden of budget repair and an ageing population. Otherwise, younger generations would bear this burden alone.

The facts speak for themselves: a mere 0.5% of Australians have more than $3 million in their super, and 85% of those are aged over 60.

Even in the unlikely scenario where the threshold remains fixed until 2055 – or for ten consecutive parliamentary terms – it would still only affect the top 10% of retiring Australians. Treasurer Jim Chalmers has rightly pointed out that it is unlikely the threshold will never be lifted.

Far from abandoning the proposed $3 million threshold, the government should go further and drop the threshold to $2 million, and only then index it to inflation, saving the budget a further $1 billion a year.

There is no rationale for offering such generous earnings tax breaks on super balances between $2 million and $3 million.

At the very least, if the $3 million threshold is maintained, it should not be indexed until inflation naturally reduces its real value to $2 million, which is estimated to occur around 2040.

Sure, it’s complicated

Levying a higher tax rate on the earnings of large super balances is complicated by the fact existing super earnings taxes are levied at the fund level, not on individual member accounts.

And it’s true that levying a 15% surcharge on the implied earnings of the account over the year (the change in account balance, net of contributions and withdrawals) will impose a tax on unrealised capital gains, or paper profits.

Taxing capital gains as they build up removes incentives to “lock in” investments to hold onto untaxed capital gains, as the Henry Tax Review recognised. But it can create cash flow problems for some self-managed super fund members who hold assets such as business premises or a farm in their fund.

Yet there are seldom easy answers when it comes to tax changes.

Most people with such substantial super balances are retirees who already maintain enough liquid assets to meet the minimum drawdown requirements.

Indeed, self-managed super funds are legally obligated to have investment strategies that ensure liquidity and the ability to meet liabilities.

In any case, the tax does not have to be paid from super. Australians with large super balances typically earn as much income from investments outside super. And the wealthiest 10% of retirees today rely more on income from outside super than income from super.

Good policy is always the art of the compromise

Australia faces the twin challenges of big budget deficits and stagnant productivity. Tax reform will be needed to respond to both.

Good public policy, like politics, always requires some level of compromise.

Super tax breaks should exist only where they support a policy aim. And on balance, trimming unneeded super tax breaks for the wealthiest 0.5% of Australians would make our super system fairer and our budget stronger.

Brendan Coates, Program Director, Housing and Economic Security, Grattan Institute and Joey Moloney, Deputy Program Director, Housing and Economic Security, Grattan Institute

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

In a new study published today in Nature, we report the discovery of a new long-period transient – and, for the first time, one that also emits regular bursts of X-rays.

Long-period transients are a recently identified class of cosmic objects that emit bright flashes of radio waves every few minutes to several hours. This is much longer than the rapid pulses we typically detect from dead stars such as pulsars.

What these objects are, and how they generate their unusual signals, remains a mystery.

Our discovery opens up a new window into the study of these puzzling sources. But it also deepens the mystery: the object we found doesn’t resemble any known type of star or system in our galaxy – or beyond.

Watching the radio sky for flickers

There’s much in the night sky that we can’t see with human eyes but can detect when we look at other wavelengths, such as radio emissions.

Our research team regularly scans the radio sky using the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP), operated by CSIRO on Wajarri Yamaji Country in Western Australia. Our goal is to find cosmic objects that appear and disappear (known as transients).

Transients are often linked to some of the most powerful and dramatic events in the universe, such as the explosive deaths of stars.

In late 2023, we spotted an extremely bright source, named ASKAP J1832-0911 (based on its position in the sky), in the direction of the galactic plane. This object is located about 15,000 light years away. This is far, but still within the Milky Way.

A dramatic event

After the initial discovery, we began follow-up observations using telescopes around the world, hoping to catch more pulses. With continued monitoring, we found the radio pulses from ASKAPJ1832 arrive regularly – every 44 minutes. This confirmed it as a new member of the rare long-period transient group.

But we did not just look forward in time – we also looked back. We searched through older telescope data from the same part of the sky. We found no trace of the object before the discovery.

This suggests something dramatic happened shortly before we first detected it – something powerful enough to suddenly switch the object “on”.

Then, in February 2024, ASKAPJ1832 became extremely active. After a quieter period in January, the source brightened dramatically. Fewer than 30 objects in the sky have ever reached such brightness in radio waves.

For comparison, most stars we detect in radio are about 10,000 times fainter than ASKAPJ1832 during that flare-up.

A lucky break

X-rays are a form of light that we can’t see with our eyes. They usually come from extremely hot and energetic environments. Although about ten similar radio-emitting objects have been found so far, none had ever shown X-ray signals.

In March, we tried to observe ASKAPJ1832 in X-rays. However, due to technical issues with the telescope, the observation could not go ahead.

Then came a stroke of luck. In June, I reached out to my friend Tong Bao, a postdoctoral researcher at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, to check if any previous X-ray observations had captured the source. To our surprise, we found two past observations from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, although the data were still under a proprietary period (not yet public).

We contacted Kaya Mori, a research scientist at Columbia University and the principal investigator of those observations. He generously shared the data with us. To our amazement, we discovered clear X-ray signals coming from ASKAPJ1832. Even more remarkable: the X-rays followed the same 44-minute cycle as the radio pulses.

It was a truly lucky break. Chandra had been pointed at a different target entirely, but by pure coincidence, it caught ASKAPJ1832 during its unusually bright and active phase.

A chance alignment like that is incredibly rare – like finding a needle in a cosmic haystack.

Still a mystery

Having both radio and X-ray bursts is a common trait of dead stars with extremely strong magnetic fields, such as neutron stars (high-mass dead stars) and white dwarf (low-mass dead stars).

Our discovery suggests that at least some long-period transients may come from these kinds of stellar remnants.

But ASKAPJ1832 does not quite fit into any known category of object in our galaxy. Its behaviour, while similar in some ways, still breaks the mould.

We need more observations to truly understand what is going on. It is possible that ASKAPJ1832 is something entirely new, or it could be emitting radio waves in a way we have never seen before.

Ziteng Wang, Associate Lecturer, Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy (CIRA), Curtin University

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

I grew up with Dorothea Mackellar and The Man from Snowy River, where ragged mountain ranges met the colt from Old Regret. I grew up with the idea that the Australian bush meant endless possibility to breed livestock and find gold in every rock overturned. But these practices of clearing and marking ownership through decree of unproductive agricultural land pushed mob further from their traditional lands. It discredited their voices and their connection to Country.

Indigenous culture is viewed as something that is static, unable to move with the times. It’s one of many stereotypes in Australia, from the deemed requirement of dark skin to “be Aboriginal”, to the assumption that our participation in society only occurred in the time prior to colonisation. Indigenous people and our culture continue to be romanticised and therefore fixed in time.

I want to broaden the story and build a new reality for the future. But to do this I need to break down the stereotypes.

After a yarn about climate change, or my family’s farming legacy, or my Aboriginal heritage, it doesn’t take long before I get asked the same old questions. Questions about the size of our properties, the number of cows, or the length of time we’ve been farming. I find this a bit uncomfortable, given the way Aboriginal land was taken, and the actions made to remove our people from this Country.

More uncomfortable are some of the questions I’m asked in other circles. You aren’t really that Aboriginal, are you? Or, what percentage Aboriginal are you?

Instead of answering, I usually spin a yarn that I believe is more relevant, more representative of my views. I try to challenge the fearful motivations behind these attempts to minimise or negate my voice and my identity.

Indigenous people have more than enough experience on these lands to give things a go and we’re more than capable of working as hard as non-Indigenous people. I’m the fourth generation of my family to raise cattle with humps – the drought-hardy Bos indicus breed – on British-type cattle country. We know how to deal with the floods and the droughts and the pests that creep a little further south each year.

I didn’t have to answer these sorts of questions when I was a kid; these conversations were hidden when my grandparents or great-grandparents were farming and supporting their families. But now they seem to matter.

Today, a farmer’s bio often starts with the numbers. The number of cattle and acres, the number of generations the farm’s been in the family and the volume of commodities produced. But what about the things that aren’t so easily quantified? The knowledge derived from deep and rich sources, of connection running through the veins and told to us by the landscape as we walk it?

This is all despite the challenges outlined in the Australian Beef Report, which estimates the average farm now needs over A$10 million of land assets to be self-sustaining. In the United States, the Department of Agriculture found that 88% of farmers run small family farms, with most relying on off-farm income to keep their passion for feeding people alive. The data is likely not much better in Australia.

Systematically organised land

My connection to food began in the Taree butcher shop my family used to run. I watched my uncles talk shop with old-timers from behind their refrigerated counter and marvelled at the different cuts of meat. Every now and then, my uncles would pause to pass a frankfurter over the counter to a youngster walking past. Back then, there was a generosity of spirit and a deep understanding of where meat came from and how it was produced. Sadly, a lot of that’s been lost to the big supermarkets who cater to customers who prioritise the convenience of getting everything in one place over the chance for a yarn.

These memories remind me of a time when agriculture was celebrated in city streets. Steers were pushed through Sydney to market or the abattoir. Back then, there was a wealth of connections between farmers and the steadily developing city towers. It’s a romantic vision of the past, of course. Poetic.

On Worimi Country, the vast riverbanks nestled deeply in a gorge remind me of what this place once was. So too the marking of a bunya pine, its height visible across the landscape indicating a place of trade or celebration.

In order to connect to this place in a way that prioritises culture and our relationship with the land, we need to learn the lessons she imparts. Indigenous people know this innately; it travels in the veins and minds of those who traverse this Country and is recalled when you hear the clicking jump of the kangaroo sound deep in the drone of the didgeridoo.

The natural flair and intuition of Aboriginal stockmen and stockwomen around livestock is reaffirmed every time I speak to a fellow Aboriginal farmer, and often comes up in reflection during a yarn with non-Indigenous farmers.

Indigenous people did not simply hunt and gather, we had a systematic way of organising the land that meant we used the precious resources wisely, from burning Country appropriately, to planting tubers and native foods, and using fence-like structures to herd kangaroos.

During the extended droughts and floods of the mid-2020s, the sustainability of farming has been top of the news agenda. But what of Indigenous sustainability and land management? Isn’t it time we asked where the Indigenous voices in those discussions are? What if we recognised the 60,000 years of knowledge to understand Australia and its landscapes better?

Take for example the ability to regenerate landscapes and promote growth with the use of fire. By regularly burning bushland, Aboriginal people were also able to keep track of areas in which animals would graze and shelter.

Indigenous people have a connection to the land that goes beyond words, and this contains knowledge of climate adaptation from old times. They’ve survived drought, extreme weather and floods for tens of thousands of years. The knowledge we have gathered can help both farmers and scientists understand how to adapt to a changing climate. We should tap into and value this and embrace what Indigenous Australians have to offer.

Black imagination

Farmers can start by reaching out to local Indigenous groups and working with them to build new, sustainable practices based on Indigenous concepts and knowledge. Local and federal government can also take action, by meeting with Aboriginal farmers to hear their thoughts on how we can make successful and sustainable change.

Our romanticised notion of agriculture threatens our mob’s inclusion, stitching a colonial fabric of Australia’s early agricultural development and removing the black faces who stood alongside early white pioneers to write the next chapter.

This Country is where culture and connection danced upon ancient land with foreign cattle and people, building both a new form of agriculture and a new society. These stories exist in the written accounts of those who crossed these lands during colonisation.

I find these intersections in Australian history fascinating, where horses galloped across ancient bush food-filled landscapes, where tribes met and often helped settlers, and where grasslands were disputed by someone new. Again and again, black imagination accommodated foreign animals, ancient songs calmed new cattle, and boys became men on horseback.

It’s this connection that I yearn for – the honest conversations about what happened here, how this land was overtaken and where we find ourselves now.

Where we can all understand our truths on these lands – how they come together on the ground and through nature and wildlife, livestock and the humans that share the pathways on Country. Where our truths build new romantic connections for the generations to come through shared stories, an awareness of past challenges and opportunities for new agricultural methods.

While the stories of the past still linger across the landscape, I am intrigued by what’s to come. How we can adapt the lessons of the past by coming together to create a more inclusive definition of Australia and what it means to be Australian.

This is an extract from Australia’s Agricultural Identity: An Aboriginal yarn by Joshua Gilbert (Penguin Random House).

Joshua Gilbert, Researcher (Indigenous Policy) Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education & Research, University of Technology Sydney

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

In 2021, Banksy revealed a mural of Oscar Wilde, clad in prisoner garb, making an escape from the abandoned Reading jail. The artist claimed that he would donate profits from the sale of the stencil he used to create the work (a projected £10 million) to set up an arts hub in the Grade II listed building.

This hasn’t yet taken place, but speaking about the work at the time, Banksy dubbed Wilde “the patron saint of smashing two contrasting ideas together to create magic. Converting the place that destroyed him into a refuge for art feels so perfect we have to do it.”

In 1895, Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labour for “gross indecency” after being convicted of “homosexual acts”. He was posthumously pardoned in 2017 under the Turing Law.

The Ballad of Reading Gaol, which he wrote two years after his release, hypnotically details the psychological and physical horrors of living in isolation in unsanitary single-cells for 23 hours a day.

It also reveals the mind-numbing conditions and physically exhausting jobs that were relentlessly inflicted on prisoners in Wilde’s day. They were required to ascend 56 steps a minute for nine hours a day on a treadmill, break stones and pick oakum (fibres from the ropes used on ships). And to do so in complete silence.

This article is part of Rethinking the Classics. The stories in this series offer insightful new ways to think about and interpret classic books and artworks. This is the canon – with a twist.

In the poem, Wilde details the intense surveillance techniques and harsh punishments adopted by the prison wardens against the “outcast men”.

“Like ape or clown, in monstrous garb,” he writes, the inmates silently trudge the prison yard in their one allotted hour of exercise per day. The poem focuses on one prisoner in particular, named only as CTW, who is sentenced to death for murdering his wife. It traces his walk to the “hideous” shed where he is to be executed, which ghoulishly sees him “cross his own coffin”.

More gothic images abound. CTW’s impending burial in an unhallowed and anonymous grave is described as “with yawning mouth the horrid hole / Gaped for a living thing” while “the very mud cried out for blood”.

Wilde also references a scene from Coleridge’s 1797 masterpiece The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as he envisions phantoms dancing a “grisly masque” in which they sing of inexorable triumph of sin in prison, “the Secret House of Shame”.

Moreover, Wilde denies that the sacrifice that CTW has offered to the prison with his execution is ultimately redemptive for him as:

He did not pass in purple pomp

Nor ride a moon-white steed

Three yards of cord and a sliding board

Are all the gallows need.

In the ballad, Wilde represents the prison experience as sadistic and unrelenting. Much like Banksy over a century later, Wilde used the degree of anonymity the poem afforded (he published it under his cell number, C33) to berate an inhumane society and the distressing penal policy of “hard labour, hard fare, hard board” that he was forced to endure.

The Ballad of Reading Gaol can ultimately be read as a celebration of compassion, resilience and art activism. Through the poem and letters he wrote to the Daily Chronicle, Wilde publicly attempted to “try and change [prison life] for others”.

Despite Wilde’s public notoriety, Irish MPs Michael Davitt and T.P. O’Connor even went as far as to quote the ballad in parliamentary debates, which led to the adoption of some of the recommendations that Wilde had made in his letters in the 1898 Prison Reform Act.

Although Wilde, himself, was to suffer the psychological and physical effects of his imprisonment until the end of his short life two years later, the 1898 Act saw the treadmill abolished, ensured solitary confinement could only be used for a maximum of 28 days and children were separated from adult prisoners. And yet, sadly, Wilde’s description of “the foul and dark latrine” of “humanity’s machine” continues to reverberate today.

On August 22 2024, “independent monitors” into the conditions at Wandsworth Prison (where Wilde was briefly held) found it to be “crumbling, overcrowded and vermin-infested, with inmates living in half the cell space available when it was first opened in 1851”.

While Wilde’s “swan song” joins with Banksy’s escaped prisoner to expose the failings of modern penal practices, it also reminds us of the enduring power of art and imagination to foster change.

Beyond the canon

As part of the Rethinking the Classics series, we’re asking our experts to recommend a book or artwork that tackles similar themes to the canonical work in question, but isn’t (yet) considered a classic itself. Here is Sondeep Kandola’s suggestion:

If you are looking for further reading on the topic of prison life and the prison experience, Andy West’s memoir The Life Inside (2022) offers a sobering and often witty reflection on living in the carceral state today. A philosophy teacher in prison, West explores the notion of freedom, redemption and our broken prison system.

You might also be interested to read Brendan Behan’s powerful 1958 autobiography Borstal Boy and Bobby Sands’ courageous Writings from Prison (2020), two incarcerated Irish writers who shared Wilde’s republican sympathies and similarly questioned the ethics and integrity of the British government who imprisoned them.

Sondeep Kandola, Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University

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

A friend of mine came to see me recently complaining of an odd ache he’d noted in his lower abs and groin. He couldn’t blame it on crunches at the gym, nor a cow kicking him in the belly again (he’s a farmer). But he does spend a fair amount of his time on the football pitch and was now noticing that every training session and match was bringing the pain on – sometimes agonisingly so.

The diagnosis? A sports hernia. This condition also goes by many other names, including athletic pubalgia and Gilmore’s groin – after the late British surgeon Jerry Gilmore who was the first to coin it. It’s actually a fairly recently described condition, dating back to only the 1980s.

The main symptom of a sports hernia is pain in the pubic and groin regions, brought on through athletic activity. The condition is actually more common that you think, especially so in footballers. Around 70% of all sports hernias appear to be related to the sport. It’s also estimated that groin pain accounts for around 5-18% of athletic injuries.

A sport’s hernia is not your typical hernia. In fact, it’s not really a hernia at all.

A true hernia is defined as when a section of tissue or organ passes into a space where it shouldn’t be. Many will be aware of those hernias which involve a section of bowel passing through the abdominal wall – such as an inguinal hernia.

There are other types of hernias as well. For instance, your stomach can pop through a gap in the diaphragm and into the chest (called a hiatus hernia). More seriously, even the brain can herniate – out of one of the holes in the skull.

But a sports hernia is different, in that it actually arises from overuse of the abdominal muscles.

The abdominals include the long, straight and central “rectus abdominis” muscles – which allow you to perform a sit-up or crunch. Three layers of muscle also lie on either side of the abdominals. These are the obliques, which have important roles in twisting and turning our bodies. The muscles are also mixed with layers of tendon and connective tissue which not only attach them together, but also to the bones and ligaments of the pelvis.

Sports hernias are typically caused by moves which involve a lot of twisting and turning – and especially those occurring at speed. Hip movements can also put strain on where the ab muscles attach at the groin region. These actions appear to cause shearing and tears in the tissue, leading to pain. It’s felt in the groin or lower abs, usually on one side. In men, who are particularly at risk, pain may also be felt in the genitalia.

Some sports rely upon these sorts of moves and actions during play. Think about dribbling in football and hockey, or pinning and throwing opponents in wrestling or martial arts. Slalom skiing is another prime example – travelling at speed and rapidly changing direction. Tackling and scrum action in rugby or American football, and explosive block starts and hurdling in track athletes might also be to blame.

The condition appears much more common in males, who are up to nine times more likely to develop it. This is perhaps because of the anatomy of their lower abs, which is different to females. The testes – which initially develop inside the abdomen – descend to the scrotum during the foetal period. But to do this, they actually have to pass through the layers of the abdominal wall which makes the structure weaker and potentially more prone to damage.

While sports hernias are vastly more common in athletes because of the regular repetitive strain they put their bodies under, it’s still technically possible for non-athletes to get it.

If you work in a job where there’s regular heavy lifting, pivoting as you do so – on a building site for instance – it may be possible to sustain the same injury. Or, doing too many advanced core exercises at the gym before you’re sufficiently strong enough might also make you more prone. Dead lifts and core exercises that use a medicine ball (such as Russian twists) are some culprits.

Managing a sports hernia

If you do develop a sports hernia, it appears that improving core strength may help you recover. Patients diagnosed with a sports hernia typically undergo a training programme to strengthen and stabilise their core muscles. In athletes who already have a strong core, it may also be worthwhile training muscles that strengthen the pelvis alongside a gradual return to sport. Physiotherapy, massage and acupuncture may also help.

Some cases might also require surgery to reinforce the groin structure, and relieve any tension on the tissues.

There’s evidence to suggest that sports hernias are both under-reported and under-diagnosed. This may be because they get confused with other types of injuries – such as an inguinal hernia, which is also related to the groin, more commonly found in males and associated with abdominal wall strain and damage.

The key difference is that a real inguinal hernia causes a swelling in the groin region or scrotum, whereas sports hernias do not. Inguinal hernias can also cause complications if the bowel gets twisted and obstructed, which can have potentially severe consequences.

So, if you’re someone who participates in these twisting, turning types of sports and notice any of the symptoms of a sports hernia, it’s best to stop instead of pushing yourself through the pain. You should also speak to a doctor in case there are signs of a true hernia, which often requires further surgical treatment.

Dan Baumgardt, Senior Lecturer, School of Physiology, Pharmacology and Neuroscience, University of Bristol

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

Like us humans, many animals rely on social interactions to survive and thrive. As a result, effective communication between individuals is essential.

Highly social animals often have more complex communication systems. Think of a group of chimpanzees gesturing and vocalising at each other, or a family of elephants communicating through touch or low-frequency calls.

Bottlenose dolphins live in complex societies where each animal has a small number of closely connected individuals and a larger number of looser associates (not dissimilar to our own social networks). They rely heavily on interpersonal interactions to maintain a healthy social balance.

Scientists have long known that dolphins use “signature whistles” to identify themselves to others. In our recent study, we present evidence suggesting that these whistles may contain more information than just identity.

A unique but variable sound

Dolphins use various sounds, such as burst pulses and whistles, to communicate. There are two broad categories of whistles: signature whistles (distinctive whistle types that are unique to each individual) and non-signature (the rest).

Dolphins use the unique frequency patterns of their signature whistles to broadcast their identity. They develop these signals when they are young and maintain them throughout their lives.

When interacting with others, up to 30% of a dolphin’s whistling may be comprised of its signature whistle. There is often some variation in the whistle versions produced by the individual animals. This led us to analyse the balance between stability and variability of the signature whistles to test if they can contain more information than just the whistler’s identity.

Listening to whistles

In 2017 and 2018, our research team made repeated sound recordings of a group of Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus) at Tangalooma Island Resort near Moreton Island, off the coast of Brisbane in eastern Australia.

We collected many instances of signature whistles produced by the same animals. We also used historical data collected from the same group 15 years earlier.

We found that, while the whistles were exceptionally stable in their frequency patterns, they did vary a certain amount (this variability also remained similar across the years). This suggests that even though frequency patterns of signature whistles encode identity, they are also likely to transmit more information, such as emotional or contextual cues.

Our study group of animals was too small to draw definitive conclusions, but our findings indicated that males demonstrate more variability in their signature whistles than females. It could be linked to the differences in their social roles and the nature of their interactions with others.

We also identified a whistle much like a signature, but which was shared between several individuals. This supports recent findings that groups of dolphins may have shared distinctive whistles, along with their individual ones.

Faces that you hear

What does all this mean?

First, signature whistles are likely to be more versatile than previously thought. They may carry additional information within their frequency patterns, and possibly other structural elements.

The second lesson is that, while signature whistles are individually learned “labels” that are like human names in many ways, in terms of the information they transmit, a useful analogy may be human faces.

Humans carry identity information in our fixed facial features. At the same time, we transmit a lot of additional information, including emotional and contextual cues, through more transient facial expressions. Like signature whistles, our faces combine stability and variability in their “information package”.

Making the whole world blurry

Understanding dolphin communication helps us better understand the challenges these animals face in an increasingly human-affected world.

Take noise pollution in the oceans. It’s a hot topic among marine bioacoustics researchers, but rarely at the front of the general public’s mind.

If we do think of it, it’s probably in human terms. Living in a noisy environment for us might be annoying and stressful, but we could still do most of the things we need to do.

But for dolphins, deafening shipping noise would be the equivalent of the whole world going blurry for us. Imagine what it would be like to navigate through life, make friends, stay away from bad connections, and be socially effective (which is necessary for survival), if you can’t recognise anyone’s face or see their expressions.

Thinking of the dolphins’ key signal, a signature whistle, as informational equivalent of our faces, may help us see (and hear) the world from a dolphin’s perspective.

Ekaterina Ovsyanikova, Academic, School of the Environment, The University of Queensland

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

The cost-of-living crisis is hitting the arts hard. Artists struggle to survive on poverty wages and audiences are getting priced out.

This challenge is not unprecedented. In the 1980s, another cost-of-living crisis sparked a bold and imaginative model for embedding artists into the everyday rhythms of working life.

Art for the working class

It was 1982. The country was in the grip of stagflation: low growth, high inflation and rising unemployment. The Australia Council for the Arts was reconciling a 20% funding cut. Seeking to offset its cut funds, the council sought out an unexpected partner to launch a community arts program: the Australian Council of Trade Unions.

The “Art and Working Life” initiative sought to celebrate, encourage and support working class art and culture. By embedding artists in workplaces across the country, it enabled workers to practice and develop their artistic skills and expression.

It also addressed two key issues: employment for artists, and increasing the public’s access to the arts.

Unions would sponsor projects and act as employers for the artists involved throughout the project’s duration. This arrangement placed artists in diverse settings such as factory floors, hospital wards, offices and construction sites, where they collaborated with workers to create art that reflected the realities of their working lives.

Why trade unions?

In 1982, 57% of Australian workers were unionised. This meant unions had the infrastructure to match the government’s funding through the Australia Council, and to employ artists on a project basis.

With union membership mandatory in many industries, this generated a guaranteed resource base capable of funding an arts program for the broader community. For artists, the unions’ reach into various industries provided significant potential audiences.

Unions offered more than resources; they brought a philosophy and a plan. Art was a cultural right. In workplaces, it could lift morale, disrupt the grind and add meaning to labour.

It also had practical benefits: strengthening workplace culture, engaging members and helping artists organise within their own industry.

Art and Working Life projects varied widely. Dancers in garment factories devised movement routines aimed at reducing repetitive strain injury. In rail yards, theatre artists wrote plays in collaboration with engineers and mechanics about gender, race, and labour. Musicians headed underground – literally – to record original songs written by miners about the threat of job losses.

By 1986, Australia Council chair Donald Horne lauded the program as “a good example of value for money”.

In four years, it reached over three million workers and their families – nearly 20% of the population – at a cost of just A$2.8 million (around $9 million today).

By the end of the decade, it had employed more than 2,000 artists, with union support matching federal funding.

A slow decline

But the program depended on two fragile pillars: a strong labour movement and sustained government support.

By the 1990s, both were under threat.

As privatisation, deregulation and enterprise bargaining eroded union power, membership declined, workplaces fragmented, and the foundations of Art and Working Life weakened.

At the same time, a major shift occurred in arts funding. In 1994, Paul Keating released Australia’s first national cultural policy Creative Nation, reframing the arts as an economic driver, emphasising export-ready, profitable outcomes. Arts funding increasingly favoured media, tourism and “creative industries”.

For the Australia Council, this shift meant a retreat from community arts programs like Art and Working Life, and the program was quietly shelved in 1995.

It marked more than the loss of a funding stream: it signalled the decline of a cultural policy vision grounded in social equity and everyday life.

Would it work in 2025?

Today, with union density hovering around historic lows of 13.1%, the infrastructure that once supported a national workplace arts program is largely gone. But the need is as urgent as ever.

In the face of today’s cost-of-living crisis, we need bold, integrated policy frameworks with a strong social foundation. Australia’s current cultural policy, Revive, was released in 2023. The document signals a rhetorical shift away from economic metrics and towards access and inclusion. But what structures bring this vision to life?

Today’s cost-of-living crisis could be used to inspire a new wave of cultural investment that supports employment, fosters participation and embeds creativity in everyday life.

Looking at the history of Art and Working Life offers more than nostalgia: it provides a practical model for anchoring arts policy in the material conditions of working people’s lives, where the arts are not apart from daily experience, but central to it.

Izabella Nantsou, Academic in Theatre and Performance Studies, University of Sydney

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

“The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there,” wrote English author L.P. Hartley in The Go-Between (1953). Modern Melburnians may feel the same. But while they live with an increasing cityscape of skyscrapers, the past is not far away.

Consider Scots Church in Collins Street. Its spire tip was for some time the highest point in the city, but now it is relatively low compared to surrounding buildings. The idea behind its vantage was different to modern planning decisions: it indicated the Presbyterians had a closeness to Heaven not possessed by other Christian denominations.

Certainly, the beliefs of many 19th-century Melburnians appear equally odd. The pseudoscience of Phrenology held that the shape of people’s skulls denoted their character. Phrenologist Philemon Sohier was even allowed to take plaster casts from the heads of freshly hanged criminals. His wife Ellen, an Antipodean Tussaud, then used the casts to create realistic replicas for the Chamber of Horrors in their associated waxworks.

But equally, while researching my recent book on colonial crime writer Mary Fortune, I encountered individuals living in 19th-century Melbourne who seem startlingly modern. A wealthy teenage girl who dressed in drag for months as The Boy-Girl, likely as a protest. A radical journalist and sometime criminal who published a lurid true-crime newspaper. And a Black author and activist who advocated for workers’ rights, the unemployed and men of colour.

This trio did not fit the mould – nor do they fit our preconceived views of what colonial Australians were like. They were ratbags: a term extremely expressive of the national character, then and now. They had the strength of character to be different, subversive, even to protest publicly. They did what they wanted, against constraints – and they deserved better than to be forgotten.

The Boy-Girl

Let us start with dress. A man wearing a dress would not be immediately arrested these days. No one would cite the Biblical injunction against cross-dressing, Deuteronomy, at them. But in 1857, French artist Rosa Bonheur had to get permission from the Prefect of Police to wear pants, for reasons of “health”.

Family photographs from the Victorian era depict rigid gender roles in dress, with father in trousers, tailcoat and top hat, mother in crinoline and bonnet, surrounded by their many offspring. Yet those roles could be bent, or blurred. Look more closely at the youngest children in these photographs. Small boys wore frocks and their hair long, until “breeched”, put into pants. Even the macho Ernest Hemingway once wore frills and furbelows, most cutely.

In 1875, Melbourne’s Block, the promenade space of the fashionable wealthy, was the site for a challenging display: the Boy-Girl. Here, notions of gender were confounded by an individual dressed as female from the waist down, but male from the waist up. As a letter to the Herald noted:

Sir,– A most distressing sight is to be seen every evening on our principal streets, viz., a poor boy evidently from want of means going about in petticoats, perhaps his mother or sister’s. I would gladly subscribe my mite towards providing him with suitable nether habiliments, and I trust the matter will be taken up by our charitable public. Yours,

“PANTALOON”

21st September. P.S. – Since writing the above a friend has told me the object of my pity is a girl – this must be a joke.

While this letter may have been tongue in cheek, it expressed the general puzzlement. The act was clearly performative, and it happened daily, from 4-5pm. Above the conventional woman’s skirt was a man’s jacket, tie, hat, starched collar and even monocle. The hair was cropped: something prescribed for women suffering fever, but not flaunted in the street. One observer noted slangy speech, loud laughter, a bold gaze – all unwomanly behaviour.

At the time the very act of being a woman in public, rather than the idealised domestic Angel in the House, was considered daring. Walking the streets was a euphemism for prostitution, as with the French “faire le trottoir”.

The Boy-Girl proved a sensation in the colonial media. No known photographs survive, but there are Punch engravings. The first, from winter 1875, has the heading IN DRAG, and shows an Irish cop protesting: “If yez ain’t a man in female’s clothes, yez a male in man’s clothes …”

A man in a woman’s dress faced being jailed in Pentridge. Gordon Lawrence, who co-blackmailed bestselling author Fergus Hume for the then-crime of homosexuality, was arrested in 1888 for “soliciting”, in a bustle outside the Melbourne Exhibition Building. He was sentenced to six months in prison, for vagrancy and “insulting behaviour”, a catch-all charge covering obscenity to prostitution.

In 1879, servant, blacksmith and gold miner Edward De Lacy Evans achieved worldwide fame when revealed to be a cross-dressing woman during their stay in an insane asylum.

The right to be sinful?

In the Boy-Girl’s case, any arrest would have been a major problem. The Boy-Girl’s father was one of the richest men in Melbourne. Kate Johnson, then 17, had been born in Mount Gambier, South Australia, to Archibald and Mary Johnson. Archibald, a Scots Presbyterian, had worked his way up from station overseer to pastoral magnate, with sufficient wealth to buy Stonnington, a major mansion, in his retirement. Of his large family, Kate was his favourite. She would promenade as the Boy-Girl for months.

Her act was primarily visual and she never commented on it publicly. An “interview” with Punch appeared under the heading “Practical Papers on Vice”. Though written with irony, it claimed the Boy-Girl wanted equality of the sexes and rights for women – including the right to be sinful. The journalist concluded the Boy-Girl would lead to a future race of Australian hermaphrodites.

Others termed her “eccentric”, or claimed the stunt was to win a lucrative bet, though the Boy-Girl did not want for money. When she stopped, to grow her hair again and dress conventionally, it was to study music and drama, at professional level. In 1877, she took to the stage, a natural progression given that theatre was a liminal space regarding gender roles. Pantomime featured cross-dressers, with the Principal Boy (an actress) and the Widow Twankey, a caricature of femininity even more grotesque than Edna Everage.

It was an unusual move for a rich young lady, since actresses were regarded as being little less than whores, however glamorous. One journalist deplored her move, saying “we fathers and brothers” only wished to keep womenfolk pure, and “out of the sight of impurity”. Johnson played Kate in The Taming of the Shrew, to a packed house but poor notices. More successful were piano performances, where she showed both skill and brio.

What might have been a brilliant career came to a premature halt in February 1878. Kate died at Stonnington, of typhoid fever – the mansion had bad drains. Crowds lined the streets to watch her funeral cortege. Even journalists who had mocked her expressed sorrow.

Her grieving parents planned a memorial, of Carrara marble, 14 feet high, in Melbourne General Cemetery, with a portrait of Kate, and of her mother, weeping at the base. It never eventuated. Archibald died in 1881, with his will bitterly contested. A marble bust of Kate was completed. Once in the Victorian National Galley, its location is now unknown.

A ratbag radical journalist

Popular commentary on the Boy-Girl included an 1877 poem, printed in the sensational weekly Police News. Its editor, Richard Egan-Lee (1809-1879), was also a noted ratbag. During a busy and disreputable life, he was a printer, publisher, inventor and radical journalist. He had at least 12 children with four wives, likely involving bigamy. Egan-Lee was one of only two people sued successfully by Charles Dickens, for pirating A Christmas Carol. Insolvencies following, he emigrated in 1863 to Melbourne.

Typically, Victorians were fascinated by true crime, but Lee had personal experience. In 1866 he was sent to jail for 12 months, for stealing type. He emerged to work editorially on the popular fiction magazine the Australian Journal, but anonymously. His eight-year tenure overlapped with Marcus Clarke. One of Lee’s descendants recalled that Clarke wrote For the Term of His Natural Life in Lee’s office, which sounds inconvenient.

Observing the success of the US Police News, featuring sensational true crime, Lee produced his own Australian version. It featured not only crime but radical politics. He declared its mission as: “to drag forth into the light of day, more shams, frauds, and humbugs, than all the other papers put together […] ever since Victoria was a colony”. He added that Victorian society was “composed of the rankest duffers and the most consummate veneered hypocrites that can be found in any country”. From the law and legislature, to the police, press and the pulpit, “all is a mass of make-believe and mockery”.

His Police News was wildly popular. Lee sold 17,000 copies weekly: a huge circulation for the colonies. Part of the success was lurid illustrations, sourced from the public: Lee would ask crime witnesses to send in sketches, which he then had engraved in an innovative process he termed zincotype. The Age deplored his “literary garbage”, but he outsold it.

Small wonder he got sued, for obscenity, though the offending illustration merely showed a man and women drinking in a bar; he was also sued for libel. The magazine ran on a shoestring and indignation. It also displayed a fascination with strong women: revenging themselves on seducers, repelling burglars, even murdering.

Lee seems a proto-feminist. He devoted an editorial to “man’s inhumanity to women”. He was also a sympathetic editor to crime writer and journalist Mary Fortune, unlike the misogynistic Clarke.

Lee died of typhoid fever (like Kate Johnson), in 1879. Few copies of his magazine survive, but the unique art project of his Police News was the subject of an exhibition by noted artist Elizabeth Gertsakis in 2018.

A Jamaican Black activist

Our last ratbag, like Kate Johnson, appeared in Punch, where he was rendered with stereotypical racism, talking like Uncle Tom. His photograph shows formidable attitude, not least as a man of letters.

Daniel Henderson was an Afro-Jamaican author and activist. A journalist termed him “Henderson Africanus”, after the Roman general Scipio Africanus. Henderson proceeded to own the nickname, proudly adopting it as “an African Political General”.

Like the Boy-Girl, he made a public display, a celebrity selling newspapers in a huge white hat, but also giving speeches and campaigning via letters. He was politically active, a proud and loud Black man.

Daniel Ross Henderson was born in Kingston, Jamaica, son of Thomas, a cabinet-maker, and his wife Elizabeth. The family were politically engaged. Daniel was named for Daniel O'Connell, former Lord Mayor of Dublin, an activist for emancipation as well as Irish rights.

The formidable Elizabeth legally and vigorously fought a claim against her freedom, and favoured education for her son. Henderson would find advancement and mobility in the British Navy, which took men upon their worth, not race. That led him to emigrate to Australia. In 1880, he married a white woman, Aphra Lightbourne, of military background.

As a child, he had read the political section of newspapers aloud to his father and workmen. Now, he sold newspapers in Exhibition Street. The proximity to Parliament House was no accident. In 1868, government supply was blocked by the Victorian Legislative Council. Henderson responded with a 24-page pamphlet, Our Imbroglio: (The Crisis) and Our Way Out of It, which closely examined constitutional law. Ten years later, a similar crisis sent political leaders Sir Grahame Berry and Charles Pearson to appeal to London, personally.

The received wisdom is it was an Opposition joke that Henderson be proposed to accompany them. The magazine Table Talk, which had the best gossip, said Punch cartoonist Tom Carrington was behind it. Carrington knew Henderson was good copy. He denigrated him racially and politically in Punch, a Tory publication.

Truth was, Henderson had already argued the case articulately and well. Newspapers and the Bulletin would note Henderson was “really one of the founders of the great liberal party” (Premier Graham Berry’s party and in those days, radicals). He was a presence, a public intellectual, who just happened to be also a Black man. The degree of vilification he faced shows how much he challenged notions of nineteenth-century race. Although Henderson tried standing for parliament several times in the 1880s and 1890s, he was never pre-selected.

Instead, he devoted time to causes such as worker’s rights, the unemployed and men of colour in serious trouble with the law. The Public Record Office preserves many of his distinctive purple-inked letters, including to the police commissioner. One prompted an formal investigation into the case of Antoine Bollars, his lodger, who (with Gordon Lawrence) had blackmailed Fergus Hume. Bollars, also Afro-Jamaican, had been convicted of a homosexual indecent assault, which occurred under Henderson’s roof. It was an unspeakable crime, but Henderson had the courage to intervene.

He was cranky, a show-off, but with the wit and force of character to defy the contemporary strictures on Black people. When he died, of peritonitis, even Punch had to admit he was “a well-meaning and good fellow”.

Bloody minded, showy and bold

A teenage girl who pushed the public limits regarding accepted notions of gender. A radical journalist and inventor who crusaded against the blackguards of his colony in one of its most successful magazines. A politically active Black public intellectual.

They captured public attention, but after their deaths they were soon forgotten.

That they existed at all in their conservative era seems extraordinary – but that they persisted against the formidable opposition is a lesson in personal courage. It is also a lesson in the virtues of ratbaggery.

Let us celebrate those who go against the grain, for they have often have the uncomfortable tendency to be right. And we can learn a good deal from them that can be applied to our troubled times: not least the virtues of political performance art, and of being bloody minded, showy and bold.

Lucy Sussex, Honorary Associate, Humanities and Social Science, La Trobe University

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

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has this week released new data which tells us about the presence of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in Australians’ bodies.

The data comes from concentrations measured in blood samples of nearly 7,000 people aged 12 and over, collected as part of the National Health Measures Survey for 2022–24.

The findings are concerning, showing PFAS are detectable in the vast majority of the Australian population, to varying levels.

But are they cause for alarm? What do these findings mean for our health?

‘Forever chemicals’

PFAS, often called “forever chemicals”, are a group of thousands of different human-made chemicals. The molecular structure of PFAS chemicals – characterised by extremely strong bonds between carbon and fluorine atoms – makes PFAS resistant to degradation.

Many PFAS products are very effective for their resistance to water, oil, grease and stains, while others promote foaming. Since the 1940s, PFAS chemicals have been widely used in many consumer and industry products, such as non-stick pans, stain-resistant fabrics and firefighting foam.

One of the downsides of PFAS is their potential to bioaccumulate, or gradually build up in the body.

Important exposure pathways include ingestion of PFAS in drinking water, in food, or absorption through the skin. Absorption of small amounts progressively builds up in the organs of people and animals, particularly the liver.

Exposure to PFAS is associated with a heightened risk of many adverse health outcomes. These include reduced fertility, and increased risk of some cancers, liver disease, kidney disease, high cholesterol and obesity.

Digging into the data

The ABS data measured 11 types of PFAS. The group of PFAS chemicals they selected reflects the most commonly detected forms from previous studies. The concentration of PFAS chemicals is measured in blood serum in nanograms per millilitre (ng/mL).

Three types of PFAS were detected in the blood of more than 85% of Australians, while the remainder were detected in lower proportions of people.

The type of PFAS most commonly detected in blood was perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS). It was found in 98.6% of samples.

PFOS accumulation has been a major problem in firefighters. Many were exposed occupationally to PFOS, sometimes for decades, and many suffered an unusually high incidence of disease, including a suspected cancer cluster.

The below graph shows the level of PFOS increases with age. This could be because it accumulates in the body over time, and because many types of PFOS are being phased out. From 2004 its use in firefighting was phased out by major users, such as the Department of Defence.

PFOS was also found to be higher in males – research shows PFAS is excreted more rapidly in females, including through menstruation and breastfeeding.

The second most commonly detected type of PFAS detected in Australian blood samples was perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), in 96.1% of samples. PFOA has recently been classified by the World Health Organization as a group 1 carcinogen, meaning it’s a recognised cancer-causing agent.

The third most commonly detected type of PFAS was perfluorohexane sulfonic acid (PFHxS), which was detected in 88.1% of samples.

So what are the implications?

The National Health Measures Survey identified a relationship between higher mean PFOS levels and markers of chronic disease including high total cholesterol levels, diabetes and kidney function.

However, it’s important to note this is only 7,000 people, and the data were weighted to be representative of the Australian population. There may be other factors, such as lifestyle or occupation, that have influenced the results.

While these findings may be concerning, they’re not cause for alarm. The scientific evidence more broadly doesn’t tell us conclusively whether concentrations of PFAS equivalent to those seen in the current data would have a direct effect on disease outcomes.

Some good news is that overall, this data suggests we have less PFAS in our blood compared to people in other countries.

Why this data is important

The ABS report provides the most detailed national baseline data on PFAS in the Australian population to date.

While many people are concerned about PFAS, some Australian communities have been particularly worried.

For example, in August 2024 it was revealed that a water filtration plant in the Blue Mountains contained substantial concentrations of PFAS. This was probably due to a major petrol tanker crash in 1992 and residual effects of PFAS from firefighting foam used to respond to that incident.

While people can have a blood sample taken to measure PFAS levels, it’s very expensive. NSW Health advises PFAS testing is not covered by Medicare or private health insurance.

Reports are emerging of Blue Mountains residents that have paid for blood testing getting very high concentrations of PFAS. These ABS results will help people who do receive blood testing assess how their results compare with typical results of a person of the same age and sex. People with concerns should consult a medical professional.

The ABS data will also be valuable for medical practitioners and public health authorities, providing important information to guide the management of PFAS contamination and its potential health effects.

Ian A. Wright, Associate Professor in Environmental Science, Western Sydney University

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

Ever wonder if your cat could pick you out of a line up?

New research suggests they could … but maybe not in the way you would expect.

Previous research has found that only 54% of cats could recognise humans by their face alone.

So how does your cat know it’s you?

Studying the sniff

A new study published today in PLOS One suggests your cat can recognise you by your smell. This feat has not been studied before and may reveal another layer of depth within cat-human bonds.

Cats often get a bad rap for being aloof or uncaring about the people in their lives, but a growing number of studies are finding the opposite to be true. We now know that cats learn the names we give them, cats and their guardians form their own communication style, and most cats will pick human social interaction over food, a choice even dogs struggle with.

And now, thanks to this most recent study, we know that cats can identify their people by smell, something they also rely on to identify their close feline social groups.

The study, by Yutaro Miyairi and colleagues at Tokyo University of Agriculture, investigated the ability of 30 cats to differentiate between their guardian and an unknown person based on scent alone.

Cats in the study were presented with a plastic tube containing swab samples from under the armpit, behind the ear and between the toes of either the cat’s guardian or of a human they had never met. As a control, cats were also presented with an empty plastic tube.

The results?

Cats in the study spent longer sniffing the scent of an unknown person compared to the scent of their guardian or the empty tube.

A shorter sniffing time suggests that when cats came across the smell of their guardian, they recognised it quickly and moved along. But when they came to the swabs from an unknown person, the cat sniffed longer, using their superior sense of smell to gather information about the scent.

Similar patterns have been observed previously, with kittens sniffing the odour of unknown female cats longer than the odour of their own mother, and adult cats sniffing the faeces of unfamiliar cats longer than those within their social group.

The findings of this new study may indicate that we, too, are in our cats’ social circle.

The brain and the nose

The study also found a tendency for cats to sniff familiar scents with their left nostril, while unknown scents were more often sniffed using their right. But when cats became familiar with a scent after sniffing for a while, they switched nostrils from the right to the left.

While this may sound like an odd finding, it’s a pattern that has also been observed in dogs. Current research suggests this nostril preference may indicate that cats process and classify new information using their right brain hemisphere, while the left hemisphere takes over when a routine response is established.

Why scent?

Cats rely on scent to gather information about the world around them and to communicate.

Scent exchange (through cheek-to-cheek rubbing and grooming each other) is used as a way to recognise cats in the same social circle, maintain group cohesion, and identify unfamiliar cats or other animals that may pose a threat or need to be avoided.

Familiar scents can also be comforting to cats, reducing stress and anxiety and creating a sense of security within their environment.

When you come back from a holiday, if you notice your cat being distant and acting like you’re a total stranger, it might be because you smell like one. Try taking a shower using your usual home products and put on some of your regular home clothing. The familiar scents should help you and your cat settle back into your old dynamic sooner.

And remember, if your cat spends a lot of time sniffing someone else, it’s not because they prefer them. It’s likely because your scent is familiar and requires less work. Instead of being new and interesting, it might do something even better: help your cat feel at home.

Julia Henning, PhD Candidate in Feline Behaviour, School of Animal and Veterinary Science, University of Adelaide

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

Florence Nightingale is often described as the founder of modern nursing. She was immortalised in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1857 poem, Santa Filomena: “A noble type of good / Heroic Womanhood.” For over a century, she has been remembered as “the lady with the lamp”, moving through the wards of war hospitals.

In Laura Elvery’s debut novel, Nightingale, she is something else entirely. She is not the symbol, but the woman – not solely the caregiver, but a patient, child and sister. It opens with an epigraph from T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

This idea of seeing the familiar in a new light mirrors the novel’s structure and spirit. Nightingale is not a linear biography, nor a detailed account of Nightingale’s public accomplishments. It is a quiet meditation on memory, and on care and the ways it marks a life.

Review: Nightingale – Laura Elvery (UQP)

Death from poor hygiene and neglect

The novel is told in three parts across two timelines. It opens in Mayfair, London, in 1910. Florence is 90, frail and close to death. Her housekeeper, Mabel, watches over her as she drifts between moments of lucidity and memories of her past. The figure who once helped to transform military hospitals reflects on her frailty, and on Mabel’s care for her. She recalls her old instructions:

Use a clear, firm voice so the patient hears you the first time. Do not ask a patient to turn their head towards you. Let the light in. Ventilate the room. Clean the utensils. Change the sheets yourself and do it quickly, without comment.

These directions reflect Nightingale’s ethos: that death came not only from bullets, but from poor hygiene, infection and administrative neglect. Elvery hints at Nightingale’s broader impact – her work on sanitation, hospital reform and data collection – not through exposition, but through the quiet authority of her voice and the awe she commands among doctors, nurses and soldiers alike.

On her final day, Nightingale receives a visit from Silas Bradley, a former soldier whose presence unsettles both her and the reader. As Part One ends, Silas asks, “What did Jean do to me?” The question will continue to haunt the novel.

Jean Frawley, a young nurse serving under Nightingale (or “Miss N”) during the Crimean War (1853–56), is introduced in the novel’s second part. In Marseilles, on her way to Scutari, Jean meets Silas. Their brief encounter sets up a romantic subplot that runs throughout.

But this thread is also one of the novel’s weakest. Jean is introduced as capable and competent, but her story becomes dominated by her feelings for Silas. Her longing for him seems out of proportion and out of step with the more grounded scenes surrounding it. The emotional arc feels less earned, compared to the stark realism of the hospital scenes.

Vivid hospital scenes

The focus soon shifts to Scutari (part of what is now Istanbul) in 1854, and an overcrowded, filthy and overwhelmed hospital. This is the novel’s strongest section: vivid, harrowing and sharply observed.

Jean’s voice brings urgency to the everyday horrors she witnesses: “Whimpering men lay on stuffed sacks on every side of every corridor, keeping company with the rats, the roaches, the maggots.” Supplies are short, medical tools are rudimentary, nurses are exhausted. The men are dying. In this world, care is emotional work.

Elvery, known for her short-story collections Ordinary Matter and Trick of the Light, brings a lyrical, sensory style to these scenes. Her descriptions are rich with visceral, sensory detail of rats, maggots, blood and chloroform.

But the focus isn’t on historical accuracy for its own sake. Elvery is more interested in the interiority of her characters, in the psychic and bodily toll of caregiving. She doesn’t dwell on dates or battles. Instead, she focuses on what caregiving feels like: its cost, its mess and its strange intimacy.

They asked the girls to kiss them, to write for them, to tell them jokes […] One soldier asked Jean to breathe in time with him.

One of the most moving scenes comes after the war, in 1861, when Jean visits a Crimean War memorial in London. She sees “on a plinth, the figure of a cloaked woman […] arms outstretched”.

Jean expects to feel pride or recognition. Instead, she finds the statue unfamiliar. “Perhaps it was a goddess,” she thinks, noticing the “haloes of leaves that circled her wrists.” She recalls the words of the tailor who sold her her uniform: “Women can’t imagine that sort of suffering.”

The scene captures a key question in the book: who is remembered, and in what form?

Resisting mythmaking

Elvery resists mythmaking. Her Nightingale is not a saint, but a woman forged in complexity: brilliant, stubborn, sometimes difficult. The novel invites us to see her not as a symbol, but as a person shaped by illness, desire, pain and time. Nightingale is not just a novel about Florence Nightingale, or about nursing. It’s about the physical and emotional labour of care, and the people whose work often goes unnoticed.

Part Three returns to 1910 and Nightingale’s final moments. But Nightingale is not the centre of her own story. Jean’s narrative forms the novel’s emotional core, and her connection to Silas drives more of the plot than Nightingale’s recollections. In this way, Elvery shifts focus, both structurally and thematically, away from a single figure – and toward the quieter, often invisible work of caregiving itself.

In a time when the cost of care – whether in hospitals, homes, or war zones – is so visible, Nightingale feels timely. Elvery asks what it means to nurse, and to be nursed. Her novel honours the messy, human particulars of caregiving, even as it gestures toward the legacy of a woman who reshaped its very foundations.

Caitlin Macdonald, PhD candidate, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Sydney

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

As we enter the colder months in Australia, COVID is making headlines again, this time due to the emergence of a new variant: NB.1.8.1.

Last week, the World Health Organization designated NB.1.8.1 as a “variant under monitoring”, owing to its growing global spread and some notable characteristics which could set it apart from earlier variants.

So what do you need to know about this new variant?

The current COVID situation

More than five years since COVID was initially declared a pandemic, we’re still experiencing regular waves of infections.

It’s more difficult to track the occurrence of the virus nowadays, as fewer people are testing and reporting infections. But available data suggests in late May 2025, case numbers in Australia were ticking upwards.

Genomic sequencing has confirmed NB.1.8.1 is among the circulating strains in Australia, and generally increasing. Of cases sequenced up to May 6 across Australia, NB.1.8.1 ranged from less than 10% in South Australia to more than 40% in Victoria.

Wastewater surveillance in Western Australia has determined NB.1.8.1 is now the dominant variant in wastewater samples collected in Perth.

Internationally NB.1.8.1 is also growing. By late April 2025, it comprised roughly 10.7% of all submitted sequences – up from just 2.5% four weeks prior. While the absolute number of cases sequenced was still modest, this consistent upward trend has prompted closer monitoring by international public health agencies.

NB.1.8.1 has been spreading particularly in Asia – it was the dominant variant in Hong Kong and China at the end of April.

Where does this variant come from?

According to the WHO, NB.1.8.1 was first detected from samples collected in January 2025.

It’s a sublineage of the Omicron variant, descending from the recombinant XDV lineage. “Recombinant” is where a new variant arises from the genetic mixing of two or more existing variants.

The image to the right shows more specifically how NB.1.8.1 came about.

What does the research say?

Like its predecessors, NB.1.8.1 carries a suite of mutations in the spike protein. This is the protein on the surface of the virus that allows it to infect us – specifically via the ACE2 receptors, a “doorway” to our cells.

The mutations include T22N, F59S, G184S, A435S, V445H, and T478I. It’s early days for this variant, so we don’t have much data on what these changes mean yet. But a recent preprint (a study that has not yet been peer reviewed) offers some clues about why NB.1.8.1 may be gathering traction.

Using lab-based models, researchers found NB.1.8.1 had the strongest binding affinity to the human ACE2 receptor of several variants tested – suggesting it may infect cells more efficiently than earlier strains.

The study also looked at how well antibodies from vaccinated or previously infected people could neutralise or “block” the variant. Results showed the neutralising response of antibodies was around 1.5 times lower to NB.1.8.1 compared to another recent variant, LP.8.1.1.

This means it’s possible a person infected with NB.1.8.1 may be more likely to pass the virus on to someone else, compared to earlier variants.

What are the symptoms?

The evidence so far suggests NB.1.8.1 may spread more easily and may partially sidestep immunity from prior infections or vaccination. These factors could explain its rise in sequencing data.

But importantly, the WHO has not yet observed any evidence it causes more severe disease compared to other variants.

Reports suggest symptoms of NB.1.8.1 should align closely with other Omicron subvariants.

Common symptoms include sore throat, fatigue, fever, mild cough, muscle aches and nasal congestion. Gastrointestinal symptoms may also occur in some cases.

How about the vaccine?

There’s potential for this variant to play a significant role in Australia’s winter respiratory season. Public health responses remain focused on close monitoring, continued genomic sequencing, and promoting the uptake of updated COVID boosters.

Even if neutralising antibody levels are modestly reduced against NB.1.8.1, the WHO has noted current COVID vaccines should still protect against severe disease with this variant.

The most recent booster available in Australia and many other countries targets JN.1, from which NB.1.8.1 is descended. So it makes sense it should still offer good protection.

Ahead of winter and with a new variant on the scene, now may be a good time to consider another COVID booster if you’re eligible. For some people, particularly those who are medically vulnerable, COVID can still be a serious disease.

Lara Herrero, Associate Professor and Research Leader in Virology and Infectious Disease, Griffith University

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

Google recently unveiled the next phase of its artificial intelligence (AI) journey: “AI mode”.

This new feature will soon be released as a new option to users of Google’s search engine in the United States, with no timeline yet for the rest of the world. The company says it will be akin to having a conversation with an expert well versed on a wide range of topics.

This is just one of many steps Google is taking in pursuit of its “all-in” approach to AI.

The “all-in” approach extends beyond just integrating the technology into different applications. Google is providing products all along the AI supply chain – a process known as “vertical integration” – housing everything from AI computer chips through to the user interfaces we interact with on a daily basis, such as Google maps or Gmail.

Google isn’t the only AI company with ambitions of vertical integration. For example, OpenAI recently acquired a hardware startup co-founded by Apple’s Jony Ive, which will centralise hardware development within the company. Amazon is taking similar steps. It owns cloud computing platforms, custom chips, device plans and is incorporating more AI services into products.

This may be the beginning of a trend of vertical integration across big tech. And it could have significant implications for users and companies alike.

The AI ‘tech stack’

Hardware, software, data sources, databases and servers are some of the layers that make up what is commonly referred to as the “AI tech stack”.

There are four main layers to Google’s evolving vertical tech stack:

1. Hardware layer. Google develops its own AI chips, known as tensor processing units (TPUs). The company claims these chips provide superior performance and efficiency compared to general purpose processors.

2. Infrastructure layer. The company uses its own cloud infrastructure to source its computing power, networking and storage requirements. This infrastructure is the foundation for running and scaling AI capabilities.

3. Model development layer. In-house research capabilities are used to drive the development of their products and services. This includes research around machine learning, robotics, language models and computer vision.

4. Data layer. Data is constantly sourced from users across all Google platforms, including its search engine, maps and email. Data collection is a condition of using any Google application.

Some argue vertical integration is an optimal and cost-effective business strategy in many industries, not just tech. However, the realities of this set-up prove otherwise.

Fuelling power imbalances

Google and OpenAI are two of just a handful of companies which dominate the global technology market.

Thanks to this market dominance, these companies can charge higher markups for their goods and services and abuse practices in online advertising.

Vertical integration further skews this power imbalance by centralising the layers of the AI tech stack to one company. A distribution of hardware, infrastructure, research and development and data across multiple industries helps support a more equitable playing field across the industry.

The loss of this equity creates greater barriers to entry for smaller companies as the larger conglomerates keep everything in-house.

It also reduces incentives to innovate in ways that benefit consumers because it eliminates the business competition that usually drives innovation.

Data is often described as the new gold. This is especially true in the case of AI, which is heavily reliant on data. Through its many platforms, Google has access to a continuous stream of data. In turn, this gives the company even more power in the industry.

The vulnerabilities of vertical integration

The success of a company that is vertically integrated relies on housing the best knowledge and expertise in-house. Retaining this level of resourcing within a small handful of companies can lead to knowledge and expertise hoarding.

Research shows knowledge and expertise hoarding reduces social learning and increases disparities between “winners” and “losers” in a given market. This creates an overall vulnerable industry, because net gains are lost in the pursuit of exclusivity.

Exclusivity also breeds a lack of resilience. That’s because the points of failure are centralised.

Risk is better managed with additional oversight, transparency and accountability. Collaborations across industry rely on these processes to work together effectively.

Centralising the AI tech stack within one organisation eliminates external scrutiny, because it reduces interactions with external providers of products and services. In turn this can lead to a company behaving in a more risky manner.

Regulatory bodies can also provide external scrutiny.

However, the current push to deregulate AI is widening the gap between technology development and regulation.

It is also allowing for big tech companies to become increasingly opaque. A lack of transparency raises issues about organisational practices; in the context of AI, practices around data are of particular concern.

The trend towards vertical integration in the AI sector will further increase this opacity and heighten existing issues around transparency.

Zena Assaad, Senior Lecturer, School of Engineering, Australian National University

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

First Nations people please be advised this article speaks of racially discriminating moments in history, including the distress and death of First Nations people.

On a cold day 25 years ago, a bitter wind swept up from the south, pushing against an endless throng of people crossing one of Australia’s most famous landmarks.

Some 250,000 people were walking across Sydney Harbour Bridge in support of Indigenous reconciliation. It was an event called Corroboree 2000.

It took more than six hours for the mass of people to make their way from north to south, into the city. Across the nation, in small towns and in the capital cities, bridge walks symbolised overcoming a difficult past and coming together.

But Australia’s relationship with First Nations people in the years since has been sometimes tumultuous, occasionally optimistic and often vexed. What legacy did the event leave?

A ‘decade of reconciliation’?

A “Decade of Reconciliation” started with the unanimous passage of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation Act through the federal parliament in 1991. “Reconciliation” was to be achieved between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians by the centenary of Federation in 2001.

The act made a national commitment for the federal government to address both “Aboriginal disadvantage and aspirations”.

It didn’t, however, specify what reconciliation was or what a reconciled nation would look like. The 2001 deadline would come and go without any way of knowing if it had been achieved.

The amorphous nature of the concept likely contributed to the widespread political support for reconciliation. But whether it meant addressing Indigenous rights, or disadvantage, or both, was often decided down political party lines.

Some First Nations activists were unequivocal in their criticism of reconciliation. It was widely perceived as a poor substitute for Bob Hawke’s 1984 promise of national land rights, and later, Treaty.

The late Uncle Chicka Dixon renamed the movement “ReCONsillynation”. The “con” was the call to “walk together” as an alternative to Treaty and land rights.

Instead, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation was established in 1991. Its approach to reconciliation was largely about building knowledge and understanding among non-Indigenous Australians about Australian Indigenous lives, experience and history. This was seen as essential to advancing justice.

Changing hearts and minds

For more than a decade, the council worked to achieve its vision, recruiting thousands of participants to the cause. It produced educational materials to guide learning about First Peoples histories and cultures. It also promoted reconciliation activities in the community.

Community-led reconciliation activities proliferated quickly. Some of these continue today, helping establish a foundation for truth-telling.

Huge historical events were unfolding alongside this work. In 1992, the Mabo decision in the High Court ruled Australia was not terra nullius (land belonging to nobody) when it was claimed by Britain in 1770. This led to native title laws, which have made it possible for some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to claim ownership of their traditional lands.

In 1997, the Bringing Them Home report highlighted the trauma caused to generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait children across Australia by removing them from their families. They are known as the Stolen Generations.

The report recommended all Australian governments apologise to Indigenous people for their involvement in the policies and practices of forcible child removal.

By 1999, all states and territory governments had apologised. The federal government had not.

A contested history

These seismic shifts in public conversation inevitably came to feature in federal politics.

In the 1996 election, the two leaders – Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating and Liberal leader John Howard – outlined very different political visions based on opposing approaches to Australian history.

While Keating was in office, he combined two causes – native title and the republic – hoping they would help generate a new story of the nation’s foundation.

He sought to replace the positive, comforting and Anglo-centric view of Australian history. He highlighted the impact of colonisation on Aboriginal people and cast doubt on the morality of British occupation.

Howard largely framed his history in opposition to Keating’s. Whereas Keating’s history dwelled on identifiable historical wrongs, Howard famously said Australians should “feel comfortable and relaxed about their history”.

For Howard, there was much to be proud of in the story of the nation’s past. He accused the Labor party of peddling “the rhetoric of apology and shame”, or what came to be known as the “black armband” view of the past.

Despite the recommendation of the Bringing Them Home report, Howard didn’t apologise to Indigenous people. He championed “practical outcomes” instead of “symbolism”, although ultimately failed to deliver either.

A historic culmination

With all these debates brewing throughout the 1990s, Australians used the new millennium to make their own large, symbolic gesture.

Corroboree 2000 was held over two days in May. At the first event held on May 27, Indigenous and non-Indigenous leaders met at the Sydney Opera House. The Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation presented non-Indigenous leaders with two documents: the Australian Declaration Towards Reconciliation and the Roadmap for Reconciliation.

All the leaders who took part left their handprints on a canvas to show their support.

But in the intervening years, the shape of reconciliation and what Indigenous people could expect from it changed.

Reflecting the Howard government’s emphasis on practical reconciliation, the council’s final report emphasised that “overcoming disadvantage is central to the reconciliation process”. The original brief for reconciliation to also address “Aboriginal aspirations” was forgotten.

Howard gave a speech at the event and expressed “regret” for the past treatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, but he did not apologise. This left many in the crowd unhappy.

The apology would eventually come in 2008 from Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd.

Where are we now?

In his recent election victory speech, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese emphasised national unity. He again placed reconciliation at the forefront of the Australian government’s Indigenous affairs agenda, saying:

we will be a government that supports reconciliation with First Nations people, because we will be a stronger nation when we close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

It was a far cry from his 2022 victory speech when he promised the full implementation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

In the aftermath of the Voice referendum, the Albanese government says it is focusing on First Nations economic independence and empowerment, along with continuing to “Close the Gap” in experiences of disadvantage.

So 25 years on from the bridge walk, reconciliation remains a feature of the government’s response to First Peoples’ calls for recognition and justice.

But reconciliation can be seen as a safe harbour to merely rebuild consensus, when more ambitious Indigenous affairs agendas stall or fail.

Heidi Norman, Professor of Aboriginal political history, Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture, Convenor: Indigenous Land & Justice Research Group, UNSW Sydney and Anne Maree Payne, Senior Research Fellow, Indigenous Land & Justice Research Group, UNSW Sydney

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

How many chargers do you own? We’re surrounded by rechargeable electronic devices – mobile phones, laptops, smart watches, headphones, e-bikes and more.

You might have a phone charger plugged in next to your bed without ever bothering to switch it off at the wall or unplugging it when not in use. The same might go for a laptop charger by your desk.

But is that risky to do? And are there hidden costs associated with leaving chargers plugged in all the time?

What’s inside a charger?

Naturally, not all chargers are the same. Depending on the application and power requirement, their internal structure can range from very simple to complex.

However, a typical charger takes in the AC (alternating current) from the wall plug and converts it to a low-voltage DC (direct current) suitable for your device’s battery.

To understand the difference between DC and AC, consider the flow of electrons in a wire. In a DC circuit, electrons move in one direction and keep rotating in the circuit. In an AC circuit, electrons doesn’t circulate and only move back and forth.

The reason for why we use both types of current goes a long way back, to the time when inventors Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla battled over which type would become the default standard. Today, we are still stuck between both. Electricity is traditionally generated in AC form, but modern appliances and batteries require the DC form. This is why almost every electrical appliance comes with an AC–DC converter.

To do the conversion from AC to DC, a typical charger needs several electrical components such as a transformer, a circuit for doing the actual conversion, filtering elements to enhance the quality of output DC voltage, and control circuitry for regulation and protection.

Chargers consume power even when not charging

“Vampire power” is real. If you leave it plugged in, a charger will continuously draw a small amount of power. Part of this power is used to keep the control and protection circuits running while the rest is lost as heat.

When we look at an individual small charger, the vampire power – also known as standby power – is negligible. However, if you add up all the chargers in your home for various devices, over time the wasted energy can be significant. Standby power is not exclusive to chargers, either; other electronic devices such as TVs draw a little bit of standby power, too.

Depending on how many things you leave plugged in, over the course of the year it could amount to several kilowatt hours.

That said, modern chargers are designed to minimise standby power consumption. These chargers come with smart power management components that keep them in sleep mode until an external device attempts to draw power.

There are other risks, too

Chargers wear out over time when electricity flows through them, particularly when the electricity grid voltage temporarily rises above its rated value. The electricity grid is a chaotic environment and various voltage rise events happen from time to time.

Leaving your chargers exposed to these events will shorten their life. This premature ageing shouldn’t be alarming for modern devices, thanks to their improved design and control. But it is particularly concerning for cheap, uncertified chargers. These often lack appropriate levels of protection and can be a fire hazard.

How should I treat my chargers?

Although modern chargers are generally very safe and should be drawing minimal standby power, consider unplugging them anyway – if convenient.

If a charger gets warmer than usual, makes noise, or is damaged in any way, it is time for a replacement. And it definitely shouldn’t be left plugged in.

Glen Farivar, Lecturer in Power Electronics, The University of Melbourne

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

Narcissism has become the armchair diagnosis of the decade. Social media is awash with people flinging the label around. Everyone’s ex seems to be a narcissist, some of our parents are under suspicion, and that office villain? They definitely tick the box, too.

The accuracy of these rampant diagnoses warrants scepticism. But the reality is narcissists do exist. At its extreme, narcissism is a rare mental health diagnosis, known as narcissistic personality disorder. But narcissism also describes a cluster of personality traits, which we all display to varying degrees.

For those of us who have been in close quarters with someone high in narcissistic traits, we rarely walk away unscathed. And we may be left with lingering questions. For example, what made them this way?

In a recent meta-analysis, my colleagues and I pulled together studies examining the link between narcissism and adult attachment styles. Our findings offer an important clue – especially when it comes to the potential roots of vulnerable narcissism.

Types of narcissism

There are two main types of narcissism.

Grandiose narcissism is what typically comes to mind. It is characterised by an overtly grandiose, aggressive and dominant interpersonal style. In contrast, vulnerable narcissism is marked by introversion, hypersensitivity to criticism, and a defensive, insecure grandiosity that masks fragile self-esteem.

Antagonistic traits such as entitlement, manipulation, and a lack of empathy lie at the core of both narcissism types. This helps to explain the interpersonal difficulties linked to each.

Vulnerable narcissism, in particular, has been linked to a range of harmful behaviours in romantic relationships. Individuals high in this trait are more likely to engage in love bombing, ghosting and breadcrumbing.

They also tend to report lower relationship satisfaction, hold more permissive attitudes towards infidelity and perpetrate intimate partner violence at higher rates.

Secure versus insecure attachment

Researchers have turned to attachment styles to help explain how individuals high in narcissism behave in romantic relationships.

Attachment theory proposes that early experiences with primary caregivers shape our beliefs about ourselves and others. These beliefs are thought to persist into adulthood and influence how we experience and navigate adult relationships.

If we felt safe, loved and supported as children, we are more likely to have a positive view of our self and others. This is the hallmark of secure attachment, which lays the foundation for healthy, stable relationships in adulthood.

But when early relationships are marked by neglect, inconsistency or abuse, they can give rise to insecure attachment styles. Adult attachment models generally identify three types of insecure attachment.

Preoccupied attachment develops from a negative view of the self and a positive view of others. Individuals with this style often feel unworthy of love and seek constant reassurance in relationships, fearing rejection and abandonment.

Dismissive attachment is rooted in a positive view of the self but a negative view of others. These individuals tend to prioritise independence over intimacy. As a result, they often struggle to form deep connections.

Fearful attachment involves negative views of both the self and others. Those with this style typically crave connection while at the same time fearing it, leading to push-pull dynamics in relationships.

An interesting pattern

In our meta-analysis, we combined the results of 33 previous studies comprising more than 10,000 participants to examine how narcissism relates to each of the four adult attachment styles. Overall, narcissism was linked to each of the three insecure attachment styles.

But when we looked at the two types of narcissism separately, an interesting pattern emerged. Vulnerable narcissism was consistently linked to insecure attachment styles – with associations of moderate strength for preoccupied and fearful attachment styles.

In contrast, grandiose narcissism showed no such link.

Does this mean insecure attachment causes vulnerable narcissism? Not necessarily. The studies we reviewed were “correlational”, which means they looked at connections, not causes. So we can’t say attachment styles cause vulnerable narcissism. To answer that, we’d need longitudinal research tracking people over time.

Still, our findings suggest that insecure attachment – particularly preoccupied and fearful attachment styles – may be an important risk factor in the development of vulnerable narcissism.

Of course, not everyone with an insecure attachment style has high levels of vulnerable narcissism. However, for some, vulnerable narcissism may emerge as a defensive coping strategy that arises when early attachments were marked by inconsistency, neglect or abuse.

Healing childhood wounds

Attachment styles tend to be fairly consistent throughout a person’s life, however change is possible. Attachment-focused therapies, such as schema therapy and emotionally focussed therapy, can help individuals heal attachment wounds and build more secure relationship patterns. These approaches may be especially helpful for those high in vulnerable narcissism.

At the same time, it is important that families have access to free and timely mental health care, so that children are supported to process and heal from trauma before it shapes their adult relationships, and the way they parent the next generation.

But prevention is better than cure.

Supporting parents and caregivers to build secure attachments with the their children and equipping them with the tools to parent effectively is essential. This is especially urgent given disturbingly high rates of child maltreatment in Australia, including emotional abuse, physical abuse and neglect – all of which have been linked to the development of vulnerable narcissism.

We don’t need to look too far to see the cost of turning a blind eye.

Megan Willis, Associate Professor, School of Behavioural and Health Sciences, Australian Catholic University

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

Ever found yourself out of sync with normal sleep patterns after late nights or working a night shift? It could be you’re experiencing what scientists call social jet lag.

The term describes the misalignment between our internal body clock (circadian rhythm) and our social schedule.

Social jet lag associated with irregular sleep patterns and inconsistent exposure to daylight is increasingly common, and has been linked with a weakened immune system.

Disruption of our circadian rhythms through shift work, for example, has been shown to have a negative impact on our ability to fight infections.

These observations reinforce the idea that maintaining a robust circadian rhythm through regular exposure to daylight supports a healthy immune system.

But how does the immune system know when it’s daytime? That is precisely what our research, published today in Science Immunology, has uncovered. Our findings could eventually deliver benefits for the treatment of inflammatory conditions.

First responders to infection

Circadian rhythms are a fundamental feature of all life on Earth. Believed to have evolved some 2.5 billion years ago, they enable organisms to adapt to challenges associated with the 24-hour solar day.

At the molecular level, these circadian rhythms are orchestrated through a genetically encoded multi-component time keeper called a circadian clock. Almost all cells are known to have the components for a circadian clock. But how they function within different cell types to regulate their behaviour is very poorly understood.

In the laboratory, we use zebrafish – small freshwater fish commonly sold in pet stores – as a model organism to understand our immune response to bacterial infection.

We use larval zebrafish because their genetic makeup and immune system are similar to ours. Also, they have transparent bodies, making it easy to observe biological processes under the microscope.

We focus on an immune cell called a “neutrophil”, a type of white blood cell. We’re interested in these cells because they specialise in killing bacteria, are first responders to infection, and are the most abundant immune cell in our bodies.

Because they are very short-lived cells, neutrophils isolated from human blood are notoriously difficult to work with experimentally. However, with transparent larval zebrafish, we can film them to directly observe how these cells function, within a completely intact animal.

Cells can tell if it’s daytime

Our initial studies showed the strength of immune response to bacterial infection peaked during the day, when the animals are active.

We think this represents an evolutionary response that provides both humans and zebrafish a survival advantage. Because diurnal animals such as humans and zebrafish are most active during daylight hours, they are more likely to encounter bacterial infections.

This work made us curious to know how this enhanced immune response was being synchronised with daylight. By making movies of neutrophils killing bacteria at different times of the day, we discovered they killed bacteria more efficiently during the daytime than at night.

We then genetically edited neutrophils to turn off their circadian clocks by carefully removing specific clock components. This is an approach similar to removing important cogs from an analogue clock so it doesn’t tick anymore.

This led to the discovery that these important immune cells possess an internal light-regulated circadian clock that alerts the cells to daytime (similar to an alarm clock). This boosts their ability to kill bacteria.

Our next challenge is to understand exactly how light is detected by neutrophils, and whether human neutrophils also rely on this internal timing mechanism to regulate their antibacterial activity.

We’re also curious to see if this killing mechanism is restricted to certain types of bacteria, such as those we’re more likely to encounter during the day. Or is it a more general response to all infectious threats (including viral infections)?

This research unlocks the potential for developing drugs that target the neutrophil circadian clock to regulate the cells’ activity. Given neutrophils are the first and most abundant immune cells to be recruited to sites of inflammation, the discovery has very broad implications for many inflammatory conditions.

The research described here was led by PhD candidates Lucia Du and Pramuk Keerthisinghe, and was a collaboration between the Hall laboratory and the Chronobiology Research Group, led by Guy Warman and James Cheeseman, at the University of Auckland’s Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences. 

Chris Hall, Associate Professor of Immunology, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau

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

This month, a woman bravely testified in court she was subjected to a “degrading and humiliating experience akin to sexual assault” at the hands of New South Wales Police. The young woman was forced to remove her tampon in front of officers during a strip search, which police later admitted was unlawful.

This experience was heard in the Supreme Court as part of a class action lawsuit that includes 3,000 alleged victims. It’s alleging police unlawfully strip-searched thousands of people at music festivals between 2016 and 2022.

These searches – which disproportionately increased against young girls and women – speak to a underlying issue within policing. Police scholars have long observed an internal culture of misogyny and sexism, both domestically and internationally.

In fact, predatory behaviour from police has been documented across the country, both towards members of the public and towards other police officers.

While there are immediate headlines and promises to improve, they’re often quickly forgotten by police and the community. In not holding them accountable, we allow the harming of women to continue and positive change to remain elusive.

A long history

This has previously been a point of conversation in New South Wales. Last year, there were reports of a female then-officer, Mel Cooper, being sexually harassed and assaulted by male colleagues. Cooper, who joined the force in 1994, argued this culture is “not getting better […] it’s getting worse”.

This reflected experiences from a report by the state’s police watchdog in 2020 reviewing workplace complaints. The report, titled Operation Shorewood, found sexual harassment was among the most common complaints.

Female officers were the most likely to be subjected to harassment, despite the most recent available data indicating they make up only 26.9% of sworn personnel.

New South Wales is not a unique case. In Western Australia, it’s been reported that sexual misconduct complaints are rising. This prompted the police commissioner to admit WA Police had a “boys club culture” issue.

In Queensland, the Richards inquiry in 2022 found evidence of a culture of sexism and misogyny and viewed predatory behaviour as a significant issue. The commission learned of multiple examples of predatory behaviour, sexual harassment and assault against female colleagues (often junior officers).

In some rare cases, rape by male officers was reported.

More recently, a Queensland police sergeant who engaged in a pattern of predatory sexual conduct was reported to still be working with the force. This was despite Queensland’s police watchdog – the Crime and Corruption Commission – recommending in 2022 that dismissal was the “only appropriate sanction”.

Decades of inaction

Victoria also has a long history of this behaviour.

In 1988, a discussion paper criticised the treatment of sexual assault victims who reported or complained to police. The paper’s recommendations were never implemented, with police and government responses dismissing the paper as “pro-victim”.

A decade later, the Victorian ombudsman investigated allegations of sexual impropriety by officers at a rural police station. The allegations, which started in 1988, included rape, sexual assault, stalking, unlawful entry on premises and threatening behaviour towards members of the public.

Victims were dissuaded from giving evidence by police. Male officers came to view sex as an entitlement of their duty, targeting vulnerable and young women. It was ultimately found that police management systems had failed to deal with the behaviour for years.

The failure to address the behaviour has only continued. An audit into sex and gender discrimination and two separate reports from Victoria’s police watchdog in 2015 and 2023 continue to show evidence of sexual impropriety and predatory behaviour.

This came to a head in 2023 when Brett Johnson was convicted of using Victoria’s police database to stalk vulnerable women and initiate sexual relationships.

In response to this, and other reports into systemic issues, Victoria Police has implemented more than 90% of the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission’s recommendations. This includes working towards implementing recommendations regarding predatory behaviour.

Lessons left unlearned

It is impossible to gauge the full extent of this behaviour and its history in every jurisdiction.

There are no mandatory reporting requirements for police complaint data in Australia. The findings we do have often come from an occasional report or inquiry into police.

These incidents are also quickly forgotten. Government inquiries and investigations often fail to acknowledge these issues have been discussed many times before.

States may recognise the need for change. Other times, they will outright dismiss it.

Many identified reforms are never fully put into practice. In the case of systems for holding police accountable, this phenomenon has been seen as “cyclic”.

This is why it’s vital to recall the incidents of our past. When another scandal occurs, we should remind ourselves these are not “bad apples” or isolated events.

They are symbolic of a crisis of reform in policing – an inability to create meaningful change. We must demand better from our police and our state governments to ensure the protection of not just Australian women, but all victims and complainants.

As researcher Janet Chan argued in her internationally recognised work on changing the culture of the police, this will not be achieved through a single reform. This will require a commitment to a range of related changes.

These include changes to education, better leadership and mentoring, more effective whistleblowing processes and reforms to police complaint systems.

A popular proposal has been the creation of an independent police ombudsman to oversee and investigate complaints against police.

However, without a continued public pressure, it is unlikely we can challenge the political power of police. Failure to address these issues will only strengthen a culture that harms all who are victim to it.

The National Sexual Assault, Family and Domestic Violence Counselling Line – 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) – is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week for any Australian who has experienced, or is at risk of, family and domestic violence and/or sexual assault.

Michael Cain, Associate Lecturer in Criminology, Deakin University

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

Every year, thousands of New South Wales students sit a test to determine places for highly sought-after selective high schools. These are academically selective public schools often associated with high Year 12 scores.

While there has long been a level of expectation around selective school entrance, the most recent round of testing has shone a fresh light on the pressures some young people are experiencing.

Media reports have described some students studying for 18 months to prepare for the selective school test, with multiple sessions of tutoring each week.

Earlier this month, police were called to control crowds at two testing centres as parents and students from one session overlapped with another. This is also the first year the tests have been done online and there were technical difficulties as students tried to complete exams.

One exam invigilator told The Sydney Morning Herald about the stress they witnessed among students.

We were dealing with kids who were freaking out and totally traumatised by what was going on. You could not make up a worse nightmare than what we went through that day.

It’s not surprising children were upset. The pressure to perform well on test day is enormous. As my previous research has found, some families believe entry into a selective school will secure their child’s future.

As my new research with colleagues suggests, this sees some families place huge pressure on students to study and prepare for academic tests in primary school.

Not just a NSW thing

Most (albeit not all) of Australia’s selective schools are in NSW.

But there is pressure around other tests in the primary years. There are similar levels of competition for lucrative private school scholarships around Australia, which children sit as early as Year 3. Many of these are determined by centralised tests.

Tutoring companies also offer programs for primary students preparing for NAPLAN tests in Year 3 and Year 5, as well as the “opportunity class” test in NSW (for an academically selective stream for Year 5 and 6).

Our research

In ongoing, as yet unpublished research on education cultures among migrant communities in Sydney, colleagues and I are focusing on 38 families with children in upper primary school.

In 2022 and 2023, we interviewed students, parents and teachers at six schools in high and low income areas of Sydney. All schools included large numbers of Asian migrants, allowing us to compare different groups’ approaches to education.

While not necessarily representative of all Asian migrant families, or all families with school-aged children in general, we found intensive preparation for the selective test was common in this group, especially among those students already enrolled in an opportunity class.

The tutoring routine

Many students preparing for the selective test told us they attended private tutoring three or more days per week, in addition to completing home based study. Some had begun this routine up to 12 months before to the test.

One mother, whose son attended tutoring every day, at three different centres, on top of two hours of daily homework, told us,

That’s how we prepare for selective […] You need to be methodical […] no pain, no gain.

Other parents explained they resorted to private tutoring because schools did not teach what was needed to succeed in the selective tests.

Not only do children spend afternoons, evenings and weekends in tutoring centres, they are also often giving up most if not all recreational, sporting and other extracurricular activities, narrowing their focus to acing the test.

Families also postpone holidays, outings and other potential distractions. Many of our student participants aiming for a selective school told us they never socialised with their friends outside of school time.

Sometimes they even neglected their school work so as to focus on the selective test. One teacher told us many of her students were absent from school in the week prior to the test, to ramp up their preparation.

How does this impact students?

This culture of extreme study and competitive schooling raises profound questions about the implications for student wellbeing. Some students spoke about their fatigue. As one student said:

I work up to late at night. So sometimes I feel drowsy and I yawn a bit and have water in my eyes.

Their teachers also expressed concern about insufficient sleep and heightened stress caused by the pressure to get into a selective school. They described students’ tears if they were not successful when the results came out.

One teacher said he had a “blanket rule” of not talking about the tests in the classroom, because his students were so preoccupied with ensuring they were doing enough preparation.

Other teachers reflected on students’ fear of taking risks because of the culture of perfectionism associated with scoring and ranking through tests.

What does the research say?

International research shows an association between high-stakes testing in primary years and issues with children’s mental health and academic confidence. There is also a negative association with students’ achievement in maths and literacy. That is, students who experience pressured exams were more likely to experience anxiety and depression, and not do as well in core subjects as those who did not experience this pressure.

Some parents in our study expressed concern for their child’s wellbeing. But others saw stress a positive sign of engagement and commitment, and necessary for securing the all important place in a selective school.

Given many are recent migrants, without established networks in Australia, and fearful of racial discrimination against their children, they believe education to be the most crucial foundation for future success.

However, we need more research on the impacts of these parental aspirations and anxieties on the next generation. And a broader discussion about the benefits of selecting some students – who may have benefited from extensive and expensive private tutoring – to go to separate, high-performing government schools.

Megan Watkins, Greg Noble and Alexandra Wong all contributed to the research on migrant families mentioned in this article, as part of a larger Australian Research Council-funded project.

Christina Ho, Associate professor in Social and Political Sciences, University of Technology Sydney

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

As educational psychology researchers, we are very interested in how students deal with setbacks and challenges in their schooling.

Research has found resilient students tend to have more positive academic outcomes. These include making greater effort with their work, having better study skills and enjoying school more than students who are less resilient.

We measure this resilience through something called “academic buoyancy”. This is a personal attribute that helps students overcome common setbacks at school, such as a heavy workload, poor test results or competing assignment deadlines.

In the past two decades of research into resilience or academic buoyancy, there has been a concerning trend suggesting girls report lower levels of academic buoyancy than boys.

To better understand this, we analysed all existing studies to conclusively work out if this gender gap exists, and if so, to what extent.

Our research

A meta-analysis is a research technique aimed at identifying the average effect of a phenomenon across a large number of studies. In the case of gender and academic buoyancy, meta-analysis can be used to calculate the average difference between girls and boys in academic buoyancy.

Meta-analysis produces an “effect size” that can be categorised as small, medium or large. In our case, the bigger the effect size, the greater the difference between girls and boys in academic buoyancy.

We searched for all published academic buoyancy studies across major databases. We also contacted leading researchers in the field for any studies into academic buoyancy they had conducted, but had not published.

Following this process, our meta-analysis included 53 studies published between 2008 and 2024 reporting on the link between gender and academic buoyancy. It involved 173,665 students from primary school through to high school and university. Study locations included Australia, the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Jamaica, Finland, China, Singapore and the Philippines.

What we found

We found the average effect of gender on academic buoyancy was statistically significant and small-to-medium in size. This means there was a reliable and noticeable difference between girls and boys and their reported levels of academic buoyancy.

In other words, girls are less resilient to everyday academic challenges (such as a poor mark or negative interaction with a teacher) than their male peers.

While we did not set out to study why this is the case, previous research suggests this could be because girls experience higher levels of academic anxiety than boys and these higher levels of anxiety may make it more difficult for them to navigate academic adversity. Now these meta-analysis findings are known, there is a need for research to more closely examine the reasons for the gender difference.

Our results, of course, are average findings. This does not mean all girls report lower academic buoyancy and not all boys are buoyant.

So efforts should therefore be aimed at boosting the buoyancy of those who struggle with academic adversity and sustaining it among those who are managing well.

Previous research suggests there are two broad approaches educators, along with parents, can take.

The direct approach

Teachers, counsellors and parents can work to directly boost students’ academic buoyancy through the following steps:

– teaching students to recognise academic adversity early, before that adversity becomes more difficult to manage. For example, when it is starting to take them longer to do homework than other students.

– explaining to students how to adjust their thoughts, behaviour, and/or emotions in the face of this adversity. For thought, they might have to start thinking about what possible resources they can draw on. For behaviour, they might seek help from a teacher as one source of support, when normally they may not do so. For emotion, they may need to minimise fear they may have about asking that teacher for help.

– encouraging students to take heart from small improvements. For example, if asking the teacher for help works, they should see this as a “win” (“I can overcome problems”).

– encouraging students to keep noticing and adjusting their thoughts, behaviours and/or emotion in response to adversity. So this becomes part of their everyday habits.

The 6 Cs of an ‘underpinning’ approach

Another approach involves targeting the factors that underpin academic resilience. Our previous research has identified six factors or points where educators and parents can help students.

1. Confidence: boosting students’ self belief in their ability to succeed.

2. Coordination: helping students with academic planning and task management.

3. Commitment: building students’ persistence; for example, through goal-setting and goal-striving.

4. Control: directing students’ attention to things they control, such as their effort.

5. Composure: reducing students’ anxiety; for example, through addressing fearful thoughts and adopting relaxation strategies that work for them.

6. Community: building strong interpersonal relationships with peers and teachers, so they feel supported.

As these strategies are being considered, educators also need to accommodate other pressures in students’ lives that may be contributing to or exacerbating a student’s difficulties, such as social difficulties or issues at home. They also need to consider any clinical issues such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Taken together, with the support of educators and parents, there are practical changes students can make to boost their response to academic adversity, and in turn, help close the gender gap around academic buoyancy.

Andrew J. Martin, Scientia Professor and Professor of Educational Psychology, UNSW Sydney; Oscar Yau, PhD Candidate, School of Education, UNSW Sydney; Paul Ginns, Associate Professor in Educational Psychology, University of Sydney, and Rebecca J. Collie, Scientia Associate Professor of Educational Psychology, UNSW Sydney

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

Anxiety affects one in five Australian men at some point in their lives. But the condition remains highly stigmatised, misunderstood and under-diagnosed.

Men are around half as likely to be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder compared to women. Some feel pressure to be fearless and hide their emotions. Others simply don’t understand or have the language to describe anxiety symptoms.

This has serious consequences. Our latest research shows young men are turning to ambulance services when their symptoms become overwhelming – some even think they’re having a heart attack.

So why do so many men wait until they need to call emergency services, rather than seek support earlier from a GP or psychologist? And what prompts them to call? We reviewed the paramedic notes of 694 men aged 15 to 25 years in Victoria, Australia, to find out.

Young men haven’t seen others asking for help

Boys are raised to value courage, strength and self-assurance, and to suppress vulnerability.

When parents encourage boys to “face their fears”, rather than offering emotional comfort and tenderness, anxiety gets positioned in conflict with masculinity. This leads to a disjuncture between the support young men are met with (and come to expect) from others, and the support they may want or need.

This also means boys grow up believing their male role models – dads, brothers, grandads, coaches – don’t get anxious, deterring boys and men from seeking help. As a result, anxiety goes undiagnosed and opportunities for early intervention are missed.

Recently, we have seen positive shifts challenging restrictive masculine stereotypes. This has improved awareness surrounding men’s depression – opening up conversations, normalising help-seeking and leading to the development of men’s mental health programs and resources.

However, men’s anxiety remains in the shadows. When anxiety is talked about, it’s not with the same weight or concern as depression. This is despite men’s anxiety having harmful health impacts including turning to alcohol and drugs to cope, and increasing the risk of male suicide.

What does anxiety look like?

When men are encouraged to talk about anxiety, they describe various challenges including repetitive worries, feeling out-of-control and intense physical symptoms. This includes a high heart rate, shortness of breath, body pains, tremors and headaches.

Jack Steele, a prominent Australian personality and one half of the Inspired Unemployed, opened up about his anxiety difficulties on The Imperfects Podcast last year saying:

I didn’t know what anxiety was. I thought I was the opposite of anxiety.

The way I explain it, it’s like […] your whole body just shuts down. My throat starts closing up and my whole body just goes numb. […] It feels like you’re just so alone. You feel like no-one can help you.

You genuinely think the world’s ending – like there’s no out.

These physical symptoms are common in men but can be frequently dismissed rather than recognised as anxiety. Our research has found that, when left unaddressed, these symptoms typically worsen and arise in more and more contexts.

Why do anxious men call ambulances?

Our new study investigated the consequences of men’s anxiety going unaddressed.

First, we used data from the National Ambulance Surveillance System to identify and describe the types of anxiety young men experience. We then looked at the characteristics and contexts of young men’s anxiety presentations to ambulance services.

Overwhelmed and lacking support, many young men turn to ambulances in crisis. Anxiety now accounts for 10% of male ambulance attendances for mental health concerns, surpassing depression and psychosis.

While every presentation is different, our study identified three common presentations among young men:

1. Sudden onset of intense bodily symptoms resembling life-threatening physical health conditions such as heart attacks.

Twenty-two-year-old Joshua, for example, whose case files we reviewed as part of our study, was on a tram home from work when he experienced sudden numbness in his hands and feet. A bystander saw he was having muscle spasms in his hands. Joshua was alert but extremely anxious and asked the bystander for help.

2. Severe anxiety triggered or worsened by substance use.

Adam, a 21-year-old man, consumed a substantial amount of diazepam (Valium) while driving home, after having an anxiety attack at work. Adam reached out to paramedics because he was concerned his anxiety symptoms hadn’t dissipated, and was worried he may have taken too much diazepam.

3. Mental health deterioration with self-harm or suicidal thoughts, often tied to situational stressors such as unstable housing, unemployment, financial difficulties and relationship strain.

Leo, aged 25, had been increasingly anxious for the past three days. Leo’s parents called an ambulance after he told them he wanted to kill himself. Leo told paramedics on arrival that he still felt suicidal and had been getting worse over the past three months.

Directing resources where they’re needed

Young men’s anxiety presentations are time- and resource-intensive for paramedics, many of whom feel poorly equipped to respond effectively. After ruling out physical causes, paramedic support is typically limited to reassurance and breathing techniques.

Most young men are then instructed to follow up with GPs, psychologists or other health professionals in the general community.

But taking that next step involves overcoming the stigma associated with help-seeking, the shame of having called an ambulance and deep tensions between anxiety and what it means to be a man.

This means many young men slip through the cracks. And without ongoing mental health support, they face high risks of presenting again to emergency services with increasingly severe mental health symptoms.

To address this, we need to:

• ramp up conversations about men’s anxiety and take their experiences seriously

• develop an awareness campaign about men’s anxiety. Awareness campaigns have successfully dismantled stigma and shed light on men’s depression and suicide

• improve diagnosis of men’s anxiety disorders by up-skilling and training clinicians to detect anxiety and the unique and distinct constellations of symptoms in men

• create accessible pathways to early support through digital psychological education resources, focused on improving awareness and literacy surrounding men’s anxiety experiences.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

Krista Fisher, Research Fellow, Centre for Youth Mental Health, The University of Melbourne; Dan Lubman, Executive Clinical Director, Turning Point & Director of Monash Addiction Research Centre, Monash University; Simon Rice, Associate Professor & Clinical Psychologist, Mental Health in Elite Sports, The University of Melbourne, and Zac Seidler, Associate Professor, Centre for Youth Mental Health, The University of Melbourne

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

Among the rising tide of loneliness and disconnection, live music is proving to be more than just a good time; it’s a powerful antidote. Whether it’s a pub gig or a stadium show, live music brings people together in ways that matter.

In a recent paper, my colleagues and I reviewed 59 studies of more than 18,000 live music attendees, mostly in Western countries such as the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, New Zealand and parts of Europe.

Here are six ways live music helps alleviate loneliness, based on our and other researchers’ findings.

Opportunities for social connection

Live music events offer people the opportunity to deepen connections with friends, and spark conversations with strangers. They can also act as bridges for people from diverse backgrounds to come together, with music as a common ground.

Music Australia recently reported First Nations and younger audiences are especially likely to value live events as a chance to make new friends, and to feel an enhanced sense of belonging.

Bonding through shared experiences

At heavy metal or punk gigs, the chaos of a mosh pit becomes a surprising display of harmony – despite lyrics of rebellion or anarchy. Strangers move in sync, expressing their private emotions in a communal way.

Research shows syncing to music, even in silent discos, enhances positive feelings and behaviours towards coparticipants. Emotional contagion, or “catching” emotions from the music or other audience members, can also contribute to emotional resonance.

When a crowd shares emotions, movement and even values, a strong feeling of unity can emerge. French sociologist Émile Durkheim called this “collective effervescence”.

Focusing on something bigger

Creative Victoria recently found the primary reason people attend live music is to connect with others and feel part of something bigger than themselves.

Live music can create this communal experience through transcendent emotions. Research into awe-inspiring events reveals they can shift our focus away from ourselves and towards a larger, interconnected whole.

This helps explain why attending live performances can encourage positive social behaviours and reduce loneliness, even if an attendee doesn’t actually speak to anyone.

Sharing one’s authentic self

Live music events, particularly festivals, have been described as “idealised communities” where attendees feel safe to express their authentic selves, free from everyday social constraints.

This “time out of time” experience can be exploratory and liberating, allowing people to connect with others in ways they might not in their regular lives. The safety, trust and respect within these spaces can be particularly empowering for historically marginalised groups, such as LGBTQIA+ and culturally diverse individuals.

Long-term identity building

Shared rituals and artefacts, from Swifties’ wristbands to EDM glow sticks, help live music fans feel like they are part of a meaningful collective. These practices are especially powerful for young people, whose social identities are still developing.

Even during the pandemic, live stream audiences overcame isolation by connecting with others through ritualistic use of emojis and comments.

Long after a show ends, merchandise, band tattoos, online fan forums and recordings of the artist’s music all help sustain feelings of connection with other members of the “scene”.

Music as a social surrogate

Sometimes, live music feels like more than just music. It can feel like a friend: it can listen, empathise and offer comfort when no one else is around.

Research shows music can reduce loneliness by reminding us of real relationships. At times, this can extend to forming parasocial relationships with the musicians themselves, which can offer solace during loneliness. This function of music became especially clear during the pandemic and lockdowns.

Reviving community

Looking at our research, it’s undeniable live music is a beacon of community and inclusiveness in an increasingly disconnected world.

But despite its enormous potential, the industry in Australia is at a crossroads. Post-pandemic recovery has been slow, with engagement in local artists’ events and events at smaller venues (such as pubs and clubs) declining.

Music Australia has found younger people are preferring to stay home for their entertainment. And Creative Victoria reports more than a quarter of the live music market has not attended an event in the past three years, prompting this warning: “These audiences need a compelling reason to entice them to return to in-person attendance.”

Alleviating loneliness, especially among young people, might just be that reason.

Whether it’s through a chance meeting with a like-minded individual at a local gig, or an identity-affirming experience at a festival, live music stands as a universal language that is capable of bringing people together to overcome feelings of isolation.

By recognising its value, we’re not just helping revive an industry – we’re tackling one of society’s most pressing issues.

Nikki Rickard, Professor, Wellbeing Science, The University of Melbourne

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

When it was revealed that Meta had used a dataset of pirated books to train its latest AI model, Llama, Australian authors were furious. Works by writers including Liane Moriarty, Tim Winton, Melissa Lucashenko, Christos Tsiolkas and many others had been scraped from the online shadow library LibGen without permission.

It was just the latest in a series of incidents where published books have been fed into commercial AI systems without the knowledge of their creators, and without any credit or compensation.

Our new report, Australian Authors’ Sentiment on Generative AI, co-authored with Shujie Liang and Tessa Barrington, offers the first large-scale empirical study of how Australian authors and illustrators feel about this rapidly evolving technology. It reveals just how widespread the concern is.

Unsurprisingly, most Australian authors do not want their work used to train AI systems. But this is not only about payment. It is about consent, trust and the future of their profession.

A clear rejection

In late 2024, we surveyed over 400 members of the Australian Society of Authors, the national peak body for writers and illustrators. We asked about their use of AI, their understanding of how generative models are trained, and whether they would agree to their work being used for training – with or without compensation.

79% said they would not allow their existing work to be used to train AI models, even if they were paid. Almost as many – 77% – said the same about future work.

Among those open to payment, half expected at least $A1,000 per work. A small number nominated figures in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

But the dominant response, from both established and emerging authors, was a firm “no”.

This presents a serious roadblock for those hoping publishers might broker blanket licensing agreements with AI firms. If most authors are unwilling to grant permission under any terms, then standard contract clauses or opt-in models are unlikely to deliver a practical or ethical solution.

Income loss and a shrinking profession

Authors are not just concerned about how their past work is used. They are also worried about what generative AI means for their future.

70% of respondents believe AI is likely to displace income-generating work for authors and illustrators. Some already reported losing jobs or being offered lower rates based on assumptions that AI tools would cut costs.

This fear compounds an already difficult economic reality. For many, writing is sustained only through other jobs or a partner’s support. As previous research has shown, most Australian authors earn well below the national average. In 2022, the average income writers earned from their work was $18,200 per annum.

Generative AI risks further eroding the already fragile foundation on which Australia’s literary culture depends. If professional writers cannot make a living and new voices cannot see a viable path into the industry, the pipeline of Australian storytelling will shrink.

More than a copyright issue

At first glance, this might seem like a technical or legal issue, concerning rights management and royalty payments. But our findings show the objections run much deeper.

An overwhelming 91% of respondents said it was unfair for their work to be used to train AI models without permission or compensation. More than half believed AI tools could plausibly mimic their creative style. This raised concerns not only about unauthorised use, but also about imitation and displacement.

For many authors, their work is more than just intellectual property. It represents their voice, their identity and years of creative labour, often undertaken with little financial return.

The idea that a machine could replicate that work without consent, credit or payment is not only unsettling; for many, it feels like a fundamental violation of creative ownership.

This is not simply a case of authors being hesitant to engage with emerging technologies. Our findings suggest a more informed and considered stance. Most respondents had a moderate or strong understanding of how generative AI models are trained. They also made clear distinctions between tools that support creativity and those designed to replace it entirely.

What they lacked was basic information. 80% of respondents did not know whether their work had already been used in AI training. This absence of transparency is a major source of frustration, even for well-informed professionals.

Without clear information, informed consent is impossible. And without consent, even the most innovative AI applications will be viewed with suspicion.

The publishing and tech industries cannot expect trust from creators while keeping them in the dark about how their work is used.

A sustainable future far from guaranteed

Generative AI is already reshaping the creative landscape, but the path ahead remains uncertain.

Our findings reveal a fundamental dilemma. If most Australian authors will not grant permission for their work to be used in AI training, even if compensation is offered, the prospect of negotiated agreements between AI companies, publishers and authors is unlikely.

What we are seeing is not just a policy gap. It reflects a deeper breakdown in trust. There is a growing belief among authors that the value of their creative work is being eroded by systems built on its use.

The widespread rejection of licensing models points to a looming impasse. If developers proceed without consent when authors are refusing to participate, it will be difficult to build the shared foundations that a sustainable creative economy requires.

Whether that gap can be bridged is still an open question. But if writers cannot see a viable or respected place for themselves, the long-term consequences for Australia’s cultural life will be significant.

If Australia wants a fair and forward-looking creative sector, it cannot afford to leave its authors out of the conversation.

Paul Crosby, Senior Lecturer, Department of Economics, Macquarie University and Jordi McKenzie, Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Macquarie University

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